But, there are different 'gods'- a whole bunch of 'em. Even the Supreme Guy recognized them, when his first Order of Business was, "Thou shall not have any gods BEFORE me."

So there was a god for crops, and one for chastity and fertility, an avenging one, a specialist in floods, pestilence, and volcanos.

I guess there is also a sports god, since so many players look towards the sky in moments of celebration. Just don't ask him for help in the over/under tomorrow. Moneychangers and the temple, ya know. . .

In the Bible it's easy to follow the progression of thinking from "Our god is better than your god" (Yahweh vs. Baal et al) to "The One God is on our side, not theirs."

In 2013, that kind of thinking is absurd. What kind of ridiculous God picks winners in football games while so many other things in our world are in such dire need of His attention.

Let's hope that the existence of God the Sports Fan says more about those who worship him than about reality. If that God is real, then we're all screwed.

I dunno. Might explain the success of SEC football.

Kind of like how they believe in the bible belt that God gives the faithful unlimited natural resources, and there does seem to be some kind of correlation where most of the world's oil happens to live underneath religious fundamentalists.

I'm just sayin'...

God loves money and the people that have it. Just ask them.

There's no oil under Israel.

According to that logic, guess that means that their lack of natural resources proves they're without the right kind of faith.

Archeologists will understand that these games were artificial constructs- complete fictions with arbitrary sets of rules, and vast bodies of thought dwelling on the intricacies of the principles, long histories, and pantheons of heroes who came and went. Each Sunday was spent in rapt devotion to ritual combat- There were thousands of sects that each had a totemistic symbol that the population would emblazon proudly on their vehicles, clothing and utensils.

What was baffling is that they spent vastly more of their treasure on game like wars than war like games.

Those silly humans eventually exterminated themselves because they focused most of their enthusiasm not on their fictions but on the realites of war. Projections of demons were only taken seriously in the real world.

Really a shame. They had so much potential.

Which, if extrapolated, would then mean that any faith based upon the religion of the Israelis would also not be "the right kind of faith". (as if any of them are "right" lol)

If God loves athletes more and shows it by allowing them to win I guess God loves billionaires more because ..... well they were rewarded with more money

Errr, jcricket, there IS oil under Israel. Geological maps have pointed to it for decades. And recently, there have been producing wells drilled.

Why no one has spent much time or serious money on oil exploration in Israel may be that companies could make more money drilling in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran. Or maybe, Isreal didn't want the oil companies taking over their country.

@1,

By your logic, I would still be an atheist!

Somehow I don't think God is a sports fan. Heaven knows I've tried to make Him a Pirates fan!

The way things are going, I wonder how much he loves the 47% of people in the US! I just heard the GOP are thinking of running Bobby Jindal in 2016. Lots of big T-party money behind that idea.

Course, it is very possible to look at that two ways. My husband said Bobby would guarantee a Democratic landslide.

Who can fathom the mind of God?

I can't even fathom the mind of Bobby Jindal.

"I dunno. Might explain the success of SEC football. Kind of like how they believe in the bible belt that God gives the faithful unlimited natural resources, and there does seem to be some kind of correlation where most of the world's oil happens to live underneath religious fundamentalists."

I doubt that religion has much to do with SEC football. Unless the majority of players on SEC teams are praying that they don't have to pass actual college classes.

Let me provide an alternate explanation for SEC football dominance: low admissions standards. I'm often sadly amused by interviews with SEC football stars. Far too often, they sound as if they're virtually illiterate. Contrast that with interviews of Big 10 and Pac 12 players who, at least a reasonable portion of the time, sound like kids capable of passing legitimate post-secondary courses.

These "flexible" admissions standards serve the interests of the SEC institutions, many of which are far better known for football than for scholarship. I guess if one of the goals of having a state university system is to provide entertainment for the masses, these schools are succeeding admirably.

I'd love to see how much more successful the SEC schools would be if the NCAA would institute national admissions standards at a level that disqualified "students" who barely read at a mid-elementary school level.

