How important is it for the Divine to possess the attributes of all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful?

For me it is very important. The thought that they didn’t possess those qualities would be terrifying. It would be like having a ruthless dictator in charge of your life only 100 times worse, if they weren’t all loving. As for all knowing, well I’d like to think the divine entity has the whole story before judging or acting. As for all powerful, if the divine entity is all loving, well, that’s who I’d want to have all the power.

it has to be or the God would end up being a jerk…. or evil

Those are qualities many people wish they had themselves, I think.

I suspect that the rationale for those predicates arose from the urge of medieval ecclesiastical philosophers to solve the logical problems inherent in undertaking an analysis of the Bible and God’s attributes.

In and of itself, discussing God’s properties is an analytical encounter destined for contradiction and confusion. This is not to make any argument as to the metaphysical and ontological statuses of God, but to point out that the analysis of religious ontology leads us to contradictions.

Perhaps the greatest mistake of Western religion was to accept the empirical worldview – there is much less room for religious mystery in contemporary Anglo-Christian cultures than has previously been seen in other European religious groups.

Every hear of anthropromorphism?

People attribute the same qualities to God that they view as admirable in human terms.

You really ought to check out David Hume’s seminal work Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Speaking as a non-religious person
Omniscience sounds mandatory in order to be the grand Creator of all that exists. If you don’t know something, how can you create it?
Omnipotence sounds mandatory to be able to be the grand Creator of all that exists. If you don’t have the power to create something, how can it exist?
And being all-loving (Omnibenevolence?) sounds appropriate to be the grand Creator of all that exists. If you don’t love something, why would you make it?

Also, we as humans love hierarchies. We have military rankings, we have socio-economic classes, we had caste systems in the middle-ages (and some other countries still do). The idea of having someone who’s better than us, and someone who is worse than us, is somehow so desirable.
So it would make sense that the entity that we worship is at the top of the hierarchy.

@Sarcasm I was going to say exactly that but much more concise. If I could give you two great anwers I would though.

@Sarcasm personally, if I were “God,” I’d have made “intelligent” life for my general amusement.

An all knowing and all powerful god wouldn’t let atrocities like the Holocaust, Darfur, and Rwanda happen. And if this god did have the power to intervene and didn’t then I’m so disgusted with it want absolutely nothing to do with it.

Epicurus was a smart guy:

http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/ll38/Gnurl/Epicurus.jpg

Being agnostic, I believe that yes, there is an omnipotent power, but that he/she/it set everything in motion and let it roll onwards on its own accord.

@Fiddle_Playing_Creole_Bastard and anybody:

How common do you think it is for people to believe in a Divinity that isn’t anthropomorphized? Personally, I find it to be a rare thing.

Fiddle I have picked up that book a couple times, I’ve yet to make it through. You inspire me to try though!

Wow. GQ and thoughtful response so far. Following this question!

I’ve often wondered about the shift from worshipping a deity that had so many human attributes that it could be descried as acting like a spoiled child, or a group of squabbling children to a single, all powerful that had love for humans as its foremost attribute.
I remember readng Campbell saying that the need of the humans at the time was the primary role player in the decidion making process.
But one cannot help but wonder if on a deeper level there is something else at play. Consider;
If one were to look at the stage of human drama from a historical standpoint, one can look back and see key players rising to the forefront at certain crucual moments with a specific role to play that is pivotal to a change in history. One cannot see it in the context of that timeframe, but it is clear in retrospect.
For instance; Benedict Arnold. A true American hero, who due to circumstances actually ended up on the other side of the revolution at a time when it looked like all was going to be lost for the colonies. There were internal arguments and bickering but because of his actions, the american soldiers unified and were able to overcome the Brits. Mr Arnold, his destiny/purpose fulfilled lived out his life across the sea. On this side of the pond his name has been reviled and stricken from the place of honor it once held. But had he not been apprehended and thwarted in his plan to give West Point to the Brits how differently would our history have been written?
Look at Oscar Schindler. Like Arnold, a failed entrepreneur who saw an opportunity with the advent of the war. He used his schmooze abilities and became a powerful stake holder and because of his position was able to save the lives of what, 1200 people? He also thwrted his own countrymen by manufacturing weapons and bombs that were faulty, so actually by this measure, the lives he saved are incalculable. From his standpoint he was just doing what came naturally and making the most of circumstances. From the standpoint of history he was outstanding and pivotal.
Are these men accidents or is there a grand design? On the world stage are we all merely players and some of us forced to prominence through pure chance or is there a grand master chess player setting up the move and circumstances thousands of plays ahead of time, long before the actual players ever come on stage?
I find it a fascinating concept.
So one could think of the different songs out there that speculate if we are all just pieces being moved on the board by unseen hands; CSNY comes to mind – ”...Spirits are usin’ me, larger voices callin’...” or Alan Parsons Project – “Could it be that somebody else is lookin’ into my mind, some other place, somewhere, some other time?”

