Stephen Fry calls God an ‘evil, capricious, monstrous maniac’

Okay. Well, I choose to disagree with your view so I suppose further disagreements are pointless.
You will not alter my views nor I yours.

 

So now you are declaring that God does exist and that God does control everything that you do and say and think? Interesting....

 

Same with Stephen Fry and the original thread premise. In order to be a lunatic and monster Fry is acknowledging God's existence. Scratch an atheist and it looks like you get a disgruntled believer of God after all.

 

Yeppir. That reminds me of one of my favorite things about non-theists.... they like to accuse God of various things such as "God is a murderer" or "God is a lunatic" or "God is a monster".... while at the same time they seemingly are not taking into account the definition of the word "is" and by extension the word "be" ... is = be = exists. Such is the mind of the "non-theist".

 

Well, except those who are indifferent.

 

I never said I was an atheist.

- - - Updated - - -

Some people enjoy discussing hypothetical situations.

 

An unexpressed opinion does not mean that a person is 'indifferent'.... it simply means that he/she desires to reserve his/her opinion. To arbitrarily say that someone is indifferent is making a presumption.

 

Another was of expressing that same thing is to say "some people enjoy discussing fairy tales like a teapot floating in space or a flying spaghetti monster or an invisible pink panda". I am almost certain that you might have heard some of those fairy tales.

 

Each and everyone of any options or choices that can be summoned or acted upon have to take place exactly as it is already known. The participant can not change from the know paths.
Now each participant doesn't know exactly what one might do or choose, but they still have to follow the script exactly as known.

 

It was clear to me.

If god isn't omnipotent/omiscient in your view, end of discussion. All is not known or seen.
But if god is omni, then yes free will doesn't exist.
It is not a problem for me.

Absolutely. Probably since a teen. Wanting to. Had to before he was born.

- - - Updated - - -

I read about 1/2 and wasn't getting your intended point.
Yes, you are doing as god knows you should do. You're playing the role well.

 

This seems meaningless to me.

 

Name 1 thing you have done or will do that the omni all god didn't know. Tell me what you could do different so you didn't have to follow the known path or choice.
Per the belief, it is known to the exact moment you will cease on this earth and how it will come about. Nothing you will ever do or anyone else can do will ever change that moment or outcome.


Same with every other event in the world.

 

I would hope so but not to me.

I really try not to say what God is or what he does or doesn't do but if omnipotence means the end of free will then of course, I do not believe God to be omnipotent.

The whole long saga of the bible with the many admonitions and rules: Don't follow that God, do not lust after your neighbor's wife, kill your son, kill those people, etc. ...it's all pointless in a world where free will does not exist.
In a world without free will God would have no opposition to counter, no evil to battle, no rules to give to
misbehaving tribes-people. Think about it.

Seriously? Conditioned?

 

Of course it's impossible for me to tell you what God knows and doesn't know.

I'm not sure if I believe this or not but I'm also not sure the certainty of my death eliminates free will for me.

Then God has eliminated the need for God.
The need for humanity, really. It (an existence devoid of free will) seems pointless therefore I question the premise as pointless too.

 

You know, this god as portrayed in the old testament was too much like imperfect man, for me to accept the existence of something that had that sort of character, that nature. So after thinking about it for awhile, I decided that such a god is impossible, and that it could not exist. Then when I looked around me, I saw people doing the most evil acts, in the name of god, and therein was the answer. The god man wrote of doesn't exist, and man just pulled all of those images out of his ass, to justify his own evil, selfish needs and actions. That seems to be quite natural for man to do, and not only when it comes to god, but also to other things.

If I were to try to imagine what the creator of the universe would be like, it sure wouldn't be the images that come from the old testament. Instead, it would be something much more sophisticated, something that would exist outside of time, and therefore the brain, being in time and of time, could never imagine what this god would look like, its qualities, its character. So it couldn't be as the authors of the old testament imagined with their creative brains, that resembles an imperfect man, jealous, arrogant, spiteful, demanding its ego to be gratified by man worshipping him. That sounds more like a human king than the creator of the universe.

The truth of this is that if god does exist, man has no way of ever knowing a thing about it, and it certainly would not act as mere man does. It would have to be nonphysical, something similar to consciousness. Or of like the nothingness that lies in the vacuum of an atom, that particles manifest from, as from nothingness. It would have to be more powerful than the vaccum between the nucleus and electrons, which has been calculated to have more energy in a single space than all of the energy in stars for a billion light years in all directions. Since we cannot define what the vacuum is, other than a vacuum, how could we ever define what god is?

In so far as our perception of particular things being evil, horrible, as the example of organisms that crawl into the eyes of children and blind them, Or of the suffering that humans have to endure in life, we are looking at that from the human, self centered perspective. Perhaps from the perspective of god, this suffering doesn't amount to much at all, for it's a mere illusion, it isn't real, or, it could be that god is doing this to himself. For if the Universe is God, his essence is in all things, then he is doing this to himself.

But the atheists, the people who want to rail against the creator want a god like the bible portrays to exist, otherwise what would they rail against? LOL. If the each of us were god, that is, his spirit was in all things, then they would have to change their rants. They could then only blame god for doing all of this to himself, and not to them. And I don't think they would like that very much. They are vested in this insane biblical god, and they get pleasure from attacking such an image. And we wouldn't want to take away their pleasure, would we?

 

True, but it hardly seems appropriate to express an opinion on something yet claim to be indifferent about it at the same time. I doubt one who is honestly indifferent on this topic would spend as much time as you have on this thread.

Also true, and let's not forget, I'm not the one claiming someone is indifferent.

 

I tend to think that everything is god, the entirety of the universe and everything in it. It's neither good nor evil; it just is.

I think the latest theory that the universe had no beginning supports this notion.

- - - Updated - - -

Yeah, you get it.

 

As hypothetical a fairy tale as discussing or claiming to understand the existence and the nature of god. I get it.

 

Well thank you for that confirmation... on both points.

 

Amazing. Two admissions of the truth of my statements and two rationalizations presented in an attempt to cancel the admission of saying the statements were true.

 

There is a difference however. That difference is that Theists place a high level of confidence in their beliefs while the non-theists who make such professions as I described do so only as a means of mocking the Theists and ridiculing what the Theists believe. Such is the sauce of warfare. In this case it is spiritual warfare. As you being a non-theist it is not inappropriate for me to conclude that you don't have a belief in spirits so you play it off as though it were meaningless. Well, have you ever been truly introduced to the Book of Psalms? You might want to start reading it, so that you can be prepared for what is on the drawing board.

- - - Updated - - -

If you don't have it.... you will get it.

 

Your indifference is really showing.



- - - Updated - - -

I never said I was a non-theist.

 

Really? What does "indifference" look like.. I have never seen it before. Is it a particular color, size, material?

Your arguments portray you as one. You sure had me buffaloed if in fact you are not one. If you are not one then tell me who your Lord and Savior is?

 

Then you don't have the same god as the bible and most christians. Nothing wrong with that.

Yes, conditioned, or rather, born that way.

 

No, child abuse is different from orders to kill the kids inside a tribe of peoples who are sexually attacking your own teenagers and corrupting them into pagan promiscuity.
That is just one act of death required to eliminate the tribe and all the fatherless children which they might have at the time.