Answerer

The name Yahweh come from name 'Jehovah' which is combination of the names of the ancient pagan gods known as EL and HE. In short, lots of bible content and the God ,itself, were taken from some pagan sources and is therefore, not anything special or distinctive at all. By the way, Gandhi is not a christian, he is a hindu and he worship idols.
Furthermore, since you, yourself claims that you don't understand God very well, how do you know that he is not a bloodthirsty liar? According to rational thought, no one can tell what a person really think unless we understand them very well. Jesus, on the other hand, is refuted countless of times by other forumers here and there is no point for me to talk about it.

Scotty

Point to me evidence without using the Bible as reference (or something that references the Bible or its original manuscripts I suppose). Why? It seems that you shouldn't need the Bible to prove anything, as the description of faith indicates.

Start there, let me know what name you come up with and I will tell you if that one is something I am sure exists or not.

-Scott

Goliath

Luvluv,

Again, I have no assurance. I am a weak atheist, not a strong atheist. Did you learn NOTHING AT ALL from our last discussion on weak atheism vs. strong atheism? *sigh* Apparently not. How sad.

Neither. Or both. Take your pick. I don't believe in either of 'em.

None. Keep stuffing that strawman!!!

Sincerely,

Goliath

Radcliffe Emerson

I'd say I'm more of a deist than an atheist. I think it's possible a conscious entity may have created everything, but I do not believe Judaism, Christianity or Islam are anything but man-made religious systems designed to control people. I believe they are made up. In fact, I think the archaelogical and historical evidence they're uncovering in the Middle East proves they're made up. Not the history around the writings, but the divine interventions, parting of the Red Sea, Israel being chosen by "God", Jesus being divine and performing miracles, rising from the dead physically, virgin birth, etc are pure fiction. I don't think a supreme intelligence has ever favored anyone on this planet or intervened in anything since the planet was created.

brighid

The problem I have in believing in what you call “a fleshed out Yahweh” which I assume is in reference to Jesus is that Yahweh and Jesus are the same being, unless of course you want to argue that Jesus is separate, distinct and unadulterated by his “father” Yahweh. There is no intellectually honest way to separate Yahweh from Jesus and remain consistent with the Christian doctrine that God and Jesus (and the Holy Spirit) are ONE and that there is only ONE God, all of one essence – not two, three, or more. Christianity claims that God is timeless, but this would mean God is incapable of change and time IS change. So He was the same in the beginning, during His revelation to the Jewish Nation and when He, as the Holy Spirit, magically impregnated a virgin to give birth to Him in human form. If Yahweh of the OT is different from Yahweh incarnate as Jesus in the NT there is a serious problem with the Jewish prophecies interpreted as being correct about Yahweh/Jesus. If the OT prophets saw through dirty lenses then you cannot trust their prophetic visions about the coming of the Messiah and if God, who is all knowing, ever present, perfect and without the presence of evil but demonstrates the inability to pick the more educated, literate and capable men and women to disseminate His message through in a way even those with IQ’s so low they are deemed retarded can’t understand then He is not perfect or all knowing and His evolution into something different means He is NOT timeless or exists outside the Laws of Nature. He is flawed and a later, more perfect deity in Jesus cannot come from an imperfect Creator who is the originator of all that is in the Universe, at least according to Christian doctrine. In order for Jesus to be sinless, perfect and unchanging one must concede that His Father was also.

The modern Christian knows the problems the OT presents to the redacted and nicer version of God that has emerged through the ages and seeks to distant themselves from the warmonger, genocidal, baby killing, heart hardening, jealous God who sends evil spirits and Satan to test His most loyal subjects, etc. But in order for Christianity to maintain any foundation it MUST rely on the Judaic OT, or else it has NOTHING. How can they claim a distinctly Jewish Messiah and savior without theOT? How would the world know about the “true” nature of this nicer, more compassionate version of Him without Jewish law and prophecy? IF the OT writers were illiterate as you claim why put any stock in what evolved from it and cannot exist without those ignorant, uneducated goat herders God El/Yahweh? Without the OT Christianity WOULD NOT exist and could not exist. If Christians complete remove themselves from the Perfect Father as He revealed Himself to the imperfect prophets and writers of the OT Christianity would be left in the gutter.

This ALONE is sufficient to reasonably doubt the existence of Christ as a perfect being or a deity in any way. Furthermore the NT deity of Jesus brings nothing new to the table, or even superior to already existing religious, philosophical and moral systems that were accessible to the common man such as can be found in many Eastern systems that existed centuries before the birth of Christ. Confucius came up with the “Golden Rule” about 500 years before Christ and who knows how long that system existed before that.

I am not absolutely positive that SOME sort of being doesn’t exist and in this way I am agnostic, but I quite sure that the Gods that are alleged to exist and specifically the OT and NT God as revealed by this God(s) through the Bible is logically inconsistent, capricious, cruel, sanguinary, ridiculous and simply a redacted version and hybrid of so many Gods that predate Him. Jesus is nothing unique, ground breaking, superiorly moral or even vaguely creative. Yahweh is a cruel SOB who isn’t worthy of sharing my bed, more or less worthy of my eternal allegiance and worship. If a perfect being, such as Jesus or Yahweh possesses a weaker moral fiber then I do … well that speaks volumes about the truth of their claim. These are but a few of the reasons I believe in neither version of the same deity.

