That's all fine, just know that positing the existence of a "god" will always confuse your understanding of reality. For a god to have real significance, it must in some way lie outside of our world.
I would say that that which both includes and is everything must be outside of everything, and never would I disagree with this position.
Otherwise, a god is just a configuration of particles and you mean something other than god -- at this point you are confusing yourself. However, the former case is logically impossible -- there is nothing that exists outside of the world.
Of course there are things which exist outside of the world. Where is the world, but in a place (God) which includes it?
Anything that exists, exists in our world, including "alternate universes" or thoughts or extradimensional demons or other crap that supposedly exists "outside of our world." But that is somewhat beside the point.
Relativity (not general or specialised, I mean simple relativity) is incredibly useful here. Essentially, there are infinite levels to anything, and infinite levels to everything. Reverse the directions of Achilles and the Tortoise. Also, read "Goedel Escher Bach" by Douglas R. Hofstadter for some interesting revelations on the nature of infinity, as it applies to everything from Mathematics, through Music, to God, backwards and forwards, and even beyond.
I think your words show the intellectual problems with this belief: you say that God may have different understandings depending on the situation: this implies that the concept itself is vacant of any inherent meaning.
Two things here. Firstly, your statement is incorrect - as far as human understanding goes, absolutely everything is subject to perspective, though perspectives may be more or less or similarly though differently informed (PO). Secondly, I assume that we are all, in some sense, "Nihilists", here - why should there be any inherent meaning to anything? Surely there is no inherent meaning to anything? If this is the case, then of course "God" has no meaning.
You say "God is reality exterior to my mind" -- what the hell is this phrase supposed to mean?
The mind includes the self and the vision of the exterior, while the exterior is independent of the mind. I thought it was quite a delightfully simple statement.
First of all, "mind" is merely a more muddled term for "brain;" using "mind" only obfuscates the discussion.
Mind is separate from brain - I've argued this before, successfully, even on this very forum. I think my general gist is often along the lines of self-conception etc. making mind greater than simple organic blah blah blah. Generally, in my experience of other people's usage of these terms - both the initiated and the uninitiated - "Mind" is the "scientific" way of saying "soul", so as not to sound at all religious (because religion is stupid, since Science is real. Duh :p). The brain is an organ whose processes generate (in a healthy example) an entity known as "mind", which is made up... Consider ants. Individually, they're fucking retarded. If you get a handful of ants and drop them next to each other, they'll go off and die. However, if you have a fully functioning colony, with the same number of (or more) ants, you will, effectively, have an organism, made of many smaller organisms. The colony has certainly given itself purpose - mainly, self-preservation - and it will use its smaller parts to that goal. Essentially, the brain is "ants", but the mind is "colony". The colony is a quantifiable and qualifiable thing, it exists, and is separate from the parts which made it. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, etc.... This is a very, very simple version of an incredibly complex and interesting analogy - once again, read Hofstadter's book.
)If you meant "reality outside of my brain," which I don't think you did, it would mean anything that's not a brain. If you meant outside of the processing power of your brain, whatever you have to say on the subject is doomed to nonsense. Language does not allow us to speak of things outside of our understanding. See Wittgenstein:
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
I've always seen Wittgenstein as being simple arguments against debating useless topics uselessly, which is why I generally stay out of these pointless discussions, unless it's two thirty in the morning and I have work in five hours but am so disturbingly bored and unable to sleep that I have to ramble on about God to people who have fundamentally different understandings of key words and concepts.
I know I'm not going to win any converts with this, but I think it is pretty clear that a belief in god is untenable from a strictly analytical level.
Evidently not, given my responses
If I'm not overstepping my boundaries, I think that Cargest may be attempting to point out that thoughts and concepts have as much of an impact on reality, in a round-a-bout manner, as the interaction of physical elements. However, the idea of "everything" easily encompasses thought as well. Hey, isn't using the term everything kind of like using the term God? ABOLISH IT!
Thoughts are also the interaction of physical elements, for they are chemical and electrical reactions in a brain. Thus, they are a part of reality and effect it. That said, while the thought of owning a slave maid who performs fellatio on me every morning might be real, this maid does not actually exist. Just as you might daydream about Norwegian wolves running through the snow and howling at the pagan moon, these are not real wolves. They're creations of your brain. Now, I might be such a weak and infantile indivudual that believing in my slave maids may be necessary for my sanity, that I need to believe in their reality just to function properly, but I think any old schmuck would be perfectly in the right to mock me for this weakness.
And, no, the term "everything" is not like the term "god;" "everything" has an established meaning, while the term "god" does not, as any conversation on the subject will tell you. But nice try, bro!
The most constructive thing to be doing right now then, rather than arguing about the existence or non-existence of a being, entity, state, or simple factor of existence, called "God", would be to be discovering and refining a general and overarching concept and understanding of what "God" can and cannot mean, and, from that, what it should mean to us.
But, for some reason, you've chosen, quite logically, not to believe in anything called "God", while I have chosen, quite logically, to believe in such a thing without question (primarily because, as stated before, it is pointless for me to question something which simply is, as far as my understanding allows).