Does God have a Personality?

[CJCRANE]

The question of God's personality is something that I have difficulty with.

I recently came across a religious fundamentalist's writings online.

This is someone I met in real life several years ago but is just an acquaintance of an old friend.

Now this guy is obsessed with doing "God's will". His whole life (according to his writings) is devoted to this.

So, he wants to do what God wants. However, his understanding of God is someone very wrathful who will punish you if you don't do what he says.

Obviously, the flip side are the people who believe that "God is Love" or "God is Merciful" etc. and that spend their lives helping other people.

So it seems to me that doing "God's will" is dependent on your interpretation of God's personality.

Plus it puts another layer between you and other people. Instead of helping people or hating people just because you want to, there's this other thing telling you what to do.

[annabanana]

1. ascribing a human-style personality to God is limiting in the extreme

IMHO

[cbayer]

5. This is a great response.

[trotsky]

15. Love is a human emotion.

Yet believers of many stripes seem perfectly OK with assigning it to their god.

[skepticscott]

41. Not to mention anger, jealousy and a few others

Just another convenient dodge of the religionistsas. Claim to "know" as much as necessary about god and his mind when they want to promote the good stuff, but when bad stuff happens, fall back on the "we can't expect to be able to understand god" evasion.

[longship]

16. Kind of a Zen response.

Maybe that's all one can say about this god being.

But people, I think, need to anthropomorphize god just like they do the same with animals, and such. (Even cars, for Christ sake!) I believe that's a common human trait. We all do it.

The Zen way of thinking -- AFAIK-- is to not do that about god. In other words, assigning any attribute to god limits god.

[stopbush]

51. But it's to be expected as god is an invention of the human mind.

[hrmjustin]

2. According to the Bible he seems to have mood swings. I like to think God is always happy.

[skepticscott]

42. If you're just going to invent

exactly the kind of "god" that you need to make you feel warm and fuzzy, why do you need the Bible at all? You could simply write your own and leave out the nasty bits.

[hrmjustin]

43. Well I suppose you could do that, but I am not going to.

I believe God is love and I get that view from Jesus Christ, so I think the NT is what I will stick with.

[skepticscott]

48. Jesus Christ says

that the sheep and the goats will be divided, and that the poorly bearing trees will be cut down and burned. And on and on with all sorts of things that sounds nothing like love or "all humans go to heaven". What you really seem to be saying is that you'll stick only with the aspects of Jesus that make you warm and fuzzy, and deny that anything else was said by him or actually matters.

[hrmjustin]

49. Yes Jesus did not come to make things warm and fuzzy. He came to tell humanity to

get their act together. He also taught that God is love.

[aristocles]

3. According to St. George

[Blue Owl]

29. That bit never, ever gets old...

[libodem]

4. Yep

Let go and let God. I think if there is a god that god is love. Is love a personality?

[CJCRANE]

8. That sounds a bit like the Tao to me...

I'm not entirely against the idea of "God" but more in the sense of the "Universe" and everything in it all being part of the same thing.

In the Abrahamic religions there is the impression that God is separate or beyond the universe or that the universe is just a part of him.

[trotsky]

6. Without fail, a believer's notion of god is essentially their idealized self.

Their god agrees with them politically on every issue.

Their god shares the morals and values they hold.

In other words, believers create god in their own image.

[hrmjustin]

7. This seems true for me.

I want God to be happy so I tend to believe God is happy.

[Bay Boy]

12. If HE or you are happy

neither of you must be reading the newspaper.

[hrmjustin]

13. Good point!

[Sekhmets Daughter]

52. Insightful!

Everything you need to know about someone can be determined by how they envision their god. Perhaps that's why atheists are frequently more interesting!

[Buzz Clik]

9. God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

.... so I've heard.

[Goblinmonger]

19. Kind of like Andy Kaufman?

Though his audience wasn't necessarily too afraid to laugh but they didn't laugh because they didn't get the joke. Or didn't realize they were the joke.

[LongTomH]

32. So was Any Kaufman God?

I think a lot of people thought George Carlin was God!

[Goblinmonger]

40. If there actually is a god, I hope it's Andy Kaufman.

He's hilarious and he takes people out for cookies. What more could you ask for?

[Scuba]

10. He's a nasty fucker.

Any all-knowing, all-powerful person who would let the carnage continue year after year must be one nasty-ass, sorry bastard.

[hrmjustin]

20. I think we should blame humans and not God for our choices.

[Scuba]

21. I certainly do.

[trotsky]

22. Who created humans, and made it part of their fundamental nature...

to be violent predators on occasion?

[hrmjustin]

23. Well we evolved like that. Why God allowed that I do not know, but I do not blame him for

our mistakes and choices.

[trotsky]

24. We are imperfect beings, and (if you believe your god created us)...

we were intentionally created to be imperfect.

[rug]

26. Only if you consider the ability to choose to be imperfection.

[hrmjustin]

38. I guess so!

[Arugula Latte]

31. Of course not. That god of yours only seems to get credit for stuff, never the blame.

It has the best PR in the universe.

[Arugula Latte]

30. I'm wondering if you believe in a god that is omnipotent.

Or does it only have partial power?

Or does it wield its power only occasionally, picking and choosing when to intervene, or cause, or control, or what have you?

How do you see it?

[hrmjustin]

37. I have not seen God nor do I know the extent of his abilities.

My faith teaches he is omnipotent but I do not know. I believe God does not decide the choices we make, nor do I believe he decides who lives or dies or gets sick.

