Dear Christians: What does your god actually do?

[ignoramus]

Because they need to reconcile their beliefs with reality. Otherwise they're just talking to themselves when praying. And they wouldn't want us to think they're crazy or anything, right.

[Vicki Q]

One of the problems with the Abrahamic god is that he doesn't do anything, despite what the Bible says he should be doing.

Perhaps of even greater concern is that he breaks all of the sacred covenants he makes with us anyway ...

<snip>

... 'Son of Man' would have come by then.

This is a very wide ranging post. Perhaps I could focus a reply on the nature of covenant (berith), from a non-literalist POV.

The basis of the covenant was the set of promises to the patriarchs (e.g. Genesis 12,15,17,22) which combined responsibility and blessing. Abraham's descendants would be the basis for a blessing to the world, but if (when! Dt 28-31) Israel failed, there would be exile. However after that exile there would be covenant renewal and forgiveness.

This concept of being a covenant people drove much of Jewish OT history. The idea was that they were responsible for undoing the problems caused by 'Adam'.

But rather like a repair truck sent to rescue a broken down car, that itself breaks down, Israel was unable to complete the task, as it suffered from the same problems that affected the rest of humanity. Jesus then sorts it out; as Israel's Messiah, he rescued Israel from it's plight. As Israel's representative, he completed Israel's covenant vocation, to rescue humanity. And as the truly human one, he re-established God's rule over the cosmos.

As such, the covenant was formally completed; indeed Paul writes a lot about God's covenant faithfulness. As well, he writes about the nature of the new covenant, as mentioned in the OT.

A lot of what you call 'covenant' is more of a description. I do think healing does take place, although I prefer to see it as a sight of the inauguration of God's Kingdom.


I hope this is helpful.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

[Bob Kelso]

This is what I believe, if any one thing is not true in the scriptures how am I to trust any other part. If the flood is false then how do I know that Christ isn't false. It has to be true from the beginning to the end, if any part is false then how do I determine what is real, or how could you. People who start reading the Bible and come to the conclusion that this part or that part isn't true, then they put doubt into the equation before they can find the truth through God, in other words a person stifles the Holy Spirit's conviction without being able to be lead to the truth. Why people do this is beyond me, it's like telling your math teacher he/she doesn't know what they are teaching simply because when the student first encounters the math they do not understand it so they reject it.
 You know I didn't say they were eating a king's meal, what I did do, was point out it was very possible for Noah and his family and the next generation or two to easily survive and not cause any extinction of any animal before the world could recover from the flood. I did this with only three animals and some vegetation, there are more possibilities to go with what I proposed, viable ones.

GC

So, since you still trust the bible, I take it you think that leprosy can be cured with the blood of a dead bird? 

There's a veritable plethora of things in the bible that are demonstrably not true.

[Aractus]

The basis of the covenant was the set of promises to the patriarchs (e.g. Genesis 12,15,17,22) which combined responsibility and blessing. Abraham's descendants would be the basis for a blessing to the world, but if (when! Dt 28-31) Israel failed, there would be exile. However after that exile there would be covenant renewal and forgiveness.

Whilst I agree that broadly speaking the covenants that God makes combine blessings and responsibilities, there are exceptions where a covenant is simply blessings with no strings attached, that is no responsibilities expected of the Israelites to receive the blessing. The Abrahamic Covenant is an unconditional covenant - God does not expect anything in return. It is given well before the instruction to keep the practise of circumcision, and that is merely a seal - a sign from God - not a condition for receiving the promised land. The Jews had kept this custom anyway, they didn't break it, so for what reason did they lose their eternal inheritance?

As such, the covenant was formally completed; indeed Paul writes a lot about God's covenant faithfulness. As well, he writes about the nature of the new covenant, as mentioned in the OT.

It was was it? So why does Jesus say "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled." Matt 5:17-18. You couldn't get a statement any stronger in favour of keeping the Law of Moses. It's not until the Jerusalem Council 20 years later that James decides that they won't require non-Jew Christians to keep the Law, but instructs that they will nevertheless abstain from meat that is strangled, meat containing blood, meat that was offered to idols, and sexual immorality. Paul goes to Syria and nearly immediately disobeys this order by telling the Corinthians specifically that the can eat meat that was offered to idols as well as meat that was strangled and contains blood - he explicitly says "eat whatever is sold at the markets and do not question it".

What Paul taught and what Jesus taught are two entirely different things.

[Infanta]

No, I don't understand.  Your description only works if ALL animals are vegetarian.  The likelyhood of a carnivore sticking to eating clean animals so as to not extinct a species is as likely as the flood itself.  This is all a moot point anyway as any species needs ~ 100 individuals minimum to be genetically viable.

