BCiF,
How could I "give" your God anything? How is that possible? You say I give him a fantasy image. I disagree 100%. I simply see behind the story. As a writer I'm aware of the artform and artistry that produces such stories. And if the story is a fable or myth, you see that as denigration; as something bad or wrong.
Understand this.
I DON'T.
I love stories. If someone cannot tell that a story is fiction, then that goes to show how good the story is. The bible is a library of stores in a shared universe (like the MCU) that has done an amazing job at convincing people that every story is true and not the brain child of the writer. People even mistake the exaggeration given to kings as if that person has actually killed 10,000 people! It's amazing! The bible is amazing! You see how often I quote the bible. I might quote the bible more than you (not a dig at you). I probably quote the bible more than many if not most believers. And that's the thing. The more you study the bible... the more you stop reading it like a fairy tale and actually study it inside and out; the setting, the language, EVERYTHING... the more you do that the more you cannot help but to see behind the curtain.
The reason why some parts of the bible make no sense, in a physical sense, is because they weren't meant to be taken literally because the person who wrote it wasn't omniscient. If God is the one who told people what to write then it would stand to reason that an author wouldn't have been limited by his own personal knowledge or ideas. But this is not the case. It is always written from a human perspective. And its filled with human frailty and weakness.
That's why we look for gods; because we are weak and cannot accept it. The other reason we look for gods is because we are looking for our own origin story. When you get defensive you don't notice it but it is YOU who get's defensive; not God. You get defensive, seemingly, on God's behalf. God isn't going to do anything to me. I'm protected by the fact that I don't believe he exists. This is the same reason that you can be protected from a curse. And because I don't believe I can say this:
"If there is a God, I pray that God strikes me down as a witness to those who read this message, before the end of the week."
You would be scared to say this. Because in your mind there are angels and demons and all these entities that can do magic. But the bible never once explains magic or its origin. Why not? Because people were already superstitious before they created ANY of this, and out of that superstition came the belief in magic, which actually came BEFORE God.
Think about it...
The bible never explains the existence of magic and instead treats it as a given. God is simply the source of all that magic; the explanation for all things unexplained. The world was full of wonder and mysteries. There were so many things humans didn't know... and had yet to learn.
As we learned we replaced superstitions with scientific fact. Science took the place of magic because we understood that all these could be explained by laws that governed the universe and physical reality. It was like suddenly having sight for the first time. And we knew our previous state was naked or "naïve". We were innocent because we were IGNORANT. But you cannot have innocence simultaneously with knowledge.
Eventually, humans even tracked mutations backwards and could see that we evolved from lower life forms. The idea that we were created by a higher lifeform, with magic, was sadly debunked. And here is the logical question that NO BELIEVER has EVER been able to answer. This question is why I CANNOT believe in a god but will if you can answer this simple question. I will even become your student if you can answer this, fairly, to my satisfaction.
Here it is.
The Creation of Man is a logical paradox. For it assumes that man could only be created by a being greater and more powerful than himself. He couldn't exist otherwise. Man must have an origin and a beginning because there can be no life outside of what has been created. Man therefore says he was created by God.
But by this logic, God should have a God as well. For how did God come to exist if he wasn't created? God must have been created by a higher, more intelligent, and more powerful being. How else could he exist?
Do you see? It's all relative. God is to us what we are to the amoeba. To a single celled organism a human is a god. To many animals, humans would seem godlike because we have many abilities they could never have. We have the power to reshape the entire world and destroy the entire planet if we chose to. Our power is in our population and organization. When the author wrote about the tower of Babel it was a recognition of the feats that were possible when humans worked together; not because there was one almighty all powerful human sorcerer, but because hundreds and thousands of people could dream, engineer, construct, build, almost anything we could imagine.
Now we're imagining levitating vehicles, infinite power sources through quantum mechanics, nanomachines, and manipulating magnetic fields. We're on a completely different level of science than we were on just 50 years ago and that is a blip in the lifespan of our SPECIES. There is even research by a Dr. David Sinclair that could lead to practical applications of immortality (anti-aging).
But you compare that to what a mouse can do, or a frog, or even a monkey, and there's no comparison. We are gods in comparison.
And the same logic exists when we look at Haile Selassie. Did he have magic powers? No. Was he perfect? No. Was he omniscient or omnipresent? No. But do we not call him a god? Doing so is based on a better understanding of what a god actually is. The Hebrew word (and it goes deeper than just Hebrew) is EL. Other languages close by were AL or OL. But in the earliest form of language there were no vowels, only consonants. So its basically the same word and concept. "L". EL in Hebrew means POWER. You could have "elohim" as powers (plural) or elohim as 'power-ful' (plural intensive). So that the plurality describes the QUALITY of power, not its quantity.
It is true that we don't come from nothing. We come from power. Scientists will tell you that we came from the sun. Life forms come from stars. Stars are spheres of energy that are nuclear reactors that create planets. I love the bible but I also love science because science tells us the rest of the story. The bible was never a science book because the authors didn't know science. Science was "magic" to them.
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