When you're a parent, you'll understand. But, yes, there are times when the only way to keep a kid from running into the street in front of a car is to tie him in a leash. What is right to do in such cases simply cannot be pre-determined.
God knows all things, but we don't. If God keeps us from the extremes, we will never have a hope of knowing all things.
You have to remember, I'm speaking from the point of view of one who believes he has evidence of life after death, and evidence of the power of God to save people's eternal souls from the damage we do to ourselves in this world. I do not believe that the physical death of the body is the worst thing that can happen to a person.
I suppose you're going to ask how I can argue against killing people if I assert that it's okay for God to let people do dangerous things? There are lots of things God can do without being evil that we would be evil to do. Partly, it's because He can and does take care of the mess.
BTW, you're preaching to the choir when you talk to me about how making the world too easy denatures art.
But, no, extremes of emotion and those tendencies are ancillary to personality, not core. Expressions, of personality, not the personality itself.
I don't advocate drugging people to get them to quit expressing themselves, I'm just pointing out that I don't agree (for instance) with the idea that going to heaven robs people of their personalities. (I noted, also, that the religion I follow does not teach that heaven consists of angels forever playing harps on clouds in some unrecognizable state arbitrarily called bliss, did I not?)
Somehow it seems to me that you are misreading my arguments. I am telling you that heaven is specifically not the brainless happy state that you seem to have become convinced that Christianiity teaches it is, and you keep trying to tell me that I'm wrong to believe in a heaven that is brainless bliss.
We're talking past each other.
Prayer (and moments of silence) come in all sizes and durations -- one second in an emergency, hours when you really need to work things out, maybe even longer.
Prayer for form is no better than education for form, but that doesn't mean that prayer must never match some form any more than it means that education must never match form.
And I think you would not disagree that collective ritual for the sake of community building is necessarily bad, if not overdone or repeated invoked without (heh) thought?
Letting the programming class count all the votes might be just as good as letting the programming class cast all the votes.
Teaching people to vote by computer is a bad thing, IMO.
Actually, making people aware just how fragile voting is, is an awesome thing to teach people. IMO. There's too many folk who actually trust "the system". Letting students create "the system" themselves, they're bound to discover that their system is not that trustworthy... and some of them might make the leap to realising that this also holds for commercial systems.
Excellent idea. Much better than any idea for building a system for them. Let them experience building a system, then have them figure out how to attack it.
I mean, in the real UN, they have pushbuttons, don't they?
Don't we want to give the students the chance to feel like they must be important because they have all these high-tech solutions to make it easier for them to sound pompous?
Feeling a litte cynical today, and I know the reasons for the pushbuttons in the real UN, but I think that we really don't want to encourage the next generation to de-personalize voting, nor do we want to risk teaching them that technological solutions for voting are valid.
Although, I have to wonder, e-mail being cheaper, is there some specific reason to use SMS? is SMS that much more convenient? Or is e-mail from the phone not yet that wide-spread on non-smart phones in the US yet?
The example about the red light, I am a parent. I have been in situations where I watched my children walk into danger from their own choices. I tried to talk them out of those choices, but they insisted. In some cases the danger has been physical and I have actually resorted, initally, to physical means to prevent them, but when they refuse to listen, well, preventing them from learning from their mistakes is also a form of abuse.
I personally don't consider idealism, cynicism, depression, being just plain tired, losing brain function, etc. as changes to personality, per se. These things are functional issues, and if the resurrection restores the body, surely it will restore the brain.
Okay, there is a range in which people can choose, say to be pessimistic or optimistic, which ideals to hang on to, that sort of thing. We can choose to moderate our reactions when we are tired, to some extent, so even a hot temper can be cooled somewhat without changing the essence of personality. In the religion which I assert (Christian), we talk about repentance, about discarding bad habits, that kind of thing. These things don't change our personality, they change the expression thereof, for the better, if we are guided by God.
