Who Made God?

I was thinking about the New Testament concepts and what the cosmological obsession among the early Christians must have meant to Jesus, James, and Paul.Look at the precedents to Christianity.Carl Sagan, in Cosmos, said that there was a continuity from Pythagorean teachings and Christianity. He said that while physically standing on a church that was built over the traditional birthplace of Pythagoras (which I think was home to the Pythagorean's meeting place)

quote:

---

Among the Gentiles: Greco-Roman Religion and Christianity
By Luke Timothy Johnson
pp.82-84

​

It was the "way of life" (bios) established by Pythagoras, however, that most influenced later political thinking and showed traces of elements we have seen also in Orphism and the cult of Dionysus.

​

Building of the premise that "friends hold all things in common," Pythagoras established a community that was far more structured than the "schools" that were to meet in the Academy of the Porch. A genuine community of possessions enabled the maintenance of firm community boundaries both for admission and dismissal. Stages of initiation into full membership were not unlike levels of initiation into the Mysteries, and like the Mysteries demanded the observance of silence. ....

​

The key tenet holding everything else together was the conviction that the essential self was the soul (psyche) and that this soul moved through successive existences (metempsychosis) either upward (away from entanglement with matter) or downward (into greater entanglement). This tenet explains Pythagoras' reverence for all living beings who had souls - all living beings were, in this sense, "friends" - and the number of commands concerning the soul's purification. The Pythagorean tradition does not invoke a myth of origins or of eventual future bliss, but the "religious" character of this philosophy is evident in two ways: it organizes all of life, and this organization depends on the apodictic instructions of a figure regarded as divine.

​

In the Dialogues of Plato (ca. 427-347 BCE). there are a number of passages that support the position that these traces of a religious sensibility were all know in classical Athens and that the version we find in Poimandres represents not a new and late creation so much as the fuller development of trends already present among some Greeks and Romans for centuries. In a passage that clearly alludes to the Pythagorean tradition, Plato has Socrates say, "I have heard a philosopher say that at this moment we are actually dead, and that the body [soma] is our tomb [sema],' before relating an elaborate set of metaphors about "the soul of the ignorant" and the importance of living temperately (Gorgias, 493C). ....

​

In a discussion on the nature of the soul in Cratylus, Plato has Socrates allude to the position that the body is the tomb of the soul, "their notion being that the soul is buried in the present life." He ascribes the view to the "Orphic poets" who held that "the soul is undergoing punishment for something: they think it has the body as an enclosure to keep it safe, as a prison, and as the name itself denotes, the safe [soma] for the soul, until the penalty is paid" (400C). And in the Laws, Plato has the Athenian Stranger speak of tradition concerning people in the past who refused to perform animal sacrifices but who instead performed only "bloodless sacrifices" of meal and grain, a practice consistent with their having been forbidden "so much as to eat an ox": "from flesh they abstained as though it were unholy to eat it or to stain with blood the altars of the gods; instead of that, those of us men who then existed lived what is called 'Orphic Life' [orphikoi bioi], keeping wholly to inanimate food, and contrariwise, abstaining wholly from things ani8mate" (782C).

​

That Plato is not unsympathetic to the Orphic-Pythagorean perspective is suggested by two passages in the Phaedo, a dialogue devoted to Socrates' last moments with his followers and subtitled "On the Soul." Explaining why suicide is forbidden, Socrates alludes to "a doctrine that is taught in secret about this matter, that we men are in a kind of prison, and must not set ourselves free or run away" (62B). More fully, he discourses on how the philosopher "would not devote himself to the body, but would so far as he was able, turn away from the body and concern himself with the soul" (64 E), a course he subsequently elaborates: "And while we live, we shall, I think, be nearest knowledge when we avoid, so far as possible, intercorse and communion with the body, except what is absolutely necessary, and are not filled with its nature, and keep ourselves pure from it until God himself sets us free. And in this way, freeing ourselves from the foolishness of the body and being pure, we shall, I think be with the pure and shall know of ourselves all that is pure - and that is, perhaps the truth. For it cannot be that the impure attain the pure" (67 A-B).

