I find this a little far-fetched as a symbol. While the cross is an ancient symbol life (phallic), seeing the empty cross as symbol for the rising is stretching interpretation. Jesus did not rise from the cross. He was supposedly taken down, resurrected in cave and then went wandering about meeting a few people before he was off to daddy.

Then, if we love our children, we should kill them as quickly as we can, since going to heaven is the best thing there is, and letting them live will lead to many of them sinning and going to hell.

The feeling of anger requires quite a few hormones, notably adrenaline and norepinephrine, that in turn require a physical body. Anger by definition clouds judgement. A transcendent omnipotent being should be beyond that. In fact, many spiritual excercises aim at inner calm, to prevent feelings like anger to emerge or at least take control.

So an angry god is imperfect in my eyes. A calm god that did the things the OT tells about it, is cruel and/or lacks any empathy toward its subjects.

A human trial has more reasons than gathering the evidence. It's about showing to the people that justice is done. It's about hearing all sides of a story.
Also if an omnipotent being would like "to cleanse" a place, it should be able to do so selectively and not just nuking the hell out of it or flooding the place. "Kill'em all, let God sort'em out" is human behaviour at its worst.

Yeah so according to you something can't come out of nothing, but god was always there. I am really curious how you bend your mind to have these ideas not clash.

Maybe it did.
We can't possibly know that.

LOL

So you are an atheist now,too? Because as we found out earlier, omnipotence+eternal don't mix with logic.

The symbol is that death (the cross) no longer has any hold on him (life). Except for the whole 'Don't murder' part of His law.
No, we should raise them well, to not give in to selfishness, hate, etc. The choice is then theirs.
Deciding who dies and when is not the right of people. Only God can make such a judgement call. You're projecting. Anger in humans has the hormones. That doesn't mean anger can't occur in a being not driven by hormones. (Weren't you arguing (and I agree) just last page about thinking outside the box?). Anger doesn't cloud judgement 'by definition'. It just makes it harder to think clearly (for us). Losing control to anger isn't the same as having anger. (You say yourself that you can take control, even when feeling anger.) (also - look at the Vulcans ;) )
Let me ask you this: If something evil is done to someone you care about, wouldn't you feel anger and be justified in that feeling? And wouldn't remaining calm be a sign of not caring?
I'm not saying you could be an impartial judge at that trial, but God doesn't have the drawback of anger clouding His judgement.
Equally, if nobody became angry at injustice, there'd be little motivation to oppose it. then we'll have to agree to disagree on the nature of the decisions. Having anger but still being in control doesn't equal 'calm and dispassionate' Which God would already know - you're trying to portray it as an unjust decision, but hearing all sides is only done to assess guilt. Human trials need to be seen to work only insofar as justice needs to be seen to be done. We know that human justice is imperfect. A trial is a necessity to show we're trying. In the case of God judging something, by definition He would be just. Again: He made the judgement, got the innocents out of the way and then 'nuked the place'.

[I've also argued before about the literal interpretation of Genesis. Flooding the whole world or nuking Sodom and Gomorrah is a lesson about keeping faith with God's commandments.]
Once again - An eternal being doesn't need to come from anywhere and so doesn't need a cause. A 'finite in the past' universe does. actually, it was explained to you by 3 posters that that wasn't the case. I can't help it if you shut your eyes and say 'not reading because my definitions trump all'

"I've also argued before about the literal interpretation of Genesis. Flooding the whole world or nuking Sodom and Gomorrah is a lesson about keeping faith with God's commandments."

Bullshit! Peter Gabriel left because he thought the rest of the band was holding him back from his trend towards more politically activist music. God and his commandments had nothing to do with it.

Good thing for the rest of them their drummer could sing.

Well then eleborate on why Hitler survived one assassination attempt after another. God taking out His revenge on 6 million jews and 20 million russians?

If someone harmed my kids, I probable would be at their front door complete with pitchfork, torch (shotgun, grenades, nukes...). But at the same time I know this would be wrong, nothing I could do would make the deed undone. Remaining calm and making the best of the situation is always the sensible thing to do.

Anger serves only one purpose: To get your adrenaline levels up in case of danger, so you are faster, stronger and less prone to pain. There is no anger without clouded judgement - that's what anger is about.
A judge must be impartial. An angry judge is among the least desireable things there are.

If you insist that your god can be angry, without being angry, you're redefining "anger" so it fits your image of god.

