Ugh, I am posting a reply and haven't yet read the whole thread so I am sorry if I say something stupid I believe there are two (or more) Gods presented in the Bible. A very human like (NPT I like to use small words but I realize you made this point) God of Fire and Smoke who promised the Hebrews all sorts of favor for doing his bidding. He liked to burn their enemies to the ground and did it often. He even turned on the Hebrews when it suited him. This God sounds pretty standard to me. A supernatural being who has its own quirks, in this case serious control and anger issues. Reminds me of Zeus. Some amalgamation of natural forces and human ambitions. Then there seems to be this other God. Something that cannot be described (cannot be depicted in an idol for example), and that cannot be viewed by a living human (to see God is to be no more) and that to even hear the voice of God would destroy a person, thus all the intermediaries and that whole prophets writing books thing. This God seems to represent some sort of pure beingness, the force of existence and consciousness. In fact the dogma presents some concepts of everyone having a spark of God within them and attributes this to their sentience. But also a God that is paradoxical in that it is all things yet all things do not constitute it, that it is beingness and non-beingness. Therefor even referring to IT as IT is not correct. I can appreciate the magnitude of that Ideal God, but I have a lot of trouble believing that God would be interested in anything I might find important or even that God could be said to have interests at all, since that is obviously a condition of a temporal being. I find myself resting on the idea of a multitude of extra dimensional entities, none of which are The God, and a whole host of people worshiping their own personal Demiurgos and that perhaps that is as close to a concept of God as humans are truly capable of understanding. Either way, the Bible is a mishmash of books and even if all the writers were divinely inspired why the hell should I assume they conveyed that inspiration correctly? Why should I assume that each of them is talking about the same God? I don't think I should, and I don't think the Ideal God is too awful worried about whether a few mortal husks are disolved back into the mix because after all, nothing was truly lost, energy does not cease to exist and energy==matter. I guess the only question left is how long it will take to prove that concousness is an energy.