God has all perfections, existence is a perfection, therefore God

[Baruch]

Oh, I thought aitm meant that G-d is like 1 big Jew.

There is an early Medieval Jewish vision, the Shi'ur Qomah.  The universe is imagined to be one giant body.  The Earth just being one tiny part.  This body is the body of G-d, and we are minuscule fleas.  An interesting inversion of the idea of pantheism.

[Baruch]

How could God be so perfect, when He's obviously in great need of as much money as he can get His spokespersons' hands on?

G-d is politically theocratic ... it takes real money to run a government that governs the entire Universe!

[AllRight]

Second, for as uptight as Muslims are about sex (lets assume killing your daughter for losing her virginity is the definition of uptight), the supposed reward doesn't seem like something a God that looks at sex with a such a jaundiced eye would bestow on a Muslim male.

Standing on the outside now looking in I find it somewhat amusing the hangups religious people have about sex. Lot's of repression going on because of their beliefs.

[AllRight]

There are a lot of reasons for these bullshit arguments.  Many, yes, are for the benefit of believers.  When you believe in magic fairies in space controlled by a giant king fairy which made everything you tend to need the occasional confirmation of your idiotic beliefs.  And there are those true thinkers in religion, often found in the leadership, in abundance in the Watchtower Society, who actively think of ways to keep their flock from thinking.  For them it's a purposeful deceit to keep their flock in line.

For a few, though, sad as it is, they actually think they're on to something.  It may start as a tool to convince themselves that belief in magical beings is not stupid, but it may get out of hand, becoming so convincing for them that they simply cannot see how anyone could argue that magic isn't real if they could just hear this explanation.  They end up here for a short time, leaving butthurt that we evil atheists wouldn't listen to them.

Having married into the JW religion and studying it for a while I find it frustrating that the members don't question why the leaders discourage college education and studying the Bible on your own.  Seems pretty obvious to me now but I do understand since they made me feel like I was too stupid to understand what I was reading all on my own.  They lose customers that way.

[Munch]

http://imgur.com/jRhEQWN



Take that, atheists...

Atheist hamster approves.

[Baruch]

There was a similar thing in Buddhism.  Abhidharma is the Buddhist word for rational theology.  It is possible that this developed from the influence of Macedonian Greeks living in what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan.  The Heart Sutra is the most popular and smallest sutra ... and is a direct rejection of Abhidharma.