to think it is rude to persistently refer to God/Allah/etc. as an "imaginary friend"

[AtheneNoctua]

even after asked not to by several posters who have stated they found it offensive.

it is funny it is always the athiests who say, 'but you believe this' and then if a disagree they say 'ah well you're not a real Christian then.'

there is an awful lot of theological diversity out there and a vast range of valid arguments and opinions about the Bible. I have been over them so many times on MN no point in doing it again, but fluffy theology 'aint. Theology is as diverse and intellectually challenging as philosophy, and no one would start generalising and being dismissive about Kierkegaard or Kant if they didn't actually know much about them. I agree it is the Church's fault that Christianity has been so misrepresented, but some athiests are a bit lazy in their assumption of what Christianity is about. Fair enough I suppose.

Can you start a virtual church justabout? I'll come!

I agree that there is a great deal of diversity within self-acknowledged Christians. from screaming creationist woman-hating tosspots to well-meaning woolly liberal Anglicans to tireless charity workers with a fine sense of black humour and all the rest. I have no problem with people picking and choosing which bits of myth systems the will go with and which bits they will dump, whether this applies to Abrahamic myth, Celtic myth, Islamic myth, Egyptian myth or any other myth system you can think of. Basically, all these myth systems were made up by human beings in the first place, so I don;t see anything wrong with different human beings reinterpreting the original myths or making up new ones to suit their own situations.
THe only thing I have a problem with is people insisting that they and their myth systems and imaginary friends should get some sort of special privileges.

agree no one should get special privileges though.

Pah! Kierkegaard. He had an imaginary friend too you know.

A lot of anti-atheist rhetoric is merely "special pleading." Why should one god be any more believable than another? I just don't get it.

I shouldn't attempt to sleep, or work, or anything else, the speed this thread keeps moving at....

mabanana - I believe that God communicates directly with me. It is sometimes very direct and clear, but more often a sense of rightness or wrongness about the issue I am thinking about. I believe that God is capable of knowing everything, because the Universe is within God, but I'm not sure to what extent God is keeping track of every detail at every mooment - I think it would be too much data to make sense of, but maybe that's only my limited imagination!

almostblue - I really don't know what will happen to you when you die, I'm not even sure the details of what will happen to me. But I think that something will happen when this creation ceases to exist. It may be that you and others who aren't/weren't in relationship with God will simply cease to exist at that point. I don't believe there is/will be a Hell - the idea of it might have value to scare people into thinking about religion, but I don't see any purpose in punishing people. So, in that scenario, dead is just dead. End of. Alternatively, it might be that when creation ends, everyone will stand before God and have to answer for their life, in which case I don't think that Christians will be judged differently from others.

GrimmaTheNome - I think that the Bible is the history of God's relationship with humanity, and was written by the people at the time based on their understanding. Therefore, the view of the writers of the OT about what God is like was based on their understanding at the time. The relationship, and people's understanding, changed with Jesus. So, I don;t think that God has changed, but I do think that our understanding has.

nooka - it is my belief that the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection made a fundamental change in the nature of the relationship between God and humanity. So, from that point on, we come to God via Christ/the Holy Spirit. The thing that I struggle with, and really can't decide yet, is whether it is possible to have the Holy Spirit without believing in Christ. Part of me wants to believe that it is possible, and that the change which Christ made is available to everyone equally. But part of me thinks that it's only wishful thinking, and another part worries that I am being insulting to people of other religions if I say they can come to God through Christ without them realising it. So I really don't know about that one yet!

SGB, I do wish you'd stop using the term 'imaginary friend'. An imaginary friend is what small children pretend to have but know full well that its all in their mind. Its a usually lovely product of their own fertile imaginations. Religious belief is something entirely different.

Unfortunately I'm now struggling to find a less trivialising and more appropriate term for this phenomenon with less potential for causing offence.

Hum... quite a lot of the OT was apparently the output of men who thought they were in direct communication with God. Was the pre-incarnate god just a really crap communicator? I mean, if he could get into details about whether or not you could eat shellfish, don't you think he might have managed to avoid giving the wrong impression of his own character?

