If you were God, what would you do?
In this hypothetical scenario, I ask you to place yourself in the shoes of some form of supreme being, whatever that may be or mean to you.
So, supposing you were a deity, what would you do and why?
What would be your characteristics? As in how would you define yourself? And what would be your motives? Would you be an active force in the world/reality or merely a passive observer?
So, supposing you were a deity, what would you do and why?
What would be your characteristics? As in how would you define yourself? And what would be your motives? Would you be an active force in the world/reality or merely a passive observer?
Comments (70)
Would you have no qualities beyond human ones? And if so, what in your understanding qualifies the title of a God? What would the distinction be from just a regular person? What sets you apart or would your "God" concept be literally "just a person" and thus apply to everyone equally.
I'd send anyone who intentionally killed, tortured, seriously hurt, or abused a child to North Korea permanently. Oh, and Dr. Phil too.
It was an exercise to put forth your best "human based" description of a God to the best of your ability. The hypothetical was about creating a paradigm for such a being based on how any individual might qualify it in their own words.
If you don't want to, that's fine. But I don't see the point in posting a response which can be essentially reduced to "I can't". It offers nothing to debate based on the hypothetical.
Well, before I did anything I'd need to know what happens after death. Do humans respawn or reincarnate after death? If so then I'd feel much less guilty about their deaths. Anyway, what I do with my newfound Sims would depend on my daily moods.
So in this instance, you replace something that already existed rather than always being that thing from the get go/start? You say "continue" to do whatever that deity is doing.
So in this case your "God" concept is a particular state or thing separate to you that can be unified with, or from which you can take over responsibility/definition?
How would u say this pre-existant and you are separated? And how would you go about reaching towards and becoming it?
Well, by offering you the full freedom of defining a God in absolutely any capacity that you desire, I would assume the question of "whether humans respawn or reincarnate after death" is entirely your decision ie up to you.
So if you needed to know this critical information before doing anything - as you said, depending on how you qualify your deity entity this "need" can be entirely within reach. The definition you make is not limited in that sense.
What might you do with your "sims" based on your daily moods? And why would you experience days or even moods per se? Would your God concept be human in the sense of experiencing days and moods?
I see, so as I understand, as a God you would hold the life and wellbeing of children in higher regard to any adult? Why is that exactly? What makes children's lives more worthy than any other (adult persons) according to you?
Would North Korea remain the same size regardless of how many people are sent there eventually leading to overpopulation, starvation and death. Or would North Korea's terrority expand to accommodate your accumulating mass of condemned people?
Would North Korea gain power and economic prosperity from the influx of forced immigration? Would the world eventually end up being all "North Korea?" After its population explodes and it conquers other countries by sheer numbers alone?
Hmm... Perhaps that anyone sees North Korea as an opportunity rather than a punishment. Regarding killers and abusers, we can't really never know.
@Benj96
Probably nothing. It is the only way I could keep living in the hopes and desires of believers. Their needed belief that X could happen anytime is what myself as God would make me alive.
Not necessarily in higher regard, but the most vulnerable are due the greatest protection.
Quoting Benj96
I'm God, for God's sake. Don't pester me with details and logistics.
Careful, don't piss God off. Maybe I'll send them to Spain instead. You know what? I'm definitely going to send Dr. Phil to Spain.
Get some new shoes?
Thats what the OP sounded like it was asking to me.Quoting Benj96 Yes, thats the assumption.Quoting Benj96
We are separated by our histories.
I would reach towards, but I wouldnt need to try to become it, as we would be completely different in the ways I would prefer and similar in our abilities.
A lot of stories about Supreme Beings include reports of what happens when you get too uppity. I am inclined to err on the side of caution.
It's fun being human. Don't you think so?
Quoting Benj96
I would secretly be everything.
Day one: invent and construct a universe with plenty of planets and fill them with plenty of people, or maybe just dogs, cats and capybara. Then have a beer and watch the sun go down.
Day two: Go back and make sure that everyone stays healthy for the whole of there lives and give them a kill switch for when they don't want to continues. Then have a beer and watch the sun go down.
Day three: Give everyone all of the knowledge they need to live the life they want. Then have a beer and watch the sun go down.
Day four: Have a walkabout to get to know the people. Then have a beer with them and watch the sun go down.
Day five: Have a meeting with they whole world, or worlds, to ascertain if the people are happy and if they have any other needs or wants. I would probably have to deny some motivational quirks like heaven and hell, too many jobsworth involved. Then I would have to invite everyone to have a beer.
Day six: get the biggest, highest quality, flat screen for my pad. Then have a few beers and watch the biggest, best reality show that I created and laugh my ass off.
