Do Christians Worship Different Gods?

HI GDR, It's an unanswerable question. Certainly you have a different concept of god to a fundie Christian and that fundie has a different god concept to the next Christian. But to say whether they are actually different gods or not, we would have to know whether or not these gods were real.Certainly there are multiple god concepts within modern Christianity. There are multiple god concepts within the Bible itself. The modern Christian has a completely disparate concept of God from the early Jews who wrote the OT and in most cases, a different god concept from the early Christians who wrote the NT. But are they different gods? Who knows. Until someone provides evidence that any of these god concepts are valid, there is no meaningful way to address the question. I think you have this exactly backwards. You should be looking at how our individual worldviews shape our concept of god.God is good. God is always good. But exactly how that goodness manifests is due entirely to the moral values of the culture in which the god is worshipped. An slave owner will think that God approves of slavery. A modern Christian will likely think that God reviles slavery. The author of Deuteronomy was a horrible, horrible bastard, so his god was a bastard too. You are a reasonable, moderate modern person, so your god is moderate and reasonable as well. Believers shape their personal concept of god to match their own worldview. There are studies that support this notion."If triangles had a god, he would have three sides."Mutate and Survive

Fair enough. Or, to put this another way, you search the scriptures and disregard anything that disagrees with your own personal morality. Anything that you personally approve of is labelled "godly". Anything that you personally disapprove of is labelled "human error". You find the NT useful in this regard because it has far less in the way of obviously abhorrent material.Your model, where we gradually home in on God's true message is indistinguishable from a model where Christian believers simply modify their gods over time to accommodate their own individual moral codes and the current moral Zeitgeist.To me this is just too... fishy. It looks too much like rationalisation. No-one ever seems to believe in a god that differs from their own personal morality. For example, no-one seems to believe both that God exists and that he is evil. To my mind, that is not a co-incidence. Thanks for the recommendation. I have a passing familiarity with Wright and his views. Like Straggler, I do see his position as being largely incompatible with anything that can usefully be described as Christianity, but it's interesting stuff nonetheless. I tend to pick up books randomly, at charity shops and the like, but if I come across a copy, I'll give it a try.Mutate and SurviveEdited by Granny Magda, : Found a stupid. Removed stupid.

Really?! Really really? Because I can think of a few dubious ones.The New Testament is by no means a good moral guide, not by today's standards. It was an improvement upon the previous efforts of Jewish mystics, but no more. It does not compare well with the secular moral philosophy of the Greeks for example. Yes, I can understand that. I respect the fact that you seek to find value in Christianity, but I still think that the way you are going about it is innately fallacious. Only if that designer specifically designed it to look exactly as if it were natural. Again, to me, this sounds like rationalisation. But the people who worshipped them did not believe these gods to be evil, that is my point. Those people probably thought that sacrificing babies (or whatever) was harsh but fair. They thought their gods were good, even as they were doing evil.As far as I know, no-one ever believed in a god whose morality drastically differed from their own (outside of henotheistic models). The fact that Christian slave owners failed to recognise their own evil (and even went as far as to claim that God approved of slavery) would seem to refute this notion. There are many competing standards for "good" and religion does not seem to have done a very good job of defining better standards. You really don't see Wright's god as being substantially different from the god described in, say, the Nicene Creed? I think there is a big difference between them.One of the main reasons, I think, that Christians seem to worship so many gods, is this tendency to totally revamp the whole concept of god, and then pretend that nothing has changed. The distant god of modern Christian moderates is vastly different from the one early Christians would recognise, and unimaginably different from the one the Jews revered. Nonetheless, most Christians seem to want to treat them as being, at some level, the same entity. I think that such believers are in denial.Modern Christianity is as different a beast from ancient Judaism as one could possibly imagine and yet many believers seem to want to pretend that they are part of the same tradition. Better, in my opinion, to be honest and worship some new god, one that better serves modern needs. Of course then, believers wouldn't be able to make appeals to authority, based on ancient texts, so you lose a popular selling point, but at least you would have a more consistent god. You wouldn't have to do the dance of finding excuses for the excesses of Yahweh. In my view, the early Christians would have done better to simply ditch the horrible OT. Similarly, modern theists, with their vague, non-interventionist gods, would do better to ditch Christianity altogether and come up with a better system, one that doesn't require constant excuse making.Mutate and Survive

