I poise a question.

[FiniteImmortal]

There may be someone who had a dream that there was a god of hurricanes of Jupiter. Whether there is or isn't, has no bearing on me and is wholly irelevant to me or our lives here on earth.

I completely agree. Although I also extend that view to include volcano gods.


There are actually an endless list of cartoon gods, golf course gods, and reality-show gods I find particularly boring, so i omitted them from this discussion. Motorcycle gods, and a few others i find more interesting, but alas, they don't make the cut for real God candidacy at this time. So far, only one seems logical.

I have explored panthiesm, and it fails to me in that, a real God must be infinite in nature (in order to be God)

Why?


Because, If god exists in the universe, but dwells in another dimension (which physics describes 11 or so dimensions according to sting theory, if i remember correctly) and is timeless, ie., claims to know the beginning from and the end, and has always existed, that by definition is an infinite being. Physics also accounts for things that exist with no physical mass, such as photons, which move at the speed of light, which from their perspective (if they had one) would be of infinite time. To be omni-present and all-knowing, infinity would be an obvious prerequisite.

and so a an infinite being swallows up an finite number of gods. If there are an infinite amount of Gods, thats the same as an infinite God.

Why?


Again, an infinite God encompasses all the God-needs of the universe, there need not be any other applications. The position has been filled.

I don't see how the Big Bang is any different or less supernatural of a beginning that God speaking matter and time into existence.

It's the same difference that separates Niels Bohr and Gandalf the Grey


While I admire Niels Bohr's contributions to humanity, he only described the mechanical process of what we observe. He didn't actually do it. Gandalf, even in his younger years couldn't have pulled it off, I'm talking about the cool Gandalf from the book, not Peter Jackson's abortion.

About imagining a God who is wholly evil, how does that work? If there really was a God that is behind all this that is wholly evil, would the world look the way it does? How would you define love? It slipped by the evil God while he was tying his shoes?

How about this: The Almighty One created the universe and all life within to be His personal playground, filled with a self replenishing supply of potential victims to torture, mutilate and generally fuck with. He created us in His own image, that we might emulate His nature and inflict His abominable will upon each other. He gave us rules that we might break them. He gave us guilt that we might torture ourselves and He made us love so that we feel loss all the more. Diseases were created to plague us. He then created religions and set them against each another, all so that we might kill, maim, torture, persecute and oppress one another, while dedicating our lives to the worship of the Great Infernal One; billions of souls, crying out in a sycophantic exaltation of a God that doesn't love you and a world that doesn't care.

Now tell how that differs from reality.


While even on my most trying days, my view of the world isn't quite that dismal, the world does seem to frequently make me wonder how much further we can veer of track before our wagon goes sailing off the sidewalk. Yes, we as humans are nasty turds. We only can declare ourselves as nasty turds because we can imagine what it should have been. We always compare our situations to the unspoken moral law that exists, and has always existed within us. But, we're not supposed to admit that, because it brings in a host of complicated ramifications. We know innately when we do a dirty thing to someone. Guilt is an inseparable thing hardwired into us to remind us we are falling short of what we innately know to have been true and right. If we think divorcing ourselves from guilt will ease our troubled minds, it won't work. The world doesn't go away when we close our eyes. When we start deleting parts of the societal operating system, the thing will crash. And when things crash hard in this modern age, the Astrodome post- Katrina would look like a nice vacation getaway. When removing a fence, it is a good idea to find out why it was put there in the first place. We are blindly following in our poor ole Roman ancestor's footsteps towards an utter failure of epic magnitude.
Glad to keep the discussion light.