tat tvam asi wrote:Stahrwe, of course God would be natural permitting a God or Gods exist. What else?

I am not talking about gods, I am talking about God, and He obviously is NOT natural.

Is that because God doesn't exist?

Because what does NOT exist is not a natural part of existence.

Stahrwe wrote:I am not talking about gods, I am talking about God, and He obviously is NOT natural.

Why do you assume it's "obvious" that a god wouldn't be natural?

As the bible would have it in the creation the Gods (Elohim, plural) are precisely natural. They are given as a fact of the nature of existence - the fact that existence consists of creator beings that go about creating things. The image of nature is given as heaven and earth with angelic realms and earthly altogether making for an image of the totality of nature. Then man sins and the small part of the totality of nature which is here on the earth, becomes corrupt. At no point are the Gods ever not natural in this mythology.

Interbane wrote:

Stahrwe wrote:I am not talking about gods, I am talking about God, and He obviously is NOT natural.

Why do you assume it's "obvious" that a god wouldn't be natural?

Because then the alienated invented fantasy of creationism would have to face reality. Reality has been anathema and heresy for nearly 2000 years for orthodox Christianity, so why would people change now?

God is all-powerful.

Our gods are limited by our imaginations, and the limits of what we think our brothers will accept as credible. Gods were once very limited. Gods of wind, fire, rain. Gods of sea, sex and war. They controlled aspects of reality, but few ever controlled all of reality. That is, until gods and pantheons are pitted against each other. Then gods are “more powerful than the infidel’s gods” until every religion has a supreme god, in control of all there is and capable of anything at all… so far as the inventors could imagine.

The god of the bible is limited and feeble by any standard of modern fiction. He was jealous of other gods, he feared losing his adherents. He meted out punishments for the smallest infractions, things if they were done against me, I would hardly give a stern talking to someone. He had no room in his heart for people to use the free will he allegedly gave them so that they could worship other gods, and there are many other limits that are imposed on god because his adherents simply lack the imagination to grant him those powers.

Why is it that bible-god is so concerned with just those few small societies in the middle east? Why isn’t he commenting on the comparatively astounding civilizations that existed in china, or the global juggernaut that has become of modern society? Why is it he seems to limit his meager miracles to healing the sick, or resurrecting the dead, when he himself is supposedly limitless?

Could it be because his inventors literally had no idea that there was anyone living beyond their borders? Could it be that god thought the stars were pin-pricks in a tarp, because he had no idea that they were stars like our sun, or indeed huge collections of them known as galaxies? The god of the bible cannot even prevent his worshipers from straying, and must resort to mass-murder, and genocide of whole people’s rather than use his infinite mastery of time and space to manipulate those same people into coming to him. No different, certainly, than reasoning with a child to relinquish a toy, rather than beating them to get it from them.

A god, capable of infinite reasoning, compassion, and planning on a scale far beyond all capability of thought, surely could convince whole nations with a subtle glance and a twinkle of the eye. Instead he descends into blood-bath tantrums worse than can be attributed to most of earth’s worst psychopaths.

He had no idea how to handle any of this because the writers of the bible had no idea. He had no idea about germ theory, or genetics, or plate tectonics or relativity because his inventors had no idea about these things.

Modern gods, created by modern story tellers are infinitely more powerful than the bible god by virtue of those authors having been exposed to the concepts intrinsic to real space travel. The massive distances, the enormous scales, the insignificance of the earth, and the extreme warping of nature in the events of the super-small, super-fast, and super-huge.

God knew nothing of these things, but WE DO! And so Cthulu is an entirely fictional being whose feats utterly dwarf bible-god. Jesus was killed with a spear, yet superman can take a Gatling gun to the chest and not feel it. The silver surfer can stand in the center of the sun, and bugs bunny can create worm-holes on walls and decide who can pass through them.

You cannot think of any way for god to save us from the flood, and you don’t fault god for his alleged merciless slaughter of all that lived but I can think of a hundred ways to save them, given that power, and I am no god.

The reason being I understand what omniscience is in a way that was simply not available to the primitives who wrote the bible. I am a product of modern society, and so I have a much greater appreciation of cause and effect, and how things interact, and how it may yet ultimately all come down to a case of there BEING no such thing as a truly random event. Any omniscient god would definitely be able to arrange events in the universe to unfold EXACTLY as he saw fit, and no amount of human doubting would have any impact on that.

I understand the true vastness of space, at least tentatively, and that is something no inventor of god had access to. They never saw another galaxy, or a supernova, or understood that the faintest twinkling of starlight was emitted from a completely gigantic ball of nuclear fusion which might even now, no longer exist, but we wouldn’t know any better for billions of years because the distance was so great that the event horizon would never reach us in our lifetimes.

