What is your take on the "traditional" abrahamic monotheistic God?

[Htom Sirveaux]

By which I mean: a transcendent, personal, all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving creator.

[Angry Dragon]

1. don't forget jealous and vengeful

[Htom Sirveaux]

7. Good point.

Interesting that those never make it into the "omni-" descriptors of God. All-jealous, all-vengeful, all-wrathful...that would probably seem pretty jarring to some people if you started including them, like how some people still get startled by references to God as "she".

[Hokie]

2. The chances are zero of its existance

There is zero evidence for it. The same question could be asked of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny, all of which have equivalent evidence of their existence.

[applegrove]

3. I don't know and can't fathom who started the universe. I don't even speculate.

So I just stick with nature and my ancestors and science as being the things I worship. And that I don't know the rest.

[OriginalGeek]

4. I don't believe there is one

Nor any of the other gods .

[Hieronymus]

5. The church has promoted lots of ..

stuff, mostly to make the church all powerful.
Many things were lifted from Pagans, Egyptians and more.

[Warpy]

6. Uh, no.

I've always thought the Taoists were onto something, that the universe is a living entity that is not self aware. It's certainly not aware of us.

[neeksgeek]

12. I always liked the opening lines of the Tao Teh Ching

I can't quote it verbatim, but I think it says "there is the Tao, which has no name." It fascinated me, still does.

[LuvLoogie]

8. I think there is a spirit realm that living humans can detect,

sense, interface with. I think there may be a point of no return where your being crosses over into another plane and cannot come back.

I also believe that not all spirits survive the crossover, that oblivion and a dissipated consciousness is the result. What remains is DNA and memories in the progeny and extended family. Intent only in the memories and influences that impacted friends, enemies and strangers. Some are not much more there than random dust and the breeze from a butterfly upon solar winds.

This talk of a benevolent all-powerful God/creator existing or not is beside the point. He/she/it could give two shits whether they are believed in. They're gonna do their thing in spite of our excellent egos pretending we don't live in momma's basement, so to speak.

[Binkie The Clown]

9. There's a sort of version of "god" that I could sort of imagine being possible...

That would be more like an emergent consciousness instantiated in energy fluxes on a cosmological scale acting like biological brain cells.

I would grant that such a consciousness might possibly possess one or more traits from the set {personal, all-knowing, all-loving}, but lacking physical instrumentality, it is certainly not all-powerful, and, as an emergent phenomenon itself, definitely not "the creator".

I can even imagine that it might be capable of uploading a person's consciousness into the cosmological energy matrix that forms its "brain cells", thus making it possible for a human consciousness to live on, "in the cloud", in immaterial form, after the biological brain ceases to function. This would not be "eternal", but only until the heat death of the universe as a whole.

None of these requires the violation of know physical laws, and even though it stretches the imagination, there is no physical reason I can think of that would rule out the possibility of consciousness being implemented in non-biological circuitry.

All of that, however, is irrelevant to the way I live my life since if it happens to be true, then I stand a good change of having my consciousness uploaded "into the cloud" whether I behave myself or whether break all the rules and live a life of debauchery. Especially if this consciousness possess the trait of "all-loving", motivating it to upload everyone's consciousness to the cloud after death, though it would probably piss off a lot people to be told that when Hitler died he went straight to "heaven".

[gtar100]

10. It's the natural end state of male-dominant ego.

Anthropomorphised deity of cultures based on class and hierarchy of power.

A human-centric perspective of spirit and mind colored by war, property ownership, and the pursuit of domination over nature and specifically domination over other people.

[EarnestPutz]

11. Monotheism is a marketing ploy.

Why is it that we find the idea of many gods, each with
their own realm of influence and competing interests, so laughable,
yet the idea of just one god so plausible? Add in a son who was
born on earth to human parents, loves everyone, who is one and the same with the
god figure, let alone the spirit that includes us, and you've got marketing
gold. Folks will love it. People wonder what happens to their loved ones when
they die, hope that it's something good. Give them what they want. Make money.

[NeoGreen]

13. Who died and made...

...it god?

That is my initial response.

[Voltaire2]

14. a quaint and foolish myth that is frequently used to justify

oppression hatred and war.

[MineralMan]

15. Such a deity is convenient to have.

That's why it was created a few thousand years ago.

[Pope George Ringo II]

16. A particularly unattractive derivative of the Aten

[Act_of_Reparation]

17. He doesn't much resemble the character described in the Bible...

...who is often petty, vengeful, and decidedly not all-knowing, all-powerful, or all-loving.

[Iggo]

18. No is. (n/t)