God Returns

Originally posted by Ghost of a Duke
Yes, it would indeed imply that all religious writings, including the bible, were written by man. My question was really to determine what God would make of such man made writings attributed to him.

If His plan from the outset was to have no contact with mankind at all, and there was therefore no revelation, no instructions, no conditions, and no promises, punishments or rewards of any kind, then I can't see how the religions and religious beliefs that had developed all around the world would actually matter one whit to Him.

Originally posted by HandyAndy
After one look around, God would be an atheist.

Such hate and anger.

Do you reckon if he came back to earth we would try and put him on a cross again?

Originally posted by whodey
Do you reckon if he came back to earth we would try and put him on a cross again?

Surely if that were the narrative that a hypothetical God figure wanted to create then that would be what would happen?

It is said that God created man and it is also said that man created God. What I'd both were truth in some way; what if God got the man he created and man gets the "God" he creates?

Originally posted by divegeester
It is said that God created man and it is also said that man created God. What I'd both were truth in some way; what if God got the man he created and man gets the "God" he creates?

That's probably quite profound, but not had my morning coffee yet, so will need to come back to it.

Originally posted by checkbaiter
In light of the new info, I agree, not interested.

So old chap, you were interested when you thought i'd posted a contradiction, but not when you realised it was a misunderstanding of the OP? 😉

I think the question raised is a fair one and allows plenty of wriggle room for a theist to address the nature of God. - As an atheist, the main factor that makes the notion of God unappealing to me is the way He is represented in the Bible. In the OT in particular we have a jealous and sometimes brutal and seemingly unjust God. (This is a problem 'for me' if we are to view the OT as divinely inspired and not just the writing of ancient man). - If however these writings were not divinely inspired, what would God make of them?

Originally posted by Ghost of a Duke
That's probably quite profound, but not had my morning coffee yet, so will need to come back to it.

Profundity is one of my core strengths. Along with "finger-pointing", "moralising" and "actual sadism" 😉

Originally posted by whodey
Such hate and anger.

Do you reckon if he came back to earth we would try and put him on a cross again?

Always amusing to find Whodey railing against hate and anger. He is such a model to us all.

It would be an interesting and provocative thought experiment to ask if and how it would even be possible to put God on a cross. Your question makes sense only when we equate God with Jesus and even so there are important distinctions to be considered (hence the doctrine of the Trinity). In the same way, I imagine we also have to assume that God returns to earth in the form of a human for your question to make sense. However there are monotheists who would consider the propositiong blasphemous not because it is wrong to put God on a cross but because it is impossible and ridiculous.

You need to ask who put Jesus on a cross and for what purpose.

In so far as his teachings were considered subversive, it seems to have provoked not the secular authorities but the religious authorities. The people most likely to want to put a latter day Jesus on a cross would also be religious.

In so far as his activities had secular, political implications, one has to bear in mind the accumulating aggression of Jewish nationalism against the Roman and other secular authorities and their desire to impose a Jewish, theocratic political order, culminating in the Jewish Wars - the most violent uprising against Roman authority anywhere in the Empire. While this points to a reasonable basis for a poltiical decision to execute anyone generating religious excitement and large crowds at that time, it remains the case that the problem is the real or apparent intermixing of religion (and religious fanaticism) with politics.

Were the followers of Jesus mixed up in the fundamentalist fanaticism that fed into the Jewish Wars? Paul denies this of course, while any followers remaining in Jerusalem will have perished, so we will never know, or never hear another side of that story. However, we do know that in the modern era, religious fanaticism and secular authority continue to be at war, with American drones at the heart of the policy to execute the religious fanatics, which is a laugh since American politics is suffused with religious fanaticism.

It is interesting by the way to speculate that a major criterion deciding if Republicans will vote for Trump or for Cruze hangs on their expectations about the return of an American Jesus. Cruze thinks it is imminent, while Trump is not sure.

Originally posted by divegeester
Profundity is one of my core strengths. Along with "finger-pointing", "moralising" and "actual sadism" 😉

Well, the last three sound about right, even though I've seen little evidence of the last one. I'm surprised you managed to spell the first one right.

Originally posted by Suzianne
Well, the last three sound about right, even though I've seen little evidence of the last one. I'm surprised you managed to spell the first one right.

😴

Originally posted by Ghost of a Duke
So old chap, you were interested when you thought i'd posted a contradiction, but not when you realised it was a misunderstanding of the OP? 😉

I think the question raised is a fair one and allows plenty of wriggle room for a theist to address the nature of God. - As an atheist, the main factor that makes the notion of God unappealing to me is th ...[text shortened]... cient man). - If however these writings were not divinely inspired, what would God make of them?

God is deliberately presented in the Old testament as harsh for good reason. The true nature of God is presented in the New Testament.
Why the difference? This is a study in itself and not problematic at all. But it entails many factors.

