Cognitive Dissonance

[PsychoSarah]

The C.G. does not go away until we know why we are here. This requires that we understand that there are 2 creators, not 1. The First creator loves unconditionally, never violates our free-will, and has no unrealistic expectations of us, and is the giver of life. The second creator created the universe and will do anything possible to keep us from finding out why we are here.

If only 1 creates, it is still 1 creator

 

[single eye]

bhsmte writes "could you give us more specifics in regards to what you deem as two creators?" Not really, but do not underestimate the ability of your subconscious and imagination to deliver more insights from what you have already been given.

 

[bhsmte]

bhsmte writes "could you give us more specifics in regards to what you deem as two creators?" Not really, but do not underestimate the ability of your subconscious and imagination to deliver more insights from what you have already been given.

Not really?

I thought so.

 

[Received]

Sorry for not realizing you were a deist.

Apparently the apologists on these forums who do are now imaginary.

By "the other side" I meant the opposite side from fundamentalism: i.e., more moderate to liberal theologians who don't do the thinking errors fundamnetalism is prone to.

But we're supposed to trust that these less-than-virtuous people who wrote about a less-than-virtuous Yahweh, wrote the rest of the Old Testament well enough that it foretold of Jesus... a messiah who came from and believed in the less-than-virtuous people's account of the world.

In the context of questioning things realistically, sure. You and I are less-than-virtuous too, you know, just closer to virtue than people back then were (which you can't blame them for given their ignorance and fear toward just about everything).

Yes - the religion you currently hold is the result of older beliefs evolving over time in response to people learning new ideas. It's still highly flawed since the beliefs didn't necessarily change based on whether they were true or not. An example might be how Iranaeus selected the four gospels in the bible today based not on their truthfulness, but instead based on the idea of the four corners of the earth and the four principle winds. Other gospels - including Jewish gospels - were then sought out to be destroyed.

I'm saying holding to a standard of "things must be literally true (factual) for a religion to have merit" is to be questioned. This is what I mean when I slightly erroneously labeled this thinking "atheistic fundamentalist" thinking. You're not a Christian or interventionalist theist but hold as the assumed standard the very thing that fundamentalist Christians hold.

I believe there is an ultimate creator, an alpha. I find Yahweh ridiculous and savage... I absolutely do not believe Yahweh to be the creator.

In a sense, there are many Yahwehs given that there are many evolving constructions of how Yahweh should be conceived. Even in contemporary circles you have Yahweh vastly different than a few thousand years ago in that he "is" love, cares about everyone, etc...but has this irrational itch to send people to Hell. Then you have people who are even more evolved who correctly (exegetically) are like, "hey, this Hell thing isn't what you think it is, and there probably isn't anything like what you think it is at all, and God is a nice guy, we're just flawed in our perception of him given our projections from these psychological flaws in the past until the present." Religions are flawed because they are constituted by people with varying levels of virtue and psychological maturity and development. But to say this swipes off any hope for a religion with such varying degrees of flawed individuals is going too far. Look at the direction the evolving perspective is leading: to a just deity who cares about everyone, and whose intention is to include everyone in his kingdom whose aim is willing the good for everyone and everything. (And yes, that's supported in the New Testament.)

 

[BL2KTN]

By "the other side" I meant the opposite side from fundamentalism: i.e., more moderate to liberal theologians who don't do the thinking errors fundamnetalism is prone to.

You said that nobody believes the Old Testament is an accurate reflection of Yahweh. That is obviously not true. The truth is that millions and millions and millions do. It is likely that the majority of Christian posters on this forum view it to be an accurate reflection of Yahweh.

In the context of questioning things realistically, sure. You and I are less-than-virtuous too, you know, just closer to virtue than people back then were (which you can't blame them for given their ignorance and fear toward just about everything).

Don't equivocate the less-than-virtuous people who wrote that Yahweh demanded infanticide with me. I seek virtue, therefore I am virtuous. The scribes who penned that wrote of a bloodlusting, psycopathic, infanticidal, insecure deity. We are not equals.

I'm saying holding to a standard of "things must be literally true (factual) for a religion to have merit" is to be questioned. This is what I mean when I slightly erroneously labeled this thinking "atheistic fundamentalist" thinking. You're not a Christian or interventionalist theist but hold as the assumed standard the very thing that fundamentalist Christians hold.

