[Paleopsych] God the Liberal

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Fri Sep 24 16:18:21 UTC 2004


Continuing the [wta-talk] If there were God thread:

God, at least the one in the Bible, is a liberal. He had too high 
expectations of human nature.

Timeline (all from the Scofield Reference Bible, which uses the King James 
Version, but using, not the original 1611 spelling, but that of 1769, which 
continues to this day):

4004 BC: On the sixth day, God makes the first, or Edenic, Covenant (Gen. 
1:26-3:13)

4004 BC: On the eighth day, God kicks Adam and Eve out of Paradise.

4004 BC: Later that day, God makes the Second, or Adamic, Covenant (Gen. 
3:14-19).

2353 BC: God floods the earth (Gen. 6).

2348 BC: God makes the Third, or Noahic, Covenant (Gen. 8:20-11:9).

2247 BC: Tower of Babel: "Go to, let us go down, and there confound their 
language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord 
scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of the earth" (Gen. 
11:7-8).

1913 BC: God makes the Fourth, or Abrahamic, Covenant (Gen. 15:18).
1491 BC: God makes the Fifth, or Mosaic, Covenant (Ex. 20, which includes 
the Ten Commandments).
1451 BC: God makes the Sixth, or Palestinian, Covenant (Deu. 30).
1042 BC: God makes the Seventh, or David, Covenant (II Sam. 7).

I am not sure what crashed expectations of the Lord necessitated all the 
additional covenants, but God got so fed up with man that he decided to 
end his entire creation.

4 BC: God, just but nevertheless merciful, sends his son to forgive 
individuals (all of them) that fail to live up to his various 
commandments, provided they will accept the offer. This constitutes the 
Eighth, or New, Covenant (Heb. 8:8).

26 AD: John the Baptist is fed up with the whole lot of the Jews, not just 
those in the religious establishment: "Then said he to the multitude that 
came forth to be baptized of him, O generation of vipers, who hath warned 
you to flee from the wrath to come?" (Luke 3:7).

31 AD: Jesus repeats the charge: "O generation of vipers, how can ye, 
being evil, speak good things? for out of the of abundance of the heart 
the mouth speaketh." (Mat. 12:34), though later he restricts the charges 
to "scribes and Pharisees" (Mat. 23:29-33).

33 AD: In a familiar act of rent-seeking, the Jewish religious 
establishment induces the government (the Romans) to get rid of the 
competition (all four Gospels). This is, of course, highly controversial, 
but as a Public Choice economist, I know rent-seeking when I see it.

You would think that by this time, God would have offered a covenant more 
in keeping with human nature as it is, not what a liberal would like it to 
be.

before 70 AD (I accept John A.T. Robinson's _Redating the New Testament_ 
here, while Scofield assigns 96 AD), God reveals to St. John the Divine 
that, nevertheless, "And I saw a new heaven an a new earth: for the first 
heaven and the first earth were passed away: and there was no more sea 
(Rev. 21:1).

On 2004-09-24, Trend Ologist opined [message unchanged below]:

> Good points, Samantha. What do you know about what might be called 
> deism?: say...

> a. God existed at one time and then died.
> b. God is sane, but is a sadist
> c. God is is insane
> d. God suffers from latent insanity
> e. God is in a coma or is semi-conscious
> f.  God is addicted to gambling
> g. We are witnessing the birth of God
> h. God has multiple personalities             etc.
>
> Samantha Atkins <samantha at objectent.com> wrote:This assumes that the purported designer sought to meet a set of
> requirements according to which the job was botched. But if the goal
> was to use evolutionary and other algorithms in a sufficiently powerful
> computational space as to evolve sufficient intelligence for the
> intelligence to recursively self-improve through successively higher
> levels. If so then the design thus far has been within the desired
> parameters.
>
> - samantha



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