So to some extent our statements about God are inevitably misleading…
I think you started another post which I was going to answer to, but to be brief, how can
any human statement, given the very small scope of human abilities compared to the Mysteries of Universe, encompass the Allness of Deity??? There are different languages from mathematical to esoteric to colloquial ranging through varieties of grammars all of which attempt to symbolically model experience and perception for transmittal/reception. There are only an exceptionally rare few of us who even know ourselves other than what we absorb as habitual thought and action examples from our family and peers. The group of us who learn to deal with the exigencies of ice living wouldn’t survive a day in the jungle, and mountaineers may lose their lives in attempt at seafaring. Things and skills are handed down. And that’s about the physical environment, not the psychological privacies the rainbow of which is unimaginable. And that stream of streams has its turbulences and backwaters, some of which have come to us from even tens of thousands of years ago. And in that maelstrom of thinking, acting, and ridiculously varied and limited perception, someone expects that there might be an adequate description of or argument for God? Really?
Even if the claim of Divine Sanction of some scriptures might be true, what happens to those in the hands of men and women is obvious. The best that I have come to accept is that in whatever way they can, those who have had an encounter with Divinity and lived to tell the tale can do two things: Using even the most ethereal language possible they might convey to others that they experienced or re-identified (much more convincing, the latter) due to something they discovered through practice or grace. Second, they can relate what they believe to be the method by which they gained that moment in their perceptive life. And so far again, the most convincing, useful, and fruitful for me has been that age old way of self inquiry.
After all, if we accept that we are “made in the Image and Likeness of God,” than we have a complete picture within and as ourselves to investigate. That completeness cannot be added to by the limits and errors of other people’s paradigms, no matter how convincing. Those are accepted because of necessity as we grow up as they are not sincerely, thoroughly and critically questioned as we grow up. In fact we are discouraged from doing so because it might rock the boat of minimal stability we call family or civilization. Yet while we claim to be the very model itself, we wholesale give up any adventure of internal discovery by selling our privilege of discovering Divinity to proxies and mediums who are far less than the originator of whatever system is in fact and cannot be other than a lessening of an original revelation.
That original revelation may have been lived to others by many as a promise, but was intended as an encouragement for one’s own work, not as a substitute for it. when we grow up as a race, this dynamic will be recognized and encouraged, as it is now institutionally discouraged in politics, science, and especially religion.
