Hi Gordon, what do you think of this:
Or
If God exists (and I truly believe She does) She would have been the creator with power and knowledge making us as She wanted. To try and make Her as we want defies logic and is a most cruel self deception that can lead to great disappointment and disillusionment.
Or
If Gods exist (and I truly believe they do) They would have been the creators with the power and knowledge of making us as they wanted. To try and make them as we want defies logic and is a most cruel self deception that can lead to great disappointment and disillusionment.
I suppose my point is that in your own sentence you were making God one and not just that but one that was a man. Whivch kind of defeats your own argument.
What if you should go to heaven and find it populated with many many Goddesses with little to no concern for you – will that lead to great disappointment and disillusionment?
Michael
I have no problem with people having their own views of God (or Gods or Godesses). But the rationale of my view is based on beliefs built up over many hundreds of years amongst many people and on principles, historical accounts and prophesies in a collection of books of scripture. Much of this is not necessarily what you (or I) might find comfortable about the nature of God and what is required of us by that entity.
It is possible of course that I have got it wrong but I would say that a god(s)devised on any one individual's highly subjective personal preferences as to what he/she/it/they should be like must logically have a very small likelihood of being correct.
As a logician I do not believe that two mutually exclusive versions of the nature of the same entity can both be simultaneously true so this implies that only the one option of the three: no god, one God or many gods can actually be true.
Of course I would be disappointed if I had got it completely wrong (although if there were no god, I should probably not know!). If you have created a god(s) as everything you would personally like him (or her or them) to be, then the possibility of disappointment must logically be much greater however!
On more important topics, there is no scriptural support for a masculine sexually orientated god. To quote Wikipedia:
'In Christianity, God is generally believed to be a Trinity, consisting of three persons in one God. The three persons of the Trinity are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. God the Father has traditionally been described with male imagery, and God the Son is believed literally to have become incarnate as a human male. God the Holy Spirit has been referred to using male, female or neutral grammatical gender depending on the language (the Hebrew word רוח ruaḥ is grammatically feminine, the Greek word πνευμα pneuma is grammatically neuter, and the Latin word spiritus is grammatically masculine). But Christianity does not regard the omnipotent God as being male, God the Father is genderless, and is only given the name, "Father" because Jesus wanted to emphasis the special relationship that his followers share with God through him. In reality only one out of the holy trinity is masculine, Jesus Christ who was born male, although his actual incarnation was to stress his "humanity" and not that he was male.'
Hebrew only has two genders, masculine and feminine. There is no gender so god could not be 'it' in Hebrew. Therefore (in accordance with normal grammatical principles) god became 'he' by default. The problem with using 'mother' rather than 'father' is that in the ancient world it would immediately conjure up images of pagan fertility godesses. This has of course happened over the years to an extent with the 'christianisation' of more ancient beliefs in such places as Latin America where in the syncretic version of Roman Catholicism there, Mary (the incorrectly described 'Mother of God') has become an object of veneration and a straight replacement for previous pagan fertility godesses. 'Father' is a much safer concept.
The relationship between fathers and their children does also tend to be different in that fathers much more readily accept that their offspring may have done things wrong (they may still of course forgive them). Mothers often do not accept that their offspring could have done that which they clearly did. A classic extreme UK example would be the mother of the notorious murderous gangsters the Kray twins, who always claimed that her sons were 'good boys'. 'Father' therefore better fits a christian concept of the relationship between God and people.
Whilst christianity encompasses an intellectual belief in the characteristics of God, this is not the most important aspect of the religion. The religion emphasises a personal ongoing relationship with God. This is very difficult to explain but does not necessarily involve voices in your head, although I should like MW to prove her statement that no rational person hears voices in their head. What is her evidence for this statement? Prejudice against the existence of the supernatural is not a proof of its non existence!
I am perhaps getting a little off topic but would happily discuss this on a different thread.
Regards,
Gordon.
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