Is a puissant but limited God worth worshipping?

Great Debates
41

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.

42

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, 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.