# Is a puissant but limited  God worth worshipping?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-a-puissant-but-limited-god-worth-worshipping/443608>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [April 2, 2008, 12:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-a-puissant-but-limited-god-worth-worshipping/443608 "2008-04-02T00:47:22Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 3

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**Author:** ![pingnak](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/94ad74/32.png) [@pingnak](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pingnak)\
**Post date:** [April 7, 2008, 1:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-a-puissant-but-limited-god-worth-worshipping/443608/41 "2008-04-07T01:49:30Z")

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Would an apparently impotent god that requires its believers to do all the messy enforcement and killings be worth worshiping?

I mean, forget a god that’s merely finitely powerful, but will smite you in a timely manner for not stroking its ego, and does useful things like make sure it rains on the crops like clockwork. That’s an easy answer. Worship or get smitten and/or starve.

A god that appears never to do anything at all, with believers that go out and do that smiting, that’s a whole other story. I mean, sure, give lip-service to it so the dolts who believe in it don’t burn you at the stake, but there’s no need to believe in a great straw-man in the sky.

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**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\
**Post date:** [April 7, 2008, 9:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-a-puissant-but-limited-god-worth-worshipping/443608/42 "2008-04-07T09:43:50Z")

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[QUOTE=Contrapuntal]  
Isn’t the literal sense “without God” rather than “against God?” _A_moral, _a_sexual, _a_pathy all mean _the absence of_ a particular thing. A_nt_i means against.  
[/QUOTE]

Atheism doesn’t come from any modern notion of adding an “a-” prefix to the existing concept “theism”, however, but rather (via French) from the entire Greek word [ἄθεος](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism#Etymology), which by the 5th C. BC did indeed carry connotations of actively/intentionally denying the Gods. Sure, it’s true that it is made up of ἄ + θεος, but even before translation it had its own, more elaborate meaning. The notion of atheism _just_ being a simple _lack_ of belief is a fairly modern one, IME. From my understanding (somewhat limited - I don’t read actual Greek) - the developed notion in Greece was something closer to heresy, blasphemy, or apostasy than the intellectual atheism of today.

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