Well, I think we can agree that Jehovah is a general pain in the ass, immature and excessively heavily msucled. He admits he's jealous, he's arbitrary and cruel and unfair (what did the Egyptian firstborn ever do to him?), he's obviously insecure and intolerant and incredibly self centered -- what's his first commandment ("Hear O Israel, The Lord Our Lord, The Lord Is One") -- and he's violent, keeps smiting people as well as encouraging others to go around smiting. He drowned the whole world because he was pissed of it, instead of fixing it or turning it over to someone who could if he couldn't. And heis commandments, while probably not too far out of keeping with the time, are not exactly enlightened by civilized standards. The death penalty for witchcraft. For adultery. According to some, for homosexuality. Sanctioned slavery. Degraded women. And then there are those frogs. Definitely not the sort of deity you'd want for a neighbor.
Course, Jesus isn't much improvement, if any. He's supposedly the God of Love, but if you don't believe in him he'll cast you into a pit of eternal torment. Why does he care whether believe in him or not? If he's so omnipotent, why does it matter to him what our cognitive state is? And cruel, you can't beat it. Fail to believe and suffer the tortments of the damned forever. Also a bad neighbor.
If the CoE deity is more of an absentee type, that is an improvement. But I think he does a lot of the Jesus stuff, no? If you need a monotheistic deity, I'm going with Doug & Liza's Deity Lite of the Church of The Free Lunch. As I understand it, the only rules are: don't believe silly things, don't be cruel, and have lots of interesting sex, isn't that right?
Besides, he's got no calories, no carbs, no fat, and no sugar, right? You can't say that for every deity. The God of the Philosophers, sans parts and passions, probably qualifies, but he comes with all this theology. I mean, what use is a diet deity who comes with the Opera Omnia of Augustine, Anselm, Abelard, Occan, Aquinas, Roger Bacon, William of Occam, Maimonodes, and the rest of the library? I like exercise myself, but that would make you into a spiritual Schwarzenegger. No, Doug & Liza's Diety Lite is the Way to go. If you have have a god.
now, you could go all Greek and have a bunch of gods. You'd have to admit the Olympian dieties would be fun live near, lots of partiesd, good food, Olympian laughter -- as long as one of then didn't take a dislike to your neighborhood and have someone send an army against it to get back someone's cheating wife. But they actually have two gods devoted specially to sex, one of whom is supposed to be especially hot, and that is a big plus from my point of view. You'd have to watch out about old Zeus running around as a bull or swan or a shower of gold and hitting on your wife, but if you're not jealous yourself, that's really up to her, isn't it?
Meditating on the divine,
jks
--- Bill Bartlett <billbartlett at dodo.com.au> wrote:
> At 7:27 AM -0500 5/1/05, John Adams wrote:
>
> >On Jan 4, 2005, at 3:36 PM, andie nachgeborenen
> wrote:
> >
> >>what's wrong with frogs from the skies?
> >
> >First, they make the road slippery. Second, they
> just encourage the
> >possums and armadillos.
>
> That applies to any plague of frogs, whether they
> came from the sky
> or whatever. Many years ago, as a travelling
> door-to-door salesman, I
> was dropped in the middle of such a frog plague, in
> north Queensland.
> The entire town and surrounding area was teeming
> with a carpet of
> frogs. It also rained continuously the entire day.
>
> The problem with frogs from the sky I believe,
> though I haven't
> experienced this personally, is that it requires
> particularly extreme
> weather conditions to actually get all those frogs
> up into the sky in
> the first place. Such weather conditions can lift
> all sorts of things
> besides frogs into the sky and drop them down again.
> This has the
> potential to be far more unpleasant than a slippery
> road. Though, as
> I say, I haven't experienced it personally, so I'm
> only speculating.
>
> I agree, deities that pull dangerous stunts like
> that to get
> attention are the sort of deities we can well do
> without. I much
> prefer the sober CofE sort of God that keeps his
> nose out of our
> business. In return, asking only that we stay
> completely out of His
> business. That way, everyone gets along just fine.
>
> Bill Bartlett
> Bracknell Tas
> ___________________________________
>
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