So this version of God is as temporal and as fragile as the next mass extinction?
Exodus? No, but there wouldn’t be, would there? Some people wandering thru the desert?
But after? We know there was a David, and a Soloman and a temple, and around King Ahaz archaeology and the OT start to mesh more.
“Some people”?
Approximately 2 million people wandering around in the desert for that amount of time would have left an imprint, and that many people leaving an Egyptian population that probably totaled 3 million would have devastated the country to the point that suggesting that such an event was not mentioned at the time would be ridiculous.
It’s not a definition of God so much as a gut feeling I have. Neale Donald Walsch refers to God as Life itself in his writings, which is where I got the idea. This forum or perhaps Facebook would be an example of a collective human consciousness, wherein people share their thoughts with each other and one’s identity becomes part of a hive mentality. I’m not saying it’s a perfect theory, but it makes more sense to me at this point than most religions do.
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You believe in a certain definition of God which seems to be different from what others believe in - and this can be said of almost anyone who believes in God.
I can demonstrate that God exists. Augustus was proclaimed a God, Augustus existed, ergo God exists. Not quite what your average person today means by God, though.
We should maybe assign subscripts to the term. You believe in God*, cmkeller believes in God[j] and Falwell believes in God[l]. Then we can stop a lot of the arguing, perhaps.
God is Love
Love is blind
Ray Charles is blind
Ergo Ray Charles is God!
Works for me. But I thought Clapton was God.
No doubt why George Harrison hung around with him.
Not sure if this makes him a scientist but he graduated from Escuela Tecnica Industrial Number 27 with a chemical technician’s diploma.
Yes, exactly. And if you are an evolutionary sociologist, a religion that substitutes a single symbolic sacrifice for literal sacrifices of children sure looks like it has an evolutionary advantage.
I think most of the major religions still exist because they codify rules for living that actually made a certain amount of sense for the cultures they were written for. Those cultures then thrived and grew, and the religions spread and gained in power and popularity.
Yes, I think Christianity is a perfect example of emergence. The strength of it is that it collected parts of earlier myths into a more sophisticated rules system for living in a more sophisticated world. Think of a religion as a constitution for the people, before there were central authorities who could enforce a real one. In this case, the enforcement mechanism is promising eternal damnation for people who disobey, and eternal bliss for those who follow the rules.
Christianity has been successful because its rules have generally been pretty good rules for helping society transition from low-trust fiefdoms and tribal societies to a higher trust agricultural society, and then to a modern society. Not all of the rules are obviously good and actually reflect the prejudices of the time they were written, but on balance… good rules. Or at least better than the competition.
Religion is being tested for fitness again, this time for fitness into a technological society. Reformations and restructuring are inevitable. By historical standards, the amount of change we’ve seen in the various faiths in the last hundred years has been pretty astonishing. Science is advancing so fast and explaining so much, and civil society and rule of law and social safety nets have been spreading and displacing the role of religion in society. The ones that can tap-dance the best will survive.
But we need to be careful before we just discard the old rules, because they worked for a reason. They may not be mystical, but they do represent ideas that have survived the test of time and competition against other ways of living. We should at least attempt to understand why they are there and what they have done for us before chucking them under the bus on the way to a secular utopia.
Yes, 2 Million would, so? I mean you’d have to a extreme Bible literalist. Many tribe numbers in the OT are there for mystic reasons or have been exaggerated over the centuries.
And he believes in Global Warming, which about half the College educated politicians in the USA don’t.
Kinda like a AA degree.
And that half are Republicans.