(Today at 5:51 am)Deesse23 Wrote:

(Yesterday at 7:31 pm)Jal Wrote: I've never been asked to give a formal definition. Let me give it a whirl:

Matter is a piece of visible reality describable in terms of volume, density, mass, shape, size, and location.

Mass = Density * Volume. One of the three can not be a separate property.
Shape and size define volume, making volume the second of your properties that cant actually be a separate one.

You gave 6 properties of matter of which 2 cant be a property. Thats a failure rate of 1/3, within your own silly world.

'Visible'? Does that mean gases aren't matter? He's being silly again.

Boru

(Today at 5:57 am)Deesse23 Wrote:

(Yesterday at 7:49 pm)Jal Wrote: 5. God commanded the prophet Abraham to kill his own son Isaac. But why should Abraham disobey his conscience? When speaking to prophets, the divine Voice speaks at the level of 100% certainty.  Abraham, therefore, suddenly became 100% certain that killing his son was of the highest moral urgency and virtue. In a nutshell, God MODIFIED his conscience (temporarily).

If your god commanded you to kill your son, should you disobey your conscience, given the fact that the divine voice would speak at the level of 100% certainty?

You should never disobey your conscience.  Thought I was clear on that.

Fidelity to conscience means doing what is right to the best of your knowledge and ability.  That's the very definition of virtue.

(Today at 5:58 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote:

(Today at 5:51 am)Deesse23 Wrote: Mass = Density * Volume. One of the three can not be a separate property.
Shape and size define volume, making volume the second of your properties that cant actually be a separate one.

You gave 6 properties of matter of which 2 cant be a property. Thats a failure rate of 1/3, within your own silly world.

'Visible'? Does that mean gases aren't matter? He's being silly again.

Boru

All matter is visible. 

Assuming the necessary optics are in place. Obviously Yahweh's eyes are better equipped than ours.

Stop nitpicking. Obviously the term visible is nuanced. For example, is Africa visible to me? Well not right wow, where I am sitting, but I wouldn't really describe it as an "invisible continent". 

Cheap shots and nitpicking - is that really all you guys got?

(Today at 5:51 am)Deesse23 Wrote:

(Yesterday at 7:31 pm)Jal Wrote: I've never been asked to give a formal definition. Let me give it a whirl:

Matter is a piece of visible reality describable in terms of volume, density, mass, shape, size, and location.

Mass = Density * Volume. One of the three can not be a separate property.
Shape and size define volume, making volume the second of your properties that cant actually be a separate one.

You gave 6 properties of matter of which 2 cant be a property. Thats a failure rate of 1/3, within your own silly world.

Ok maybe I was a little redundant. I wasn't much concerned since noble debaters won't nitpick.

Size and shape are worth mentioning explicitly and redundantly because the traditional denial of these of God, exacerbated by the traditional insistence on divine infinitude, contributes to 2,000 years of theological idiocy.

(Yesterday at 10:29 pm)Jal Wrote:

(Yesterday at 8:19 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: b-mine 
All things are possible with god.  You really ought to spend more time with that thought right there.

So a fair, charitable reading of the Bible is to claim that Yahweh can make 2 + 2 = 5?

Just like 1+1+1=1.....yes! 

The whole point of mysteries and miracles is the impossibility.  It was taken as a demonstration of divinity.   In the fullest expression of this principle, and in contradiction to your new age take, there are no fundamental forces, there is no natural or theological reductionism.  There is only god, whole and indivisible, and it's all god magic. We live in a fallen and illusory world, where things seem to work ways that they do not as a consequence of their corruption....but one day, one bright morning, this vale of tears will be lifted, lol.

That this strikes your contemporary mind as stupid is to be expected - but that's the turd you're polishing. That's the pig that, even in your estimation, needs a bit of lipstick.

(Yesterday at 9:29 pm)arundharma Wrote: I was a follower of God but during my life certain events led me in hating God and then Atheists preached arguments to convince there is no God.  

Like what?

(Today at 7:47 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote:

(Yesterday at 10:29 pm)Jal Wrote: So a fair, charitable reading of the Bible is to claim that Yahweh can make 2 + 2 = 5?

Just like 1+1+1=1.....yes! 

The whole point of mysteries and miracles is the impossibility.  It was taken as a demonstration of divinity.   In the fullest expression of this principle, and in contradiction to your new age take, there are no fundamental forces, there is no natural or theological reductionism.  There is only god, whole and indivisible, and it's all god magic.  We live in a fallen and illusory world, where things seem to work ways that they do not as a consequence of their corruption....but one day, one bright morning, this vale of tears will be lifted, lol.

