It’s not a deep-seeded desire to have God exist. It’s more of a reconciliation. The belief that an indifferent God exists shares a tenet with atheism, in that neither school of thought thinks God interacts with mankind.
If I really wanted unicorns to exist, I’d go with horses, not cats. 
If I’m going to abandon reasoning for something imaginary, I’m going to stake my claim in similarity and precedent.
uh - atheism says “no god(s) exists” - while it may follow that “therefore it doesn’t interact” - its not a “tenet” of atheism. (for it to be, you would have to believe something exists that doesn’t interact - atheism does not)
It may be a tenet of agnosticism or deism or some other ism - but it is not one of atheism.
A good number of liberal mainline Protestant Christians (and a good number of Eastern Orthodox and growing Catholics and Evangelicals) are universalists, so you don’t even have to believe that ;).
There is a difference between cherry picking bits and dealing with each portion of Scripture seriously and struggling with it to determine what it means and what it is referring to. The community may determine in reading the Scripture, with tradition, and though the guidance of the Holy Spirit, that certain texts are literal (and even then the question is what is the context) and some are mytho-poetic. To me, there is a large difference in reading the Bible literally and reading it literary - does the interpretation of a story match the grand narrative, does it match what was said by Jesus, does it match what we know now to be true through the working the Spirit? If no, then lets look at it again, and see what it tells us - this is something that the Christian community has been doing since the beginning; its why the communal reading of Scripture is so important (and continues to be so for mainline Protestant, Catholic, etc.).
What need is there for reconciliation between that which is real and that which you previously determined to be not real?
As I said, I’m not the biggest geek in this area (my geekery is confined mostly to other topics), so I’ll happily concede to your greater knowledge.
I’ll agree with you so far as the specific term you use there - that the NT has “a veneer” of credibility, and to the larger point that works which reference that which we know already to exist have at the basic, first-glance level a ring of truth that something with no obvious direct connections might not. But I’d limit it to that. A level of detail, accepted in advance, layered into a narrative might make it more palatable, but it says nothing in and of itself about how true it is, or how credible; we need to actually see how those details interact with whatever points we’re being asked to accept, if they do.
Even then, I don’t think it always works. If I say that I am King of England, and at another time that I’m King of Gondor - I don’t think the fact that England exists makes the first claim any more credible than the second, even just on the face of it. They’re both immediately ridiculous claims.
Speaking of cherry picking - say you had a big bowl of fruit of various varieties, some of which is good and some of which has clearly seen better days. Someone comes along and says that clearly you don’t want to eat the whole bowl - very reasonable. Then he picks some fruit from the bowl that you should eat. There’s a big mix of types, but he also picks some clearly rotten pieces along with the good ones - and then hands the selection to you to enjoy.
That may be what unsettles you - not that some passages get rejected, but that no one tells us how some make the cut and others do not - and in some cases the ones that do are clearly rotten.
Sure.
That part isn’t for me to say.
“What is a Christian?” Lots of different answers. Are Mormons in or out? I’ve met Protestants who don’t believe that Catholics are Christians. I’ve met Catholics who don’t believe Jehovah’s Witnesses are Christians.
(And don’t even start with Jews! I’ve known Jews who happily eat shrimp cocktail and work on Saturdays.)
Part of it is because the Bible is such a mixed bag. It contains both beauty and ugliness. It has poetry and horror. Some of it, such as Job and Daniel, were intended to be metaphors and not literal.
It’s like the Sherlock Holmes stories. Or X-Men comic books. Some are brilliant, but a handful are so bad, we like to pretend they don’t count.
Pick what you like, ignore what you don’t. It’s your right.
Well, wait a bit. If you claim you are the current reigning King of England, then that won’t work, because there is actual proof against it. The claim can be demolished.
But suppose you claim you’re a direct descendant of Richard Plantagenet, and thus have a legitimate claim to the Kingship. That would be a lot harder for me to test. (I believe there actually is such a person out there; how do I know you aren’t him?)
But as for the King of Gondor…you can’t even show me Gondor. You can’t bring me anyone who’s ever been there. You can’t show me photos of it, or point to it on a map of the world. It’s a more ridiculous claim.
You might be the Plantagenet heir. You damn well aren’t Telcontar’s heir! (If you are, you have elvish blood. I want a full genotyping!)
You seem to be confirming both my points there. That on the face of it, purely by introducing a detail we accepted is true and looking no further, that a claim isn’t more credible compared to one we don’t have such a detail for, since you had to bring up that evidence in order to make that point. And that credibility is established not through demonstrating adjacency to facts, but association and support.