All based on empirical evidence, of course! (Can't stop laughing at the "data")

DAY-3905329 #1.1 But, there are different 'gods'- a whole bunch of 'em. Even the Supreme Guy recognized them, when his first Order of Business was, "Thou shall not have any gods BEFORE me."

You are kind of correct on that but, Judah/Christians don't call them Gods, but angels. Many in Vatican city, and other areas of the world have their favorites to whom they pray to. Kind of like the poly deist of ancient Greece, and Rome.

Here's a link I Googled Problem: The Old Testament mentions multiple gods Verses: Multiple; Status: Minor

viewer01,

In the Genesis story of the Tree of Knowledge, after Adam and Eve eat the fruit the Creator laments (Genesis 22):

"And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever"

(emphasis added by myself)

Obviously, this lament is directed to others, and they are not Adam and Eve.

From the text, it would appear these others are being addressed as equals (which I believe is more apparent in the formulation of the original Hebrew, which refers to God as plural -- Elohim -- in Genesis).

Perhaps your label of 'angels' is used to hide past practices of polytheism?

I do not believe in a vengeful or judgmental God. God created our souls to travel back and forth to the more material universes in order to learn, experience and think for ourselves, not for some selfish desire for slavish worship. What 'miracles' we get by praying to God for them, we manifest for ourselves.

Some people, like Hitler or Stalin, may create a Hell for themselves temporarily, but that is their own choice, and temporary. lasting only as long as they don't forgive themselves and move on to their future lives.

Remember the parable of the prodigal son? The father sends out his two sons with equal shares of his wealth. One works hard, invests wisely, comes back a huge success. The other spends it all partying, wastes it all, comes back a failure. The father welcomes both back home, celebrates their return, then sends the failure back out with another share to try to make something of himself. No judgment, no lecturing, just love and respect.

God didn't create us to bow and kowtow in worship, or to force us to languish in His personal torture chambers because we screwed up and displeased Him. God isn't petty, or vain, or vindictive. People are. Those who believe they can talk to God are only projecting onto their image of what they want God to be and say...

Always nice to be reminded that the majority of your fellow Americans are drooling morons.

As stated by the Sage of the West (Mel Brooks) in Blazing Saddles:

Jim: [consoling Bart] What did you expect? "Welcome, sonny"? "Make yourself at home"? "Marry my daughter"? You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons

From the text, it would appear these others are being addressed as equals (which I believe is more apparent in the formulation of the original Hebrew, which refers to God as plural -- Elohim -- in Genesis).

In this case Elohim is singular (used with singular Hebrew verbs) though there are other verses in the Bible where Elohim is plural and suggests other beings (we assume created beings - angels - fallen or otherwise) - but not as "equals".

Anyone interested should review the material on " Elohim and Hebrew singular and plural verbs" - there is a lot of it.

Um, Hebrew is not my native tongue, and I am not one to pick up languages easily, but...

(there is always a 'but')

It is my understanding that...

Eli or El (depending on the era and region) is the singular. Elohim is plural, except when used in the five books of Moses, where it can be either singular or plural by today's usage. This exception may be due to current, monotheistic, views on the divine being in conflict with the ancient views upon which the oral tradition is based.

Oh, and according to early translations of the Books of Moses, Moses led the Hebrews through the Sea of Reeds, not the Red Sea, while fleeing the Egyptian army.

Isn't language grand?

Christians would prefer that Elohim be plural in the creation story - supporting God in three persons. There is not a lot of Jewish support for that interpretation. It appears to be determined by surrounding verbs. (See link at bottom of page)

Yam Sup - thanks - I had forgotten about that.

There are several areas of disagreement that may be based on differences in translation or something else. Contrary to the Old Testament, does Pi not equal 3! Moses and all of the Israelite builders and craftsmen who would have heard the design specifications would have been aware of that. Egyptian builders used an estimate of 256/81 or about 3.16. So the ancients wrote assuming their audience had an appropriate body of knowledge to interpret and "fill in the blanks"- making attempts at literal translation subject to discussion.