I do not. Fundamentalist Christians hold it to be true that Yahweh is real and his son is Yeshua. I deny both of those. I do find Yeshua's recorded teaching of loving God and loving your neighbor as a wonderful modus operandi.

In a sense, there are many Yahwehs given that there are many evolving constructions of how Yahweh should be conceived. Even in contemporary circles you have Yahweh vastly different than a few thousand years ago in that he "is" love, cares about everyone, etc...but has this irrational itch to send people to Hell. Then you have people who are even more evolved who correctly (exegetically) are like, "hey, this Hell thing isn't what you think it is, and there probably isn't anything like what you think it is at all, and God is a nice guy, we're just flawed in our perception of him given our projections from these psychological flaws in the past until the present."

Why on earth would we want to use a minor god from the Babylonian pantheon of seventy pretend gods to evolve our understanding of the cosmos' creator? Just get rid of all the Yahwehs... they're just as bogus as Molech, Ba'al, Ashterah, and El.

 

[single eye]

bhsmte writes, "I thought so". So you got the answer you expected and you still have C.D. Doesn.t sound like you got a lot of bang for your question.

 

[bhsmte]

bhsmte writes, "I thought so". So you got the answer you expected and you still have C.G. Doesn.t sound like you got a lot of bang for your question.

Uh huh.

 

[Received]

You said that nobody believes the Old Testament is an accurate reflection of Yahweh. That is obviously not true. The truth is that millions and millions and millions do. It is likely that the majority of Christian posters on this forum view it to be an accurate reflection of Yahweh.

I don't think I said that, and if I did I take it back. Try this: nobody *reasonable* believes in the OT as an accurate reflection, and I probably said either this or that nobody moderate or liberal does.

Don't equivocate the less-than-virtuous people who wrote that Yahweh demanded infanticide with me. I seek virtue, therefore I am virtuous. The scribes who penned that wrote of a bloodlusting, psycopathic, infanticidal, insecure deity. We are not equals.

Relax.

Infanticidal, in the context of a culture that allows this, doesn't reflect on the individual anywhere near as badly as it does in a culture like ours that doesn't allow this. You have to consider the garden as well as the flowers. "Psychopathic" has a very specific meaning in psychology, and I don't think any author in the OT fit that definition. You seem to be conflating ignorance and fear and the culture that motivates and is the consequence of this with psychopathy.

I do not. Fundamentalist Christians hold it to be true that Yahweh is real and his son is Yeshua. I deny both of those. I do find Yeshua's recorded teaching of loving God and loving your neighbor as a wonderful modus operandi.

What I'm saying is that you're espousing a standard along the lines of facts or literal truth is what matters in determining any broader need to take a text seriously or consider it true in a broader, non-literal sense. That's fundamentalist-speak.

Why on earth would we want to use a minor god from the Babylonian pantheon of seventy pretend gods to evolve our understanding of the cosmos' creator? Just get rid of all the Yahwehs... they're just as bogus as Molech, Ba'al, Ashterah, and El.

You're not getting what I'm saying. Should I paraphrase?

 

[Colter]

Judging the past of evolutionary religion by the standards of the present, the past will always come up short. The present standards will come up short to a future age of light and life.

The quality of truth and the insight into the character of God evolved throughout the Bible books. Moses himself was a reformer of previous religious thought and practice. Yahweh was the name of the nature God of the Sinai volcano, one of many names of different nature Gods. Sinai was active during the sojourn of Moses' clan hence they would settle upon Yahweh as the singular name of their emerging monotheism.

 

[BL2KTN]

I don't think I said that, and if I did I take it back. Try this: nobody *reasonable* believes in the OT as an accurate reflection, and I probably said either this or that nobody moderate or liberal does.

People who view the bible as entirely inspired or divinely authored likely view the Hebrew bible (OT) as an accurate reflection of Yahweh. I wouldn't call them unreasonable. I think you're taking a 30-50% chunk Christians and calling them "unreasonable." To say that means they cannot be reasoned with, and I certainly do not accept that as true.

Infanticidal, in the context of a culture that allows this, doesn't reflect on the individual anywhere near as badly as it does in a culture like ours that doesn't allow this.