Day seven: Probably stay in bed with a stomachache from all of the laughing I did. Then get a pizza for lunch.
Day one, week two: Now what the fuck am I going to do now?
Dr. Phil is definitely welcome here; at least he exists, unlike deities like God. I hope Dr. Phil had a fantastic time in Mallorca or Almería. I'll let you know whether he does "guiri" things or not.
I'll try to keep him safe from anti-tourist riots, by the way.
Quoting T Clark
God abandoned us a long time ago...
I think i see what you mean. So long as you do nothing, believers in your existence are free to imagine or contemplate your true nature? I suppose if you take any certain/exact definition it probably wouldnt satisfy every believers desires, hopes and dreams. You would effectively become impersonal, no longer a unique concept in everyone's minds. In a way that is a sort of death - a death of the diversity of personal understandings.
The phrase "Never meet you heroes" comes to mind -a sort of disappointment or dissatisfaction between the dissonance of the imagined and the actual.
It is.
Quoting frank
Interesting. What I gather from this is you would have some sort of duality in your existence. On one side you would be a singular thing (human) and on the other end of the scale you would be everything (secretly).
How would you sustain this secrecy, this pseudo-separation? Would it be in the paradoxes, contradictions and delineations between things or selves. Is it the free will of others and diversity of opinions, the non-accordnace of individuals that masks your double nature?
Very true. You'd certainly run into problems if you were a physical/tangible God. For example if you were a God on this planet you would likely make enemies very quickly and be harassed, defamed, accused, begged, assaulted due to everything that makes us human -desire for answers, desperation, jealousy, ego and narcissism, the rat race for power and authority.
So if you were a supreme being on earth I'd ve very concerned for your wellbeing personally.
Perhaps existing in anonymity is the more responsible/cautious choice.
Interesting. So you'd keep some distance basically. Reach towards or approach it (perhaps through communing or contemplating) but would never fully embrace/become it -keeping those distinctions between you that are preferable and desired whilst acknowledging your similarities on a personal level?
Correct me if I'm wrong. Just here trying to interpret as best I can.
I guess that in itself is quite revealing/illuminating.
You would be constantly pestered for details and logistics by not only me but everyone else, if you were indeed God and we could speak to you. Universal management does sound exhausting. Better you than I haha.
Quoting Sir2u
Do you think the disparity between how much knowledge any individual desires would cause issues? Perhaps person A wants omniscience and Person B wants just enough knowledge to survive in blissful ignorance. How do you resolve privacy issues, intellectual property etc when some people know almost everything and others know little.
Quoting Sir2u
Do you think everyone would feel happy being provided with everything they could possibly want? Do you think things would lose value, boredom would kick in? Do you think people would still have a sense of purpose or motivation to work towards anything? Perhaps some people will always be unhappy regardless of what you offer them?
Quoting Sir2u
Haha. An important statement. Would you get bored with your limitless abilities and time? Would there be a certain angst or dread that you did so much in 1 week and have billions or maybe trillions of years left on whatever clock you decide. What might you do differently if you were disenfranchised with being this being forever?
Four things 1) I would be omnipotent 2) I would be omniscient 3) 4) I wouldn't care what you thought or wanted.
Do you know who Dr. Phil is? He's pure evil.
Quoting javi2541997
No. You're thinking of Franco.
That's three things.
Are you omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent and indifferent or does omnipresence not take part in this tetrad?
You are reversing the power relationship involved. In Genesis, we were thrown out of the Garden after we tried to become equal to God. Similar smackdown happened with the tower of Babel.
Icarus did not pack enough sunscreen. Prometheus got nailed to a cliffside.
As the Reverend Dirty Harry said: "A man has to learn his limitations."
Exactly!
Quoting Benj96
Yes!
Quoting Benj96
Yes. Villain-victim, parent-child, husband-wife, rich-poor, etc. But I think the biggest is villain-victim. There's soooo much emotion fueling that relationship.
And every attempt we make to bridge the gap, narrow the distance between our own disatisfying/imperfect realism and a seemingly perfect ideology, a God - an absolute or fundamental source of knowledge, power, authority, justice, order, control and origin seems to lead to our own demise and suffering - as you pointed out with the various parables or analogies/old stories.
Why would you say that is? Why ought an ideal be forbidden to us? Is it supposed to be ignored? Dismissed? Permanently unknown? Approached yet never reached? Is it to serve as a lucrative tease but nothing further?
Indeed there is a powerful emotive narrative embedded in the villain - victim dichotomy. An obvious follow up question in this respect is where does the "Hero" fall in this arrangement between victim and villain. As most understand a hero to neither be a victim nor a villain. Furthermore most of those faith-inclined idealise God as a Hero.
