Silly phrases atheists like to say

If God does not really have a face, then one wonders why bother going to the trouble telling Moses that He won't show it.

Exodus "21 “There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock. 22 When my glory passes that place, I will put you in a large ·crack  in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. 23 Then I will ·take away [remove] my hand, and you will see my back. But my face must not be seen.”

In any normal reading  does that, with the concrete detail such as the cleft in a rock etc, really seem intended as metaphorical?  

It must also be noted that other Christian sites do take the Moses encounter literally:


Ultimately though whether 'face' is to be interpreted literally or metaphorically is not really the issue. It lies in the fact that in some places in scripture whether a "glory" or anthropomorphic attribute, we are told God's "face" cannot be seen, at other points it is described as being so. That's the contradiction and you haven't addressed that.

A further thought is this: if we are to discard any literal notions of anthropomorphism when reading scripture as just educational aids then, to be logically consistent, we ought to discard notions of your deity as supposedly possessing those very human characteristics of, say, love, anger, jealousy, repentance and mercy. 

Er... but didn't you just say above God can't be seen at all?  It appears not all contradictions are to be found in the Bible lol



Yes, and the unfortunate context here is that you are saying two different things at once, while scripture's contradiction is plain and clear. QED.





You need to go back and read again, to where I already said apologists equate calamity conveniently just with Natural Evil (and explained the compromises that involves.)

But God still says he creates calamities, which is the point; a contradiction especially when Joel for instance clearly says He relents over the same. One presumes that God would not relent over that which He was not responsible, while it is hard to reconcile an all-good (or is that too anthropomorphic?) god with one who deliberately creates disaster and the resultant misery. But I can see why you do not wish to address the point I made.

Next up: was man is created before other animals or was man God's final creation? Genesis' two creation accounts imply both.

A related issue is when one asserts that objective justice or morality originates from the deity. Since what is objective must be necessarily free from the preferences of personality,  the Bible's anthropomorphic verses, including those specifying that God is by turn jealous, loving, angry, merciful etc and with His "chosen peoples" make any claim to objectivity harder to sustain.

OMG, Eva's back! 

I suppose if one defines morality as God's will, then for people that is an objective standard - it doesn't matter what disagreements people have about what's right, there is only one moral truth. That truth may be then subjective for God, but objective for everyone else.

Probably just temporarily. Spending most of my free time reading/writing these days and mostly keep my social interaction to a handful of friends/family. This place seems pretty dead anymore anyway. I think internet forums have sadly been sacrificed to the gods of the major social media platforms, most of which aren't conducive to this kind of in-depth discussion, hence my lack of interest in them. 

Anyway, my post was just noting that it's really a definitional thing. To me, subjective/objective should be used to denote the differences between things that are dependent upon minds or independent from minds. If morality derives from God's mind it's still subjective under that definition. It's not mind-independent the way rocks and trees are. The claim that there is only one moral truth (or that moral truth exists) is simply moral realism, not necessarily objectivity (though there's an argument to be had on the reality of non-objective things). Further, someone's subjectivity isn't objective to everyone else; that's not how that works. We can infer someone's subjective states through objective means--brains, language, actions--but the objective means are still distinct from the subjective states. We also don't even have that with God because we don't have a being we can interact with as an object at all; what we have are people trying to infer what the subjectivity of that mind is by observing the objectivity of reality. 

However, even if we eliminated all of these difficulties and agreed that we had access to God's mind/subjectivity and knew what his standards for morality was, we're still left in the position of, one, having morality be relative to a mind's subjectivity and, two, having to agree on using that subjectivity as the standard we should use. The latter is not trivial. Consider the hypothetical where a god exists but is very different than the supposedly-benevolent god of Judeo-Christianity and this God deems that what's moral is actually what causes the most pain and suffering to others. Are we then obligated to accept this god's morality, even if that god created the universe, life, etc., as the ultimate, "objective" standard for morality? Or can we simply reject that morality and stick to our own? Now, what fundamentally changes is if the god IS the supposedly-benevolent God of Judeo-Christianity? There's a few paths you can take here: you can claim that both the benevolent and malevolent gods have THE "objectively true" morality and we are wrong for rejecting it/right for accepting it in either case; or you can claim (as I do) that morality derives from our innate-but-conflicted feelings about how to achieve our desires within a social context where we also have to take others' desires into consideration and thus we aren't obligated to treat any deity's morality as "the objectively right" morality; or you can try to concoct some argument why we should accept the morality of one God but not the other and how our ability to do that doesn't violate the entire notion of "objective" morality. 

Good point! 

Genesis 1:1 "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth." How could that possibly be historic? Nobody was there to witness it. Nobody wrote it down. The only feasible explanation is that someone just assumed "God did it". In the first sentence of the Bible, I’ve debunked your claim that the Bible is historic. Or is that one of the places that you cherry-pick with the word, "context"?

Google the subjunctive phrase, "as if", which you used twice in your response.
•"as would be the case if" – to rephrase your words, "The people that were writing about Jesus wrote about him as would be the case if Jesus were a historical figure". It doesn't mean that Jesus WAS a historical figure, it means that "they" were writing about him AS IF he were.

Yes, gullible people were willing to die for Jesus. People were also willing to die for Jim Jones, David Koresh, Marshall Applewhite, Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy, Charles Taze Russel, and many others. Are/were they supernatural? You're not willing to die for Spider Man, but are you willing to die for Jesus and the truth of Christianity? No?? Then you’re a bit smarter than those that did.

How can Matthew 2 be historic? Keep in mind that Matthew was written at least 60 years after Jesus’ birth. Without prior written documentation, all Matthew could rely on was hearsay of other hearsay. Yet Matthew 2 gives the account of the virgin birth and the wise men in Bethlehem. If you’ve ever played Telephone (A.K.A. Chinese Whispers) as a kid, quite a bit of embellishment can occur over the course of 60 years.

Do you believe Matthew’s gospel of the wise men? Why doesn't anyone else mention them? Do you also believe the historic tale of Joseph Smith finding the golden plates? After all, a few of Joseph Smith’s friends allege that they saw the golden plates (so it must be true).

99% of things religious people say about Atheists, are made up things that only happens in their own head.

Silly phrases atheists like to say

are nowhere nearly as silly as the phrases theists like to say...as this thread has evidenced.

Guess I was wrong then. Love the image of God laughing at those followers who think the same as I did though...