Do Christians Worship Different Gods?

Hi GDR. I'm just popping back in after a hiatus, and it's a pleasure to read your posts again. To say that "it isn't necessary" is to say that you don't really need (and in fact, may be better off without) the bible as the foundation of your faith. That is, you seem to be saying that portions of the bible can and should be set aside in some sense.If you accept the notion that any individual's own "revelation" (or logical/emotional discernment, or intuition, or guesses) about God or other spiritual matters is both valid and sufficient for the individual, then you acknowledge that any sort of "absolute authority" in this matter (e.g. as represented in scripture) can be considered unnecessary and even undesirable.That strikes me as being the essential foundation on which we base our notion of religious freedom in the U.S. The important thing is to guarantee to the individual the right to form his/her own thoughts on these matters. The problem is not just the misguided goal of forming beliefs based on (selective) literal interpretations, but more importantly, the dangerous goal of requiring individuals to abdicate their own freedom of judgment about it -- to accept the authority of some specific scriptural interpretation without questioning it.It's not just that humans have an individual desire to belong to a like-thinking group; the more insidious problem is that fundamentalist groups, once established, have an intrinsic, self-serving need to enforce like-mindedness among their members, at the cost of individual freedom. Hence the severe punishments we've seen prescribed in scripture for apostasy and "heresy". The bible "tells us" a lot more besides that, obviously, and if you cite the specific passages that, in your view, say "Jesus was the word of God", you'll have to accept that others will draw conclusions from those same passages that are different from yours. I'm glad to see that you don't view this as a problem -- in fact, you seem to be both open and curious about the variety of interpretations that people come up with, which is a refreshing point of view.As for "replacing Jesus with the Bible," well, I supposed it's understandable that such confusion could arise... "Jesus is the word of God", "the bible is the word of God", so "Jesus is the bible / the bible is Jesus", etc. But seriously, I think I get your point -- I wonder how many Christians really do sense a personal relationship with their savior, as opposed to simply yielding to scriptural authority (or just attending and dropping money in the plate).I do wonder in what sense you can actually believe in "the God of the OT (Yahweh)." A lot of OT stuff has to be (re)interpreted pretty liberally, and a fair bit has to be put aside altogether, to reconcile that deity with the "Father figure" in the trinity, it seems to me. Of course, I think that just in the NT by itself, there's plenty of confusion about what sort of deity this is.

Anyone who holds an opinion like this: should check out the YouTube channel called "Evid3nc3", and in particular watch his two-part series on "The History of God" -- here's the first part:https://www.youtube.com/user/Evid3nc3#p/u/6/MlnnWbkMlbgYour point of view, GDR, seems to be only a stone's throw away from pursuing an objective, evidence-based assessment of how Abrahamic faith was introduced into the world, and what has happened to it since then. This in turn will provide a clearer, more substantive understanding of just how the gods of various consecutive epochs differ from each other, and how those differences are the product of cultural interactions and changes.It's the culture that designs, creates and tweaks the deity, not the other way around. That is, if we acknowledge the social and cultural progress we've made since the 1st and 2nd millennia BCE, it should be easy to identify the parts of the OT that should be left behind. In other words, scripture should be treated in the manner that we apply to other informational literature (including scientific discourse): as we spot inaccuracies, we should correct them, and as we recognize parts that are no longer applicable, we should discard them.Of course, this is something that is antithetical, and effectively contradictory, to the very concept of treating scripture as sacred.
(And of course, to my mind, it means the concept sacred scripture should be abandoned.) I don't quite understand why that should be particularly relevant, given that (a) this is simply another supernatural assertion by fallible human authors (who actually give inconsistent accounts for it), and (b) bodily resurrection is a theme shared by numerous other theistic treatments of various mortals (including the prophet Mohamed and Genghis Khan, among others). This seems obviously true, but since Christian conceptions of god are all without evidence and all fundamentally incoherent, the fact that there are so many different conceptions is both unsurprising and inconsequential, except to Christians. My other reply above addresses this. What matters in this issue is not so much the alleged substance of the differences in God's nature, but rather the ability of an individual to examine, assess, and choose among alternate conceptions (or to choose "none of the above").When a group insists on the authority of sacred scripture, this simply amounts to enforcing the authority of a specific interpretation of that scripture, which entails discouraging, suppressing, denying and even punishing individual free thought on the matter -- as well as any scientific discourse that might threaten the enforced interpretation.In contrast, anyone who recognizes the possible need to pursue alternate interpretations of scripture, and/or the possible fallibility of scripture in general, and/or the possible irrelevance of particular portions of scripture, and who acknowledges/supports an individual's right to judge these matters freely, has the ability to overcome the limitations of the past, to learn more, and to understand better.That dichotomy in the attitude toward scriptural authority is, I think, the root cause of the current culture war in the U.S. and elsewhere. In the U.S., we have the benefit of a Constitution, which has been, on the whole, successful for over 200 years, as a firm support for the latter view. But attacks from the fundamentalist groups are relentless, and must be opposed by continuous effort.