that is what you will use it for, but if you looking for who God realy is, you will find that in all his doings he is fair and loving, and wishes salvation upon all of mankind.
How nice! The opposite of Pascal's Wager. If God is good, then he'll take care of me whether I believe the Bible or not.
So if you would be so kind as to show some examples it would go alot further than the vague references with nothing to back them.
There are plenty already listed on this thread- and not minor details like archelogical record (which is always disputable), but fundamental things too.
For example, there are dozens of Bible references to the fact that "God is good". And there are also multiple places where God is described doing something evil, such as wantonly killing innocent children (Such as the female bears, or the 10th plague of Egypt). Since a good person doesn't do evil things, any pair of such passages are contradictory.
I have no idea how you came to the (inaccurate) conclusion that I was a dualist.
Obviously because you claimed there are things beyond God's power. You said that the punishment of sinners was the responsibility of the victim, not the executioner. Either God is really supreme, and all of Hell and damnation is due to His will, or He is not the prime mover, and is balanced by other forces (natural or intelligent) of similar power. (Satan being the usual suspect, since a large fraction of lay Christians believe in unspoken dualism, using Satan as a mental crutch to explain why a loving God allows bad things to befall)
Your terrorist analogy breaks down because you're blaming God for our sin.
Wrong. I never said that. The point you're missing is that I attribute to "God" not the sin, but the punishment, which, if the Bible is to be believed, is something He's proud of.
Your terrorist analogy breaks down because you're blaming God for our sin.
So, can I come to your house and spy on you with my infrared binoculars? Then, when I see you commit some sin, I'll shoot you with a ketamine dart and abduct your sleepy self to my backwoods cabin.
There I'll chain you above a pit of boiling diesel, slowly lowering the hook, only stopping if you proclaim to love me. (Which I won't explain to you myself, but will assume you've heard rumored beforehand)
My actions in that hypothetical scenario are so wrong I needn't continue- but what needs explaination is why God is praised for doing something much worse. That story was hardly an analogy at all- it's almost a literal description of Hell and God's Judgement (as taken from Jack Chick, for example)
To expand on one point: injustice. Part of the wrongness is that death by burning is a disproportional punishment for most sins. It might be fair for murder, but applied to theft, sloth, vanity, or covetness, it's totally excessive. Yet, God allegedly applies a punishment infinitely worse to all sins uniformly.
Honestly, I would not feel comfortable spending externity with a guy who punishes Mohandas Ghandi exactly as harshly as Josef Stalin. (Both major leaders who committed multiple sins through their lives, and both died without accepting Jesus). A loving God would give the denizens of Hell an opportunity to change their minds after a few centuries of torment.
I don't claim to know that.
So, you're open to the possibility it could be out of arrogant, disdainful spite?
We don't have to sin.
And God doesn't have to punish sinners either. But He does. For no reason. Which is cruelty. (All the "evils" which people frequently attribute to Satan are really the responsiblity of the one who created and commanded Lucifer)
God didn't create us so that we are programmed to automatically sin.
Another unanswerable dilemma. How many humans have there been so far? 7 billion now, so say 50 billion total? And out of all of those, how many have been without sin? Depending on who you ask, maybe 1, maybe 5000. Some would even say millions. Regardless, a vanishingly small fraction of humans are sinless. Fewer than 1%.
So, if I design a car, and 99% of them explode before driving 50km, then you know that either (a) I am a dangerously bad designer, or (b) I am an evil engineer who wants things to blow up.
Similarly, since 99% of humans sin, and God created humans, then either he's a clumsy, unintelligent designer, or he wanted them to sin. Either one of those alternatives leads to unsurmountable paradoxes.
We were in a true and loving relationships with God until we (not to be confused with God) screwed it up.
Are you claiming to be Adam? Or Eve? I thought they'd both died already. If you're NOT claiming to be one of the 2 people alive prior to the screw-up, then exactly HOW do you think you caused it in any way? Time travel?
Or are you saying (the usual Christian line) that you've inherited responsibility for the crimes of a distant ancestor? But no just deity would hold a child for a parent's sin...
So you subscribe to the dualist heresy, believing that God is not all powerful, and instead has an equal and opposite counterpart in Satan... you should've said so before. That's not the official Christian position, although it is a lot more sensible.
and acceptance through Christ being the only way.
