It’s like the bookkeeper who moved a nickel from his pants pocket to his vest pocket, to make sure the books balanced.
Can God write a sentence so complicated that he cannot parse it? 
I always wondered why God had to be a Hypocrite in Exodus.
He gave the Tribes of Israel a set of laws, including prohibitions against theft and homicide, then orders the tribes to enter Canaan and slaughter everyone they come across.
Take their lives and take their land.
Enola Straight: He’s all-powerful, right? He could have kept the Canaanites out, so the land would be empty and the Children of Israel could move right in without any fuss.
If fuss was absolutely necessary, he could have filled the land with monsters, which the COI could battle without immorality. Or swamps: make them work to clear the land.
But letting other people move in and then letting the COI go rip them apart – brutally – rape the women and kill the kids and trick the men into getting circumcised then ambushing them – that’s big league dickery.
You’re defining God in human terms. Remember, God is the scientist, earth is the petri dish, and we are the mitochondria. The OP said that God wasn’t being too godly. I’m saying God is WAY too godly, beyond the scope of our senses and comprehensive ability. That’s why we can’t understand his motives.
This line of reasoning reconciles science and religion for me. I, through reasoning, decided God doesn’t exist, and therefore lost my spiritual connection. Now I’m no longer miserable, because instead of being sad that God doesn’t exist, I’m comfortable with him being out there and having no desire to affect my life.
I always like H.L. Mencken’s definition of the Creator:
“A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.”
Through reasoning you decided that God doesn’t exist.
By what method did you determine that he existed after all?
I realize that this is a zombie thread, but Hamlet hit on something that has bothered me about the “Liberal Christian” POV that seemed to get dropped in the discussion with Voyager.
And
[QUOTE=Hamlet]
See, I take that part as simply a story that enlightens us by pointing out that humanity is flawed. I have no problem seeing that the Adam and Eve story is just a myth, but using it as an illustration that humanity is flawed, and thus imperfect.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t see how someone can read the Bible and say, “This Adam and Eve story is just a myth. But this whole Jesus is the son of God and humanity’s savior… Absolute fact.”
What “outside the Bible” information prompts that?
This is a big part of what drove me away from religion. If you don’t take the whole Bible literally, how do you know what is real and what isn’t? Who determines that? People? The very people that the Bible insists are flawed?
The NT has additional support. There really was a Roman Empire, a Temple, High Priests, Golgotha hill, Gethsemane, Pontius Pilate, two Herods, etc.
The Garden of Eden story doesn’t have any additional support, and, perhaps worse, it entails more contradictions, including lurid contradictions of scientific reality. Two humans do not constitute a successful breeding population; the nascent race would die off within a few generations.
(And…yeah, there are a few historical contradictions in the NT. Herod didn’t slaughter hundreds of kids in Bethlehem, and the whole earthquake with graves opening bit in John didn’t happen. Shrug.)
We get to pick and choose. Many Mormons accept a stripped-down version of their faith, leaving out the New World settlements and walled cities. Some Mormons even quietly leave out some of Joseph Smith’s story of the golden plates.
Baby, yes, bathwater, no. Dessert topping or floor wax? You choose.
New York is real, that doesn’t mean that Godzilla is. Or The Ghostbusters. etc…
Beyond that, though, if you draw the line at the NT, you leave out the whole 10 Commandments story. And Leviticus.
How far can you strip down the material your religion is based on before your religion is no longer relevant to the material?
Okay, that is a position I understand (but don’t hold.) We humans get comfort from things we only imagine. When we start distorting our lives for them, or worse, trying to distort other people’s lives for them, then there is a problem - but that is something you don’t do.
Saying an unknowable and unfalsifiable god either exists or doesn’t exist is equally valid. I thought you were rather more committed to an actual god, my apologies.
I’ve asked that very question many times, and have never gotten a reasonable answer.
The physical existence of Jesus is not the problem here. As I understand it, much of Christianity is based on original sin through the choice of our original father and mother. If there was no such event, why the need for Jesus?
My understanding of Jewish law, gained from sitting and standing through many Yom Kippur services, is that Eden is a just-so story and that we get right with God for our inevitable sins and mistakes is to atone. Which he accepts. Sometimes.
True. It just makes the story more convincing than, say, Lord of the Rings, where the entire world doesn’t exist.
That would have to be a personal choice for each individual to make. Some insist that the tiniest little whole causes the entire network to unravel; others can deal with interpreting parts literally and parts metaphorically.