However depending on who you ask, God can also be a villain - an omniscient, omnipotent entity that doesn't answer your begging or rectify your suffering. For others God is the perfect victim - wherever unjust persecution and sacrifice appears in writings on the topic.
Im God. If I say its four, its four.
Yes, when I was in university, Dr. Phil was a main subject of memes and jokes. Well, the American students introduced us to him on campus. Wasn't he the one with the red-haired teen girl, screaming cash me outside or something like that?
Quoting T Clark
We started talking about God and suddenly Franco showed up. Why does this happen all the time in Spain?
A supreme being would be responsible for our production. Our ideas are just our ideas. As the Proverb says:
I would not ever do anything and be eternally at peace with that.
Blissful contentment.
I wouldn't define myself or anything else ever.
To be.
Neither. My eternal bliss would be complete (or sufficient enough) for me to be forever oblivious of everything including myself.
That's a good question. I've only ever thought about the Hero in connection with possibility. Like, when the die is cast, there are six possibilities, but the one that appears at the end is the man (or woman) of destiny: the hero. What do you think of the Hero?
Quoting Benj96
Yes. In the book of Job, his wife tells him to curse God and die. Boethius was an influential philosopher in the middle ages who taught that we're all bound to the wheel of fortune. If you're doing well, enjoy it, because the wheel can turn down and you can lose it all. If you're at the bottom of the wheel, don't fear, because the wheel keeps turning and there's something amazing in your future.
I think that the knowledge they need to live their lives would probably not include personal details of others. Maybe if base level knowledge included the result of messing around with other people meant that they would mess around with them in the same way it would prevent lots of problems.
Intellectual property is just another way of saying I want money, if everyone has everything the need they don't need to sell their ideas, I think it might even remove the unrealistic pressure of creating and so let them create what they want to instead of what might sell.
Quoting Benj96
I think if their intelligence is high enough and maybe a bit of motivation to find and enjoy things in life that problem would not appear. And that would be fixed on day 2.
Quoting Benj96
The kill switch is for cases when they are bored. But I hope that does not happen in the normal span of their life.
Quoting Benj96
You noticed! This is one of the questions I like to ask the religious zealots that insist I should join their club. They never have a valid answer.
I have no idea what I would do for the rest of eternity, but at least I would ot have to put up with a bunch of angels singing my praise and saints sucking up to me for favors.
EDIT: thinking about it, I could probably have a good eternal life being invited to dinner everyday by the people I created, after all there would be millions of them. Intelligent conversation, good food, what else could one want. Shit I almost forgot good beer.
I wouldn't write a word down either while I was here because of our post-Heideggerian deconstructionist tendencies. (Total hassle leaving people free to think for themselves, but it yields the best people - people who consider "best" as something to consider.)
God is interested in people. So interested he became one of us to make it easy for us to understand that. So interested, that he would take a punishment for wrong-doing, to show us that wrong-doing leads to misery and death (because despite the hangovers after drinking too much, we fail to learn anything that isn't easy and continue to destroy ourselves), and take this punishment in a painful way even after living a life free of any wrong-doing whatsoever, and so, be the recompense none of us can be for each other, and physically rise from the dead to show us what this is all about - living with God as his friends, his family by adoption, forever.
But then, if I would do this if I were God, I'd be doing much better now. Good thing for the rest of you (and myself) that I'm not God.
Shiva!
Wonder if it would catch on.
I guess the only thing I would add is I would make the outcome either come sooner, or less up to we human beings. To me, what God has done is enough, and were all getting there, but hes given us so much power over the process. I like being free though (when I occasionally am free), so maybe he knows what I want better than me.
Isn't destruction and creation mutual and necessary opposites? As in for state A to transform into state B, state A is altered/augmented or entirely replaced.
I was under the impression that every interaction is the loss/destruction of what was before and the creation of what is next. Even in the creation of a first thing, there is the loss/destruction of its absence. Feels yinyang to me
Interesting. How would you characterise this being outside the realm of a universe? How would you distinguish it from "nothingness/total absence of being"?
Fair enough. Can't argue with God I guess. I'll just have to go back to re-learning the number line. "God forbid" I ever need more than 2 things but less than 4 things or need to conceptualise a triangle or triad.
Apparently there is a sect where Shiva is the supreme being, but otherwise, he/she is the destructive side of the Hindu trinity. Destruction isn't necessarily a bad thing. Consider:
Once upon a time, there was a successful slave revolt in St Domingue, which had been a major funding source for the French. A Spanish army, nearby, thought they would drop in take St Domingue, but the slaves fought valiantly, and preserved their freedom. A British army, observing the situation, decided they would drop in a take over St Domingue, but the slaves drove them off, again with great bravery.