---

Perhaps the view was that the original matter of the universe was the same thing as "God" and it was part of everything, especially the matter of sentient life.The Soma of Jesus was a replacement for sacrifices (the Passover).All Christians are members of the Soma of Jesus.This concept is present in the current New Testament and even more so in the Ebionite/Nazarene Gospel of Matthew.The early Gnostics has traditions of James and Mary handing secret teachings to others and cosmology was very relevant.

Sounds a bit too pantheistic, don't you think?

Perhaps one, if a "Biblical Christian", MUST have a sort of pantheistic type of view on "where God came from", when one has to consider that God would have come from another universe.Stay with the idea of (the) God, consistent with modern Christian fundamentalist's beliefs, coming from another universe, and one (such universe) that would have begun as absolutely nothing.Staying there,now we have to consider:1. If you want to avoid the issue of God having to evolve somewhere along the way to his/her/its very existence, then you must assume that any (of whatever initial) matter that came from nothing was God, so he/she/it was the first of all the initial matter (whatever it was that went from nothing to something).2. One must see God as not just a "collective soul" of all initial proto-sentient "life", but he/she/it must also have been any and every type of matter.O.K., but the ancient Greeks didn't really consider the issue of another universe (even if one is willing to stretch out a grant to the ancient Greeks which is giving them credit for - at times - generally understanding what our own universe actually is), instead there was a view of a spirit world.Here are some google quotes

quote:

---

Plato (427-347 BC), in his later work entitled Timaeus sketched out a theory of the origin and nature of the cosmos. The world was the creation of a "Demiurge" (from the Greek "demos" or people and "ourgos" or work) -- the most highly placed of gods, working in the "public" interest (Plato, like the ancient Greeks generally, was a polytheist -- a believer in many gods). This superior god was by nature good, and so tried to create an image of itself that was as good as possible. But the Demiurge could not create a world out of nothing; its powers were more limited than the God of Genesis. The Demiurge fashioned the cosmos out of materials provided by a pre-existing "chaos", or jumble of matter, which the Demiurge organized into the four elements -- Earth, Water, Air and Fire. These formed the "body" of the cosmos, which was also endowed with a "soul". The soul of the cosmos, which Plato considered as its better or more important part, was its principle of eternal and recurring circular motion, bringing about the circular motion of the moon, planets, sun and stars.

​

Background to Cosmology: The Ancient Greeks

---

quote:

---

Plato wrote the following question and answer sometime around 350 BC:

​

Is the world created or uncreated?that is the first question.
Created, I reply, being visible and tangible and having a body, and therefore sensible; and if sensible, then created; and if created, made by a cause, and the cause is the ineffable father of all things, who had before him an eternal archetype."[2]

​

Plato - CreationWiki, the encyclopedia of creation science

---

Then the first group to be called "Gnostics", according to Hippolytus (wrote in the first decades of the 3rd century).

quote:

---

Naassene Sermon[edit]

​

The Naassenes had one or more books out of which Hippolytus of Rome largely quotes in the Philosophumena, which professed to contain heads of discourses communicated by James, the brother of Jesus, to Mariamne. They contained treatises of a mystical, philosophic, devotional, and exegetical character, rather than a cosmological exposition. A very interesting feature of the book seems to have been the specimens it gave of Ophite hymnology.
....
Creation[edit]

​

The Naassene work known to Hippolytus would seem to have been of what we may call a devotional character rather than a formal exposition of doctrine, and this perhaps is why it is difficult to draw from the accounts left us a thoroughly consistent scheme. Thus, as we proceed, we are led to think of the first principle of nature, not as a single threefold being, but as three distinct substances; on the one hand the pre-existent, otherwise spoken of as the Good being, on the other hand the "outpoured Chaos," intermediate, between these one called Autogenes, and also the Logos. Chaos is naturally destitute of forms or qualities; neither does the preexistent being himself possess form, for though the cause of everything that comes into being, it is itself none of them, but only the seed from which they spring. The Logos is the mediator which draws forms from above and transfers them to the world below. Yet he seems to have a rival in this work; for we have reference made to a fourth being, whence or how brought into existence we are not told, a "fiery God," Esaldaios, the father of the idikos kosmos. That is to say, it was this fiery being, the same who appeared to Moses in the burning bush, who gave forms to the choical or purely material parts of nature. It is he who supplies the fiery heat of generation by which these forms are still continued. In this work the Logos had no part, for "all things were made through him, and without him was made nothing." The "nothing" that was made without him is the kosmos idikos. On the other hand, it is the Logos, who is identified with the serpent, and this again with the principle of Water, who brings down the pneumatic and psychical elements, so that through him man became a living soul. But he has now to do a greater work, namely, to provide for the release of the higher elements now enslaved under the dominion of matter, and for their restoration to the good God.[citation needed]