Sorry! I outlined in Message 14 where I think you're going wrong; What you seem to think you're doing is honing in in the bits that were divinely inspired. You have no reason to suppose that. All you're really doing is searching through the Bible for bits that you like.To search through and say "I like this bit" and "I disapprove of that bit" is perfectly valid. To go on to conclude that these bits are the divinely inspired bits is unsupported and logically invalid. Well, that's kind of a loaded question for me. I am an atheist. I don't believe in, like or approve of Christianity, so there is no way I think a Christian ought to approach the Bible, since I cannot say that anyone ought to be Christian.I think that the Bible should be read simply as what it is; a collection of human works, interesting for their historical and cultural status, but not possessed of any special/supernatural content. You should read it the same way that you read and assess any secular work of philosophy or fiction. Um... designed? Instead, we see a world of material forces, often random, usually quite purposeless and frequently arbitrary and cruel.Certainly a designer could have designed all this, to look as natural and non-designed as possible, but there is no reason to suppose this. It's like saying "Sure this could be a cat, but the very fact that it looks so cat-like only goes to show that it might be a dog.". It's just a form of Last Thursdayism. But they must have thought that their actions were morally justifiable, or they would not have gloried them.Can you show me any example of a person worshipping a god that they considered to be evil? But of course, you don't know that it's being misused. For all we know, the nasty bits from the Bible about murdering infants and slavery and such, might be the bits God was really keen on. All you lovey-dovey hippy liberal Christians might be the ones who have got it all wrong. Again, you are pre-supposing that good=godly, and I believe that to be unwarranted. I can agree with all of that. Except for the Canadian bit. Everyone knows that God has the voice of David Attenborough. Yes and that's my problem with it. It would have been far better to have dismissed the more noxious segments of the OT and to have moved ahead by building upon the best bits. Both Christianity and Islam have made attempts at modernising the OT, but both have, IMHO, failed because of their unwarranted attachment to a lot of outdated Bronze Age hate speech.Let's be very clear, the OT has caused a lot of suffering with this kind of material. It is still doing so. A quick look at the way the oppression of women is still excused by some by reference to the OT shows us how damaging these toxic teachings are. They should have been abandoned. The NT was the perfect opportunity to do this, but instead it sends mixed messages. I agree with what you're saying about how we should approach the Bible, but I think that your way still leaves you open to being left with many competing god-concepts. The need for constant interpretation leaves plenty of wiggle-room in which new gods can spring up every time anybody hits a disagreement.Mutate and Survive

HI GDR, Only because you've decided that it is. One could just as easily construct a "meta-narrative" from unconnected works of secular philosophy. I doubt very much that most of the Bible's authors would agree with your analysis. And in doing this, you are doing exactly what you advise against; taking the Jewish scriptures out of the context in which they were written. Out of interest, what would you do if the morality of the NT were to let you down? Through which filter are we supposed to view the (frequent) moral failings of the NT? Okay, fair enough. What specific insights do you think that the Bible has to offer that secular philosophers and other religions don't have? Of course the universe is finely tuned. What else could it look like? Seriously though, we could see some evidence of the supernatural. Any evidence at all, even a tiny bit. Instead we see natural forces operating devoid of any obvious controlling intellect. I'm sorry, but to me, that just sounds like you're giving up on the whole Problem of Evil, just assuming that there must be a satisfying answer even though you can't think of it. I could never be satisfied with that. That's pretty much what I'm saying too. I just find it far more suspicious than you do that these gods are so much in the image of their worshippers.There exists an interesting piece of research on this topic. Here's a bit from one of my old posts;

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Religious believers tend to think that God's beliefs are uncannily similar to their own beliefs. Here's an extract from the excellent Not Exactly Rocket Science blog;

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Psychological studies have found that people are always a tad egocentric when considering other people's mindsets. They use their own beliefs as a starting point, which colours their final conclusions. {Nicholas} Epley found that the same process happens, and then some, when people try and divine the mind of God. Their opinions on God's attitudes on important social issues closely mirror their own beliefs. If their own attitudes change, so do their perceptions of what God thinks. They even use the same parts of their brain when considering God's will and their own opinions.

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This leaves God looking suspiciously like an internet sockpuppet, that just agrees with whatever the believer thinks. The really damning thing is that by manipulating the test subjects in order to change their opinions (by exposing them to strong or weak arguments for an issue), Epley found that "God's" opinion appeared to shift as well. Essentially, if a believer asks "What would Jesus do?" they are really asking "What would I do?".

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Original paper here;

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Just a moment...