1) There are certain human norms. Having the moral minimum of not smashing infants in front of parents seems to be a human norm throughout history. We look at cultures that teach otherwise with awe in that they are extreme, bizarre, and outside of the norm.

2) Given that you are indicating the ancient Hebrews were one of those extreme, bizarre, and outside of the norm societies, why in the world would we trust anything that came out of them in regards to theology?

You have to consider the garden as well as the flowers. "Psychopathic" has a very specific meaning in psychology, and I don't think any author in the OT fit that definition.

"Then I heard the LORD say to the other men, "Follow him through the city and kill everyone whose forehead is not marked. Show no mercy; have no pity! Kill them all – old and young, girls and women and little children. But do not touch anyone with the mark. Begin your task right here at the Temple." So they began by killing the seventy leaders. "Defile the Temple!" the LORD commanded. "Fill its courtyards with the bodies of those you kill! Go!" So they went throughout the city and did as they were told." (Ezekiel 9:5-7 NLT)

If that isn't psychopathic, I don't know what meaning the word can hold.

You seem to be conflating ignorance and fear and the culture that motivates and is the consequence of this with psychopathy.

Filling a religious building with dead bodies of a city you've already conquered does not appear to be based on either ignorance nor fear. It appears to be based on bloodlust.

What I'm saying is that you're espousing a standard along the lines of facts or literal truth is what matters in determining any broader need to take a text seriously or consider it true in a broader, non-literal sense. That's fundamentalist-speak.

All I'm doing is respecting the text, reading it contextually and according to its genre. You're taking what was written as literal history and saying, "I don't like it, therefore it isn't literal." Yet the parts you label "not literal" look nothing like the parts that are obviously written as metaphor or symbolism. It's just your way of making the bad stuff not real.

You're not getting what I'm saying. Should I paraphrase?

Sure.

 

[mindlight]

I would never be so crass as to compare the creator of the cosmos to Hitler. I'm comparing Yahweh to Hitler, though it may be unfair to Hitler since Yahweh is recorded as having savagely killed more people.

That's cute that Yahweh plays with us like poker cards.

So Yahweh gave you the choice to "turn or burn," eh? But you were born into a family that believed in the Christian god, right? So you never turned... you just asked a 2,000 year old Jewish man to forgive you like the people around you taught. You were never called a Muslim or a Hindi... you had nothing to turn from other than your own behaviors (which consequentially most continued right along afterwards anyway).

Yet there are children born into Muslim families every day who will have cancer and die at fifteen or sixteen. And though they may have been kind, caring individuals, your Yahweh supposedly thinks the consequence for their being born into a Muslim family and dying relatively young is that they should be set on fire, suffering the same pain as someone receiving third degree burns, day and night, for a hundred years... a thousand years... a million years... a billion years... a trillion years... and on. I couldn't do that to my worst enemy, little alone a kind little Muslim girl who happened to get cancer when she was twleve and died when she was sixteen. Yet that is your Yahweh. He makes Hitler seem like a wonderful fellow.

Turn or burn, right?

What about the people with no choice? What about the individuals throughout the past two-thousand years who never heard of a little Jewish man named Yeshua? I would suppose that they will be set on fire as well, but you may be like some Christians and assert your own opinion that surely Yahweh wouldn't be so unjust. I mean, he handled the thousand of little Muslim girls who died of cancer in their teens with justice didn't he?..............

...................

But again, we're not talking about God. We're talking about a 4,000 year old minor god from the Iron Age... a god from the Babylonian pantheon of 70 gods... the son of El, Yahweh. I'm as worried about him sending me to hell as I am Molech, Ba'al, Allah, Zeus, and Thor. And if he does send me to hell, then hell will be a more moral place than Heaven, because I would be in Hell and the bloodlusting, genocidal, infanticidal, misogynistic, rapist Yahweh would be in Heaven.

It's like saying "no reasonable man would suffer in a concentration camp instead of eating at Hitler's table."

After you get over the incredulousness, have fun showing me where I'm wrong.

You read like someone who does not know God properly and yet whose life is a scream of hatred against a "god" you have conceived who would dare to punish people for not taking Him seriously. You reel off a list of similarly unreal gods as comparable choices to the one you have rejected.

