Describing the Christian God

[Confused]

From another thread the following quote was made:

So long as we insist that God is a scientific matter, then I cannot. In that sense, I agree with you, there will be no direct scientific evidence for God - thus, I do not believe in God as you describe him. I would propose, however, that this is not the whole of the story.

I have heard my daughter make similar claims and find them just as meaningless.

I would ask someone to please describe the Christian God to me and what evidence they have to support their description of Him.

Late edit: as usual, my OP isn't clear enough. I am looking for attributes that you would use to describe God. Not what He wants us to do, not what proves his existence.

[InTheFlesh]

Are you not pro abortion?

I am pro choice and not all that into abortions while Christians should just claim it is God's will that the fetus is aborted.

Are you anti abortion?

[InTheFlesh]

Beto,

You and the bible make DIFFERENT claims.
If we are exactly like God,
how is it that we are flesh and bones
and he is not?
Can you provide scripture to support your claims that God is not a man?
Were we not made by the hands of God?
Did he not breathe out of his mouth
and give us the breath of life?
The words of God come out of the mouth of Jesus!
Is Jesus not a man?
Is Jesus not the eternal creator?

Doesn't nature itself teach you that everything comes from seed of itself?
Were we not all born inside another human being?
Just like everything else,
if a human drops a seed
the result is another human.
If you plant a seed that came from a tomato,
you will get a tomato.
It's not that deep!
God, who is Spirit
manifested InTheFlesh.
We are the same,
We posess a spirit
but we live InTheFlesh.
But we were alive before our physical body was formed.
God is a reality.
Our makeup is proof!

Made in the "image of God" refers to our immortal soul....but those who lives on in the flesh such as yourself would find it difficult to search our soul.

But, God gave us the revelations, the knowledge...even His Own Son and the freedom to use our reasoning power to discover who we are and in whose image were we created.

Unfortunately, right now our immortal soul once so beautiful has been distorted and corrupted with the ugliness of hate, malice, envy, wickedness, greed, lust....

but God calls us the use our will to direct our actions and our life to the proper end of goodness...which is to become the image we were created with.

Can you back up your quote I bolded with scripture?

[Cathar1950]

Are you not pro abortion?

I am pro choice and not all that into abortions while Christians should just claim it is God's will that the fetus is aborted.

Are you anti abortion?

It is something between a woman and her doctor and none of my business.
Some abortions are simply miscarriages, so you have to ask God what He is.
38,000 children die from poverty in the USA alone and we have to wonder how pro-life we really are especially when the godly hate welfare which is about 70% children.
What does abortion have to do with your convoluted, limited and unexplainable description of God?

[Confused]

I think she is afraid of me.

Afraid of you, I think not. Believe it or not, the world doesn't revolve around you and my health certainly doesn't. Next time, try not to think so hard and maybe you won't be wrong.

Confused,
What does being created in the image of God have to do with us being evil?

Sorry, when did I make the assertion that it has anything with us being evil? I don't think I am evil.

Do you know the definition of "image"?
Jesus is the image of the invisible God.
An image is NOT good or evil, it's something you can see with your eyes.

I will have to admit that the meds they have me on are a bit strong, but I have absolutely no clue what you are talking about. Is there anything here even related to my OP or you just spouting out to make yourself feel important?

Your screen name fits you PERFECTLY!

I will take that as a compliment. I would rather be confused than be arrogant and self righteous.

Pss.145
[17] The LORD is righteous in all his ways, and holy in all his works.

How does this describe God? He is righteous? What does that mean? He is holy? What does that mean? He is this way in all His ways and works? Do you think you could actually address the OP or do you just enjoy your nonsense? Why is your description (if you can really call it that) accurate?

And in case you get all self important again, I will respond when I am able to next, not at your command. I think my daughter has pretty much summed you up accurately.

[Confused]

MODERATOR NOTE:

I would remind ALL posters to look to the OP and stay on topic. Abortion is not found anywhere in it.

If we can't, then I will have no problem locking my own thread rather than seeing few select posters take it into such a downward spiral that nothing will allow it to recover.

[Confused]

Are you not pro abortion?

I am pro choice and not all that into abortions while Christians should just claim it is God's will that the fetus is aborted.

Are you anti abortion?

It is something between a woman and her doctor and none of my business.
Some abortions are simply miscarriages, so you have to ask God what He is.
38,000 children die from poverty in the USA alone and we have to wonder how pro-life we really are especially when the godly hate welfare which is about 70% children.
What does abortion have to do with your convoluted, limited and unexplainable description of God?

None of this is relevant to this thread, so please, do not keep it going by responding to irrelevant issues.

[InTheFlesh]

Downward spiral?
It went downhill from the 1st reply remember?
I actually sparked it.
But now I will go away so your thread could get back on track!

