YOU are GOD E-Book

Werner J. Kraftsik

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 207

Beschreibung

From the earliest beginnings, people have searched for the where from, where to and the meaning of their lives. Because there were and are no satisfactory answers, something otherworldly, something greater, incomprehensible for the origin of the world, the creation of man and for the fate of all had to be cause and cause. This is how the images of God emerged, which developed differently in the various ethnic groups. Where is this god? Who is he? What does he tell people? What does he expect from people and what do people hope for from HIM? Where do they find God - ultimately? It's a long-running search, with surprising results.

Leseprobe

A God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, who has a will at all after kind of the one which we experience at ourselves, I cannot imagine.

© Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955), theoretical physicist, born in Germany, stateless from 1896-1901, Swiss citizen from 1901, citizen of the USA from 1940. Research on matter, space, time and gravity; The main work is the general theory of relativity published in 1915. Nobel Prize in Physics

God as the creator of the universe (title of a Bible moralisée, around 1230) Anonymous - archiv.onb.ac.at, public domain

Preface:

YOU ARE GOD TOO

"Man is basically a desire to be God."Jean Paul Sartre

The inherent urge, no matter which religion, philosophy or even tradition one may follow, to realize "God", to want to understand whether and what meaning life has, is probably exactly the reason why you, highly esteemed reader, are holding this book in your hands right now. It shows that you are a reflective person and do not want to be satisfied with the simple and mundane answers of life. Sincere congratulations already once on this.

He also invites us to repair the old “highways” to God, that is, highways to ourselves.

It obviously seems to be simply that God looks at us every day in the mirror. But it means also to happiness "search for knowledge" - and not "knowledge discovery".

So, you are completely on the safe side, no matter what is now presented on the following pages.

Get involved, enjoy the journey. You can only win.

As is well known, thoughts create reality. But only feelings animate the created.

Werner J. Kraftsik not only leads us theoretically through the concept of God, but the invitation to experience this topic from the inside out becomes an active "participation scenario".

If we were created “in his image” (so it is in the holy scriptures of Christianity), then God is our mirror or we are his mirror. However, we want to look at it, in the mirror we probably only recognize ourselves. In this regard, I find Werner's considerations and conclusions simply not provocative.

It fills me with gratitude that someone in the German-speaking area is now openly turning to this topic with so much courage. I Werner J. Kraftsik the first time met with us at our castle to its author reading on "Morals and Dogma" (Albert Pike).

It is more than a masterpiece to translate this giant of literary humanities. What Werner created there is in no way inferior to the translation of the Bible by Luther & Zwingli. This translation will still be applied and used many hundreds of years from now.

It fills me with great joy and gratitude to know such a great spirit as a friend and brother in spirit, this since our first meeting.

For sure for a whole life.

The fact that Werner has also dared to work on mammoth projects, which more and more people are now beginning to understand, is truly phenomenal. Some may think that it is intended to provoke, but I see it more as an invitation to question existing answers.

May you accept his invitation to learn more about yourself, about God, and at the same time feel your religion, philosophy or tradition more than "valued".

I have studied pretty much every religion, philosophy and tradition on this planet, but I was able to experience a lot of new things in this work. This has not really happened to me that often until now.

Only dead fish swim with the current, they say - this work can take you all the way to the source in the highest peak regions, enjoy the journey, it's worth it.

At this time, when this work is published, more and more people are beginning to look for more meaning in life and so more and more people are approaching the subject of "God".

The life and synchronicity have meant that it can now be made available to such a large audience.

Werner solved it masterfully!

I AM YOU ARE WE ARE

Compassion & love

Schloss Wartensee, Spring awakening 2021

In gratitude,

Saint von Lux

"Who therefore wants to search and find GOD, let him search him in himself, namely in the innermost of his soul."

(Angelus Silesius)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Belief Systems

GOD - A Description

As long as there are human beings, and since human beings have been asking themselves why they are actually on this planet, and why this world, as it is, exists, have human beings been asking for the cause.

They ask WHO is responsible for all that surrounds us, all that affects people and the world, nature and sometime who created all being?

Did these early humans find conclusive answers?

I don't think so, because you lacked basic, scientific knowledge for the answer of their questions, which would have made concrete answers possible.

They searched for answers, and for that which is not recognizable or has been explained, it remained attempt to explain the inexplicable.

Popular depiction of changes in body structure during the course of hominization, public domain, File: Darwin-chart.jpg

Let's imagine an "early man", e.g. the real human development form assumed as the first, a "Homo Erectus" >> the erect man << who experiences the impact of a lightning into a tree for the first time in his immediate proximity.

