Bobdaduck on the God of the creeds

I don't think The Duckstack is on most of my readers' radar, but there's often some remarkably insightful material mixed in with the absurdism. This is from his latest, "Consume Consubstantial":

Under [the "normal Christian"] framework, most descriptions God uses for himself in the Bible aren’t true. God isn’t “really” a father (in the sense of siring genetic children), God doesn’t “really” get angry, Christ isn’t “really” human, etc. I know normal Christians would rebut me here, saying he’s “fully human and fully God”, but 100% + 100% = 200%, that’s not something human attainable and I think most congregants sense it. . . .

If Christ is 200% human (something unachievable by normal people) then its actually sinful to try to emulate him. Christ “taught with authority, and not as the scribes”, but you as a mortal need to restrict yourself to teaching like scribes (deferring to scripture). Christ could judge people but you can’t. Christ could keep the commandments perfectly, but its not actually reasonable to expect regular people to. (How this is usually expressed to me is “the point of the commandments is just to show you how impossible keeping commandments is.”) Christ could have people look up to him but you shouldn’t. Christ could be prideful but you can’t. Christ could forgive sins but you can’t. Christ could do miracles but you can’t. Christ can be a God but you can’t, to name a few common ones. (Christians indeed constantly say this was the sin of Adam and Eve- not disobedience, but wanting to be like God.) In this framework Christ becomes not a role model, but a mythic parable like Hercules and similar. You can see how restrictive this is, if I’m right. Instead of a theology aimed at expanding the soul of man and reaching new heights, the doctrine trends instead to “put man in his place.” There’s a time and place for putting you in your place, but I don’t think its always. I do not believe mankind is innately loathsome, only that mankind can be. Christ could be free from original guilt, but you can’t. You have to be guilty about yourself, innately.

Extrapolating, I think it is difficult for many Christians to believe such a being “actually” cares, either. Its more like he super-cares. His love is so loving it doesn’t even look like love, its the pure boundless adoration at a level we can’t even comprehend. So why bother. In my opinion you might as well not call it love at that point, it just dilutes the word. Pragmatically speaking, people are going to pair out meaningless variables. Similar with other attributes described in the creeds of Christendom, its all poetry for how incomprehensible and beyond us he is and none of these words mean anything concrete. . . .

What we’re left with is a sterile God enacting a sterile plan that we are mere cogs in. You can argue against all of this of course -- you can say, ‘but the bible says God is love!’ and so on, but I’m not sure there’s actually a way around these implications with the doctrines of noncontingence and the unmoved mover and so forth. This might be why Catholics have saints to pray to instead- more human. All of these “proofs” for God rely on calculating a sort of necessary basis for existence, and really only work if you treat God more as a variable than a sentience. Or a meta-sentience, if you prefer. So sentient the concept of sentience doesn’t even make sense.

Read the whole thing.