The Christian God

[felix dakat]

Hi jdhawaii333. Welcome to ILP, the Religion Forum and this thread.

I was under the impression that God does not will evil but rather he allows for us to have free will and consequently evil has been allowed to persist through humanity.

Yes there is a free will argument. However, there are problems with it including 1] Natural evil arises independently of human choice 2] Christianity teaches that humans are born with original sin or a sin nature that virtually guarantees that they will sin. 3] humans are born into a world controlled by Satan thus stacking the deck against them

I do not believe God and Satan are in it together. That would be the complete antithesis of what God is. I do not believe the goal is to get humans to confess their crimes or to test their faithfulness.(although those may be steps along the way) I believe the ultimate goal is for us to do exactly what we're doing on this forum...search for Truth.

I like the idea that our search for the truth here on ILP has ultimate significance. True the New Testament narrative is not that God and Satan are conspiring together. But perhaps the answer to the problem requires that we de-literalize that picture. The Book of Job does show that God tests the faithfulness of humans and the so-called Lord's Prayer in the Gospel of Matthew includes the petition to God "lead us not into temptation." If God did not lead people into temptation, why would Jesus teach us to pray for deliverance from such?

In the Genesis story Adam and Eve represent man's choice to break away from Truth and to recognize the self. Unlike any other creature on the planet we were given that freedom and we chose/choose selfishness. By shedding our sense of self we move closer to the Truth and closer to God. God does not will that we experience evil. He wills that we have the same freedom He has...the freedom to choose.

Lot's of positive points there. According to Christian dogma, God does not will us to experience evil. In church I was given a convoluted explanation for why Jesus teaches us to pray to God beseeching him not to lead us into temptation. But I can't help but see an apparent contradiction there. In the church I attended for 13 years we were taught not to ask questions. Questioning God's Word was Satanic. But I find that suppressing questions is like trying to cut off my brain. Thus, I wonder whether God wills us to experience evil or not. Is God unable to carry out his own will? Surely if the Almighty God did not will that we experience evil, we wouldn't. Our Father, lead me not into temptation.

I do not believe we are doomed to sin by our biological make-up either. We all have choices to make in life and its quite obvious to me that by making "good" choices we can work towards making life better. The greatest example of that is in Christ.

Free will versus determinism is one of those perennial unanswered philosophical questions. Christ is a great example. But if he was the Only Begotten Son of God as per the Gospel of John or had two natures one human and the other a divine one like the orthodox Chalcedonian creed teaches than it seems he may have had an asset that we do not possess. It seems that for him to be an example for us to follow he must have a human nature that is like the ours in every way. How about that?

[omar]

Evening Felix,

--- Sin is possible.
O- If not near certain apart from God- that is their point.

--- Nothing happens unless God wills it.
O- Including freewill.

--- God is capable of preventing what he does not will.
O- True.

--- Therefore, God wills sin.
O- No. God wills human freewill, which makes sin possible, but only if we choose it, which is not what God wants, but what God allows.

--- Excusing sin because God is merciful or "no one is perfect" in unchristian. If it were that easy Christ would not have to die to save people from their sins. Christians call these notions "cheap grace." Grace was not cheap in this view. Jesus had to shed his precious blood to pay for it.
O- That is not what I am advocating. No one is prefect. We are born with that capacity for bad...inherited...genetic, who cares? But what I am saying is that each has a choice to make. Your parents may have walked away from the church when you were a child and could do nothing about it. They might have made you believe in something else entirely. But eventually you begin thinking for yourself and begin to doubt even the most cherised and comfortable belief. You experience doubt, you experience freewill. What you do with that doubt is what makes or breaks you before God.

--- God's plan is not about people achieving individual greatness according to the NT. It is about people living "In Christ" manifesting Christ who is "in them" as a community known as the church.
O- Not just as a community but with what we do, how we behave. This is clear in all of Paul's letters when he admonishes the bad behaviour of some within the Church. It is not the cause of salvation (what we do) but the expected consequence of our salvation, the outward expression of Christ within.

--- Your response is a diversion from my argument that original sin makes sin a certainty. We have less chance of being sinless as we do a being born and surviving without peeing because genetically we were born with a bladder. If It would be unjust to hold us accountable for having to pee, how much more is it unjust to hold us accountable for sinning when we inherited a "sin nature"?
O- Original Sin is a pre-disposition, not a pre-determination to sin. Having freewill, we still can call on God, as Paul did for example, and through His Spirit...you get the theological point.

--- I suppose by "good" you mean all good, and you include in your definition that God is also the creator of everything. Then, observing that infants are born without heads from time to time, which is bad [according to the parent's POV at least], one might conclude that-- yes "God is good" by definition, but there is no God that fits the definition.
O- Yes. Or conclude, without losing intelligibility, that headless babies must be part of a good God's plan that we cannot understand (the monism of Leibniz)

--- No, you might have found the true God that meets Anselm's definition. The standard is Anselm's. But your right, belief the true God might be considered heresy by the Reverend Doctors.
O- You turn St Alselm into a heretic without losing a beat don't you. The Word, the Logos, was the only standard he understood and it was, according to John, Christ.

--- Evidence would be if Jesus returned to earth, destroyed the Satan dominated kingdom, and reigned the world with justice. That's what Christians have a right to expect based on the NT. Once that happens, everyone will have reason to expect that Jesus will cast Satan into the lake of fire. This is all orthodox doctrine on the eschatological side of what I assert is a conflict in the Christian dogma.
O- Theologically, I would say that my client claims that he believes that that is exactly what will happen and he knows that when it happens he will be counted among the blessed. But that was not the point about evidence.
If a very powerful creature, like Q, decided to make all the problems on earth go away, he could. That doesn't make him God, but it might be called as evidence for some that he is.

--- A misrepresentation of science in service of your clients. You did say you were their lawyer after all so I suppose defending them with sophistry as you are attempting is to be expected.
O- Not at all. Give me your interpretation. Mine is just an extrapolation of Hume's argument of constant conjunction. Habit, not necessity is what creates this "law", this scientific constant.

--- You stretch Kuhn's theory way beyond his intended meaning in an attempt to remove science from the discussion by invalidating it.
O- Then you have not understood my point. It is not our scope to invalidate science, but to cleanse it of religious feelings. It must faced, naked and humbly, as it is and not as we want it to be. Then take a look back at the standard you have used with religious feelings and realize that at the edges of being, there is no evidence, scientific or religious, but faith either in science or religion.

--- One can interpret the passage that way. One can interpret it to mean that sin is that evil person, Satan the devil incarnate in the flesh. How would one decide the issue either way.
O- Where are the bones and flesh of Jesus? Where will be the bones and flesh of those being called up? paul narrates it as an alien-abduction and not as a world littered with souless zombies, or corpses. The flesh is not the devil.

--- Why not go one step further and interpret that Satan himself is but a metaphor for evil-- evil personified? Why not admit that that the personal God Himself is an anthropomorphism as well?
O- That is what many well educated Christians among my clients believe. Certainly they do not refer to God as "Him" because God is anatomically a man with planet-sized balls intead of a black-hole sized vagina. Evil can take a form, from a person, to an animal....better understood as Zeus was. But I have already made my argument about Satan as an officer, a functionary, a function that can be done by others in that official capacity.

--- OK now you say he performs a function where as before you seemed to be reducing "him" to a function.
O- A District Attonery is an office and a function.

--- You demonstrate here albeit unintentionally that you do understand that humanity's sin nature is such that not sinning is impossible except for a God-man.
O- I think that I am losing faith that you know what we are talking about here or can see past your prejudice. Did you not see my scriptural base for the argument? To man alone it is impossible, but a man that has God's Spirit everything is. It is therefore likewise impossible for a mere man to survive the venom of snakes, or drive out demons, but with God's Spirit, in Jesus name, these are possible. But while living righteously, a consequence, not a cause of salvation, is possible for a man, so too is it possible for him to fall away from God. The righteous man is not the one who tell you he is all-that-and-a-bag-of-chips, but the one that abases himself to make more room to glorify his God.

--- Yes but your response missed my point. The heart IS a positive thing [i.e. it exists] whether it has a brain or not. Likewise, evil is a positive thing [positive in the sense of being an entity] whether or not it is personified.
O- No. In the discussed passage what has positive being is the flesh, the body and it takes on a a metaphoral persona.

--- An interesting factoid to be sure. But what they're thinking about their crimes is false by definition in your scenario because you state that what they committed was a CRIME.
O- Killing a boy because you felt he had a gun, but in fact did not, is a crime, isn't it?