We trust God, so don't have any reason to believe He will restore us to something we have not chosen by our thoughts and our actions. Quite the opposite, in fact, we believe we are reward and punished based on what we did with what we were given. And, yes, there is scriptural basis, for example, Jesus said, "In my house there are many mansions,..." (New Testament, John 14: 2)
This kind of "deep doctrine" (not really so deep) is not going to by found be casual reading of books on the mythos. Some of them are taught to us through, well, prayer.
I think I can guess that you are going to claim it is all derangement of mind caused by too much fantasizing while one is on one's knees or something. The fact that one has to want to find it tends to draw jeers from the cynic: "Well, aren't you just seeing what you want to see?" and such.
But my experience is that, for example, if one doesn't want to learn how to program in Java, one can read all the books on Java that there are and even go through the motions of typing in the examples and still not be able to program in Java. Wanting something is not a bad thing.
Moments of silence not used to to figure out what one can do are wasted. Pondering that doesn't include assessment and conclusion is not much use, either. Likewise, prayer. Prayer only for form is weak medicine. This is what I mean when I suggest that there is more to religion than you have considered. We put into it what we choose to put into it, and we get out of it what we put into it.
As an allegory, we can choose to spend our time on computers playing games and chatting about things that don't matter. We can also choose to use computers to do real work. (Most of us choose a bit of a mix.)
The implements of religion are tools which we can choose to use for own good or not. And, well, we often tend to have a bit of a mix in our choices there, too, I'll admit. I myself have done some pretty stupid things and some pretty good things because of my religion. When I recognize the difference, I tend to try to set aside the stuff that isn't helpful.
Your example about the red light? Do you have children? Do you know how hard it is to get them to listen to common sense some times?
I expect you will again assert that God should be able to save such a child even if the parent was simple unable to react fast enough. But you skip a whole lot of other possibilities.
For example, which is going to be more emotionally damaging? Getting hit by a car and then finding himself alive (as a spirit) in a different world, a world connected to this but different, perhaps being met by the people who were his grandparents in this world, or being hauled around in a harness from age two because the parents ar unwilling to let the poor child make any "wrong" decisions?
By the way, the perfect God I believe in is also capable of healing emotional damage, especially in those who are willing to be healed.
Which version of heaven? God owns this universe. He has all versions of heaven that are necessary. People go to the heaven they are willing to prepare in this life to receive. It's a little more involved than that, because many people don't get all the chances they should in this life and God can and does make allowances for that, but forces no one to a heaven they don't want.
Hell is mostly for people who aren't willing to go to heaven at all. No, don't tell me you don't think people would willingly reject heaven. There are plenty of people who don't like having to make choices, and heaven is full of choices.
None of the things that you think motivate me in heaven? I think otherwise. But, then, the heaven I would choose is not the heaven you thought you were describing, by any means.
Personality being linked to the brain? FWIW, the body will not be resurrected without the brain.
But I think you're jumping to conclusions. We can demonstrate, for instance, that certain stimulations to the brain can cut temper short, but, then, so can sleep deprivation. Those, and all other experiments I've seen mostly demonstrate that we are human, and subject to a variety of influences, rather than demonstrating that we would have no personality without a brain.
There is far more to religion than I think you have considered.
If you are not willing to consider what I have offered, perhaps you would at least allow that even an avowed atheist will allow a person a moment of silence in respect of the dead and the suffering, particularly if that moment of silence involves asking oneself what can be done to help those who are suffering.
For some people, prayer may be useless or even less than useless. It is not so for most of the people I know who regularly pray.
I had written a longer reply, then I tried to log in without going to a separate window because that doesn't seem to work in the current interface in the version of FF I'm using, and I lost that all.
My wife is telling me I shouldn't be engaging in this kind of conversation with people I don't really know on a Sunday morning.
The short version is that, if you admit that death may not be the end of the soul, a lot of assumptions about the behaviour of an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent, etc., deity change. He can save the eternal souls of people who leave or are removed from this world. Which doesn't answer a lot of your questions, I'm sure.
A world in my understanding is neither good nor evil. It's neutral, because there are no deities, no creation and no intention in it. It just works the way it works, in the same way that gravity sometimes works to my advantage and sometimes may harm me.