Why is that the only way? Who made the rules again? Who created the threat of damnation, and pointed mankind down the path towards it?
If I plant a bomb in your car and then save you from it, will that earn your appreciation the next day? Somehow I don't think human terrorists are rewarded for foiling their own crimes- should God be held to a lower standard?
When Bible-thumping Christians say you're going to Hell, I encourage you to remind them that Hell simply means eternal separation from God,
Great. Is there a chapter and verse supporting this? Because my KJV really says nothing of the kind (I'm looking at Mark 16 and Matt 40 for starters, and they say the opposite)
AC: Try thinking of it this way: omnipotence means being able to do everything that is logically possible.
Yes indeed, if you're willing to change the meanings of words, then anything you want to can be proved.
Just like I already explained, by changing the definition of "omnipotent" to mean something other than what it does, you can remove the paradox. Of course, you could've also changed "good" to mean "selfishly loving only Himself, suffering others only for their syncopany", and remove the contradiction that way too.
Redefining "omnipotent" to a weaker term not only breaks Biblical inerrancy, but also removes a major reason to believe in Jesus. And yet it still doesn't surmount the other objections to the Christian position, like "If God is so good and powerful, why aren't we in Heaven already? Or at least why doesn't God have broadcasting wattage power at least surpassing Rupert Murdoch's?"
I wouldn't give my child a choice to do something dangerous. Adults, however, have ownership of their lives and I don't have a right to impose my will on them
Right. Because compared to the child, you are prehaps 5-20 times as smart. She doesn't know the cars are dangerous; you do. You can tell her best interests better than she can.
So, when talking about God, who is at least 50 million times as smart as a human, if He sits back and allows people to go into Hell because they don't believe in it or don't think it's bad, that means one of:
1. Hell isn't really that bad. 2. God doesn't really love us. 3. God isn't strong enough to keep us from Hell (maybe because He doesn't exist at all)
Is it love to hold someone accountable for a choice when they never understood or were even TOLD the consequences?
I don't know what Hell is other than separation from God.
That's a post-Biblical description invented by apologists who saw that the original meaning was logically inconsistent.
It's not that God is sending you to Hell; it's that he is not violating your free will by bringing you into forcing Himself on you for all eternity.
If you love someone, and are aware that person is about to make a damaging, irrevocable mistake, then you'll do everything you can to protect him, regardless of free will.
Try it yourself sometime: watch your baby wander into the street, and let him go ahead and die because it was his own "free will". Then explain yourself to the judge...
AC: God is just. Since he is, he does not break the rules for anyone.
Ok, if you say so...
AC: a perfect sacrifice to be punished and die in our place.
But that's breaking the rules! It isn't JUST to punish one person for the crimes of others. What you're saying is that God breaks the rules for EVERYONE.
Actually, any logical argument involving an omnipotent entity is paradoxical, regardless of other content. In fact, the concept of omnipotence by itself is a paradox.
"Omnipotent" means "can do anything", which in logical terms means "If X is omnipotent, then any statement of the form 'X can Y' is true"
So if someone is omnipotent, he can do all the following:
Make a rock heavier than he can lift. And then lift it.
Add 1+2 and get 5, without making any mistakes, or redefining the laws of arithmetic
Be the most virtuous being ever, and gleefully weave a small girl into a lampshade
Die and live
Most generally, an omnipotent entity can simultaneously hold two contradictory positions. Paradox is no obstacle to the omnipotent.
So all you've really done is prove that claims for God are beyond rational consideration. If God is omnipotent, then everything He's said (through the Bible, etc) could be total truth, or total lies. Rational analysis breaks down.
Therefore free will and God's omnipotence are mutually exclusive.
It's trivial to demonstrate a paradox in any argument about an omnipotence. Another easy one is the claim "God is good, God is great". If "great" means "omnipotent", then God can do anything, which includes being totally evil, which is contradictory with being good. If God cannot be totally evil, then he wasn't really omnipotent.
Repeat to absurdity, and then keep on going.
The alternative, of course, is for the apologist to remove "omnipotent" from her claims, replacing it with the weaker term "all powerful"
Actually, consider Saddam Hussein a libertarian. He set up a system where you have the choice to love him or not. It's your call. In Bagdad, Al-Sharaf is simply remarking the obvious: all of us have chosen at some point not to love Saddam.
