Christianity without creationism - Also other similar theologies.

Penis Drager

Penis Drager

Schrödinger's retard
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Preface: Christianity is not the only religion this logic applies to. It's just the most popular... especially here.

So let's say you believe the creation story is metaphorical. You think your god spent billions of years to create human kind in literally one of the most roundabout ways possible. Why?
Why would he do it that way when he could just snap his fingers and make it so?
As dumb as creationists are, at least their version of history makes a bit of sense. Sure, you could ask "why 6 days?" but that still makes a whole lot better sense than billions of years. If the goal was humans, you're smoking crack if you think an all powerful God would take so long to do it.
 
Penis Drager said:
Why would he do it that way when he could just snap his fingers and make it so?
Click to expand...

Why'd he make adam and eve with no knowledge of how to be sapient or independent but then put a tree in their garden that could make them understand reality but told them not to touch it and then punished them when they did? Did he know it was going to happen? So then why even set up the garden in the first place and just directly put them in a careless harsh world already knowing that it's terrible?
 
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>Why would he do it that way when he could just snap his fingers and make it so?
god is beyond time. billions of years or a few days, it makes no difference to god.
i think that asking "why would he do X when he could instead do Y" type questions about the intentions and motivations of god is generally pointless because god is unknowable and incomprehensible to humans.

but i share your view that dedicated fundamentalists are more consistent about their worldview than secularized modern christians who cherry pick parts of the faith that are appealing to them while brushing aside and ignoring everything they dislike for whatever reason.
 
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Penis Drager said:
Preface: Christianity is not the only religion this logic applies to. It's just the most popular... especially here.

So let's say you believe the creation story is metaphorical. You think your god spent billions of years to create human kind in literally one of the most roundabout ways possible. Why?
Why would he do it that way when he could just snap his fingers and make it so?
As dumb as creationists are, at least their version of history makes a bit of sense. Sure, you could ask "why 6 days?" but that still makes a whole lot better sense than billions of years. If the goal was humans, you're smoking crack if you think an all powerful God would take so long to do it.
Click to expand...
I think Origen in the 1st century was the first of many to make it allegorical. If God wanted to order something to come about immediately rather than mostly leave barring slight intervention, He would do better than what we have now. We cannot know the mind of God.
 
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The Fool said:
Why'd he make adam and eve with no knowledge of how to be sapient or independent but then put a tree in their garden that could make them understand reality but told them not to touch it and then punished them when they did? Did he know it was going to happen? So then why even set up the garden in the first place and just directly put them in a careless harsh world already knowing that it's terrible?
Click to expand...
was it the eating of the fruit that caused God to banish them or was it Adam blaming God for giving him the woman who tempted him?

the notion of "God made them in the image of himself" means they have an undetermined will and are responsible for their actions.

and then there's the theological opinion that eden was another realm or planet.

christianity ends with the return to eden. its kinda fallen by the wayside as fundies focus only on heaven or hell.

Either way the world was only harsh after the fall.
 
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If you were going to create a universe would you just skip all the cool stuff to get to humans? If you created a place as large as the universe (or creatures as small as humans) why would you just put life on one planet?
Who says he wanted to make humans specifically? Maybe he just wanted to uplift whatever creature earned it or tickled his fancy?
Also, maybe God had to troubleshoot? Just because he's omnipotent in his created universe doesn't mean he is outside of it. But I guess that takes some of the mysticism out of it.
Saying God works in mysterious ways is a cop-out but saying you should be able to rationalize the mentality of a being that can create a universe is also a bit retarded.

The biggest issue with Semitic Gods from what I've seen is that they're supposed to be omnipresent. A lot of Gods in religions can do anything they want but don't have inherent universal Santa Clause spying powers.
 
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The Fool said:
Why'd he make adam and eve with no knowledge of how to be sapient or independent but then put a tree in their garden that could make them understand reality but told them not to touch it and then punished them when they did? Did he know it was going to happen? So then why even set up the garden in the first place and just directly put them in a careless harsh world already knowing that it's terrible?
Click to expand...
I'm not saying creationism makes a lot of sense. I'm just saying that a god that gives two shits about people would probably not take his sweet ass time to make them.

