If Islam didn't exist neither would Islmaic Jihad.......religion is a major seperator in the Middle East and has led to the extremism of many factions.

How many wars are started for reasons OTHER THAN religion? Not many.

isn't it belittling to assume the divine would experience the same sort of "pleasure" that a human would?

a neutral surgeon could clip a tiny clump of cells from your frontal lobe and you'd never be able to experience pleasure again. handcuffing god with human emotions like "pleasure" seems like such a small minded view of god from my point of view.

like is god an infallible deity? or a teenage girl?

neural*

ya, there is a massive question mark over what happens to people who never even heard jesus, and therefore dont ever have a chance at responding to the 'gospel'.

i dunno. ive heard some various explanations, whether they are focusing on claiming those people wont be held guilty or focusing on claiming they will be guilty because their ancestors were guilty (since literal bible says that we all came from 2 people, and somewhere along the way sides of the family cut themselves off from God, or something like that.)

but as for my personal answer, all i can say is 'i dont know'. i think christians have dug themselves into too many holes by trying to come up with an answer for everything, and looking pretty foolish and stupid in so doing.

and who knows why God chose to give me that experience, which i would hazard a guess that less than 1% of american christians experience something similar. doesnt make me better in any way. maybe it just means im more psychotic, heh.

dete: as far as servants go, i like your parable, and agree that it is better to be a 'happy' worker instead of a complaining one. the parable that came quickest to mind was the one about how the master recruits workers all day long, and then in the end he pays the ones who worked 12 hours the exact same amount as he pays the ones that worked 2 hours. or something to that effect.

well, in defense of God, believers do say that He created us in His image.........so it isn't that far fetched to think He may have similar emotions as us.........but that does detract from him being an infallable creature, since he could go emo on us at any moment (think Noah's Ark again)

well said monte.

"I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, 'If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?' 'No,' said the priest, 'not if you did not know.' 'Then why,' asked the Eskimo earnestly, 'did you tell me?' "

~Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974

happy i think where christians get the idea of a personal God from is genesis 2 where it states that God created man in his image.

so the writers of the bible were pretty smart to switch it up like that and state right at the beginning that God isnt like us, but we are like him. conniving bastards. i blame moses.

MONTE I SAID THAT ALREADY.........NOBODY IS READING MY PUNY POSTS

lol @ god going emo on us and drowning us.

someone should have given god a copy of his 10 commandments unless its another one of those "do as i say, not as i do" lessons.

i wonder what trimester all the first born sons of egypt were in when god had them all aborted. =D

but seriously, the only reason god is handcuffed with human emotions in all the stories is because of the intelligence level of the people who invented the tales.

"We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes." ~Gene Roddenberry

ya God did go sorta emo there. good news is he made a deal with noah afterwards that hed never do it again. and he created a rainbow. noah then promptly grew a vineyard, got drunk and naked, then cursed one of his sons. God was like wtf, out of all the humans, i chose THIS ONE DUDE to survive and restart the world population? fuck that rainbow, im gonna give it to the homos.