It's just that He loved us enough to give us the choice of loving Him, and when we choose to walk away He has loved us enough to die in our place so that we can walk back.
It makes sense insofar as you feel happier by believing good things will happen to you. The inaccuracy of your beliefs is unlikely to be revealed before your death, so it's overall a plus.
The poisson distribution can also be used to study how 'accidents' or 'malfunctions' or the chance of winning the lottery never, once or more than once, are distributed on the level of a population.
Nope. The Poisson model is completely appropriate. It has no requirements for subjects to be re-inserted into the population after an event as you claim.
Just check your textbook for the chapter on "Mean Residual Life". Classical application of Poisson curves.
Surely you can see how capitalism combined with lifespans measured in the centuries would inevitably lead to an unbreakable plutocracy
Pure capitalism always leads to plutocracy anyhow. That's why pure capitalism doesn't work (it always leads to a revolution by the poor, unless the rich are clever enough to share the wealth first)
Immortalilty will make it somewhat more obvious, because the ruler will be the same 1 man, instead of the same 1 dynasty.
Oh, and, though mentioning it will reveal me to the blue state elites as a red state knuckle-dragger, it's got a 24 hour NACAR channel which is awesome.
Nope. Mentioning NACAR brands you as a carpetbagging eastern-liberal candidate desperate to attract some rural votes to lose less badly in the 2002 elections.
Humanity has waited millions of years to get there; a few centuries won't make any difference.
Humanity has had spaceflight, nuclear bombs, and genetic engineering for a lot less than 1 century. A few more centuries could make ALL the difference. The timelimit isn't with Mars; it's with us.
Please, please, please let the geophysicists and soil chemists and wind science guys have a good solid look at the place before you start changing its chemistry permanently
It would be quite impossible to terraform without studying all those things in detail first. That'd be like trying to build a boat without first knowing what construction materials you have: just work blindly and hope it all falls into place.
I also don't think it changed it from accident to intent, just involved Frodo in that accident,
No. Frodo was always involved. Originally, the "accident" was Gollum biting off Frodo's finger, ignoring that it was the only thing holding him up. He fell into the lava immediately afterwards.
In the movie, they both recovered to the ground and went back & forth fighting afterwards, making it not Gollum's mistake which killed him, but Frodo's violence.
No they aren't. "Hero" is one of those words that's circularly defined: a person is automatically a hero if enough others call him a hero. It's about popularity, not effectiveness.
Look at Pvt Jessica Lynch for a good example of a recent hero who did absolutely nothing worthwhile, and whose failures put others' lives at risk. (She gets points for effort, though)
Dominant athletes from Tom Brady to Mike Jordan back to Babe Ruth are heros, and they don't save lives, or even make much of a positive social contribution.
Heck, Osama Bin Laden is hero to millions, and he's primarily a killer.
You could argue that none of the people I've listed SHOULD be heros, but that doesn't change the fact that they ARE.
(Of course, by the popularity-oriented definition, "geeks" aren't heros either...)
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We can make fun of all the misspeaking that Dubya does, but we can't mock Gore for saying "I took the initiative in creating the Internet."?
Mock that if you must. But inserting "invented" in place of "took the initiative in creating" completely changes the meaning.
People keep misquoting it with "invent" because that makes it funnier- because stupidity is funny, whether or not it's true.
that is what you will use it for, but if you looking for who God realy is, you will find that in all his doings he is fair and loving, and wishes salvation upon all of mankind.
How nice! The opposite of Pascal's Wager. If God is good, then he'll take care of me whether I believe the Bible or not.
So if you would be so kind as to show some examples it would go alot further than the vague references with nothing to back them.
There are plenty already listed on this thread- and not minor details like archelogical record (which is always disputable), but fundamental things too.
For example, there are dozens of Bible references to the fact that "God is good". And there are also multiple places where God is described doing something evil, such as wantonly killing innocent children (Such as the female bears, or the 10th plague of Egypt). Since a good person doesn't do evil things, any pair of such passages are contradictory.
I have no idea how you came to the (inaccurate) conclusion that I was a dualist.