Your solution to this list of unbelievable deities is to dream up a Deistic fantasy that does not engage with peoples blasphemy or praise at all. Who created only to disengage and let the cosmos take its course.

Indeed you read as the ultimate example of the Cognitive Dissonance that your OP is meant to address.

But to engage with some of the points you raise..

Anyone who is captured will be run through with a sword. Their little children will be dashed to death right before their eyes. Their homes will be sacked and their wives raped by the attacking hordes. For I will stir up the Medes against Babylon, and no amount of silver or gold will buy them off. The attacking armies will shoot down the young people with arrows. They will have no mercy on helpless babies and will show no compassion for the children. (Isaiah 13:15-18 NLT)

The Babylonians would get what they had been dealing out from people just as bad. That God uses the wicked to punish or destroy the wicked demonstrates his Sovereignty and Almighty power.

From there Elisha went up to Bethel. While he was on his way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him. "Go up baldhead," they shouted, "go up baldhead!" The prophet turned and saw them, and he cursed them in the name of the Lord. Then two shebears came out of the woods and tore forty two of the children to pieces. (2 Kings 2:23-24 NAB)

Such taunts were symptomatic of a deeper rebellion and contempt for the things of God than mere taunts about baldness. Contempt for God is stupidity as this incident graphically demonstrates.

Regarding people born into poisoned or deceived cultures which do not in themselves share a revelation of God. The bible speaks about infant children going to heaven despite having never reached an age where they could have responded to a presentation about God (2 Samuel 12:23 ). It talks about an age of moral accountability that would imply that children dying before that age may well be saved (Isaiah 7:15–16). It talks about how people may respond to the revelation that they have received.

For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.

The Catholic Catechism teaches this:
Those who through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience—those too may achieve eternal salvation.

Someone who has heard the gospel and properly studied the New Testament has little excuse.

But the child rapist who converts on his deathbed deserves paradise forever.

You or indeed any one are hardly in a position to criticise Gods willingness to forgive a repentant sinner. It is the biggest single reason why we can trust Him. He wants to be with us and has done everything possible to make that happen.

I haven't. And again, we're talking about Yahweh, not God.

We are talking about a wilful misinterpretation of the Divine as revealed in the Old Testament. Israel sinned again and again but always it was Gods desire to restore them as it is for Him to have mercy on you.

Turn or burn. No reasonable man would choose hell.

And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever......Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.
Revelation 20 v 10, 15

 

[Received]

People who view the bible as entirely inspired or divinely authored likely view the Hebrew bible (OT) as an accurate reflection of Yahweh. I wouldn't call them unreasonable. I think you're taking a 30-50% chunk Christians and calling them "unreasonable." To say that means they cannot be reasoned with, and I certainly do not accept that as true.

Unreasonable doesn't mean incapable of being swerved by reason. It just means that their particular stance isn't as reasonable as it could be. And yeah, I'm going to hold on that point with that many Christians.

1) There are certain human norms. Having the moral minimum of not smashing infants in front of parents seems to be a human norm throughout history. We look at cultures that teach otherwise with awe in that they are extreme, bizarre, and outside of the norm.

That's because you're including cultures that don't do this with the norm. Again, it's not a question of norms, and I agree completely with you that these cultures are more barbaric. I'm saying consider the garden when you judge the flowers. That these cultures are, historically considered, on the lower end of the nice norm doesn't hit on my point that the individuals in these cultures are functioning within these cultures.

2) Given that you are indicating the ancient Hebrews were one of those extreme, bizarre, and outside of the norm societies, why in the world would we trust anything that came out of them in regards to theology?

Because it's not as extremist as you claim it to be (there are unambiguously bad stripes of blackness that are entangled with other shades of grey and white in the Hebrew narrative you present), and because an individual influenced by a bad culture is still capable of making good points about God, and the better an individual's culture becomes throughout a historical progression the better and more "objective" his perceptions become. You seem, overall perhaps, to be selecting the worst about this culture and labeling it according to this worst, when all things considered the Hebrews had some brilliant and beautiful insights into God alongside the bad ones we can easily drop as projections given how easily we see the fingerprints of barbaric psychology on them.

