(April 16, 2013 at 3:20 am)Godschild Wrote: We know God exists in belief, we learn who He is from revelation, through His word or from Him.
The collection of texts we call "the Bible" did not descend from heaven on a ray of light to a soundtrack of angelic choirs. The original texts were written by men, ordinary human beings, just like you and me. Anyone who wanted to believe that their writings were taken by dictation from a god would have to take their word for it. Those texts were then copied by hand (no printing presses in those days)--by men. Then re-copied and re-re-copied, by men.[1] The texts were then assembled by men, redacted by men, and declared to be "scripture" by men (non-Christian rabbis in the case of the Hebrew Scriptures, and late Roman prelates under the aegis of corrupt Emperors in the case of the New Testament). Unless you're reading your scriptures in Aramaic and Koine Greek, then what you have is the result of translation, re-translation, and re-re-translation--by men. If you have ever incorporated information from pastors' sermons, Bible commentaries, stuff you were taught in Sunday School and the like into your "knowledge of who God is," then that's yet another layer of human beings between you and any original divine impetus that the original writers might have claimed to have received. In order to take the Bible as "the Word of God"[2] you have to place unlimited, unconditional trust in all those human beings, who are no more divine than you or I.
As for your other channel of information, direct knowledge "from Him," the problem here is that millions of people claim to have the same kind of direct, unquestionable knowledge, yet they disagree with you on important matters, either as believers in other deities, or in versions of your own that you consider Vile Heresy.
Quote:One of the most wonderful things is the orixa' [deities]...And we feel confused and grateful at the same time, with this process of having an orixa'...and I feel very much this force, this major force, a force I can't explain. It exists between Heaven and Earth...There are mysteries that cannot be explained, and one of them is the orixa'
---Zeze, a young African Brazilian woman, in the film Candomble': A Religion in Brazil with African Roots (1989), translated from the Portuguese[3]
Quote:"First, the polythesitic traditions are invariably experiential, although this is also true for aspects of the Religions of the Book: for example, Hasidism, Pentacostalism, and Sufism. People come to know the deities in polytheistic traditions directly, via such modes as mediumism and shamanism, modes to which we shall return in succeeding chapters. This is one of the reasons for a multiplicity of deities. People with differing personalities and experiences meet differing deities. Without an enforced monotheistic creed, people are open to an abundance of numinous possibilities. Faith is both meaningless and irrelevant. We know what we experience; it takes no leap of faith to assume the reality of deities we have directly encountered. ...Arising from encounters in rituals, visions, and so forth, our acceptance of the validity of the experienced deities is absolutely no different, except more certain, than knowledge gained from sensory experiences."[4]
As non-believers, we are faced with countless claims from people who "know" that various deities exist with absolute confidence. Even within the monotheistic traditions, the believers, for all their professions of complete certainty, cannot get their stories straight. Hasidic Judaism/Reform Judaism/Kabbalah/etc., Sunni Islam/Shia Islam/Wahhabi Islam/Sufi Islam/etc., and the tens of thousands of varieties of Christianity. All of these people are quite sure that their gods exist, that they "know" them, and (in the case of the monotheists), that everyone else is wrong.
If gods and goddesses (or some single god or goddess) are/is real and they/he/she/it communicated and/or communed with humans in some way, we would anticipate that as people got to know them better, that human beliefs would converge on the reality. If you look at the earliest maps of the world, especially from different cultures and times, you will see that they differ a lot. But, as surveying techniques improved and people systematically explored and mapped the world, on up to satellite imagery, world maps converged toward a single set of shapes for continents, placement of rivers, etc. World maps in the U.S., China, North Korea, Zaire, etc. will all look virtually identical nowadays, apart from place names being in different languages. This is because we all inhabit the same planet. As we got to "know" it better, our knowledge turned out to be knowledge of the same thing.
When it comes to deities on the other hand, we have a situation where "different people meet different deities," and the gods a person believe in tend to reflect that person's psychology, culture, and upbringing. "Deities," in other words, tend to "behave" as if they are formed in the minds of their believers, rather than existing independently.
NOTES:
1. With the potential for error that implies. For example, the story of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery is not found in the earliest manuscripts of the Gospel of John. Nor does the "long ending" which includes post-resurrection appearances of Jesus appear in the earliest manuscripts of the Gospel of Mark. Though biblical scribes usually tried their best to transcribe the texts accurately (when they weren't inserting interpolations or removing bits that were problematic for their theology), they were only human. "The Bible" is a human artifact.
2. Ironically, there is nothing in any Biblical text to indicate that there would ever be such a thing as "the Bible" (a "canon" composed of the Hebrew Scriptures plus a "New Testament"), much less any hint of which texts it would contain. The preamble to the Gospel of John says that Jesus, not any compilation of human texts is "the Word." Your Bible is an idol.
3. Cited in The Deities Are Many: A Polytheistic Theology by Jordan Paper, State University of New York Press, 2005, ix (ninth page before regular page numbering, brackets in original)
4. Ibid, pp 13-14.