LISTEN, CHRISTIANS!

[Esquilax]

God has to keep his laws or he's not God. Are you confused when someone kills and eats an animal? No, because you are familiar with the concept of something having to die in order for you to live. The natural world and the spiritual world operate by the same concept, your spirit needs food also.

But god, being god, would also be able to change those laws. He's supposedly all powerful, right? If he can't change them, he's constricted by rules that surpass him in power and, in many ways, make him less capable than I; simple things that I can do, like forgiving without needing a blood sacrifice, are apparently impossible for god? And yet you'll still call him superior to me?

I was speaking mainly from a child's perspective, because eventually you'll grow into adulthood and become equal or surpass you parent in knowledge. With God on the other hand, you'll always remain infantile, you could never hope to be equal with an infinite being. Which is why I say by that very nature he IS your superior.

Stop conflating power with character; god may be more powerful, but his character as revealed in the bible is far less mature than my own. You want to talk about infantile? Your god lashed out and killed Lot's wife because she didn't do exactly what he wanted down to the most minute detail.

As for your biological father, you feel that way because of how your father treated you personally, what has God done to you personally to reject him?

Um, he killed almost my entire species by drowning? He cursed me with mortality for the crimes of another that I could not possibly have averted or had a hand in? He arranged affairs so I would have to deal with you?

Hypothetically, of course. I know you like that word.

Authority is power, plain and simple.

Then I have no particular interest in the self serving nature of your game. You can't talk about free will and how god wants us to come to him by choice out of one side of your mouth, and then construct a hypothetical in which he's just going to force me to out of the other. You do remember the initial question, right? "If you knew god existed, would you unconditionally accept him as your god?" If free will is as big a figure as you guys make it out to be then "no" is a valid answer, but you keep responding to those answers by asserting something else that isn't present in the initial question, which is that god is going to force us to accept him. If that's what you think is going to happen then the answer, for everyone, is "yes," but that doesn't mean anything. You've essentially turned the question into meaningless pablum more rightly posed as "if you knew that god existed, and he forced you to accept him unconditionally with his power, would you accept him unconditionally?" It's completely circular.

You all tend to think that God was some psycho killer but forget he walked on the earth in human flesh...

... And menaced the moneylenders with a whip, while introducing the concept of eternal hell into christian theology. Human flesh houses a lot of psychos, Huggy, I don't know why you think "he walked in human flesh" somehow disqualifies him from being psychotic.

I wasn't comparing God to a criminal, I used a criminal as an example to show that you complying with his demands has nothing to with his moral character.

And your assertion is that one should comply with the demands of any being more powerful than you, regardless of the content of those demands or the character of the aggressor? Just knuckle under and accept it, every time?

Are you aware of how many social justice movements would have withered on the vine and died had people taken that approach? Do futile gestures in the name of justice so lack nobility to you?