Sorry, got you confused with a different poster.

As I understand it, these interpretations and translations are still constantly being debated.  Regardless, I hope you would agree that your interpretation is very different than the mainstream interpretation, and is not what most people mean when they say they believe in "The Bible", or what they mean when they talk about "God".  I still don't know if I understand what you believe in... do you think that everything in the Old Testament that specifically defies rationality (talking snakes, man out of clay, etc) is a metaphor/misinterpretation, and that everything that seemingly defies rationality (parting seas, the great flood) is a mistranslation of a non-miraculous event?  If so, where does God fit into in any of this?  It seems like if you distill the entire old testament into metaphors and misinterpretations to try to line it up with science and history, then that leaves no room for a god in any usual sense of the word.

My point is that "disappearing when you look at them" was never part of the stories of Greek gods.  If you add in something like turning invisible when you look at them, then you're not talking about the Greek gods, you're inventing a variation of them that goes against what the people actually believed.
 

No, I was trying to point out that greek gods and judeo-christian gods are equally ridiculous.

I get the feeling we're talking over each other :B .  I'm not saying I believe in them; far from it.  I agree that religion is nonsense.  I was debating your idea that religion and science don't have to conflict.  I think they do; if something is actually "nonsense" then it's not particularly scientific to believe in it, and scientific inquiry into the thing can only lead to disproving it.  You couldn't believe that there is a giant guy in a toga standing on the mountain in front of you while simultaneously being right there and observing that he's actually not and still claim that you're being scientific.

I don't think they'd specifically say something like that because that sort of thinking didn't really exist in philosophy until Logical Positivism, or at least Descartes (I think therefore I am).  Early Greek philosophers like Plato touched on the idea that everything might be an illusion, but the idea of marking certain supernatural things that you want to believe in as "outside existence" didn't really come about until the Church needed to update their teaching to deal with the dominating ideology of materialism and determinism that was taking over during the Scientific Revolution.  When Greek philosophers and theologists (they were generally one and the same) talked about things, they meant them literally; there was none of the wishy-washiness of today where theologists need to dance around the problem of pretending to know about something that they must define as unknowable.

Leauki,

I have never seen gods who throw lightning and mate with humans.

That's what makes it nonsense.

Huh. That's odd, I'm pretty sure there's storm gods all over the world, in multiple religions. And I'm also pretty sure there's gods in multiple religions who have mated with humans. So, these stories of gods affecting the natural world aren't exactly unique to Greek religion, although I suspect many of those stories weren't even meant to be taken literally - any more than you take the parting of the Red Sea as a literal parting of the Red Sea.

Just seems inconsistent - it's okay to have stories of a single guy wiping out an entire army with the jawbone of an ass, or G-d sending angels to annihilate everyone in two cities, or a flood to punish humans - but when the Greeks have stories of the gods getting involved in human affairs, it becomes nonsense? I'm not sure I follow the logic here. Folklore is folklore, whether Jewish, Greek, Norse, or Celtic, and it's frequently filled with stories of implausible, magical events.

You misunderstand two things.

First, Judaism is different from all other religions (except those derived from it and Zoroastrianism) because it rejects the idea of "storm gods" or the idea of gods or a god who is or will ever be corporeal (Christianity weakened that principle).

And the parting of the "Red Sea" can be taken literally. It just so happens that _literally_ the text doesn't refer to the ocean we call the "Red Sea" now.

I don't know what really destroyed Sodom and 3amora but I am convinced that the story about there being one survivor is probably true. As for how the city was destroyed, I don't care for the details in the explanation. The details are meant to teach us something, not make us focus on the details rather than the main event in the long run.

And yes, gods getting involved in human affairs in the ways the Greek gods did is nonsense. I have never seen it happening.

I recommend to watch "the man from earth"
this movie, even though not directly focused on religion, it dose cover some intersting parts of it

It probably isn't, no.

But I am open-minded and willing to learn. Please point me to evidence for it if you think that I should accept it as real.

Yes, you can. And I wouldn't care.

However, the way the god of Judaism is described that particular god is not really observable. Hence for that particular god "seeing" the god is not the way to confirm the god's existence.

That is different from Greek gods who were prone to making personal apperances.

I have seen the atomic bomb on film. I have seen the effects of the Holocaust. My family's home in Germany was destroyed in World War II. Other people have seen the genocides in Darfur and Rwanda. In the case of Darfur a friend of mine was personally affected when he lost his entire family while he was a student in Egypt.

So I have seen all these things or heard from people who saw it.

I cannot say that the same is true for pink unicorns, hence I don't believe in them.

You may call it ludicrous, of course. Perhaps I shouldn't believe in things I have seen. Perhaps I shouldn't believe in things people I trust have seen. And perhaps I should believe in things I have never seen and nobody else I trust has ever seen.

But I found my method quite rational so far.

You don't think a story about a people walking through a swamp is plausible?

And why do I have to provide the examples (I did, you quoted it and ignored it). Why don'y you provide a few myths?

When did I say that you have to believe in Jewish myths?

I don't care nearly as much about you believing in the Hebrew Bible than you seem to care about my non-belief in the Greek pantheon. (And then I didn't even say that I don't believe in the Greek gods. I merely say that the legends are nonsense. Whether or not those gods exist is really of little concern to me.)

Behold..the Ancient of Days has returned...after only 2 1/2 years.  Check those posting dates forefather1.

In the beginning I created the heavens and the earth...  I saw it and it was meh.

When necro-threads are revived I immediately expect spam/spammer......

Behold the religious spammer as he WILL be smote from this place.

On the 9th day God created Spam.

So say the men who wrote the Bible ... Truth is only true when you can't disprove it, not because a few say it is so.

Are you also Jafo Jafo from hulu? I saw a post the other day and realized I have no clue what a Jafo is. 

As to god, me saying I am god is exactly what those Hebrews in the desert did so long ago. Then a charlatan, or maybe a nice guy who knows, claimed to be connected to it and more than a century later another book was written teaching the opposite of the old one. It is convenient because one says forgive and the other says to smite, so you can pick and choose which parts you like better.

The only thing wrong with following this old book is that it tends to contradict other old books and causes some ridiculous wars. 

What more is there to say?

Googling gets you 'quaint' results... like "Jews Against Firearm Ownership", but the 'true' definition is "Just Another F***ing Observer".

I am a "Comms/Observer" for the FIM and FIA [GrandsPrix] ...

science is the search for God by people who refuse to believe that human's aren't the highest form of existance.