The try to live the following premise:
"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law without contradiction." (Kant, Categorical imperative)

Anger, while unavoidable sometimes, is contradictory to that.

Maybe the worst kind? Would do wonders to His credibility.

I don't believe in "righteous anger". Concepts like this lead to witchhunts and holy crusades. The maybe certain degrees of anger (burning wrath, cold hate). And a god might be angry or not. But angry is angry.

Righteousness is, to be honest, a word I loathe. It implies an arrogant feeling of moral superiory that is simply not fitting a colorful multicultural world.
"Righteous anger" may be a cool ability of a paladin character in a fantasy game (like Smite Evil), where good and evil are set into the rule system, but in real life I tend to avoid people that use words like this.

I want to ask one question: Do you think that Christianity as an organized religion in power since Theodosius I - has it brought more good or bad to the world and humanity as a whole?

Given that we don't know what would have been otherwise, is that question answerable?

Worship involves having attitude of deep respect, adoration, and reverence while in service to one who is worthy of it. It is often used in a religious sense, but it can also be what what hold in highest regard and pour our time and effort into. For instance, people can can worship a celebrity or a professional athlete by praising them, admiring them, and imitating them. Everyone worships something and God wants us to imitate Him, so we should worship our Creator rather than what He created.

God is merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children's children to the third and the fourth generation. He is love, holy, righteous, just, and he is our savior and provider. I worship Him because of who He is and what He has done. He alone is worthy of worship and worshiping anything else is like dust in the wind.

"merciful and gracious"

HAHAHAHAHA

HAHAHAHAHA

*breath*

HAHAHAHAHA

Oh man, I think I just soiled myself! XD

I agree, if you have reason to think the author isn't being honest or that their bias is showing, then it might be reasonable to read between the lines, but at the end of the day, it's still conjecture. The danger comes when you start to take liberties with the text to make it fit your own preconceived ideas, because then you're no longer doing history. This is where it is extremely helpful to have the wealth of manuscripts that the Bible has. It allows us to trace where copying errors or changes were made so that we can be over 99% sure that what have matches the originals and know where what we have it is uncertain.

The books that were canonical had broad agreement for the most part. If you take the four canonical Gospels and look at how familiar they are with the land, with agriculture, architecture, botany, culture, economics, geography, language, law, personal names, politics, religion, social stratification, topography, weather, etc., and compare them non-canonical books, there really is a stark contrast. If someone who was unfamiliar with the land was making up a story much later, all those sorts of details would have dropped out, and that's exactly what we see. This also means that there are a large number of details in the Gospels that we can check independently which would quickly discredit the Gospels if they had got them wrong, but gives validity to them because they got them right. I agree. All sources are biased, so that's never a reason to dismiss a source. I agree that even if a source is unduly influenced by bias, that there are still things that we can learn from it. However, there still are sources that simply have no credibility.
I'm glad you're enjoying yourself.

Oh sorry I just fell to pieces trying to imagine how these people felt about god being merciful and gracious.

The very act of projecting something means that the projection has different properties than the original object. It is incoherent to talk about both being the same object and have the same properties. According to the law of non-contradiction, a square can't be a circle and in the same sense and at the same time, so what it might or might not look like in a different dimension is irrelevant. If we find our stuff later about other dimensions, then we can add that to our knowledge, but that does not mean that we can't know anything about this dimension. Why not? We might not be able to know everything about it, but we could still know somethings with certainty. For instance, the it had a beginning, so it has a cause or that it transcends width and length. You must be reading something else.

And if we're talking about a human using the word to describe themselves, then I'd agree.
Bear with me for a moment and assume that God exists and created all there is. Would He not then be able to lay claim to the 'righteous' title?
If He makes the rules on which morality is based, then His POV on it is the righteous one by default, no? Impossible to say, without it the world might be a lot worse, or not. I'll not say it hasn't brought some badness, but it has also brought goodness.
People often look at the big things like the crusades or the inquisition, while ignoring the day to day charity.
Besides, organised religion in power is not the same as the faith on which the religion is based. Sadly, God being just and telling us to be good doesn't always translate into people's actions.
Power corrupts, and does so in every big organisation. It's not that the people in charge necessarily become evil, just that their judgment becomes clouded by it.

God is what makes reality possible, not the concept. The entire Testament requires study, but there is value in it.
Most of the people who aren't in a religion do many of the do's and don'ts anyway.
God being merciful and gracious does not mean there will be no suffering.