Permanent omnipotence?

[Angrboda]

You're so intent on making God evil please prove it, since there is no other place to find out about God you will need to go to scripture and within them you will have to show where it says God is evil. If you can not do so then speculation is all you have, coming from you speculation means no more than .... well useless.

William Paley and many theologians would disagree. You would not be where you are without many additions, from Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas. I love the arrogance of conservative Protestantism, to believe they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and the bible, when both come to them by the handmaiden of tradition. Protestantism is such a stupid faith.

"Is the whole of the bible not the name of God? Surely God does not rest nestled inside this, that or another bunch of words. So is not the whole of the bible then in fact not the name of God? How does this or that corpus of the holy word not itself not be simply another nestling of words? Is not then the universe also a part of the true name of God? And yet there are also things of which, exist in the minds of men that do not exist in the world. Are these too, a further rippling outward of the necessity in naming God? And what of that which does not exist? Is its not existing also not a fact of God?"

- apo/rae/ras


"The continually progressive change to which the meaning of words is subject, the want of a universal language which renders translation necessary, the errors to which translations are again subject, the mistakes of copyists and printers, together with the possibility of willful alteration, are of themselves evidences that the human language, whether in speech or in print, cannot be the vehicle of the Word of God. The Word of God exists in something else."

- Thomas Paine


"The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ leveled to every understanding, and too plain to need explanation, saw in the mysticisms of Plato materials with which they might build up an artificial system, which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order and introduce it to profit, power and pre-eminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them: and for this obvious reason that nonsense can never be explained."

- Thomas Jefferson

Woven into the immense tapestry of Judaic story and lore, peopled as it is by vast branching histories of families, kings and nations and by the fierce dramas of war and passion and the thundering justice of God, there exists, as it were, one quaint and tender image whose great importance may easily be overlooked.

Two men, one young and the other old, are facing each other. The younger man is balancing himself on one leg. The other, whom we may picture wearing a modest skullcap, holds his right hand over his heart and halfway extends his left hand, palm down, toward the first man.

The older man is Hillel the Elder, greatest of the rabbinic patriarchs. The place is Jerusalem, sometime in the forty-year period between 30 BC and 10 AD - during the reign of the hated Herod the Great and his son Herod Antipas.

The story in question is from the Talmud and is given there in very few words:

A man approaches Hillel in a nervously defiant attitude. "I will embrace Judaism," he says, "on the condition that you can teach me the whole of the Torah while I am standing on one foot."

Straightaway, Hillel replies: "What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah. All the rest is commentary. Now, go and study."

(I believe this retelling is from Bart Ehrman, Satan incarnate to Christians of Godschild's ilk. Odd, Godschild's name has no apostrophy; apparently he is the product of multiple gods, a holy chimera, as it were.)