Isn't language grand?

Funny - I was just thinking of my high school and college English teachers. They were gentle souls - and I am happy, for their sake's, that they will never see my daily brutal mutilation of their favorite subject.

Adam_Selene

http://www.israelofgod.org/genesis1.htm

As a Broncos fan...there was this years "Hail Mary" that ruined my day...

Maphi,

Tell me about it... says the person from DETROIT.

;-)

maphi, and Katami, Detroit, #3 and 3.1,

Ditto on the Pittsburgh Pirates. Prayer never got them going after the All Stars. Every July they go down like the Titanic. Bummer.

While I'm at it, prayer didn't help the Pittsburgh Steelers either!

When was the last time ANY beer bottle was allowed in any football, baseball, hockey or sports facility? That's why God invented plastic cups!

Re: #3.3

You mean to tell me that commercial was ........FAKE!?!?!?!?

It's only a game.

jcricket, #4

The only thing Bobby Jindal ever got right!

You wonder if he ever reviews his show before it is broadcast. How can any normal person not realize that he is just adding fuel to the fire, and is leading the stupid in the stupid party?

Bobby Jindal believes you can do without state income or property taxes, by raising sales taxes to make up for it, making the rich richer by making the poor poorer......

Stupid is as Stupid does...

Didn't Bobby Jindal participate in an exorcism or something?

If there's no "religious" test for office can there at least be a bugnuts-crazy test?

"Just don't come to the taxpayers with your hat in your hand after you've been handed your ass in court."

Bravo!

Thanks Russell,

I always look forward to the RL supplement to this post.

The guy suing his Quaker church is a weird one, isn't it? I think there's got to be more to the story than we are seeing at this point...

That whole "Playing Wii games" just throws me...the whole thing sounds odd....life in modern America...at least it's not boring

"I give God 10%," Alois Bell,a pastor at Truth in the World Deliverance Ministries Church, wrote on the receipt, scratching out the automatic tip and scribbling in an emphatic "0" where the additional tip would be. "Why do you get 18?" (There were more than eight people in Bell's party, triggering the auto-tip.)

And I am sure his GOD will make sure that he only GETS 10% when he dies....

Seriously, and people think churches should take care of the poor in this country? Does that pastor even have a clue what the people who served his party get paid?

#7 RL One way to get rid of an armed intruder!

How cool is that! Interesting post.

@katami and dragoon

i suspect "playing wii games" is the newest version of "hiking the appalachian trail." nudge, nudge, wink, wink....

Or the pastor came over to play Wii games to keep the woman safe from her husband who may have been abusing her and to assess the threat. Or the pastor may have been offering friendship to both of them in a difficult time where the husband was isolating the family.

By the way -- it is my understanding that Friends' Meetings (Quakers) are a leaderless group who do not have any clergy. There are some "Quaker" churches that, at least in Richard Nixon's time, were more like the mainstream Protestant churches and those churches did have pastors.

Perhaps we can all quit speculating and read the back story from the link.

I did read the article. AND I watched the video. There's a lot that isn't being said in the article/video. What was there is nebulous, to say the least. It's possible that the pastor and the woman were having an affair, but that doesn't explain why the church members banded together to help the woman move out of the home. It sounds more like there was something hinky going on - abuse of some sort. We may never know.

And there are more than 1 kind of Quaker. You are thinking of the Friends General Conference, which are "unprogrammed" Quakers. They don't have ministers or anything like that, and meet in silence. However, there are also "programmed" Quakers, who have a somewhat more evangelical bent. They DO have ministers. They also have a programmed order of service, and hymns.

May I add, where the hell are the Saints?

It is doubly sad, Pete!

You do know the Baltimore is playing San Francisco do'nt you Dixie.

Re: #14

"... just how vast the known universe is, the more petty and insignificant human behaviors become."

In other words, [read this in a comment somewhere recently - sorry don't remember where]:

Mother Nature is powerful! And we are small and biodegradable.