Me claiming I’m the King of England isn’t more credible than me claiming I’m the King of Gondor just on the pure face of it; they’re both ridiculous claims. It’s when we introduce not a nod to reality but look at whether there’s any actual links there that credibility can be established. As you say; there is actual proof against it. Or actual proof for it, if I’m that distant relation and I had a DNA test to show it.
Getting back a bit to the point I originally disagreed with you about, New York being real doesn’t make New York-set stories more convincing than Arda-set stories. That detail alone means nothing either way. It’s when you bring the evidence in that it can mean something one way or the other. Likewise, with the Bible. References to places, events, and persons that we have evidence to believe did exist doesn’t mean anything in and of itself. We have to look at the interactions of those places, events, and persons, with the details of what the Bible otherwise asks us to accept. Now, I’m far from a Biblical scholar or a historian (I’m fairly sure I know even less on both fronts than I do Lord of the Rings!), so I can’t argue the Bible’s place in a narrative of history. But a claim of support for its correctness purely on the basis of references to what we consider historical facts doesn’t work.
That’s going a bit beyond what I said. I said that the stories of Jesus in the NT are a little more believable, because we know that many of the background details are true. This was in comparison to OT stories like the Garden of Eden, or the Captivity of the Children of Israel in Egypt…for which there isn’t any evidence. (In the case of the latter, quite some strong evidence that the story isn’t true.)
As I said already, your claim (hypothetical) to be an heir to the English throne is at least a little more credible than your (hypothetical) claim to be an heir to the Gondorian throne…if only to the degree that there is such a place as England.
It doesn’t so much introduce evidence for the proposition, as it removes fatal evidence against it.
And all of this is in the context of defending people who choose to interpret the Garden of Eden as a metaphor, while believing that Jesus lived and died. The two are different kinds of stories. The reality of the setting improves the believability of the story.
Schliemann’s discovery of the historical Troy doesn’t offer any meaningful support to the notion that Aphrodite and Ares fought there with magical spears…but it does help us believe that there may have been a Mycenaean war against Troy.
Those stories aren’t made more believable at all by the introduction of background details we accept are true. Truth doesn’t work by osmosis. I mean, try this;
Is the second claim more believable to you because it’s surrounded by accepted facts?
Nope. Not in and of itself. And not to any greater extent than it does Aphrodite and Ares… without looking at the actual evidence of links.
Well, I don’t see any way to go forward from here, so I’ll be pleased to agree to disagree.
I did ask a question. Even if we can’t agree, I’m interested in where our incomprehension of each others’ view lies.
Well… I’d have preferred just to let it drop… But let me try…
In my opinion, your example doesn’t quite work, because the additional clauses are completely independent of the primary clause. Scotland’s politics and the World Cup don’t relate in any way to your name.
But… Suppose you said, “I watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade from my apartment window last year.” And suppose I look in your SDMB profile, and it gives you location as “NYC.” Hm. Okay, that makes the story somewhat more likely than if your location had been “Dallas, TX.” There actually is relevance between your location and the likelihood of your having seen something at that location.
The “accepted fact” has to do with the matter in question.
The fact that wine and bread and olive oil and fish and fishermen and nets and donkeys are all real – and mentioned in the NT – don’t do anything to make the NT story more plausible, because they don’t have anything to do with the story. The fact that Romans really did crucify people – does.
Heck, at this point, you could be a distant heir to the throne of England via any of a number of inactive lines. At very least, I don’t have any way to show that you aren’t!
This is a dodge. Now you are exempting God from the negative aspects of his own creation and leaving the blame ambiguous and nebulous.
So what created sin and evil? Sin and evil created itself? Satan created evil?
God created Satan, ergo, if Satan made evil, God made Satan and is omniscient enough to know creating Satan creates evil.
I’m a writer of a story. I write the villainous character. I write with complete foreknowledge that my villain will slaughter the main character in the finale.
Therefore, I created the villain, and wrote all the evil he did. Therefore I am the villain.
God creates Satan with all knowledge of his coming evil, examples of which actually escape me at the moment, since he’s nothing more than a comfortable scapegoat and imaginary being.
Therefore God creates evil.
And if he didn’t, that means evil created itself, or always was, completely demolishing numerous idiotic religious arguments about how the universe had to be created by a God, it couldn’t just be here, completely ignoring the whole what created God question, wrapped comfortably in the turtles all the way down logic, because they don’t take two seconds to actually logically think through their deeply held beliefs.
That’s my main beef with religion. If you care about it so much, why do you spend so much time avoiding the hard questions? Why do you give non-answers to those questions as answers to people asking the hard questions?
I posed you a conundrum, which is the following: God is omnipotent and creates everything, and is aware of the consequences of doing so. God does nothing to stop the great many evils that take place, and according to some, even delivers some of the greatest of evils personally. How is this good, and if it is good, why aren’t humans who emulate this behavior considered good?
