Who, Exactly, Is God?

Nan God

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Believers talk a lot about God.

In their many and several conversations, they report that he* is all good … all knowing … all powerful. And because of these attributes, they pray to him, they sing to him, they praise him, they call on him in times of distress, pain, and despair. And most of all, they DEFEND him!

* Sidenote: It is said that calling “God” an “It” would make him impersonal (!).

Further, they claim to hear his voice, yet others close-by hear nothing. They claim to feel his presence, yet are unable to provide a clear description of what that means. When asked if they have ever seen “God,” they make references to nature, to “unexplained” events and/or happenings, to the existence of the universe. (Or they will claim the Hebrew individual described in the newer part of the “Holy Bible” is a full-on representation.)

Some will say that God is LOVE, yet they are unable to explain the many atrocities (described in that holy book he supposedly wrote) that were commanded by him. Or why he allows his (alleged) human creations to commit inhumanities against one another.

God is frequently described using metaphors, symbols, parables, and maxims. He is also represented by a multitude of idols and images.

Yet no one has seen this entity in a pure and observable form.

So the question remains.

Who, exactly, is this being referred to as “God”?

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Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

105 thoughts on “Who, Exactly, Is God?”

  1. A man-made narrative construct, indoctinated into credulous,malleable minds until a state of self- delusion is reached whereby the ‘Believer ‘ will often defend this delusion to the death.

    Sad,but true….
    Fortunately this condition is not permanent.

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    • 2400 years ago, Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher reasoned out the existence of God and called him the Good. Aristotle, Plato’s most famous student and perhaps the greatest philosopher of all time, developed logical proofs of God’s existence.

      Neither Plato nor Aristotle were Christian. Because of these great thinkers, today we understand atheism to be a catastrophic failure of reason.

      All atheists offer in response to reason are personal opinions, logical fallacies and “facts” that are not facts.

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          • No. You did not address my post. All you did was offer the reasoning of a couple of philosophers … and essentially, their answers are no more valid than those provided by believers.

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        • Aristotle was a brilliant man, but he was operating based on severely limited information compared with what we have available today. As a result, he was wrong in many of his conclusions, for example, about the structure of the solar system.

          In Aristotle’s time, a supernatural entity seemed like the only plausible explanation for (a) the observed complexity of life, and (b) the origin of the universe — the “why is there something rather than nothing” problem. We did not discover the true naturalistic solutions to these questions until 1859 with the publication of Darwin’s work for the former, and the early twenty-first century (implications of quantum physics and the uncertainty principle) for the latter. Nevertheless, we do now have them. Aristotle himself would surely have expected that knowledge would progress over time and that some of his own hypotheses would be superseded by new evidence.

          In short, one can respect the achievements of ancient philosophers while recognizing that their conclusions cannot be taken as definitive thousands of years later.

          In any case, even claiming that a supernatural force is needed as a first cause does not remotely mean that that force was anything like the Christian deity. Zeus, Ahura Mazda, Odin, or some entity or entities unlike anything imagined by any human religion would fit the bill equally well. Some Greek philosophers argued that several dozen gods were a more likely explanation, consistent with the pagan religion of the time. So such a claim has nothing to say about the basic “who is God?” question here.

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          • Thank you Infidel!!! I’m so glad you decided to add your comment. Of course it goes without saying that SOM has made several attempts to defend his position on this issue, but I have chosen not to share them.

            P.S. I especially liked your last sentence. Unfortunately, there are many who use blogs for nothing more than to air their personal gripes, rather than entering into a rational discussion on the blog topic.

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      • Ah, yes! The ancient art of defining gods into existence. The ancients also defined via reason the path of all heavenly bodies into perfect circles around the earth. And they reasoned that just as you must reach out with your hand to touch something, light must come out of our eyes to see things.

        The ancients set us on the path to discovery. But lots (possibly most) of their intuitive reasoning was bull.

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        • Smoking Mirror, of course. You notice that the Sun came up this morning? Sure a few Mexica enemies of the great Aztec State had to die horrible bloody deaths, but….

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      • Back at ‘cha SOM! As an atheist I have never asserted that I can prove that “god” (a god, the god, whatever) exists; that would be futile and impossible. However extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and the claim is YOURS to defend, not ours. Since you make the claim that such a supernatural entity exist, it is incumbent upon YOU to prove it.

