Quote - > Quote - Throughout the Old Testament, God is often self-described as jealous, vengeful, and judging by some descriptions, pretty over-the-top when it comes to revene for injustices. But then, when you run the Universe and your subjects are semi-civilized humans who do far worse to each other on a near-daily basis... let's just call it Getting One's Undivided Attention.

Not until a far more advanced (relatively) stage of civilization do we see the radical concepts as put forth by one Yeshua of Galilee: Love, Forgiveness, Tolerance, Kindness...

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Oh come now...  you actually call this a REASON why God is how He is?

I honestly don't (and literally cannot) claim any of it to be a "reason" - just that it lends insight towards finding one.

Quote - Answer me this. If He is all-knowing and all-seeing, how come he did not know EVERYTHING that was going to happen LONG before it ever happened? And KNOWING all of these things...   HOW could He get angry?

Dunno - and if I ever find out, I'd likely to have gained omniscience, in which case I think I'd be too busy putting such a gift to my advantage, instead of discussing how to gain it. ;)

Quote - a mother is preparing to bake bread. She gets all of the ingredients together - except the yeast. She puts the bread in the oven and when the timer goes off and she pulls it out of the oven she finds it has not risen. AND THEN SHE GETS MAD. Now of course she KNEW it would not rise because she intentionally left out the yeast - and YET...   she still got mad. DOES THIS MAKE SENSE?

Bad premise - bread dough doesn't have any concept of free will.

Quote - The devoutly religious really do not ask the hard questions and the vast majority of the time resort to "We don't understand Gods' Plan."  Uhh...  yeah.

Do you fully understand String Theory, enough to repeatably and reliably prove the concept in a laboratory?

You don't?

Well, I guess String Theory is false then, and the scientists working on it are fools. Best get on with ignoring it and finding something else.

(...and before you say it, note that even the biggest proponents of this physics theory don't fully grasp the thing, and will readily admit as much).

You also make a lot of bad overly-generalistic assumptions - that the "devoutly religious do not ask the hard questions". How on Earth would you know that? ...all of them? What questions would you consider "hard" enough, given that outside of geologic scales of measurement, "hard" is a subjective term?

Quote - As has already been pointed out here, it is obvious that most religious consistenly misinterpret the stories in the Bible and sway them to mean what they want them to mean.

Call it a side-effect of struggling to make sense of a document that has been through a whole lot of mishandling over the millennia. Also, you too easily lump in benign individual (and group) struggles for insight, vs. malicious intent and propaganda.

It also happens that misinterpretation (either through mistake or by malicious design) occurs with alarming frequency in secular documents as well - see also the series of UN/IPCC reports.

So no, misinterpretation is not a religious thing - it's a human thing. Which is part of what I was trying to say all this time.

IOW, I'm really sorry, but atheism does not make one superior, nor does it grant you anything special. You're still as human and frail as the rest of us, and just as statistically prone to our foibles and failings of intellect and wisdom... and just as prone to speaking it as if it were (s'cuse the pun) Gospel. ;)

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