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Discussion here;

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It's well worth a look, not least becasue it may help to explain why Christians seem to worship all these different gods. Absolutely.Although I can't help but feel that if the number one head honcho of the universe really did send us a message, that it would be reasonable to expect it to be more useful and reliable and less ignorant and contradictory than the Bible. If the Bible were truly divine, there is a way in which I feel that we ought to be able to read it as the fundies do. Of course reality gets in the way of that, but I just can't imagine why God would obfuscate instead of giving us something truly authoritative. This leaves you in a bit of a pickle, doesn't it? If the If the NT is accurate and Jesus is divine, then you have your moral filter, through which to interpret the OT.On the other hand, if the NT is merely a human document and the claims of a divine Son of God are bogus, your moral filter is broken.You seem to be left in a position where you must assume the truth of the NT or your analysis just falls apart. And for that you have my profound respect. I both agree and disagree with this. People have done that, but plenty of the nastiness in the OT is precisely as it was intended to be. The authors did not give instructions on killing unruly children because they wanted people to love each other. They wrote that because they wanted people to kill unruly children. they thought that was the right thing to do. You can accuse modern Christians who might support that notion (and there exists a tiny minority who might) of being cruel monsters, but you can't accuse them of taking the instruction out of context. They're viewing exactly in context. You are the one who is taking it out of context, by insisting that we interpret the OT through the NT. I think that is incredibly naive. Jesus articulated next to nothing about women's rights. If he had, he might have changed the world for the better. Instead he was more or less silent on the subject. Virginia Wolfe he ain't. And Paul is an outright misogynist bastard. In my opinion, this is one of the greatest failings of the NT and one of the surest ways to see that the morality of the NT is not divine, but merely of its time and culture. When I last checked, there were hundreds of different Christian churches, each with their own idiosyncratic ideas about what God wants. I'd say that there are a great many competing Gods out there. That is a fine notion, but when you take a close look at it, it tells us that the religious book we choose or the God we follow doesn't really matter at all. All that matters is being good. That's all well and good, but it leaves the idea of laying claim to any particular faith looking somewhat pointless.Perhaps you're not a Christian after all. Perhaps you're a Baha'i. Mutate and Survive

Hi GDR,I know that you're involved in a lot of discussions right now, so we may as well leave this one here. After all, we've come to the point where your argument rests upon the truth of the resurrection, something that is well outside of the scope of your topic here. In truth, I've been a long way off topic throughout. Thanks for an interesting discussion though. I'll just leave you with this; How's that guidance thing working out?Mutate and Survive

Hi GDR,I went a long way off topic with my last messages, but it has belatedly occurred to me to ask this; do Christians worship the same God as Jews? As Muslims? Do all three Abrahamic faiths worship the same God?Of course I think that this question is as unanswerable as the first, but I think it is worth asking. Just a thought.Mutate and Survive

Hi jar,I agree, but I suspect that GDR will feel differently about it. I think that this question might prove a useful exercise though. If the three faiths don't worship the same God, I can't see how the disparate Christian faiths can be said to worship the same God.Mutate and Survive

Then I think you have your answer. If we regard the three Abrahamic faiths (or as a neo-pagan friend of mine calls them the "Three poison shoots from one poison root") as worshipping the same God, then all Christians worship the same God. If we were to say that the three worship different gods, then I think that we would be forced to conclude that the various Christian sects also worship different gods.Of course, as an atheist, I still maintain that each individual worshipper has their own personal god concept. Yeah, it would seem that way. Or at least, I agree that it should seem that way. In practice though, it doesn't work. There are plenty of nasty bits that are common to all three faiths, mostly (as IamJoseph never tires of pointing out) because the Christian and Muslim faiths are so heavily cribbed from Judaism. The misogyny is there in all three. The tolerance of slavery is there in all three. So is the threat of divine wrath. I think that if you look, you'll find that there are many abhorrent tales and attitudes that are common to all three faiths.I agree that your method seems reasonable, but in practice I think that it fails badly.Mutate and Survive