Brighid

Ojuice5001

Three comments:

1. I beg to differ, luvluv, about Plato and Aristotle being hard to understand. I believe that anyone with a high school diploma can understand Plato and Aristotle. Plato and Aristotle are very commonsensical, and they have been talked about so much that, even if someone doesn't undertand the original source, they can read the writings of Mortimer Adler or his like and understand quite well.

2. Owilleke,

Good point about a "weighted odds" god. This is the only way to posit a god who is intimately involved in the universe, without running afoul of the fact that there are few or no miracles.

3. What does everyone think of the Greco-Roman pantheon? Is their likelihood greater than, less than, or equal to that of Jehovah?

Ojuice5001

sandlewood

I don’t know if I’m one of the posters you are addressing, but I can give you answers anyway. Then I will get back to you on the last post you made to me, the reasoning of which is not compelling.

1) Yahweh is commonly defined as having characteristics that are logically contradictory. Omniscience and omnipotence preclude each other. I realize that there have been attempts to explain this away. But all they serve to do is obfuscate what is really a very simple issue. In fact, I think omnipotence itself is only a concept and is not a logical possibility.

1b) Who knows what the correct definition of Yahweh is? Christians have all different definitions. Whenever you talk to a Christian, the discussion necessarily starts out by determining what that particular person’s definition of Yahweh is.

I really don’t see how you can pick and choose to believe the NT but not the OT. What God was Jesus referring to if not the God of the OT? This gets back to my question of what method you use to determine which parts of the Bible are true and which are not. So that question is in fact relevant.

2) What Gods I find logically possible is secondary. What is Gods are logically possible is not as relevant as the existence of evidence for any Gods. So far I haven’t come across any.
But I would find any God more logically possible if it weren’t defined as having infinite characteristics such as omnipotence and omniscience. But then, if they weren’t omni-everything they wouldn’t be Gods would they?

David Bowden

Lack of evidence that he does exist, for starters. (Care to provide any, that we might all evaluate it?)

I suppose if no other culture had invented gods and angels, or supreme gods and lesser gods, then the idea of Yahweh and the heavenly host might be more impressive. Same goes for spectacular demigods/messianic figures and the sort of miracles attributed to the saints. Maybe stories about such things impressed earlier generations.

Now that we can compare them and trace their similarities and apparent relationships, they're not awe-inspiring or belief-compelling, so much as intriguing in a more or less academic sense. Speaking personally, my interest in religions, or human nature, or the existence of the universe isn't lessened by my lack of faith in the old explanations for them. The ancient accounts of Yahweh, and their myriad theological interpretations, just don't merit the belief that they are true.

Instead, it would appear that Yahweh fits into the scheme of human-created religious ideas, and that increased theological sophistication (all the way through the emergence of skepticism and outright atheism) can be accounted for as a byproduct of critical thinking and human imagination, not "progressive revelation."

Do you have a method for helping us to distinguish the latter from either of the former?

Your questions prompted me to ask a few questions about the grounds of your own conception of Yahweh, luvluv. But I'll get to those in a moment.

The OT concept of Yahweh seems to me to be a well-recieved authority by Yahweh-worshippers of the Jewish and Christian varieties. I don't think Augustine, for instance, intended for his teachings to contradict anything said about God in the OT. To explain, yes, but to contradict, no. So as a basic conception, yes, that's where we all get our information about Yahweh, and I think we'd be correct in asking where anybody gets the authority to correct or modify that OT conception, whether or not we're believers. This includes being skeptical of anything Jesus taught that ran counter to anything recorded in the OT. Does this seem reasonable to you?

How would God's true people acquire or form their conceptions of Yahweh, around a generation or two or ten prior to Herod the Great? Is it not our OT (and perhaps the rabbinical interpretations of the time) that they would rely on? Would those conceptions be accurate? If not... what in the OT is inaccurate, and by what authority do you make that call?

Also: at what point was Yahweh properly "fleshed out" for us - in Jesus, or did it take Augustine, or Aquinas, Calvin, Spurgeon, John Paul II, Matthew Fox or Bishop Spong to finish the work of revealing God in his/her/its true nature to us? (*-see postscript for more...)

In short, luvluv: How accurate is any Yahweh-theology? How do you know? By what specific criteria do you personally evaluate such things? Would you recommend those criteria for everyone to use?

How do you (and how would any Yahweh-believer) protect yourself from just arbitrarily preferring one theology over another? If you share your criteria with us, it might help us all analyze the many varieties of Yahweh-systems (Islam, Judaism, LDS and the thousands of Christian systems), and put them on a scale of truth-reliability, and compare the best of them with our own skeptical positions.

And where do you personally draw the line on any "truth" that supercedes and corrects the errors in the records/teachings of the past? Can your version of "the truth about God" be surpassed by a later theology which damns yours as fatal error or traditionalist ignorance? (If not, what prevents your theological views from being surpassed?)