Instead of confronting the issue, you dodge.
You avoid the problem entirely.
You suggest God is innocent in the entire matter. Suddenly there are things in God’s creation which God has no knowledge of and nothing to do with.
I author a story, but I can’t control the actions or dialogue of the villain. I certainly cannot be held responsible for the misogynistic and homophobic things he says. I might have written the book but I can’t be held accountable for what’s inside these pages.
This is the nonsense logic you’re using- God is the creator, without which we are nothing. But evil? Needed no creator, and God was asleep at the time, so you can’t blame God for anything. Just lavish him with praise.
That type of unthinking unflinching uncritical praise is the kind of praise that is hollow and mindless. You are ascribing greatness to the invisible man, and ignoring all possible liabilities the invisible man might incur from being author of everything.
I start a corporation and it sells a product to people. I rake in all the profits.
The product kills people. Well, I cannot be held accountable. Blame happenstance.
All the credit for all good things that have absolutely nothing to do with the imaginary father figure in the clouds go to this hypothetical creature, but floods and holocausts and the problem of evil? Oh, that was like that when I found it.
That’s the kind of cowardly, spineless devotion I find sickening. Own your belief. If you believe in this being that’s responsible for everything, he cannot have a wall of separation between himself and evil. It’s that simple.
But you cannot face that fact, so you dodge.
That is what I find so offensive.
So he presents a false choice: I give you free will, but I will only accept one choice.
If you choose to burn forever and ever in agony, well, at least you had an option.
This is bullcrap and you’re fully aware of that. As a matter of fact, it would be a great mercy to not allow such a choice, and remove all consciousness from these beings.
Tormenting them with the ever-present possibility of eternal agony if they ever mess up, and inventing a universe which presents them such opportunities every second of every day, is cruel.
Removing free will would be quite merciful, since the freedom involved is an illusion.
He had a plan to fix his flawless universe.
His flawless plan to fix the world has yet to save everyone. And ignored thousands of generations of people who lived before Jesus. And who never heard of Jesus due to not living on that continent.
Your God seems to only give a hoot about people living in the Middle East, and he’s QUITE SELECTIVE ABOUT THOSE PEOPLE AS WELL, considering he gives permission to commit genocide against certain folks.
In short, your perfect God’s perfect solutions are as flawless as your logic.
Color me unconvinced.
You know, my actual parents weren’t perfect, but in order to demonstrate how much they loved me, they did not birth a child and then torture it to death to demonstrate that they forgive me for not being as flawless as them.
In the real world, such parents would be put on death row, because they’re sick and evil ****s.
That’s what your God is.
I wager to you that I’ve spent more of my life reading your bible than you have.
There are no answers in the Bible. There are only lunacies and contradictions and the lewd imaginings of people who had no understanding of law, morality, or justice, and couldn’t keep their lies straight.
I want that on my tombstone. If there’s *anything *I want left behind after I’m gone, is that quote.
If I am one day reduced to inert ash and dust, and there is nothing left of the vital force that animates my being, and all I leave behind for humanity is the above thought, that would be an improvement over nothing.
If humanity finally stops spending so much of its collective effort and energy and thought trying to unravel the mysteries of the Bible, we may yet discover the cure for disease and aging and most forms of suffering and death. It is as much a waste of time as dedicating your life to studying Time Cube.
Time Cube is as coherent and full of good moral lessons we should all follow. The ravings of mad men are not for the sane to be poisoned with.
Read it if you must, understand how it influenced civilization, understand the cultural references. Revere it as the word of God, and suffer for it, as we have for too many generations.
She isn’t going to respond, and she probably hasn’t even looked at this thread since she posted. She posted just to drive people to her website.
Hi Folks,
I am new to this forum.
I just glanced through the arguments of thread creator , quite reasonable arguments to question “God” or the existence of God.
Half way through the opening post, I couldnt help but curious to know whether there is any exploration to find answers to this question of “God” outside Abrahamic religions. It is only Abrahamic religions which treat “God” as separate entity who is remote controlling the entire universe sitting in Heaven.
Any one who is passionate to get real answers would not restrict themselves Abrahamic religions but search further outside this set up.
Can you suggest one that might provide more evidence for the god it follows?
Please read about Advaita Vedanta which is the essence of Sanatana Dharma(Hinduism). There is no place for “Individualist” God here. There is a verse in Sanskrit " Aham Brahmasmi" it is the enlightened state which roughly translates in to “I am God” but not necessarily correct translation. Correct Translation would be “I am Brahman” Brahman the universal consciousness. Anyone who is serious about spiritual quest must read Mandukya Upanishad to begin with.