Iacchus said:
What Iacchus is doing is recycling the old "liar, lunatic, lord" argument that has been a common tactic of Christian fanatics lately. The argument is that if Jesus wasn't lying or crazy, then he must have been who he said he was. It is a false trichotomy, if you will. They then go on the offensive and claim that anybody who doesn't believe Jesus must be calling him a liar or a lunatic. They seem to ignore the most obvious answer, which is that he could be quite simply wrong. Not crazy. Not lying. Just wrong.
But then I'm afraid we'd all be good little robots and there would be nothing to learn. Why does the rest of the world (nature) not need to know about it? Look at our closest "relatives," the apes? Maybe it's just me, but I can't conceive of them postulating the need for a Creator. They seem to be perfectly content with what nature has given them ... otherwise they probably would have developed their own dialect by now and complaining about it just as much as we do.
No.
Heh...my sister in law tried this one on me last summer. She had never even thought of the possibility that the story might simply be fictional. She had no idea of the chronology of the writing of the bible, of the pre-existing myths that were incorporated into it...simple things that it seems to me that anyone who bases their beliefs on the bible ought to know about it. She thought, for instance, that the gospels were written by J's disciples during his lifetime, as a sort of diary. The fact that the first book came some 30 years after J was crucified gives quite a long time for the "telephone game" to distort a story.
Yes, it is only us who have felt the need to create God. Finally, you get it.
I don't even need to take it this far. As I'm merely relating things from my own experience. It's interesting though, how you make it sound as if I've "borrowed" it from somebody else. The "default position" does make me out to be a liar though or, a terribly irrational person.
Perhaps because we're the only ones who can appreciate the fact that He does?
As several here have said, the default position is that you are quite simply wrong.
The history of religion supports the idea of us inventing god. The notion of "appreciating", as you put it, is *drumroll* circular. Congratulations.
It doesn't surprise me one bit that equally ignorant statements like this are made by those whose superiority is certain unto themselves.
I understand that the Jewish Oral Tradition was quite strict, and required a lot of discipline. Not just anyone was allowed to "repeat" the stories.
No, our perception of God is relative, just as it is relative with anything else. Or, would you have us all believe that the Universe which, each of us perceives differently, is merely a figment of our imagination?
No.
