We Need More Iron Chariots

God can create the universe, but this little bit of technology is too much for him.

I've figured out how to make God stop punishing us with tornadoes and hurricanes and flooding. (Apparently, God can't just send a swarm of locusts to one person's apartment, he needs to take out an entire city.) It's right there in the Bible: iron chariots.

Judges 1:19

And the LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron.

So, if you want to make your house safe from acts of God, just park an iron chariot in the front lawn. God is powerless before them.

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God as Man is Absurd

god, omnipotence, omniscience, jesus, trinity, bible, christianity,

The humanity of Jesus, when combined with his supposedly also being god , was always a problem for me in my believing days. How can one be human in the truest sense of that word, and also be god? To be human is to have both a defined beginning and a defined ending. To be human is to be nonomniscient, to be nonomnipotent. This is the essence of humanity.

We, all of us, will end someday. As someone famously said, "On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero." This is the essence of humanity. Do what you must, what you wish, what you dream, now, because 2 seconds from now is no guarantee.

We can only know a very little bit of what there is to know. Therefore, words like "believe", "trust" and "faith". I can never truly know how those I believe love me really feel, therefore I believe that they love me, rather than know. I trust that they are telling me the truth, I have faith in their good intentions towards me.

We can only affect a small portion of the world, as well, leading to words such as "attempt" and "try". I can try my best to make the world a better place, I can attempt to feed the hungry, but I can't end hatred or hunger. It is this attempt in the face of impossible odds that defines greatness, but only the greatness of the limited, not the greatness of the omnipotent.

God, on the other hand, as imagined by the Christians*, doesn't believe anything, he knows. God does not trust or have faith, and thus is entirely inhuman. God also doesn't try or attempt anything, he simply does. And is unutterably inhuman. Forget the rock so big he can't lift it, how does an eternal being, with neither beginning nor end, understand the plight, the struggles and dreams, of the truly limited?

In this context, God as man is nonsensical. Even the concept of a portion of God** trapped in human flesh makes no sense. It's still God. It's still omnipotent, omniscient, eternal. It's still absolute inhumanity in a human shell.

*God as imagined by Jews isn't quite the same, or perhaps as imagined by the ancient Israelites. Read Genesis. God wandered through the Garden of Eden wondering where Adam and Eve had gotten to. That's not omnipotence.

**The closest I got to understanding the Trinity was that Jesus represented a small portion of God in a human body, but that doesn't make any sense either. How can something eternal be apportioned?

It's a Feature, Not a Bug

omnipotence, omnipotent, god, bible, christianity, christian, atheism, atheist, pagan,
Makarios explores what he essentially describes as a glitch in human design, a glitch that I would call a feature.

I stated in my last post, "Jesus didn't come to earth to establish a new religion. He came to bring healing to a broken relationship. The relationship was broken by disobedience BUT the disobedience was the result of a lack of, or perhaps even an inability to love our Creator as He is worthy to be loved. As with any relationship, when we love ourselves the most, we serve ourselves over and before those who we claim to love. That's too bad because one of our primary goals in life is to love God and to enjoy Him forever.

here's my problem with that. supposedly, our creator created us. if his entire goal is to be worshipped, and he made us for that purpose, why did he make us lacking or unable to worship him properly?

this just doesn't make any sense. god is omnipotent and omniscient. therefore, he knows how to make humans capable of worshipping him properly, and is capable of doing so. the fact that god did not make us capable of worshipping him properly means one of three things: (a) he is incapable of doing so, (b) he is unwilling to do so, (c) god did not create us.

(a) is an impossibility if god is omnipotent. if god is omnipotent, god as christians imagine him does not exist. this does not prove the nonexistence of any deity, simply the deity as imagined by christians. i don't really know if jews and muslims picture an omnipotent god or not. this leaves the field open for pagan gods, so win for you, my pagan friends!

(b) this isn't really worth spending much time on, because it automatically falls into the category of "ineffable", which is just another way of saying "shut up, that's why!"

(c) this option gets really weird really fast, and could possibly be a subheading of (a). Yhwh, the god of the christians, does exist, but did not create us. Either some other god created us, or abiogenesis did its thing, and Yhwh merely found us here. The purpose Yhwh put us to has nothing to do with the purpose we were created for (or the purpose we just don't have), hence all the troubles between humans and Yhwh. It's not our fault, it's not Yhwh's fault, humans are just a bad fit for Yhwh's needs. This option also requires that Yhwh is not omnipotent. Pagans win again!

It's the omnipotence, really. If christianity had not declared god omnipotent, we wouldn't have these issues. You don't have to explain the failures and limitations of a limited god, but with Yhwh, there's just no way around the logical gaps.

Omnipotence- The Pros and Cons

god, omnipotence, omnipotent, religion, christian, covenant, unbeliever, pagan, atheism, atheist,
One of the things that has always bothered me about the christian god is the supposed quality of omnipotence: almighty or infinite in power, as God.

What bothers me about Yhwh's supposed omnipotence is that every time you turn around you see an example of something that really needs to be fixed. People dying in floods or fires, children being raped, people being tortured, people starving to death, people dying slowly of terrible illnesses. Any reasonable person looking at that is going to experience some serious cognitive dissonance trying to reconcile an omnipotent, loving god with what actually happens here on earth. Some people resolve their cognitive dissonance by retreating into "god is ineffable", some people become atheists. However you do it, eventually you have to reconcile yourself to the inevitable conclusion that either Yhwh doesn't care or Yhwh isn't omnipotent, but he certainly isn't loving and omnipotent.

In my opinion, pagans have the best solution to this problem (without resorting to the "oh, fuck it, I can't believe this shit anymore" of the atheist): specialization rather than omnipotence. Pagan gods and goddesses are like modern day medical professionals. If I have a brain tumor, I want a neurosurgeon, but if I need my hip replaced, that's not the doctor I want in the room. Pagans have different gods and goddesses for every occasion, and they are clearly not omnipotent. Thus, if I ask a pagan why didn't Thor or Zeus or whoever save those people from drowning, I'm not going to create any cognitive dissonance. The answer is simple: it wasn't in their power.

Writers tend to deal with this problem in the same way: they remove the element of omnipotence. Either god is space aliens/humans from the future, vastly more powerful than our bronze age forebears, but not omnipotent, or god is limited in some way. For instance, Stephen R. Donaldson creates a god limited by his own creation in the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. This of course brings up the issue of how does god create a rock so big he can't lift it, but at least we know why we're counting on an antihero to fix things.

Feel free to chime in with your favorite explanation of why god is the way god is. Book recommendations always welcome.