The bottom line is if humans are the goal, why nog get to the fucking point? If essentially 0 effort is required to make them from scratch, why make it look like everything came about naturally?
 
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You say "roundabout" as if that means something to an eternal Being, like God was floating around in spacetime laboriously clumping matter together until he had a planet, then assembling molecules together by hand until he had a primitive life form, poking it until it became multicellular, and so on--sighing in frustration that this was so complicated and taking so darn long. No thinking person actually believes that. If you suggested such a thing to a classical theist he'd start foaming at the mouth and tossing around volumes of the Summa, but even a theistic personalist would be like, "Wait a minute, that's not how God works, that's not how any of this works." You are taking a sort of extreme personalist view that God is like a superpowered human, and his actions should be judged on the basis of what a human would do with magic creation abilities. He's not a superpowered human. He's the eternal and omnipotent being who created and sustains everything in existence. He doesn't need Frederick Winslow Taylor telling him his processes are inefficient.

You also refer to "the creation story," as if there's only one. Genesis has two, the Elohist and the Yahwist. I don't think they're entirely irreconcilable, but they're clearly different stories. The Elohist is more universal--God creates Light and it's good, he creates an expanse in the midst of the primordial ocean and it's good, he creates land and it's good, and so forth. Humans were the culmination of this effort, but all the groundwork must be laid first and he declares all of it to be good in its own right. The second narrative is more anthropocentric and personal, it's an etiological myth for human mortality, the pains of childbirth, and for some reason snakes. It's also a warning that you can learn good and evil through experiencing consequences, but the consequences will be painful for you.
 
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Standardized Profile said:
You say "roundabout" as if that means something to an eternal Being, like God was floating around in spacetime laboriously clumping matter together until he had a planet, then assembling molecules together by hand until he had a primitive life form, poking it until it became multicellular, and so on--sighing in frustration that this was so complicated and taking so darn long. No thinking person actually believes that. If you suggested such a thing to a classical theist he'd start foaming at the mouth and tossing around volumes of the Summa, but even a theistic personalist would be like, "Wait a minute, that's not how God works, that's not how any of this works." You are taking a sort of extreme personalist view that God is like a superpowered human, and his actions should be judged on the basis of what a human would do with magic creation abilities. He's not a superpowered human. He's the eternal and omnipotent being who created and sustains everything in existence. He doesn't need Frederick Winslow Taylor telling him his processes are inefficient.

You also refer to "the creation story," as if there's only one. Genesis has two, the Elohist and the Yahwist. I don't think they're entirely irreconcilable, but they're clearly different stories. The Elohist is more universal--God creates Light and it's good, he creates an expanse in the midst of the primordial ocean and it's good, he creates land and it's good, and so forth. Humans were the culmination of this effort, but all the groundwork must be laid first and he declares all of it to be good in its own right. The second narrative is more anthropocentric and personal, it's an etiological myth for human mortality, the pains of childbirth, and for some reason snakes. It's also a warning that you can learn good and evil through experiencing consequences, but the consequences will be painful for you.
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It's not the time scale that matters so much here, though I did imply it did. What matters is the steps involved:
"I will create a place humans can thrive in, then I will create humans" is a whole different story from "I will set down a set of laws the universe will follow for billions of years that will eventually lead to human beings coming about on an insignificant piece of rock in an unfathomably large universe."
 
Penis Drager said:
Preface: Christianity is not the only religion this logic applies to. It's just the most popular... especially here.

So let's say you believe the creation story is metaphorical. You think your god spent billions of years to create human kind in literally one of the most roundabout ways possible. Why?
Why would he do it that way when he could just snap his fingers and make it so?
As dumb as creationists are, at least their version of history makes a bit of sense. Sure, you could ask "why 6 days?" but that still makes a whole lot better sense than billions of years. If the goal was humans, you're smoking crack if you think an all powerful God would take so long to do it.
Click to expand...
Do you not have a hobby? Why bake a cake when you can go and buy one?

You're not capable of understanding God any more than an ant is able to understand a human. Should God exist, it's an entity so far removed from ourselves we have no way of understanding how it's mind works. Creationism being true or false doesn't matter, ultimately what is is and what isn't isn't. There is nothing stopping a creationist from studying fossils as a form of holy jigsaw puzzles and being fascinated by the game God left him. Studying God's creation is the original form of science, it's wrong to assume creationism is incomparable with science until you have a method of proving the origin of the universe in a replicating fashion like recreating it exactly in a lab.
 
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DumbDude42 said:
but i share your view that dedicated fundamentalists are more consistent about their worldview than secularized modern christians who cherry pick parts of the faith that are appealing to them while brushing aside and ignoring everything they dislike for whatever reason.
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The Catholic Church doesn't insist on a literal interpretation of the Bible, and I wouldn't consider them secularized.
 
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Standardized Profile said:
You say "roundabout" as if that means something to an eternal Being, like God was floating around in spacetime laboriously clumping matter together until he had a planet, then assembling molecules together by hand until he had a primitive life form, poking it until it became multicellular, and so on--sighing in frustration that this was so complicated and taking so darn long. No thinking person actually believes that. If you suggested such a thing to a classical theist he'd start foaming at the mouth and tossing around volumes of the Summa, but even a theistic personalist would be like, "Wait a minute, that's not how God works, that's not how any of this works." You are taking a sort of extreme personalist view that God is like a superpowered human, and his actions should be judged on the basis of what a human would do with magic creation abilities. He's not a superpowered human. He's the eternal and omnipotent being who created and sustains everything in existence. He doesn't need Frederick Winslow Taylor telling him his processes are inefficient.

You also refer to "the creation story," as if there's only one. Genesis has two, the Elohist and the Yahwist. I don't think they're entirely irreconcilable, but they're clearly different stories. The Elohist is more universal--God creates Light and it's good, he creates an expanse in the midst of the primordial ocean and it's good, he creates land and it's good, and so forth. Humans were the culmination of this effort, but all the groundwork must be laid first and he declares all of it to be good in its own right. The second narrative is more anthropocentric and personal, it's an etiological myth for human mortality, the pains of childbirth, and for some reason snakes. It's also a warning that you can learn good and evil through experiencing consequences, but the consequences will be painful for you.
Click to expand...

Yeah, E is the cosmic sky daddy. J was the relatable earth daddy. E was more or less omniscient whereas J couldn't find Adam and Eve in his own goddamn garden. That part always cracked me up.
 
DumbDude42 said:
>Why would he do it that way when he could just snap his fingers and make it so?
god is beyond time. billions of years or a few days, it makes no difference to god.
i think that asking "why would he do X when he could instead do Y" type questions about the intentions and motivations of god is generally pointless because god is unknowable and incomprehensible to humans.

but i share your view that dedicated fundamentalists are more consistent about their worldview than secularized modern christians who cherry pick parts of the faith that are appealing to them while brushing aside and ignoring everything they dislike for whatever reason.
Click to expand...
Every Christian cherrypicks what parts to follow
 
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Rust-froth said:
Do you not have a hobby? Why bake a cake when you can go and buy one?

You're not capable of understanding God any more than an ant is able to understand a human. Should God exist, it's an entity so far removed from ourselves we have no way of understanding how it's mind works. Creationism being true or false doesn't matter, ultimately what is is and what isn't isn't. There is nothing stopping a creationist from studying fossils as a form of holy jigsaw puzzles and being fascinated by the game God left him. Studying God's creation is the original form of science, it's wrong to assume creationism is incomparable with science until you have a method of proving the origin of the universe in a replicating fashion like recreating it exactly in a lab.
Click to expand...
The point of this thread isn't about how dumb creationism is (it's pretty dumb but whatever). It's that any anthrocentric theology is dumb without a form of creationism.
Deism can still work here, but Christianity can't. If the goal is to make people, a perfectly wise god would choose the most efficient route. "Mysterious ways" is a dumbfuck argument since it only takes the most basic understanding to understand how dumb it would be to take a billion extra steps to do what he could effortlessly do in a millisecond all in one go.
 
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