A practical definition for "God"

[robvalue]

Thanks very much for the comments everyone

Wyrd:

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Sure, I have no doubt that "God" and "leader" we're pretty much interchangeable at one point. If I remember right, the Christians got labelled atheists (a very different use of the word in that time) for not accepting Caeser as their God. I'm not too informed about who exactly the bible God may represent, but you may well be right there. It's something I should look into, it's interesting.

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Cantor: Hi there! Yeah, I agree

Salacious: Thanks very much, I appreciate it! Your commentary is spot on. I didn't know if I was going to get any responses here! I'm glad you're on my wavelength

Brewer:

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For sure. I meant the God idea starts off as an unnecessary assumption in its deistic form, or perhaps a generic active God. It then certainly does develop into fantasy, very deep delusions and randomly attributing normal events to magic. My comments are meant to be just an observation rather than a criticism; this is what the God belief amounts to. We all probably make unnecessary assumptions; those of us sceptically minded try to identify and remove them as much as possible.

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Lek:

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Hi my friend, good to talk to you. I hope you're OK? I was worried by what you said in the rapture thread. Are you really sitting around worrying about it happening? I'm very concerned for you if so

Thanks, the hike was brilliant and I appreciate the support! I'll be posting some pictures about it soon. I'm glad you agree with the cause!

Sure, I respect that the way you think about this subject is entirely different to me. But to an outside observer, Salacious has it right, you're choosing to accept a particular set of religious stories at face value where you would reject all other religious stories which have just as much verifiable evidence (none). I've spend a long time looking into the Jesus stories, and objectively it is almost certainly a fictional character. Possibly entirely fictional. At best it's loosely based on a real person. I can share some resources about this is you are interested.

Also, the gospel authors didn't see anything. They wrote the stories based entirely on hearsay, if they even meant what they wrote to be taken literally at all which is highly in question. They were going on rumours, just as you are. They are not eye witness accounts.

Even if you did see him do a bunch of "magic" stuff, to just believe everything else he said after that I call the "wow" fallacy. If you get to a point with someone that they have impressed you so much with what they have done that you'll believe whatever else they say, you've put yourself in the position of literally believing anything at all. That's very dangerous.

But I respect all of this probably doesn't mean much to you as your approach is entirely different and you're entitled to believe what you like.

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