Who's afraid of a godless universe?

Many people feel that a godless universe would be a frightening place, vast, amoral and empty of meaning.Others, including myself, would find a universe ruled by an all-powerful God much more unsettling, especially if that God were the despotic tyrant that Iano, amongst others here, seems to believe in.So my question is:Which would you find more scary, a universe without a god, or one ruled over by an all-powerful God?This message has been edited by JavaMan, 02-18-2006 01:39 PM

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

Hi, JavaMan.Your PNT seems a bit sketchy.Maybe you could take a position and provide some reasoning for it. Your position is implied by your terms--perhaps you could make it explicit and provide supportive reasoning?Alternatively, you might outline some consequences for both possibilities.

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Trust me.

Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, we do like to have topic title that actually give a bit of information about the topic theme. Change it to something that really means something, via editing message 1. Do what AdminOmni said also.Adminnemooseus

It isn't as if there are two universes out there, one with no God, the other with a despot - and we get to choose which one we join.We are stuck in the universe we are in. We can't make that choice. So I don't understand what is to be debated here.As AdminOmni suggested, you need to clarify the topic.

Three basic roads here.
1) Good God
a) Personl
b)non-personal
2) Bad God(Tyrant)
a) We are grasshoppers in a flame, squirming to survive
b) We have been abandoned to our own fate.3) No God. Just a humongous universe that is bigger than our dustspeck of a planet can handle.Which way do you wanna go? Push EDIT on your opening post and rewrite it according to the guidelines of the admins who posted above.
Get back to us with final revision by March 1st.

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I've edited the post to give a bit more meat to the question. Is that enough?

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

Done.

Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.I chose to promote the entire PNT version, including the various admin comments, rather than the alternative of promoting just message 1. Offhand (non-admin mode perspective) my impression is AdminNWR pretty much said it all in his message 4: But we shall see where this goes. Probably won't happen as such, but I see this as ideally being a short topic (10 or 20 new messages, and then close it down).AdminnemooseusThis message has been edited by Adminnemooseus, 02-18-2006 02:24 PM

According to my current tentative view, that's exactly the type of universe we live in. I can't tell how the other alternative would feel. One would have to experience it. A religious person might tell us how it feels from their perspective.

...and despite this being a pre-promotion admin message, I gots to ask:

quote:

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2) Bad God(Tyrant)
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b) We have been abandoned to our own fate.

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Why would this make God bad?

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"Intellectually, scientifically, even artistically, fundamentalism -- biblical literalism -- is a road to nowhere, because it insists on fidelity to revealed truths that are not true." -- Katha Pollitt

Both are extremely scary and depressing to me; unless, Jesus Christ perfectly represents the God of the universe.

quote:

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Jesus Christ perfectly represents the God of the universe.

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Imagine water turning into wine whenever you needed it!

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"Intellectually, scientifically, even artistically, fundamentalism -- biblical literalism -- is a road to nowhere, because it insists on fidelity to revealed truths that are not true." -- Katha Pollitt

That would totally rock. I wonder if he can do both red and white wine? How about a nice merlot.The one thing that would freak me out would be all the zombies rising from the dead all the time.This message has been edited by SuperNintendo Chalmers, 02-18-2006 04:00 PM

Micah 2:11 If a liar and a deceiver comes saying, I will prophesy unto thee of wine and beer; he would be just the prophet for this people!

You are kidding me surely? You haven't noticed that pretty much every religious poster here mentions this issue at some point. Of course there's only one universe, but there are at least two radically different views of it. Isn't that what the debate here is about?

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible