Do you believe in god?

[Sri Lumpa]

Grey Acumen said:

Oh good fucking grief, this is so retarded. all this does is show the limitations of your own perceptions. I mean, hell, I can even come up with a proper response to this: God creates himself, only more powerful. Tadah! God is all powerful

Ok, poor phrasing on my part, rephrase it with "can god create ANOTHER being more powerful than him?" if you prefer

thus you should not be attempting to express his capabilities through rational numbers. What you should be using is infinity, which is a constantly increasing number that no matter how high you count, you keep going. Hence God's powers may constantly be growing as well. I can never get over just how narrow minded someone has to be to think that God, a "ALL POWERFUL" being who is responsible for creating and maintaining the continued operation of the entire universe, is supposedly going to be constrained to the same mental limitations, perceptions, and awareness as a human being, ei NOT ALL POWERFUL. It's like a man thinking he can accurately tell his wife exactly what childbirth will feel like, or like an Amish computer tech service, or hollywood depicting reality.

Actually I believe that it is much more likely for god to be constrained by lack of existence and hence NOT POWERFUL AT ALL rather than limited in power.

You think infinite power, and thing that I think limited power whereas I think lack of power due to lack of existence is the most plausible alternative.

Though a god (or being in general) could very well have created the universe without being all powerful, he would just need to be very, very powerful so that to us he would appear all powerful without being so.

Also, in order for someone to do good, they have to believe that there is a universal good and bad, not subject to the opinion of the masses. Otherwise all they are doing is what other people want them to do.

I do believe in a universal good and bad. It is just that I believe that it exists regardless of the existence or nonexistence of any particular deity and that a chaotic god giving us immoral commands does not make said command moral, it makes said god immoral.

In essence the existence of god and the existence of morality are orthogonal to each other, hence why I call myself orthotheist.

Even if the god of the bible or the koran or the vedas revealed itself in a theoretically undisprovable manner and offered me conversion to its faith (say, because he thinks I'm a nice guy and hates to see me go to hell because I don't believe in him) I would not jump at the occasion and instantly convert to judaism/christianity/islam/hinduism but would also need to know that his moral were good morals (either because I already think so or because he can convince me by logical means why they are; though being very powerful he could doubtlessly change me to believe them to be regardless of whether I would find them good or abject of my own volition).

You could say that one of the differences between you and me is that I consider all the gods to be part of the masses whose opinion you do not want to be subject to whereas you pick out one of them whose opinion you say you subject yourself to (though you probably don't as I am sure there are plenty of things in the bible that god did, said, or inspired its authors to write that you would disagree with).

If you believe in a universal good and bad, then you essentially are believing in the most basic fundamental principles of god, upon which all other teachings are founded.

Wrong, godhood does not imply goodness as plenty of religions have had evil gods. It is only the narrowminded judeo-christiano-islamic view that think that due to them postulating only one full god that they view as omnibenevolent no matter what atrocities he commits.

EDIT: And yes, I know that isn't a perfectly mathematically accurate description of infinity, but the point still stands. People keep thinking of All Powerful as this static point that never changes, when anyone who has ever seriously attempted to better themselves know that perfection is NEVER a destination to be reached, but an ever increasing goal to be continually strived for.

But this is not what the bible says (haven't read the koran so I would have to ask superchunk on that), it says that god is perfect, not that he strives to be. It is the bible that implies said point stands still and that god is there and that we humans should be striving for it.