Drich Wrote:The best any of can do is try and redefine your understanding of God to match what the bible actually says. But it seems some of you have built arguements around hating God in a very specific way, and seem afraid to address God as the bible describes Him.
I did, that's why I asked how you can think of God as good when he is a monster worse than every human monster ever conceived. Your response was an appeal to might, which shows me that my understanding of God is correct.
The reason why the Sunday School idea of Buddy Christ is the popular interpretation is obvious: it's easy to justify believing in a loving, caring personal God when it is all but entirely certain that God does not exist. That is something you can wish for, the perfect heavenly parent, the comfort to all your worldly sorrows. I bet, even the hardest of us atheists at one point or another wish they had some kind of magical helping hand to set bad things right. Wishful thinking is powerful and gripping, which is why the belief persists.
Of course, that is not what God is. God is hateful, spiteful, jealous, cruel, and as of the New Testament, emotionally manipulative. God made men with flaws, then made rules he knew they could not hold to, and spent centuries directly slaughtering them in response to behavior he knew was coming. He is a kid who set up a sandcastle just so he could enjoy knocking it down and hearing the screams of the dying. Then, at some point, he decides to 'forgive' us for being made flawed, and demands that we thank him for that.
No sane person would willingly worship a God like that, this is why the bulk of his followers have redefined him so that he has the best of human qualities. The God which really exists in the Bible would have been relegated to obscurity long ago because you can only worship that kind of being out of fear, and that fear can no longer hold because we know that natural disasters are not God's wrath. We know now that plagues are not his punishment. We know this because there is no pattern, no correlation. Worship of the true form of God is now reserved for hateful bigots, racists, misogynists and apocalyptic lunatics like you.