--- Evil is basically destruction.
O- No. Evil is unnecessary, meaningless destruction. Destruction of the very earth by flood was done by God, but because it was as punishment, it was not evil. But the destruction of an innocent, the case of Job for example, that is the origin of the POE. It is at it's heart the search for meaning, for value.

--- It requires a being to destroy. Moral evil is a destructive act. But Biblical Christianity sees it as a quasi-physical phenomena, i.e. it destroy through corruption.
O- explain.

--- If everyone thought that they were doing the right thing, no one would have a sense of guilt. I have experienced a sense of guilt.How about you? Therefore, everyone does not think they are doing what is right.
O- A sense of guilt is problematic. By the way it is one of those "evidence" that is cited by the Church. We experience it and we want to be rid of it too and so enter: excuses. Once we form an excuse, then conscience begins to lose it's sting. But guilt comes after an impulsive act, usually. However there are many occasions when we do something that hurts another in the belief, erroneous belief that is, that we are doing the right thing.

--- OK I misunderstood you. Wasn't Eden on earth too? Seems you have altered the story slightly. Why?
O- It is irrelevant, I think, whether Eden was another planet, dimension or was actually somewhere in Turkey. It was lost in any way, so it doesn't matter where it actually was, but the constrast it provides to life as we know it here on earth.

--- I didn't say "we" so I don't understand the question. I was referring to Jesus and Paul.
O- I am referring to which Christians are being addressed. The Church as a whole contains those who rest but also those still living now and in the future, so who was Paul addressing by "we"?

--- Perhaps they are afraid to consider the objectively for fear that it would undermine their faith. I feel for them. I have had to face the same fear.
O- But how do you face those fears. For my client, there is a community in the Church and also a connection with God. But all of this is of no avail. I think that being religious is a human phenomenon. It is not surprising that people are believers in all kinds of things, but surprising when we find those who SAY they are not. And I enphatize "say" because under scrutinity each will reveal a hidden irrationality, an animal faith if you will, and it is because we do not live by sight but by faith. I recommend Loyal Rue's book.

--- It's a matter of empirical observation and probability not circles.
O- Probability is circular reasoning.

--- So what? That's where we are. I can live with it.
O- And this expression can be used also by Paul. "Why do bad things happen to good people?"
"I cannot know for sure what only God knows."
"I can live with that."

[Moreno]

I used the term self because these categories seem to be embedded in my experience as a knowing subject. I agree that they are metaphysical in the sense of being part of experience prior to any hypothesis about whether of not they are physical.

And everyone I have ever met has metaphysical beliefs, including scientists. Often they come out of the experiencing subject's common sense.

Well let's see... Propositions that are true independently form experience are a priori truths. A priori truths may be analytic or synthetic. The example I gave is then both a priori and analytic. Is that confused?

Well, yes, since it limited apriori truths to analytic ones. Everybody's belief systems have apriori foundations, and these include synthetic truths, so to ignore this facet is off. You can't start a system with analytic truths, since these presuppose truths and offer little room to build from. But if you say 'Everything is physical' or 'Everything is made up of atoms' (a la democritus) then you can more on to other things, deductively or inductively.

I think there is a distinction that must be made here between metaphysics as categories that are unavoidable as structures that condition experience and speculative metaphysics with its doctrine of the soul, its attempts to describe the world in its unconditioned totality and its idea of a perfect being presiding over a transcendent world. The former is unavoidable, the latter, perhaps not.

But those categories are not unavoidable, physicists and mystics often work with different metaphysics, for example. Even more mundane believers in various cultures, religions, worldviews have metaphysics that are not like the common sense 'Western' metaphysics. I don't know what machine can measure weirdness. They all seem very weird to someone.

[felix dakat]

Well, yes, since it limited apriori truths to analytic ones. Everybody's belief systems have apriori foundations, and these include synthetic truths, so to ignore this facet is off. You can't start a system with analytic truths, since these presuppose truths and offer little room to build from. But if you say 'Everything is physical' or 'Everything is made up of atoms' (a la democritus) then you can more on to other things, deductively or inductively.

Analytic truths are weak purely a priori. Synthetic truths are stronger but the mix what is true by definition with experience. They're messier. Statements like "everything is physical or everything is made up, of atoms require qualifiers because they go beyond empirical observation.

But those categories are not unavoidable, physicists and mystics often work with different metaphysics, for example. Even more mundane believers in various cultures, religions, worldviews have metaphysics that are not like the common sense 'Western' metaphysics. I don't know what machine can measure weirdness. They all seem very weird to someone.

Are we talking about the same thing? Categories like cause and effect, substance, time and space? Are you saying weirdness is a metaphysical category? I don't think so.

[Moreno]

Analytic truths are weak purely a priori. Synthetic truths are stronger but the mix what is true by definition with experience. They're messier. Statements like "everything is physical or everything is made up, of atoms require qualifiers because they go beyond empirical observation.

Not that anyone here who is pro-science, anti-metaphysics (as they conceive these) seems to notice that 'everything is physical' goes beyond empiricism.

Are we talking about the same thing? Categories like cause and effect, substance, time and space? Are you saying weirdness is a metaphysical category? I don't think so.

No, I wasn't proposing 'weirdness' as a metaphysical property. Perhaps some physicist has used the term for something, but I don't think anyone else has.

[felix dakat]

Hello Omar--

--- Sin is possible.
O- If not near certain apart from God- that is their point.

--- Nothing happens unless God wills it.
O- Including freewill.

--- God is capable of preventing what he does not will.
O- True.

--- Therefore, God wills sin.
O- No. God wills human freewill, which makes sin possible, but only if we choose it, which is not what God wants, but what God allows.

Anyone with experience in life can read the Garden of Eden story and predict what the inevitable outcome will be. Certainly an omniscient God could. Infinity plus possibility may inevitably result in the production of evil. The cost of creating a world that is separate from God may inevitably include evil.

O- That is not what I am advocating. No one is prefect. We are born with that capacity for bad...inherited...genetic, who cares? But what I am saying is that each has a choice to make. Your parents may have walked away from the church when you were a child and could do nothing about it. They might have made you believe in something else entirely. But eventually you begin thinking for yourself and begin to doubt even the most cherised and comfortable belief. You experience doubt, you experience freewill. What you do with that doubt is what makes or breaks you before God.

It's comforting to learn that you know exactly how God feels on this matter somehow.

O- Original Sin is a pre-disposition, not a pre-determination to sin. Having freewill, we still can call on God, as Paul did for example, and through His Spirit...you get the theological point.

A pre-disposition to sin so powerful that everybody does it but Jesus. 100% probability is strong evidence of a direct cause and effect relationship as you will ever get for anything in the life.

O- Yes. Or conclude, without losing intelligibility, that headless babies must be part of a good God's plan that we cannot understand (the monism of Leibniz)

Ignorance is your best and most frequent used default argument. "Must" applies only because you dogmatically refuse to consider alternative explanations.

O- You turn St Alselm into a heretic without losing a beat don't you.

No. I lost a beat thinking about it. I merely looked at possible implications of his definition of God. Those that do not think for themselves seldom are accused of heresy.

If a very powerful creature, like Q, decided to make all the problems on earth go away, he could. That doesn't make him God, but it might be called as evidence for some that he is.

Is this a Star Trek reference? I fail to see the relevance.

O- Not at all. Give me your interpretation. Mine is just an extrapolation of Hume's argument of constant conjunction. Habit, not necessity is what creates this "law", this scientific constant.

Yeah I'm fine with that. What are you looking for, an absolute?

O- Then you have not understood my point. It is not our scope to invalidate science, but to cleanse it of religious feelings. It must faced, naked and humbly, as it is and not as we want it to be. Then take a look back at the standard you have used with religious feelings and realize that at the edges of being, there is no evidence, scientific or religious, but faith either in science or religion.

I see that as a false dilemma. Faith is qualitatively different than belief in scientific findings.

O- Where are the bones and flesh of Jesus? Where will be the bones and flesh of those being called up? paul narrates it as an alien-abduction and not as a world littered with souless zombies, or corpses. The flesh is not the devil.

OK. Fine. Let's take it a step further. Evil is not the devil either except in the religious imagination.

O- That is what many well educated Christians among my clients believe. Certainly they do not refer to God as "Him" because God is anatomically a man with planet-sized balls intead of a black-hole sized vagina. Evil can take a form, from a person, to an animal....better understood as Zeus was. But I have already made my argument about Satan as an officer, a functionary, a function that can be done by others in that official capacity.

First, I think it is time to drop the lawyer pose. I have patiently tolerated your game in the interest of meaningful dialogue. For my pains, you have criticized me as hostile on the "Is Felix hostile toward religion thread". So in the interest of the pursuit of truth I respectfully request that you cut the crap and represent your actual views.

