(February 17, 2014 at 4:01 pm)Sword of Christ Wrote: He is described in human terms at some points but that's just a bit of artistic license.With very few exceptions, he is only ever described in human terms. I am aware that the descriptions of body parts are not always meant to be literal (in some instances it cannot be ruled out that the writers intended this) but gods are nearly always depicted as humans on an imaginary power trip. The Biblical god is no different. In the OT he seems a lot like the kind of daydream a bullied kid would have, where he becomes an unstoppable ass-kicking machine who lays a savage beat-down on anyone who stands in his way (as long as they don't have iron chariots, anyway).
In the NT he's more grown up, using his aWesomE DeBate SkillZ to verbally slap down his opponents, occasionally putting on a display of God Powah to remind them that just because he's showing some restraint doesn't mean he can't lay down a vicious bitchslap if he wanted. His opposers only get the upper hand because he arranges it, and in the end he laughs off their best effort and leaves them with the reminder that, like the Terminator, he'll be back.
He's the ultimate revenge fantasy in both original and updated forms. The revenge fantasy remains a very popular genre in storytelling to this day, and lots of movies still use it to sell tickets. Why? Because it's such a basic human experience.
"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