Tony\'s God (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, November 21, 2011, 18:15 (4752 days ago) @ dhw

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An important personal note: I hope it’s clear to you that while these arguments do, I think, require an answer, I’m deliberately setting black against white. If I believed in God, my views would be very close to David’s wonderfully wise and balanced opinions as expressed in his posts to you on this thread.

Thank you. What is obvious to me is that it is very difficult to shake off parent's teachings (while you are in childhood. As an adult you may yearn to 'live up' to them. An example from my lie. My Mother told me thre was a God, in a matter-of-fact way. I went to Sunday School and learned that it was boring. I had a Bar Mitzvah because I was the first born male on both sides of our family. I memorized the Hebrew I had to 'read'. As a kid it was exciting: I pleased my parents, and I got lots of presents. There was a great party afterward. Psychological underpinnings for religious feelings, none! Tony on the other hand has those underpinnings and is returning to them.

None of us knew who God really is as a 'person like no other person' (Adler). We pick and choose from our background. I think I am lucky in the sense that I am a tabula rasa, a blank slate. I was agnostic, from not thinking deeply enough, and luckily began to read about cosmology and particle physics as the standard model was being fitted together. The logic of God popped out, but who He is personally is the wishful thinking in the Bible. And that is where the trouble between humans begins. Everyone wants to believe their version! Karen Armstrong points out three versions of God: OT adolescent, with an angry nasty, but loving God. NT, advances, thrives on a loving description, and the Quran gets to adulthood, by looking at his creations and knowing him through study of them. (With the Quran, just skip the nasty stuff about spreading belief with war and conquering).

Conclusion: the worst way to build a reasonable belief system is to start with biblical teachings. That is why earlier on this website I mentioned my 'third way'. dhw is frightened by what he reads about God in the OT. dhw doesn't like evil; God should have made the world 'perfect' in his mind. No, God had to give us free will. We would be puppets otherwise. Making this Earth requires Earthquakes that kill, and so on. Theodicy is addressed in many ways.

Clean out the cobwebs, clear your mind and the existence of God is logical. There has to be a first cause.