Feb 11

Through these readings we seem to have come to a problem where we need to really think about who is God? I think this is partially because the people of Israel got mixed up with the people of Egypt who belong to a different culture. Here we can sort of see God as this character that is sticking with only one group of people and wants to fix the world through them. I would say that this claim is made clear in the old testament. Now, it is very interesting to see how God reacts with the Pharoah compared to how he reacts with “his people”. He always used Moses as somewhat of a translator to get the message to the pharoah and the interaction just seems distant in some sense. Not to dwell over that, I think God in the strictly psychological sense is some form of a higher being, where humans direct this sort of “loneliness and security” that the reading talked about to him/her. We can talk about how different people view God because that seems a very bias description. I would just rather define God in more of a broad way. I don’t really agree with all of the points of the reading, especially in how he drew the relation between atheism, monotheism, and polytheism. I think atheism stands out since it is simply a rejection of the belief system presented in religion. We can talk about how it is all talking about the same notion but the specificity in the conversation is much more important than the commonality between them. In the catholic sense, God is best defined as the all good, all powerful and all knowing being that loves humanity and sent his son and “named him” to create a social realtionship with us, which was discussed in the reading.