​

Naassenes - Wikipedia

---

I don't know how much of the early Gnostic cosmology was shared by Jesus, Paul, and James but they were familiar with God saying that he had help (let us make man) in creating man according to a "page one" creationist view of Genesis chapter 1. They also know that Chronicles (a post Exile book) essentially said that satan/Satan (whatever that meant at the time) was the agent God used to get David to take the census of Israel, while the earlier Samuel book simply said God did it.I also don't know how much the views of Plato completely represent the Gnostic beliefs.But Plato seems to feel that the Demiurge (perhaps a type of "Satan"?) did not make matter but in fact simply used it to bring about the elements; perhaps the four fundamental forces of nature were being "finely tuned", by a "Satan", and then with a Dark Energy type of force as well?Perhaps the spirit world (known to the ancients and described by them) was a synonym for another universe or possibly a conflation of the dual reality of the advanced beings being from BOTH alternate dimensions AND another universe?It will be difficult to parse and interpret ancient beliefs through a modern scientific understanding of the Cosmos, but a modern analysis of ancient beliefs might help us understand where they were coming from and what their texts/philosophies/devotionals were trying to convey. (And fundamentalists almost think that Jesus would have understood the universe's origins anyway, and the same fundamentalist will say that he knew "where God came from" as well as saying that Jesus was actually God)I would not rule out a REQUIRED pantheistic view of the first matter in another universe, IF ONE WANTS TO MAINTAIN FUNDAMENTALIST CHRISTIAN VIEWS.Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.

See you got me there. From everything that I have studied, there has never been evidence of either pantheism as defined by Websters nor of dualism. Granted the Genesis scripture is problematic. After all, who is us? Everything that I have read from what you call Christian Fundamentalism emphasizes a literal Bible...so we do have an interesting rabbit trail to explore. (I like googling almost as much as you do! )Thre is an interesting website called Closer to Truth which is the first thing I found. It has lots of interesting videos but I don't really have time to explore them at the moment. I need to focus on finding an answer to the question of who us is in genesis. Winging it, I have often found it easy to believe that God is by definition the uncaused first cause...and by that I mean that nothing ever came before Him...not to say that once upon a time there was nothing and later on there was God, mind you. That before time was, He is. Before space was, He was. Before matter, he was. Revelations has an interesting take on it that I often use.Note, by the way, that time and space are believed to be created things...thus we are only discussing ideas. The idea of an eternal uncreated god is a belief. Perhaps I like it because it explains God in a way that I can appreciate His vastness and infinite omnipotence. I'm not sure that the ancient Greeks were any worse at contemplating these things than I am, but let me give two of my favorite Bible scriptures that I came to agree with...at least so far.1) Revelation says that God was, is, and essentially will always be. It also implies that the Beast(which some see as satan) Once was, is not and yet is for those whose name is not written in the Book of Life.Granted I am simply parroting my beliefs to you, and I respect the articles which you google as well. In fact, the 2004 version of me would have tried to essentially win this discussion and stereotype you as a seeker of knowledge rather than truth, which at the time i would have declared that I in fact had.(By virtue of having been saved. Now, in 2018, (Happy New Year by the way) I try and present discussions and arguments without necessarily trying to win.Question for you, LNA. If you were given the choice between monotheist, polytheist, pantheist, agnostic, atheist and/or dualist...which would you consider to be the most logical belief?Paul talked of an unknown god and then proceeded to explain that the god he worshipped was known. Perhaps one could argue that this concept did not rule out pantheism, but rather supported it...but I have always been taught that Monotheism (and at worst Trinitarianism) was the essential doctrine of fundamentalist Christianity.jar has also brought up the idea that Paul was out to start a distinct belief or religion apart from traditional Judaism.To be honest with you, I have considered myself a monotheistic Christian, but would welcome criticism as long as it is constructive.

