What makes a god?

What does it mean to say something is god or a god? My ancient history teacher said that the only workable criterion is immortality. Therefore Judaism and Christianity aren't monothestic as angels are immortal and there therefore gods albeit subordinate gods. What if we discovered the observable universe was created by a scientist in a meta-universe. He would have created the world and maybe be able to control all events in ours. Would she be god? How about if instead of a scientist in a lab it was some kid with his equivilent of legos? Does god have to have a consciousness? A personality?

Making good music.
That makes someone a "god" in my mind.

Though, of course, they're still just human. *shrugs*

I mean, I guess, to me, "god" implies "good at what they do".

But, then, I've never been religious.

whOa. that's entirely too deep for me. *crawls under a rock* :)

This smacks of the "Can god make a wall so high he can't jump over it" discussion.

I suggest Gordon be burned at the stake. I'll accept stoning as a backup.

I think Gordon is already stoned. ;-)

A lot of SF writers have posited that gods that aren't actively worshiped disappear, and that a god's power is proportional to it's worship base.

Your ancient history teacher is on crack, Gordon. I really wish you'd stop saying that immortality = godhood as it is a patently ridiculous assertion, as you yourself note. Notions of godhood and their definitions depend on the mythological framework within which they exist. Clearly within the Jewish and Christian Mythoi, immortality is not alone sufficient as a criterion for Godhood since there exist within the framework beings which are immortal but not gods. Your question is pretty meaningless without a common mythological/religious background which, clearly, we do not have here.

The question is personal. I was asking what makes a god to you? What are your personal criteria. Not just you, I was talking to everyone.

It is something that always interested me. As for immortality, the Norse gods weren't actually immortal. Baldor was killed and sent to Hel (that isn't a typo, Hel is the Norse goddess of the dead).

As you might have picked up by now I'm a mythology buff. Which means I've read lots of different notions of how gods are supposed to act and what they do. I've always felt that though we use the same word to describe Zeus and the judeo-christian god, they are very different.

Personally I sort of feel that if it isn't omniscient and omnipotent it isn't god. It is just a really powerful being. I of course also think that being omniscient and especially omnipotent leads to logical parodoxes.

It think the real genesis of this thread was arguments I've had over the years with my friend Bad Carey. I'd argue that the common notions of god lead to parodoxes and he's say, so god doesn't follow those notions and i'd say, then that isn't god.

So now I'm just curious as to what other people think it takes to be a god.

Buffy actually comes into this. In season five she fought Glory, a goddess of a demon dimension. She didn't seem qualitatively different from the demons and other creatures she's fought. I didn't quite see what made her a goddess.

This is starting to feel like more of a diary entry than a forum post. I'm going all over the place.

Then the question should have been "What, in your mind, are the criteria required to make a being God, or a god, in your eyes?" The wording of the question suggests that you are looking for an objective analysis, and your history teacher's statement seems to be his attempt to speak for the entire theist world.

I do not, at this point in my life, necessarily believe in God as *a being* but if I did, God would be without form (and thus, genderless), omnicient and omnipotent, eternal, incomprehensible not in the sense of being beyond our current level of comprehension but rather inherently incomprehensible to humans, and would have something like love for God's creation. I did not say good or omnibenevolent for a reason... people who engage in theodicy often try to judge God by human standards of good and bad. This to me seems rather naive and contradictory. When people ask why God allows bad things to happen to good people I stop listening because the question doesn't make sense. If there were such a God, that God was here long long before we were. We came into this world and the world was what it was... God was what God is. All we can do is describe what exists in this world and try to explain it for ourselves. Its not as though the world were once a wonderful perfect place and then we were suddenly betrayed by this God creature who made bad things start happening (unless you believe literally in Adam and Eve in Eden, and that opens up a whole new can of worms)... that has always been the case. It seems to me that the more relevent question would be why we, as humans, don't deal with this reality better and have to make up reasons and excuses for that reality.

Glory in Buffy was clearly a goddess of a polytheistic reality, and didn't need to be endowed with the utter vastness of power and existence with which a monotheistic God must be. It was ok for her to be basically an extra-powerful demon-like thing with the added bonus of worshippers.

I think that Bad Carey's argument was, in reality, that God is what God is, and is not dependent on human notions for God's existence. People try to set down rules for what God must be, and when their perception of reality reveals something different, they blame God, or the lack thereof for not living up to their expectations. In my mind, any God that had to live up to human expectations is probably not God.

wah. *brain explodes* :D

Who says that's reading *too much* into it? Personally, in high school I was just about ready to convert to the religion of the Endless ;)

The bible doesn't explicitly say that angels are immortal, in fact it doesn't say much about them at all: angels are variously refered to as malakhim, i.e. messengers, and elohim or bene elohim, i.e. gods or sons of god...

God is sometimes referred to as Adonai Elohim, Lord of Lords. The commandment says "I am the lord your god, and you shall have no other gods before me" - doesn't say there aren't others, just that God is the premier god.
And Israelites are specifically reminded not to worship (and punished for worshiping) the gods of various neighbors and conquerors throughout the old testament.

Clapton is God

!!! *dies laughing*

i thought i was the only person who still used that line, you are my new favorite person :)

a big rock music fan dies and goes to heaven. when he arrives at the gates, he watches as all his heroes pass by--john lennon, jimi hendrix, jim morrison, janis joplin, and on and on and on. then he sees bono.

"huh?" he says. "i didn't know bono had died."

"no, says st. peter. "that's just god. he likes to pretend he's bono sometimes."

ok. that's probably only funny if you're me. :)

I was waiting for someone to post it! :D

I guess that shows I'm ooooooollldddddd! =)

That's a lot older than Niel Gaiman. That was old when the original star trek used it.

[spelling and grammar checker OFF]

All this makes the assumption that we, as "lower" beings, have the means through which to define god or god-like. I'd like to make the claim that all our knowledge, perception about the world, concepts on how life interacts, how we anthropromorphize in general, are all drawn from the world around us and how we perceive it.

should my fish perceive me as god-like because i transcend their understanding? do i exist to them, given that i'm outside their boundries of their world? would a higher dimensional being suffice to be considered god-like?

perhaps the definition of god-like should be 'transcends comprehension', in which case i'd like to nominate the entire female gender as god-like... in a good way, of course :)

i think an interesting question would be 'are humans perceived as god-like by anyone?'. most of the wild animals i've seen weren't too impressed with us. i think cats were put here to keep us humble. maybe dogs think we're god-like...

Ray, when someone asks you if you're a god, you say YES!

The Christian God is more than just immortal (that's a pretty silly and simplistic definition). Omniscence and omnipotence are also requirements. He also has to be Good, and he cannot contradict his own nature.

That's the Christian god. I was talking about a god in general. Now I have to admit my ideas of what a god is has been highly influenced by the ambient Judeo-Christian culture I live in. Hebrew school may not have made me a good Jew but it helped define the god I don't believe in

One thing that Judaism added to the ideas of religion that was not in the Greco-Roman model was the idea that god is inherantly moral. The classical gods were capricious and not bound by the codes of human behavior. Yes the same could be said of the Judeo -Christian god but at least there is felt the need to morally justify when he does things like order the extermination of a nation. The Greek gods would just do it at of pique.

A white gown

Freud's Moses and Monotheism made a pretty good argument that we make god in our own image. Our conception of "what makes a god" seems to change with individual and social development. There are just too many interpretations in place and time of what a god is for me to believe in one, or several. ... metaphysics ... pass the dispirin please.

That's what gods are made of.