From: Stephen Buckley <sbuckley@sfu.ca>
Newsgroups: alt.atheism.moderated
Subject: Re: who's the real God(tm)
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1992 22:36:19 GMT
Distribution: world
Organization: Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada

Eli Chiprout <emc@doe.carleton.ca> writes:

>Stephen Buckley <sbuckley@sfu.ca> writes:
>>  i do not believe in God(tm) because he brags and lacks humility like buddha.
>>god can be humble if he wants but does he not deserve to be glorified if
>>he created everything?  if not, why not?  there is more to my faith and
>>relationship with god than him claiming to be the creator.  basically
>>if you are willing to worship the greek gods because they best describe
>>reality and give you a relationship with god, go right ahead.  i'll
>>stick with God(tm) in the bible.

>It is difficult to understand what anthropomorphic statements mean to god?
>Why does a god need to be worshiped at all?

  :)  i should compile a faq with this as one of the top questions.  god
needs nothing.  he deserves worship for creating us.  

>Does an engineer need worship for creating the world's fastest supercomputer.
>(I am an engineer, an although I did not create the word's fastest
>supercomputer, I would not ask for worship if I did -- Just money :-)  ).

  no an engineer doesn't deserve worship because the don't create everything
out of nothing.  the analogy between humans creating things and god
creating everything breaks down simply because we are not god, the creator.

>Suppose this god created everything there is as he claims (does that
>include himself?).  What does this imply about his claim on my worship?  Does
>time mean the same to him as to me?  Or does he perceive all of time
>in one single mindview?  If he created everything, is he incapable of
>creating it without earthquakes,famines, pestilences or does he send
>these around every once in a while (mainly on poor third world countries)
>to teach us a lesson?  If he created everything, has he lost control so
>that now a random evolutionary pattern taken over, placing disorganized
>craters on the moon, and the rise and fall of species over vast periods
>of time on the earth.

  these are really great questions which i could answer in the context of
biblical description of the nature of god.  but to do so, we'd all have
to accept for the sake of argument that god exists and is knowable through
the bible, however recent experience shows that no one is willing to
take on this premise for me to answer these questions without heaps of
public and private flames.  i have answers to these questions from the
bible and i'd be happy to respond to you privately.  but i'm not stupid
enough to answer questions like these publicly again.

>You elect one supposed fact, "the original creation of everything" and
>use that as a basis of worship (which means something to humans but not
>necessarily to a god) and neglect so many other facets of the "creation"
>that would clearly point one away from worship, assuming that god needed
>such.  

  and to be more clear [like i should have been in the beginning] i don't
have faith in god merely because he claimed to create everything.  there
is a lot more to my faith than that.
---                          
     Stephen Buckley        /    the meaning of life is the answer
     sbuckley@sfu.ca       /      to God's question in the Bible:
   TrueNorthStrong&Free   /        
      1-800-REALITY      /    "What are you going to do with my Son?"