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I have thought before, a number of times, that if God had certain attributes, I wouldn’t want anything to do with him. For instance, a god who arbitrarily decides who is saved and who is damned is a god I would not be willing to associate with. I have come to believe in a god who wants us to be happy in this life just as much as he does in the next. A god who loves us beyond comprehension and wants nothing more than to see us all succeed. A god who is understanding of our mortal circumstances and who is forgiving. A god who has realistic expectations for us. These attributes are attributes of a god I can get behind.
If my idea of God turns out to be wrong on those points, I will take a lower reward or even “damnation” over being with him/her/whatever. If God turns out to be this petty control freak that sometimes appears to be what the church suggests is the case, I don’t want to affiliate with him. If it turns out that the true God is some tribal god who expects regular human sacrifices to be welcome in his kingdom, well, I just don’t want to be in his kingdom. If god turns out not to be real at all, well at least I did all I could to truly enjoy this life and make the best of it. If a belief in god was merely a tool to bring hope into my life, that’s still valuable.
A wonderful loving mom and dad. It is that simple to me. I consider myself a hopeful agnostic. I hope there is a God and an afterlife, but I know I could definitely be wrong and have accepted that. I also have a hard time believing that God is very involved in our earthly experience anymore. Mainly because of horrible things that happen that make no sense. There was a story a few years ago in the news that I followed closely of a toddler who had gone missing in the woods. The woods were such rough terrain that it was even dangerous for volunteers to help. Lots of places where the boy could have drowned or fallen. They were convinced that he couldn’t have gone far at such a young age. But days later, they found him in a field in the middle of the woods, quite a ways outside of the perimeter they’d been searching. He had been alive for days and the autopsy showed he had died of hypothermia. That story really crushed me. It made no sense to me that a loving God who could have done something, would let this poor baby wander alone in the woods for days, starving, freezing and afraid, and not help someone find him or at least have the kid fall and die quickly. The chances of him making it that far were so surprising. It hurt me to know that God hadn’t intervened to help this poor baby and instead just let him suffer for days in the woods alone. I struggled to find any sort of lesson that little boy was supposed to learn from that. That story changed the way I saw God and other things in my personal life that would go wrong and didn’t seem to have any reason also confirmed that idea. So for now, I like the idea of a loving God, but the idea that he for some reason cannot interfere with us is more fitting with my experiences. Maybe he can give us comfort, but I have a hard time believing He can create miracles here, and that maybe our earth just has miracles sometimes on its own. Anyway, maybe that was a bit dark, but I do still hope there is a loving God or an afterlife. I guess to answer your question, I would need some explaining, if I found out that God has a hand in our earthly experiences, as to why he didn’t interfere on certain things when it seems reasonable to interfere. I don’t think I support a God who -Would torture any of his children for all eternity. Doesn’t matter what they did or how bad they were.
-Would require any of his children to physically harm any of his other children
-Would wipe his children’s minds, and send them to a place with millions of contradictory, inconsistant teachers as part of a test.
-Would make any of his children less happy than they would be otherwise, in the long run.
-Would subjucate his most valiant children in the next life to the absolute neediness and dependancy of infancy, so the mothers’ who lost them in childbirth will have the opportunity to raise them.
-Who lies
I can stand behind a God who
-Wants his children to be happy
-Created this world for their joy
-Encourages personal growth and development
-Never makes a promise he won’t keep
-Empathizes and understands (or seeks to understand) his children
-Wants his children to become like him
-Never coerces or forces
-Always desires kindness and peace
Like LH said, a good Dad.
This is a good question partly because what I want to affiliate with, what is my perception of reality, and what I would not like to affiliate with are all different. My answer to the question itself is the same as LH’s. But throw in life experiences and observations and it’s not that simple.
I’ve got a screw loose. Rather than ask what kind of god would I want to affiliate with I ask, “What kind of god would I want to be?” nibbler wrote:
I’ve got a screw loose. Rather than ask what kind of god would I want to affiliate with I ask, “What kind of god would I want to be?”
A giant pumpkin head god?
Roy wrote:
A giant pumpkin head god?
One little slip like that can cause the Great Pumpkin to pass you by.
[attachment=0]great_pumpkin.png[/attachment] 
I am also a hopeful agnostic. I like the quote by Marcus Arelius (at least attributed to him) to live a good life, and hope the Gods are just If they aren’t, at least you lived your life as best you could. I’ve had so many unusual things happen to me that have caused me to adapt in strange ways, I hope God takes that into account if it turns out there is a judgment day. Most of all, I want him to be fair with me.
Beefster wrote:I have come to believe in a god who wants us to be happy in this life just as much as he does in the next. A god who loves us beyond comprehension and wants nothing more than to see us all succeed. A god who is understanding of our mortal circumstances and who is forgiving. A god who has realistic expectations for us. These attributes are attributes of a god I can get behind.
My feeling is that you likely don’t have much to worry about if your beliefs are rooted in these good things. The rest works itself out.
I find it hard to believe the almighty powerful god of the universe to be petty in anyway.
That doesn’t mean that some evil souls deserve damnation. There are some really really bad people in this world.
I don’t think the judgement will be based on mormon or not mormon, temple recommend holder or not, checklist complete or not.
It will be a judgment based on what kind of person you become, and less about how you got there.
And my feeling from your posts is that you are doing just fine and are on a good path, and if there is a god…he also knows that. It sounds like the rest of your thoughts go along with Pascal’s wager, which is not a bad approach to take.
I don’t believe god can be god and be petty. He would cease to become god were he so petty.
I like the God I believe is taught in what I consider to be true Mormonism. I approach this question with a constraint. What I want God to be has to be consistent with the evidence I have. I don’t want untruth. Loving parent? Not in any sense that I’m familiar with. I could only make this idea work as a believer when I ignored the horrible lives that so many people lead. When I didn’t ignore them, I had to absolve God of wrongdoing with ideas like “Getting body was such a privilege that…” and “This life is just blip in the eternities…” and “We chose this life knowing that it would be difficult…”
(Funny thing: when you absolve God like that, you also supply yourself with excuses to not act to change things. See also the Church’s war against LGBT happiness. “God will fix everything in the end…”)
Creator? God is squeezing into a narrow gap nowadays. If we eventually relegate God to The Entity That Made the Big Bang Happen because of limitations in what we can observe, I’m okay with that.
Judge? Advocate? The laws are messy, ill-defined, and communicated to us very poorly, if at all. The only judgment I’m willing to believe in consists of little more than “You made it! Good job!” for anyone who wasn’t a mass murderer. (Even then, there are mitigating circumstances, from a cosmic point of view.) I won’t pretend that there are well-defined, well-known and agreed-upon eternal laws, just to preserve some notion of a final judgment.
Past Believer Reuben objects to this. He says, “That’s why we have the atonement!” Current Heretic Reuben replies, “Why all the complication? Geez!”
After having written all that, I’m a little closer to answering the original question.
The kind of God I want to affiliate with doesn’t require me to continually defend it or make excuses for how it behaves. It doesn’t require me to believe strongly in it, or even believe in it at all. On the positive side, I’d like to think it somehow occasionally nudges me toward making life better for my fellow travelers.
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