Ruty (sorry, replying to something said way down the thread) Any second year psychology student will be able to tell you how easy it is to induce ritualistic behaviour in pidgeons and rats, based on the promise of a reward, possibly. It's called an intermittent reinforcement schedule, and is incredibly hard to erase the behaviour. Animals as well as humans are hardwired to develop these behaviours.

Almostblue - I have to agree with MIS on this one. You won't be able to change you mind once you are dead. My understanding of hell is similar. There isn't a firey pit with a little red bloke with a pointy tail and a fork, it is oblivion, nothing, the end.

Since you expect to get that, that shouldn't be a problem at all.

The afterlife is only for those who have a belief. What that would be like I have no idea.

Grimma - I am with you on SGB continuing to use 'imaginary friend' when most people on here have found it either offensive or just plain silly.

I would suggest she might just use the word 'God' as a replacement. Tell it like it is.

Grimma - I take your point, if God hasn't changed then there must have been some seriously bad interpretation going on at times.

Oh yeah... SGB, why not just 'god' ... but always with the quotation marks of course.

UnquietDad, thank Thor you're back. SGB's been on double shifts all week.

My 3 year old (who isn't a christian or given any religious education) said this morning 'when I die I'm going back to normal'

I loved the idea of 'the matrix' movie -that we are convinced by the reality we know and we live within it, but that it is possible to step outside that reality and there is a whole other existence that we aren't aware of in this life.

We have clues and can only guess.

If god was definable/ visible/containable/within our intellectual grasp then it wouldn't be god.

I've been away a few weeks, actually. And am likely to be again. I'm acquiring more "real life", sadly.

slug & anyone else - for your interest - Dawkins article on ritualistic behaviour/reinforcement here. You'll note when it came out.

Thank you. I hadn't seen that one.

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end

mis, yes, but HOW does God communicate with everyone on earth? I mean by what physical method? And how does he see everything? In what sense exactly do you mean 'the universe is in God'? Physically in God? Does God obey the laws of physics when he intervenes in earthly life (by 'talking' to us/answering prayers etc)? If so, how does he achieve this feat?

And are you always 100% sure which messages are from god and which are not? If there is even a shadow of doubt then it violates free will.

No, I'm not going to stop using the term 'imaginary friend'.It's an accurate one with the advatage that it covers the whole spectrum (ie some people believe in different deities, some believe in fairies, tree spirits, giant lizards that rule the world etc. All these beliefs are equally the business of the person concerned and equally ludicrous.) Many toddlers believe fervently that their imaginary friends are real. So do many adults. It's their lookout.
As to some people being offended, if you are offended, that's your problem not mine. THere is no right not to be offended, because many people are easily and unreasonably and frequently offended in such ways as to protect these twats people from ever having to experience being offended would involve stripping away the human rights of other people.

I don't know how - although I believe it is linked to self-awareness, I have no idea of the physical process by which it happens. I suppose I could say that God causes neurons in the brain to fire, causing the effect, but I don't know how.

When I say that the Universe is in God, what I mean is hard to describe, and of course totally unprovable! But, to me, it's like imagining you are an amoeba within a pool of liquid - the liquid is both outside of you, and also the stuff you are made of. That's sort of how I see God as the pool of liquid, and the Universe as the amoeba - God is in everything and through everything, but at the same time bigger than everything.

So God can "see" everything because God is "in" everything.

sgb i dont think anyone should get priledges either, woould agree with you there. Ultimately your beliefs make you happy, mine do the same for me- as long as neither of us hurt anyone who are we to argue with that?

Grimma i don't personally think we know enogh about the OTb authors (well we don't know that much about the NT ones!) to be able to credit them with anything like the inscrutable reliability one would need. The books in the Bible were selected by the Church wth their own formative agenda.

onager - that's an interesting question, I really hadn't thought of it in those terms before!

I am convinced that I can tell the difference between when I am asking God about things, and when I am thinking about them myself. It just "feels" different somehow. I do not believe that God influences me to do things without my being aware of it.

But then if I was programmed/influenced to think that, then I wouldn't know, would I?