Not only did he hear the bursting of the tree in close proximity, which was a new thing to his ears, and with its intense volume, perhaps an event he had never experienced before. His skin, his body hair, were burned away or scorched by the pain associated with the heat of the lightning, unknown until now.

This burned itself into his brain as a memory that no longer faded, as it were like a "brand".

Once he recovered from his fright and the pain of his scorched skin subsided somewhat and became more bearable, he might realize that he was not in "his territory."

The small group to which he belonged always moved in a very specific area of the forest and to avoid unknown dangers, the boundaries of this area were never undertaken alone, but always together with others, especially the brave of the community - he was alone and had entered unknown territory.

Other beings - humans or animals that could have been dangerous to him had not been seen - so there must have been some other cause that had tried to kill him or at least warn him not to enter the unknown terrain. Perhaps such a moment, such an experience was the trigger for the assumption that there is or must be something invisible, something numinous, supernatural, which both evoked shivers of fear and at the same time seemed respectfully attractive.

Is this how the IDEA arose in the Paleolithic hunter-gatherers that a superior being watched over their world, both over the surrounding nature, the plant and animal world, and over themselves, and cared for the well-being of their lives as much as for their sufferings?

Their ideas about this "superior being" were thereby quite realistic and equally related to their daily lives, as the first, mostly female figurative representations of goddesses, mother goddesses, as statues suggest.

They observed and experienced protection and security daily with the mothers of their group, who cherished and cared for the offspring, but also reprimanded them when necessary. So it was obvious to determine something for an inexplicable protective power which coincided with the daily experiences of weal and woe. It is therefore not surprising that among the first representations were female figures, which probably represented not so much the realities, but an idealization of the revered but also feared force that belonged to the time.

Today, archaeologists speak of Venus figurines found in various places and considered objects of worship.

Such Venus figurines are dated by the sciences to the so-called Upper Paleolithic, about 40,000 to 9,700 BC.

The Venus of Willendorf made of limestone, age: 30 000 - 27 000 years, © Photo: Postcard of the Vienna Museum of Natural History

Whether they are really first concepts of God remains, because no conclusive proof can be led, in the end speculation, nevertheless some speaks for this assumption.

As GOD, goddess or deity supernatural entities are called, whose main qualities consist in the fact that they have indescribable abilities and powers which cannot be explained by nature and therefore they are neither explainable to the people nor their nature is comprehensible for the people.

Mythologies and religions see in God/Gods as the origin of all being, as the shaper and preserver of the world known to us, of the whole universe, thus a for all areas of the being ruling, all-embracing force.

In the different circles of life and culture corresponding ideas about the respectively valid God developed, which, if one looks at it more closely, all corresponded in their manifestations to the requirements of the circumstances of life of the people in question

We shall see at a later date that the basic structures of the respective gods probably bore different names, but differed little in their functions from the gods that appeared in other cultures.

Later in the history of mankind, it occasionally happened that, as a result of wars, the "new religion" was imposed on the defeated cultures or "old ideas" were mixed with those of the victors.

In the developing cultures, ideas of spirits, angels, demons, and finally gods successively emerged and took an important, indeed often a dominant, part in people's lives.

The idea that the ancestors continued to influence and participate in the destiny of the clan as invisible authorities is reflected in the ancestor spirits revered in many cultures.

Their influence on nature, as well as on the lives of people, was, as research assumes today, an integral part of people's social life.

Science today assumes that the "cradle of mankind" was in Africa.

In West Africa, in the southwest of today's Nigeria, the Yoruba1 developed ideas of gods, the gods called Orishas.

Orishas are for the Yoruba associated with the forces of nature, which as water, earth, air and the fire represent the different forces present there, they were personified forces of nature.

These were not "distant gods", they were close and familiar to the people and only the specially initiated managed to contact these gods when they put themselves in a trance and receive their messages. With these early conceptions of God, the associated religious developments can be seen, because the Orisha themselves, as purely immaterial phenomena, were not recognizable to humans.This required "chosen ones" who were able to make contact with the deity and thus communicate its "messages" to people. A development, which should influence the God conceptions of humans up to this day substantially. In old-Icelandic writings, the EDDA2 a GOD with the name "Tiwaz" is called in Scandinavia as GOD of the fight and victory, who is worshipped, however, also as preserver of the law and order.

The Germanic peoples of the European, Nordic part of the continent, worshipped "Thor" or "Donar" for the seafaring peoples as a thunderstorm or weather god, while the peasant, Germanic society considered and worshipped him as a vegetation god, who was above all the protector of the world of the people, of Midgard.

