As Christians, Jews, and Muslims, we believe in an infinite, eternal God who is beyond the universe and is not bound by time and space the same way humans are.

This is why I can't buy the words when I hear them:

God likes this
God dislikes this
God was right about this
God saw this
God anticipated this
God was angry
God loves, God hates

These are all human characteristics suggesting that God is living and experiencing things along with us on a day to day basis. And because he's more powerful than humans, he can predict the future and make a plan for it, but this is not the same as God not being bound by past, present, and future.

I know I will have many Bible verses quoted at me about how God was
pleased about something and angered at something else, but how can this be?

I'm mostly looking for theists to explain this to me in a logical way, because I know the atheist's answer is just, "well, he doesn't exist", so that's how it can be.

logical fallacy. DUCY?

IDNCY

Religion is anti logic.

I'm not catholic but this is a pretty good summary - didn't have time to look for the protestant version, wouldn't be much different.

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01558c.htm

Theism and logic are not compatible. Anyone who says otherwise does not understand one or the other, or both.

Don't forget that God is a white anglo too. He must have looked really strange walking around the Middle East.

The ancient Eastern religions would probably agree with this statement also.

To my understanding the Eastern religions don't really believe in a God in the same way that Jews, Christians, and Muslims do. They more or less believe in the divinity of the natural universe, like god is all and all is god so to speak (this is specifically Buddhism and Taoism; Hinduism and Jainism don't really apply to either category.

How about thinking about it this way.

If there is a God and he wants to impact us wouldn't he have to take on human characteristics to communicate with us and to shape us?

Also people claim to have a relationship with God and these human like attributes make him both approachable and help provide a means of approaching him and identifying with him.

So you would admit that this is not God's true nature, but merely a face he puts on in order to communicate with us? If that is the case, why would God stop halfway and make his communication to us debatable and ambiguous? If God really wanted (another human quality) to take on human characteristics why not make it indisputably clear by making a loud voice in the sky or something like that?

It seems to me that the human characteristics attributed to God are given exclusively by humans. Because God's true nature is incomprehensible, other than some entity existing in, beyond, over, and around, time and space, the best we could do to explain him to people was to give him human characteristics, especially the uneducated. I don't believe that God has any sort of real human characteristics, not even that he/she/it adopts them to talk to us. Nor do I believe that God has any vested interest in us as individuals.

The way you say it sounds like this:

1. God created the universe and everything in it, including us
2 Somehow he created some barrier between him and us.
3. God his having trouble breaking through his own barrier.
4. Because God wants to talk to us, but can't get there fully. At best he gives us the Bible, but mixes the Koran in there too to confuse us; then he performs ambigous miracles to show us he is real. It seems this is like static over a radio transmission.

If you believe in God, and I do, isn't it much more logical to assume that God just exists, and humans do the best they can to comprehend him?

I think it is God's true nature still he has to make things intelligible to us.

How can we comprehend him fully when he's so much better and more powerful than us plus we have weakened spiritual processing powers (some type of disjuncture occurred at the Fall).

To me the 2 outstanding characteristics about God are his love and his holiness. Everything he does is so much bigger, purer and better than what we can do. His mercy, his justice, his blessings, everything he does flows out of these two intertwined attributes of his.

A lot of his bible directives to believers come across as ways to re-establish a connection with him. He does it through prayer, our imaginations, bible readings, good works, modeling through Christ, and probably a lot of other things in the physical world that you have to ponder to pick up on.

I think there is just enough order and just enough chaos in the world that the biblical account is accurate enough for us to draw archetypes. How we use those archetypes depends on who we are. We are suppose to grow up in faith yet in relationship to God we will always be his "little children". Just as an adult's actions is mostly incomprehensible to a small child a lot of God's actions are incomprehensible to us. Small children mainly focus on what their parents do in particular for them. Adults exhibit the same behavior towards God. All their questions revolve around "Me". Its a big and time consuming process for some people to learn the world doesn't revolve around them.

Then it is obvious you have a poor grasp of logic. Logic does not rest on the empirical provability or rational conceivability of a statement.

All apples are garden gnomes -> apples grow on trees -> Some garden gnomes grow on trees is perfectly fine (if a little surreal) logic.

Don't forget that the Buddha put aside all questions about the existence or non-existence of God as irrelevant to confronting the unsatisfactoriness of life. This has not stopped many Buddhists from believing in gods or other supernatural beings, of course.

In Hinduism there is also a dichotomy between the masses who believe in various incarnations of personal gods, whereas in the Vedic roots of Hinduism and in intellectual circles God is more or less as you express it.

In Taoism God is the watercourse way, again something "like god is all and all is god," although there is a mystical strain of Taoism that I don't know much about that may favor a supernatural/anthropomorphic God.

Zen Buddhism has adopted a kind of Taoist attitude toward religion and makes light of anything too doctrinaire while eschewing any theist sort of God.

personification of god:



holy trinity imo