Brian wrote:Interesting discussion.
From the Bible, God made man, not the other way around.
From reality, man wrote bible.
It has throughout history gone something like this..
Man doesn't understand reality.
Man dislikes reality.
Man dislikes death.
Man fantasizes about how reality should be.
Man comes up with a personally acceptable fictional reality, and in the same seemless motion he psychologically substitutes it for his own.
Man vocalizes, visualizes, and conceptualizes this reality to other men who have the same perceptions; who also quickly adapt it.
A religious belief system is born.
This is the basic birth and progression for every religion that has emerged since humanity started painting on cave walls.
As mankind advanced through the millenia in intelligence and in the understanding of reality, new more advanced religions formed. A religion would be revised until no amount of revision could save it from facts, and thus it would be replaced by another. Which would also be replaced. People were fairly fickle in their choice of belief.
Greater sophistication needed to be put into conceptually adapting religion to reality, so people could believe it.
In the current set of world religions, the bible(s) (and other religious texts), are the written guides for this. They take the idea of the fictional reality, and make interpretations for any and all contexts in our genuine reality which reinforce, or at least understandably agree with that idea.
The New Testament is arguably the most effective with this because of it's notion of "faith". It's basically a system for how to make your very own interpretations of genuine reality so there doesn't need to be an explicit explanation for everything written in the text. This makes the religion much more durable.
Despite this though old volumes are still continually being replaced by newer ones which incorporate yet more historically adjusted explicit, hypothetical, and metaphorical explanations for genuine reality.
To answer the topic of this thread, " Is "God" in the "10th dimension"?
No.
That's like asking if Alice in wonderland is in hell.
"God" and other such fictional entities only exist in our imaginations.
Although a good question might be, "Is imagination a dimension?"..
Maybe a dimension comprised of what we call ideas and thoughts, which somehow determines the other nine?
This I think is relevant and worth thinking about.