That this strikes your contemporary mind as stupid is to be expected - but that's the turd you're polishing.  That's the pig that, even in your estimation, needs a bit of lipstick.

You seem to be rambling.

Case in point - but it remains true that in the understanding of divinity that christianity arose from, god is a reality maker, not a reality taker. 2+2 or any other function is whatever god says it is, when god says so. Subject to suspension, revocation, and revision at will.

TL;DR:
Yahweh's earliest historical footprint (Egyptian Shasu-land inscriptions, the Kenite/Midianite hypothesis, the Kuntillet Ajrud texts) shows a regional storm/warrior god who gradually absorbed El's titles and council over ~1000 years, then only became explicitly singular/universal during the Babylonian exile (Second Isaiah, 6th century BCE) centuries after the earliest sources. Elephantine's own Yahwistic colony was still naming other divine figures alongside Yahu as late as the 5th century BCE. None of this trajectory looks anything like "first piece of matter to awaken unto sentience" The earliest layers have him marching from Seir with storm and earthquake, not slowly assembling galaxies from unawakened matter. Your panpsychist Yahweh isn't a hidden truth beneath the ancient sources. It's a modern concept retrofitted onto a deity whose actual documented history was going somewhere else entirely.

Long Version
You're projecting a modern philosophical concept (panpsychism) onto an ancient deity while ignoring the evidence for where Yahweh actually comes from. Yahweh wasn't conceived as an abstract first piece of matter. He began as a localized storm/warrior god in the southern desert who gradually absorbed the attributes of the West Semitic pantheon over a thousand-year period. If we look at the actual epigraphic, archaeological, and source-critical evidence, the historical footprint of Yahweh tells a very different story

Origins (c. 1400–1000 BCE)
Egyptian inscriptions from the reigns of Amenhotep III and Ramesses II name a "Shasu-land of yhw" in the southern desert near Seir, Edom, and Midian. The phonetic match to YHWH is widely accepted, though the lists name a place or people, not a documented cult. Biblical poetry remembers Yahweh marching from this same region, Seir, Edom, Teman, Paran (Deuteronomy 33:2; Judges 5:4–5; Habakkuk 3:3), and this convergence anchors the Kenite or Midianite hypothesis: that Yahweh originated among nomadic groups south of Canaan and entered Israel through contact with them, perhaps via Moses's Midianite father-in-law. The theory is old, widely held, and still argued over; the poems may equally be theophany language rather than migration memory, and a volcanic mountain-cult origin, sometimes suggested for the storm and earthquake imagery, is a step further than the evidence goes.

The biblical account of the name itself is split. Exodus 6:2–3 has the patriarchs worshipping El Shaddai, with Yahweh's name withheld until Moses at Sinai. Genesis, by contrast, has Abraham using the name Yahweh generations earlier. That contradiction is one of the classic seams source critics use to trace how the Pentateuch was stitched together from different traditions.

Early Israelite Religion (c. 1200–800 BCE)
Israelite religion took shape within the wider West Semitic world headed by the god El. Yahweh did not simply step into an existing Canaanite pantheon; the early poetry suggests two distinct figures merging, with Yahweh gradually assuming El's titles, council, and authority (a takeover more than a synonym). This merger shows up in Israel's own name, which like Ishma-el carries the El element, though naming conventions can outlast the beliefs that produced them, so this is corroborating rather than decisive.
The oldest poetic material (the Song of Deborah, the Song of the Sea) casts Yahweh as a divine warrior arriving from the south amid storm and earthquake. Whether that makes him originally a storm god in the mold of Baal, or a warrior figure who later picked up Baal's weather, is an open question in the field.

The Kuntillet Ajrud inscriptions (8th century BCE) bless people "by Yahweh of Samaria/Teman and his asherah." Asherah here may be the goddess herself, a cultic pole or symbol associated with her, or a fixed liturgical phrase that had outlived any living cult. The grammar allows all three, and the site looks more like a waystation on a trade route than a temple. What the inscriptions do show is Israelites invoking Yahweh alongside a feminine cultic element without apparent discomfort.

Behind all this sits a wider cosmology: Yahweh as head of a divine council of lesser beings, the "sons of God." That picture is what let the religion function as monolatry (Yahweh as Israel's god, without denying that other nations had their own) well before it hardened into monotheism.

Monolatry and the Divided Kingdom (c. 900–600 BCE)

For centuries, Israelite and Judahite religion is best described as monolatrous: Yahweh alone for Israel, other gods left to other nations. The Deuteronomistic history's constant complaints about Baal and Asherah worship are best read as evidence the practices were widespread and durable. A polemic repeated that often is describing the norm, not a lapse.