Obviously because you claimed there are things beyond God's power. You said that the punishment of sinners was the responsibility of the victim, not the executioner. Either God is really supreme, and all of Hell and damnation is due to His will, or He is not the prime mover, and is balanced by other forces (natural or intelligent) of similar power. (Satan being the usual suspect, since a large fraction of lay Christians believe in unspoken dualism, using Satan as a mental crutch to explain why a loving God allows bad things to befall)
Your terrorist analogy breaks down because you're blaming God for our sin.
Wrong. I never said that. The point you're missing is that I attribute to "God" not the sin, but the punishment, which, if the Bible is to be believed, is something He's proud of.
Your terrorist analogy breaks down because you're blaming God for our sin.
So, can I come to your house and spy on you with my infrared binoculars? Then, when I see you commit some sin, I'll shoot you with a ketamine dart and abduct your sleepy self to my backwoods cabin.
There I'll chain you above a pit of boiling diesel, slowly lowering the hook, only stopping if you proclaim to love me. (Which I won't explain to you myself, but will assume you've heard rumored beforehand)
My actions in that hypothetical scenario are so wrong I needn't continue- but what needs explaination is why God is praised for doing something much worse. That story was hardly an analogy at all- it's almost a literal description of Hell and God's Judgement (as taken from Jack Chick, for example)
To expand on one point: injustice. Part of the wrongness is that death by burning is a disproportional punishment for most sins. It might be fair for murder, but applied to theft, sloth, vanity, or covetness, it's totally excessive. Yet, God allegedly applies a punishment infinitely worse to all sins uniformly.
Honestly, I would not feel comfortable spending externity with a guy who punishes Mohandas Ghandi exactly as harshly as Josef Stalin. (Both major leaders who committed multiple sins through their lives, and both died without accepting Jesus). A loving God would give the denizens of Hell an opportunity to change their minds after a few centuries of torment.
I don't claim to know that.
So, you're open to the possibility it could be out of arrogant, disdainful spite?
We don't have to sin.
And God doesn't have to punish sinners either. But He does. For no reason. Which is cruelty. (All the "evils" which people frequently attribute to Satan are really the responsiblity of the one who created and commanded Lucifer)
God didn't create us so that we are programmed to automatically sin.
Another unanswerable dilemma. How many humans have there been so far? 7 billion now, so say 50 billion total? And out of all of those, how many have been without sin? Depending on who you ask, maybe 1, maybe 5000. Some would even say millions. Regardless, a vanishingly small fraction of humans are sinless. Fewer than 1%.
So, if I design a car, and 99% of them explode before driving 50km, then you know that either (a) I am a dangerously bad designer, or (b) I am an evil engineer who wants things to blow up.
Similarly, since 99% of humans sin, and God created humans, then either he's a clumsy, unintelligent designer, or he wanted them to sin. Either one of those alternatives leads to unsurmountable paradoxes.
We were in a true and loving relationships with God until we (not to be confused with God) screwed it up.
Are you claiming to be Adam? Or Eve? I thought they'd both died already. If you're NOT claiming to be one of the 2 people alive prior to the screw-up, then exactly HOW do you think you caused it in any way? Time travel?
Or are you saying (the usual Christian line) that you've inherited responsibility for the crimes of a distant ancestor? But no just deity would hold a child for a parent's sin...
Are you suggesting God should take away our freedom to make those choices?
Anyone who is good will prevent atrocities if it is easy to do so. (That doesn't mean removing the choice, but the consequence).
The fact that atrocities happen means that there is no being in existence that is both good and powerful enough to prevent them.
but that's due to our actions, not His.
So you subscribe to the dualist heresy, believing that God is not all powerful, and instead has an equal and opposite counterpart in Satan... you should've said so before. That's not the official Christian position, although it is a lot more sensible.
and acceptance through Christ being the only way.
Why is that the only way? Who made the rules again? Who created the threat of damnation, and pointed mankind down the path towards it?
If I plant a bomb in your car and then save you from it, will that earn your appreciation the next day? Somehow I don't think human terrorists are rewarded for foiling their own crimes- should God be held to a lower standard?
you won't be allowed to be with God eternally
I think AC said it better than I can: "Now love me freely, or else Suffer Eternal Damnation!!! BWAHAHAHAHA!!!"
Does that make better sense?