"Then I heard the LORD say to the other men, "Follow him through the city and kill everyone whose forehead is not marked. Show no mercy; have no pity! Kill them all – old and young, girls and women and little children. But do not touch anyone with the mark. Begin your task right here at the Temple." So they began by killing the seventy leaders. "Defile the Temple!" the LORD commanded. "Fill its courtyards with the bodies of those you kill! Go!" So they went throughout the city and did as they were told." (Ezekiel 9:5-7 NLT)

If that isn't psychopathic, I don't know what meaning the word can hold.

How about delusional?

Filling a religious building with dead bodies of a city you've already conquered does not appear to be based on either ignorance nor fear. It appears to be based on bloodlust.

As if bloodlust isn't itself based on ignorance and/or fear, or other variables.

All I'm doing is respecting the text, reading it contextually and according to its genre. You're taking what was written as literal history and saying, "I don't like it, therefore it isn't literal." Yet the parts you label "not literal" look nothing like the parts that are obviously written as metaphor or symbolism. It's just your way of making the bad stuff not real.

It's nowhere near as arbitrary or wishful as that. I'm saying you can easily see a progression from Old to New Testaments, and even from old post-NT churches to contemporary ones, where God becomes more and more seen and experienced as love and positive stuff. And always with the bad things at any time (OT, NT, older churches or newer ones) we can easily see the fingerprints of anthropomorphisms and human rotten psychology, which we can safely say need to be thrown out. Keep in mind that the characteristics of God described all throughout the Bible (loving, just, righteous, etc.) all demand that we do this: if God is said to be loving and there are verses where he clearly is Satanic, we must by necessity throw out the verses that are this way. E.g., take them non-literally, human projection speaking, or just wrong.

Sure.

I'm not saying that there are literally "many" Yahwehs, hence my "in a sense" adverbial phrase. I'm saying there are many perceptions and conceptions of who Yahweh in connection with the psychological maturity of the cultures we're discussing. So when you say that "Yahweh" is definitely not the creator, my question immediately is: "which conception that carries the label 'Yahweh'?" Is this the Yahweh of tribalist Judaism, the later Yahweh who wanted to save all the Gentiles, the Yahweh who claimed to become incarnate as Jesus and actually attempted to save all gentiles, the Yahweh as Jesus in Logos form who really is "bringing all men to myself"?

 

[BL2KTN]

You read like someone who does not know God properly and yet whose life is a scream of hatred against a "god" you have conceived who would dare to punish people for not taking Him seriously. You reel off a list of similarly unreal gods as comparable choices to the one you have rejected.

I hate Yahweh as much as I hate Hercules (and all other pretend gods). I other words, I don't.

Your solution to this list of unbelievable deities is to dream up a Deistic fantasy that does not engage with peoples blasphemy or praise at all. Who created only to disengage and let the cosmos take its course.

Nope. I simply resist describing the creator of the universe in ways that people cannot demonstrate, prove, or know.

Indeed you read as the ultimate example of the Cognitive Dissonance that your OP is meant to address.

Except that I'm not mentally stressed in the least. I was highly stressed, experiencing Cognitive Dissonance, as I matured as a Christian. The more I learned, the more I knew what I had been taught was not true.

The Babylonians would get what they had been dealing out from people just as bad. That God uses the wicked to punish or destroy the wicked demonstrates his Sovereignty and Almighty power.

So the little children deserved to be smashed according to you? Is your mind that depraved that you can defend the murder of children? Is this how far you will go for your Yahweh?

Such taunts were symptomatic of a deeper rebellion and contempt for the things of God than mere taunts about baldness. Contempt for God is stupidity as this incident graphically demonstrates.

So calling someone "bald" is bad enough that you think having little boys ripped apart by bears is an appropriate punishment. You terrify me. Would you drop a small boy into a cage with a starving bear if the child called a pastor "baldy"?

Regarding people born into poisoned or deceived cultures which do not in themselves share a revelation of God. The bible speaks about infant children going to heaven despite having never reached an age where they could have responded to a presentation about God (2 Samuel 12:23 ). It talks about an age of moral accountability that would imply that children dying before that age may well be saved (Isaiah 7:15–16). It talks about how people may respond to the revelation that they have received.

You think they really want to go to a Heaven ruled by the god that just had them ripped apart by bears and smashed until they died in front of their parents? It's like if Hitler saved the children from his concentration camps to come stay with him.

Your logic is off.