Then Napolean sent his soldiers to take back St Domingue. They say the former slaves, watching the approach of the French fleet, thought everyone in France had come. But the slaves fought back, and then summer set in. Yellow fever started to take out the French soldiers and their mood turned sour. They began to entertain themselves by throwing captured prisoners into a ring of bloodthirsty dogs to watch them be torn apart. And then the French caught the leader of the slave revolt. They took the general to the bay and drove stakes into his shoulders as he watched his wife and son drown in the bay in front of him.
But with regard to these French soldiers, who created the air they breathed? Who created the ground they stood on as they lost their humanity? It was the god of creation. In this case, the god of destruction is the good one. He/she takes the French away and reduces them to molecules in the dust. He takes all the pain of the people we now call the Haitians, and lets it crumble away in the breeze. He lets them have a new birth of freedom. Shiva does the same for you everyday.
I'll settle for the galaxy for now. My next project would probably be to terraform a whole bunch of planets and seed them with fast-evolving life forms that all have a decent chance of becoming human-like, so they can develop interstellar travel, trade and war with one another. Quite a lot of potential for entertainment there.
But isn't Yahweh expert at genocide and death? Didn't he destroy the world and even have his own son killed? Yahweh could do anything he wants to cleanse humanity but he seems to enjoy doing his thing with a maximum amount of violence and destruction. I guess that's why he is called a vengeful God who is strong in wrath. The cosmic Mafia boss.
I may be influenced by Abrahamic monotheistic religion, where the Trinity and God are creators, not destroyers. For this reason, it was a big surprise for me to meet deities that are destructive, although I understand that creation and destruction can be tied to each other.
Yahweh is god of Old Testament - a tyrannical destroyer of lives and worlds. Jesus is, by some accounts, his son.
Why does most deity want to be the father of Jesus? I think this is key. Instead of asking, "If you were God, what would you do?" I think it would be more reasonable to ask: "If you were Jesus, what would you do?"
Well the father, the son and the Holy Ghost are all one God - Yaweh.
Quoting javi2541997
Well, if I were Jesus, I would be more inclined to say, 'Fuck this, I'm going to Hawaii!'
I would at least get a decent lawyer, or just run like hell before paying the bill for the last supper,
Anyway, he didn't create anything, nor did the Holy Ghost. Jesus cured a few sick people and killed some innocent pigs, but other wise, his entire assignment was to preach and get killed.
Yes, I wonder if they got the idea from The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis (1955), wherein Jesus imagines a normal life with Mary and children. In Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln (the book Dan Brown ripped off for his famous 'novel'), this idea is explored as a conspiracy theory.
Crucification, or a wife and children? Surely there must be something less punishing than both those extremes. :wink:
Not for the son of a deity got on a mortal. Look how the Greek gods treated their illegitimate children!
Kazantzakis (as @Tom Storm pointed out) wrote clever paragraphs regarding this, and what could happen in real life rather in the story written in the Gospels.
The film directed by Scorsese is pretty good too. There are a bit of differences with the novel, but this scene blew my mind: Jesus is seeing himself on the cross but randomly disappears, and the cross is there empty, but the crowd is still yelling. A little girl takes the hand of Jesus and says: Leave them alone in their dream. Don't worry. Now, I will show you what really happened with your life...
Whereas Adam and Eve were caste out of the garden for a transgression they didn't understand, some new great reversal might occur by putting up a sign on my (God's) basement door that reads: "Do Not Enter!"
Do you dare go into the basement? That odd smell coming from the basement is a sign that you should not go in there. It's locked, you can't get in. Don't try. You're not allowed in the basement. You wouldn't understand what you see there anyway. It's nothing. Don't worry about it.
Under no circumstances are you permitted to go into the basement. There will be consequences if you do.
Indubitably, you will copy me (God) as soon as you see what I'm doing in the basement. So stay out!
You can't be God if I am God. Duh!
God wouldn't get to watch the dramatic unfoldment by his own (atrocious) desire if no one comes around to open the basement door. Someone will always open the basement door. You can count on it.
Having just watched Robert Eggers The Lighthouse, after learning he is reviving the cinematic tale of Nosferatu, the horror fantasy influence is too much on my mind. Halloween is going to last until the very end of this year what with the scary election in Nov and the cult of the skin wearing orange man. Will we survive?
"My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" :death:
So frickin' true! What a species!
But what would you do that you wouldn't do? That is what we do and don't want to know.
Paramatman/brahman is supposedly devoid of all attributes, despite the attributes of the "absolute", "eternal" and "blissful" sticking to it. It is a true enigma. Is it just the space in which all things occur?
God is empty of God, until some representative/avatar swoops down to try to tell you about extending your cars warranty.