It's all moot because a single tiger must eat a lot more than every one of the "clean animals" they brought aboard:

1. Tigers may consume up to 40 kg (88 pounds) of meat at one time.
   
   
2. It is estimated that every tiger consumes about 50 deer-sized animals each year, about one per week.
   

(Source: http://seaworld.org/animal-info/animal-i...ng-habits/)

Let's see... Ark floats for one year... that equals 100 "deer-sized animals" just to keep the tigers alive.

Then there's the lions... according to these guys, the male and female lions average 15 pounds and 11 pounds per day, respectively. Call it 26 pounds per day per pair, and we get about 9500 pounds of meat for the trip, or (according to Butcher-Packer online, an "mature buck" (male deer) averaging 165 pounds will produce 83.08 pounds of meat, so we'll just round that to 85 lbs) a need for the two lions to consume roughly 112 deer on the trip.

Oh yeah, did I mention? There are the panther, jaguar, leopard, snow leopard, cougars, cheetahs, lynxes, pumas... oh man. That's a lot of meat-eating going on in that 450 foot long, 75 foot wide boat! Even if you presume that all eight of the human passengers on that boat spent all of their time hauling giant nets full of fish and seaweed aboard the vessel, there's no way they could get enough in there -- If you've ever watched an episode of Deadliest Catch, you'll have some idea of what I mean, here. Those guys use powerboats, electric hoists, and modern equipment... and they're lucky to fill one hold of one small ship. They might manage to feed a few dozen of the carnivore species aboard, assuming they never got tired, never got sick or injured doing such a dangerous job out on the ocean in a directionless barge, and basically fished every waking hour of the day with gigantic nets that never snapped, tore, or frayed.

Want to start a running tally of the "obligate carnivores" they would have to feed on that trip? (Obligate is a tear meaning they must eat meat and only or mainly meat, for their survival.)

I'll start: owls, falcons, hawks, eagles, vultures, domestic cats, alligators, crocodiles, komodo dragons, wolverines, snakes, ... whew, this could take a while. I hope my point was made already.

There is no way the food supplies needed to support even a fraction of the species that would have to be aboard the Ark for one year, not even counting the requirements of poop removal, oxygen circulation, and physically keeping the animals apart from one another so they didn't change the program and decide to eat one of the two unicorns to make them exti... oh damn.

No silly, there weren't lions and tigers and panthers etc on the ark.  There was just one pair of the cat "kind" and they were nice little tabbies that lived on milk. They developed into all those other types of cats later - but NOT by evolution of course.  

[TheRocketSurgeon]

---

It's all moot because a single tiger must eat a lot more than every one of the "clean animals" they brought aboard:

1. Tigers may consume up to 40 kg (88 pounds) of meat at one time.
   
   
2. It is estimated that every tiger consumes about 50 deer-sized animals each year, about one per week.
   

(Source: http://seaworld.org/animal-info/animal-i...ng-habits/)

Let's see... Ark floats for one year... that equals 100 "deer-sized animals" just to keep the tigers alive.

Then there's the lions... according to these guys, the male and female lions average 15 pounds and 11 pounds per day, respectively. Call it 26 pounds per day per pair, and we get about 9500 pounds of meat for the trip, or (according to Butcher-Packer online, an "mature buck" (male deer) averaging 165 pounds will produce 83.08 pounds of meat, so we'll just round that to 85 lbs) a need for the two lions to consume roughly 112 deer on the trip.

Oh yeah, did I mention? There are the panther, jaguar, leopard, snow leopard, cougars, cheetahs, lynxes, pumas... oh man. That's a lot of meat-eating going on in that 450 foot long, 75 foot wide boat! Even if you presume that all eight of the human passengers on that boat spent all of their time hauling giant nets full of fish and seaweed aboard the vessel, there's no way they could get enough in there -- If you've ever watched an episode of Deadliest Catch, you'll have some idea of what I mean, here. Those guys use powerboats, electric hoists, and modern equipment... and they're lucky to fill one hold of one small ship. They might manage to feed a few dozen of the carnivore species aboard, assuming they never got tired, never got sick or injured doing such a dangerous job out on the ocean in a directionless barge, and basically fished every waking hour of the day with gigantic nets that never snapped, tore, or frayed.

Want to start a running tally of the "obligate carnivores" they would have to feed on that trip? (Obligate is a tear meaning they must eat meat and only or mainly meat, for their survival.)

I'll start: owls, falcons, hawks, eagles, vultures, domestic cats, alligators, crocodiles, komodo dragons, wolverines, snakes, ... whew, this could take a while. I hope my point was made already.