We are talking about a wilful misinterpretation of the Divine as revealed in the Old Testament. Israel sinned again and again but always it was Gods desire to restore them as it is for Him to have mercy on you.

Yahweh did restore Israel despite their sins. Meanwhile, he killed millions of their enemies for their sins... or just for existing depending on his mood. Yahweh was an evil war god.

Turn or burn. No reasonable man would choose hell.

I've already refuted this statement. You can retype it until you have carpel tunnel syndrome, but it won't change the erroneous beliefs you hold.

Unreasonable doesn't mean incapable of being swerved by reason. It just means that their particular stance isn't as reasonable as it could be. And yeah, I'm going to hold on that point with that many Christians.

You said the people were unreasonable, not their belief. One such person is Mindlight. Is Mindlight unreasonable?

That's because you're including cultures that don't do this with the norm. Again, it's not a question of norms, and I agree completely with you that these cultures are more barbaric. I'm saying consider the garden when you judge the flowers. That these cultures are, historically considered, on the lower end of the nice norm doesn't hit on my point that the individuals in these cultures are functioning within these cultures.

Why should we think that such a barbaric culture as the ancient Hebrews should be chosen by the creator of the cosmos as its chosen people?

Because it's not as extremist as you claim it to be (there are unambiguously bad stripes of blackness that are entangled with other shades of grey and white in the Hebrew narrative you present), and because an individual influenced by a bad culture is still capable of making good points about God, and the better an individual's culture becomes throughout a historical progression the better and more "objective" his perceptions become. You seem, overall perhaps, to be selecting the worst about this culture and labeling it according to this worst, when all things considered the Hebrews had some brilliant and beautiful insights into God alongside the bad ones we can easily drop as projections given how easily we see the fingerprints of barbaric psychology on them.

These ancient Hebrews considered such barbarism to be so reflective of their god that they included them in their sacred texts. It seems that you're trying to downplay the evil in the bible by saying "but, but there's good stuff too, and even more of it!"

How about delusional?

Psychopaths are delusional.

As if bloodlust isn't itself based on ignorance and/or fear, or other variables.

It reminds me of saying something isn't evil, then telling someone all the causes of evil in order to prove that.

It's nowhere near as arbitrary or wishful as that. I'm saying you can easily see a progression from Old to New Testaments, and even from old post-NT churches to contemporary ones, where God becomes more and more seen and experienced as love and positive stuff. And always with the bad things at any time (OT, NT, older churches or newer ones) we can easily see the fingerprints of anthropomorphisms and human rotten psychology, which we can safely say need to be thrown out. Keep in mind that the characteristics of God described all throughout the Bible (loving, just, righteous, etc.) all demand that we do this: if God is said to be loving and there are verses where he clearly is Satanic, we must by necessity throw out the verses that are this way. E.g., take them non-literally, human projection speaking, or just wrong.

Take what you like, toss what you don't. I see what you're doing.

I'm not saying that there are literally "many" Yahwehs, hence my "in a sense" adverbial phrase. I'm saying there are many perceptions and conceptions of who Yahweh in connection with the psychological maturity of the cultures we're discussing. So when you say that "Yahweh" is definitely not the creator, my question immediately is: "which conception that carries the label 'Yahweh'?" Is this the Yahweh of tribalist Judaism, the later Yahweh who wanted to save all the Gentiles, the Yahweh who claimed to become incarnate as Jesus and actually attempted to save all gentiles, the Yahweh as Jesus in Logos form who really is "bringing all men to myself"?

It would seem that Batman has a better canon than Yahweh, huh?

 

[Received]

You said the people were unreasonable, not their belief. One such person is Mindlight. Is Mindlight unreasonable?

If he takes Yahweh literally as I've opposed, then insofar as this issue is the case, yeah.

Why should we think that such a barbaric culture as the ancient Hebrews should be chosen by the creator of the cosmos as its chosen people?

Do you think other cultures weren't barbaric at the time in equal fashion? Again, you're magnifying the barbarism while excluding the good parts and concluding barbarism.

These ancient Hebrews considered such barbarism to be so reflective of their god that they included them in their sacred texts. It seems that you're trying to downplay the evil in the bible by saying "but, but there's good stuff too, and even more of it!"

