iceaura,
And no need to pretend the people you are responding to have engaged in such pretensions.
Then you should respond to the verse in which God gives His intentions for His actions (and also take into account God's potential), instead glossing over it as though it has no consequence.
God killed entire categories and populations of people, men and women and children, on purpose and aforethought, and we call that genocide. That's our human word for such behavior.
From your perspective He killed them, but from His perspective he relieved them of an eternity of the lowest form of hell, due to their own foolishness. If He'd have intended to kill mankind, you and I wouldn't be having this conversation.
Indeed it does, and Bill Maher is once again found to be simply stating the obvious.
Again, from your perspective, because you are anti-God, and will agree to anything which is seems to place God in the worst light.
The description in the Bible, the sum total of the evidence we have, is one of motivated, intentional, genocide - mass murder.
Murder is an unlawful act of killing other human beings (
other kind of gives it away). Also, these people had transgressed the law of nature about as far as one can (taking the verse you systematically ignore into consideration). From what I can tell, God reluctantly wiped those people from the face of the earth, because of their being ''pure evil''.
It was planned in advance, explicitly justified in advance, and carried out deliberately against entire populations of defenseless people to suit the purposes of the perpetrator.
And what purposes would those be (before you blurt, think about the verse you systematically ignore)?
The only doubt comes from the observation that the entire story is a myth, and that does not change the nature of the events in it.
Of course you don't mind painting God in lowly human picture, despite your claim to not believing in Him (because of lack of evidence Lol!! The atheist anthem). No doubt you will play your ''lack of evidence card' when you are forced to accept that you're wrong. And in this case you are definitely wrong.
Or as you put it: Theists and Deities are identified as who they are by their words, and their deeds. And Maher's simple observations of what those words and deeds were and are, remain simply and materially accurate.
Yes, Maher's simple(ton) observation just happens to rule out everything that gives clarity to God's actions. ''God is a murderer'', he bleats, yet the only reason one can give for that conclusion, is that God kills extremely evil humans, and even then it is done purely because it has to be done. I have given you (Biblical/scriptural) evidence that God did not ''murder'' anybody (remember that murder is be used as it would be in a court of law), and you have given nothing but faithfulness to the accusation of a modern television icon.
If you really believe that Maher's entire audience is ignorant of the Bible or any aspect of the thought and tradition of your Church, you have a lot to learn about them.
What ''Church''? I'm not talking about church, or religion. I'm talking about that claim, which was taken as an idea, from a book which has real words in it so one can read for themselves, but choose to follow the idiotic rantings of new atheist nonsense. Oh and by the way, they are ignorant, because they could not have stopped to think whether there is any truth in any scripture, at least before mocking it. They automatically turn off, by using humour, and pretending they have everything under control.
And about human nature. People who actually don't know anything about the religions and deities that Maher mocks aren't the ones laughing so hard - they don't see the point, haven't met the situations and people he is riffing off of, don't know what he's talking about or why he's making a big deal out of what looks to them like nothing much. His audience is full of apostates - and a lot of them know their Bible, their theology, their Church's teachings, very very well.
We're not talking about religion, or dieties. We're talking about a specific idea which has been drip-fed to the masses, over a long period of time. That's how he can get away with being so popular, while spreading, and indoctrinate with, disinformation.
It has nothing to do with religion. This is an attack on God.
jan.