@liminal, I just read it for my Modern Critiques of Religion class. It’s really quite interesting, and the character of Cleanthes is a perfect embodiment of the topic of this question.

Just some thoughts, as I am still mulling over what everyone’s said so far. “God” as we know it is traditional only for a small portion of human existence. There is a much longer history, where people believed things much in contrast with the ‘stern but loving’ patriarch figure that arrived with Jesus. Don’t forget that Christianity was reviled as a cult for a period after it became a movement.

The oldest forms of religion are more in touch with the Divine in nature and not as anthropomorphized as they later became. People believed in nature spirits and deities; unknowable, unpredictable, capricious, and needing appeasement. People revered the feminine influence that was evident around them and these religions tended to worship a Mother figure. The oldest figures created to depict a physical form of Divinity are those of an ample woman, full of breast, stomach, and thighs, full of fertility and maternity.

A Mother figure, though, is anthropomorphic, bringing me back to the point of the discussion. My guess is that by imagining this powerful force in semi-human terms, it makes it far easier to relate to. Comprehending the Divine is kind of like how truly wrapping your head around the vastness of the universe is impossible.. something too big for us to totally comprehend. My personal view has long been that man has an innate need to label and categorize things, and religion is just another means to do so, to create some order out of the unpredictable chaos that is life.

I really don’t think it matters who, how, or what you worship (with the sole exception of Satanists*) because the Divine is merely however we choose to see it, whatever way is easiest for us to comprehend. Polytheists are no different than monotheists, they just worship the different aspects of the Divine, rather than the Divine as one being with all of those characteristics. To me, the different religions are like paths up a mountain; all of them are different ways of getting there, but the ultimate goal is the same.

* My views on Satanism are well-informed and not knee-jerk.

@MissAnthrope I like the point you make, but on an interesting sidenote, the original “Satanic” cult had not much to do with devil worship but rather was more along the lines of the worship of Abrasax. The Catholic Church just branded it as satanic because they accepted that the fun “sinful” things of our world were just a part of life and not Lucifer inserting sinful thoughts in our head.

Many have answered this q exactly as I would have – the Divine (I like that word way more than God, by the way) has to be better than humans because, otherwise, what’s the point of worshiping it or being its children or what have you.

Not all that many gods have been defined as having those particular traits.

If you think about the Gods of the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans, they were fickle, often impish and indolent, petulant, dissolute and, vengeful. Thor, Odin, the pantheon of the the Hindu gods aside from Brahmin, Ishtar; none of these would fit the description in your question. I could list many, many more but few today would recognize the names well enough to have any idea what attributes were assigned to them. Suffice to say that the Omniscient, Omnipotent All-Loving gods are in a distinct minority.

In fact, the Christian idea of God being such doesn’t square all that well with the Yahweh of the Torah. “Ye shall not go after other gods, of the gods of the people which are round about you; for the LORD thy God is a jealous God among you) lest the anger of the LORD thy God be kindled against thee, and destroy thee from off the face of the earth.” Deut. 6:14–15. And ”‘Vengeance is Mine, and retribution, In due time their foot will slip; For the day of their calamity is near, And the impending things are hastening upon them.’” Deut. 32:35.

The God of the old testament was not these things.

Good things being pointed out!

I would agree that such a god is in the minority and for many faith traditions it is not all that important. In the US I tend to hear more conversations about Abrahamic traditions than I do others. In some conversations it can seem that it is highly important, for some, to identify with or disassociate from these particular attributes of the Divine. I find this very curious.