Thor (by Mårten Eskil Winge, 1872) public domain

When the ideas of a belief in a GOD or gods have developed, is not possible concretely, because there was no writing as a possibility of recording at these early times. Archeology interprets found artifacts in such a way that they only make sense on the basis of religious cults, which require a corresponding belief in certain entities.

This uncertainty naturally leaves a great deal of room for interpretation, which has not yet been definitively or satisfactorily answered and thus clarified by religious studies.

This is how the different concepts of God have developed, making it considerably more difficult to pin them down to specific cultural areas.

In the imagination of early mankind, gods became supernatural beings to whom special spiritual abilities were assigned.

These imagined, assumed gods had their own views and desires that responded to the behavior of humans, but remained essentially invisible.

These did not necessarily have to be gods in human form, they could be stones, mountains, but also plants, such as special trees or even very specific animals, whose assumed and imputed human characteristics represented the connection of the >> divine to the human <<.

The development of the images of God

As just indicated, in the course of the development of mankind different images of God have unfolded, which were mostly in very close and often dominating relationship with the daily life of mankind.

By divinity, people have understood and still understand the fundamental distinction between their ideas of the world of gods, a god and the world of men.

The world of the gods included in the early times of mankind, in some cultures also the animal world and in places plants were assigned divine properties, which we still know and use today occasionally as pure "medicinal plants".

In „Meyer Konversationslexikon“ from 1907 there is an interesting entry on the subject of plants and gods:

Sacred plants, plants significant for the cultus of the various religious systems, which either symbolize a certain religious idea, or were sacred to a certain deity, or play a role as a religious means of enthusiasm in the cult of sacrifice and oracles, or as god's court trees in the administration of justice. Many indigenous peoples choose certain trees as fetishes, from whose branches they hang stuff rags or their cut-off head hair as offerings; African tribes make particularly strong baobab trees the site of their religious gatherings. On old Egyptian wall paintings one sees the idea of the eternal life in form of a tree of the life represented, from whose treetop a deity grows out, which keeps the "water of the life" in a jug and donates to the soul of a deceased standing in bird form under the tree, whereby also the faithful standing there catches something of it with the hand.

On Assyrian wall decorations, seals and cylinders there are representations of a sacred tree, sometimes guarded by cherubim, like the biblical tree of life in paradise. A deity often hovers above it, with kings and priests standing to the side Often, next to the sacred tree, eagle-headed deities are depicted taking cone-shaped structures from bags they hold in their hands, which they hold over the same.

These ideas of God stem from the idea that everything in the surrounding nature is animated in some form, i.e. is seized by a spirit or spirits that must exist outside of the world that can be understood and recognized by humans. From this, early humans derived the divinity that was recognizable to them.

The ideas of the relationships between earthly people on the one hand and the plant and animal worlds that are removed from human beings and dominated by spirits emerged.

Religious scholars refer to such a religious-spiritual attitude as animism, because it means that the entire world is, so to speak, “breathed” by one or different spirits.

Closely related to this may be hunting magic, which may have had great importance in the development of magical practices for the people.

What moved people to draw the animals they intended to hunt in remote caves, without direct daylight on the cave walls? Was it the "magical motive", the representation of the animal a cultic act, with which one wanted to get closer to the hunting goal?

Cave painting from Lascaux, public domain,

There is a theory of hunting magic that tries to interpret the art and spiritual sentiment of early humans:

The image of a living being, the hunting target, either as a drawing or also as a sculpture, so people may have thought and felt, is the being itself or its spirit contained in it. By drawing or making a corresponding sculpture, they give the creator of the work dominion and power over the corresponding being. This perhaps explains the behavior of members of indigenous peoples who do not want to be photographed because they fear the "loss of their soul".

On the other hand, the relationship to the spirits, the unrecognizable powers and forces in nature, in the plants, the mountains, but also springs and rivers, and also the animals, was represented by sacred symbols - totem signs for the people.

Such signs served as a sign of identification with a certain "higher being" who was recognized as an absolute authority, and at the same time they represented, inside and outside the group, the sign of connectedness in one's own group.

The acceptance and orientation towards the spiritual were complete at this time. There was no separation from reality, from everyday life, because the entire life was ruled by the cults.

Cultic acts before the vital hunts, through ritual transformation of the hunter into the animals to be hunted, should conjure up the luck of the hunt.

Forgiveness rituals on the killed hunting prey should avert acts of revenge of the entities inherent in the animals by appeasement.

The thanks to the "great spirit" for a survived disaster as for each successful act by offerings was made with the same fervor as one asked for sparing from hunger and misery.