Alva, I'm guessing a lot of people enjoyed your post, I certainly did. Sad part is far too many would dispute, they only listen to rightwing opinion. It happens I grew up during the 2nd World War, so I lived it. I use a lot of your talking points when talking to people. The expression, failing to listen to history results in repeating mistakes, is still one of the truest statements anyone could ever hear.

As to a deity, seems unlikely, but still have to say, I just do not know, no one does. I do know no one is paying enough attention to what is happening to this beautiful place. As a science & history buff, isn't it amazing to find what some think is important?

Well Blanks- I might give you Vietnam, although Eisenhower was sending advisers as early as 1954. Kennedy sent Green Berets, and Johnson sent troops. Still, Nixon did nothing to help the situation.

Did you ever hear of the WIN program, started under Jerry Ford? It stood for Whip Inflation Now, and I've even still got my WIN button. Ford inherited rising inflation from Nixon, who, in response to the Arab oil embargo (and consequent rising gas prices) slapped a lid on the economy. When it came off, inflation skyrocketed. WIN didn't work, and Carter inherited the rising inflation from Ford. Try studying history rather that rewriting it.

Shooter, blaming the CIA director for Bush's decision to wage a war of choice is utterly pathetic. To say that FDR exacerbated the Depression shows a complete lack of understanding of economics. The worst year of the Depression was the same year FDR took office. Things improved after his policies were implemented. I would note that FDR had such an uphill battle to fight that US business interests even attempted to overthrow the U.S. government and establish a fascist dictatorship.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

The stagflation of the late 70's were a result of war bonds to pay for Vietnam, plus the oil embargo. I would note that people also blame Carter for the high interest rates, when that was a decision made by Paul Volker, who was the Fed Chairman at the time. Those high interest rates dried up all the excess debt in the economy, and solved the problem.

In other words, Republicans deny all their failures, and instead of accepting responsibility for their actions, just blame Democrats for their own short comings.

As for your last question, I'm no cosmologist, but I do like to watch the Science Channel. As I understand it, the theory of relativity states that mass effects time. Mass drags on time. The more mass, the slower time moves. When you reach something like a black hole, you reach a singularity, where time, at least to the outside observer, stops moving.

To ask what happened before the Big Bang defies what we know of the science. The Big Bang created time as we know it. Therefore there was no before the Big Bang.

Gentlemen, this chart demonstrates Republican Presidents did their best to restrain inflation in the face of Democrats in charge of both houses of Congress. http://sphs73reunion.org/images/remember73/economy/inflation%20rate.gif

Here's unemployment under FDR. Note where WW2 starts. Little known fact is that Hoover tripled Govt. spending. http://i242.photobucket.com/albums/ff90/AvaBrendan/U3U5UnemploymentGreatDepression.png

Lastly, if you have either time or mass or something that goes bang, there was something before.

Shooter, on your first two paragraphs, I have no idea what you're getting at. Inflation is more common when you have economic growth. Disinflation and deflation are more common with economic contractions.

Shooter, logic fails when we're talking about cosmology. You have to understand the science to argue the merits of it. Neither of us are qualified to discuss this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_MFhAoUUmQ

Once again, Shooter demonstrates an ability to misrepresent history for the purposes of propaganda. Then he ventures into science, and completely misses the mark.

Examples of each:

First, when considering economics of the late 70's and early 80's, any serious student of the era will recognize that Fed Chairman Volcker was responsible for reigning in inflation. Since President Carter appointed Mr. Volcker, it was the policies of the Carter Administration that ended the borrow-and-inflate policies of earlier presidents, particularly Nixon.

Second, when considering the beginning of the Universe, please keep in mind that space, time, and matter (as we know them) did not exist before the 'Big Bang'. Without space and time, we cannot even contemplate there being a 'before', let alone 'something before'.

Why would I need science to know if something existed? We are here, the universe came from somewhere. Magic?

re inflation, no it isn't common to growth. See Clinton's inflation. I'd also point out the preponderance of blue in the huge inflation times and the greater red in the moderation. Republicans are better for the economy.

