yes Abrahamic religions probably do to some extent believe in God as an aged human male with a beard who lives in the clouds
No, they really don’t. Not even a little bit. If you really went to seminary school, you would know this. Even when believers use that kind of imagery as a metaphor to describe attributes of God, Christians, Muslims, and Jews know it’s a metaphor. At least every single adult believer I’ve ever known or read books or articles written by knows this.
My point in the opening of the essay is this — when atheists insist that what believers understand to be a metaphor must be taken literally, they are setting up a straw man argument. They are trying to make points by tearing down a belief that no one actually believes. It is exactly as if I were to attack atheism because I find their deification and ritual worship of Charles Darwin unreasonable. Of course the don’t really worship Darwin. But that’s the whole point. It’s easy to knock down a straw man. It’s also pretty pointless.
Christianity in addition, also believes that Jesus is the flesh incarnate of God that stated “if you have seen me, you have seen the Father”.
The incarnation of Christ is a very complex theological concept. To reduce it to “Jesus had a human body so God must have a human body” is a classic example of reductio ad absurdum. To say that’s what Christians believe is patently false. For example, in Christian theology all three Persons within the Godhead, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, existed as one God before the historical event of the birth of Christ occurred. So the Son preexisted Jesus. Yet Jesus is the Son. There’s no way to reduce that to a question of bodies.
Who can really tell who and what God actually is for 100% sure
I agree with this. Atheists tend to be 100% sure they know what God is — a fairytale. And that’s fine, they’re free to believe that. I would never ask them to do otherwise. What they’re not free to do, at least with me in the room, is grossly misrepresent what other people believe in order to tear those beliefs and believers down.
All of the world’s religions are complex and subtle systems of understanding human and supernatural reality, and the interplay between them, that have developed over at least hundreds, and more often thousands of years. No religion anywhere can be summed up in a sentence, a paragraph, or even one book. That’s why seminaries/structures of education exist in all religions. Because it takes years of diligent study to take in the whole picture. If you could sum up any religion on a postcard, or in a single absurd image, seminaries would be unnecessary.
