Do you know that the God of the Bible doesn't exist?

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When you stop double-posting.

O.K. I quit double-posting, are you goint to quit trying to prove your god exists??

Touche, Ragtime. He's got you there....

God will exist whether you choose to believe in Him or not. Things absolute will remain true regardless of whether anyone thinks "yea" or "nay", even if all people who believed in God turned away from Him, He and His standards will remain true. Even when the universe and time are no more, God and His Word will remain.

But you can also look at it this way; humans are the only ones on the planet who reason, and put together constructive thoughts and beliefs. Animals act on instincts, mainly for survival. So therefore, God exists in the minds of the believers, and without man and his beliefs, there would be no god, because animals don't have the ability to think like we do. So saying God will exist long after we've departed is a sort of rhetorical statement, because once man disappears, God also disappears.

My birds show ability to reason and I have noticed they do have a language of a sort, even if an in-house one among themselves. It isn't a sophisticated as Egyptian, but then again, neither is English at least in my opinion. I believe these parakeets and cockatiels know God, but mainly from the book of nature which has been corrupted by sin. The ones that can speak among themselves may be able to pass down information, but not as well as written records.

How can you not understand that the Creator of the universe, except for His Son Jesus who is God in human flesh, exists apart from His Creation?

But so-called talking birds (parrots, minahs budgerigahs, parakeets etc) are only mimicking speech that they hear. If you talk to or around a bird long enough, they will repeat what is being said, and may even build up a vocabulary. It doesn't mean that they have independent thought and reason in the way we do. If they were in the wild, for example, with no human contact, they would just be chirping in no distinct language about anything and everything. So saying your birds know of god isn't exactly true, because they don't think like us.

We're all human and therefore none of us has perfect knowledge, so how can any of us really know God? We try to create a representation within our mind of how God might be (if we believe in a God) but how do we know we have got it exactly right?

I think that some of the studies which show that
some birds have language comprehension skills
approximately equivalent to chimps disprove this.
But, the point has little to do with birds, OR language
processing. If there is such a thing, clearly all partakes
of it.

The problem that I have is reconciling the evil and
spiteful God of the OT (and remember, Jesus did
say that the rules of the OT stand, even if some, such
as Paul and Ragtime disagree with his word - but who
was Jesus anyway?) with what I would define as love.

Calandale, I have much the same question myself - if Jesus is a God of love (as per the Bible teachings) why does he let so many bad things happen to good people? If it's to test them, then I don't think the test is fair.

I can imagine god, at the end of the exam: the bell rings, the class (all humanity) hands in their papers, and god throws away his black pen. Picks up his red pen and fails the lot, with a wry grin on his face saying 'ha ha, that'll teach 'em..'

Calandale wrote:
I think that some of the studies which show that
some birds have language comprehension skills
approximately equivalent to chimps disprove this.

The smartest known bird is an African grey parrot named Alex. He's quite bright, but not a chimpanzee level.
Alex the parrot

Alex was indeed the one I was thinking of,
but I see no evidence in that article which
refutes the idea of a chimp-like capability;
indeed, it seems to claim better than they
have.

Though, even pigeons are able to learn certain
language skills. And Ravens are outstanding problem
solvers.

Chimpanzees have very extensive sign-language vocabularies, and are capable forming new compound words and teaching their sign language to each other. They can discuss things that happened days earlier. As the article mentions, they cannot 'talk,' but this is because they do not have the physical volal capacity to mimic a wide range of sounds the way that humans and birds can.

chimpanzee communication

talk with chimps

chimp bios

The bible was written by men, just because men claim a book they wrote was from god, doesn't mean it is! How many nutcases on the street claim to be jesus and we simply ignore them? Somehow people think an old book written by greedy men for political domination of the masses of slaves and poor men and women, is somehow holy? It's a bunch of crap. The bible was written by rich people to control the simple minded.

I'm not sure what you mean by the God "of" a book. (This is beside the fact that the Bible is actually two completely different books.)

A book does not own God. More importantly, a hegemony does not own God. There seems to be a trend these days to think that God empowers hegemonies. That is not what religion is about. If it could be said that God empowers anything, it is what Hegel called the "actual", which is usually in favor of the oppressed.

Although it cannot be proven that God exists, it could be said that there is evidence. And it has nothing to do with books or miracles. It has to do with physics. There are symmetries in physics at the effective level, but it can easily be argued that these symmetries are not fundamental. The question of why the universe has apparently non-fundamental symmetries, or indeed why the universe has anything at all that can be described mathematically, has no logical answer.

No matter how much we know about the universe, there will always be an unknown at the root of the knowledge tree. It is reasonable to assume that the universe is not built upon an infinite layering of different systems. It is also reasonable to assume that the fundamental layer is unknowable. Then, it is reasonable to identify the control at the fundamental layer that extends through and organizes the other layers as God, and to speculate on what relation God has with our lives.

A holy book is, at the most basic level, a philosophical essay about God. Like all philosophical essays, it contains some things that make sense and some that don't, without any good answer as to which is which. This does not detract from the inspiration that holy books give to people that read them to get inspired with goodness.

It is important to note that reading a holy book does not guarantee that it is interpreted for a good purpose. It is this good purpose that I consider the link between holy books and God, independently of any specific thing the books say.

The fact that holy books were written by hegemonies does not detract from their ability to inspire goodness in those who are willing to seek it. It is irrational to assume that hegemonies are incapable of writing anything inspirational. Hegemonies are simply groups of people. And money is not the only thing society revolves around. It also revolves around conscience, inasmuch as those who have a conscience make the hegemonies hear them. In today's age of computers, this is easier than ever. We do not anymore have to go to a public square to shout and risk getting our head blown off.

Note that a conscience can only be explained as a gift from God. It cannot be deduced from theories of games or behaviors.

Instead of the usual meaning "radical orthodoxy", we could give "RO" a new meaning "radical objectivity". A hegemony that betrays its people betrays itself. And it is our right and our duty to assert the existence of a proper meaning of hegemonic rules, and to hold hegemonies accountable for taking the letter of the law away from its spirit. To rebel against words whose meaning has been forgotten serves only to further condemn ourselves in the eyes of those who read them falsely. We must instead rebel against the forgetfulness itself.