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I can respect that. I can respect that a lot. You're one of the few I've met who consider Jesus a god and haven't blown him all out of proportion, and I like that.

On the all-powerful/all-loving thing, I explain natural disasters by wayof my "God is a committee" theory (excellent word you put on it there!) - the God-energies are all-loving, and can only be all-powerful when they all work together, and they can't always do that. Also, they do not create the natural disasters; they can only avert them when combined. I believe we are the hobby of Gods, their personal project, if you will, and thus, Gods don't want anything to go wrong, and try their best to keep things from getting out of hand.

Here's what I say about God/God-energies:

-Four-dimensional. God-energies (heretofore referred to as "Gods") freely traverse Time as well as Space; much as we can move forward, backward, left, right, up, and down, Gods can as easily move through time. However, while they can see and interact with multiple moments at once, they have a limited field of vision, much as we do. Being four-dimensional, Gods see everything in our three-dimensional world simultaneously inside and outside, front and back, just as we perceive both the edge and the middle of a two-dimensional circle drawn on a computer screen. However, we can only truly perceive three dimensions, so we cannot possibly construct a full image of a God.

-Gods are not all-powerful, but they seem that way to the lowly three-dimensional residents of our world, simply because they can do things physically impossible to us. The laws of physics do not apply to Gods, and probably not the laws of thermodynamics either, but these laws do apply to us, and Gods cannot change them. They can interfere with their effects, but only in such ways that do not violate them. Life, for instance, goes against one law of entropy without breaking it: Gods' work that anything lives at all.

-Gods want the world to work out. They cannot directly interfere with human nature, nor with natural events, but they can set things in motion. Anything that has inherent chaos can be directly interfered with by a God, as long as there is a chance for the God's altering to happen naturally. For instance, a God might change the exact flow of heat in a planet's mantle in order to slightly alter the path of a tectonic plate, but such a change would take much longer than we can perceive. Since not everything can be directly changed by Gods' work, and each God has a limited sphere of influence, the aversion of certain naural disasters - tsunamis, for instance - sometimes takes longer than we have, due to only a limited number of Gods working to avert it.

-Gods can manifest in three-dimensional forms. They do this to communicate with some beings who might be particularly appropriate to spread a message. The forms they may take can vary greatly, and Gods will normally take a form that the three-dimensional will perceive as Godly. Angels are one well-known form.

Lucca, those are some awesome thoughts! I find the enlightenment and personal paralells that I can reach through your wisdom rather interesting...thank you very much for sharing them with us!

Visualizing God...how does one do that? It seems almost too big a question to answer. I must admit, that I've never tried. At least, I've never tried to connect with what I'd call the "Greater God," that force that makes up the highest spiritual power in the Universe. I'd almost call that force absolutely unknowable. If we were to try, we'd likely lost all grasp on our mortality...a rather grevious penalty indeed.

I prefer to connect to different faces of that God. My personal connection is through a Goddess, in the case, Isis. I've studied many Goddesses, and while I honor Diana in her place in the Italian Goddesses, I am bound and connected with Isis. How I know this...I cannot explain. She has come to see me in dreams, and she has told me she is there whenever I read her name. It's a personal connection with an aspect of God...I see this woman in white robes and celestial light and healing as a piece of a bigger whole that I will never understand in this lifetime.

I'd like to comment on a certain line of thought...specifically, that God made us in his own image, as is quoted from the Old Testament. On this, I have two theories...neither seems completely right, but perhaps someone can devine some level of understanding from it.

- God is a spiritual being, made up of spiritual energies. He put these spiritual energies into mankind, and this is what gives us our unique control over the universe via faith. When He made us in "his own image," it was with this raw spiritual essence. The physical bodies formed around the energies (souls), and do not really look anything like God.

- God, quite simply, is a living being, made up of cells. This is the more scientific of options, with elements of Science Fiction thrown in. It is a science fact that the amino acids that combined together to create the first living thing cannot exist together at the same time. Approximately half of the amino acids counteract, neutralize or transmogrify the other half, making the natural combining of acids nearly impossible. Perhaps God was an alien chemist of sorts. Perhaps some of the writers of the Old Testament were scientists, and in saying that God made us in "his own image" is a simplistic way of saying that God was a living thing that made more living things. Perhaps we're just a rampant science experiment...one never knows.

Thoughts to think on, eh?

Odd... I've never read anything by Asimov in my life.

I should.

in the book of genesis, it says that the lord created man in his own image.
so wouldnt he look like one of us? maybe different people have different ideas, but there you have it from a christian view, anyhoos.

"So Elohim created Adam in his own image, in the image of Elohim created he Adam; male and female created he Adam." - Genesis 1:27 [Translation from Original Hebrew] (Adam means "Humanity" in Hebrew. Eve means "Life" in Hebrew.)

Thus indicating that both genders exist in the Godhead.

Elohim combines these things: 'El' means 'God', but 'Eloh' is God with a Feminine Gender applied: 'Goddess'. '-Im' is a plural ending, and is masculine. It encompasses the totality of God - Male, Female, and the Angels. If the word Elohim occurred only once in the Bible, this combination of a masculine plural on a feminine singular noun would easily be dismissed as a copier's error. However, Elohim is used to represent the deity in more that 30% of the divine namings in the Bible. Only Yahweh (Jehovah) is used more often. Elohim is also the first divine name used in Genesis (First chapter, first verse, third word in the Hebrew). The obvious conclusion regarding this name is that an unusual meaning is intended.

The letters in YHVH represent male/female.

Yod - Masculine
Heh - Feminine
Vau - Masculine
Heh - Feminine

The original tongue of the Hebrew and Aramaic translates 'Holy Spirit' as female. It is a feminine gendered word in the original languages that cannot be translated as "male" or "neutral".

The Holy Spirit started out as The Shekinah, who was known as YHWH's feminine personage/aspect/manifestation/consort.

Shekinah - (Hebrew, "shachan", meaning "to reside"--Schechinah, Matrona, etc.) The female manifestation of God in man, the diving "inwohnung" (indwelling). Also, the "bride of the Lord". The expression "the Shekinah rests" is used as a paraphrase for "God dwells." In the New Testament sense, the Shekinah is the glory emanating from God, His effulgence. The passage in Matthew 18:20 is translated by C. W. Emmet (in Hastings, "Dictionary of the Bible") to read: "when two sit together and are occupied with the word of the Law, the Shekinah is with him."

The Gender of the Holy Spirit:

The Biblical Hebrew word for Spirit is Ruwach, meaning Wind, Breath, Inspiration; the noun is grammatically feminine. In the "Odes of Solomon"; the oldest surviving Christian Hymnal, the Holy Spirit is grammatically female. The Greek word for Spirit, 'Pneuma', has no grammatical gender. The Holy Spirit is translated in masculine terms *only* in languages such as Latin and English.

The Greek pronoun translated "Him" in John 14, speaking of the Holy Spirit, refers to "Self" in all persons: Him, Her, It. Otherwise the New Testament refers to the Spirit with grammatical neuter. "Him" in John 14 is a pronoun without gender.

Holy Spirit - Another name for the Comforter, the 3rd person in the Trinity, sometimes regarded as female. The apocryphal "The Gospel According to the Hebrews" makes the Lord speak of "my mother the Holy Spirit" who "took me by one of my hairs and carried me to the great mountain Tabor" (traditionally the mountain of the Transfiguration). The "mother" reference here is explained by the fact that in Aramaic, which Jesus spoke, as also in Hebrew, the word "spirit" is of feminine gender. Origin "On John II, 12", quotes the cited passages from "The Gospel According to the Hebrews." [Rf. Harnack, "History of Dogma" IV, 308; Hervieux, "The New Testament Apocrypha" p. 132; Hastings, "Dictionary of the Bible, Tabor"]

Origen on John, ii. 12. And if any accept the Gospel according to the Hebrews, where the Saviour himself saith, 'Even now did my mother the Holy Spirit take me by one of mine hairs, and carried me away unto the great mountain Thabor', he will be perplexed, &c. . . .

The description of the Holy Spirit as 'my mother' is due to the fact that the Hebrew & Aramaic word for Spirit is of the Feminine Gender.

"[T]he innocent and unbegotten Adam being the type and resemblance of God the Father Almighty, who is uncaused, and the cause of all; his begotten son [Seth] shadowing forth the image of the begotten Son and Word of God; whilst Eve, that proceedeth forth from Adam, signifies the person and procession of the Holy Spirit." - Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 6, p. 402

The Didascalia, a 3rd Century clergy manual, commanded the churches that, "the deaconess should be honored by you as the Holy Spirit is honored". Thus, officially confirming that the role of the Holy Spirit is of a feminine nature.

Also...

The Ten Sefirot of Jewish Kabbalah include both masculine and feminine qualities. Right side masculine, left side feminine. Jewish Kabbalah pays a great deal of attention to the feminine aspects of God.

Christian Gnosticism portrays God as Father, Mother and Son, a Trinity in which the Holy Spirit is identified as female, e.g. Apocryphon of John 2:9-14. For further reading on female divinities in Gnosticism, see Pagels, pp. 48-69.

She is refered to as the Shekinah in Judaism, the Holy Spirit in Christianity, and Barbelo in Christian Gnosticism.

but also with the christian view, the trinity(father, son, and holy gh-*cough* spirit)could god be a woman since jesus was a man?

I don't mind. I've compiled it together from various online sources on the subject. I use it myself in certain threads on Gaia. 3nodding

how would you describe him in terms of superficial features, like hair-color?

as far as I've heard, have a B.S, (for all that BS the means ^_~) in biology, this is not correct.

and as far as i'm concerned, if i want to see God, i open my eyes. God is in everything.