Salyavin, I think atheists also anthropomorphize God! For example, when they say that if there was a God, he or she would be the human idea of benign and there wouldn't be such horrible events in the world. That's making a big assumption about the nature of God.
On Wednesday, February 19, 2014 1:01 AM, salyavin808 <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote: I love the people have shifted the idea of what god is when earlier interpretations turn out to be too easily disposed of. I can see why theology never satisfactorily answered any questions! But I am impressed with the energy people put in to weaving their way past the need for evidence into some sort of logical cul de sac of him being unfathomable. God has always been anthropomorphism, mankind's vanity and paranoia writ large. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <s3raphita@...> wrote: Re "So the argument must be falling down somewhere, probably because I can conceive of Him not existing.": So the "Him" you can conceive as not existing is clearly NOT the Him whose non-existence is inconceivable! The God you conceive might not exist is an image that you've constructed in your imagination based on your Sunday School lessons, so is essentially an *idol* - a false god. It is good news that you see that idols can't exist. The more idols you dismiss the closer you come to the real God that lies beyond your or anyone else's conceptions. The 14th-century theologian Meister Eckhart made the same point: "The more they curse God the more they praise Him!" Re "Seems reasonable to me that God would have a strong moral sense, stronger than mine even, and that he wouldn't like to see people suffer.": The Godhead doesn't have a strong moral sense. It is the crassest anthropomorphism to imagine otherwise. (It's another category error!) But we humans have a moral sense ("The soul is naturally Christian" - Tertullian, third century) so we should encourage that moral sense to flourish in the same way that a gardener encourages a flower to bloom and emit its fragrance.