Wandering over now that the kids are in bed and I have a bit more time - I have a personal interest in conversion events/etc, and one of the things I've noticed is that most of them are inner, not outer. It's not what happens in the world, it's what happens in your head (or soul, if you like) that matters.
Because lets face it: someone could wipe out the sun or create life in front of you, and if you have no inner feeling or impulse, then that entity is no more than a highly powered alien. I'm thinking here of that slightly silly Avengers macro that goes around sometimes, with Steve Rogers on it saying "Personally knows two gods, still believes there's only one god." And, well, no - Steve knows two incredibly high-powered beings from another "realm" who happen to have been worshipped as gods in the past in his world. Someone else mentioned Q elsewhere, which is another example - just because he can bend time and space doesn't mean he's a god. It just means he has a lot of power.
Which is true both from the theist and atheist perspective: Steve Rogers is a theist, a Christian, and he still looks at the beings otherwise thought of as "gods" and goes "nope, just aliens with power"; most of the Trek context is pretty atheistic, and so everyone looks at Q as a high-powered alien.
So I think for a lot of people, it's an internal thing, not an external thing. It's what moves you and what you experience. And if that's the case, even angels in the sky saying "by the way, the Bible's totally true and YWH is alpha and omega and so on" after smiting down an army could easily still get a response of "bullshit."
(I'm playing with this idea in one of my own novels - because there are angels who will show up and say just that, while there are also other characters who go "oh yeah? my god says you're full of shit" who have also had a personal experience with said, and once again, everybody has to figure out who THEY believe.)
no subject
Because lets face it: someone could wipe out the sun or create life in front of you, and if you have no inner feeling or impulse, then that entity is no more than a highly powered alien. I'm thinking here of that slightly silly Avengers macro that goes around sometimes, with Steve Rogers on it saying "Personally knows two gods, still believes there's only one god." And, well, no - Steve knows two incredibly high-powered beings from another "realm" who happen to have been worshipped as gods in the past in his world. Someone else mentioned Q elsewhere, which is another example - just because he can bend time and space doesn't mean he's a god. It just means he has a lot of power.
Which is true both from the theist and atheist perspective: Steve Rogers is a theist, a Christian, and he still looks at the beings otherwise thought of as "gods" and goes "nope, just aliens with power"; most of the Trek context is pretty atheistic, and so everyone looks at Q as a high-powered alien.
So I think for a lot of people, it's an internal thing, not an external thing. It's what moves you and what you experience. And if that's the case, even angels in the sky saying "by the way, the Bible's totally true and YWH is alpha and omega and so on" after smiting down an army could easily still get a response of "bullshit."
(I'm playing with this idea in one of my own novels - because there are angels who will show up and say just that, while there are also other characters who go "oh yeah? my god says you're full of shit" who have also had a personal experience with said, and once again, everybody has to figure out who THEY believe.)