Bingowings said:
Why would a mosquito see the Abdominal Dr Vibes as anything less than food?
Why should I even concern myself with this God fellow if His milieu is so conceptually alien to my own? What's the scripture for if only the attuned can fathom it (surely they don't need to fathom it if they are already attuned)?
I can get my head around the notion that the grand cosmic project is a work in progress and that trillions have to suffer in ways which make no sense and seem cruel from within the mechanism to serve an ultimate goal that is perfection.
But that's not what scripture is saying.
It's saying the universe was made in six stages, It's finished. God's the boss and if you don't start feeling sorry about playing with your penises and stop it in the name of an incarnation of Himself He allowed to be nailed to a tree and die for three days you will suffer forever.
Meanwhile you faithful chosen people go over their and kill those male children and rape those women.
If God is all powerful and all knowing, all possible universes are possible to him and yet he picked the one where he knows I will be born and due to free will take qualitative umbrage at the biblical account of himself and be damned.
He made me with hell in mind.
And I'm supposed to like this chap?
What's more he is supposed to be the same person as Jesus who is by almost every account a likable and approachable superhero with compassion, who feels empathy with the downtrodden, the sick and the bereaved.
It makes more sense to me that they aren't the same person or if they are, the act of incarnation has changed God in ways He hadn't foreseen.
If God can change he isn't always perfect.
Either the Tyrant God is perfect and the gentle Jesus is a corruption of his true self or Jesus is an upgrade Which means the scripture relating to God Mk1 needs to be re-worked.
But the acts of his fully human group of followers don't match with Jesus either. They sound more like devotees of God Mk1.
You can understand where the Gnostics got their groove from. The OT God sounds like a faker, an insecure God wannabe. A Devil (powerful but evil).
Where as Jesus sounds like a representative of a nicer God who doesn't want anyone raped but has interceded as much as he can (Good but limited).
i can see myself being convinced by a Good but limited God. I might thank him for the opportunity of life and forgive him the unavoidable crapness of some of life (mortality for example).
But the the Tyrant God He can just swivel.
"...from my perspective" sums up the misunderstanding.
The sad truth is, with regard to these matters, we pitiful little creatures DON'T HAVE ANYTHING THAT COULD BE CALLED A PERSPECTIVE!!! We don't even count as mosquitos in camparison to a surgeon.
Even so, the unattuned can gain the knowledge they require. They just have to work harder for it (see The Apostle Thomas.)
The Universe is far from finished. Scripture tells us that it is groaning. The six stages were the initial creation.
"With great power comes great responsibility." Humans expect their high chiefs to judge and set the wrongs right. God is the only one who can fulfill that need. "Give every man as he deserves and who would scape whipping?" What if the creator doesn't want to give all of his creations what they deserve? How could he escape the imperative to condemn according to human logic (Man was not made for the Sabbath but the Sabbath for man.) Jesus is that way out.
Do you know what would happen to those male children or women? Would they die in the desert or be taken by men who would give them worse treatment? What would happen to the nation that doesn't show that they mean business according to the standard of the time? Doesn't perceived weakness invariably encourage aggressors and lead to even more war and suffering? Do you know what happens to a society that plays too much with it's penises in unnatural ways? What happens if men stop caring enough about the next generation? Tear down and destroy the people who do care? History indicates it might be very bad. It might be the thing that tips the balance and drags us to totalitarianism.
All Universes are possible? What if this universe is Logically necessary to God's knowledge? The Forger problem might have some application. If a forgery is so convincing that there is no way to distinguish it from the original, is there any meaningful distinction? What if our universe IS a part of the perfect knowledge of God? It IS God knowing. People complain that God doesn't need to put us through this because he already knows the outcome. But if the knowledge is so complete and perfect that it is indistinguishable from the history of our universe, his knowledge could BE the history of our U. There would be no need to "Do it again in reality". It may be our reality. We are knowledge in the mind of God.
God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are the same entity viewed from different human perspectives at different points in time. God doesn't change. Humanity changes. The way you relate to a small child in the past will be quite different from the way you relate to a spouse today or that same child in the future. We can judge human conduct to some degree, but we don't have the most minute part of the information necessary to judge our creator.
A Surgeon does radical, invasive, harmful, violative things to his patient. Is it therefore "evil"?
These human jackals who come in the name of "compassion" are most often horrifying tyrants. Depravity is a cruel sort of tyranny. Why should you prefer their tyranny?