        In the absence of extraordinary proof, I’ll take ANY proof, anything tangible, observable, whatever. And don’t point to the the dusty old narrative written 2,000 years ago by anonymous, third or fourth party writers. That is ALSO your claim, not your evidence.

        There are, of course, facts on our side, mostly about how this silly mythology was written, when, by whom, etc. We have gads and gads of archeological evidence we can point to and reason through in order to discern how this book was written and it was NOT by a god, as the sleeping faithful constantly contend.

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        • RaPaR, Plato and Aristotle proved that it is possible to reason out the existence of God. From both science and common sense we know that everything has a cause. Therefore, the First Cause of everything is God.

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          • So two 2300 year old philosophers “reasoned” out A god, not YOUR god, just any one and you’re setting your faith on that? Not very discerning if you ask me.

            Since we “know” that everything has a cause, how did god get “caused”?

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          • RaPaR, Your comment is a non-sequitur. God is God. If you wish to claim him as your own, fine by me. The point is, that any person with common sense can reason out that God exists. I have taken the topic further and developed actual scientific proofs of God’s existence. Also I have authored a mathematical equation that states what God is, using the concept of order as understood by biologists.

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          • SOM: Show me. I’d like to see where A + B = God. This will be a first.

            As far as my non sequitur is concerned, answer the question. If all things have a “cause” what was it that “caused” god? Don’t give us the “god is god” nonsense, that’s an admission of ignorance. If you don’t have an answer just tell us, don’t give us even more nonsense than your original claim.

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          • A+B is what 3rd graders do. My equation is from Calculus. God is God, is a philosophical statement taken from Plato and Aristotle. It means that God has a knowable, understandable nature. If we know and understand the nature of a thing, we understand the thing itself.

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          • Sorry, Plato didn’t believe in an actual “god”. Plato believed the universe had some kind of intelligence. He believed in a kind of demi-urge, not a true deity, not even intelligent, but which was responsible somehow for creation. He also believed in reincarnation. If you’re trying to use Plato to support Christian beliefs, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Christian apologists have persisted in attempting to use Aristotle and Plato to support their beliefs, and mostly what they prove is that they never actually read or understood what either of them say.

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          • grouchyfarmer, I refer you to Book VI of Plato’s Republic where he expresses a compact model of reality called The Divided Line. What Christians call God, Plato called The Good. All of reality is an image of The Good.

            Also, Plato and Aristotle were absorbed into Christianity starting from the very beginning. Apostles Peter and John preached and wrote to the Greeks who understood reality through the eyes and minds of Plato and Aristotle. Saint Augustine was a Platonist. Saint Albert the Great and his protégé, Saint Thomas Aquinas expounded upon Aristotle. Aquinas, in fact, referred to Aristotle simply as, “the Philosopher.”

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          • C’mon, SOM. The ‘Good’ is not what Christians call your god and Plato did not propose or believe or ever write that any god was the ‘Good’. The ‘Good’ was a desired object as a state of mind and the line that divides these states of mind is used to show equivalent levels of kinds of rationality to achieve them (the ‘Good’ was achieved by its equivalent rational discourse, intelligence).

            But you’re quite right in that the early Church absorbed the metaphysics of Platonic modelling of ‘reality’ using the notion of never-changing forms to be evidence for an invisible divine spirit in things… and that what made these things certain thing was a particular nature. (The Church ALWAYS steals everything it uses – including metaphysical thinking itself – and produces nothing but delusion – and unearned authority from the delusion – in return.)

            Aristotle established ‘natural philosophy’ assuming physics – the nature of things – followed philosophy – thinking about forms, that only the invisible ‘form’ was ‘real’ and that everything real (with physical properties) was a facsimile of the form because it was always changing. See? The logic is irrefutable!

            This model’s conclusion, unfortunately, was factually wrong (which Galileo demonstrated) because the assumption that informed the central premise was factually wrong: namely, that forms may be assigned unchanging natures by people through belief alone but – hey – things simply don’t have natures that make them what they are! Their physical properties do.

            Oops… what’s a Church to do? Well, like any determined ideologue, the Church as a whole just doubled down on its metaphysics and so assigned to anyone not willing to go along with the Great Delusion some moral flaw, some connection with Satan! Hence, the oft repeated genocides of those ‘others’ (From religious soldiers everywhere… “They made me do it, donchaknow…, Just following orders… blasphemers!)

