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God's too great to communicate clearly with humans

Rhea

Rhea

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But my curiosity was sparked reading the comments to this article about a charming boy who tried to be "Christ-like."

There was a lot of discussion about the different interpretations of the bible's words; even whether Paul was rejecting being a Pharisee or still was one. Someone said, "couldn't God just tell people the accurate interpretation and be done?" Someone replied, "like the way you can tell bacteria to go away? God can't speak our language, that's why we have to use the bible"

And I thought to myself, if it is true that God has no way to speak to humans now and make the bible (and his existence) clear without argument, then how was Eve to know it was actually bad to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge? What if she interpreted it wrong and thought it was actually okay?

Either God can communicate clearly and all Christians and Jews and Muslims should be on the same page - OR - Being Eve is no different than being the Westboro Baptist Church, the Pope, the gay minister in New Hampshire or the liberal UUer.

Can humans understand God or not?
 
That sounds like a poorly-thought-out Self-Mutation defense.
We can't have people taking God's silence as a bad thing, so there must be a reason he simply must be silent... So we posit a gulf...
And say we have to depend on the Books because it's the Word.
But...the Word of a being who cannot speak with us would be a worthless Word...
And the question was how to interpret His Word in the first place...
But my main point is, you cannot expect a gnostic relationship with God any more than you can tell infections 'shoo!'

The whole point of The Holy The Books is that God can, and HAS commnicated his desires unto us. Sending us to the Books because God cannot communicate with us is less than a circular argument. It's more of a Moebius strip argument...
 
If humans cannot understand God, then She's not the omnipotent being described in The Books, and The Books aren't a better way to try to guess Her Will than to study Her Creation or listen to what She put in your hear/brain when she created you with empathy.

Ooops, I just put deism, pantheism, and fideism on the same level of validity than Christianism or even theism, so much for trying to be Christ-like.

Plus, when your study of Her Creation leads you to conclude you can describe how it works without refering to The Books or some supernatural devices, it makes it perfectly valid to ignore the possibility of Her Existence in your daily life... Ooops again.
 
This is a bogus argument for about a gazillion reasons, not the least of which is the fact that humans, unlike bacteria, have complex language skills and the capacity for abstract thought. For an omnipotent god the limits on this god's capabilities multiply exponentially the instant a difficulty is discovered comparing the claims with reality. This creates every bit as complex a theodicy as the logical problem of evil does.

As an example, many of the same people will claim that their god knows our innermost thoughts. The only mechanism that could exist whereby this god could know every innermost thought each of us as an individual have yet be incapable of communicating back would be if he was only capable of observing but not manipulating the physical world in any way. Like a ghost in the movies, he could see what was happening but is completely powerless to interact with it in any way.

The implications of this relationship between the physical world and whatever domain this god exists in are devastating to anyone wishing to credit their god with ... anything. While it is theoretically possible that such a god could have done something in its realm of existence that caused our universe to come into existence (deistic creation) the implication is that this god can do nothing to manipulate the physical world in any way. It cannot cause lights to appear in the sky and flash words to us to convey messages we can read. It cannot make sounds in our ears that would sound like someone talking to us. But just as importantly it cannot heal sick people, cause famines, stop horrific storms, transform water into wine or levitate objects off the ground. It cannot impregnate a virgin. If they wish to occupy the terrain of this unfalsifiable god they don't get to make any claims about anything it does or anything it says. It cannot communicate with us any more than we can communicate with a bacteria.

What a contortionist the apologist has to be. All the absurdities vanish immediately once the irrational belief in this myth is discarded.
 
Right. If you start with the most compelling case, that all deities throughout recorded history have been created by Humankind, the Great Creator of Deities, you get the picture in the round. BTW, isn't it usually the case that the bigwigs in all religions tell us that God's revelation is plain, overwhelming, evidentiary, and consistent? They only fall back on that 'God is inscrutable' horseshit when their religious tales run up against tragic reality. There seems never to have an age or creed in which there weren't plenty of people scrambling to get to the top by telling us peons what God was saying.
 
