(June 24, 2013 at 6:22 pm)Consilius Wrote: You said people serve God out of fear and not love.I said that if god is considered capable of wicked acts, then he must be served out of fear and not love. To serve him out of love for him, he must be defined as good and as incapable of wickedness. Thus, any act that would ordinarily be deemed wicked must be rationalized as a good act.
Quote:There is nothing negative in these claims.I didn't say there was. But none of them explicitly claim that he personifies good or love. As you note, he is a product of the writers of his time, and thus a powerful, angry, vengeful, warlike god is simply par for the course.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould