Dear david f,

I hope you enjoyed your stay at the Atheist Convention.

>>The God of the Bible is inconsistent<<

This is a fact known for centuries, not waiting to be discovered by contemporary atheists or skeptics. Heaps of explanations, interpretations, qualifications, circumvention etc have been offered through the ages to avoid a total rejection of the Bible as a source of some valuable inspiration and guidance (albeit not scientific information, as we know now). Therefore, Christians speak of hermeneutics, and I suppose something similar exists also in the Judaic reading of these ancient texts.

The reasons for avoiding such rejection are sophisticated. They do not follow from any rational necessity but rather from what is called “faith”, the feeling by some of us that human existence, and the world surrounding us, must have a purpose that can only be beyond what we can represent, "model", through scientific theories.

You might remember that when trying to explain my beliefs I was referring to narrative, mythological, but also purely speculatively rational (Aquinas?) models of those aspects of reality that cannot be described by mathematical models entering physical theories. In pre-scientific ages such models - e.g. the Book of Genesis - were offered to explain ALL reality, including those aspects of it that today are much more effectively described and explained by science.

In this sense, instead of saying “God is a mythical creature” I would say God is a being (or just "something", if you like) modeled (evenntually together with other “spiritual” beings), as a person e.g. through myths or mythological models. Models that - in distinction to scientific models - cannot be supported or falsified through experimentation based on a strict separation of the subject from the object.

I think something similar is true about the emancipation of ethics, without necessarily leading to the rejection of the Bible. As the source not only of “truth” (in spite of “creation in six days”) but also of ethics, of what is “good” (in spite of God acting there in a way our understanding of what is good could not endorse)

Hello David J..
Christian belief is a response to a God who has revealed his presence and love through a people, then a person, and from that time 2000 years ago the Church of the People of God. As imperfect such revelation may be to a tidy mind it is nevertheless an accepted understanding of some billions of people on earth this day.

You do not believe. I do. You see my belief being of a myth. Sells and George seem to need intellectual filters to see it at all. I see it as a simple reality of life, revealed through the witness by millions of good people across millenia living lives of service to others expressing the substance of things hoped for and evidence of things not seen.

David your limited reason stops at the provable, measurable fact. What you see as irrationality, I see as my extended reason that flows from the the depth and breath of transcendent truth that incorporates the will of God which penetrates the whole of existence giving substance to human purpose. Where you see end, we Christians see completion of a task revealed to each of us as individuals to engage in life in passivity, and in full activity.

cheers