We could have been human, we could have had free will, and we could have had the opportunity to act in an infinite number of good ways. Our freedom would have been limited to the ways in which we could love God, but so what? Let’s pretend there were a multitude of other ways to act: love for God, hate for God, zorb for God, quib for God, stot for God, and kirg for God (these are hypothetical other ways we could have acted). Now you would be arguing right now, if these other means of acting (outside of love and hate) brought upon damnation, that to take them away would limit our free will. No, God just would have left our human nature free of the things that could condemn us, and that would be better than a system in which countless multitudes of people would suffer eternally. We don’t complain that our free will is in violation because we can’t have zorb, quib, stot, and kirg for God (and thank God we don’t! Because that would mean a lot more ways to enter the firey pit). So what is the problem with only being able to act in love (but in many freely chosen ways)?
But you have it wrong. We DO have an infinite number of ways we can feel towards God - love, hate, fear, indifference, confusion, apathy (not to be confused with indifference), gratitude (not to be confused with love), resentment, attraction, repulsion, worshipfulness, awe, friendliness, distance, utter incomprehension - in fact we can feel the whole gamut of emotion towards God.
And those feelings can motivate us to act in an infinite number of ways toward God as well.
We can be quiet and still in wonder and prostrate ourselves in worship, we can pray silently or out loud, gather in Churches to pray with our fellows, we can shout for joy, sing, dance, play music, preach, teach, heal, speak in ‘tongues’, walk the streets waving banners with messages about Him.
We can scratch our heads in puzzlement and ask all sorts of questions on CAF or of priests, rabbis or imams, write articles or poetry about our atheism/agnositicsm, or make TV shows or movies or music about them.
Or on another hand we can utter blasphemies against Him or expressions of hatred towards Him, vandalise Churches or mosques, spit on priests or preachers, petition for, write and enact laws enshrining freedom of (which equally means freedom of) religion and the like.
There’s no end to the actions we can do ‘for’ or ‘against’ God - or in a spirit of agnosticism.
Okay, well maybe you didn’t see it (I doubt this, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt): whether you saw it or not
You think it’s doubtful that kids who are disciplined by their parents usually think at the time the parents are wrong? And usually think that they are right, that they know more than the parents and are being unjustly punished? It’s incredibly common - I’d be most surprised if you’d never experienced it yourself.
You were certainly learning from it (any psychologist will attest to this).
At the time I was NOT necessarily learning that my parents were always right - that insight only came to me well and truly after the fact. And yet you expect us, with our limited understanding, not only to at some stage understand Almighty God, but to have instantaneous insight before or at the time that He punishes us?
We cannot be motivated (as you’ve said) to learn correct behaviour without it being rewarded or punished. Furthermore, you’ve never seen someone rewarded or punished eternally. This, in psychological terms, means that you haven’t actually learned anything, nor should you have been expected to. You can’t learn what you don’t see or experience. God, in that sense, makes a poor analogy for a parent (unless he is the type of God who bestows kingships and throws lightnight bolts in this day - in which case, I’ll have to revamp my argument)
Well, some of God’s rewards are and have been earthly, true. Not all, but some. Not that I solely or mostly base my claims on them.
I haven’t physically seen someone rewarded or punished eternally, true. But then I’ve never physically seen someone subjected to waterboarding or the electric chair either. Yet I certainly believe that people ARE subjected to it. Why? Because I’ve read about it and heard about it from sources who I trust. Might they all be lying? Or mistaken? Sure, but it’s most unlikely.
Same with eternal punishment - for one thing there are numerous accounts of people who have been granted visions of hell and purgatory as well as heaven. Including atheists and areligious types who’ve had Near Death Experiences - which are by no means all positive ‘step-into-the-light’ kind of goings-on. They describe what they saw, they have no motive to lie, they are unlikely to all be deluded or mistaken - so I can trust them as much as I trust people who write about torture.
I think there are a lot of caveats to those figures that you’re leaving out, but that aside, It doesn’t matter to me what the world thinks or how much of it. The Egyptian sun-god Ra would have been worshiped, potentially, by more believers than Christianity has ever known. You don’t regard Ra, and I don’t regard Yahweh, so let’s not appeal to masses of people, because we can select any group in time and space to do it with.
The ancient world had nowhere near the population levels to make it possible, especially given that belief in the ancient Egyptian gods was pretty much localised to Egypt rather than being a phenomenon that spread far and wide across all continents as Christianity has done.
Even so, what we’re arguing about is ELUSIVENESS - ie the difficulty of finding out information. You’ve said God is elusive, in other words that it’s difficult to find out information about Him. I’ve argued He is not, because many HAVE found out about Him.
I certainly wouldn’t call Ra ‘elusive’ either - even though I don’t believe in Ra personally it’s easy enough to find out what was believed about him. I happen not to believe it - but to say it is because Ra is elusive is nonsense, so it is to say that God is ‘elusive’.