Your response which puts those well educated Christians squarely on one side of the conflict I am describing. But are those Christians orthodox? Aren't they liberal Christians who are not even accepted as true Christians by the evangelicals or fundamentalist or stricly orthodox. They cannot confess the Nicene creed without doing mental gymnastics

O- I think that I am losing faith that you know what we are talking about here or can see past your prejudice. Did you not see my scriptural base for the argument? To man alone it is impossible, but a man that has God's Spirit everything is. It is therefore likewise impossible for a mere man to survive the venom of snakes, or drive out demons, but with God's Spirit, in Jesus name, these are possible. But while living righteously, a consequence, not a cause of salvation, is possible for a man, so too is it possible for him to fall away from God. The righteous man is not the one who tell you he is all-that-and-a-bag-of-chips, but the one that abases himself to make more room to glorify his God.

You are confusing the solution with the problem. You have never acknowledge the inevitability of sin which makes the crucifixion of Christ a necessity. Now you want to skip over that and go directly to Christianity's proposed solution. You admit it is impossible, but you justify punishment for it. You wish to draw down a miraculous supernatural remedy for a common every day problem. OK. I get it. Perhaps it's another case of God setting up a sham to demonstarte his power. Kind of like when he made it look like the Pharoah was persecuting the Jews when in fact He was pulling the Pharoah's strings.

O- No. In the discussed passage what has positive being is the flesh, the body and it takes on a a metaphoral persona.

OK fine, then the devil is another sham, there is no evil being, evil is the absence of good and God is behind it all pulling the strings. If so, the conflict in the concept of God disappears.

O- Killing a boy because you felt he had a gun, but in fact did not, is a crime, isn't it?

Not according to your argument. It's the absence good. And I'm not saying it is or isn't. What I'm saying is that that explanation conflicts with Xian eschatology's picture of the Devil as an evil world-ruling being.

O- No. Evil is unnecessary, meaningless destruction. Destruction of the very earth by flood was done by God, but because it was as punishment, it was not evil. But the destruction of an innocent, the case of Job for example, that is the origin of the POE. It is at it's heart the search for meaning, for value.

A tsunami is not unnecessary or meaningless. It is a natural process with ambiguous consequences and as such part of the ecological balance of nature. Yet it is evil to the innocent persons killed by it and their families.

--- It requires a being to destroy. Moral evil is a destructive act. But Biblical Christianity sees it as a quasi-physical phenomena, i.e. it destroy through corruption.
O- explain.

Perhaps an example will help. Paul describes how God punishes idolators by alloing them to become corrupt "in theri persons." "Corruption" is a physical metaphor like decay or rust.

O- A sense of guilt is problematic. By the way it is one of those "evidence" that is cited by the Church. We experience it and we want to be rid of it too and so enter: excuses. Once we form an excuse, then conscience begins to lose it's sting. But guilt comes after an impulsive act, usually. However there are many occasions when we do something that hurts another in the belief, erroneous belief that is, that we are doing the right thing.

In any case, it was a black swan to your argument that people always think they are doing the right thing.

O- Probability is circular reasoning.

Probabilism is what is supportable with evidence. Absolutism isn't.

--- So what? That's where we are. I can live with it.
O- And this expression can be used also by Paul. "Why do bad things happen to good people?"
"I cannot know for sure what only God knows."
"I can live with that[/b]."

Right. But, only if Paul is admits that he doesn't know if there really is a devil and if God may be the source of evil, if Jesus is coming back, if his [Paul's] visions were hallucinations, if he is going to heaven, etc. I am unaware that he ever admitted any of these things.

[omar]

Hello Felix.
--- Anyone with experience in life can read the Garden of Eden story and predict what the inevitable outcome will be. Certainly an omniscient God could. Infinity plus possibility may inevitably result in the production of evil. The cost of creating a world that is separate from God may inevitably include evil.
O- If the outcome was a foregone and foretold conclusion then there is no freewill and in it's absence God is having a party all by himself. Even your objections are not your choice but built in into His game. You deserve no praise and no blame and of course, no dignity.
However, ME and my client do not subscribe to such determinism, so the outcome at Eden was NOT inevitable and no one could have known, even God, the choices they would make. Just because I flip a quarter a million times, it is not certain that it will [b]ever[/b] land on heads rather than tails.
And as I said before (or did I?) the existence of doubt, of fear, inevitable consequences of our finitude, our utter reliance on faith, mean that, like the poor, the Satan we shall always have around. Satan presents that "minority report", that alternative to what is basically speculation. It is doubt that stops us in our tracks. It is the cauldron where resolution is steeled. One has to learn to overcome it, but it is not the cause of sin. You seem to think that ONLY Jesus could overcome Satan, that only the God-Man could resist his temptation, but the fact is that Jesus was always the example to follow. That is how he presented himself. He was not asking the impossible from his apostles, in his mind. He asks Peter to walk on water, like him, because walking on water is not the exclusive capacity of the God-Man. And as with water walking so with resistance. He quotes the scriptures to resist Satan, basically implying "this is nothing new; this is the wisdom that has already been delievered, if however forgotten. What he brings is nothing new but a fulfillment of what is already there.

--- It's comforting to learn that you know exactly how God feels on this matter somehow.
O- Errr....My client you mean? I am a negative theologist. To me no-thing is known, but for my client, his case is that he has faith in scripture as the revelation of God.

--- A pre-disposition to sin so powerful that everybody does it but Jesus. 100% probability is strong evidence of a direct cause and effect relationship as you will ever get for anything in the life.
O- But WITH God, what is the percentage? No one is just pre-determined to be righteous, but if you accept Jesus and receive the Spirit of God, you now have a possibility to be righteous. No one is righteous...in his time, in Paul's time. That does not mean that Job for example wasn't righteous. But those were righteous lives after harkening to God. By himself, then, no man is righteous, but the absence of God from a man's life is NOT a 100% certainty, but a choice he or she constantly makes. Wickedness, like righteousness, are conditions that we create through each choice we make and not a biological condition like a deformed foot.

--- Ignorance is your best and most frequent used default argument. "Must" applies only because you dogmatically refuse to consider alternative explanations.
O- Alternatives are nice. I am presenting my client's case and not alternatives to it. That said, other alternatives still present OTHER problems because existence is what it is.

--- Yeah I'm fine with that. What are you looking for, an absolute?
O- Nope. Just saying that any prediction is irrational at it's core, so don't be so quick to point fingers at the religious folks who outright affirm their tentative status by declaring that they only know by faith.

--- I see that as a false dilemma. Faith is qualitatively different than belief in scientific findings.
O- Theology matches it's findings to a revealed pattern. Science does much the same. Once something attains the value of a "law", however tentative, it is used to reach even more conclusions, not simply based on what is observed but on what the methodology SAYS that was observed.

--- First, I think it is time to drop the lawyer pose. I have patiently tolerated your game in the interest of meaningful dialogue. For my pains, you have criticized me as hostile on the "Is Felix hostile toward religion thread". So in the interest of the pursuit of truth I respectfully request that you cut the crap and represent your actual views.
O-
Oh come on Felix! I always have to take the opposite side. What fun would this site be if we did not present opposing arguments. I believe I grow from doing that, from walking a mile in another's shoe. And I have been clear from the beginning. And as far as the hostile thing, for one thing I thought that the voting was annonymous. Last time I participate on such a thing. And second that is what I felt at the time. Have I always seen you as hostile? No. But I think that maybe you're going through a phase, like Ehrman.

--- Your response which puts those well educated Christians squarely on one side of the conflict I am describing. But are those Christians orthodox? Aren't they liberal Christians who are not even accepted as true Christians by the evangelicals or fundamentalist or stricly orthodox. They cannot confess the Nicene creed without doing mental gymnastics
O- And you don't see hostility?
Listen, a bit of empathy is all I propose. You want me without my client, then you know that I do not subscribe to any creeds. They are measures taken by historical and not theological necessity. They are the product of man and not of God. I deny much of scripture, but NOT the possibility that all was written as a reaction from a confrontation with whatever it is we call "Divine". That said, I have family that I love that consider themselves Christians; people that I admire, whom I consider intelligent. We are talking about doctors and engineers here. And they believe in much of what I have been defending here. And it is not because they do mental gymnastics. That retort, in MY opinion, shows a callow appreciation of religion. You present a caricature and leave out the flesh and bone believer. I had to step in and give that person a voice. It is the right thing to do. I am afraid that until you get past such JUDGMENTS about Christianity, (which seems as one of a handful of religions you are actually hostile to) you will not see it as what it is.
Are there abusers of religion, those that forget it's tentative origins, that use it as a blugeoning rod rather than a feather to careess? Yes, of course, but not for that shall I stand and trade places with them, become them, and use a different rod for the same business of alienating and make them feel stupid.