            Metaphysics as a kind of modelling of reality (yet by design unhinged from its adjudication) is just mental masturbation claiming to be the highest form of ‘real’ sex – the ‘Good’ so to speak – because it poofs into being extraordinary and stimulating delusion. Woohoo!

            Once again, to answer the question, “Who is God?,” we are led straight back to the minds and assigned imaginings of those who mistake the internal experience with the external reality we share. And hey, if Plato and Aristotle with such Big Brains can fool themselves, we’re even more likely to do so. That’s why using reality itself as an adjudicator for our beliefs about it is even more important than ever. We are really good at fooling ourselves!

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          • tildeb, Plato’s The Good was the source of all reality. Plato reasoned out that the source of reality is all good. That, by definition is God. This is consistent with the Christian understanding of God which was revealed to them by Jesus, who was God in human form. Aristotle also reasoned out God’s existence. He called God, the First Cause.

            These are not states of mind or metaphors or social constructs. The Good and the First Cause are where reality, truth, and beauty come from.

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          • SOM, I suspect you and I could have a grand discussion about metaphysical thinking. But my point is that because it’s a logical argument starting with a wrong premise – that things have natures derived from ‘forms’ – the conclusion is therefore wrong: most importantly, the need for a divine First Cause. It’s logical based on the assumed truth of the premises, sure… but factually wrong in reality and absolutely non productive in the creation of knowledge (something religion itself absolutely shares: zero knowledge production).

            And so to argue that this broken methodology (used for metaphysical meanderings but central to its legitimacy) provides us with ‘proof’ for some god is not productive to figuring out who is god when you’re trying to metaphysically argue what is god.

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          • What wrong premise? Take a look at Plato’s Divided Line and tell me where is the wrong premise. What is Aristotle’s wrong premise with his logical determination that everything began with a First Cause?

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          • I’ve stated it quite clearly several times: assuming/believing THINGS have a nature. This matters because the ‘nature’ supposedly comes from (or ‘descends’ from, or is infused by) the ‘form’, you see. That’s the assumption. That’s the wrong premise. You have to believe FIRST that forms are real and, for that assumption, there is not only no evidence for it to be true (granted, one might expect this from some ethereal ‘realm’) but that there is nothing but evidence contrary to it. Simply put, things don’t have a ‘nature’. This matters because our whole scientific endeavor and everything it has produced shows us that things don’t have natures but are, instead, subject to forces and properties in reality. And I even went so far as to explain how we know that now: Galileo’s thought experiment (the inclined plane) that when published rocked the foundation of the Church (and on whose shoulders Newton claimed to stand). Metaphysics had its cornerstone removed by this revelation and the whole rotten metaphysical edifice has never recovered. Even if there were an ethereal realm, SOM, there is literally no way anyone including you could know anything about it because, as I also said, it has been intentionally severed from reality once ‘natures’ (and the agencies that supposedly cause or fiddle with them) are deleted.

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          • It is obvious that everything has a nature. That is why we can tell the difference between a cat and a dog and we know we are different from a plant or a chair. This is Aristotle at his simplest. He is often called the philosopher of common sense.

            Plato’s version is that everything participates in its own form. I teach forms in mathematics as do all math teachers. On Plato’s Divided line, mathematics is the next highest realm of reality above the sensory realm. And the realm of forms is just above mathematics. The Good is the highest and the source of all reality.

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          • SOM, I will continue to approve your comments so long as you use them to explain your POV on the blog topic. Your frequent derogatory references to atheists or atheism will be deleted.

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          • My comments are based on well known and much discussed philosophy. The philosophy I express is mainstream coming from both America’s Founding Fathers and the Roman Catholic Church.

            Postmodern philosophy of which atheism is a part rejects the age old wisdom and philosophy of the Ancients and the wise men who designed and created the United States of America.

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          • The topic of the post is Who is God. You have presented your POV that this supernatural entity is/was a part of philosophy. You have attempted to validate this perspective by referencing ancient philosophers — and then you have gone on to deride postmodern philosophy.

            It is clear to me, and I would venture to say most of my blog readers, that you have made your point. So, unless you have anything NEW to add –and can refrain from demeaning atheism– I won’t be approving your future comments on this particular post.

