BrightEyes - I was not attempting to prove that at all. It is not pertinent to this thread, but Thucydides brought it up, so I pointed out something related to that. The essential point is still that if God is in fact God (and not a god, lowercase), then He can't "die". If He could, then He is not God.

tmg, you didn't answer my question. And can you explain what "belief in God" means? Honestly, think about it. Billions of people pray to a multitude of different things, so really, what does it mean to believe in your God?

"If He could, then He is not God."

What makes you think that besides the Bible or a preacher or yourself?

(And we will assume for the moment that the Bible, preachers, and yes even you nola all accurately convey God's messages. The point here is that these messages could be lies.)

Why do there have to be all these conditions?

-If God were to kill Himself, you would know, or rather, you would not, because you would cease to exist.
-God cannot die.
-God doesn't lie

I don't understand why these all have to be true. Although, I must side with the believers in a loving God. In my day to day walk with God I can experience him working in my life. Some would say that it's just a feeling of emotion, hypnosis, or some such bogus. But it's real and it's in me. It sounds cheesy here, but it's not cheesy when you experience it. I believe there's a God watching over me at this moment, and he loves me; he won't abandon me.

@ Thucydides, You just answered your own question, congrats. it is that we cannot know if he even exisits, is omnipotent or omniscient, we cannot know in what form he embodies or his personality, we cannot know how much truth the bible tells us. We cant prove souls exist either. We can never know if he killed himself.

Every Religon requires a leap of faith, and a personal choice to make the leap or not, nothing is different here so we debate a thing we can never understand.

Lol Patton, I guess I let my hand tip. I wanted to keep my own belief out and ask the question. But since you pinned it down, my belief is one of skepticism. You can't actually know anything, so claiming to is dogmatism.

Thucydides - I will address this again with a bit more clarity then. If God is in fact God (uppercase) then He can not die, because if He could, then He would at best be a god (lowercase). The definition of God in the uppercase generally includes omnipotence, which is the essential quality of God (uppercase). If God lied about who He was, then He is not God, but again, at best, a god.

On your specific points, God can not be matter, because if He was, then He could not be omnipotent (being bound by the laws of physics and all). As a result, the word we use for beings that are not matter is spirit, so if God is not matter, then He is necessarily spirit.

On the points about people, those are not really relevant to this discussion, I only brought them up because you did so initially. I will not argue them further because they have nothing to do with the central argument.

We each must make up our own minds and hope we guide ourselves to our hearts desire

Zaza:

I have believed that too, but there is not reason to think that believing something makes it true. Do I HOPE that what you say is true? Sure.

But none of that is on the point that I wanted to make, which is more of a hypothetical question that I think would make a good movie or divine epic poem etc: what if God killed himself?

nola, you assume that the bible speaks the truth. Keyword there is assume.

If God did indeed killed himself, the reason for it void, then I believe that there would be many to follow his suicidal path. A lot of holy men and women would commit suicide themselves because the thought of no god would seem almost unfathomable.

I think you guys are operating on different definitions of God. Maybe we ought to define God first. I think most people agree that God is infinite, immaterial, omnipotent, omniscient, yes? From the Bible we can tell that he has some kind of personality, at least one that is readily recognized by humans as a personality, so it would seem that at some level he does think like us. He feels anger, has a sense of fairness and justice, he's capable of jealousy as he would not share his creations with false idols, he would ruin a man's life to prove to Satan that the man worshipped him not just for the blessings which shows some pride that he feels impelled to defend. Anyone else have anything to add or dispute in this definition?

Of course God can 'sin' but it's not 'sin' in the same sense because he's God. He decides what is sin and what is not. He routinely kills people in the Old Testament, a direct violation of the ten commandments, but what does it matter when God is clearly a level above humans, more so than humans are to ants.

nola, I find the idea of the soul interesting. What exactly would it encompass? When you die, your soul leaves your body behind, but what does it retain? Does it retain your personality? Your memories? Your greatest dreams and your darkest secrets? Your sins?