There is no way the food supplies needed to support even a fraction of the species that would have to be aboard the Ark for one year, not even counting the requirements of poop removal, oxygen circulation, and physically keeping the animals apart from one another so they didn't change the program and decide to eat one of the two unicorns to make them exti... oh damn.

---

No silly, there weren't lions and tigers and panthers etc on the ark.  There was just one pair of the cat "kind" and they were nice little tabbies that lived on milk. They developed into all those other types of cats later - but NOT by evolution of course.  

That's one of the arguments that gets me riled up faster than any other, since I'm a former biologist. The "created kinds" argument proposes a version of evolution a hundred times more radical than anything evolutionary biologists have suggested, even under Punctuated Equilibrium, with no visible (or defined) means of stopping such a rate of change in the here-and-now (in other words, at that rate, they should already look significantly different from when we first observed and described the species in writing, for example by Aristotle, if the process was going on as they claim). It's also patently nonsense, of course, and leaves out how the kangaroos and other marsupials got to/from Australia, and the New World monkeys got to/from the Americas.

But in re-reading the above, it occurred to me that they were on a leaky boat in the midst of The Mother of All Storms™, as the rainfall amounts needed to cover the mountains in that time period is 6" per minute for the full 40 days/nights (40days x 24hrs/day x 60mins/hr = 57600 minutes of rain... Mt. Everest = 29,029 feet x 12in/ft = 348,348in... 348,348in / 57600min = 6.0477 in/min). Yeah. Ever seen a 1"/hour rainfall? That's what Hurricane Katrina had. Super Typhoon Haiyan, the largest such storm ever seen, produced 200mph winds and a maximum rainfall of 3.9"/hour. Per hour, not per minute.

Assuming the boat wasn't destroyed by a rainfall literally 363 times more powerful than Hurrican Katrina's max rainfall, it would have been very damp from minute leaks in the pitch covering the timber, weeping/condensation effects, and respiration of all the animals in there. So tell me...

...how did they keep the grain from rotting/mildewing? If not grain, what did they feed the herbivores? We focus so much on the carnivores because of the meat=extinction thing, but I'm picturing the bins for storing barley, wheat, etc. Certain animals, like ruminants, could do okay on seaweed, but some of the higher-metabolism critters just won't survive without grains for a year. They'd have all been high on LSA from the ergot on the barley... before they died of starvation.

---

I once heard Kent Hovind argue that the mountains were lower, before the flood, and had been up-thrust to higher heights during the flood, to account for the Mt. Everest argument. Just for fun, I went and looked up the height of Mt. Ararat, on which they claim the Ark came to rest as the floodwaters began to recede (to where?), and it's 16,854 feet high.

So using the same equations above, I calculated the rainfall just to get the water above the height of Mt. Ararat:

16,854 ft x 12 in/ft = 202,248 inches high. 202,248 inches / 57,600 minutes = 3.51 inches of rain per minute.

That's 210.675 inches of rain per hour, or 54 times more powerful than Super Typhoon Haiyan.

[Godscreated]

This is what I believe, if any one thing is not true in the scriptures how am I to trust any other part. If the flood is false then how do I know that Christ isn't false. It has to be true from the beginning to the end, if any part is false then how do I determine what is real, or how could you. People who start reading the Bible and come to the conclusion that this part or that part isn't true, then they put doubt into the equation before they can find the truth through God, in other words a person stifles the Holy Spirit's conviction without being able to be lead to the truth. Why people do this is beyond me, it's like telling your math teacher he/she doesn't know what they are teaching simply because when the student first encounters the math they do not understand it so they reject it.
 You know I didn't say they were eating a king's meal, what I did do, was point out it was very possible for Noah and his family and the next generation or two to easily survive and not cause any extinction of any animal before the world could recover from the flood. I did this with only three animals and some vegetation, there are more possibilities to go with what I proposed, viable ones.

GC

So, since you still trust the bible, I take it you think that leprosy can be cured with the blood of a dead bird? 

There's a veritable plethora of things in the bible that are demonstrably not true.

 So you think you can prove God can't cure leprosy with the blood of a bird.

GC

[JesusHChrist]

 So you think you can prove God can't cure leprosy with the blood of a bird.

GC

So you think you can prove getting bitten by the right kind of genetically modified spider won't turn you into Spiderman?

So you think you can prove Xenu isn't imprisoned somewhere in the Pyrenees?

So you think you can prove Zeus didn't have sex with Leda?

So you think you can prove Mohamed didn't fly to Jerusalem and back in a single night, on his winged horse-thingy?

Through magic, all things are possible.

[Whateverist]

To the OP: Heal the blind, make small loans and aid in digestion?