God is evil or God does not exist

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Again, the reasoning being used in this thread to lay indictments against God is human reasoning, and therefore imperfect.

If you want to successfully indict God, then you must yourself be “more prerfect than He.

Could you elaborate on this. I want to be clear on what you are saying before I respond.

Let me know which part.

If you mean the last part about reductive materialism as a total world view rather than a niche application I got into that in the third paragraph of my second post (right after Mikah's comment). If you mean the first part, ie. the sky-daddy Zeus bit, I might need a more specific question.

I read it, I don't see how either Theism or Materialism is dead or dying respectively. I could believe Theism is dying at least in the general public, but having actually lived with some dead believers and witnessing their community I think it will persist in a minority population indefinitely.

As for materialism dying? There is some speculation that a "post-scarcity" society will end materialism. I am skeptical a "post-scarcity" society will ever exist.

Ah, okay, I meant something very different by 'materialism'. I meant the philosophy that consciousness only exists on neurons and that the rest of the universe is strictly non-conscious.

Also I didn't mean that the numbers of believers in organized religion was plummeting to zero, I meant that the evisceration of the direct credibility, especially at the level of a literal read, of the stories involved by blunt facts from other directions pretty much proves that most religious institutions are just cultural and political in nature of their content and that their holy books are largely a collection of politics and culture from earlier times. While there are likely certain bits of mystic truth in these texts they tend to be much more general, symbolic, they're not available at the direct narrative level, and the people who get into studying them are often branded heretical, not main-stream, or esoteric/occult, because the value of those ingredients tends to run orthogonal to the rigid moral stories often taken up by the churches, synagogues, and mosques reciting the letter of the stories.

I think the stories we've been telling ourselves, first by dogmatic theism for thousands of years and then increasingly dogmatic atheism over the past few centuries, are but far too simplistic to be accurate and nature seems to keep reminding us that our beliefs or what's trending in culture doesn't change the nature of reality.

Thanks for clearing that up, I was confused. Makes sense now and is much more relevant to this thread. Your language left ambiguity that I took in a very different direction, because my brain is fixated on capitalist-communist debates.

I'm an Atheist, but have always found a polytheistic or Zoroastrian view of the world more plausible than monotheism.

As FNord alluded to above, trying to interpret "God" by human logic is folly. A supreme being would have a level of thinking far beyond what we can even comprehend.

Gnostics believe that what created everything was not God but a Demi-urge that thought it was God.And that's why creation is flawed.

Kinda works when you read up on it