1. That's not MY God or Religion you're criticising

Comment #82033 by dark_matter on October 25, 2007 at 3:05 pm

On this question the atheists and theists are in agreement on one point: that God is some sort of a "being" about which either the attribute of "existence" or "non-existence" applies. But what if the two sides have it equally wrong: what if God is not a "being" at all -- unconfined by space, time, causality, and the law of the excluded middle?

The implications of this may be embodied in a different approach to religion - perhaps something more in the direction of Zen or Baha'i than the traditional Abrahamic religions.

The substantive responses I've seen here are some variation on the following: 1) this is just a maneuver to put the topic beyond rational debate; 2) this may be a minority opinion but what matters are the 99% of religionists who believe otherwise; or 3) such a God would be irrelevant anyway so who cares.

But none of these arguments hit home: Just because an idea is not common, or because it might be used as a dodge, or because it is inconvenient to talk about concretely, does not mean that it cannot in the end be an accurate description of reality--or at least as accurate as, say, the mapping of a spherical surface onto a sheet of paper, which involves unavoidable distortions and tears. And while such a notion of "God" could be consistent with a naturalistic picture of the universe, and thus strictly speaking be irrelevant to say physics or biology, it would not necessarily be irrelevant to how we see our own existence in the grand scheme of things, and thus how we choose to live our lives.