If you have to ask...
When Bible-thumping Christians say you're going to Hell, I encourage you to remind them that Hell simply means eternal separation from God,
Great. Is there a chapter and verse supporting this? Because my KJV really says nothing of the kind (I'm looking at Mark 16 and Matt 40 for starters, and they say the opposite)
Love must be given freely. Have you not ever heard that sometimes, you have to let the one you love go?
I agree with both those things, and indeed, that's why I'm complaining.
Are you a control freak by any chance?
Is Jesus Christ a control freak, by any chance?
Where is this demanding for reciprocity?
He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.
You cannot force someone to love you.
Exactly! That's why Christ/Yahweh's attempts to force love are so very wrong. One might even call it evil.
AC: Try thinking of it this way: omnipotence means being able to do everything that is logically possible.
Yes indeed, if you're willing to change the meanings of words, then anything you want to can be proved.
Just like I already explained, by changing the definition of "omnipotent" to mean something other than what it does, you can remove the paradox. Of course, you could've also changed "good" to mean "selfishly loving only Himself, suffering others only for their syncopany", and remove the contradiction that way too.
Redefining "omnipotent" to a weaker term not only breaks Biblical inerrancy, but also removes a major reason to believe in Jesus. And yet it still doesn't surmount the other objections to the Christian position, like "If God is so good and powerful, why aren't we in Heaven already? Or at least why doesn't God have broadcasting wattage power at least surpassing Rupert Murdoch's?"
Three days of Jesus in hell equals potential millions/billions of ordinary people eternity in hell.
Elsewhere in this thread, somebody says: "Hell is separation from God". But since Jesus IS God, it'd be tricky to separate Himself from Himself...
Of course, the idea that Jesus spent the time between death and ressurection in Hell is quite novel and not standard Christian rhetoric.
I wouldn't give my child a choice to do something dangerous. Adults, however, have ownership of their lives and I don't have a right to impose my will on them
Right. Because compared to the child, you are prehaps 5-20 times as smart. She doesn't know the cars are dangerous; you do. You can tell her best interests better than she can.
So, when talking about God, who is at least 50 million times as smart as a human, if He sits back and allows people to go into Hell because they don't believe in it or don't think it's bad, that means one of:
1. Hell isn't really that bad.
2. God doesn't really love us.
3. God isn't strong enough to keep us from Hell (maybe because He doesn't exist at all)
Is it love to hold someone accountable for a choice when they never understood or were even TOLD the consequences?
I've yet to meet or hear of anyone who has lived a completely "right" life.
Slow reader, eh? Don't worry, the story picks up in part 2.
I don't know what Hell is other than separation from God.
That's a post-Biblical description invented by apologists who saw that the original meaning was logically inconsistent.
It's not that God is sending you to Hell; it's that he is not violating your free will by bringing you into forcing Himself on you for all eternity.
If you love someone, and are aware that person is about to make a damaging, irrevocable mistake, then you'll do everything you can to protect him, regardless of free will.
Try it yourself sometime: watch your baby wander into the street, and let him go ahead and die because it was his own "free will". Then explain yourself to the judge...
AC: God is just. Since he is, he does not break the rules for anyone.
Ok, if you say so...
AC: a perfect sacrifice to be punished and die in our place.
But that's breaking the rules! It isn't JUST to punish one person for the crimes of others. What you're saying is that God breaks the rules for EVERYONE.
Actually, any logical argument involving an omnipotent entity is paradoxical, regardless of other content. In fact, the concept of omnipotence by itself is a paradox.
"Omnipotent" means "can do anything", which in logical terms means "If X is omnipotent, then any statement of the form 'X can Y' is true"
So if someone is omnipotent, he can do all the following:
Most generally, an omnipotent entity can simultaneously hold two contradictory positions. Paradox is no obstacle to the omnipotent.
So all you've really done is prove that claims for God are beyond rational consideration. If God is omnipotent, then everything He's said (through the Bible, etc) could be total truth, or total lies. Rational analysis breaks down.
Therefore free will and God's omnipotence are mutually exclusive.
It's trivial to demonstrate a paradox in any argument about an omnipotence. Another easy one is the claim "God is good, God is great". If "great" means "omnipotent", then God can do anything, which includes being totally evil, which is contradictory with being good. If God cannot be totally evil, then he wasn't really omnipotent.
