(May 3, 2015 at 4:51 am)robvalue Wrote: The atheist does not necessarily even discount the possibility of a god, just that the atheist does not yet believe that there is a god.
I will confess the theoretical possibility that a "non-discounting" atheist exists. Although this species is about as easy to detect as the Higgs boson.
(May 3, 2015 at 4:41 pm)Lek Wrote:(May 2, 2015 at 11:38 pm)Jenny A Wrote: No, the bible certainly does not paint god as a cream puff, more like a sadistic, homicidal, maniac...
The people that occupied these lands were very ugly. Did they bear any responsibility for their demise?
I suspect a failure to appreciate the many modes or aspects deity presents in. The world is ugly and there's the warlike, slaughterous deity implacable in fury. Yet there is also the lyrical deity resting quietly by the waterside, hymning the beauties of the sky and countryside. And even the remorseful deity who fears an uncertain future. Some religions have separate gods to display these aspects; the Abrahimic faiths combine them all into one. Or into a trinity. And so on. Only recently, with mass education and high tech, has it been where academic disciplines like science provide a framework for people to orient themselves with respect to the world.