1. This has been dealt with here in the past. In short, people in the OT did not have holy spirit in them permanently like in the NT. It was not available until Acts chapter 2.
In the OT, only a select few had holy spirit "upon" them and it was conditional.
That is why David cried out ...
Ps 51:11
11 Do not cast me away from Your presence,
And do not take Your holy spirit from me.
NKJV
Anyway, people were not told all about the Devil. They knew very little about him. They could not deal with dark spiritual forces. They could not cast out demons like in the NT. They could not understand that evil came from Satan. So God used the figure of speech "metonymy". God took the blame for evil and suffering even though it was not from him.
You can learn more here..

http://www.truthortradition.com/articles/the-figure-of-speech-metonymy-as-used-in-the-bible

It was not until the Gospels that Jesus taught and declared God. He taught the people that the devil came to kill, steal and destroy. He taught that God was good.
2. The devil has always been at war with God and had tried to stop the coming Messiah promised in Genesis 3:15. He tried all sorts of things, tampering with genetics (the demonic angels co-habiting with woman) bring in a whole new race of evil people. God had to save the remaining 8 uncontaminated humans left. Thus the Ark to preserve the bloodline of the Christ.
In other places God had to destroy whole armies like the Assyrians trying to destroy the Jews, and so on. One has to remember the spiritual side to all of this. Satan was the one sending armies to destroy the Jews.
So, God protected the Jews from being overwhelmed by taking the blame for good and evil. Then he protected the bloodline from direct attacks from Satan.
There is much more to this than I could share in a post.
If you are really interested go to the link above and read, watch video's etc.

Originally posted by Suzianne
Well, the last three sound about right, even though I've seen little evidence of the last one. I'm surprised you managed to spell the first one right.

Ain't spelchekers great? Suz, total off topic: you asked me why the reverse polish calculator was such a big deal, remember? A guy and his wife who live near where I work, I am recording their band, getting paid even🙂 anyway, I saw he had a Hewlett Packard calculator I had wanted for a long time, a reverse polish model, the HP11C. I have the HP12C which looks just like the 11 but is used for financial calculations, how much do I owe after 23 payments out of a 30 payment schedule and so forth.

For engineering work it is not so great so I wanted the 11, and Jon had one and gave it to me.

I downloaded the manual, still around on the net, even though the 11 and 12 are from around 1985.

The manual explains RPN really well, which surprised me.

One of the calculations I used to make was figuring out where to put the frets on a guitar fretboard. One a regular calculator with number storage you need to do this:

Find the 12th root of 2, which is 1.059 (that is the fundamental number used to figure out frequencies of notes, then invert and you get 0.9438 and change and this number can help in figuring out just where frets go on a guitar (they get slightly closer together as the notes get higher but at the first octave, the number is exactly half the distance).

So with a normal calculator, you first get to that .9438 thing, hit STO A (puts that number in memory location A) and then you enter the max size of the fretboard, in this case for simplicity, 1000 mm or one meter.

Using that calculator, you go RCL A times 1000, and you get 943.8 mm which is where fret # 1 goes. Then you again go RCL A times that 943 and you get 890 mm and for fret 3, 890 times RCL A, get the picture? By the time you get to the 12th fret, you have done 36 button pushes. At the 12th fret it is exactly at 500 mm.

But in RPN, you do the math to get 0.9438 (inverse of the 12th root of 2) and you hit Enter, enter, enter. That puts that number at the top of the "Stack", which is just 4 memory locations arranged where hitting enter puts a number in the first lowest level of the stack, hitting enter again reproduces the same number one stack higher and so forth till all 4 stacks have that number in it.

So that takes 3 button pushes.

Then you just put in 1000, now just hit the X button (multiplication) and you get that first fret number 943.8 mm then just keep hitting X and the next number appears, X again and the third and so forth, so by the time you get to the 12th fret, you only have pushed 12 button pushes plus the 3 enters, so 15 keystrokes to do what normal calculators takes over twice the keystrokes. You get the answer as soon as you hit the next X and no futzing around with recalls and such.

That is just one small example of how RPN is superior to regular parenthesis based arithmetic. When you were taught arithmetic in grade school you wrote down the first number, put the next number below it and put the operation next to the second number and did the math. That is exactly how RPN works, no parenthesis needed for long chained math like this: (3X8)+(5-98)/(8X6)+(5-67). RPN handles all the internal details of doing that math without having to resort to all those parentheses, and it gets even more complex if you have multiple embedded stuff like ((8x7)+(3/4))/ (((7+3)x(6+4))X (4-8)/(3+8)) RPN eliminates the need for all that faldarah of nested parentheses.

I know this belongs somewhere else but I know this is a recent post you made so spilling it all here🙂

Originally posted by Ghost of a Duke
Hypothetically speaking (as I know theists enjoy hypotheticals) imagine God had never attempted to make contact with mankind. Let's assume that He is indeed all powerful and all loving etc, but that it was His plan from the outset to have no contact with us at all; no prophets, no miracles, no angels, no divinely inspired writings.

Imagine this Go ...[text shortened]... saged him? Would the way he was presented in the Old Testament for example please or dismay him?

Let's start with your premise which allegedly informed the hypothetical.
You assert that "theists enjoy hypotheticals."
What is the basis of this claim?

Originally posted by Suzianne
All these so-called "hypothetical musings" have one goal. To present the Bible as false and to make the believers envision the "what if" of "no God". Not interested.

Frightened?
I'm sure you are not but that is how you come across.

Originally posted by FreakyKBH
Let's start with your premise which allegedly informed the hypothetical.
You assert that "theists enjoy hypotheticals."
What is the basis of this claim?

Is irony something you only do after laundry. 😕

What is your basis for the claim the Earth is flat? (Rhetorical question, as your madness is best contained in one thread).