Repeat to absurdity, and then keep on going.
The alternative, of course, is for the apologist to remove "omnipotent" from her claims, replacing it with the weaker term "all powerful"
Actually, consider Saddam Hussein a libertarian. He set up a system where you have the choice to love him or not. It's your call. In Bagdad, Al-Sharaf is simply remarking the obvious: all of us have chosen at some point not to love Saddam.
It's just that He loved us enough to give us the choice of loving Him, and when we choose to walk away He has loved us enough to die in our place so that we can walk back.
A perfect being would love unconditionally, instead of demanding reciprocity.
Does this make sense?
It makes sense insofar as you feel happier by believing good things will happen to you. The inaccuracy of your beliefs is unlikely to be revealed before your death, so it's overall a plus.
The poisson distribution can also be used to study how 'accidents' or 'malfunctions' or the chance of winning the lottery never, once or more than once, are distributed on the level of a population.
Nope. The Poisson model is completely appropriate. It has no requirements for subjects to be re-inserted into the population after an event as you claim.
Just check your textbook for the chapter on "Mean Residual Life". Classical application of Poisson curves.
Surely you can see how capitalism combined with lifespans measured in the centuries would inevitably lead to an unbreakable plutocracy
Pure capitalism always leads to plutocracy anyhow. That's why pure capitalism doesn't work (it always leads to a revolution by the poor, unless the rich are clever enough to share the wealth first)
Immortalilty will make it somewhat more obvious, because the ruler will be the same 1 man, instead of the same 1 dynasty.
Oh, and, though mentioning it will reveal me to the blue state elites as a red state knuckle-dragger, it's got a 24 hour NACAR channel which is awesome.
Nope. Mentioning NACAR brands you as a carpetbagging eastern-liberal candidate desperate to attract some rural votes to lose less badly in the 2002 elections.
Humanity has waited millions of years to get there; a few centuries won't make any difference.
Humanity has had spaceflight, nuclear bombs, and genetic engineering for a lot less than 1 century. A few more centuries could make ALL the difference. The timelimit isn't with Mars; it's with us.
Please, please, please let the geophysicists and soil chemists and wind science guys have a good solid look at the place before you start changing its chemistry permanently
It would be quite impossible to terraform without studying all those things in detail first. That'd be like trying to build a boat without first knowing what construction materials you have: just work blindly and hope it all falls into place.
Moving a folder to the trash does not erase (teporarily or otherwise) the data, it moves it off of your computer, into the trash can
No. A file in the trash is still on your computer (because the trash too is on the computer)
Emptying the trash can moves it out of the trash can and onto the floor.
No. Emptying the trash erases the file. If they were merely on the floor, they'd be recoverable.
Anyway, those are irrelevant to your non-point.
Then he could have bet safely and still won regardless.
That's not a statistical victory; it's an arithmatical one, which is a much stronger term. Statistical means there is a small chance of loss.
I also don't think it changed it from accident to intent, just involved Frodo in that accident,
No. Frodo was always involved. Originally, the "accident" was Gollum biting off Frodo's finger, ignoring that it was the only thing holding him up. He fell into the lava immediately afterwards.
In the movie, they both recovered to the ground and went back & forth fighting afterwards, making it not Gollum's mistake which killed him, but Frodo's violence.
You can put it in the contract that everyone who touches the code has to have a security clearance.
And you can require CIA and FBI officers to have security clearances too. Doesn't mean they're not working for Moscow.
Heroes are people who save lives.
No they aren't. "Hero" is one of those words that's circularly defined: a person is automatically a hero if enough others call him a hero. It's about popularity, not effectiveness.
Look at Pvt Jessica Lynch for a good example of a recent hero who did absolutely nothing worthwhile, and whose failures put others' lives at risk. (She gets points for effort, though)
Dominant athletes from Tom Brady to Mike Jordan back to Babe Ruth are heros, and they don't save lives, or even make much of a positive social contribution.
Heck, Osama Bin Laden is hero to millions, and he's primarily a killer.
You could argue that none of the people I've listed SHOULD be heros, but that doesn't change the fact that they ARE.
(Of course, by the popularity-oriented definition, "geeks" aren't heros either...)