Dear Seattle, this is a long post, so forgive me, and I hope you get the information of the concept of God, because we cannot talk about God existing or not, if one of us does not have any information of the concept of God.
{QUOTE="Seattle, post: 3259351, member: 271333"]You don't need me if all you want is what is in the dictionary. You already know what is in the dictionary for the various definitions of the various gods.
You also want someone who "knows" what God is but only the religious "know" what God is. The non-believers can't "know" what the concept of God is when they don't think there is a God.
I have a "concept" of dinosaurs even though they don't currently exist because they did actually exist. That's the only reason I have a concept of dinosaurs.
I don't have a concept of God or of unicorns or of ghosts.
This thread has gone on long enough without accomplishing anything so I'll end here.{/QUOTE]
Dear Seattle:
You are in anxiety that I might pin the information of God you can produce from your vocabulary database, and say that you already commit yourself to the concept.
That is not my intention; we are at least from my part into a dialog that is not land mined with a lot f dishonest semantic tricks.
It is like you are a child afraid of any electric shock as to get killed by electrocution, because your mommy warned you about touching any wire at all; then in school in your class the science teacher is teaching you about the facts of electricity and how it helps mankind and also its dangers. And he wants to show you how and why electricity or an electric current can give you a painful shock and even kill you, by inviting each child to touch a wire that is not connected to any source of current; but you will not cooperate in the experiment, you just resist and resist and resist and resist in fear.
That is what I see in you, you fear to just repeat your information of the concept of God from your stock vocabulary, because you are besieged by the phobia that you might end up being fraudulently ensnared by me as having already admitted the concept of God to be any ground for admitting His existence.
Okay, then I will volunteer to you the information of the concept of God from the Finnish atheists in their Dictionary of Atheism [see, they are not afraid of the information they have on the concept of God]:
[quote}
http://www.dlc.fi/~etkirja/dictionary.htm#mozTocId382589
Finnish Dictionary of Atheism
[The entry God is between the entries Google and Godless.]
God: A deity or a god, is a postulated supernatural entity, usually, but not always, of significant power, worshipped, thought holy, divine, or sacred, held in high regard, or respected by humans. They assume a variety of forms, but are frequently depicted as having human or animal form.
Sometimes it is considered blasphemous to imagine the deity as having any concrete form. They are usually immortal. They are commonly assumed to have personalities and to possess consciousness, intellects, desires, and emotions much like humans.
Such natural phenomena as lightning, floods, storms, other "acts of God”, and miracles are attributed to them, and they may be thought to be the authorities or controllers of every aspect of human life (such as birth or the afterlife).
Some deities are asserted to be the directors of time and fate itself, to be the givers of human law and morality, to be the ultimate judges of human worth and behaviour, and to be
the designers and creators of the Earth or the universe.[/quote}
So, there you have it, the information from the Finnish Atheists’ Dictionary of Atheism, and that line,
“designers and creators of the Earth or the universe,” it squares with my information on the concept of God as
the creator and operator of the universe and everything with a beginning.
Okay, now you have the information of the concept of God.
Let us go back to
nature, tell me what is the relation of nature to the universe?