-Wanderer

*-One could follow up with so many relevant and pressing questions:

How much OT inaccuracy did Jesus believe, and how might that affect our interpretation of his own authority?

Is Yahweh fleshed out yet, or is more fleshing out still needed?

Is our careful skepticism actually helping God's self-revelation along by constantly inspiring theological refinement? If so, should we continue to help that self-revelation along - by being skeptical? (After all, we're about getting the most truth for the buck that we can, and one would imagine that Christians and Jews would be eager to know their God better.)

If a person living in AD 10 were convinced that the OT God was a hideous thing, would he be justified in rejecting Yahweh-worship in favor of another, less offensive theology? Now translate that to our day; if the state of the art in theology still paints an unappealing picture of Yahweh, even after all the editing and emendation by thousands of years of theological refinement, are skeptics justified in rejecting it?

Why isn't an "atheist priest" like Don Cuppitt right in saying that we must finally accept the concept of Yahweh as so much dead weight, and that religion, if it is to survive at all, must cope with His absence?

(I won't ask you to explain away the diverse and generally incompatible theologies out there, but bear in mind that we skeptics do find it very hard to believe that a God who wills to reveal himself and draw people like us to Himself would settle for so much incoherence in His name. It would seem that there is no reliable guideline for discerning the truth about Yahweh, and this is another reason I ask you to share your criteria with us. By comparing it with methods different from yours, perhaps we'll come to some conclusions concerning how to know the truth about Yahweh's nature and the possibility of his existence.)

[ July 03, 2002: Message edited by: wide-eyed wanderer ]</p>

Typhon

Yup. He’s about as likely as Zeus, Sobek, or Anu. Clearly and positively, the work of historical and cultural fiction.

Same reasons that make me certain that Odin does not exist, as a true being outside the realm of the imagination of humans. He is clearly the creation of people, in his attributes, actions, desires, and world-view. Like many ancient deities, he also reflects the magical and highly inaccurate scientific knowledge of the societies which gave birth to him. No credible evidence has come to light to dispute this, or to place him in any different category than the gods of the Greeks or the Asmat, or any other group.

Yahweh shows his colors and start as a nomadic sky-god in the Old Testament quite well, but the additional of the new mythology of the New Testament does little to change the chances, or lack thereof, of him being real. Jesus is likewise a highly suspect character, who I doubt existed historically, but rather is a mystery-cult like avatar added into the religion, very much a combination of Mithras and Osiris. So, yes, he is equally implausible under both interpretations.

The abstract, deist gods or those of a similarly removed, cosmic indifference. Again, there is still no credible evidence for their existence, but they remain much more logically possible and there is less you can say about them, or their possible motivations. However, the trail of human invention seems to likewise lead rather obviously to their creation, a progression if you will, from the earlier, cruder fashioning of our gods.

They are rarely “personal” or as I like to say, “household gods,” who intervene and posture in the lives of mortals (and in the process display much of the same mortal concerns, pettiness, and frailties, even cloaked in the powers of the mythic gods). They can be seen as some abstract intelligence which may or may not have kickstarted reality, and may or may not care a whit about some insignificant little local plot of mud and water where an upstart species of primates have decided to worship them, or some conception of them.

.T.

Pomp

luvluv,

1) What is it about Yahweh that makes you so certain that He does not exist?

Primarily, the complete lack of evidence for Yahweh's existence. Yahweh supposedly exists, wants me to know he exists, and has the power to literally anything he wants, yet I can see no good evidence that he does, in fact, exist. There's something wrong with this picture. You will, of course, have an answer for this, most likely involving "free will," which leads me to my secondary reason for disbelieving in Yahweh, the one that distinguishes my strong disbelief in Yahweh (and Zeus, Odin, etc.) from my weak disbelief in gods in general.

Judeo-Xian doctrine is riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions. While it is possible, as many of our theist participants, including yourself, have demonstrated, to reconcile most of these problems with a degree of effort, there's no point. If there is no evidence that A exists, it is far more parsimonious to conclude that A does not exist than it is to invent convoluted apologetics to defend the possibility that A exists.

1b) Do you base your conception of Yahweh around the Old Testament or does your definition include Yahweh as fleshed out by Jesus, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, etc. (For the record I don't believe in Yahweh as described in the Old Testament myself, but I'm quite fond of the fully fleshed out Yahweh).

All of the above. As several others have noted, it would be very interesting to see a detailed account of how one is supposed to decide which portions of the OT Yahweh are to be validly redacted by subsequent "fleshing out."

2) What Gods do you find more logically possible?

All the ones that I haven't heard of, plus the deist god.

2b) What is it about them that makes them so much more possible than Yahweh?

Simply put, the fewer claims one makes for ones god, the more difficult it is to disprove its existence. I disbelieve weakly in hypothetical unnamed god concepts because of simple lack of evidence and parsimony. I can't disbelieve them strongly, as I do Yahweh, because no positive claims have been made for them that can be refuted.