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        • If the reference is to be honest, then Dr. Luis Camillo Almeida’s god is the same belief in a pantheistic god of Spinoza that Einstein claims to be his own. And that god is identical TO the universe. Hence, the creator of the universe and everything in it is the universe. THAT is Einstein’s god, and he also insists the notion of a personal god is infantile, a Just So story for children. So obviously Dr. Luis Camillo Almeida couldn’t possibly believe in the latter. That would be intentionally dishonest.

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  3. Okay, makagutu. I asked Freud:

    “Religious doctrines are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.” – Sigmund Freud

    Ark, you are right, also. This question stirred up all that repressed anger and shame I worked so hard to bury. It’s hard to believe that someone as intelligent as myself could ever have done just what you described. I always had a scripture for any argument I ran into. It is designed to that end. Nothing can be proven or disproved by argument and argument is the only way to deal with it. I apologize to everyone I ever tried to teach that garbage to. I apologized to my children in person. Like Christianity, it was only to soothe my own feelings.

    I like Mark Twain. The Ukrainians and the Russians are praying to the same god to deliver their enemy into their hands. The same god that listens to none of them. “… they report that he* is all good … all knowing … all powerful.”

    It has been this way since the first imagined answer to some unknown cause/effect question.

    Thanks, Nan. I needed an excuse to enjoy a couple of fingers of bourbon.

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  4. Btw, did everyone read HCRichardson’s Sunday commentary? Russia is fighting on the side of good.

    What more evidence do we need of the evil caused by religion? It justifies genocide.

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  5. As I understand it, there are five thousand answers (give or take). There is no who. There is not a what. There is just that thought. And thoughts, human or not, are not enough for me to hold up as a god. But, that’s your point, Nan.

    Oh, I see you are still entertaining SOM.

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  9. “Some will say that God is LOVE, yet they are unable to explain the many atrocities (described in that holy book he supposedly wrote) ”

    Yes, this can be explained, easily. God, who is all good, eliminated evil. Some complain that God lets evil go, yet when he ordered the Israelites to slaughter evil to the last man, they complain that God is a genocidal maniac.

    Imagine 10’s of thousands of Adolf Hitlers, Joseph Stalins or Mao Zedongs rampaging throughout the land raping, robbing, dominating, abusing.

    God intervened and has his people slaughter them.

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    • Several of the massacres ordered by God in the Old Testament explicitly included killing children. The alleged flood of Noah, if it had really happened, would have killed millions of babies who had had no opportunity yet to be evil, as well as millions of animals who, by Christian standards, were not capable of conscious evil.

      Whoever “God” in the abstract may be, the Biblical God is not “good”.

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      • cagjr, SOM will not be providing this information since his primary purpose on blogs such as mine is to criticize and castigate atheists and non-believers. He offers little to nothing in the way of FACTS … and inevitably deviates from the blog topic — which is why his comments go straight to the moderation box.

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  10. I have asked many a religious person one question: If god is all-powerful (omnipotent), all-knowing (omniscient), and a loving god, then … why do airplanes fall out of the sky killing innocent people? I’ve yet to receive an answer that wasn’t a total bullshit cop-out, so I quit asking, having answered the question for myself. I am convinced that man made god in his own image, or what he thought was his own image, rather than the other way around.

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    • Jill, God is the God of eternal life. He cares deeply for everyone, especially those who fall victim to the evil that men do and the evil that befalls man from living in the natural world.

      God is the God of justice eternal.

      This is the message of Easter when Jesus conquered death.

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    • “God works in mysterious ways.”

      “We do not know the mind of God and cannot question His ways.”

      While giving out the excuses and mansplains, the same people say the scripture is the word of God, therefore the things that come from the mind of God.

      It is not meant for man to understand God’s ways. That is the job of priests, preachers, and Popes. Sometimes we see even them struggle with the answers, mainly because that ‘book’ is under constant revision.

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  11. Humanity’s obsessed with God, so I think a better question is, “Where is God?” I believe he’s ‘in our heads.’ I believe God personal to each of us and where we go with our thoughts and inward dialogue determines where we go with God- determines who God is, to me.

