I read your post on the front page of CEMB and to me it seems that you'd be OK with the concept of God but not the one in the Quran.
I’d say that’s actually a pretty fair statement.
You're looking for a God which makes absolute sense.
Not necessarily. I realize that I’m an ignorant, limited, flawed, silly ol’ human being. I’m pretty good at understanding basic concepts, though. So things don’t have to make absolute sense to me for me to believe them. I just have to find them
believable. Where you see justice carried out on the earth and it's obvious that God is doing it. Where the sick are healed and the poor are looked after and you can see it happen.
So this part is actually completely untrue. You’ve actually got it all wrong here. I
don’t expect to see god sticking his nose into everyday human life. I don’t expect him to cure AIDS for African babies or to stop high school girls from getting assaulted in dark alley ways or to defuse bombs left in open air Friday markets.
Because if God did those things some of the time but not others, I’d have to question his integrity even further. If a doctor only treated people who praised him, or if a fireman only extinguished the fires of the homes of people who loved him, while they watched other people die because they did not grovel and beg enough, then I would have no respect for that doctor or that fireman. A God who sees evil but only intervenes when he has his ego stroked is not a god I would worship or love, even if it were real.
But the problem is that this is what the Qur’an actually claims. The Qur’an claims that its God answers the call of those who beg him, while it also says that he does not care about the people who don’t. “Say, my lord does not care about you, save for your calling of him.”
The Qur’an says that God heals the sick when he feels like it. It says that he strikes whomsoever he wills with lightning. It says that he gives some couples boys and other couples girls and makes some couples barren when he feels like it. It says that he guides whom he wills and leaves astray whom he wills. He holds birds in the sky. He sends the winds and the rains. He “sent down eight pairs of cattle.” He makes the ships sail in the sea. He raises the sun from the east and makes it set in the west. He turns night into day and day into night.
So, we can look at these things two ways. Either, one, we can imagine an anthropomorphic God sitting up on high directing the wind with his hands and farting out lightning bolts from his arse. And every time the natural evidence shows us that this is not the case, we can make our god smaller and smaller until we are back 4 billion years ago talking about how dust particles could have come together without our god.
Or, two, we can look at the world as it is: people get sick for natural reasons through genetic disorders, germs, and diseases. Lightning strikes at random through natural causes. Ships sail through the sea following natural laws. Birds fly according to natural, physical laws. Humans evolve through natural means. Stars ignite and planets form through natural means. God does not intervene. For now, at least, we’re on our own to figure things out.
And given that we are indeed limited, flawed, silly ol’ human beings, then the last mystery we should ever claim to have fully comprehended would be the one that lies well beyond our means of observation. The most we could ever say is “I don’t know.” It’s the only honest answer. The moment anyone comes to us claiming to have all the answers and asking us to be gullible, asking us to have faith because they said so, asking us to believe because if we don’t they’ll torture us, asking us to do what they say while we are alive because if we do they will reward us – but only after our lives have ended, then our spidey senses should go off and we should run the other way.
Topic: Ringside: Quod Sum Eris vs CallMeTed - Is there scientific evidence that proves