Really, the best way to go from a theist perspective would be to say that they *weren’t * actually worshipping the theist’s god from their perspective. If they weren’t, we can just say that they were confused, deliberately misled, and suchlike. If, however, these people were worshipping that god while thinking he was actually Zeus it opens a whole can of worms. If that god can be so wrongly pictured that the only similar characteristic is in being a god - what does that say for one’s own view of that god? IOW, if they were horribly wrong in their view of that god, so can everyone be.
I would say that were I to believe in a particular god’s existence, i’d very much prefer the former option to the latter.
I apologize if what I posted yesterday was a little bit muddled. Let me go back to the beginning and try to explain better.
I started by saying that there couldn’t be multiple Sons because that would undermine the unity of creation. You responded by asking, quite reasonably, why the division between the Father and the Son doesn’t also undermine that unity.
As I see it, God always has treated the universe as a unity (which helps explains why we call it “the universe”). The Father created it as a unity, the Holy Spirit sustains it, and the Son redeemed the entire thing. So while each member of the Trinity had a different task, they never divided up the universe. However, if there had been one Son to redeem the Middle East, a second Son to redeem China, a third to redeem Mexico, and so forth, that would imply that creation had been sliced up into pieces.
Obviously the Trinity has been the subject of enormous amounts of thinking, writing, and debate. I don’t claim to understand it perfectly, and I can’t explain it all here. I do think that one critical piece of the puzzle which is essential to understanding it comes at the start of John’s Gospel, when it says describes Jesus as “the Word”. (Though I’ve heard that a more accurate translation would be “the Message”.) So Jesus was not merely some guy who was particularly well-suited to delivering the message. He was the Message.
This explains why the Father couldn’t just come down to Earth and deliver the Message. The Message is not merely a collection of thoughts in people’s heads. The Message is an entity. Consequently, when it appeared on Earth, it had to appear as an entity. It could not be injected directly into everyone’s mind.
(The idea of Jesus being the Message may sound bizarre if you’ve never considered it before. I’d argue, however, that we actually think about a number of individuals in a similar way. For example, we often say, “In Shakespeare blah blah blah”, rather than, “In Shakespeare’s plays blah blah blah.” Thus we seem to feel that Shakespeare transcended merely being a guy who wrote good plays and actually joined his soul together with his plays. Likewise we talk about “Aristotle” rather than “Aristotle’s philosophy” and “Mozart” rather than “Mozart’s music”.)
You missed the point, God didn’t ask/tell man to do anything that was harmful. Man decided that on his own. The reasons for different teachings was because of the different beliefs held by man not God. I am not holding the Christian God to be the perfect one. The real God is Love. Nothing more, nothing less. All the rest is distortion. This world is not difficult to understand. It is man that makes it seem so.
So even though every single group of people came up with a different definition of God or their gods, with different teachings, practices, and moralities, the fact that most of them had some sort of deity floating around in their tribal lore proves that they all experienced the Christian God? And you know this because God is Love?
That seems a conveniently all-encompassing argument. You seem to be stating - as Thing Fish referenced earlier - that all the good and kind parts of religion are God’s work, while all the unpleasant or cruel aspects are the result of fallible human beings distorting the ‘true message’. Who is the moral arbiter in all this? If in the past homosexuality, say, is considered an evil deserving of punishment, which later on liberal churches become okay with, where is the distortion there? God’s will must have been misconstrued, but by whom, and when? Are you saying that every feature of religion which isn’t love, forgiveness or acceptance is a distorted human construct which the religious will eventually grow out of?
And if after all that the conclusion is ‘God is Love, Love is God’, can we not just cut out the (middle-)man, and just believe in Love?
That’s a good point. I hadn’t thought of it like that; you’re right, if Jesus redeems everyone, then all the others would just be dying and being resurrected. My immediate response was that God could arrange matters so that all the Sons (or Daughters; might be nice to have a daughter to show equality) were killed around the same time, and then resurrect them at the same time, and so use their total sacrifice as a way to redeem mankind. And then I thought that that wouldn’t work, because of free will; God couldn’t guarantee they’d all be killed at the same time. Or even all killed.
But then that made me think. I mean, his idea was that Jesus would be killed. And he certainly picked the time to drop Jesus into the mix. And he does after all know how everyone would react. I think it would be possible for God to arrange matters so that the deaths of many could occur at a similar time.
It could just be florid language, of course. I think you could say it’s similar to what you said earlier; it’s a message that can’t just be told, it had to be seen, there has to be a role model. OTOH, i’m pretty sure Genesis describes God himself as “the Word”, but he didn’t go down personally; it may be that being “the Word” doesn’t actually refer to the message that way at all.