[Fallibleone]

Moderator Warning:InTheFlesh, you have responded in this thread with an off-topic post, directly after the request by a moderator that people not do so. If you have nothing on topic to add, do not add. On top of this, questioning a moderator intervention within the thread is against the rules. I strongly advise you to more closely monitor your posts in general or you are likely to receive more warnings in due course. Please DO NOT reply to this post except via PM.

[Confused]

This might actually be more relevant in the Theology Forum so I am moving it.

[Cathar1950]

I am trying to get back on track.
It seems to me that the attributes of God are both numerous and limited.
I kept wondering how anyone could come up with the attributes of God without the use of some sacred scripture. Of course there is always revelation or revelations but like any attributes they are going to be limited by our experiences.
But what are attributes and can you separate them from existence?
I once read that even existence was an attribute. Does God have the attribute of existence?
Even if we name off all the supposed attributes of God, does God actually have those attributes? How do we know?
Can we really talk about God without using analogies and metaphor?
One attribute of God seems to be spirit while stories give him ears that hear, a nose that smells and even a backside. These are also attributes of God found in the scriptures.
How do you give evidence about God’s attributes without at least presuming God existence and showing evidence for God?

Confused has ask about the Christian God.
This does narrow it down somewhat.
But the Christian tradition or traditions are broad and deep enough to find examples everywhere. The Gnostic view of God seems different then the orthodox, both are different then a Jewish or Ebonite view. Yet Christianities can include them all.
Orthodox Christianity has a different concept of faith then either the Bible or Gnostic versions. Faith is closer to faithfulness in the Bible then the orthodox idea in belief in a proposition which by the way often hold attributes of God as propositions to be held.
If we are going to insist that we are made in God’s image shouldn’t there be some correspondence and maybe we can’t help but make God or the gods in our image as we have no other images. We pick the gods we worship or at least choose them from other possible responses or images. Theology might be better served working on our images of God rather then defend outmoded views of a tyrant and master.

Hartshorne writes about how Whitehead saw God’s power as the power of persuasion.
I find it hard to separate persuasion from reasoning or reason. I think there is something to Whiteheads idea that the purpose of reason was to promote the art of living.
I find a certain beauty to Hartshorne’s social conception of God.
He describes a God that is sympathetically related to everything where God feels and understands the joy and pain of being absolutely and remembers forever infinitely as far as possible. What else would a spirit do?
Certainly the idea of a suffering God is not foreign to Christians. I also tend to think a suffering God that suffers with us takes God off the hook for the problem of evil and horrific suffering especially if the future is open to real novelty.
A God outside of time and space wouldn’t have attributes we could understand that alone explain or describe. This all-knowing God would only know contingent knowledge and have an open future.
Does God have integrity and how do we know such things?

I like Confused’s OP question. What are the Christian attributes of God?
The Bible is not a valid source unless you hold attributes about the writings that are as dubious as experience and feeling and open to interpretation where there is no agreement
Concerning context, content or meaning. The images in the Bible have changed over time and between writings, rewritings, redactions and editing.
I also don’t think the question can be answered to anyone’s satisfaction. Claims to a personal relationship with God or Jesus are even more dubious and possibly even unbiblical. Analogy breaks down once you allow supernatural explanations.
How do we describe God as presumed by some theists without metaphor?
My favorite metaphor was God as lover. We can easily see examples of this in the “Song of Songs� or “The songs of Solomon� even if many are love songs and poems of ancient Egyptian gods. Do they express something we can relate to?


Robert Price in his book, “The reason Driven Life�, tell us how the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach explains how “theologians always say God in himself is unknown and unknowable to us, that instead we can know only his attributes, his qualities (goodness, power, love, truthfulness, etc.).�
Then he asks “why we should suppose that there is any divine being at the center of it all?� Then Price goes on to write; “Why believe in some by-definition unknowable being in which all the attributes are needles in a pincushion? He proposed that the only real divinity was that of the divine attributes themselves, and that theses exist nowhere else but I the human breast, not out there somewhere. Belief in God, Feuerbach thought, resulted from the moral cowardice and self hated of the human race. We refuse to believe in our own potential for goodness, creativity, love, and the like, and so we project all these qualities onto the heavens and make them the exclusive property of an imaginary God. And as a result we see ourselves as miserable doomed sinners. We must denigrate ourselves in order to make the imaginary God look better. But then we project our own evils onto an imaginary devil who we say tempted us to sin. At the same time we try to make it easy on ourselves. We make God gracious, willing to save us not by our own
good merits but by his free love towards us.� I might add some would even go as far as saying just some of us are given this grace yet they claim we can’t accept it unless it is given by God while we are also responsible for not having it.