Shooter,

The Laws of Nature, the basis for our investigation of the Universe, did not exist before the universe.

It is not possible to determine what happened before the Universe. To even say the Universe came from 'somewhere' assumes the operation of Space and Time, both of which also did not exist before the Universe.

There is just no 'there' there.

Also, regarding macroeconomic indicators such as inflation, we must take into account there is a considerable lag between actions and effects. In other words, the inflation rate of a given day is the result of earlier actions, not those of the day.

But, of course, this is inconvenient for Shooter. So, he would have us believe there is no delay between cause and effect.

So, when considering the variation of temperature in the seasons, Shooter's methodology would have us believe that days with lessening sunlight cause higher temperatures, for the hottest days of the year in the northern hemisphere are typically in July and August, when the days are growing shorter, as opposed to May and June when days are growing longer. Never mind that the heat capacity of the oceans causes a lag between the cause of heating and the highest temperatures.

Similar arguments can be made for inflation and other macroeconomic indicators.

This is pretty funny. The one constant we have on the inflation chart is Democrat Congresses during the inflation eruptions. But of course that has nothing to do with anything.

Meanwhile we are supposed to believe we sprang from nothing or at least something we can't understand? So why should anyone accept your versions of where the universe came from rather than religion's?

Shooter,

You can accept anything you want. The point is we have utterly no frame of reference for what happened before the existence of the universe. When speculating as to what happened before the beginning of time (itself an oxymoron), we have no meter with which to judge differing theories, for we have no Space, Time, or Laws of Nature.

Nothing. Nada. Zip.

As for your inflation chart, since the hottest days of the year are always after the summer solecist, then by extension hot weather is caused by lessening sunshine and increasing the length of the night. Since this correlation goes back millions of years, it dwarfs anything we can find in human history.

Correlation does not equal causation. We must examine causes to determine effects, such as Fed Chairman Volcker's policies causing the sharpest reduction in inflation in US history, and Volcker being an appointee of a Democratic President and Congress.

Shooter:

Religion does not and cannot explain anything in the empirical universe because religion is not and cannot be based on empirical evidence.

Rational people using the tool of science have already described the universe all the way back to a few picoseconds after the big bang. All the evidence points to a big bang. At no point does any of this evidence require the existence of anything but measurable phenomena.

God requires existence, existence god not require god.

Inflation and political parties and other comparisons.

http://arts.bev.net/roperldavid/politics/recessiondemrep.htm

http://arts.bev.net/roperldavid/politics/economy.htm

Roper is not an economist but an MIT Phd in Theoretical Physics - these links will give you a very nice set of graphs and geeky tables showing the measure of political party control vs various economic measures.

The specific one on inflation is below

http://arts.bev.net/roperldavid/politics/inflate.htm

Shooter should have given you the link to the entire page with several graphs

http://sphs73reunion.org/webpages/zremeconomy.html

Scroll down for a trip through the 73 economic lane. "Go Pirates"

Kbomp106, You just brought sense to complete nonsense.

As a lifelong Detroiter, I much prefer to think that God just doesn't care about sports. When you live in a city which has been decimated by poverty and the near death of the Big Three, you'd think the least He could do is let the Lions win the Super Bowl once, right?

While I may think the one thing sillier than prayer is football; I do feel compelled to point out that Dallas went to Obama.

The thing about stupid people is they don't know they're stupid.

You are correct. Pope JP II appointed Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict) to handle all of the abuse cases and this was before the scandals broke out. All of this points to a massive cover up by both popes. What really galled me was when Benedict came to the US and blamed the scandals on the "permissive society." Every Catholic should be insulted/angry by that comment and withdraw any financial support. Everyone who is not Catholic should feel insulted. Considering the worldwide scope of the scandals, it took a lot of chutzpah to make that remark.

The permissive Nazi youth, taught Ratzinger well.

Make that "true believers," and I'd agree with you.