Hi GDR, Dontcha just hate when that happens? Still, I think that's one of the hallmarks of a truly interesting discussion. A little ambiguity makes things more interesting. I understand where you're coming from and I think that this approach to religion is certainly one of the best. I just think that it leaves you with unanswered problems.In theory, your round table of faiths sounds like a great idea, but in practise, most Abrahamic denominations claim exclusive truth, which makes it little more than an empty talking shop. There is also the fact that acrimonious schisms bloody conflicts have erupted between these faiths. Rather than agreeing on common grounds it seems to me that religion is more likely to divide people as to reconcile them.Then there is the logical side of things. You can go through the holy texts all you like. You can draw out all the nice bits you like. None of that is valid evidence of a good god. As I have said before, you are pre-defining God as "good" and then searching for the texts that match your definition of "good". It's a meaningless exercise. You could do the same with the writings of Epicurus, or Plato. It has nothing to do with the divine, only with a set of texts and your personal morality. I agree. Iano's dominionist view of the divine is eerily similar to that of an al-Qaeda terrorist. But what this goes to show is just how bad an idea it is trying to derive one's morality from the Bible.You look at the Bible and get an uplifting moral message that we can both agree is pretty good. Iano looks at the same text and comes out with... what he comes out with. Neither of you is truly taking their morality form the text. You are taking your own moral visions and linking them to the text where you can.You only recognise the kindness, mercy and love that you see in the Bible because they were already part of you. You didn't need the Bible to teach you goodness. You already had it in you, that's how you are able to recognise it when you see the good bits in the Bible. Similarly, Iano didn't become the way he is simply because the Bible told him to be like that. He probably underwent a similar process, where he searched the texts for little nuggets of nastiness that suited his demeanour.I don't think that you're way of reading the text lets you get a better view of the mind of God. I think that it only lets you get a view of your own mind. However, I don't think that's a bad thing. I think it's a strength. By embracing a personal morality that does not have any connection to gods or holy texts, you are cutting out the middleman, freeing yourself from the outdated Bronze Age mentality espoused by Iano and some of the Bible authors. If it isn't necessary to look at the bad bits, then it is no more necessary to look at the good bits. If it is invalid for me to cherry pick the nasty bits and thus conclude that the three faiths are evil, it is equally invalid for you to cherry pick the nice bits and conclude that they are good. Actually, I think that the Bible can be read literally. You seem to be falling into the trap of thinking that if a literal reading proves to false (Eg. a flat Earth or a six day creation) then the passage must not be read literally. This is wrong.It is perfectly possible that the author of a passage intended that passage to be read 100% literally, but it just happens to be wrong. Looking at Genesis 1, I tend to think that it was intended to be read literally, at least in part. It must have been intended to have a symbolic content, but that does not mean that a literal reading wasn't there. Gen 1 is wrong, quite horribly wrong about everything, but that doesn't mean that its author didn't intent it to be literal. Well yeah. Those sound like sufficient reasons to write a literal-intent religious text to me. Aren't you doing the same? "The Bible" tells us..." How do you know that Jesus is the word of God? The Bible told you. How do you know that he is good? The Bible told you.You are doing the same thing as the fundies, just in a less extreme and more flexible version. But this is the word of an all-knowing benevolent god! It shouldn't need improving upon. Your observation is far more in line with a tradition of human attempts to describe something that simply isn't there.Mutate and Survive

Yes, I agree. But when we take a look at reality, that is not what we see. We do not see religions converging upon a central truth, except where science has forced them to withdraw from various claims (cosmology, origins of life and so forth).Instead we see religions diverging over time. This is more consistent with a non-divine explanation. When tested against reality your idea seems to fail. I regard that as strong evidence that you are wrong. But how did you know which bits of the Bible were the good bits and which the bad? It can't be from the Bible, or else you would think slavery good and women's rights bad.I maintain that you already had the moral instincts. You only associate them with God because your religious conversion (an attempt at self-improvement on your part) occurred at the same time as your moral development (another concious attempt at self-improvement. It does not mean that there is a direct causal relationship, only a loose association. I don't think it is an issue. You can only assert that God is the source of morality. You can offer no evidence. I'm sorry, but it just sounds like more rationalising. Trying to view the Jewish scriptures through a Christian lens is a textbook example of cherry picking, since it was not written for Christians. The reason that your "truth" is so nebulous is precisely because you are cherry picking.I cannot fathom why an intelligent god would chose to work by encouraging his followers into this kind of vague nebulous rationalisation. That doesn't sound to me like God is trying to encourage us to use reason, it sounds more like he is trying to persuade us to abandon it.Mutate and Survive