The problem is not in the Bible stories but rather in the reader.You are still trying to find consistency in a whole host of inconsistent unrelated folk tales.If you look for answers from the faction that tries to sell the Bible as some single consistent story; as inerrant, you will get answers made up to simply pretend the inconsistencies are not there.Sources that begin their sales pitch with a fallacy cannot really deal with the reality of what IS written in the stories.Throw the Inerrant Bible Snake Oil Salesmen away.The issue disappears when you realize that the authors of many of the Old Testament stories believed there were many, many Gods. The other Gods were real, were Gods, were powerful but they were not their God(s).The authors of the Genesis 2&3 tales had no problem with the idea that there were lots of Gods, a whole hierarchy of Gods. "Us" means me and my crew.This gets emphasized and repeated in many of the early folk tales describing the creation of the People called Israel (as opposed to the Nation State of the same name). This is the whole purpose of the Exodus story (the creation of a Peoples with a particular God) and of Joshua (the defining of the area that was under the dominion of that God).I am the Lord Thy God. Thou shalt have no other Gods Before Me.This defines a specific god, a god that is distinct from the other Gods, a God that has dominion over a particular peoples and later a particular piece of land. That is why in the much later 2 Kings 5 story of Naaman the God Rimmon is to be treated with courtesy and why Naaman needs the earth from Israel since he was in an area, a land, where Rimmon was Dominate and so a piece of the land where the Israeli God was Dominate was needed to bring the influence and power with it.Again, there is no "God of the Bible" rather there is the God imagined by the authors of Genesis 2&3 and God imagined by the authors of Exodus and God imagined by the authors of Joshua and much much later the God imagined by the authors of Genesis 1.

You have a point, much as it makes me uncomfortable. I'm not sure yet if I can totally throw away the concept of Biblical Inerrancy, but I'll consider it for the sake of debate.
The challenge for me is that if i throw God away, I find myself plagued with a lot of uncertainty. It is most definitely not comfortable.Besides...do you see where Lamark New Age is coming from when he states: My immediate reaction to that was to attempt to explain that the God whom I understand transcends not only this universe but any and every other possible universe (or multiverse) and like Paul states, was and is not made by human hands nor minds nor brains nor imaginations. It's the Capital letter God. The GOD whom you claim is complete but whom I count as "good". I don't feel that I can limit my definition of who GOD is from the Logos of the Bible stories.
The God whom I believe in is reality, if it exists. Granted I have been taught that Jesus factors in there as a necessary relational road to understanding GOD, but I can appreciate and understand how both you and LNA are unafraid to use other stories to explain other possibilities.But my question to you both is this:
Why pantheism? Why not monotheism?

This idea tweaks my brain. I wonder what Son Goku thinks? Granted one definition of pantheism is this:

quote:

---

1 : a doctrine that equates God with the forces and laws of the universe
2 : the worship of all gods of different creeds, cults, or peoples indifferently; also : toleration of worship of all gods (as at certain periods of the Roman empire)

---

Thus if i claim to be a monotheist, I cannot equate God with any forces or laws
(such as the informal law of karma, or what fundies state as the law of sowing and reaping) nor can I claim that God is definable since even that is a law of human wisdom.Though some claim that modern humanity is idolatrous at its core---we at times value money, football, and SI swimsuit models with more passion than we do God---I would agree that some could argue that Trinitarianism can be perceived as polytheistic and that in a strict sense, attributing power to Satan and the entire concept of idolatry multiplies worship into a virtual pantheistic panopoly.

What difference does it make whether you create one God or many Gods?Monotheism was an evolutionary creation. If you look at the Gods of the Bible you find that the early creations are a pantheon of Gods, each over a particular peoples and geographic area.But that is not what LNA is trying to present. He is simply pointing out that the Christian Concept of the Trinity as a Unity really makes little or no sense and that over time Christianity itself has declared that all the possible ways for it to make any sense are heretical.That's just another example of Christian Dogma shooting itself in the foot, something it does really well.Edited by AdminPhat, : fixed broken quote

quote:

---

You have a point, much as it makes me uncomfortable. I'm not sure yet if I can totally throw away the concept of Biblical Inerrancy, but I'll consider it for the sake of debate.
The challenge for me is that if i throw God away, I find myself plagued with a lot of uncertainty. It is most definitely not comfortable.