As I read the above and ponder things I am struck with how easy it is to craft a God or gods from our own imaginings, even to the point of depending on the imagining of others. @MissAnthrope I resonate with your words.

“Traditionally, God is described as being all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful. I sometimes wonder why God having or not having these attributes seems important to people when it comes to discussing Divinity.”

Hmmm. You and I evidently did not read the same book. I recently found myself on a 3,500 mile solo voyage from Barbados to Ascension Island and, although I had plenty of other things to read, I realized that if I was ever going to crack that book and finish it from cover to cover, this was my opportunity. So I went at it. I approached the Bible as the single most important document in Western culture, not as history or teachings written by men whose hands were guided by a Supreme Being.

Genesis was familiar ground, so I scanned through that one, looking for some point or meaning I may have missed. Exodus, the story of Moses and the Israelite people fleeing Egypt was familiar as well, but I’d never actually read it. The devil is in the most interesting details, like when the Pharoh ordered the death of all the newborns, he initially asked the midwives to kill them. To their credit, they refused. Fine Egyptian ladies all. Things like that makes this story interesting. And how stubborn the Pharoh was about letting this slave workforce go—it took ten curses in the form of drought, plague, locusts, etc., etc., before finally his own people were sending the Israelites off and giving them gold and jewels as incentives.

But this God. Oh my God, this God. If this guy ever came to me and said that I was one of his chosen ones, I’d run like hell. This guy acted like a mean drunk father from hell. Mean. In the beginning, he wasn’t so bad. He’s probably just started drinking when he first came up with the idea to save “His” people from the Egyptians. He was in his manic phase. It probably hadn’t taken a toll on his mind yet. That can take a couple of years. There were some red flags, though. Even before the Red Sea thing, he had called Mo on the carpet because the people had begun doubting this God’s powers when the Pharoh wouldn’t bend. Moses reminded God during one of these scoldings that never wanted the fucking job, wanted to know why god picked him, he wasn’t qualified, etc., etc., and even asked God to please just kill him and put him out of his misery. I thought this was an hilarious scene. “Just kill me now, man. These people are impossible!” But God relents, and the story goes on.

First, he convinces Moses to lead his “chosen” out of Egypt to save them from lives of slavery and into the “Promised Land.” By performing increasingly powerful acts, mostly in the aforementioned curses on the Pharoh and his people, he convinces Moses that he will always support Moses and his peeps. Then came the parting of the Red Sea, The best of the Egyptian soldiery are wiped out when the sea closes in on them, then the manna when they ran out of food. Then water out of a rock. Good stuff. Every time these people would start to complain of the conditions, God came up with something to take the pressure off Moses. So far, so good.

Well, this lasts for about a year until they reach Mt. Sinai and he starts laying down the law—number one and the most important one is that these people are to not ever, ever, ever, ever praise any other gods. Big no no. Then came other rules support earthly authority, like not fighting with one’s parents, etc. Then came stuff that just makes sense if you want a stable society like no stealing, no murdering, and no messing with another man’s wife. You couldn’t even “covet” her, which means don’t even think about it.

And don’t covet another guy’s things either. Pretty basic. You really can’t have a lot of that if you want a decent society in which to raise children and if everybody can’t be standing by their tent all day guarding their shit when they need to be hunting for water, or food, or fighting the Amonites, or Hittites, or just the whole uncircumcised world in general.

Anyway, one of the first things these people do is make this calf out of gold and start up with the idolizing. They must have been awfully bored. It’s not what I would do if I was stuck at the foot of the Mountain eating flakes of bread off the ground every morning, but who am I. The people and their calf pisses God off. He calls Moses to the mountain top and rages at him. God says that the whole deal is off now, every one of these ungrateful, unfaithful, un-everything people have to die now. The worthless little bastards have to go.

And here is where Moses finds his niche. He becomes the intercessor. The good wife of the madman drunk who wants to beat all the kids every night when he comes home blotto from a hard evening lifting libation at the tavern after work. Moses mollifies God, tells him, “Hey, you really don’t want to do that, God. I mean, what’s the Pharoh going to think? Here you bless these people as your chosen ones, only to lead them into the desert and slaughter them. Doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it?”

