Summations Only

purpledawn writes:

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Where in the Bible do they refer to God as a person as in human individual?

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Matthew 9:2-6
Mark 2:3-12
John 1:1
John 1:14
John 5:16-18
John 8:58
John 10:30-31
John 10:38-39
John 14:9
John 20:28
Acts 20:28
Colossians 1:16
Colossians 2:9
1 Timothy 3:16
Titus 2:13
Philippians 2:6
Hebrews 1:8
Revelation 1:17
Revelation 22:131 Timothy 3:16 is pretty explicit: I can understand why there might be some confusion with those early verses I mentioned since "Son of Man" is an unusual phrase to talk about the divinity, but "God was manifest in the flesh" is pretty much exactly what you were going for.Now, the Bible immediately contradicts those claims...sometimes in the same chapter. In John 8:40, Jesus says he isn't god: But then just a few verses later in 8:58, he claims he is: A similar contradiction takes place in John 14. First Jesus says he is god and not two dozen verses later, he says he's not. No wonder everybody was having trouble with the accusations against him about whether he claimed to be the son of god.

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Are gods presented as humans in the Bible stories?

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With regard to Jesus? Yes.

purpledawn responds to me:

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does that make the God referred to in the flood story or any of the Hebrew Bible stories a human individual?

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Since humans are made in god's image and upon eating of the Tree of Knowledge became as gods, knowing good and evil, that's an interesting question.Certainly Jewish theology is that there is only one god. That is the crime of Jesus: Claiming to be god. One of the big points of Judaism is that it is a monotheistic culture. That's the very first commandment: Thou shalt have no other gods before me. The idea that there could be another is anathema.

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Was I correct in Message 135, when I said that God killed the people in the verses listed and not a person?

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Irrelevant.

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If we are going to tally up deaths caused for religious reasons, then we need to know that there was a religious reason for the deaths.

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Indeed. And god casting judgement is religious...especially over people who aren't his.

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God did it, IMO, is not a religious reason. That just tells us who caused the deaths. If we're pulling the data from stories, we need to discern the reason from the story.

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Unless you are presuming that god is taking his orders from somewhere else or that it was an accident, then the deliberate machinations of god are inherently religious. Part of the problem of being the source of all morality is that you don't get to behave outside of that. Anybody who has been in positions of high authority can tell you that: Authority means everything you do is part of that.Theology is concerned about that comprehension of good and evil and everything god does is part and parcel of that. It's the age-old question of: "Does god do it because it's good or is it good because god does it?" In either case, if god kills someone, it is definitively connected to that question of religion.You're right that "god did it" is insufficient. But if god ever has an intention, that is all the justification needed.