--- You are confusing the solution with the problem. You have never acknowledge the inevitability of sin which makes the crucifixion of Christ a necessity.
O- Never was a necessity. Jesus in fact asks God if He would do it some other way, but resigned to do His will whether he understood it or not..
Now I'll answer the rest in my voice, as you want. When I was defending the orthodox view I reported on what they believe. But here is what I believe. The Bible is written with several points of view in play. even when a canon was proposed and approved it was only an opinion that it was one author, God, speaking through all the pages. This meant that you have, embedded in the pages, the history of an evolving idea, reacting to the world in which it grows. However I believe that freewill is an underlying assumption. It was certainly defended well by Erasmus, who up until then was the voice of a typical orthodox. The inquisition that was ran by the orthodox was carried precisely because of the underlying assumption that the will is free. Augustine did address the issue and gave inroads to later protestant stances, but, for example Luther, still leaves room for the "mutability" of character. Even while asserting the omnipotence of God, these men had to leave the possibility open for man's culpability. St. Augustine became a saint for the church, I think, because he won for the Church the north of Africa from the predominant Donatist Church, but his central contribution to theology is not predestination, else, no schism would latter have arrived with Luther's thesis.
By itself, our will is not enough, is not strong enough, to go in either direction completely. God is seen as a booster. Those that ignore Him are thrown out, repulsed. While those that "listen to the Father and learn from Him" will come to Jesus, as it were, "drawn" by Him (John 6). There are so many nuances that are left out of theology. Each bit is lifted and made absolute, requiring the obliteration of countless other voices, and a myriad of other points. Is all of humanity predestined? Or did only a few get chosen in this way to serve as teachers for others? Instead of asking such questions, men reach simple and elegant conclusions because of prejudices they have about the truth and what it would look like. As a negative theologian I do not believe specially that which is too elengant and simple. It is not mental gymnastics, I want you to understand, but natural dispositions we hold as human beings. They reside in all human enquiries where something is presumed known.

--- OK fine, then the devil is another sham, there is no evil being, evil is the absence of good and God is behind it all pulling the strings. If so, the conflict in the concept of God disappears.
O- No it doesn't! You continue on as IF THE POINT IS TO REMOVE THE CONFLICT. If there was no conflict then why is there a mystery about His will? Why assert that His will is not our will? Why obey when we can simply understand? What indeed is left to know perfectly in the afterlife if there is no conflict about the concept of God in this life? I have simply made the case of ignorance, not the case of perfect intelligibility.

--- Not according to your argument. It's the absence good. And I'm not saying it is or isn't. What I'm saying is that that explanation conflicts with Xian eschatology's picture of the Devil as an evil world-ruling being.
O- The Catholic Church is in this world, last I checked. Is it therefore their argument that they are ruled by the devil? No? So there must be exceptions, yes? Those liberated by the power of God from the shackles of evil, da, da, da?

--- A tsunami is not unnecessary or meaningless. It is a natural process with ambiguous consequences and as such part of the ecological balance of nature. Yet it is evil to the innocent persons killed by it and their families.
O- I was speaking of the believer in God.



--- In any case, it was a black swan to your argument that people always think they are doing the right thing.
O- A "black swan"? Sorry, I have never heard that expression. What does it mean?

--- Right. But, only if Paul is admits that he doesn't know if there really is a devil and if God may be the source of evil, if Jesus is coming back, if his [Paul's] visions were hallucinations, if he is going to heaven, etc. I am unaware that he ever admitted any of these things.
O- Just as scientist do not begin their explanation of string theory by a declaration of what they don't know.

[felix dakat]

Omar--
Let me preface my following responses by saying that I have appreciated your willingness to keep this dialogue going as long as you have. I have learned from our discussion and I thank you for your part in that.

O- If the outcome was a foregone and foretold conclusion then there is no freewill and in it's absence God is having a party all by himself. Even your objections are not your choice but built in into His game. You deserve no praise and no blame and of course, no dignity.

Which, may be the case. We do not know.

O-However, ME and my client do not subscribe to such determinism, so the outcome at Eden was NOT inevitable and no one could have known, even God, the choices they would make. Just because I flip a quarter a million times, it is not certain that it will [b]ever[/b] land on heads rather than tails.

It seems duplicitous for you to go on posing as a lawyer for beliefs that you do not yourself consider worthy of holding. It is a means of obfuscating rather than revealing the truth.

O-And as I said before (or did I?) the existence of doubt, of fear, inevitable consequences of our finitude, our utter reliance on faith, mean that, like the poor, the Satan we shall always have around. Satan presents that "minority report", that alternative to what is basically speculation. It is doubt that stops us in our tracks. It is the cauldron where resolution is steeled. One has to learn to overcome it, but it is not the cause of sin. You seem to think that ONLY Jesus could overcome Satan, that only the God-Man could resist his temptation, but the fact is that Jesus was always the example to follow. That is how he presented himself. He was not asking the impossible from his apostles, in his mind. He asks Peter to walk on water, like him, because walking on water is not the exclusive capacity of the God-Man. And as with water walking so with resistance. He quotes the scriptures to resist Satan, basically implying "this is nothing new; this is the wisdom that has already been delievered, if however forgotten. What he brings is nothing new but a fulfillment of what is already there.

The Christian standard is "not I but Christ". You apparently don't understand grace and so misrepresent the Christian faith.

O- Errr....My client you mean? I am a negative theologist. To me no-thing is known, but for my client, his case is that he has faith in scripture as the revelation of God.

Why do continue to waste time defending claims that you personally have found unworthy of belief? As I stated in my last post, I am tired of the "client " game. I will not play along with this " ruse any longer. You said to me elsewhere: "How about you present those religious feelings and expose them to the same standards you have used for those "cargo" religions? Just what exactly do you believe?"

O- But WITH God, what is the percentage? No one is just pre-determined to be righteous, but if you accept Jesus and receive the Spirit of God, you now have a possibility to be righteous. No one is righteous...in his time, in Paul's time. That does not mean that Job for example wasn't righteous. But those were righteous lives after harkening to God. By himself, then, no man is righteous, but the absence of God from a man's life is NOT a 100% certainty, but a choice he or she constantly makes. Wickedness, like righteousness, are conditions that we create through each choice we make and not a biological condition like a deformed foot.

If the Church recognized any possibility of not sinning I could agree. But what does their sacred text say "All have sinned." No exception but the God-man.

O- Alternatives are nice. I am presenting my client's case and not alternatives to it. That said, other alternatives still present OTHER problems because existence is what it is.

In other words, you are wasting time repeating arguments that you yourself can't believe. Get real.

O- Nope. Just saying that any prediction is irrational at it's core, so don't be so quick to point fingers at the religious folks who outright affirm their tentative status by declaring that they only know by faith.

If the church holds these views tentatively why has it been willing to persecute and even execute people who think differently?

O- Theology matches it's findings to a revealed pattern. Science does much the same. Once something attains the value of a "law", however tentative, it is used to reach even more conclusions, not simply based on what is observed but on what the methodology SAYS that was observed.

One difference is that science has empirical evidence. Theology doesn't. It claims revelation. It's a significant different. Claiming they are the same is clearly wrong.

O- Oh come on Felix! I always have to take the opposite side. What fun would this site be if we did not present opposing arguments. I believe I grow from doing that, from walking a mile in another's shoe. And I have been clear from the beginning. And as far as the hostile thing, for one thing I thought that the voting was annonymous. Last time I participate on such a thing. And second that is what I felt at the time. Have I always seen you as hostile? No. But I think that maybe you're going through a phase, like Ehrman.

Bully for you. Fun? So this is a joke for you? You have walked a mile in somebody else's shoes time to wear the ones you own. Thank you for confirming that you voted that I am hostile toward religion.

You're hiding behind a facade. I'm not interested in you're mascarade. I am interested in beliefs, opinions, ideas, and arguments that you personally think are worthy of your own belief. Hopefully you are capable of tapping into those because I'm not going to play along with your "lawyer/client" game any more.

O- And you don't see hostility?

That wasn't hostility I was speaking from experience. I used to have to do those mental gymnastics myself and I know plenty of other people you admit that they did the same thing. If you want to belong to a creed professing church, you either have to believe every single tenet or you just have to shut up about the parts of the creed that you can't really believe in even though you may go to hell for your doubt.

O- Listen, a bit of empathy is all I propose.

Apparently you suppose that I don't have any. You have been pretending that these views are actually worthy of belief. Does someone have to delude himself to experience.

O- You want me without my client,

Are you whack? Cut the crap. You don't have a client. This is getting ridiculous. Snap out of it.