And God does still make his presence known. He just doesn't part seas, cure lepers, or create women out of ribs anymore. He prefers more subtle techniques nowadays such as making his image known in a piece of burnt toast. If God killed himself, I can guarantee that we'd know longer see him in food.

Thucy, I do like the question that you presented, as it is only a question.

Tell me Thucydides. What did you experience and how did that make you feel? And how do you feel about the feeling you had earlier?

Crispminis +1 for the food reference

Nola:

The case of the letter G is really just syntactical. I mean come on. You know what I'm saying do you not? A dictionary definition of God proves nothing. The dictionary definition is based of the belief of Christians primarily (if it's in English), which in turn is based off the Bible, which in turn (theoretically) is based off of the mouth of God.

So the "what if God lied" question still applies... please answer it.

oops, Chrispminis*... my bad

Thucydides - The below article defines God (with a capital G) in signficant detail:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06612a.htm

If you are not interested in the later sections (based on revelation, etc.) the first section is based on reason and just discusses the infinite nature of God.

Also, the convention of a capital letter distinguishes God from the Greek gods, for instance, who, while clearly more powerful than people, are definitely not all-powerful (or even close for that matter).

Alright, while nola is stuck on the grammatical workings of some old book, I'd like to see more people answer the question.

Rather, the semantics.

Zaza:

It's a standard experience:

In church. They sing a hymn. For me, A Mighty Fortress is Our God. They sing a line that hits home. For me, "The Prince of Darkness grim, we tremble not for him, his wrath we can endure, for lo his doom is sure." I feel that God loves me, that he is there, etc. Later, a few months later, something good happens. For me, I get a car. I attribute this to God loving me.

The rest of the story is pretty normal too, but less so:

Later, I apply critical thinking skills. I start to think about the nature of knowledge. I conclude no knowledge is possible, only beliefs. I decide that the belief in God, the Christian God anyway, though nice for Christians, is not nice for me, because it means many negative things for my life. A good example: I cannot date or have sex with my girlfriend whom I love. So, yes, I hope there is a God, and I hope he loves me, because that's a nice thought. But I have no idea if it's true, so I don't worry about it.


Now, what would be totally cool (as a story anyway) would be if God killed himself. What a drama!

BrightEyes - Seriously, you have not answered my argument in any capacity other than to say that I am citing the bible (which I did not find in any of my posts by the way). Please reference the first section of the article I posted in my previous post.

Okay nola I will play your game:

Let's say then, that since you will not retreat from your definition of "God" in the upper case, that there is no such thing as God with an upper case G. Instead, there is only one god. This god is very much like God, with a few key differences:

-He can die.
-He can lie.
-He can die without his creation, the universe, going away.

Then this god also lies to the human race, giving them the Bible. The people of earth, his creation, believe it. They even capitalize his name, calling him God. However he is just god. All the same, he doesn't care, because he ends up killing himself.

Where besides the bible does it say that god (or God or GOD or gOD) exists? How do we assert that God is "infinitely perfect"? See this information, it comes from the Catholic encyclopedia, which is the assumption that the bible is accurate.

If there is a god (lowercase) somewhere, then sure, he can die. No big deal. However, because his existence is not eternal, then he would require a God (uppercase) to have been created.

Thucy, you should go out and write this book, I'd be glad to input in this if you wanted it.

BrightEyes - I was referencing the first section of the article only. You will not that it does not site revelation anywhere in it.

nola:

why is that exactly? you are making a large assumption there.

but as usual I will go with that assumption. There has to be an eternal god for anything to exist.

Okay so there is. But he actually doesn't do anything at all. he is more like a rock than anything. he created god and then just sort of rolled over, never doing anything.

Then god did all the things I mentioned above.

Happy?

Also... lol... BrightEyes, I feel I am not the most qualified to write a Milton-esque "Deity Lost" or something like that lol