Are there many people here who believe in a personal god: “a being with a personality, including the capacity to reason and feel love”? After reading the Is God a Person thread I’m beginning to wonder.
For those who do believe in such a God, why do you suppose he did not create us as his peers? (I’m assuming we aren’t.) There is no hidden agenda or trap here. Just a sincere question to increase my understanding.
If you propose some father-child analogy, was God ever as we are now? Will we eventually become his peers?
According to C’tian theology, God did make pure spirit beings (angels) which are in a sense His children, maybe He made us to demonstrate He could even raise up little mud-babies into hairless monkeys into His children.
For your last question, while I differ with it, may I direct you to LDS theology?
Lest you not want to look it up, according to LDS beliefs, God was once like us, and the best of us (by his standards) will have the opportunity to become Gods ourselves. I don’t know that we’ll become his peers though; I think he’d still be above us, a “god’s god”, so to speak; he’d remain the father, we’d remain his (grown up) children.
(Not that I believe this stuff, but I did get the full indoctrination regimen, so I believe I have the details correct.)
FriarTed and begbert2, thank you both for the LDS information. I’ve been reading a bit here on Wikipedia. I’m not clear how much equality there was/is in the pre-existence but it sure sounds much more egalitarian than I knew. Very “American” as befitting its roots I suppose. (I hope that’s not take as an insult. None is intended.)
If we compare God as the ocean, we are like the drops of water. God could be called our father, or creator. Was God ever as we are now? That’s a possibility, but unknown. Will we ever be God’s peer, no, as we grow so grows God.
I’m not sure you use “personal god” as defined in the OP. “God is personal to each of us” is more of the Depeche Mode variety. I’m talking about a God that is to some degree person-like rather than God is everything. If you believe in such a God, and that he created us, then why do you suppose he didn’t create us as persons with all characteristics and abilities equal to his. Or did he?
For me, we are like God in that our eternal selves are not corporeal. “We are created in the image of God” doesn’t mean that God has arms and legs, but that we have sprit.
Hi Liberal. Sure. Personhood (his or ours) is not necessarily about a corporeal body or appearance. Whatever you (any you) believe in in the way of our pre-, afterlife, or eternal existence, does God have characteristics or abilities that define him as an distinct entity? Which of those do we have? To the same extent? Which don’t we have? Why not? Could God have created us as his equals in every way?
A computer can be doing a million things and still have time for your request. God can do the same only faster, because there is no time in the spiritual world. God is a personal God. Most people want things to be easy, if we knew everything at our creation why create. We would be clones, you can’t learn much from a clone. We are designed to learn, to grow.
My view is that God created us to be sort of a extension of Himself. We were to be as God and be in perfect alignment with the will of the Father. Somewhere along the way we went astray, and we are what we are now. What would we have been like if we didn’t stray, I would look at the life of Jesus as a example. We could heal the sick just by touch, could cast out demons with a simple command, we could walk on water, and tell a tree to uproot itself and plant itself in the sea and it would do exactly that.
But everything we do would not be for ourselves, but only for the Father and the greater glory of God.
He can, but would it be right for God to do that without us at least asking Him? Part of the fall of man is man saying to God, we’ll try things on our own, it was right for God to allow us to try. But for us to really be on our own that means that we really are on our own.
So we once had the same capabilities as God before we (or our ancestors?) did something to lose them? Is it possible to figure out who or what that was?
Couldn’t we not be as knowledgeable as God without being merely a clone? Why couldn’t God create his own equal. It would make backgammon (or however one might care to interact with equals) much more interesting for everyone.
This is a good question, or maybe there are several questions here:
Is it possible for there to be more than one Supreme Being?
Is it possible to create someone equal to oneself, yet who is not just a clone of oneself? (This is not a question about whether equality entails sameness, but about the limits of creative ability.)
If not, is it possible to create someone who is not currently equal, but who has the potential to grow or develop into an equal?
Would/should God want us to be his equals? Would/should we want to be? Would there be a danger involved (to God, or to us, or to the universe), and if so, how could that danger be dealt with?
It is the reason God loves us so much, God didn’t want a bunch of ‘yes men’, he wants men that come to Him by their own free will. To look at it another way, God pushes the envelope right to the limit, yes he could create beings to be always with Him, but where is the glory in that, it’s pretty dull. But God is going right to the edge in the beings He creates. God does nothing half assed.
I would WAG that we had the same capabilities of Jesus as man on earth, which seems a bit shy of the Spiritual Father God. Jesus did not know at that time of His second coming ‘Only the Father in heaven knows’, also Jesus did not know who touched Him in the crowd when the woman was healed by faith.
When Adam and Eve followed the advice and temptation of the serpent (Satan), in a direct violation of God, they separated themselves from perfect alignment with the Father. This separation that caused us to become what we are.