O-They are measures taken by historical and not theological necessity. They are the product of man and not of God. I deny much of scripture, but NOT the possibility that all was written as a reaction from a confrontation with whatever it is we call "Divine".

Then most of your post here have been largely canard.

O-That said, I have family that I love that consider themselves Christians; people that I admire, whom I consider intelligent. We are talking about doctors and engineers here. And they believe in much of what I have been defending here.

Then let them come on and defend them. What you have been doing is patronizing to them and to me.

O-And it is not because they do mental gymnastics. That retort, in MY opinion, shows a callow appreciation of religion.

I think you misunderstood. I clarified my use of that expression above.

O-You present a caricature and leave out the flesh and bone believer. I had to step in and give that person a voice. It is the right thing to do. I am afraid that until you get past such JUDGMENTS about Christianity, (which seems as one of a handful of religions you are actually hostile to) you will not see it as what it is.

I was raised a Presbyterian. I was born again at the age of 19. I was a member of a fundamentalist sect for 13 years. I still consider myself a Christian, although I have not been a church member for more than a decade. I think it is possible to be critical without being hostile. That is the line I am attempting to walk.
Your pose as a lawyer may have served a purpose. But we are discussing something here that has existential seriousness for people so I think it is time to go deeper if your up for it. If this topic is just a joke or an exercise in polemics to you, you need not continue.

O-Are there abusers of religion, those that forget it's tentative origins, that use it as a blugeoning rod rather than a feather to careess? Yes, of course, but not for that shall I stand and trade places with them, become them, and use a different rod for the same business of alienating and make them feel stupid.

You lost me with that second sentence. Is that logical? Do you have an identity problem?

O- Never was a necessity. Jesus in fact asks God if He would do it some other way, but resigned to do His will whether he understood it or not.

Not a necessity? According to Christian doctrine, if Jesus had not gone to the cross we would all be lost in sin. It is only necessary if humanity is to be saved. It is the only way humanity can be saved. As you acknowledge, it was God's will, in other words necessity. So necessary that Jesus the Son of God had to bow to his will.

O- Now I'll answer the rest in my voice, as you want.

Thank you.

O--When I was defending the orthodox view I reported on what they believe.

Or at least what you believe they believe.

O- But here is what I believe. The Bible is written with several points of view in play. even when a canon was proposed and approved it was only an opinion that it was one author, God, speaking through all the pages. This meant that you have, embedded in the pages, the history of an evolving idea, reacting to the world in which it grows.

I agree. Such understanding underlies my position that there are conflicting views embedded in the Christian conception of God.

O- However I believe that freewill is an underlying assumption. It was certainly defended well by Erasmus, who up until then was the voice of a typical orthodox. The inquisition that was ran by the orthodox was carried precisely because of the underlying assumption that the will is free. Augustine did address the issue and gave inroads to later protestant stances, but, for example Luther, still leaves room for the "mutability" of character. Even while asserting the omnipotence of God, these men had to leave the possibility open for man's culpability. St. Augustine became a saint for the church, I think, because he won for the Church the north of Africa from the predominant Donatist Church, but his central contribution to theology is not predestination, else, no schism would latter have arrived with Luther's thesis.

Both side of the conflict embedded in the Christian concept of God may be interpreted in terms of free will so it isn't of primary relevance to my thesis.

O- By itself, our will is not enough, is not strong enough, to go in either direction completely. God is seen as a booster.

You misunderstand the Christian doctrine of grace. God is seen as "all in all" not as a booster.

O-Those that ignore Him are thrown out, repulsed. While those that "listen to the Father and learn from Him" will come to Jesus, as it were, "drawn" by Him (John 6). There are so many nuances that are left out of theology. Each bit is lifted and made absolute, requiring the obliteration of countless other voices, and a myriad of other points. Is all of humanity predestined? Or did only a few get chosen in this way to serve as teachers for others? Instead of asking such questions, men reach simple and elegant conclusions because of prejudices they have about the truth and what it would look like. As a negative theologian I do not believe specially that which is too elengant and simple. It is not mental gymnastics, I want you to understand, but natural dispositions we hold as human beings. They reside in all human enquiries where something is presumed known.

You have stretched my phrase "mental gymnastics" beyond my use of it. I was referring to the situation in which people must claim that they accept the entire creed when maybe they cannot accept some point or two. Apparently you had some kind of emotional reaction that has clouded your thinking about me and my thesis.

O- No it doesn't! You continue on as IF THE POINT IS TO REMOVE THE CONFLICT. If there was no conflict then why is there a mystery about His will? Why assert that His will is not our will? Why obey when we can simply understand? What indeed is left to know perfectly in the afterlife if there is no conflict about the concept of God in this life? I have simply made the case of ignorance, not the case of perfect intelligibility.

In a truely monistic world view, there is no conflict. Maya is an illusion. In God everything is fine. All that is need is to wake up and see the harmony of things as they are. No conflict in the concept of God there.

O- The Catholic Church is in this world, last I checked. Is it therefore their argument that they are ruled by the devil? No? So there must be exceptions, yes? Those liberated by the power of God from the shackles of evil, da, da, da?

The New testament states that the devil is the ruler of this world and that the church is in spiritual warfare with the devil. So the church is a beachhead in the war against the devil, holding the fort until Jesus returns with the cavalry to save us. Why don't you know this stuff?

O- A "black swan"? Sorry, I have never heard that expression. What does it mean?

Here's a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiabi ... _inference

O- Just as scientist do not begin their explanation of string theory by a declaration of what they don't know.

Scientists haven't built a church based on string theory or killed anyone over it yet that know of.

[jdhawaii333]

After reading over the dialogue between Omar and Felix I feel that my opinion is minuscule...scholastically speaking. The two of you reference ideas and facts I only hope to understand in my lifetime. That being said...I don't feel like I can commit to either side of your respective beliefs. How could I? You both represent individual perspectives that are admittedly subjective. My recent post of exclusivity represents a shallow representation of how I feel on this subject.

I truly believe both of you have a remarkable amount of truth embedded in your words. On the same token, how should that seemingly obvious sense of truth shared between the two of you be properly represented. Is it the responsibility of mere chance that people come to the same understandings that the two of you have "stumbled" upon?

I respect the both of you. I humbly submit to your greater knowledge of philosophy in general. I do not, however, understand your lack of ownership of leadership. Is there not a point where humility becomes selfish?

[omar]

Hello Felix,
---Let me preface my following responses by saying that I have appreciated your willingness to keep this dialogue going as long as you have. I have learned from our discussion and I thank you for your part in that.
O- Well I have read your pieces for a while and you know that we agree on a lot of these things, so I don't know, without "my client" if there is much to talk about. But for all of that, I think that a few things ought to be said.

--- It seems duplicitous for you to go on posing as a lawyer for beliefs that you do not yourself consider worthy of holding. It is a means of obfuscating rather than revealing the truth.
O- They are not beneath me or something like that. Just because I am not a Christian doesn't mean that it is because Christian beliefs are not worthy of being believed. I am being serious here. That is a personal decision that everyone should make. Me? I disagree. But it is like the divisions in our political arena. Just because I won't vote, as an example, for party X, it does not mean that I believe membership to party Y unworthy of me. In the end all of us follow something that means the same...we are in a search for meaning, for value, for God, and often find it in a religious translation. But value, like truth, like God, must be sought, and it is rarely found, you must earn it and once obtained...it is always subject to judgment, it is always vulnerable, always at risk of disintegration.
I do not fault people for the truths they have found, if they have earned it, fought for it, even if it is your truth and not mine, because likewise I have earned my truth. I hold mine as dubious, as vulnerable to judgment...I may learn something new, but I understand that it isn't easy for one to genuinely give up what one has fought to obtain. I know of the inertia, but I appreciate it, I respect it. It is something that we must be aware of, guard against it, if we can, but I know that what we have obtained does not just go away. It is not like moving a rock, in which case it moves completely, when you shove it. Instead it is like mud, which gives way to a point without moving completely. It absorbs at the point of force.
So what then. I am not out parading my beliefs. What would that accomplish? I parade my doubts. When I take the case of my opponent, of that which I am not, I parade the argument against my beliefs and the best case for that other person's belief and I learn just how humble I should be and how human the other is. I hope with this little chapter we close the subject of "play" and "games", let alone "joking".

--- The Christian standard is "not I but Christ". You apparently don't understand grace and so misrepresent the Christian faith.
O- Look, that is your truth, I guess. I have as much right to my truth as yours. That said, I seriously think that you misrepresent Christianity.

