Stories about prayer

You would think an all powerful god would provide evidence that could not be mistaken for anything else. Everyone is left guessing what this god wants.

It leads to a very big argument against God.If *I* was all-powerful, and created tiny-beings and wanted to be involved in their life and help them:
-I would want to give them clear direction
-I would not want to confuse them or leave doubt that may possibly lead them down an incorrect path
-I would want them to have tools to correctly identify the reality I created around them
-I would NOT want to play some "tee-hee" game about keeping my existence a mystery to see who may and who may not "believe in" me. What does this even do other than feed the ego of a child-like being?Therefore, if *I* would do things better, and this makes God out to be a child and God is supposed to be "very good" and "cares about us," then:
1. God does not exist.
or
2. God exists, but is not all powerful - He helps us as much as He can, but is not capable of getting around these seemingly-childish games.
or
3. God exists, but is not "very good" - He is child-like (or possibly malevolent) and enjoys playing with us for one reason or another.It no longer leaves room for an "all powerful" being who "loves humans."

It might be an argument about some gods but I don't see how it is an argument about GOD.Consider the God found in Genesis 1. That God creates simply by an act of will, and creates once then moves on to the next creation. That God has no contact with any of the creation and looks on all of them equally and judges the work good.But that God is aloof and separate. It would not care what the creation thought.

I don't know who this "everyone" is who is "left guessing." The Bible really doesn't leave us in the dark at all, but if you want to know the answer to questions about Him you have to BELIEVE what it says. That's "what He wants" and He's very clear about that. You all are looking into your own minds and into worldly assumptions to find the answer to questions you can't find that way. I mean you, Stile, jar and others on this thread.

remind us of the construct again?

How is this not equivalent to a God that exists, but is not "very good" towards humans?
Which is possibility #3 I explained above.I think we agree, and we're just describing the same thing differently.
My phrasing may have been unclear, but point #3 is intended to include the situation you're describing above.

What you said was, "Critics will say that we believers would be reprobates without Him...whereas *they* would still do the right thing...." (Message 54). That seems to separate the critics from the believers. There really is though. There's you and the apologists that you follow and the others who follow the same apologists. If you really did have your own ideas as to what's real, you wouldn't all be parroting the same party line.

I wouldn't go patting myself on the back just yet. Unbelievers have a higher opinion of humanity-at-large because that is the future they believe in. They will claim that this is all that anyone has...believers included. I reject though cannot objectively prove my counter-position. This is what frustrates me to no end about jar. Though claiming to belong to a recognized Christian Church, he forever argues that humanity creates its own Gods....which makes a conversation with him regarding GOD rather difficult. Its all more Jewish than Episcopalian, in my mind... Look at Spinoza, for example. Spinozas ReligionSome snippets:

quote:

---

Lately, atheists have gone on a publishing offensive. Although wishing to give the impression that their highbrow books buck the trend, in reality, they preach to the converted. For casual and confident disbelief in religious faith is the dominant view at our major newspapers, national tv networks and radio stations, and certainly at our leading universities. However strong faith may be in the heartland, few and far between are the reporters and editors, correspondents and anchors and producers, professors and university administrators who take seriously the idea of a mysterious and commanding God, creator of the heavens and earth, who has formed human beings in His image and who demands justice, kindness, and humility from humanity.

​

Nevertheless, best-selling author Sam Harris in The End of Faith and Letters to a Christian Nation, distinguished Oxford University biologist Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion, and all-star journalist and irrepressible man-of-letters Christopher Hitchens in God Is Not Great are mad as hell about the persistence of belief in God, and they don’t want to take it anymore. Religion, for them, is the root of a great portion of the evil in the world. They decry faith as certainly false and clearly irrational, sustained today, as ever, by ignorance, obscurantism, credulity, cowardice, and, not least, the sinister skill with which crafty clerics exploit the all-too-human craving for the comforting illusion that the suffering and injustices of this world will be corrected in another. Our sophisticated and outspoken atheists, suffused with anti-theological ire, are, in short, faithful heirs of Voltaire’s call craser l’infme! to crush traditional religious belief.

---

And this is what I see. Atheists are getting ever more bold in using logic, reason, and reality to build an aggressive case against the rationality of belief.
Of course, it is easy to blame it all on a spiritual war, but I unabashedly do so, aware of the impossibility of proving that either. More:

quote:

---

Of course, there are secular Republicans and believing Democrats. But scratch the surface of the opinions of men and women of the left and you will find, more often than not, the conviction that though we are alas obliged to tolerate it, religion and particularly biblical faith is at its core intolerant and a menace to liberty and democracy.

​

Unfortunately, our neo-Voltaireans ill-serve toleration, liberty, and democracy. Nor do they advance the cause of knowledge. Their heavy reliance on scorn, mockery, and ridicule to defeat, once and for all, their self-proclaimed enemy contravenes the commitment to rational argument, grounded in observation and experience, in whose name they would consign religion to the dustbin of history. Moreover, our militant atheists distort or render invisible religious believers’ self-understanding.

---

I'm still reading...nore comments later.

We have a higher opinion of humanity because we're not encumbered by that nonsense about a "Fall". We're free to believe we can do better. In fact, other religions also have a higher opinion of humanity than you evangelical Christians. I know you'd rather quote apologists than actually think about the issues. A lot of people could stand to be more Jewish. I notice that your quote is about Spinoza and not from Spinoza. Why not let Spinoza speak for himself? Do you hear yourself? You're talking about logic, reason and reality as if it was a bad thing.

Well, that would be the billions of people who would never trust anything you say about the bible or anything else.Edited by Tanypteryx, : No reason given.

The just shall live by faith...not evidence. If you had a rich uncle, how do you know that people were not only being nice to him because he had money?

You're embellishing. Habakkuk does not rule out evidence.And remember the story of Thomas. Jesus offered evidence to the other disciples and then to Thomas.

Well it could be a God that simply does not select humans for special consideration,; one that sees ALL creation as good. The God in Genesis 1 saw all that was created as Very Good and so saw pond scum and humans and skunks and squezalls as equally good.As I said, some Gods can be eliminated but not all GODS.

Phat, Phat, Phat.Jesus was a Jew. Jesus was never a Christian.Not sure I've ever pointed that out to you but Jesus was born a Jew, circumcised as a Jew, educated as a Jew, preached to Jews and in the Synagogue, lived as a Jew and died a Jew convicted under Jewish Law.

Or not.