SATCHMO

I see it as a very flawed statement, not because I don't believe that atheism is every bit as much a belief system and a form of faith, (albeit, perhaps not blind faith, but a bit myopic nonetheless), but because it puts one's faith in the human capacity for accurate reasoning regarding what our senses perceive, our mental deductions, and what we subsequently arrive at being the nature of absolute reality.

I did preface my statement with the disclaimer that I'm not a conventional Christian and that I do not take the story of the exodus and its events as literally as the majority of fundamentalist Christians would. In truth, I'm being very inaccurate about my belief system by referring to myself as a Christian. I'm not. I am a pantheist, which is to say that I identify God as being The Whole that is greater than the sum of all of its parts, The Universe, and my faith is the dynamic between what my ego perceives to be my self and this whole of all being.

Having said that, the foundation of my own faith is greatly informed by the Judeo/Christian/Islamic tradition, as well as other faiths. I'm a believer in all, subscriber to none. And Yes, I do "pick and choose", I do make the discernment between what is a literal account of history, what is didactic, and what is both, and rarely, what is neither. I'm a great believer in story books. I think the scriptures of all faiths have great value to humankind, but the Bible is not uniformly history or His story and I believe it is up to each individual believer to extricate the wisdom inherent in a sacred text from the vehicle which is used to convey it.

(This whole line of questioning rings of the book of Job from the old testament, which is another great biblical story.)

I would be as grief-stricken and outraged as you would be if you were to witness the same events happen to your own family, but God is incapable of committing a crime, especially murder. Crime, in general and, Murder specifically are acts that are motivated by lower vibratory states of human emotion, namely fear, but also greed, jealousy, anger, or a false sense of power, and the effect that these states have upon one's judgment. And although some of these qualities, mainly anger and jealousy are imposed on God in the Bible by some of its authors, they really are exclusive to the human experience, therefor asking, "What if, every crime committed was God manifesting himself in human form, simply to test our faith. Would these crimes be just simply because God did it?" presents me with a conundrum, because every crime committed IS committed by God manifesting Himself in human form, but the crime is being committed by an individual who is, in a sense, acting apart from and perceiving themselves as separate from their own intrinsic divinity. As it regards the individual, the crimes would not be just, because the crimes would be motivated by human emotion and judgment.

I actually made the opposite argument, that the term supernatural is contradictory in and of itself, and that I define what we perceive as being supernatural as being something that simply contradicts our current understanding of the nature of reality.

I am in no way saying that "God exists, simply because we cannot disprove it". I am saying, in the words of Lao-tzu: