Then God said, "Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."


So....

More than 1 god?

Read the first couple chapters of Job. There the Bible speaks of the sons of god.

RS

It's like the guy said; if we're made in God's image shouldn't we be, like, invisible.

quas wrote:Then God said, "Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."

So....

More than 1 god?

No, royal we (majestic plural). Nothing more, nothing less.

Animavore wrote:It's like the guy said; if we're made in God's image shouldn't we be, like, invisible.

Not necessarily. Maybe God is up there hiding in a stealth plane.

Papa Smurf wrote:

quas wrote:Then God said, "Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."

So....

More than 1 god?

No, royal we (majestic plural). Nothing more, nothing less.

What's the rationale behind the usage of "we" to refer to the majestic singular?
Why is this usage inconsistent? Sometimes god refers to himself as I.

I don't think many people claim that the Bible of today comes straight and unmessed with from something written thousands of years ago. It's undergone numerous messings with, each one incorporating changes involving 'new' words, phrases and ideas. What version were you quoting from? If it's anything later than the 12th century, which it will be, that's the obvious answer.

theropod wrote:Read the first couple chapters of Job. There the Bible speaks of the sons of god.

RS

Sons of god means angels.
Were angels involved in the act of creation?

quas wrote:

theropod wrote:Read the first couple chapters of Job. There the Bible speaks of the sons of god.

RS

Sons of god means angels.
Were angels involved in the act of creation?

How do you know what the refernce means?

What creation?

Is it a pinhead hoedown?

RS

theropod wrote:How do you know what the refernce means?

http://www.equip.org/article/who-were-t ... genesis-6/

In Job, sons of gods are angels.

Elsewhere, different meaning maybe.

What creation?

Creating the earth, humans and all the other creatures on earth.

Did God create all that by himself or did he create minions (angels) to help him create stuff?
If the latter, then "in our image" refers to God and the angels.
If not, then there are multiple creators (Gods).

quas wrote:

theropod wrote:How do you know what the refernce means?

http://www.equip.org/article/who-were-t ... genesis-6/

In Job, sons of gods are angels.

Elsewhere, different meaning maybe.

What creation?

Creating the earth, humans and all the other creatures on earth.

Did God create all that by himself or did he create minions (angels) to help him create stuff?
If the latter, then "in our image" refers to God and the angels.
If not, then there are multiple creators (Gods).

Apparently, this particular fiction is important to you. Why?

"It says he made us all to be just like him. So if we're dumb, then
god is dumb, and maybe even a little ugly on the side."
-- Frank Zappa

Is there a reason you're not answering my question, quas? Which version of the Bible does your quote come from? Is there some reason why the royal we being introduced in the 12th century does not explain your passage? Do you think your bible of choice was compiled earlier than that?

So, seeing as God is usually declared male, then God has a dick.

What does he do with it?

Didn't Karen Armstrong write in A History of God, that christianity is actually an amalgamation of earlier polytheist religions, and that hints of this is scattered throughout the texts that made it into the bible?

IIRC she mentions, among other things, that whole business with Moses and the tablets. He comes down from the mountain seeing the jews having started worshipping that golden calf/bull thing, which is actually another God (of harvest or fertility or something) in some other qasi-jewish sect-religion common at the time of the old testament. Curiously one of the commandments is to not worship other Gods but YHWH. Yahweh is actuall both a God of wind and of war, being pronounced as if you are breathing, yah-weh (breathe in, breathe out). She ties all this crap together in ways that make perfect sense of all these disparate references to other gods you see in the old testament.

I heard about all this stuff first from this excellent video:

Fenrir wrote:So, seeing as God is usually declared male, then God has a dick.

What does he do with it?

Is it circumcised? If so, who performed the operation?

quas wrote:What's the rationale behind the usage of "we" to refer to the majestic singular?
Why is this usage inconsistent? Sometimes god refers to himself as I.

What, you're expecting the Bible to be faultless or something? Anyway, I originally thought that it was just the English/other translation that had introduce the royal 'we'. However, the wiki page I linked to also says

Several prominent epithets of the Bible describe the Jewish God in plural terms: Elohim, Adonai, and El Shaddai. Many Christian scholars, including the likes of Augustine of Hippo, have seen the use of the plural and grammatically singular verb forms as support for the doctrine of the Trinity.[7]

and if you follow the to Elohim it says

Elohim (Hebrew: אֱלֹהִים‎ ’ĕlōhîm) is a grammatically plural noun for "gods" or "deity" in Biblical Hebrew.

so it seems this usage of the 'royal' we might actually trace back to the polytheistic origins of tha Abrahamic religions. Maybe the 'royal' we is based on the idea that the King/Queen/God is God's representative on earth and should therefore be addressed in the same manner as God in the bible? No time to look into this further atm.

It's more than one god because there were multiple deities worshipped in "Palestine" before the middle of the first millennium when the god Yahweh was adopted as the god of the Hebrews. The Bible speaks of them and bans them in the 10 commandments "thou shall have no other gods before me". The documentary hypothesis clearly shows there are two points of view of the stories in the "history" that of the write "E" being the priest of El, and the writer "J" being the priest of Yahweh. Then there's Moloch, and Baal, worshipped by Jezebel, who tried to convince Ahab to abandon Yahweh (1 Kings 16:31).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_creation_narrative

I don't agree that there are two creation narratives. I think the second writer, or the writer of the second chapter was embellishing the creation story, not writing a different version of it. But that's just my opinion.

Borrowing themes from Mesopotamian mythology, but adapting them to the Israelite people's belief in one God, the first major comprehensive draft of the Pentateuch (the series of five books which begins with Genesis and ends with Deuteronomy) was composed in the late 7th or the 6th century BCE (the Jahwist source) and was later expanded by other authors (the Priestly source) into a work very like the one we have today. The two sources can be identified in the creation narrative: Genesis 1:1–2:3 is Priestly and Genesis 2:4–2:24 is Jahwistic. The combined narrative is a critique of the Mesopotamian theology of creation: Genesis affirms monotheism and denies polytheism.

When read carefully chapter by chapter, it's obvious there were more than one god in the history, but as a collected narrative, see above, it's meant to make it one god.

Rumraket wrote:I heard about all this stuff first from this excellent video

+1 for the Evid3nc3 reference. That whole series is excellent IMO.

He needs patreons to continue making videos (and I think his whole series is among the best on the topics of atheism, theism, evidence and philosophy on all of youtube). I signed on for 10$ pr video.