Because there's good stuff. I'm saying if you go to a garden and find five bad plants and ten good plants, you're hastily generalizing if you stop at the five and say, "the garden is bad." And that they included god in their texts doesn't consider my point of projection.

Psychopaths are delusional.

But their delusions don't *cause* their psychopathy. To say psychopathy is just an epistemic matter is to miss what psychopathy means in the psychological literature.

It reminds me of saying something isn't evil, then telling someone all the causes of evil in order to prove that.

Not at all. I'm not saying that bad actions aren't evil.

Take what you like, toss what you don't. I see what you're doing.

How do you reach this conclusion?

It would seem that Batman has a better canon than Yahweh, huh?

And it seems like you're writing off this interpretation because you don't like it.

 

[BL2KTN]

If he takes Yahweh literally as I've opposed, then insofar as this issue is the case, yeah.

And you recognize that you're probably in the minority of Christians on this site, right? Are they all unreasonable like Mindlight?

Do you think other cultures weren't barbaric at the time in equal fashion? Again, you're magnifying the barbarism while excluding the good parts and concluding barbarism.

Confucianism came about around the same time the Hebrew bible was being canonized. Confucianism seems to be orders of magnitude more ethical than Yahweh... it would seem the creator of the cosmos would have used Confucianism a hundred times over before using the ancient Hebrews (who you now agree were barbaric).

Because there's good stuff. I'm saying if you go to a garden and find five bad plants and ten good plants, you're hastily generalizing if you stop at the five and say, "the garden is bad." And that they included god in their texts doesn't consider my point of projection.

The entire book of Genesis is fiction. The rest of the Pentateuch is fiction and disgusting laws (such as how to own slaves, sex slaves, child sacrifice, etc). When the start is five books of nonsense, what's the point?

But their delusions don't *cause* their psychopathy. To say psychopathy is just an epistemic matter is to miss what psychopathy means in the psychological literature.

As I said, if filling a religious building with the dead bodies of your murdered victims isn't psychopathy, I don't know what the word means.

How do you reach this conclusion?

The parts you want Yahweh to be, you keep. The parts you find unfitting for Yahweh, you discard.

And it seems like you're writing off this interpretation because you don't like it.

I like reading genres the way they are intended. If you'd like to interpret, let's read the Psalms in their original Hebrew. The parts we've discussing were never meant to be interpreted... they were literal history.

 

[single eye]

The problem with deism is the lack of purpose. There is no rational explanation for why GOD would create such a violent, hostile, and cruel universe/world in the first place. Add to that it does not resolve the lack of understanding of what our purpose is here in this universe/world.

 

[BL2KTN]

The problem with deism is the lack of purpose.

Why do you think deism lacks purpose?

There is no rational explanation for why GOD would create such a violent, hostile, and cruel universe/world in the first place.

You think there's a better explanation for a violent, hostile, cruel universe by inserting a loving creator? In actuality, I don't find the universe to be violent, hostile, or cruel. It's just physics. But if you think Yahweh specifically created human beings for a purpose, then yes, it is violent, hostile, and cruel towards humans past and present... and I'm not sure why a loving deity would do that.

Add to that it does not resolve the lack of understanding of what our purpose is here in this universe/world.

Again, I'm not sure why you think that.

 

[single eye]

I never said that I thought the creator of the universe was loving, you assumed it and you assumed wrong. I never said that I thought we were created by yahweh for a purpose, you assumed it and you assumed incorrectly. We do agree that a loving deity would never do such a thing and this is exactly why the creator of the universe could not possibly be GOD.

 

[BL2KTN]

I never said that I thought the creator of the universe was loving, you assumed it and you assumed wrong.

Saw the cross in your religious icon and figured that since you identify as a Christian seeker, you believe in a god that sacrificed himself out of love for humanity. Fooled again!

I never said that I thought we were created by yahweh for a purpose, you assumed it and you assumed incorrectly.

Sometimes I think the word Christian is functionally useless.

We do agree that a loving deity would never do such a thing and this is exactly why the creator of the universe could not possibly be GOD.

Alright, well, I'm not interested in whatever imaginary thing(s) made the universe and the next-Marvel-movie story you've made up for your religious beliefs.

 

[single eye]

Please enlighten me as to how you separate the creator of the universe, who you believe is a loving god, from yahweh? Is your position not made up?