    Although consistent, the Bible stories we grew up with are probably mostly inaccurate. The Jewish record keepers seemed to focus more on personal names–genealogies–and on an event’s religious significance. God was ‘in their heads.’ People have always been fascinated by gods; Abraham and the Israelites narrowed them down to one- “Jehovah.”

    So what’s up with the Bible’s many claims that, “The LORD said unto so-and-so”? I think it was all in their head, just as it is with ours. Moses saw the sun reflecting on a mountainside bush and credited it to fire, and so to God. And the resulting dialogue in his head was with God.

    And this is where personal relationship comes in. And to me, precisely why we’re here. So I’ve followed through with this inner dialogue based on what seems to work for Bible writers. I take Jesus Christ to be the door to this relationship via a new birth. My personal relationship with God began when I received him. Now we have a never-ending back-and-forth. I adore him.

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    • Arnold, I appreciate your position as regards to “God.” But clearly, my question was NOT “Where is God?” because I’m fully aware that every believer will have an answer … “in my heart, in my thoughts, in my spirit,” etc., etc.

      Instead, my question is WHO, exactly, is this “God” that supposedly resides in one’s heart/thoughts/spirit?

      As I stated at the end of my post: no one has seen this entity in a pure and observable form. So logically, he is nothing more than an idea, a thought, a personal “feeling.”

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  13. To take a direct stab at the original question, I would say that God is a fictional character who has evolved over time due to being depicted in different media and by different people with different agendas.

    A good analogy would be Batman. The Batman of the original early comic books, of the Adam West TV show, of the recent big-budget films, and of the recent comics, are quite different characters despite explicitly being stated to be the same person.

    The tantrum-throwing constantly-enraged toddler God of the Old Testament, the Jesus of the New Testament, the theologians’ God of clashing absolutes (omnipotence, omniscience, total benevolence, etc), and the modern fundie God obsessed with condemning homosexuality and abortion but little concerned with most of the Old Testament’s other taboos, are all supposedly the same entity, but are different because their “authors” are different and have different agendas. This is exactly what one would expect of a fictional character in use over a long period of time, similar to Batman, and that’s who God is.

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  14. Who is God?

    As one Susi Bocks said, God is, “The short answer – a figment of believer’s imagination.”

    Silence of Mind is an excellent illustration of believers’ tenuous grip on reality. He/she has little understanding of what an atheist is, but true to the Christian creed demands the right to tell everyone what he/she thinks anyone of us should be. Their understanding of religion doesn’t look much stronger.

    Explaining who God is is akin to explaining whether he/she/it exists. Who God is changes from person to person, age to age. But always he carries the description of who is teaching the doctrine.

    For Kirill and Putin, God is the entity who put its stamp of approval on the invasion of Ukraine and the genocide and other crimes we see every day. Perhaps it is the same God worshipped by those Americans who uphold Putin and other despots.

    For the Christian Nationalists, it’s the entity that gave them authority over every person of color, sexual orientation, civil, and human rights.

    We have returned to Mars Hill with the panoply of gods Christianity was supposed to replace.

    These are the Gods. E Unum Pluribus.

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  16. There was mention of sophisticated Christian theology in this thread. Christianity is downright primitive compared to the amazing Hindu theories, as diverse and interesting as any fantasy novel. And like Christianity, this amazing family of religions can be used to foster violence and destruction. As he promotes his theocracy, Silence of Mind might want to observe how well it is working right now in India.

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  17. I like these questions. Congradulations, this gives me multiple things to write about. The word God can refere to multiple different gods, most christians (if you’re talking about Christianity) aren’t very specific on which God they serve and they know little about him. That is why you have been getting hippy and vague responses or some over exageration of their feelings.

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    • A quick check of your blog’s Welcome message revealed this:

      Lets face it, the Bible is probably the most compelling historical and religious document ever written.

      Perhaps the most compelling religious document, but far from a historical one.

      In any event, thanks for your comment. I’m happy that I was able to provide material (?) for your blog posts.

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        • According to Wikipedia … “History” is an umbrella term comprising past events as well as the memory, discovery, collection, organization, presentation, and interpretation of these events.

          Certainly the bible stories have been discovered, collected, organized, and presented … but it is the “interpretation” where, IMO, it stumbles badly. Witness the approximate 41,000 +/- world-wide denominations … not to mention the 34,000 +/- in the U.S. alone.

          For me, this says the historical element of the bible is suspect.