In my way of thinking, a world that "works the way it works" is a good world. (Thinking about the first several verses of Genesis.) I don't think we disagree in substance there.
However, if you claim that the world is created by something for you to inhabit, then it's different.
How so?
The creator then is responsible for the way the world works. Just like you "create" the world your children inhabit, and it's generally considered bad parenting to leave dangerous things around.
Well, there is theory and there are ideals and then there is practical reality. You can be fully diligent and children can still find ways to make the world you let them live in dangerous. Even if you have enough money to remove every last danger you can recognize.
So let's say we meet somewhere in a field. If I trip on some hole that just formed naturally there, then that's not good nor bad, it's just the way it was.
If you however go around digging holes, then invite people into the same place, then you're either being actively malicious, or at least negligent, neither of which IMO can be called good.
So, if I invite you over for a game of golf, I'm malicious or negligent?
Now, before you go getting mad at me for that, let me tell you what happened to a friend of mine. This wasn't the holes, it was the balls. He and his fiancee enjoyed playing golf. Just before their wedding date, they were playing a round at the local course and a stray ball hit her in the head. (They had to postpone the date until she recovered from the surgery. But she did survive, they did get married, and neither she nor her family held it against him.)
So I think that if the world has a creator, in order to be called good, he should have made a world devoid of tsunamis and earthquakes. Since they exist, it indicates that the creator if any is not good, but either malicious or negligent.
No golf courses, either, I suppose?
No schools where the kids can get drugs from friends who make bad decisions?
Asking God to remove all dangers is really asking a lot.
The way you say that makes me think you think I think God is just being coquettish (sp?).
I don't, FWIW.
Actually, I do think I understand, in part.
I'll admit, it did take a while before I understood that the difference between NP and NP complete is part of why we have to have things happen in this world, that seem non-optimal to us. While I'm not going to ask you to understand that immediately, I would like you to exercise a little understanding.
Some of us who believe, believe He wants to talk with us about things. Prayer for us is a duplex connection.
In this case, the prayer is something like this:
"Is there something I can do?"
And the answer yesterday and this morning is that my first job is to see to my own family's safety.
And it's not like I really spent a long time coming to this conclusion. More to the effect of taking a moment to check whether what I was doing was the best. Atheists will do basically the same thing, just call it taking a moment to think, or to check their conscience.
When you can't go there and join in the relief efforts, partly because the earthquakes haven't stopped enough for relief efforts to really begin, partly because the roads are closed, partly because you have to be making sure your own family is safe, prayer, or perhaps a few moments of silent reflection, may the best you can give for the moment.
Prayer is not necessarily off-topic.
I'd suggest that it's not worse than posting comments here.
(And I'd like to post more replies, but I have things to do. Most of the country is still functional, and we need to keep it so, so that the relief work can start once the earth and seas have settled back down a bit.)
If there were no earthquakes, tsunami, wars, etc., it wouldn't be this world, and it wouldn't be in this universe.
It wouldn't be interesting, either.
Sure, we don't like the bad stuff to happen. But if we make a world where nothing bad can ever happen, it works out that nothing good can happen either. At least, I've thought about this for a really, really long time and I can't figure out how even God could make a world with nothing but good in it.)
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When you're a parent, you'll understand. But, yes, there are times when the only way to keep a kid from running into the street in front of a car is to tie him in a leash. What is right to do in such cases simply cannot be pre-determined.
God knows all things, but we don't. If God keeps us from the extremes, we will never have a hope of knowing all things.
You have to remember, I'm speaking from the point of view of one who believes he has evidence of life after death, and evidence of the power of God to save people's eternal souls from the damage we do to ourselves in this world. I do not believe that the physical death of the body is the worst thing that can happen to a person.
I suppose you're going to ask how I can argue against killing people if I assert that it's okay for God to let people do dangerous things? There are lots of things God can do without being evil that we would be evil to do. Partly, it's because He can and does take care of the mess.
BTW, you're preaching to the choir when you talk to me about how making the world too easy denatures art.
But, no, extremes of emotion and those tendencies are ancillary to personality, not core. Expressions, of personality, not the personality itself.
