I think God is crazy

Originally posted by DINSTAAR
I don't know if its just me, but I was raised in a Christian home and I have read through the Bible and did all the VBS's, camps, and big events like Promise Keepers, and now I find myself disgusted with Christianity and more recently, the Bible in particular. This has led me to think that the being written about in the Bible is crazy. I think God is crazy.

Are you familiar with the Ontological Argument? It's a philosophical argument that in broad terms says that if it's possible for us to imagine a perfect God "than which nothing greater can be thought", that He must therefore exist. I believed in God long before I ever picked up a Bible, and I was not raised in a Christian household. In everything around me I saw intelligent design. I sought out that creator and I found Him. I think your mistake is that you think He can be found in and defined by the Bible, but He does not reside there. Your Bible search has led you to the conclusion that "God is crazy", yet as the Ontological Argument clearly shows, if God exists He cannot be crazy, because by His very nature He is that which nothing greater can be thought. Your conclusion should instead be that the Bible has issues, because it does not represent a pure and perfect God. The problem with the Bible and all other documents of this nature is that they are written by people who are trying to describe the indescribable. Imagine a being that created everything, has existed an infinite length of time, is everywhere at once, exists out of time, etc. We do not have the capacity to understand this. God is beyond our understanding. In my opinion this is why every single believer had a different opinion of who/ what God is and a different interpretation of what has been written about Him. It's because we're trying to paint Him into a box that we can understand rather than accepting that He is beyond our understanding. I wish you the best on your journey and hope you don't end it because of the dead end you found in the indoctrination you were put through.

The Birth of Religion
We used to think agriculture gave rise to cities and later to writing, art, and religion. Now the world’s oldest temple suggests the urge to worship sparked civilization.



I think we should be less critical and more in awe of the rise of civilization and the role that spirituality played,

Göbekli Tepe, to Schmidt's way of thinking, suggests a reversal of that scenario: The construction of a massive temple by a group of foragers is evidence that organized religion could have come before the rise of agriculture and other aspects of civilization. It suggests that the human impulse to gather for sacred rituals arose as humans shifted from seeing themselves as part of the natural world to seeking mastery over it.


French archaeologist Jacques Cauvin believed this change in consciousness was a "revolution of symbols," a conceptual shift that allowed humans to imagine gods—supernatural beings resembling humans—that existed in a universe beyond the physical world. Schmidt sees Göbekli Tepe as evidence for Cauvin's theory. "The animals were guardians to the spirit world," he says. "The reliefs on the T-shaped pillars illustrate that other world."

In Genesis man was kicked out of the garden and the punishment was he became a tiller of soil,

ngm.nationalgeographic.com...

I found it interesting that they continued to build on the site, but it never was as spectacular the first

one part of humankind turned its back on foraging and embraced agriculture.

Puzzle piled upon puzzle as the excavation continued. For reasons yet unknown, the rings at Göbekli Tepe seem to have regularly lost their power, or at least their charm. Every few decades people buried the pillars and put up new stones—a second, smaller ring, inside the first. Sometimes, later, they installed a third. Then the whole assemblage would be filled in with debris, and an entirely new circle created nearby. The site may have been built, filled in, and built again for centuries.

Bewilderingly, the people at Göbekli Tepe got steadily worse at temple building. The earliest rings are the biggest and most sophisticated, technically and artistically. As time went by, the pillars became smaller, simpler, and were mounted with less and less care. Finally the effort seems to have petered out altogether by 8200 B.C. Göbekli Tepe was all fall and no rise.

ngm.nationalgeographic.com...

Who were the gods,

and why did they disappear?

What did ancient man know or have contact with that we no longer have?

The construction of a massive temple by a group of foragers?
and as time went by they became worse at building the temples?

Originally posted by Harro
My advice to you is to pick up a subject or two at a college and study theology. You might benefit from some more insightful, academic readings of the bible rather than relying on those from your childhood. I'm sorry you are raging against your upbringing but, whilst I respect your opinion on your take of the Bible, you may want to inject some rigour via more learned opinions.

I was thinking the same thing this morning, research biblical archeology and read some books by Minimalists and. Maximalists.

There is an irrefutable fact of an ultimate reality that I am about to present to you all. Don't take this with a grain of salt, but listen closely, understand, and consider the implications.

The ultimate and the absolute is as follows:
Infinity and Nothing

If infinity were something it would be finite, therefore infinity is nothing. Whatever you say about infinity, you can say about nothing. We all come from nothing. That is scary for most people so they try to make up a way out and call it religion. Fortunately, you don't have to make up anything anymore. Nothing isn't just nothing, but nothing is a paradox that is infinity/nothing. That is God.

God isn't crazy, he's just unstable. God appears contradictory in the Bible, and that's exactly what he is. But it is what it is. You can either destroy your way to nothingness, or discover and love your way to infinity. Either way, you will be headed to the same place. It's just a matter of perception.

Read my signature and some of my other recent threads. I offer absolute and ultimate knowledge about the nature of all that is and all that isn't.