Centralization of worship became state policy under Josiah (c. 622 BCE), triggered by the discovery of a law scroll usually identified with an early form of Deuteronomy. That identification comes from the same Deuteronomistic writers who had every reason to promote a Jerusalem-only, Yahweh-alone program, so the scope of Josiah's actual reform is probably narrower than the text claims. The pressure toward centralization predates him regardless: Hezekiah's reign already shows anti-high-place measures, and the Assyrian crisis of the 8th century likely did as much to drive it as any king's initiative. It was a consolidation of royal and priestly power in Jerusalem as much as a theological program.

Exile and the Turn to Monotheism (587/586 BCE onward)

The Babylonian exile is where explicit monotheism enters the textual record, above all in Second Isaiah (Isaiah 40–55), which declares Yahweh not just Israel's god but the only god: the one directing Cyrus and the fate of every nation, including Babylon. That declaration built on rhetoric already present earlier ("who is like Yahweh?") and on prophets, Hosea, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, who had spent the preceding century attacking the legitimacy of other gods. The exile sharpened a gradient into an outright claim rather than flipping a switch. Some scholars also trace an influence from Persian Zoroastrianism, encountered by exiles in Babylon, on the era's more transcendent picture of God, though that remains a live argument rather than settled fact.

This theology took hold first among the priestly and prophetic circles who wrote and preserved it, which meant it could dominate the literature well before it dominated practice.

The Elephantine Evidence
The clearest proof of that gap comes from Elephantine, a Judean military colony in Egypt active from at least the 6th into the early 4th century BCE. Its Aramaic papyri describe a working Yahu temple with animal sacrifice, a practice Jerusalem's Deuteronomistic theology treated as illegitimate anywhere outside the capital. Legal and cultic texts from the colony name other divine figures alongside Yahu (one contribution list splits funds among YHW, Eshembethel, and Anathbethel; another mentions Anathyahu), though these appear inconsistently across documents rather than forming one fixed pantheon, and scholars disagree on whether they're separate gods, aspects of Yahu, or a small divine family. Many of these Bethel-associated names surface earlier in Syria and in the northern kingdom before its fall in 722 BCE, so Elephantine may be preserving an old northern Israelite pattern as much as demonstrating what Judeans generally believed.

Around 407 BCE, after rivals destroyed their temple, the colony petitioned Jerusalem and Samaria for help rebuilding it. The reply that survives raises no objection to a Yahweh temple existing outside Jerusalem, though it's also a short piece of administrative correspondence, not a theological ruling, and the rebuilding authorization seems to have dropped animal sacrifice, which reads as a compromise rather than a full endorsement. The community's silence on the Torah in its surviving papers shows they didn't mention it in these particular documents, not that they'd never encountered it.

What Elephantine does establish is that a functioning Yahwistic community in the late 5th century could run a temple, observe Passover, and still name multiple divine powers in its everyday legal and cultic life. Whether Judea itself looked the same at the same moment is a separate question that needs evidence from Judea, not Egypt.

Second Temple Period and Beyond
Exclusive Yahwistic monotheism became the normative theology of Judaism through the Persian and Hellenistic periods, particularly among priestly and scribal elites, but the resulting universe stayed crowded with angels, a divine adversary, personified Wisdom, and other semi-divine agents, so "monotheistic" never meant a heaven emptied down to God and humans. Samaritan Yahwism, later magical texts invoking multiple divine names, and continuing diaspora variation kept that plurality alive well past the return from exile.

This is the theology Rabbinic Judaism inherited, and in turn Christianity and Islam, both of which understand the God they worship as the God of Israel. "Allah" is simply the Arabic word for God, used by Arabic-speaking Christians too, not a separate name running parallel to "Yahweh."

By this period, pronouncing the divine name aloud had become taboo, and "Adonai" was substituted in speech. The Masoretes later attached Adonai's vowel points to the consonants YHWH as a cue to make that substitution, not as a record of pronunciation; medieval Christian scholars later read those borrowed vowels together with the original consonants and produced "Jehovah." The actual ancient pronunciation isn't fully recoverable, but "Yahweh" is the standard scholarly reconstruction, built from Greek transliterations, theophoric names, and Hebrew grammar, not a guess invented from nothing.

The hidden looks an awful lot like the invisible. From a practical standpoint, they're indistinguishable. But since the explanation for the invisible is more parsimonious, it is to be preferred.