It cannot be excluded that in the further ethnic development the fear of the all-dominating "great spirit" founded the prohibition of images of God in the Jewish as well as in the Original Christian religion.

When and how did religions come into being?

An exact time when religion arose cannot be determined scientifically, because certain developments occurred before the existence of writing, which therefore could not be documented. It is difficult to determine, for example, for the Paleolithic Age, what purely cultic actions were and whether this can already be interpreted as religious.

It is conceivable that already very early the first creation myths, which - by the experienced and recognizable life and death of humans - initially referred to mother deities.

They were the bearers, but also the rulers of life; they gave and received the life of all.

People discovered a reverence for the great whole of these life processes and developed from it a special feeling, which can be called religiosity, later institutionalized and developed into religion, or the different religions.

The cave paintings found in Lascaux (France), as well as female figurines discovered elsewhere, could be interpreted as cultic-religious.

Detail of a human with a bird's head and bison, Lascaux Cave, Magdalenia CC BY SA 3 0

This first abstract thinking made it possible to develop special sensibilities, which was the prerequisite for the emergence of religiosity and religions. Thereby, no linear development can be ascertained, but these developments have developed differently due to respectively changed situations and conditions, just as the ideas and confrontations of the hunters and gatherers with life and death had resulted. In dealing with life, the hunting experiences, successes or failures and the resulting consequences for their lives may have played just as much a role as the deaths of members of their communities.

It cannot be excluded that these paintings, one dates the oldest ones to about 36,000 years ago, have nothing to do with religion, because religious developments are assumed to have started about 10,000 years ago according to the artifacts found.

It is conceivable, but by no means certain, that animistic hunting myths were mixed with early ideas of the afterlife.

In the book "The Darwin Code "5 published in 2009, the biologists Sabine Paul and Thomas Junker tried to find out whether there was an evolutionary benefit for religion. They argue, among other things, that there are connections between religion and art because both art and religion require a great deal of time to make the respective ideas and goals successful.

In addition, religion, like art, is community-building because it can summarize the group's imagination, feelings, and desires. It is important to note that the formation of communities through art is more of a voluntary nature, while religions subject their communities to more or less strong constraints. Freedom or personal interpretation, possible in art, largely exclude religions.

The available archaeological finds do not allow any conclusions to be drawn.

Venus von Tan-Tan 6

Whether the early hunter-gatherers made their drawings for purely aesthetic reasons, or whether these paintings have a religious background of some kind, must remain a matter of speculation and will continue to provide ample material for sustained discussion among scholars and theologians.

The Jewish-Christian religion sees in the human being created by God this as image of God, at the same time a prohibition of images is fixed in the Ten Commandments. The worship is due neither to the man created by God, nor the images created by men, but God alone.

It is, that one must not forget with most people, hardly possible to believe in a GOD, without to make also a picture of HIM.

Therefore, the Christian theology and philosophy has developed several means to minimize the dangers which exist with it.

The fear of the "great spirit" was so great that it was additionally and expressly forbidden to Jewish people to pronounce HIS name.

This is the implementation of the prohibition of the misuse of names in the second of the Ten Commandments of the Bible:

"You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain".

This prohibition is both reinforced and expanded in the 3rd Book of Moses, the so-called Leviticus, in Lev.24:16, and it is also subject to draconian punishments:

„ Anyone who blasphemes the name of the Lord is to be put to death. The entire assembly must stone them. Whether foreigner or native-born, when they blaspheme the Name, they are to be put to death. “.

With these quotations from the >> Tanach <<, the Hebrew Bible, called the "Old Testament" by Christians, the prohibition of naming is justified.

It seems worth mentioning in this context that the Bible, which is called "the Word of God", has the name >Tanach < composed of three different parts of the Bible:

Torah, the five books of Moses

TA

the books of the prophets newiim

9

NA

as well as the writings Ketuvim

10

CH

The “Word of God” was written by different people in different times.

The naming taboo was justified with the contents of the "holy scriptures"; it is astonishing, however, that despite the clear statement in the Ten Commandments and the law of blasphemy from Leviticus, the Bible pronounces the name an estimated 7,000 times.

Scientists of religion suppose that it could have to do with the fact that with the "Abrahamitic religions"11 the monotheism asserted itself and their GOD YHWH12, after all foreign "gods" by the assumption of the faith in the ONE and ONLY GOD had taken the place of all other gods, and therefore a proper name became unnecessary for the distinction.

In the Bible > New Testament <, just like in the Koran, there are clear instructions on how people should deal with "GOD":

For it is written:

You shall worship the Lord your God