---

Plenty of people believe in God without believing that the Bible is inerrant. Throwing out Biblical inerrancy isn’t throwing out God.Especially because Biblical inerrancy seems to mean throwing out understanding of the Bible. So what if the second creation story has hangovers from the time before that Hebrews were true monotheists. If they are there, they’re there. Does that change Jesus’ message in any way ? So what if the Flood story is two versions of the story mashed together. It is and you can see it if you read carefully even in translation.Maybe you think you need Biblical Inerrancy as a foundation for your beliefs, but what value is a false foundation that may well interfere with your understanding of scripture ?

OK, so what about Paul? You have argued before that there is no evidence that Paul saw Jesus as God. Paul describes God in a way that makes sense. Fundies would, of course, argue that when Saul got smitten and blinded, he not only switched sides but had a revelation of who God is. He certainly sounds reasonable to me. Of course, you likely will reiterate that GOD, if GOD exists, is unknowable and undefinable. My point is that from what I can gather, Paul likely wouldn't agree with you. As a side note, I wonder if Paul would see God more as good or, like you, as complete?

Really read what Paul wrote instead of the pieces parts that get taken out of context.Also really read what is said by others in the Bible stories about the Damascus Road incident; the account changes dramatically over time and repetition. Luke itself contains three different mutually exclusive accounts of the event. Paul himself in Galatians posts yet another entirely different and contradictory story.In addition, Paul's basic nature never changes. He is still the zealot he was before.In addition, Acts excludes Paul from being an Apostle. All the descriptions of God in all religions make sense. That is simply true. What I imagine you mean is that you like some of the descriptions of God that Paul markets even though like all modern God marketeers he sell only the sizzle and not the steak. He claims the God he is selling is knowable but never tells how to tell if it is really God or a bad burrito.Edited by jar, : applin spallinEdited by jar, : more appalin spallin

quote:

---

See you got me there. From everything that I have studied, there has never been evidence of either pantheism as defined by Websters nor of dualism. Granted the Genesis scripture is problematic. After all, who is us? Everything that I have read from what you call Christian Fundamentalism emphasizes a literal Bible...so we do have an interesting rabbit trail to explore. (I like googling almost as much as you do! )

---

I have confused you, and it is my fault (I think I know where I really confused you about my entire post, and it was a poorly placed paragraph. Will quote it later). You did good in trying to follow my post, but I was allowing for God to have created the "us" in Genesis, as well as pretty much everything in THIS universe.God made THIS universe we all know, and matter is from his creation, but not part of God.The pantheistic God would have referred to the same God (but!) in ANOTHER universe (or perhaps the entire multi verse of everything that made up the initial NOTHINGNESS that existed everywhere and by that I mean all the other places/non-places that ever have existed outside our universe) and I was offering that as an alternative to the idea that God must have "evolved" on some other universe, then come to our "SPOT" (which later became our Universe we live in) to create our universe.I was saying that God might have made up all of the earliest matter that came from "nothing to something" in ANOTHER universe, thus he would not have "evolved" but in fact he would have been the collective "first something", though perhaps this quasi intelligence might not have had much (if anything) going on mentally as the proto-matter would have lacked much of a mind (even on a collective consciousness "spiritual" level).I think I know where the confusion came in.I was quoting and (in a lousy broad brushing way) describing the cosmological views of early Christians (or at least the early Gnostics)and certain Greek philosophies, WHICH ONLY COMPREHENDED OUR OWN UNIVERSE.Here were the confusing parts I dropped in.

quote:

---

I don't know how much of the early Gnostic cosmology was shared by Jesus, Paul, and James but they were familiar with God saying that he had help (let us make man) in creating man according to a "page one" creationist view of Genesis chapter 1. They also know that Chronicles (a post Exile book) essentially said that satan/Satan (whatever that meant at the time) was the agent God used to get David to take the census of Israel, while the earlier Samuel book simply said God did it.

​

I also don't know how much the views of Plato completely represent the Gnostic beliefs.

​

But Plato seems to feel that the Demiurge (perhaps a type of "Satan"?) did not make matter but in fact simply used it to bring about the elements; perhaps the four fundamental forces of nature were being "finely tuned", by a "Satan", and then with a Dark Energy type of force as well?