I don't advocate drugging people to get them to quit expressing themselves, I'm just pointing out that I don't agree (for instance) with the idea that going to heaven robs people of their personalities. (I noted, also, that the religion I follow does not teach that heaven consists of angels forever playing harps on clouds in some unrecognizable state arbitrarily called bliss, did I not?)
Somehow it seems to me that you are misreading my arguments. I am telling you that heaven is specifically not the brainless happy state that you seem to have become convinced that Christianiity teaches it is, and you keep trying to tell me that I'm wrong to believe in a heaven that is brainless bliss.
We're talking past each other.
Prayer (and moments of silence) come in all sizes and durations -- one second in an emergency, hours when you really need to work things out, maybe even longer.
Prayer for form is no better than education for form, but that doesn't mean that prayer must never match some form any more than it means that education must never match form.
And I think you would not disagree that collective ritual for the sake of community building is necessarily bad, if not overdone or repeated invoked without (heh) thought?
If you're going to that much trouble, just take the camera to them.
(Yeah, apologies for ruining a good reason t buy a telephoto lens.)
If I hadn't already posted.
Letting the programming class count all the votes might be just as good as letting the programming class cast all the votes.
Teaching people to vote by computer is a bad thing, IMO.
Actually, making people aware just how fragile voting is, is an awesome thing to teach people. IMO.
There's too many folk who actually trust "the system". Letting students create "the system" themselves, they're bound to discover that their system is not that trustworthy... and some of them might make the leap to realising that this also holds for commercial systems.
Excellent idea. Much better than any idea for building a system for them. Let them experience building a system, then have them figure out how to attack it.
You're talking about pretty high resolution, there.
I mean, in the real UN, they have pushbuttons, don't they?
Don't we want to give the students the chance to feel like they must be important because they have all these high-tech solutions to make it easier for them to sound pompous?
Feeling a litte cynical today, and I know the reasons for the pushbuttons in the real UN, but I think that we really don't want to encourage the next generation to de-personalize voting, nor do we want to risk teaching them that technological solutions for voting are valid.
Not reasonable at a model UN convention.
I think the technology solution is shiny, and it moves.
Although, I have to wonder, e-mail being cheaper, is there some specific reason to use SMS? is SMS that much more convenient? Or is e-mail from the phone not yet that wide-spread on non-smart phones in the US yet?
if I had mod points.
Teaching people to vote by computer is a bad thing, IMO.
The example about the red light, I am a parent. I have been in situations where I watched my children walk into danger from their own choices. I tried to talk them out of those choices, but they insisted. In some cases the danger has been physical and I have actually resorted, initally, to physical means to prevent them, but when they refuse to listen, well, preventing them from learning from their mistakes is also a form of abuse.
I personally don't consider idealism, cynicism, depression, being just plain tired, losing brain function, etc. as changes to personality, per se. These things are functional issues, and if the resurrection restores the body, surely it will restore the brain.
Okay, there is a range in which people can choose, say to be pessimistic or optimistic, which ideals to hang on to, that sort of thing. We can choose to moderate our reactions when we are tired, to some extent, so even a hot temper can be cooled somewhat without changing the essence of personality. In the religion which I assert (Christian), we talk about repentance, about discarding bad habits, that kind of thing. These things don't change our personality, they change the expression thereof, for the better, if we are guided by God.
We trust God, so don't have any reason to believe He will restore us to something we have not chosen by our thoughts and our actions. Quite the opposite, in fact, we believe we are reward and punished based on what we did with what we were given. And, yes, there is scriptural basis, for example, Jesus said, "In my house there are many mansions, ..." (New Testament, John 14: 2)
This kind of "deep doctrine" (not really so deep) is not going to by found be casual reading of books on the mythos. Some of them are taught to us through, well, prayer.
I think I can guess that you are going to claim it is all derangement of mind caused by too much fantasizing while one is on one's knees or something. The fact that one has to want to find it tends to draw jeers from the cynic: "Well, aren't you just seeing what you want to see?" and such.
