onegreatperson

Okay, okay. This touchy feely bullshit has got my perverbial "panties" in a bunch! The idea of "god" is absurd, but why might you ask? Why is it so fucking absurd??? Holy shit there onegreatperson, just show me the light, bring me from the cave of blantent trickery and make my illusuons go away.

What is god?

Where did god come from?

If "god" does exist, is it really the judeo-christian "god"? Also christianity seems to be a big twisted wire of slightly different beliefs, so what christian "god" is it? Remember Jehovas Witnesses claim to be just as much of a christian as does a Baptist.

Is it the biblical "god" of the King James Version? And if so then since language have been changed and books have been changed how could it be the same "god"?

One last question: This personal relationship with "god". Hmmmm......If it is so personal and in according to the KJV the way it seem's is so different than what the christian claims it is, then why is it called a personal relationship???

Okay time for my apocalyptic sign
<img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" />

Fiach

I am perplexed that no poster has ever really attempted to define God. What exactly is God? How can we argue about the existence of God if none of us can define that of which we are debating?

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.

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 and probably all European 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.

I am just posing this for discussion, and in particular for hyper religious America. Where I live, admission of Atheism carries no penalties.

Fiach

onegreatperson

The way you describe different "gods", is excellent. However, I ask that question towards the christian. What is god? Not to another atheist, but nonetheless, food for thought.
<img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" />

Jobar

Welcome ogp- defining God is a problem so big that some of us call ourselves igtheists- we are ignorant of what anyone means when they use the word God. It has been my observation that no two believers have exactly the same definition, although they be members of the same denomination. Ask the right questions and the differences show up.

Ah, I'm going to leave your post here- but if you want to rant instead of discuss, we have a better forum for that. (Which I myself use on a regular basis!)

[ November 13, 2002: Message edited by: Jobar ]</p>

Tercel

Here is the definition of God I have given before here when asked (I am amused that "no poster has ever really attempted to define God"):

Please read carefully, and try to understand what I am meaning before criticising (previous discussions developed tangents due to careless reading).


As to the second question: "Where did god come from?"...
Nowhere. If we trace the casual line back to its beginning asking "where did this come from" each time, then either there will either be an infinite regress or a beginning. Both seem logically problematic, but personally I think the idea of a beginning seems more sound than an infinity of causes whose existence is never really explained. God presumably is that beginning - certainly my speculation on the likely attributes of that beginning seems to give something pretty much along the lines of God as defined above.

Amie

I am inclined to agree with Jobar on this one how no two believers will define God in the same way...However I think there is some continuity between the definitions that are given...

Jobar you said "ask the right questions and the differences show up"
I agree there will be differences since it is all subjective interpretations...

oh and I believe God is love

[ November 13, 2002: Message edited by: Amie ]</p>

Zentraedi

I believe it is possible that a god could exist that we have yet experienced. The tales of Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian, Aztec, Hebrew, Islamic, Druid, etc. Gods and the rest of that New Age stuff just a bunch of B.S. God does not have to be related to anything we have ever encountered. And the definition of a god could vary greatly from person to person. If you are an Atheist do you even know what you could possibly be an atheist to? We haven't a clue what could beyond our planet, nevermind whats beyond our universe. I will not know of any god(s) within my lifetime.

[ November 13, 2002: Message edited by: Zentraedi ]</p>

Jobar

Amie, I respect that- the fact that you believe in a God of love speaks well of you as an individual. But you know about people like Torquemada, who believed in a cruel God. You both read from the same scriptures, and yet the deity you worship is not his- one who would order the lives of babies to be dashed out on stones. I think I would understand better if every theist worshipped their own idiosyncratic version of God, and made no attempts to identify that God with anyone else's- it would certainly take away a lot of the ammunition we atheists use to attack the whole idea of a divinity!

What if you lived in the middle of a continent, and had never seen an ocean- and one day you met a sailor, who described a whale to you as being huge, and black, and a vicious attacker of men and their ships. The next day you met a different sailor who called whales huge, and white, and gentle morons, somewhat like cows of the sea. And the next day another sailor with a different tale, and the next day yet another- with no two sailors giving the same description, save that there was fair agreement that whales were big? What would you think about whales if you then went to sea yourself, and found no creature like any of the tales? You'd suspect that whales were a myth, or a joke which old sailors played on landsmen, I think. How is this any different from all the differing tales about this God so many people claim to believe in?

Goliath

Tercel,

It seems to me as though you're using "god" as an undefined term and using 1-5 above as axioms (ie statements about how a "god" behaves).

However, I'm a bit concerned about 2. What do you mean by the relation "x is more powerful than y" (where x and y are beings)? How do you know that such a relation forms a linear ordering and not a partial ordering? In other words, what if there exist two beings--call them x and y--such that x is not more powerful than y and y is not more powerful than x? If the "power" relation only gives us a partial ordering and not a linear ordering, then why must there be a biggest element amongst the set of all beings ordered under power? (ie what if there is no such thing as "the most powerful being")?

Sincerely,

Goliath

Shadowy Man

What if there was a being that was:

1) Uncreated
2) Supreme
3) Created the Universe
and
5) Immortal

but not 4) Personal and Intelligent?

would it still be God?