James Brown

God Diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder

dog-on

The answer is very simple.

They are not the same god.

The god of the OT is actually the demiurge, (creator god) of the gnostics.

The god of the NT is the unkown, but most excellent god who sent his son to ransom us from the curse of the law of the demiurge.

Of course, after Jewish history was usurped, these two distinct entities were merged.

gdeering

Clearly in the face of Roman power God realized he had made some promises he couldn't keep, so he "went all passive" and created surrogates to claim that the "all loving" guy actually intended this stuff to be taken spiritually.


Too long have we been fooled by the glasses and little curl of hair on the forehead.


Gregg

jakejonesiv

Right!

Elijah

The Greek philosophy of Plato was a compromise/duality between a world of constant change from Heraclitus and a world at rest from the Pythagoreans. God was put on the side (or past the side) of the universe that was constant so it become unchanging; which made the idea of him changing emotionally or being able to be appeased with sacrifice impossible. The old understanding of god gets criticized or considered an intermediary between man and their more rational understanding of god. This understanding of God is also nearly incomprehensible and the idea of being able to worship him alone becomes impossible, so the idea of worshiping him as the Jews wished to becomes obsolete, leading to a dead guy being used as the image of the invisible god and sacrifices ending.

Now this creates a lot of confusion because explaining the philosophical change to the uneducated(uninitiated) masses is difficult, slow and gets understood as being more arguments for or against the same type of gods’ personality and not a reunderstanding of the concept itself. Even today the vast majority of people are still only familiar with the supernatural understanding of god and completely unaware of the philosophical argument around god for the past 2500 years.

bacht

supernatural reason: God spoke to humanity in different ways at different times

natural reason: humanity conceptualized God in different ways at different times

Badsidhe

To me it seems that the personality, power, and influence of the gods is always simply a reflection of the human needs of the time and place the gods are prevalent in.

Fertility gods/goddesses were powerful in pre-/sub- agricultural societies. Childbirth and raising was more perilous, and every new pair of hands was desperately needed by the group.

Rain gods were the leaders of the pantheons in agricultural societies. War gods rose to prominence in times of war and raiding, usurping the old leaders and becoming the new leaders of the pantheons.

As societies settled more, population density rose and workers began to specialize, the gods representing laws, contracts, and of course social ethics and propriety became the standard.

The gods have always changed to meet the people's standards, not the other way around. Examine the Indian god Indra/Varuna: he started off as the rain god, became the war god, and then transformed into the lawgiver god of wisdom (finally being adopted into this more recognizable form in Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Christianity) . Tracking his personality change through time is an indicator of what the people needed most at that point in history.

The same is seen in Jahweh: when warring against the neighboring tribes, his followers new him as a war god. When cramped tight in their new cities (or when living in the cramped cities of others), he became the lawgiver. When ethical and philosophical competition arose from the sophist Greeks and Persians, he became meek and mild.

Modern day Christians see their god in their own image: a post-Enlightenment era social and ethical thinker, not the bloodthirsty war god he originated as, despite the fact his exploits are clearly written into their favorite, albeit rarely read, book.

Vinnie

Marcion, a man after my own heart...

Nero's Boot

Indeed! Gods, as we understand them, are nothing more than the antropomorphism of the universe. We imagine gods, and as our thoughts change to other topics, our gods change with them.

--this means that all religions are really just social constructs and nothing more NB

Self-Mutation

Atheists still don't get it? No wonder they don't believe!

God cut himself off from us and gave us over to our sinful selfish desires ever since Jesus' sacrifice was finished. It's up to us now to want to go to Heaven, or go to Hell. It's in Paul's writings. If Jesus kept coming back like in the Old Testament, that would falsify his prophecy of the second coming.

Think about all the people that exist in the world. We know of tons of people that speak very nastily toward Jesus. They say "Christianity must be destroyed" and have views that are completely opposite Jesus' views. Now, when this person dies and finds out Jesus is real, why should Jesus let this joker into Heaven? He spent his whole life denying Christ and cracking jokes about him, and God should just let him into Heaven? It is all up to us whether we will be happy in this life and then even happier for all eternity, or if we want to be miserable going through life saying "God doesn't exist!" making joke after joke after joke and be even more miserable after we die.