There are distinct variations of Christianity in our world today, and each, be it the Catholics or the Protestants, think of themselves as orthodox. Even to talk of Christian orthodox is to leave out something. Take an issue as basic as predestination. You can ask 10 Christians and perhaps only three will give you a recital of a creed as an answer.
The most basic message in the whole entire Bible is not that God wills every move, but that God is judge, that God judges OUR actions, as Paul says in Romans "God will give to each person according to what he has done".How can the Christian feel guilt (Hebrews 10) when it was His will? Jesus, out of obedience accepts His will against what he might have wished otherwise. And I see the big picture and I wonder why you even bring this up? It can be defeated soundly by scripture, so I took the position of a lawyer because I hate to see slander-- does that explain why I think that you have been hostile?-- but not to religion perse, but to a certain form of religion, i.e. Christian, and fundamentalist in specific. But I don't blame you from having a beef with fundamentalism. Anyone remember Raphael from KDH? But you ought to throw your criticism as the noblest form of fundamentalism you can find rather than the most vicious. If I judge Catholicism then I should take note of the inquisition, but also note it's encouragement of charity.

--- You said to me elsewhere: "How about you present those religious feelings and expose them to the same standards you have used for those "cargo" religions? Just what exactly do you believe?"
O- And here is another: "How are your beliefs in any shape religious"?

--- If the Church recognized any possibility of not sinning I could agree. But what does their sacred text say "All have sinned." No exception but the God-man.
O- Righteousness is NOT the absence of any sin, but those that do not seek God every step of the way. the God man was a modern-David and we know, as they knew, that David sinned, but David also repented and always sought the Lord. Again, what I believe is nothing like this, but I am saying that that is a form of belief that makes sense and it is what some have explained to me. And once you take that at face value you find instances of it in scripture. God sent wave after wave of prophets to wake up...a robot acting iaw a program? or did he want dialogue with a willed creation, created in His image?

--- One difference is that science has empirical evidence.
O- Define what is empirical evidence? Evidence from observation? Then when the Lord spoke to Paul...?

--- Theology doesn't.
O- What you should have said is that there is no standard interpretative model to understand empirical evidence. Same with science. Was Tyrannosaurus Rex a scavenger or a hunter?

--- It claims revelation.
O- Different names, same necessary inference.

--- That wasn't hostility I was speaking from experience.
O- You can speak from experience with more charitable language or can't you?

--- I used to have to do those mental gymnastics myself and I know plenty of other people you admit that they did the same thing.
O- yet to go from you and your friends to everyone else, we are talking billions, counting those in the past, is a leap of faith that you should have overcome by now. What difference is there between that and "No one is righteous"?

--- If you want to belong to a creed professing church, you either have to believe every single tenet or you just have to shut up about the parts of the creed that you can't really believe in even though you may go to hell for your doubt.
O- I think you had the wrong pastor or priest leading the Church. Just because they all say "Lord, Lord" does not mean that Jesus knows them.

--- I was raised a Presbyterian. I was born again at the age of 19. I was a member of a fundamentalist sect for 13 years. I still consider myself a Christian, although I have not been a church member for more than a decade.
O- It shows. What do you believe now? How is it different from before? What was the reason, the root cause, if any, for that departure? To you then, who is Jesus? Who or what is God and if "It" even necessary? Is Jesus even necessary? Do you see Jesus as a man or as a God? If as a man then what are his flaws? If as a God then what do you consider your flaws?

--- I think it is possible to be critical without being hostile.
O- I agree. Is that what you have done? I think you could do better.

--- That is the line I am attempting to walk.
O- fair enough.

--- You lost me with that second sentence. Is that logical? Do you have an identity problem?
O- C'mon Felix! It is a way to make a point while addressing possible objections that can be raised against your position.

--- Not a necessity? According to Christian doctrine, if Jesus had not gone to the cross we would all be lost in sin.
O- According to Jesus, all things are possible to God, including saving us from sin without his sufferance and death.

--- I agree. Such understanding underlies my position that there are conflicting views embedded in the Christian conception of God.
O- Like I said, you knew this from other discusions we have had and points you have seen me raise.

--- You misunderstand the Christian doctrine of grace. God is seen as "all in all" not as a booster.
O- The Christian doctrine or the Calvinist doctrine? There is no historical, all-emcompassing Christian doctrine on predestination. The "mental gymnastics" (last time I use that phrase I hope) reflect just that.

--- In a truely monistic world view, there is no conflict. Maya is an illusion. In God everything is fine. All that is need is to wake up and see the harmony of things as they are. No conflict in the concept of God there.
O- In such a view there is no need for "God", at least not in the traditional sense. Is this what you now believe?

--- The New testament states that the devil is the ruler of this world and that the church is in spiritual warfare with the devil. So the church is a beachhead in the war against the devil, holding the fort until Jesus returns with the cavalry to save us. Why don't you know this stuff?
O- I know this stuff son, but that was exactly what I said. There is a beach head, an exception, yet how can that be if the devil is the ruler of this world? Because God has all the power and He can set a beach head wherever He wants. Thus it is He that is the true ruler, the one who can exert His will immediately and perfectly....when He gets to it.

[felix dakat]

Omar--- Here you go--

O- Well I have read your pieces for a while and you know that we agree on a lot of these things, so I don't know, without "my client" if there is much to talk about. But for all of that, I think that a few things ought to be said.

If there is nothing to talk about when you drop your fictive client, then there is no need to talk. It would be a sad commentary on the state of dialogue if it is only possible when two parties disagree.

O- They [Christians] are not beneath me or something like that. Just because I am not a Christian doesn't mean that it is because Christian beliefs are not worthy of being believed. I am being serious here. That is a personal decision that everyone should make. Me? I disagree. But it is like the divisions in our political arena. Just because I won't vote, as an example, for party X, it does not mean that I believe membership to party Y unworthy of me. In the end all of us follow something that means the same...we are in a search for meaning, for value, for God, and often find it in a religious translation. But value, like truth, like God, must be sought, and it is rarely found, you must earn it and once obtained...it is always subject to judgment, it is always vulnerable, always at risk of disintegration.

You claim that the putative facts of the Christian faith are worthy of your belief but you reject them any way. That doesn't make sense to me. Something that is true is worthy of belief. You state that Christianity is worthy of belief. Therefore, it must be true.

I do not fault people for the truths they have found, if they have earned it, fought for it, even if it is your truth and not mine, because likewise I have earned my truth.

It appears you believe in subjective truths, but not objective Truth. If that is the case, that explains a lot of your preceding posts. It is, however, antithetical to the position you have been defending.

I hold mine as dubious, as vulnerable to judgment...I may learn something new, but I understand that it isn't easy for one to genuinely give up what one has fought to obtain.

If your truths are dubious why do you consider them "truths?" Why not, hypotheses, or hunches, or guesses?

So what then. I am not out parading my beliefs. What would that accomplish? I parade my doubts. When I take the case of my opponent, of that which I am not, I parade the argument against my beliefs and the best case for that other person's belief and I learn just how humble I should be and how human the other is. I hope with this little chapter we close the subject of "play" and "games", let alone "joking".

And yet you repeatedly call on me to parade my beliefs when I express doubt about a Christian concept. Claiming that you are making the best case for your opponent is a bit arrogant, isn't it? "Joking" I retract but I still think "game" aptly characterizes what you have been doing. Sorry.

--- The Christian standard is "not I but Christ". You apparently don't understand grace and so misrepresent the Christian faith.
O- Look, that is your truth, I guess. I have as much right to my truth as yours. That said, I seriously think that you misrepresent Christianity.
It was Paul's truth. Paul is a major source of Christian orthodoxy which is what we are discussing. So, no it isn't a matter of whether it is merely my truth or your truth.
There are distinct variations of Christianity in our world today, and each, be it the Catholics or the Protestants, think of themselves as orthodox. Even to talk of Christian orthodox is to leave out something. Take an issue as basic as predestination. You can ask 10 Christians and perhaps only three will give you a recital of a creed as an answer.

I am referring to the historic Christian church. That church always includes Paul who's standard was "not I but Christ" according to the Book of Galatians which is part of the New Testament, the accepted Christian canon. The subject here is the Christian God not predestination. This matter is not relative to the knowledge of a percentage of Christians. It is a matter of the official doctrine of the historic church.

The most basic message in the whole entire Bible is not that God wills every move, but that God is judge, that God judges OUR actions, as Paul says in Romans "God will give to each person according to what he has done".How can the Christian feel guilt (Hebrews 10) when it was His will? Jesus, out of obedience accepts His will against what he might have wished otherwise. And I see the big picture and I wonder why you even bring this up? It can be defeated soundly by scripture, so I took the position of a lawyer because I hate to see slander-- does that explain why I think that you have been hostile?-- but not to religion per se, but to a certain form of religion, i.e. Christian, and fundamentalist in specific. But I don't blame you from having a beef with fundamentalism. Anyone remember Raphael from KDH? But you ought to throw your criticism as the noblest form of fundamentalism you can find rather than the most vicious. If I judge Catholicism then I should take note of the inquisition, but also note it's encouragement of charity.