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          • Oh, I see, that is a major problem. I’m assuming that you would like to read a more logically driven explanation of potential historical elements rather that the popular emotionally charged sermons? If there were a chance that someone could convince you that there are real historical truths in the bible, dispite the hypocracy of the interpretations of the many denominations, what concepts would you like to be explained?

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          • Thanks again for your comment, but since our brief conversation has veered from the topic of my post, I prefer not to respond. Perhaps in the future I will write a post on the declared historical value of the bible and the topic can be discussed among all my readers.

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        • As examples, the Bible claims that the following events are historical:

          – A creation of the world ex nihilo just a few thousand years ago

          – A world-wide flood

          – Captivity of the Hebrew in Egypt as slaves

          – Hebrew exodus from Egypt and invasion of Canaan

          – Large Hebrew empire at the time of David and Solomon

          Archaeology, contemporary historical records, and all other available relevant evidence are clear that none of these things actually happened. Only around 600 BC does the Biblical narrative start to match actual history. The Biblical stories before that are just mythology no different than the myths of the Greek or Norse gods.

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          • Thank you! I appreciate your reply. I will write about these topics when I get a chance. Briefly i’ll explain some of this.

            1) The world is not 6,000 years old. It is older but not as old as modern science puts it. That one was super hard to find.
            2) The world wide flood is documented in other ancient religions but they’re not as accurate as archeological discovers in rocks. (David Montgomery).
            3) This one i did research on many years ago, I was able to find a pharaoh that had anonymously disappeared apparently during the time of the exodus. However I will have to revisit that research sometime
            4) Currently there is no evidence that Solomon had a temple as massive as it is in the Bible. However, there’s been debate on where the actual location of Isreal was.

            These topics are fascinating and extremely hidden. I will attempt this research again. Thank you!!!

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          • I don’t want to offend anyone, but in a previous comment, I explained that I prefer comments to remain “on topic.” Please visit Majesty’s blog where this discussion would be far more appropriate. Thanks!!

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  18. Infidel: I read somewhere that many of the glorious stories about Israel were invented to justify the return of the priestly and military class to Canaan as Persian Satraps and tax farmers. Have to justify the new taxes somehow to the extant peasant class.

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  19. There being over 32,000 denominations of Christianity alone (counted in 2000), it seems that “it” has over 32,000 descriptions when it comes to Christianity. Since I have divined (pun intended) that each believer has their own “personal” definition, then there are billions of Gods in Christianity alone.

    I use “it” for my god pronoun a lot because adding “personal” to the powers/properties of their god make their god that much more impossible. We know that all-knowing is impossible, all-powerful, too. Omnipresence is unnecessary, even if claimed, and claiming the godhead to be a person is nonsense (look up the definition of person in any dictionary and none will list Person (noun): #4 a god.

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    • But some Christians (almost uniquely of the American heretical version) claim to be buddies with….in a relationship with…their “god”. As they are that important to the purported creator of a universe(s) so immense that we cannot even really comprehend it. But hey, god talks directly with ME ME ME and provides advice on my (trivial) problems.

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  20. I suspect ‘God’ is actually the non dominant hemisphere of our (bicameral) brain. We experience this ‘other’ in a variety of ways, not least of which is having a sense we are not alone. So – like most people – we then attribute this internal sense of ‘presence’ (different to our ‘own’ usual company) to an external agency and then double down to insist it’s ‘out there’ somewhere. Voila: God… with as many versions as there are people and yet with all the attributes – positive and negative – our species demonstrates.

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    • I think you’ve nailed it with this … Voila: God … with all the attributes – positive and negative – our species demonstrates.

      Its “existence” has ALWAYS been nothing more than our own derived sense of “something.”

      Out there.

      And no matter how much “calculus” one manipulates, it doesn’t change the fact that … “no one has seen this entity in a pure and observable form.”

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      • I agree… and why there is zero evidence independent of the believer for this external divine agency. ‘Revelation’ and ‘testimony’ is really the sum total and yet is the most powerful ‘evidence’ an individual can experience.

