Do you think God is authoritarian?

[Thumpalumpacus]

[...] while knowing it could be higher than that.

Yeah, the Flood, orders to bash out the brains of non-Jewish babies ... his followers learned well, so we had the 30 Years' War, the conquest of the American tribes, and so on. "Thy will be done", indeed.

[FrustratedFool]

God gives commands and punishes the disobedient.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Is there a pool on when a "free will" argument pops up?

[The Grand Nudger]

Don't you all find it funny that a nonexistent being like God has a hold on so many people in this world, in a way like an authoritarian person?

I'd say that if you can't find the funny there would be nothing other than tragedy to it.  It's funny, for example, that we are falling away from those god beliefs even as we fall into authoritarian civil beliefs.  I suspect that people with authoritarian bents who may have once been amenable to an authoritarian god are just tired of waiting.  They want results.

[Nay_Sayer]

FSM is a mass of spaghetti that can fly. Xhe has no desire to be an authoritarian, Xhe only wants to be helpful, also a big fan of tacos

[Simon Moon]

Do you think God is more like an authoritarian figure, and absolute monarchy, and a dictatorship; if in a subtle way?

People have pictured God in a lot of different ways. 

The God that Hitchens describes, and that people tend to argue against on this forum, is certainly a tyrant. As far as I can tell, this view of God comes from a literal reading of the Old Testament and some fire-and-brimstone type preachers.

The God of Plato, of Aristotle, of Augustine, of Dante, and many etc., is not at all a tyrant or authority figure.

Hitch, and the members of this forum aren't arguing against that god you describe in a vacuum. How is it our fault the literal reading of the OT is the god we are most often presented with by the theists we encounter?

And how is the NT god any better? Infinite punishment for finite thought crimes is not invented until the NT. To my way of thinking, any god that would create infinite punishment for finite crimes, is substantially worse than one that orders genocide or condones slavery. At least those things end.

Do you really think that if a Deist wants to debate the existence of a deist god, (or someone wants to debate the God of Plato, of Aristotle, of Augustine, of Dante, etc) we will debate the OT god?

I can't speak for all atheists, but I only debate with theists about the god they present to me. It is not up to me to define their god

I never define their god for them. If I am going to get into a discussion with the theist (they usually instigate it when they find out I am an atheist), the first question I ask, is for them to define the god they believe exists.

The fact is, though, the vast majority of gods presented to me, are versions of the Abrahamic god, which are usually the one described in the Bible. Which is, even if one were to cherry pick the hell out of the Biblical god, in order to make it a benevolent Biblical god, it is still an authoritarian. Benevolent authoritarianism, is still authoritarianism.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

FSM is a mass of spaghetti that can fly. Xhe has no desire to be an authoritarian, Xhe only wants to be helpful, also a big fan of tacos

Euphemism?

[Belacqua]

the first question I ask, is for them to define the god they believe exists.

This seems like a good idea. 

If someone says "Christians believe that God is XYZ," but then it turns out that many significant Christians haven't or don't believe that, then the statement is over-simple. 

So we should probably specify whose beliefs we're discussing.

[Nay_Sayer]

FSM is a mass of spaghetti that can fly. Xhe has no desire to be an authoritarian, Xhe only wants to be helpful, also a big fan of tacos

Euphemism?

Nope. FSM just loves a solid taco with pica de gallo.

[The Grand Nudger]

So we should probably specify whose beliefs we're discussing.

Theism is the belief in personal and intervening deities.  People who believe in that.  Seems pretty straightforward to me. One of the many arguments for anti-theism is that theistic beliefs are inherently authoritarian. We could go through the list in itemized ways, but that might be pointless. When we say that christians believe in an authoritarian god it won't matter which particular way they think god is an authoritarian. They bicker amongst themselves as to how god gets his authoritarian on, but there's no version of christianity or any other faith based on theistic gods that doesn't make explicit or implicit invocations of authoritarianism.

Might...just might... have something to do with gods real dad. That the defect is genetic.