This is not complete knowledge of the universe, but it is a damn sight better than anything bible-god has demonstrated, and the same goes now. Any god that I invent will seem silly and immature to the citizens of the future who understand physics in a way which simply isn’t available to me now. They will think of my understanding of galaxies and super-clusters as quaint and trivial, when juxtaposed to the larger concerns of Mbranes and colliding universal super-strings.

The invented gods of the future will be infinitely more powerful still…

And how could I even begin to take your god seriously, knowing that?

My response is that Johnson1010 and most everyone else on BT has no idea of what they are talking about when they discuss God. There has been a dedicated policy to avoid being educated about Him either through instruction of simply a systematic study of the Bible. It is as easy to make up false statements about God as it is to imagine new reasons why the Hubble Constnat needs to be corrected.

In my tenure here I have been; amazed at the lack of rigor permitted to pass as strong argument, and the obsession with God.

There has been a dedicated policy to avoid being educated about Him either through instruction of simply a systematic study of the Bible. It is as easy to make up false statements about God as it is to imagine new reasons why the Hubble Constnat needs to be corrected.

Yes, you "educated" me on what you think some of the characteristics of god were. I remember you making some of them up in an attempt to avoid a contradiction. I called you on it, so you backpedaled and claimed god was outside logic. You have nothing to teach people about your god, even when referencing the bible as source material. What actually happens is that you're informing people of your opinion, and nothing more.

Your remark about the HC is in the wrong thread. If science was limited to only imagining hypotheses, you'd have a point. But the hypotheses are useless without empirical evidence.

I'm ipod typing this and it's a pain in the ass to try type and edit but here it goes anyways...

Stahrwe you're talking to people who either used to believe the bible is the inerrant word of God and that he allows all of the mess because sin has to run out it's natural course to the bitter end, or at least people who are familiar with that scenario. When people question the logic involved in these beliefs it's simply to take the fallen nature doctrine as it is and look how utterly foolish the whole thing is.

If God knows the future then why allow sin to happen in the first place? I was taught that there are countless other worlds out there all of which were created by God as well and each with a garden where each were tempted the very same way. But as this apology goes, the earth and Adam and Eve were the first to fall for the serpents deception and eat the forbidden fruit. So the idea is that the whole infinite realm of space and all of the beings created by God are watching the effects of sin as it plays itself out down to the bitter end. God doesn't stop sin or prevent it from happening because the earth is being made an example of. If God didn't allow free will or allow sin to play then God could be accused of being unfair by all those watching the drama of the fallen earth. And you can imagine that this particular apology devised by Ellen G. White as if it were entirely biblical comes in to explain things like UFO's and everything else. There's a sense of the earth being center stage for this elaborate drama.

So when confronted with the slaughter of the OT the apology comes in to suggest that God was having to show everyone just what comes along when choosing sin. The wages of sin is death and every brutal OT verse gets covered by this outlook. The only one who knows when sin will have run it's course is God and that's why neither the angels nor anyone else know the day or hour of the second coming as this apology goes. So by the time sin has run it's natural course and is at the point where no one can rightfully accuse God of any wrong doing by putting an abrupt end to it all, then bam!!! It's suddenly Revelation time at that point.

This is all complete and total nonsense however Stahrwe!!!

People have been adding to the God concept for ages and ages. The above apology is the result of the bible mixed more attempts to reason through the bible and claim that divine vision explained the whole thing in detail. The myths before the bible are bunk as far as any literal reading goes, the bible is bunk as far as any literal reading goes, and these additions and after thought apologies are bunk as well. Johnsons right, these myths reflect the primitive cosmologies of the primitve times in which they were constructed. All of the attempts to go back and apologize for the inconsistencies in the bible crash and burn in the process. There is no justifying the blatant ignorance and error of the bible writings periods. The gig is up to all but the stubborn entrenched minds who fancy perceiving thems as "spiritually dead" and as the "dung of the earth" in desparate need of "salvation" from a far off fantasy realm where a fantasy supreme being (three in one) resides with his now humanoid resurrected son at his right hand. This is just plain embarrasing to even reflect on Stahrwe. At least I have the excuse of being a child when I held such sky high delusions as reality, but what excuse do have to be this deluded still at such an old age? It's mind boggling for me to see senior citizens that have never snapped out of it in their life time. Deluded to the grave..:

johnson1010 wrote: Why is it that bible-god is so concerned with just those few small societies in the middle east? Why isn’t he commenting on the comparatively astounding civilizations that existed in china, or the global juggernaut that has become of modern society? Why is it he seems to limit his meager miracles to healing the sick, or resurrecting the dead, when he himself is supposedly limitless?

Great points, along with the rest of your post. You should write up an essay along those lines and publish it somewhere.

For a book that is presumably written for the ages by an omniscient being (or I guess "inspired" is the proper term), it is rather pathetic. That's really the best God could do? Where is any indication at all of knowledge beyond what people knew at the time?

What Stahrwe calls our "obsession" is simply a fascinating sociological observation that seemingly rational adults actually believe the Bible is true.