To see only one side or the other of the conflict is to miss my point. At best, God as the ultimate source and destination of everything exists in paradoxical relation to free will in the Christian faith.

--- You said to me elsewhere: "How about you present those religious feelings and expose them to the same standards you have used for those "cargo" religions? Just what exactly do you believe?"
O- And here is another: "How are your beliefs in any shape religious"?

I'll answer your question when you explain what you mean by religious and how it is relevant to the topic of this thread.

--- If the Church recognized any possibility of not sinning I could agree. But what does their sacred text say "All have sinned." No exception but the God-man.
O- Righteousness is NOT the absence of any sin, but those that do not seek God every step of the way. the God man was a modern-David and we know, as they knew, that David sinned, but David also repented and always sought the Lord. Again, what I believe is nothing like this, but I am saying that that is a form of belief that makes sense and it is what some have explained to me. And once you take that at face value you find instances of it in scripture. God sent wave after wave of prophets to wake up...a robot acting iaw a program? or did he want dialogue with a willed creation, created in His image?

This is wrong according to standard Christian doctrine. The presence of the smallest sin renders a person completely unacceptable for fellowship with the perfect God. Those whom God effectually calls, He also freely justifies; not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous; not for any thing wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ’s sake alone; nor by imputing faith itself, the act of believing, or any other evangelical obedience to them, as their righteousness; but by imputing the obedience and satisfaction of Christ unto them, they receiving and resting on Him and His righteousness by faith; which faith they have not of themselves, it is the gift of God. { The Westminster Confession of Faith}

O- Define what is empirical evidence? Evidence from observation? Then when the Lord spoke to Paul...?

Empirical data are data produced by an observation or experiment. The Biblical accounts of Paul's vision vary significantly. For example, in Acts chapter 9, it says "The men who were traveling with him stood speechless, hearing the voice but seeing no one." In Acts chapter 21 Paul states "Now those who were with me saw the light but did not understand the voice of the one who was speaking to me." {The Holy Bible, English Standard Version} Given the discrepancies, the empirical status of Paul's experience is questionable.

O- What you should have said is that there is no standard interpretative model to understand empirical evidence. Same with science. Was Tyrannosaurus Rex a scavenger or a hunter?

Lack of a single standard for diverse disciplines in science doesn't help make the case for theological empiricism. Unanswered questions about T. Rex don't make theology empirically supportable. One can imagine the kinds of evidence that could resolve your question about T. Rex by falsifying one of the other hypothesis. The same cannot be said of God.

O- Different names, same necessary inference.

Not at all. Revelation involves inner ecstatic vision not external public evidence.

--- That wasn't hostility I was speaking from experience.
O- You can speak from experience with more charitable language or can't you?

"Mental gymnastics" was uncharitable? I'm talking about concepts not persons. It seems to me the problem is that you are hypersensitive for some reason I do not understand.

O- yet to go from you and your friends to everyone else, we are talking billions, counting those in the past, is a leap of faith that you should have overcome by now. What difference is there between that and "No one is righteous"?

The character of a creed with a list of tenets that must be assented to for admittance to a group is such that it invites this kind of experience. There are numerous accounts of similar experiences in the literature. Still, I'm not claiming universality which is what you are implying. That's the difference.

--- If you want to belong to a creed professing church, you either have to believe every single tenet or you just have to shut up about the parts of the creed that you can't really believe in even though you may go to hell for your doubt.
O- I think you had the wrong pastor or priest leading the Church. Just because they all say "Lord, Lord" does not mean that Jesus knows them.

I had a number of pastors in a number of churches. My experience is far from unique.

--- I was raised a Presbyterian. I was born again at the age of 19. I was a member of a fundamentalist sect for 13 years. I still consider myself a Christian, although I have not been a church member for more than a decade.
O- It shows. What do you believe now? How is it different from be re? What was the reason, the root cause, if any, for that departure? To you then, who is Jesus? Who or what is God and if "It" even necessary? Is Jesus even necessary? Do you see Jesus as a man or as a God? If as a man then what are his flaws? If as a God then what do you consider your flaws?

Ha Ha! Church attendance hardly guarantees saintly demeanor. Look at the Religious Right. I don't have a fixed set of dogmatic beliefs. That would be inconsistent with the present state of human knowledge. I have a faith connection to the ultimate which is mediated by sacred symbols. The state of research regarding the historical Jesus is such, that many critical questions about him cannot be answered conclusively. Yet for me he was a wisdom sage who revealed in his teaching and character the god of love.

--- Not a necessity? According to Christian doctrine, if Jesus had not gone to the cross we would all be lost in sin.
O- According to Jesus, all things are possible to God, including saving us from sin without his sufferance and death.

A line you are taking out of context and distorting it's meaning. You would distort Christianity in order to win an argument. Placing God's omnipotence in opposition to His Plan of redemption is unacceptable to the Christian POV. You don't seem to realize when your own position bleeds through to misrepresent the position of those you are supposedly representing but actually patronizing.

--- You misunderstand the Christian doctrine of grace. God is seen as "all in all" not as a booster.
O- The Christian doctrine or the Calvinist doctrine? There is no historical, all-encompassing Christian doctrine on predestination. The "mental gymnastics" (last time I use that phrase I hope) reflect just that.

Grace is Biblical and a universally accepted concept by orthodox churches including Roman Catholicism and the eastern Orthodox churches. are being offered us. "Spiritual grace originates from the divine Ground of all being, and it is given for the purpose of helping man to achieve his final end, which is to return out of time and self hood to that Ground." [ Aldous Huxley ]

-

-- In a truly monistic world view, there is no conflict. Maya is an illusion. In God everything is fine. All that is need is to wake up and see the harmony of things as they are. No conflict in the concept of God there.
O- In such a view there is no need for "God", at least not in the traditional sense. Is this what you now believe?

In such a view God is reality. Such a view is traditional. It is sometimes called the perennial philosophy [a term coined by theodicist Leibnitz]. Neo-Platonism is one instance of this kind of thinking. I think along those lines sometimes. The mystical side of the Xian thinking goes in this direction. It doesn't solve the problem of the suffering of innocents.

O- I know this stuff son, but that was exactly what I said. There is a beach head, an exception, yet how can that be if the devil is the ruler of this world? Because God has all the power and He can set a beach head wherever He wants. Thus it is He that is the true ruler, the one who can exert His will immediately and perfectly....when He gets to it.

"Son" I will charitably interpret as humor and not condescending hostility as you might if I used the expression. And so we have gone full circle. If God can defeat Satan whenever He wants, than He appears complicit in Satan's evil when he allows it to go on. To which you have replied that God has a reason [a greater good] which he has not disclosed and so on.

A speculative alternate explanation is suggested by the privatio boni doctrine which is that since evil is the absence of good, Satan does not exist. Evil is the necessary ransom of creation. The only way evil could have been avoided is for God to never create anything outside or beyond "Himself." But God's very overflowing infinite goodness made existing alone impossible. Once anything existed apart from God, the potential for evil became a matter of necessity. This would involve the paradox that God is all good and all powerful and yet subject to necessity like the rest of us.

[felix dakat]

Hi jdhawaii333

After reading over the dialogue between Omar and Felix I feel that my opinion is minuscule...scholastically speaking.

Your opinion is welcome here and significant even if it is wrong.

The two of you reference ideas and facts I only hope to understand in my lifetime.

Thanks. Me either.

That being said...I don't feel like I can commit to either side of your respective beliefs. How could I? You both represent individual perspectives that are admittedly subjective.

Well I am attempting to say something objective about Christian texts that are open to public scrutiny. So I think you could commit which is not to say you have to...

My recent post of exclusivity represents a shallow representation of how I feel on this subject.

I'll take a look at that.

I truly believe both of you have a remarkable amount of truth embedded in your words. On the same token, how should that seemingly obvious sense of truth shared between the two of you be properly represented. Is it the responsibility of mere chance that people come to the same understandings that the two of you have "stumbled" upon?

I don't know. I'm not trying to persuade anybody, just trying to find my own way through the maze of existence i was born into.

I respect the both of you. I humbly submit to your greater knowledge of philosophy in general. I do not, however, understand your lack of ownership of leadership. Is there not a point where humility becomes selfish?

No need to submit. Everybody has to make their own way, you know, "...work out your own salvation..." Phillipians 2:12. Buddha said roughly the same thing. It's not humility on my part. I don't know what you expect.