---

I was simply making the point that there was a recognition of entities existing (and continuing to exist) BEFORE the Big Bang (not that they knew of a Big Bang!).I was not saying that God did not create them, in fact I was granting that God created everything in OUR universe.The closest thing to an understanding of another universe (among the ancient peoples) was the idea that there were spiritual entities that existed before our own.That is what we have to work with when we want to consider a "first cause" in our universe.Here was the rest of my post 183, after your above quote.

quote:

---

Perhaps the spirit world (known to the ancients and described by them) was a synonym for another universe or possibly a conflation of the dual reality of the advanced beings being from BOTH alternate dimensions AND another universe?

​

It will be difficult to parse and interpret ancient beliefs through a modern scientific understanding of the Cosmos, but a modern analysis of ancient beliefs might help us understand where they were coming from and what their texts/philosophies/devotionals were trying to convey. (And fundamentalists almost think that Jesus would have understood the universe's origins anyway, and the same fundamentalist will say that he knew "where God came from" as well as saying that Jesus was actually God)

​

I would not rule out a REQUIRED pantheistic view of the first matter in another universe, IF ONE WANTS TO MAINTAIN FUNDAMENTALIST CHRISTIAN VIEWS.

---

I was saying that God either evolved in another universe or he was the first matter to come from "nothing to something" (both refer to another universe and BEFORE our own). The latter would be the pantheistic scenario. Think of it as the difference between the first biological life to come from the rocks, and the first Hominid to evolve from the Australopithecines (advanced chimp like creatures that are much further along the way to modern humans). But God would have been proto-elemental (with a collective spirit type of proto-intelligence, but it wouldn't have been an intelligence that was manifested in the material realm) if the Pantheistic scenario is correct. He could very well have been something we don't have or understand on our own universe.You then said

quote:

---

Thre is an interesting website called Closer to Truth which is the first thing I found. It has lots of interesting videos but I don't really have time to explore them at the moment. I need to focus on finding an answer to the question of who us is in genesis. Winging it, I have often found it easy to believe that God is by definition the uncaused first cause...and by that I mean that nothing ever came before Him...not to say that once upon a time there was nothing and later on there was God, mind you.

​

That before time was, He is. Before space was, He was. Before matter, he was. Revelations has an interesting take on it that I often use.

​

Note, by the way, that time and space are believed to be created things...thus we are only discussing ideas. The idea of an eternal uncreated god is a belief. Perhaps I like it because it explains God in a way that I can appreciate His vastness and infinite omnipotence. I'm not sure that the ancient Greeks were any worse at contemplating these things than I am, but let me give two of my favorite Bible scriptures that I came to agree with...at least so far.

​

1) Revelation says that God was, is, and essentially will always be. It also implies that the Beast(which some see as satan) Once was, is not and yet is for those whose name is not written in the Book of Life.

​

Granted I am simply parroting my beliefs to you, and I respect the articles which you google as well. In fact, the 2004 version of me would have tried to essentially win this discussion and stereotype you as a seeker of knowledge rather than truth, which at the time i would have declared that I in fact had.(By virtue of having been saved. Now, in 2018, (Happy New Year by the way) I try and present discussions and arguments without necessarily trying to win.

​

Question for you, LNA. If you were given the choice between monotheist, polytheist, pantheist, agnostic, atheist and/or dualist...which would you consider to be the most logical belief?

---

I don't know about the last question (though "agnostic" by definition admits an ignorance that we all truly have, so it sound closer to what we all are BUT WON'T ALL ADMIT TO), but everything above that last question seems to look at our own universe .(except perhaps the part where you said "and by that I mean that nothing ever came before Him...not to say that once upon a time there was nothing and later on there was God, mind you" which can possibly be interpreted as referring to other universes before our own)You then said

quote:

---

Paul talked of an unknown god and then proceeded to explain that the god he worshipped was known.

​

Acts 17:22-28 NIV writes:

​

"Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: "Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. 23 For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.
24 "The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. 25 And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. 26 From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. 27 God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 28'For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring."

​

Perhaps one could argue that this concept did not rule out pantheism, but rather supported it...but I have always been taught that Monotheism (and at worst Trinitarianism) was the essential doctrine of fundamentalist Christianity.

​

jar has also brought up the idea that Paul was out to start a distinct belief or religion apart from traditional Judaism.

​

To be honest with you, I have considered myself a monotheistic Christian, but would welcome criticism as long as it is constructive.