Rhea said:
But my curiosity was sparked reading the comments to this article about a charming boy who tried to be "Christ-like."

There was a lot of discussion about the different interpretations of the bible's words; even whether Paul was rejecting being a Pharisee or still was one. Someone said, "couldn't God just tell people the accurate interpretation and be done?" Someone replied, "like the way you can tell bacteria to go away? God can't speak our language, that's why we have to use the bible"

And I thought to myself, if it is true that God has no way to speak to humans now and make the bible (and his existence) clear without argument, then how was Eve to know it was actually bad to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge? What if she interpreted it wrong and thought it was actually okay?

Either God can communicate clearly and all Christians and Jews and Muslims should be on the same page - OR - Being Eve is no different than being the Westboro Baptist Church, the Pope, the gay minister in New Hampshire or the liberal UUer.

Can humans understand God or not?
Click to expand...
I prefer Kevin Smith's interpretation:

If God spoke to you, your head would explode.
 
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dystopian said:
So the all-powerful, all-knowing god either doesn't have the power to turn down the volume, or he doesn't know how...
Click to expand...
Moreover, the Perfect Creator, whose very existence can be deduced from the Perfection of His Creation didn't build receivers that could handle his transmissions.



Whoops.
 
Which all leads to, "What is the difference between communication with an invisible magic sky creature and no communication with an invisible magic sky creature?"
 
joedad said:
Which all leads to, "What is the difference between communication with an invisible magic sky creature and no communication with an invisible magic sky creature?"
Click to expand...
Deep in your heart, you'd know how the difference would feel, if you weren't such a hater of the Truth of Gawd.
 
So let's get this straight. God is so far "above" us we cannot understand his message. Yet at least some of it comes through the people he inspired to write and compile the bible. But it's full of error and contradiction, so it has inspired more hate than love, more confusion than clarity, and generally been very destructive to our society. But a few things do come through very clear, god hates the gay, barely tolerates women and loves foreskins.

He is so knowledgeable, so intelligent and so powerful it's very difficult to divine his message and our purpose in his plan. Yet this all powerful, complex being that made the entire universe, the quantum universe, black holes, white dwarfs, gravitational lensing and the Higgs Boson field is really, really concerned about when and where we bleed out of our lady parts, where we put our penis, cutting off the tips off our cocks, and whether or not our testicles are in good order when we approach his altar. He loves the smell of burning flesh, and at times has killed us by the millions because we have failed to live up to the standards he set for us that we could not understand because HE made us too fucking dense to get what he's saying.

 
It does just seem to be a post-hoc rationalization. God talks to people all the time in the Bible, so it should be kind of hard to assert that you're a Christian while saying that God can't communicate with us. Even if you take the Kevin Smith type of reasoning, God can still talk to an angel and have that angel talk to us, so communication is still easy.
 
You mean like how Moses couldn't communicate well, and needed a speaker for him (Ex. 4:10)... yet was capable of long-winded speeches (Deut.)?
 
In fairness this is one of those rare times when the story line makes sense. Ostensibly it took 40 years for Moses to get from being a poor speaker to being a long-winded public speaker who just wouldn't shut up. I can see that happening. Not with him starting off as an 80 year old man and ending up 120 years old, but maybe starting at 20 and being a rambly public speaker at 60.
 
"I am the LORD, the God of all humankind. There is, indeed, nothing too difficult for me. " - Jeremiah 32:27
 
Judges 1:19 "And the LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron."

Oops, a contradiction.
 
braces_for_impact said:
Judges 1:19 "And the LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron."

Oops, a contradiction.
Click to expand...
Naw, apologists have explained that it was Judah who couldn't drive out the Valley-ers, not the LORD. Which somehow means it's not God's fault...
 
Then the LORD said to him, "Know for certain that for four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own and that they will be enslaved and mistreated there.

Abraham replied, "Huh what?!"

God replieth "Nothing."
 
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