(Just for clarity, I don’t reject the whole of the OT. I’m sure there are lots of parts – Kings and Chronicles and the like – that are fairly accurate, historically. Okay, Solomon didn’t have 14,000 chariots, but Solomon probably existed.)
If I recall correctly, though I’m very very far from a Tolkien expert and it’s guaranteed that someone on here will be able to correct me, Arda actually is Earth, so technically speaking it does exist - to at least the same level as the Garden of Eden, anyway.
Beyond that, though, I’m not sure I agree with your reasoning. I’d argue that, since we actually have New York to study, we can gather more evidence as to whether the events of Ghostbusters actually happened, and discover lots of it that says it didn’t. With Lord of the Rings, you just have the basic either/or of reality. Citing references to stuff that actually existed isn’t a plus or minus to credibility by itself; it just means we have more opportunity to discover stuff which does do that.
I’m almost certain Tolkien didn’t mean it that way. (In contrast, Robert E. Howard’s “Hyborian Age” world is intended to be our own world, in an age before massive cataclysms destroyed Aquilonia and Nemedia.) Tolkien’s civilization contradicts our world’s history in too many points; it simply cannot be reconciled.
It’s a little like the classical paradoxes of confirmation theory, the “grue” paradox, etc. (One of the funniest is: if I am claiming that all crows are black, then I am also claiming that all non-black things are not crows. So, not only am I finding confirmation in every black crow I see…I’m also finding confirmation in white sugar, red Chevettes, green moss, and so on.)
The discovery of the historical site of ancient Jericho doesn’t necessarily give any support to the idea that the walls were blown down by a miracle of God – but it does help support the notion of an Israelite conquest of the region.
As you note, you can find actual evidence that the events in Ghostbusters didn’t happen. That’s like finding a white crow. It blows the hypothesis away.
I’m only saying that the NT has a veneer of credibility that the creation account lacks. Whether or not Ghostbusters is fiction, it’s more credible – we have a better ability to suspend disbelief – because of its real-world setting.
It’s not wholly unreasonable for a person of faith to believe in Jesus…but not in Adam and Eve. Different books, written at different times by different people, with different levels of proximity in time and place. The NT accounts rely on fewer friends-of-friends-of-friends.
I believe in the universe. It is infinite, magnificent, mysterious, powerful, and I can SEE it. Other than visibility, defining terms for the universe have been used for God. If I try to understand God’s motivations, I will not succeed unless I consider God to be the universe. The universe created us, but does not find our planet any more significant than the zillions of others it created.
Indifference from a higher power accounts for God’s inconsistent treatment of mankind. The writers of the Bible interpreted this inconsistency as the whims of an authority figure that cannot be questioned. Many believers nowadays rely too much on the perspectives of men who existed thousands of years ago, who wrote with a sense of entitlement. So, I’m not using the Bible to reconcile my existential crisis.
As I told Czarcasm, I believe in the universe. I consider the universe as God, but I don’t intend to worship it, pay tithes to it, or observe holidays associated with it. It just served to fill my spiritual void after I stopped believing in the standard conceptualization of God.
The thing is, we already have a word to call the universe, and that word is “universe”. Calling the universe “God” without assigning it any additional aspects that would differentiate it from the common definition of “universe” is akin to calling call all cats “unicorns” out of nothing more than a deep set psychological need for unicorns to somehow exist in our reality, come hell or high water.
So I can chose “Thou shalt not kill” and Heaven as the only valid concepts in the Bible, ignore the rest and call myself a Christian and go to heaven when I die? Sounds like a sweet religion to me.
Though I would guess you would have to at least believe that Jesus was the son of God and is the savior or else the whole “Christ” part of the word “Christian” goes right out the window. So that counts me out.
Something about cherry picking bits out of the Bible and essentially throwing out the rest bothers me, but I can’t quite get into words why. Maybe it’s because I can’t quite grasp why you would base such a significant portion of your life on something you don’t seem to have full confidence in. Maybe it just seems to wishy-washy. I’ll try to form more coherent thoughts for my next post, but I hope someone else may chime in and maybe provide some clarity.
so, you created your own god - that
a) doesn’t care about you
b) you don’t care about it
c) has zero evidence of anything “spiritual” about it
d) re purposed a word/thing that already exists in order to give yourself something ‘concrete’ to explain it
to fill a ‘void’ that you think you have because religion, which you reject, taught you that there must be some form of spiritual stuff that you need?
interesting…