---

Keep in mind that Paul, read literally (if the NIV has the tenses correct), was giving God credit for ongoing creation when he says, "he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else."But every fundamentalist knows that there are naturalistic forces behind oxygen PRESENTLY, even if God is said, by those same fundamentalists, to have placed the atmosphere around the Earth 6000 years ago.An admission that the Bible telescopes a long period of time (countless "ages" that man arbitrarily labels via a separation into various periods/eras to classify the history into an understandable and comprehensible summary portion) would be wondrous if the same understanding of Paul's words would be applied to the early chapters of Genesis.Even a directly acting God (100% "creationist") is telescoped by Paul, in the same speech.Here we can see that Paul combined/telescoped the chapter 1-2 creation of Adam with the direct separation of man in the Babel incident roughly 10 chapters later."From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live."But God uses agents (like an "evolving" or changing atmosphere) to presently GIVE ALL MEN things like breathable oxygen.But, to the point of your question, Paul did seem to want the pagan Greeks to see monotheism (or perhaps a dual worship of God THE FATHER AND God THE SON if he came to see Jesus as God, which I think is possible, though most scholars will say that Paul considered Jesus to NOT BE GOD, therefore Paul was monotheistic, and thus they disagree with my non-expert opinion) as the correct way to go.Back to my point.God used agents to make the present world. Naturalistic agents and spiritual agents.Like the early Christians knew (well they were more obsessed with the idea of spiritual beings making the world, so perhaps there wasn't much naturalism there).But I was not saying that anything was not created by God on THIS UNIVERSE , though the very forces of nature might have been imported (and perhaps modified) from another universe that God did not create. Ditto for the elements and the building blocks.Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.

Since you said that a paragraph of mine really made you think ("This idea tweaks my brain"), I suppose I should quote this great thing I typed.I said (rather brilliantly):

quote:

---

Perhaps one, if a "Biblical Christian", MUST have a sort of pantheistic type of view on "where God came from", when one has to consider that God would have come from another universe.
Stay with the idea of (the) God, consistent with modern Christian fundamentalist's beliefs, coming from another universe, and one (such universe) that would have begun as absolutely nothing.

---

Simply brilliant (joking).After you quoted me, you said:

quote:

---

This idea tweaks my brain. I wonder what Son Goku thinks? Granted one definition of pantheism is this:

​

quote:
1 : a doctrine that equates God with the forces and laws of the universe
2 : the worship of all gods of different creeds, cults, or peoples indifferently; also : toleration of worship of all gods (as at certain periods of the Roman empire)

​

Thus if i claim to be a monotheist, I cannot equate God with any forces or laws
(such as the informal law of karma, or what fundies state as the law of sowing and reaping) nor can I claim that God is definable since even that is a law of human wisdom.

​

Though some claim that modern humanity is idolatrous at its core---we at times value money, football, and SI swimsuit models with more passion than we do God---I would agree that some could argue that Trinitarianism can be perceived as polytheistic and that in a strict sense, attributing power to Satan and the entire concept of idolatry multiplies worship into a virtual pantheistic panopoly.

---

All I will say is that any "God of the gaps" notion that what we cannot comprehend & scientifically discover the origin of (or at least what brought about these things) must therefore be of God, should be avoided.The same avoidance should be part of our approach to the theological idea of actual things (forces, sub atomic particles and where they came from) BEING God himself.But we should understand that God, if he created this Universe, had to have come from somewhere.We should also understand that our ancient texts didn't comprehend another Universe (But they DID have God and/or spiritual entities existing before the beginning of our Universe).Understand that the ancient texts lacking a description of another universe doesn't mean that they would not have done so if OTHER UNIVERSES were part of the philosophical (or also the camp fire)discussions going on.There is a difficult enough time for scientists, of all people, to wrap their minds around the possibility of other universes.Know our limitations but cautiously read (other universes) into the ancient descriptions of spiritual beings existing before creation.(God might have efficiently used the idea of physical forces and matter from other universes, and modified them to make up our own physical reality. Modified the idea and then created that forces and matter HERE in our Universe)

quote:

---

attributing power to Satan and the entire concept of idolatry multiplies worship into a virtual pantheistic panopoly

---

But everybody is given certain powers.And there are two completely different things between idolatry and God giving Satan power to separate elements that God created.(Don't Christians say "Lucifer" is the same thing as Satan, so why can't the Biblically described light giver - Satan! - be responsible for separating enough elements further and further apart so that the temperature can drop enough so that Photons can "light up" by 378,000 years after the Big Bang?)Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.

