(June 23, 2017 at 4:01 pm)FatAndFaithless Wrote: For what it's worth, any god that is as simplistic as "God is that which allows for existence rather than non-existence" is literally defining god into existence, and I don't even bother with those. It's not even cogent enough to have a position on - I could define god as the physical laws of the universe if I wanted.That's right. I think almost all of us, Christians and non-Christians alike, would define gods similarly: they are subjective agents, they are massively powerful, and perhaps they are immortal. Even there, I think a lot of us here would suspect that there might very well be some kind of intelligence so incomprehensibly vast that it would seem like a god, much like we are something like gods in relation to the bacteria within us.
It's when the gods start looking like bald monkeys and getting caught up in human drama that the bullshit alarm really has to start blaring.
I suspect that the definition "God is the Universe" is a bait and switch. Once people accept this "God" as being real, then the goalposts get moved to us having to stop masturbating in the shower to avoid hellfire, or having a duty to hit our wives, but with a stick no thicker than our thumbs.