[Humanist_Activist]

39. Forget choices, did we choose to be vulnerable to disease, to have earthquakes, wildfires...

and other natural disasters happen to us?

At best, we are looking at either an impotent god, a type of deistic god, or no god at all, at worst, we are talking about the Abrahamic god, a god that is actively malevolent.

[LiberalAndProud]

44. I must say, that's expected.

Last edited Sat May 18, 2013, 09:02 PM - Edit history (1)

There are two excuses for a creator who would appear to be capricious and unfair that seem to always make their way into these conversations:
* Free Will
* Mysterious Ways

These excuses explain everything to the faithful and nothing to the skeptical. Perfect.

[LostOne4Ever]

45. Either way

It seems like he/she's allowing/causing us to suffer for nothing more than a game for his/her amusement.

[hunter]

46. "The Nazis gassed me" or "I choked on a peanut" or "I sat down in front of a tank..."

... those are much better stories to tell at the end of the universe than "I was a corporate accountant who died a very lonely old man without a will in my sleep."

Like You didn't even leave your money to your cat and favorite man servant?

What's wrong with you, man? Everybody suffers and dies eventually. That's life! It's how you play the cards you were dealt that matters.

[Scuba]

47. I guess what's "wrong" with me is that I don't believe in the supernatural ...

... and the idea of an "all-knowing, all-powerful" "god" who allows little children to be raped and murdered because "god works in mysterious ways" and I should love him anyway, to be very damned offensive.

[Bay Boy]

11. He seems to have mellowed out since the Old Testament days...

...thank goodness! He was smiting everyone left and right back then.

[longship]

14. This is one that is very difficult.

What are the characteristics of God? Are those which are normally professed by believers even intelligible?

These questions might gnaw at some believers if they think about these things with some depth. It's easier to ignore them rather than confront the dissonance inherent in God's characteristics. I think that such cognitive dissonances are inherent in the way humans think. We all do it to some extent.

The Reasonable Doubts podcast covered this topic in episode 40: Unintelligible God

[on point]

17. Yes, dog is a big fat zero, zilch nada. If not made up wouldn't know it was there!

[woodsprite]

18. He's the REAL unknown comic! n/t

[ChazInAz]

25. Mark Twain's opinion.

"God is a malign thug."

[notadmblnd]

27. I think God must have put himself on Prozac between the time

the Old Testement and New Testement were written.

[Blue Owl]

28. Yes, the Omnitype

n/t

[kestrel91316]

33. The god of Judeo-christian religions, the god of Abraham,

is one evil mofo. He's more like a demon than anybody worthy of worship.

That's all I'm gonna say about that particular fairy tale.

[SheilaT]

34. Clearly he's a psychopath who delights in not only watching,

but causing the suffering of others. He loves to torture, and kills whenever the whim strikes him.

If he were a mere mortal, we'd hope he'd eventually get caught and put in prison the rest of his life, with or without medication.

[LostOne4Ever]

35. I remember being in a scientific ethics class

And we were debating, if I recall right, euthanasia. We had this one fundamentalist there and a liberal Christian challenged him on his view of god. The liberal Christian said the fundamentalists view of Christianity made god sounded like a cruel, mean, bigot and that those "were the traits of man not god." The Fundamentalist responded, "well we were created in God's image, so if those are traits of man they must be traits of God too." The liberal Christian disagreed with him furiously.

My views of the God of the old testament are very mal-theistic. He drowned families begging Moses to save their children, killed the first born children of the people of Egypt because of the sins of the Pharaoh, and said:


[div class="excerpt" style="background-color:#dcdcdc; padding-bottom:5px; border:1px solid #bfbfbf; border-bottom:none; border-radius:0.4615em 0.4615em 0em 0em; box-shadow:3px 3px 3px #999999;"]Exodus Chapter 20[div class="excerpt" style="background-color:#f0f0f0; border:1px solid #bfbfbf; border-top:none; border-radius:0em 0em 0.4615em 0.4615em; box-shadow:3px 3px 3px #999999;"]20:4 Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

20:5 Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;

20:6 And showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.


So when I think of Elohim/Jehovah I think Jealous and Cruel. Then along comes Jesus with his "don't judge unless ye be judged" and "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" teaching (the latter having been taught by others long before him) and then hes sounding alot nicer....BUT he also brings up the concept of Hell and the apocalypse.

Further, Hell isn't for those who are evil and wicked...its for non-believers only. Doesn't matter if you spend your whole life helping others...no belief and you go to hell. So he goes from jealous and cruel to Loving,Proud and arrogant ! So overall hes Proud, arrogant, jealous, and cruel but he loves you despite the fact he will banish you to hell for all eternity for not giving him attention.

Personally, Im not a fan.

When I think of the God of Thomas Paine, I think disinterested and neutral. Boring =P
He's indifferent to me and I am indifferent to him.

[goldent]

36. I think human reasoning only works well for earthly things

like bisecting an angle or figuring out how to counteract a corner blitz.

The OP's question is interesting but trying to answer it is like pissing into the wind

[backscatter712]

50. He can have whatever personality you want - He's a fictional character.

He gets the personality you ascribe to him when you imagine him. It doesn't have to make sense at all.

The God that people here on DU pray to, or that Unitarian-Universalists tend to worship has a completely different personality from the psychopath that Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church prays to.

[Brainstormy]

53. Fallacy of Assumption

Do unicorns prefer hay to grass? Are leprechauns good dancers? Why are poltergists so angry?