The Wikipedia page is pretty helpful at showing Biblical hot spots which give Satan quite a lot of power over nature.

quote:

---

Lucifer as Satan or the devil[edit]

​

Adherents of the King James Only movement and others who hold that Isaiah 14:12 does indeed refer to the devil have decried the modern translations.[84][85][86]

​

Those treating "Lucifer" as a name for Satan may use that name when speaking of such accounts of the devil or Satan as the following:

​

Satan inciting David to number Israel (1 Chronicles 21:1), though in 2 Samuel 24:1 it is stated that God caused David to take census of Israel

​

Job tested by Satan (Book of Job)

​

Satan ready to accuse the high priest Joshua (Zechariah 3:1—2)

​

Sin brought into the world through the devil's envy (Wisdom 2:24)

​

"The prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience" (Ephesians 2:2)

​

"The god of this world" (2 Corinthians 4:4).

​

The devil disputing with Michael about the body of Moses (Jude 1:9)

​

The dragon of the Book of Revelation "who is called the devil and Satan" (Revelation 12:9;20:2)

​

They may also use the name "Lucifer" when speaking of Satan's motive for rebelling and of the nature of his sin, which, without using the name "Lucifer", Origen, Chrysostom, Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine attributed to the devil's pride, and Irenaeus, Tertullian, Justin Martyr, Cyprian, and again Augustine attributed to the devil's envy of humanity created in the image of God.[87][88][89] Jealousy of humans, created in the divine image and given authority over the world is the motive that a modern writer, who denies that there is any such person as Lucifer, says that Tertullian attributed to the devil,[90] and, while he cited Tertullian and Augustine as giving envy as the motive for the fall, an 18th-century French Capuchin preacher himself described the rebel angel as jealous of Adam's exaltation, which he saw as a diminution of his own status.[89]

​

Lucifer - Wikipedia

---

Actually, the early Gnostic Naassenes (who seem to have existed before 150 AD and certainly before 200 AD when they were mentioned as using the Gospel of the Egyptians by an Orthodox Church Father) might not have had overall cosmological views too far removed from Jesus, James, and Paul.I really wish we had more texts (oh just a tantalizing sliver we have) to see what else was part of early Christianity.

Hi LNAI would like to comment on a couple of your comments. I am a fundamentalist and I do not believe our universe came from another universe. That is string theory.I do not believe anything that exists came from nothing. Only scientist believe that. Science has not and can not discover the origin of the universe.There is no scientific data until T=10^-43 s.
This is due to a mathematical problem, General Relativity breaks down and can not give any information.Added by edit: The Planck epoch is the time during which physics is assumed to have been dominated by quantum effects of gravity.String theory was proposed to solve this problem. Since there is no data available anything that is devised by scientist that existed prior to T=10^-43 s. has to come from their imagination. I have stated on this web site that anything that could cause the universe and everything in it to begin to exist would be God, no matter what it was.It would have to be eternal in existence.
It would have to be Omnipotence, Omnipresence, and Omniscience.Stephen Hawkins proposed an 'instanton' had popped into existence and produced the universe we have. Therefore he claimed to have proved we did not need God to create the universe.For the 'instanton' to pop into existence it would require a vacuum which would require space to exist in.But I have had it pounded into my head on this site that there is no thing outside of the universe. It was supposedly a self-contained universe, according to cavediver and Son Goku that began to expand at what we call T=10^-43 s. . The Hebrew word שחר translated "Lucifer"
exists 1 time in the Hebrew text. Isaiah 14:12Anyone with a 5th grade reading ability can read Isaiah 14:6 and understand Isaiah is writing a proverb against a man who was the King of Babylon.The word Lucifer is used in Isaiah 14:12Four verses later in Isaiah 14:16 "They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, and consider thee, saying, Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms;"The subject of the proverb has not changed and the question is asked: ", Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms?".That plainly says man, and a man is not an angelic being.I would appreciate any corrections needed to make my statements accurate as they will be a part of my book. I will not use cavediver's and Son's handle in the book.God Bless,Edited by ICANT, : To correct the number T=0^-40 second as pointed out by NoNukes. Edited by ICANT, : Corrected time to the Planck epoch