        So denying any god exists (for lack of external evidence, which is perfectly reasonable) invokes the typical response by believers that one is therefore trying to deny the experience they have had (and these run the gamut of kinds of experiences a non dominant brain produces). Because the experience was… well, experienced and was powerful in effect… this anti-theistic argument carries no weight to those who know they have experienced something. And being dismissed as foolish or crazy for having had the experience is not helpful but usually invokes the returned sentiment, to dismiss non believers because they haven’t yet had a similar experience (and the list of apologetic reasons why this might be the case). Some religions will tolerate this delay while others will just put you to death. Nice.

        So I think it is helpful to understand the experience as an attribution error (because we can test it in reality and reality should carry the greater weight IF we think what’s true actually matters or should be respected and are willing to put our beliefs aside for a moment!). Yes, the experience is real; now let’s figure out what’s really going on here.

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  21. As I recall from my delusional fundamentalist days (not well enough to cite verse, but I have checked it several times in the past), God told man that he was “sorry I made you” just before The Flood. Gee, God, that’s one heck of a mistake! Yet here we are.

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    • Well hello, TB! Glad to have you aboard. And yes! Here we are (not all of us though) … still trying to “please God.”

      Hope you’ll check back in now and again. Appreciate your perspective. 🙂

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    • Question: how does a “perfect god” which we hear about every day – check out Christian radio for an hour or so a day and you’ll hear it also – make a “mistake”? How does that happen? And, furthermore, how does an omniscient, omnipresent “god” not ALREADY KNOW it’s going to be a mistake from the start? You mean that Yahweh, the all-knowing, “all beneficent” god of the Israelites did NOT KNOW as he was creating man that they would be a complete and total failure to the point that he would want to wipe them off the face of the Earth?

      ‘Splain Lucy!

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    • And as asked in the blog post title, Who, Exactly, Is God?

      People like to reference this “God” entity and credit all sorts of things to “him,” but no one has yet been able to provide a clear and defining and visible proof that such a being exists.

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      • DNA connects all living beings at some point. Everything alive on Earth shares DNA, from what I can discover, so, maybe, if there is a “god” (not meaning a God) it is our DNA.
        On second thought, no, its just DNA, and somewhere way back millions or billions of yesrs ago, it will trace back to one cell that managed to achieve mitosis. And those cells split, and split, and split, and now cover this world, inclyding us.
        This is the point where all the science-minded people can tell me how wrong I am. Pleae feel free.

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        • You are not wrong at all….in fact there is a European scientist that has been extracting DNA from as many extant animals as possible and building a comprehensive and robust database of the gene pool. I believe it will eventually prove that ALL lifeforms on this planet are ALL related and the DNA will demonstrate this. Of course, not to the satisfaction of the Magical Kingdom Crowd, but anyone else with an iota of common sense or objectivity.

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          • Just saying, but I came to this conclusion not from a scientific viewpoint, but one of pure thought. It makes the most sense to me. And, as evety thinking person knows, gods do not have DNA, so therefore there is no God! (Just bringing this back to topic, Nan.)

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          • I understand, that thought is a good one. If “we all” (all animals) eventually came out of the oceans, shouldn’t we have some shared DNA and it appears as thought that inclination is a good one! Geneticists are finding out more and more than ALL animals have shared DNA markers and variants between ALL animals, at least so far.

            Doesn’t that say much more to us than religion ever could? that we are all interconnected? I remember when we were Unitarian Universalists one of our statements of belief was in the “interconnected web of life to which we all belong”. This to me is much more significant that some mythology or religion.

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          • Of course it is, much more significant. Except, why are you limiting it to “amimals”? Do plants not have DNA? Do individual cells not have DNA?
            I am asking because I do not know for certain. But I cannot imagine any living beings not having DNA, right down to bacteria and plankton.
            I read somewhere that viruses are incomplete cells, which I do not understand. Do they not have to be “complete” in order to be able to reproduce, which they obviously do quite rapidly. Instead of asking what is God, which is really a meaningless question, what we should be asking is, What is life? A much more interesting question, one that, since we are all living beings, should have an answer, somewhere?

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  23. Viruses are not considered “living” organisms for a number of reasons; they do not respire at all, no oxygen nothing. They also do not regulate their own temperature or consume any energy at all. They also can not reproduce on their own, they are more or less a bundle of DNA that requires a host to reproduce. They remove the DNA of their host cells and implant their own DNA causing the cell to generate more viruses.

    I do not know of any definition of a “living” entity that isn’t disputed by someone or other.

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