True, but from their emergence, each of these faiths splintered into a multitude of separate sects. How many have formally re-united? None that I know of. Today there are a bewildering number of different flavours of Abrahamic religion, all with their own take on the faith. Many are by no means as liberal with their scriptures as you are. I think you are putting too rosy a sheen on this one. I think you are projecting. The OT supports slavery and the NT tolerates it. Neither condemn it. This, to my mind, rules out both as the voice of any benevolent being. The same goes for women's rights, which, despite any positive sound-bites you might be able to quote, are never clearly articulated in scripture. I find it unthinkable that a divine being could send us his message of love and allow this to go unmentioned, thus condemning half the world's population to continued oppression.You have to admit, for a timeless message of love and harmony, these two issues stand out as quite major omissions. So the Bible fails as a moral guide. It fails in practical terms (it failed to teach Iano a damn thing) and it fails in theory as well, since you can't reasonably pin our morality on God.The only things hanging your Christianity together seem to be the resurrection and the OT prophecies that are said to predict Jesus. As axiomatic principles go, these two are a big ask. Also well outside the scope of this thread. I strongly disagree with this. By telling us the truth in a clear and rational way, God would in fact be giving us a better choice. It would be an informed choice and thus a mature choice. As things stand (according to your model), he has chosen to communicate his message via an absurdly unclear medium. This has lead to doubt, schism, factionalism, and war. By choosing this deliberately obscure means of communication, God has transformed the choice he would have us make into a totally irrational one, founded upon flimsy evidence and bad logic. I don't think I could ever believe that a good god would behave in this petty way. Certainly, if there is such a thing as Hell, he owes us the chance to make an informed adult choice. In denying us this, I think your god is doing a great injustice.If God were to send us a clear message it might make choosing God a bit of a no-brainer, but it would not take away our choice. In fact, it would be the only way of making it an meaningful choice.Mutate and Survive

Only a third? Lucky man. Well absolutely. In my opinion, that's because theology is nothing more than cobbled together moral philosophy and literary criticism, none of which can ever be absolutely authoritative.By contrast, if there were real gods, there would be no reason why theology need be so nebulous. Theology is vague because it is the study of things that aren't real. The stakes are high though. If a god is going to place my immortal soul in the balance, dependent on my adhering to a set of rules, it seems only fair for him to tell me what those rules are, clearly and without obfuscation. By analogy, I am expected to obey the laws of the land. If I fail to do this, I am punished. But the point is that those laws are available to me in a clear and understandable form. The laws of God are hidden amongst piles of dross, cunningly disguised as the deluded opinions of long deceased men. If If a nation were to present its laws in such a way, no-one would know which they were expected to keep and which they were not. It would be a ridiculous situation and yet I think it is a close match for what you are describing. Except that if our children disappoint us, we don't sentence them to eternal torture. That would seem a bit harsh. Not very parental. Then why are there so many Christians who place faith over deeds? It can't be that clear. And there are also many Christians who act like demented bullies, so God's will seems to have passed them by as well. On balance, I think He could have made it clearer. I took a look. I wasn't very impressed. He spend most of the first minute equivocating over the question. Then he shamelessly cherry picks the OT, skipping right over its hypocrisy. Then he further equivocates over the "slavery of sin" (what rubbish!). He doesn't even mention sexism at all. The only point he makes is the bit about declaring a slave to be a "Christian brother". I think that this fails any moral test. Person-hood is not dependant upon being a Christian. Paul should be articulating the universal person-hood of all humanity, Christian or not. He should be clearly condemning all slavery, not just making vague noises about it. He should condemn the ill treatment of the slave on the basis that slavery is absolutely wrong in all cases, not for any other reason. His failure to express clear moral principles on this issue totally undermines any respect that I might have for him as a moral guide. He is not revealing some timeless moral standard he is merely a man of his time. And a nasty and brutish time it was. I would love to think so, I have always liked Hitchens. Sadly, the outlook apparently is not good. I agree that he's a better writer than Dawkins, but I still like reading Dawkins, as his views correspond very closely to mine. McGrath on the other hand annoyed me so much that I would have thrown his book across the room if I hadn't been reading it in a PDF. Even then I was tempted to take my frustration out on my monitor. Mutate and Survive

I notice that you had to redefine the meaning of the word "choice" to reach this spurious conclusion. No, he would be creating an informed choice. Simply having a very easy choice does not mean that one has no choice.If anything removes the element of choice it is the threat of eternal torture. That might be more reasonable, provided that the conditions of that choice were made freely and clearly available to all. Failure to provide such information undermines the validity of the exchange.Mutate and Survive

Nonsense. It is still a choice, just a more obvious choice. There is no element of loss of free will here. Only a clearer choice. I fail to see how an unclear choice is any better. That's the best simile you have to offer? With the message being hidden so thoroughly, your god is more akin to an unseen sniper. I fail to see how this makes it any better when he pulls the trigger. I think I'd rather take the more honest approach of a gun in my face.By the way, I have actually had a gun pointed in my face and I chose not to do as I was told. So apparently I did have a choice. The only way that this choice can be made to appear balanced is by obfuscating all the details. That is not a balanced choice, it is a con job. So he hides the truth from us in a deliberate attempt to catch us out. That is pretty sick stuff. If that is true it makes the Bible completely unimportant. And if they were given a genuinely clear description of the consequences of following that heart's desire, then they might be fairly held to account. But we are given no such description.Mutate and Survive