Originally Posted by Dilettante

Upon reflection, this needed to be in a separate post:



SMadsen, you use "transcendent" in relation to divinity in a way unlike any religious person I know. You use it as if to "transcend" something just meant "to be outside of" it. I don't know anyone who believes in a God "outside of reality." That would, practically speaking, be precisely the same as believing that God didn't exist (i.e. "wasn't real"). I'm sure there are some religious people who use "transcendent" in that pointless way, but it's certainly not all of them.
To "transcend" is to be greater than; to be "all that and more"; to "go beyond." In this sense, the very notion of "transcending reality" is nonsense; it is self-contradictory. And it is not something that is always, or even often, applied to God(s).

For example, to return to our Grecian peasant, he certainly did not believe that Zeus was outside of or entirely separate from reality. It was Zeus, after all, who hurls lightning bolts; that obviously means he interacts with physical reality. Zeus can also be angered by humans; therefore physical reality must interact with Zeus. I suspect that if the Grecian peasant ever had any thoughts about Zeus transcending anything, it was only that Zeus was not limited by the same physical laws and forces as everything else was. Zeus could walk amongst the clouds; Zeus could turn himself into an ox; Zeus could handle lightning bolts with his bare hands. These were attributes the peasant saw in nothing else and he could not explain (and possibly not imagine) how Zeus managed to do them. If the "natural world" was the day-to-day existence he generally experienced, then Zeus represented something that was "all that and more." Zeus could do the natural world thing (lightning, being an ox, having sex with women, etc) but he could also go beyond the natural world and do other stuff. He transcended the natural world. He was supernatural.


"The divine" is not that which is outside of reality. By definition, nothing can be outside reality; that's what reality means. "The divine" is that part of reality which is especially associated with one or more given entities referred to as gods (i.e. the "deities"). The lightning bolt was a "divine" symbol because it was associated with Zeus. Throwing lightning at houses as a "divine" act, because Zeus was the only thing capable of doing it.

There is, now that I think about some more, a tendency in some religions (certainly in some doctrinal sects of Christianity) to fall into that kind of nonsensical "God transcends reality" sort of rhetoric. That is regrettable.
But it is not the only way to believe in God (or gods). And I suspect that if people actually sat down and thought about it, most of them would abandon that kind of rhetoric but not actually change what they believed.