But my experience is that, for example, if one doesn't want to learn how to program in Java, one can read all the books on Java that there are and even go through the motions of typing in the examples and still not be able to program in Java. Wanting something is not a bad thing.
Moments of silence not used to to figure out what one can do are wasted. Pondering that doesn't include assessment and conclusion is not much use, either. Likewise, prayer. Prayer only for form is weak medicine. This is what I mean when I suggest that there is more to religion than you have considered. We put into it what we choose to put into it, and we get out of it what we put into it.
As an allegory, we can choose to spend our time on computers playing games and chatting about things that don't matter. We can also choose to use computers to do real work. (Most of us choose a bit of a mix.)
The implements of religion are tools which we can choose to use for own good or not. And, well, we often tend to have a bit of a mix in our choices there, too, I'll admit. I myself have done some pretty stupid things and some pretty good things because of my religion. When I recognize the difference, I tend to try to set aside the stuff that isn't helpful.
It was time to go to church, among other things.
More assumptions come out here.
Your example about the red light? Do you have children? Do you know how hard it is to get them to listen to common sense some times?
I expect you will again assert that God should be able to save such a child even if the parent was simple unable to react fast enough. But you skip a whole lot of other possibilities.
For example, which is going to be more emotionally damaging? Getting hit by a car and then finding himself alive (as a spirit) in a different world, a world connected to this but different, perhaps being met by the people who were his grandparents in this world, or being hauled around in a harness from age two because the parents ar unwilling to let the poor child make any "wrong" decisions?
By the way, the perfect God I believe in is also capable of healing emotional damage, especially in those who are willing to be healed.
Which version of heaven? God owns this universe. He has all versions of heaven that are necessary. People go to the heaven they are willing to prepare in this life to receive. It's a little more involved than that, because many people don't get all the chances they should in this life and God can and does make allowances for that, but forces no one to a heaven they don't want.
Hell is mostly for people who aren't willing to go to heaven at all. No, don't tell me you don't think people would willingly reject heaven. There are plenty of people who don't like having to make choices, and heaven is full of choices.
None of the things that you think motivate me in heaven? I think otherwise. But, then, the heaven I would choose is not the heaven you thought you were describing, by any means.
Personality being linked to the brain? FWIW, the body will not be resurrected without the brain.
But I think you're jumping to conclusions. We can demonstrate, for instance, that certain stimulations to the brain can cut temper short, but, then, so can sleep deprivation. Those, and all other experiments I've seen mostly demonstrate that we are human, and subject to a variety of influences, rather than demonstrating that we would have no personality without a brain.
There is far more to religion than I think you have considered.
If you are not willing to consider what I have offered, perhaps you would at least allow that even an avowed atheist will allow a person a moment of silence in respect of the dead and the suffering, particularly if that moment of silence involves asking oneself what can be done to help those who are suffering.
For some people, prayer may be useless or even less than useless. It is not so for most of the people I know who regularly pray.
I had written a longer reply, then I tried to log in without going to a separate window because that doesn't seem to work in the current interface in the version of FF I'm using, and I lost that all.
My wife is telling me I shouldn't be engaging in this kind of conversation with people I don't really know on a Sunday morning.
The short version is that, if you admit that death may not be the end of the soul, a lot of assumptions about the behaviour of an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent, etc., deity change. He can save the eternal souls of people who leave or are removed from this world. Which doesn't answer a lot of your questions, I'm sure.
A world in my understanding is neither good nor evil. It's neutral, because there are no deities, no creation and no intention in it. It just works the way it works, in the same way that gravity sometimes works to my advantage and sometimes may harm me.
In my way of thinking, a world that "works the way it works" is a good world. (Thinking about the first several verses of Genesis.) I don't think we disagree in substance there.
However, if you claim that the world is created by something for you to inhabit, then it's different.
How so?
The creator then is responsible for the way the world works. Just like you "create" the world your children inhabit, and it's generally considered bad parenting to leave dangerous things around.
Well, there is theory and there are ideals and then there is practical reality. You can be fully diligent and children can still find ways to make the world you let them live in dangerous. Even if you have enough money to remove every last danger you can recognize.
