sourdough

theists claim that
God created man in the image of himself,
God is also transendent=invisible!
so how come man is not invisible?

I know he doesn't exist,I'm just curious how can believers follow such illogical nonsense?

Violent Messiah

In what context are you using image here?

If you are implying physically, transcendence cannot be classified as a physical property.

But if you were talking of a deeper meaning, then it very well answers the question already - a deeper meaning.

diana

If you can read the GoE story and think God was talking about spiritual death for eating of the TOKOGAE, you can brush off the implications of that "image of God" thing with relative ease.

d

Infidelettante

I think "image" here means something quite different than the idea that man exhibits some characteristic of God or is modeled after God in some way. I think it is an image in the way that your reflection in a mirror is your image. Adam was the image of God because he had no will of his own but rather was created to do the Gods bidding. In this view Adam was in fact a robot. A golem to tend Gods garden. Adam was created without the ability to choose. That was what the original author of Genesis was trying to tell us. God is the villian in the story. He created a being for a trivial reason. A God who could do such a thing is not worthy of worship. Is it any wonder that this passage has been misread for millenia? Whose interest is served by this interpretation. Not the Hebrew priesthood. Not the Fundamentalist Christian. Not the Catholic Church.

The author of the second chapter of Genesis used a metaphorical device we pagans know well. It is the Triune Goddess. Eve is Mothergod. She who gives birth to all things. The fruit is Goddess as Maiden. In her all potentials and possibilities exist. The serpent is Crone, the old woman, the wise woman who takes us in death and renders us in her cauldron. The one key passage of the Bible that Christianity is built upon was written by a Pagan to reveal the treachery of God.

Fiach

There are several different quasi-definitions of God used on the various forums. The classic type is the anthropomorphic god. This God usually has a human personality with human emotions, human virtues, and human vices. These are manifested by jealousy, anger, rage, love, mercy, capriciousness, justice and injustice, insecurity (need for adoration as assurance of his supremacy), and forgiveness. He is omnipotent, omniscient, and the creator of all reality. This anthropomorphic god can range from the minimal anthropomorphism of Monotheistic Allah, to the marked human raging Monotheistic JHWH, to the every human Jesus Christ who is a God-human hybrid in a trinity that believers pretend to be Monotheism. The Judeo-Islamic-Christian God is an alter-ego of man.

He is a reflection of cruel desert shamans and his personality flaws merely reflect man's. I paraphrase the Bible to "Man made God in man's own image and likeness." All of man's evil actions and vices are magnified to infinity in God.

There are relatively undefined or poorly defined gods such as the one recognised by Deists, Unitarians, and Bahai’s. This god is conscious but clearly not human. He or She may or may not have emotions. That is not defined. He/She has but one function. That is to create the universe and the rules by which it runs.

Then there is the totally undefined God, not of a particular religious school of thought. People say they believe in a god-creator but say that nothing can be known about this god.

Another kind of god, believed by many American scientists, possibly to avert the charge of Atheism is the Inanimate God. This god is defined, as perhaps Steven Hawking would say, as the elementary forces of nature and the unified field theory of reality. This god is not a conscious being. It has no personality. It is incapable of thinking (cognition).

It knows nothing. But its action results in the formation of universes, beginning with a big bang from a tiny singularity, and accounts for all of the properties of energy and matter. Those innate properties account for the evolution of matter from energy and nanoparticles, and the evolution of life from atoms combining into a series of increasingly complex molecules. Life evolves through stages of mobility, which requires some self-awareness and reactivity to cognition and intelligence. Intelligence is merely an animal behaviour evolved in stages for adaptation. This adaptation includes finding food, finding reproductive mates, and avoiding predators. As such thinking and intelligence is not necessary for a creator god who needs no food, needs no reproductive mates, and need fear no predators. Such a creator-god needs intelligence no more than a sponge needs a computer keyboard.

This then gets us to the question facing Atheists. In countries like the USA where Atheists are widely hated, would they be better off claiming to be theists. When asked to elaborate on God, they could reply with a Hawking style definition. They would be eligible to join the Boy Scouts of America, and previously Atheistic war veterans (10%) could join the Veterans of Foreign Wars now denied to them.

Fiach

passion9

We were created in His image, having His same charcteristics as people. We can show love, jealousy, anger, passion, sympathy, and many other emothions just as God can and does. Also we have a concept for abstact thinking, we are not "robots" as someone put it (and if Adam could not make decisions on his own, how do you account for the Fall... that was clearly his own decision). That is what seperates us from animals on this earth, and what makes us in the image of God.

Philosoft

Why would God need these emotions? Why would he get angry? Anything that doesn't please him can be changed instantly, anything he doesn't change is obviously a part of his plan. What is there for God to be jealous of?

Clearly? Surely you jest.
Well, I'm a little disappointed. Why didn't God give us a sense of justice that mirrors his own? Why do we constantly resort to "mysterious ways" to explain why God does certain things?

Violent Messiah

Why anthromorphism? Why would a perfect omni...... God need to have human qualities?

I don't believe that God reserves a predetermined fate for us.

What are you disappointed about? What 'sense of justice' do you exactly want to have?

Philosoft

Irrelevant. There need not be a single "predetermined fate" for predetermination to occur. God is a being who acts through force of will. Thus, whatever is God's will obtains, by definition. An omniscient God who knows the future is seeing a determined future. So, if God wills a state-of-affairs that happens in the future, he is determining the SOA and all actions that have a causal link to the SOA. Call it what you want.
I am often told I can't judge God's actions, or lack thereof, (as recorded in scripture) because I lack the necessary moral foresight. I am to believe, without the ability to make an informed moral judgement, that God has good reasons to allow atrocities. I must ignore what my own moral sense tells me about the plane crash in Algeria, in favor of blind trust that somehow, an omnipotent being needs that crash to happen in order to ensure some outcome.

Violent Messiah

I've read in the past few posts about an argument against the omniscience of God. I share the same belief - Omniscience does not entail knowing the future. God does not will us to action, nor does he control our responses.

It was not God's action that made the plane crash - possibly, engine failure, human error, or something else.