God and Reality (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by dhw, Thursday, June 20, 2013, 19:06 (3956 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

TONY: I know I probably shouldn't dare to make any biblical assertions in a thread about god, but...-Irony appreciated!
 
TONY: The biblical answer is something we can certainly relate to. There was God. God created a son(motivation, loneliness, creativity, who knows). They spent some time getting to know each other, as any good father and son would. Every thing else was created 'through and for' his son. (The books words, not mine..) Certainly creating something more for your son is something that we can understand.-By sheer coincidence, I have just read the obituary of a former chaplain at my younger son's old school (though he left before my son went there). You will draw your own conclusions from the following extract, which presents an interesting and, for me, rather sad counterbalance to Tony's post:-"...His passion for preaching drew big crowds.-But his faith dwindled. He was involved in the translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which cast doubt on much of the accepted historical narrative of Christianity. Reading the Christian existentialist Paul Tillich reinforced his doubts, as did heated debates with John Robinson, Anglican bishop of Woolwich and author of the controversial Honest to God (1963). Billington considered his own The Christian Outsider to be its sequel.
 
After 19 years as a Methodist minister, he wrote The Christian Outsider (1971), which concluded that a personal God did not exist, Jesus was not his son, and there was no afterlife. He was accused of heresy by the Methodist doctrinal committee of appeal, tried at the Methodist Conference in Harrogate ... "850 ministers discussing nothing but me and my beliefs for seven hours" ... and defrocked."-(He went on to be head of philosophy from 1971 to 1995 at what became the University of the West of England, and wrote several more books.)-Clearly not everyone who studies the bible, as this man did in great detail, can relate to its answers.