The existence of God

[emjay]

I'm sure you'll get to the point where you explain how a mind certainly isn't sense knowledge, or how a brain certainly isn't a device?  It would seem like those omissions could be important.  Now..Plato...well, he couldn't have known much about minds or brains, so, for him, an admission of genuine ignorance.  Howsabout us?

Meanwhile, the god that christians believe in was a man, that could be killed, and more broadly interacts all-the-time in the world.  A god they believe is and can be and has been detected.  That sounds idiotic to you and I, I suppose, but that is what they believe.  You're probably giving the pope too much credit too...it would be far more likely for the pope to try and make some failed example of all the pointers on all the devices pointing to gods.  That's actually his style, it plays well.  In fact, he's said exactly this about a great many subjects, a great many times.  The man is a vocal creationist, lol.  He's confident that the current scientific account of the origins of the universe and the evolution of life are confirmation of gods existence, and he isn't as shy as you are to plainly say as much, as a christian, espousing a very common christian belief.

Here is my favorite profundity-

God is not the answer to an intellectual curiosity or to a commitment of the will, but an experience of love, called to become a story of love, The mystery of God is never exhausted; it is as immense as his love.

Well shit, huh?  The man in the funny hat has spoken directly to each of these items, and all in just one proclamation.  So much for that bit of bullshit..and you had to drag poor old platos name through the mud to end up here.  A man who we can safely assume would not have appreciated the christians claims of appropriation over his thoughts.  The christians you appear to be angling for, and constantly insisting that atheists have misunderstood, are as thin on the ground as their silly god.

I certainly agree that that type of Christianity is, or seems to be, very thin on the ground... indeed I think I've only ever met two people that espouse it and they're both right here on this forum. I can confidently say that none of my family circle or Christians I know IRL, or indeed me when I was a Christian, have/had this sort of conception of God. To them, and to my past self, God would always be some sort of concrete, conscious, thinking entity, even if it was 'outside' of or beyond the universe.

Personally I find Neo and Bel's views on this to be quite interesting, and it doesn't make my blood boil like most 'mainstream' talk of Christianity does, but at the same time its interest for me lies in its abstractness, and that very abstractness makes it all but impossible to reconcile with the God described in the Bible. So though I think this classical concept of God, if I'm understanding it right, as some sort of abstract collection of Forms, is interesting, I think getting from that to the God described in the Bible, particularly the 'jealous' god of the OT, is too big a leap.