So let's say we meet somewhere in a field. If I trip on some hole that just formed naturally there, then that's not good nor bad, it's just the way it was.
If you however go around digging holes, then invite people into the same place, then you're either being actively malicious, or at least negligent, neither of which IMO can be called good.
So, if I invite you over for a game of golf, I'm malicious or negligent?
Now, before you go getting mad at me for that, let me tell you what happened to a friend of mine. This wasn't the holes, it was the balls. He and his fiancee enjoyed playing golf. Just before their wedding date, they were playing a round at the local course and a stray ball hit her in the head. (They had to postpone the date until she recovered from the surgery. But she did survive, they did get married, and neither she nor her family held it against him.)
So I think that if the world has a creator, in order to be called good, he should have made a world devoid of tsunamis and earthquakes. Since they exist, it indicates that the creator if any is not good, but either malicious or negligent.
No golf courses, either, I suppose?
No schools where the kids can get drugs from friends who make bad decisions?
Asking God to remove all dangers is really asking a lot.
Well, it's the morning after, and the danger has not passed yet. That was why I was suggesting staying sober.
(For my part, drugs, including alcohol, aren't where I'm going to take my worries/concerns/frustrations/sorrows/etc. But that's my choice.)
The way you say that makes me think you think I think God is just being coquettish (sp?).
I don't, FWIW.
Actually, I do think I understand, in part.
I'll admit, it did take a while before I understood that the difference between NP and NP complete is part of why we have to have things happen in this world, that seem non-optimal to us. While I'm not going to ask you to understand that immediately, I would like you to exercise a little understanding.
We're all deluded. Why blame the other guy for his delusions instead of trying to understand your own?
Depends on your understanding of God.
Some of us who believe, believe He wants to talk with us about things. Prayer for us is a duplex connection.
In this case, the prayer is something like this:
"Is there something I can do?"
And the answer yesterday and this morning is that my first job is to see to my own family's safety.
And it's not like I really spent a long time coming to this conclusion. More to the effect of taking a moment to check whether what I was doing was the best. Atheists will do basically the same thing, just call it taking a moment to think, or to check their conscience.
When you can't go there and join in the relief efforts, partly because the earthquakes haven't stopped enough for relief efforts to really begin, partly because the roads are closed, partly because you have to be making sure your own family is safe, prayer, or perhaps a few moments of silent reflection, may the best you can give for the moment.
Prayer is not necessarily off-topic.
I'd suggest that it's not worse than posting comments here.
(And I'd like to post more replies, but I have things to do. Most of the country is still functional, and we need to keep it so, so that the relief work can start once the earth and seas have settled back down a bit.)
Yeah. yeah. That gets a chuckle.
But, FWIW, Google is not my god, either.
Okay, define a "good" world to me.
Show me how a good world can exist where there are no natural or man-made disasters.
But I want one thing in it -- the possibility of good things happening. If good things can't happen, I won't accept your claim that it's a good world.
I'm wondering if you're using a sock puppet to make faith arguments sound bad.
I think I see the source of the argument here.
Freedom implies non-optimals. Or, rather, freedom is equivalent to the existence of things mortal humans consider non-optimal.
Some people get so uptight about danger that they want freedom to quit existing too.
If there were no earthquakes, tsunami, wars, etc., it wouldn't be this world, and it wouldn't be in this universe.
It wouldn't be interesting, either.
Sure, we don't like the bad stuff to happen. But if we make a world where nothing bad can ever happen, it works out that nothing good can happen either. At least, I've thought about this for a really, really long time and I can't figure out how even God could make a world with nothing but good in it.)
Creating a world that has earthquakes and tsunamis and then putting people on it is evil?
You'd suggest, I suppose, that He put the people on a world without earthquakes and tsunamis?
An unreal world, perhaps? Where the people He creates can experience everything but reality?
It sounds to me a little like an action game without the action.
If God is omnipotent, He also has power to bring the people who died today back to life. Further down the road, in a better world.
No idea whether the orginal poster was being sarcastic, however.
When you can't do anything else, praying may not be a bad thing?