I still think it could. At the most inelegant level, God could simply have inserted the memory of the events surrounding Jesus’ life and death into everyone who was around’s heads, but not actually do it. With the added knowledge that that was not a dream, but a message from God, you retain the experience (because experience isn’t actually living it, it’s percieving the living of it) without actually killing Jesus. Then, for everyone else, you could install essentially a “film” into their heads, explaining what would happen, why it did, and clearly stating what the message to be learnt from it all is. For better cultural understanding, the “film” could be tailored to each person. And if the sacrifice is still necessary, only one of the Sons/Daughters (essentially the stars of the film) could be killed.
I would actually tend to think that saying “In Shakespeare” rather than “in Shakespeare’s plays” is just a matter of saving time. I would say “in Shakespeare”, but I don’t consider his soul to be joined with his plays. Likewise with Aristotle and Mozart. It’s just a figure of speech.
I think it might be worth realizing that, despite his persistent use of the term capital-G God (which I think is nearly univerally read as “the Christian God” in discussions on this board), he isn’t actually talking about the Christian God. (Regardless of the term he uses.)
He can correct me if I’m wrong, but the god he believes in is basically a big ball of love, that happens to liberally distributed through everything in some not-conventionally-detectable manner. Any attribute of declaration of Specific God X (such as Zeus or Thor or Yahweh) is a human anthromorphization or conceit, except for the few notions that happen to align with lekatt’s own religious worldview, such as unconditional love and there being angels and an interactive afterlife.
Personally it’s seems somewhat dishonest to claim that persons who worship Thor or Ra or Zeus or God are worshipping this love-ball-god; notably the people who were doing the worshipping didn’t think they were, and who would know better than them?
I’m not sure that answers the OP’s question though. The existance of love in the world might prove the universality of God if you’re inclined to believe that that is the definition of God, but the OP was asking if there’s any standardly agreed upon explanation for why a certain school of “different beliefs held by man [that are] not [from] God”–i.e. all the stuff you don’t personally believe in but that most religious people do–wasn’t distributed to the whole of the world if God’s intent was to bring about the entirety of humanity.
As ever, a lovely lovely answer - but not a satisfactory one to my question in post 45:
I believe in Love as a concept, yet I am an atheist - they are not mutually exclusive conditions. From what I can gather, your belief is that God is Love, and that all the frills and trappings that different religions have tacked on are of human design. Without the mythology, where is the need for God? You don’t need a god to be able to love, after all.
You assume that love is a positive thing. You also assume it has an automatic relationship with sanity. People are perfectly capable of hating and loving the same thing, or of destroying what they love. Love is not especially virtuous.
Maybe love in practice is often flawed, but surely even you think the ideal of Love is a good thing? Or failing that, a bit better than out and out hatred? I’m as godless as can be, but I don’t see the need for - or indeed honesty in - rejecting every human ideal as a hopeless delusion.
First, we need stock definitions of both “love” and “hate” that we can agree on. Is it o.k. to hate that which is evil? Where does love of doing wrong fit in?
Declaring “God is Love” is meaningless, because you are redefining “love” to mean “Anything that God does, no matter how meaningless, destructive, spiteful or asinine we find it to be.”
Note that I didn’t say “want” to hurt you. I said “must”. It’s an important difference. Take, for example, free will. That certainly causes a lot of harm, evil, and the like. Leaving us all in a state of total bliss would be a much better way to show us love. And yet we don’t. Now, I don’t know how you particularly address the issue of free will, but many religious people suggest that God places free will very highly in his list of priorities to give us. Thus, because he loves us, he must allow us pain. I’m sure if he exists he’s very sorry about it, but nevertheless he does it.
Imagine if you had a child. You could keep him at home all day, playing video games, eating ice cream, and doing all those things that kids love to do. And i’m sure that would make him very happy. But that wouldn’t set him up well for his future life, so you send him off to school, where unfortunetly but undoubtedly he will encounter hardships. You love him, and so you must hurt him.
I absolutely agree there are problems - the first of which would be, as ever, defining our terms. I was just responding to DT rather depressing view that love isn’t anything special. Because it seems obvious obvious that Christian-style love of one’s fellow man - in an ideal form, divorced from the mythological window-dressing - could only be desirable.
I was looking at it the other way - that ‘God is Love’ defines God as anything which can be construed as positive - companionship, empathy, understanding. It’s just a way for religious thinkers to assimilate all human goodness and slap a white beard on it.
I think you could say it’s similar to what you said earlier; it’s a message that can’t just be told, it had to be seen, there has to be a role model. OTOH, i’m pretty sure Genesis describes God himself as “the Word”, but he didn’t go down personally; it may be that being “the Word” doesn’t actually refer to the message that way at all.