>Simon Hibbs says:
>
>>Some of the quotes on that page are illustrative of what I mean.
>
>># Plotinus was a pantheist of the world-rejecting type. He envisaged God as an
>># impersonal Unity - infinite, eternal, with no spatial location, and (curious,
>># but consistent) without thought, knowledge or movement.
>
> This sounds like the Zzaburi's concept of the Creator as it's been
>described on this list. I suppose Neo-Platonism might serve as a model for
>the way more mystical ideas can get grafted on the mind-oriented worldview
>of the Zzaburi to create schools of sorcery with very different feels.
It's also similar to some Kabbalistic ideas about God - God does not think, He _is_ thought. God does not posess knowledge, but _is_ knowledge. God manifests each of these attributes to such an extent that they are nolonger processes. God encompasses all of these attributes completely and eternaly to the fullest extent that they can be expressed. To say that God thinks X might imply that God does not think Y, which would mean that at that moment, God would be incomplete.
It's hard to reconcile this idea of God with the concept of a personal God. It's also only a small step to think of God as being moraly neutral, beyond good and evil. Throughout most of history, people who subscribed to ideas about God similar to this have been branded as atheists. In fact what we think of as atheism is a very modern phenomenon. Personaly I do not think that Zzaburi are atheists in this modern sense. I think that they subscribe to a 'morphic resonance' style concept of a cosmic principle of conciousness, that exists independently of individual concious beings.
Could someone holding that belief in our world be accurately described as being an atheist? Perhaps.
Simon Hibbs
End of The Glorantha Digest V8 #135
Powered by hypermail