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[–]fschmidt 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

I follow the Old Testament, and most of what you wrote doesn't match what is written there. There is no rule against "criticizing or objecting God", in fact Moses argues with God. The "things you can or cannot say" is only that you cannot promote other gods since Israel at that time was a theocracy, so this was effectively treason. This is similar to not being allowed to call for assassination of the president in America. There is no "thought crime" in the Old Testament. There is no requirement to believe anything, and there is no concept of Hell in the Old Testament. Unlike "human dictators" who use coercion to enforce their rules, the god of the Old Testament is just giving rules of advice and warning that failure to follow this advice will result in societal collapse.

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Could I ask you, do you believe that God meant for everyone to have the same kind of skin, hair, eyes, or facial bone structures? Will people in Heaven have different aesthetic appearances? Or did God's image originally want everyone to be one color?

[–]fschmidt 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

God's means of shaping humans is evolution. Evolution implies that God wants people to be optimized for their environment, and therefore people should vary. The Old Testament rejects the idea of Heaven and Hell (Ecclesiastes 3:18-22).

The creation of mankind is first mentioned in Genesis 1:27 which I would translate from Hebrew differently. I would translate it as "So God created mankind in His own image; He created it in the image of God; He created them male and female.". Of course the image of God is kind of meaningless since it is never described. So the idea here is just that God and mankind have something in common, not that all original people were clones.