And God agrees. He backs down. (I was laughing my ass off by this time. It’s a bloody tragi-comedy.) Gods decides he’s not going to kill them all, just a few thousand. And for the rest, they get to wander in the desert for the next forty years eating manna every morning and sometimes, when God is in the mood, maybe some quail for meat. The generation Israelites he took out of Egypt, except for Caleb would never get to enter the Promised Land because of the golden calf deal. Not even Moses himself.

Moses had to be disappointed, taking all this shit for nothing. Except one thing. Moses had to intercede time and time again when the people, over the next forty years screwed up with praising new Gods, messing with the uncircumcised, and even complaining about the life-saving manna. God seemed eternally pissed at these people and over and over again threatened to kill them off. And if it wasn’t for Moses, he would have. Moses’ most important job was talking this mean old drunk down from his rage and convincing him that they were worthy of forgiveness. This goes on and on and on right through the Pentateuch, into Samuel, Judges, KIngs… This guy, this God, favors special people, makes them leaders, and invariably finds a reason to not only fuck them in the end, but the next ten generations of their family line.

Saul really screwed up. Here’s a guy that obviously suffered major bouts of clinical depression, but was a good soldier, good leader of his people for awhile, but in the end he and his whole family got it, too.

Even David couldn’t get out of life unscathed. He did some suffering at the hands of this God after a lifetime of soldiering and good leadership. Solomon was the only one who seemed to escape the wrath of this old bastard.

There was this one scene, when the Ammorite king, Og, suddenly finds out that there are 650,000 seasoned Israelite soldiers on his border and freaks out. All they want is to pass through on their way to the promised land. Og says no way, you people will strip my land of crops and livestock as you move through, so go around. The Israelites promise not to do any of that, but Og doesn’t buy it. He figures these people want to invade and take his kingdom, so he sends for an oracle to come and have God bless him and curse the Israelites in order to assure Og victrory in the impending war.

So Og’s emissaries travel some distance to this oracle’s house and tell him Og wants him to come and bless his army. The oracle needs to consult with God first, and God says no. The Israelites were his people whom brought out of Egypt and they were the blessed and Og was cursed. Them emissaries report this back to Og and Og tells them to get their asses back to the oracle and tell him that Og will give the oracle houses full of gold and silver if he’ll come and bless the army.

The oracle must’ve been tempted by this, because he checked back with God a second time to see if he could bless Og’s army (I didn’t know you could do this. I figured God, being a perfect being, his word would be final. But what do I know.)

Anyway, this time God changes his mind and tells the oracle that he can go, but he must say exactly what God tells him to say when he gets to Og. Happy about the prospect of obtaining houses full of gold and silver, I’m sure, the oracle sets out with the emissaries to O’s place. But halfway there, this angel from God blocks the way and threatens to kill the oracle if he doesn’t turn back! WTF? So, there’s this whole talking donkey scene and the oracle somehow escapes the angel, and goes on his way only to have God tell Og that, no way, the Israelites are going to kick your ass. And they do.

This was when I seriously began thinking that this whole thing, this story, was about a freaking alcoholic prick. God, in actuality, was some drunken bastard who lived alone and came home from work every night shitfaced to his computer and booted up some kind of Second Life type thing and just took out all his frustrations by fucking with these people in the program. In the Og incident, the guy was so loaded the night before that the next day he’d forgotten he’d given permission to the oracle to go to Og. The behaviour is that of a serious substance abuser.

God does this over and over in the OT. Then there is this new covenant. He softens up a little, sends his son down into the program to announce the kinder, nicer deal for man. God would be more understanding, more forgiving. He wanted to set a good example for his followers. Not every sin would be punishable by death.

It’s just as if this mean old drunken bastard had found AA and decided to turn over a new leaf.

You can go two ways when you figure out the christian god is a dick. You can throw the bible out the window or you can place its stories in the appropriate context. It’s a massive collection of stories put to paper by mortals, the wisdom of generations before we fucked things up beyond repair. Of course some of it was written by lunatics but you should learn from that too. You can learn from pretty much anything if you try hard enough and the bible offers a lot to work with.