Best case scenario: extremely hands-off in an attempt to let us do things on our own while still being compassionate and forgiving (upside: nice afterlife if you’re not an asshole)
Not so good scenarios: extremely indifferent, incompetent, or uncaring and experimenting on us (a la the Sims or other you-play-God games - fun to mess with things to see what happens), or simply doesn’t exist
Worst case scenario: hates us, possibly because we killed his son
To be honest, I feel the most probable scenario is God is nonexistent, but assuming the existence of a God, I feel extremely indifferent or hands-off is most likely. Because you have to admit, for all the horrible things there are in the world, there are as many wonderful ones, so why would he give us those if he was truly evil, unless maybe he’s really clever evil and just making the bad things seem worse by comparison/taunting us with the great things.
Edited to add: I love this thread, by the way. It’s very interesting.
When I was a kid; nominally Christian, sort of a good-natured mob boss of whom you could ask favours, but better not piss him off or he’d send the boys round to break your legs.
Getting older; absentee landlord. Uncaring, if there.
He is pure love and light. He lets me see everything, the good and the bad. The beauty in the everyday. He makes me want to try harder to be good and to use everything he has left me with. Which isn’t much…But I am very grateful for the faith he has given me.
Ironically, he’s a lot like George Carlin. Or maybe a cross between Carlin and Leary…
He knows you know what’s right or wrong, slaps you upside the head when you fuck up, holds an umbrella over you when the downpour is just too strong for you to stand up anymore on your own.
But I’m atheist, so what do I know.
Except that whatever he is, he’s going to get a good chewing out if we meet. :dubious:
Randomly fatal and debilitating accidents? A rock falls off a cliff and kills a kid. This is humanities fault? Lightning strikes a swimming pool killing some innocent people, this is Mans fault?
My God is kind of an asshole. He continues to punish innocent children for something their great, great, great, … grandparents did over 6,000 years ago. Then he created this really confusing book to explain it all and filled it with contradictions so we never can tell what he really wants us to do to avoid burning in hell. He also wears a brown sweater that zippers up the front.
My problem therefore is how you can describe God, and then declare that He is nonexistent. This seems inherently contradictory. If He doesn’t exist, then there is nothing to describe.
“Joke answers” was probably a poor choice to explain myself, but what I meant was that it sounds like you want us to make up a being, rather than for us theists to actually describe the being we actually believe in.
If I’m going to design a God, then that’s pretty much what I said. I really like Dogma’s portrayal of God as being both innocent and deadly. And I like the idea of a God that goes around destroying evil beings. A savior-a champion. But the God I have seems to be more into forgiveness and letting bad things happen, but then turning those bad things into good things. Since He lets bad things happen, He doesn’t fit my definition of innocent, even. It seems more like He wants to teach that the bad things are not as bad as we think.
He’s a lot more into “I’m doing this for your own good” than “I’ll protect you.” I don’t know why, since others also experience him in the other form. In fact, I did for a long time. Perhaps I am not seeing a new person, but merely another side. I do know that going from He is inconsistent to He doesn’t exist is folly, because the only time I doubt that far is when I have lost the will to live. Or maybe the other way around. The point being that I am either not thinking straight, or said thinking is inherently detrimental to my mental well being. The correlation is too strong to be otherwise.
Plus there’s the fact that I was once dead, and am yet still alive.
My gods, if I had any, would be multifarious. I picture them as a bunch of insane genius children who have taken over a Home Depot. This one sits in the corner building Buckminster Fuller’s wet dream from discarded crates; that one runs around with a chainsaw in one hand and a blowtorch in the other. They’re all constantly undoing each other’s “work” and they don’t care who gets pulped by a runaway forklift for their amusement.
I’m tempted to believe this because I have no other way to make sense of being a complex machine whose only purpose is to crank out a few more of the same and be destroyed. And there’s no way the Mandelbrot set and this http://people.smu.edu/eheise/Leucochloridium_paradoxum.htm are products of the same imagination. Most of all, I’ve seen enough undeserved good and bad luck in life that to think of it as one God’s judgment is obscene. At least my gods have each other to screw up their plans–what’s His excuse?
When I was a kid, my God was a sort of formless ineffable force, like a living law of physics, but also something that, somehow, *cared *about me.
It didn’t preclude me also believing in lowercase-g gods, who I figured were a lot bigger than me and a lot smaller than capital-G God (who/which I never really *called *God, even in my own head, though I guess the term fits), and who could be your friend, your enemy, or just indifferent to you–like regular people writ large.
The first one stopped making sense for me a long time ago. The second one clung on a bit longer. I can somehow buy little-g gods who are solely involved with Earth and surrounding areas a lot easier than I can buy a omnipotent Creator of Everything.
My god is an enigma. He/she/they/we definitely exists but hstw only reveals a tiny part of hstw-self. My task in this life is to learn as much as I can and recognize that god is mostly unknowable.
Or maybe a cross between Carlin and Leary…