[omar]

Hello Felix

--- You claim that the putative facts of the Christian faith are worthy of your belief but you reject them any way. That doesn't make sense to me.
O- worthy of belief, period. I don't believe but not because it is unbelievable. I don't vote republican but not because I consider their belief system as unbelievable. It all begins with a choice. All truth begins with a choice.

--- Something that is true is worthy of belief.
O- yes, but what is true is a choice. I can get that if A then B but it is IF I decide to accept such and such as true. Is it true that the sun will rise tomorrow? Of course it is if I accept that the universe IS lawful, not provisionally but essentially. Temporal observations do not give me an essense of the eternal.

--- You state that Christianity is worthy of belief. Therefore, it must be true.
O- That something might be reasonable does not mean that they are true or real.

--- It appears you believe in subjective truths, but not objective Truth. If that is the case, that explains a lot of your preceding posts. It is, however, antithetical to the position you have been defending.
O- you wanted me to tell you about my beliefs. As I said I did not agree with my client.

--- If your truths are dubious why do you consider them "truths?"
O- because of how define truth. Would it be better if I spoke of provisional vs absolute truths? Those held openly vs those held closed? If I said that light travels at such and such speed and I am stating a truth it refers to what I am convinced of and with good(in my opinion) reason. It all begins with choice. Judgment.

--- And yet you repeatedly call on me to parade my beliefs when I express doubt about a Christian concept.
O- I call you out to show you that belief qua belief is subject to uncharitable judgments. But I guess you take this my being touchy.

--- Claiming that you are making the best case for your opponent is a bit arrogant, isn't it? "Joking" I retract but I still think "game" aptly characterizes what you have been doing. Sorry.
O- no more arrogant than being so sure that is not the case because of one confession. Or no less arrogant than thinking that because you can quote a historical document you have the essense of Christianity. You show the same faith as the drafters of those documents. But these licenses are necessary for the possibility of communication so I don't consider that arrogance but convenience that you and I needed to take.

--- I am referring to the historic Christian church. That church always includes Paul who's standard was "not I but Christ" according to the Book of Galatians which is part of the New Testament, the accepted Christian canon. The subject here is the Christian God not predestination. This matter is not relative to the knowledge of a percentage of Christians. It is a matter of the official doctrine of the historic church.
O- yet you quote the Westminster creed which is disputed within the Presbyterian church and the formulation an eventual heresy in the eyes of the catholic church... You know, those "other" orthodox.

--- I'll answer your question when you explain what you mean by religious and how it is relevant to the topic of this thread.
O- very defensive aren't we? It's your Choice.

--- This is wrong according to standard Christian doctrine. The presence of the smallest sin renders a person completely unacceptable for fellowship with the perfect God.
O- so Job was unrighteous? Or was he Jesus? Sin is not a taint but a choice. This is Christian doctrine. According to their deeds...choice is only absent and inconsequential only if you subscribe to Calvinism.

--- Those whom God effectually calls, He also freely justifies; not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous; not for any thing wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ’s sake alone; nor by imputing faith itself, the act of believing, or any other evangelical obedience to them, as their righteousness; but by imputing the obedience and satisfaction of Christ unto them, they receiving and resting on Him and His righteousness by faith; which faith they have not of themselves, it is the gift of God. { The Westminster Confession of Faith}
O- Calvinism. This is not Christian orthodoxy but Presbyterian orthodoxy. The Catholics for example do not agree.

--- Empirical data are data produced by an observation or experiment. The Biblical accounts of Paul's vision vary significantly. For example, in Acts chapter 9, it says "The men who were traveling with him stood speechless, hearing the voice but seeing no one."
O- Says nothing that they understood but that they heard

--- In Acts chapter 21 Paul states "Now those who were with me saw the light but did not understand the voice of the one who was speaking to me." {The Holy Bible, English Standard Version} Given the discrepancies, the empirical status of Paul's experience is questionable.
O- what is the discrepancy? Both state that they heard not that on one occasion they understood but not on the other.

--- Lack of a single standard for diverse disciplines in science doesn't help make the case for theological empiricism.
O- now yo think that i am defending theological empiricism? I brought that up to suggest that empiricism, like evidence, is a POV

--- Unanswered questions about T. Rex don't make theology empirically supportable.
O- i bring that up because the same set of bones yield different interpretations. Same with theology.

--- One can imagine the kinds of evidence that could resolve your question about T. Rex by falsifying one of the other hypothesis. The same cannot be said of God.
O- only a scenario that resembles Jurassic park would answer that question to the exclusion of the other since what you are talking of here is behavior.

--- Not at all. Revelation involves inner ecstatic vision not external public evidence.
O- revelation is a meeting, a connection to something that is public, ie god. The point Paul makes is that revelation is public and his confrontation with Christ, as you quoted earlier is , again, public.

--- I had a number of pastors in a number of churches. My experience is far from unique.
O- so you were also a catholic or a baptist as well?


--- Ha Ha! Church attendance hardly guarantees saintly demeanor. Look at the Religious Right. I don't have a fixed set of dogmatic beliefs. That would be inconsistent with the present state of human knowledge. I have a faith connection to the ultimate which is mediated by sacred symbols.
O- What do you mean by "faith connection"?

--- The state of research regarding the historical Jesus is such, that many critical questions about him cannot be answered conclusively. Yet for me he was a wisdom sage who revealed in his teaching and character the god of love.
O- did Jesus preached about hell? How is that reconciled with this god of love.

--- A line you are taking out of context and distorting it's meaning. You would distort Christianity in order to win an argument. Placing God's omnipotence in opposition to His Plan of redemption is unacceptable to the Christian POV.
O- free will is not in opposition to his plan but part of it. The objection you raise is a Protestant objection not a catholic one. Certainly that was not what was in Erasmus mind.

--- You don't seem to realize when your own position bleeds through to misrepresent the position of those you are supposedly representing but actually patronizing.
O- if you take Westminster as THE Christian orthodoxy then the misrepresentation is all yours.

--- Grace is Biblical and a universally accepted concept by orthodox churches including Roman Catholicism and the eastern Orthodox churches.
O- explain to me then the dispute between erasmus and luther

--- "Son" I will charitably interpret as humor and not condescending hostility as you might if I used the expression.
O- and I shall not take your insinuation of what I would have done in your stead as condescension.

[justintimeforonce]

Still, the idea of people suffering for eternity in hell or the lake of fire [Revelation 20:15] is incompatible with a God who is love [I John 4:8]. That's one of the incoherences in the concept of God I was alluding to in the OP.

God is Love BUT what most people don't know is that God is also just and he is a good judge who will always judge rightly. consider this say someone raped and murdered you mother, he is tried and found guilty, however he tells the judge yes i did do this terrible thing, but look at all the good things i have done! i give over $100000 yearly to the red cross and help at the soup kitchen every thanksgiving! if the judge would agree with him and let him off would everybody praise him and say what a good judge he is? No! he would be fired! if we would think this with a judge why would we think God to be any different?

[felix dakat]

Hi Omar--

-- You claim that the putative facts of the Christian faith are worthy of your belief but you reject them any way. That doesn't make sense to me.
O- worthy of belief, period. I don't believe but not because it is unbelievable. I don't vote republican but not because I consider their belief system as unbelievable. It all begins with a choice. All truth begins with a choice.

Oh, I see. Please explain what putative facts of the Christian faith that are believable that you choose not to believe and why you choose not to believe them even though they are believable.

--- Something that is true is worthy of belief.
O- yes, but what is true is a choice. I can get that if A then B but it is IF I decide to accept such and such as true. Is it true that the sun will rise tomorrow? Of course it is if I accept that the universe IS lawful, not provisionally but essentially. Temporal observations do not give me an essence of the eternal.

I disagree. What is true is what corresponds with reality whether it is chosen or not. But right, ultimate reality in itself is unknowable. We know in part as Paul said.

--- You state that Christianity is worthy of belief. Therefore, it must be true.
O- That something might be reasonable does not mean that they are true or real.

That which is reasonable but untrue is not worthy of belief. It can only be acceptable as reasonable if its truth status is unknown. Once it is known to be false, a proposition can no longer be held to be reasonable.

O- you wanted me to tell you about my beliefs. As I said I did not agree with my client.

You have no client. Like me, what you have are ideas about Christianity that are more or less accurate. I frequently consult Christian sources to check my ideas about Christianity for validity and reliability. Since your idea of truth favors choice over correspondence to fact, I suppose you are not under any obligation to do likewise. However, your ideas may suffer from a dearth of truth as a result.

O- Would it be better if I spoke of provisional vs absolute truths? Those held openly vs those held closed?

Yes

O- I call you out to show you that belief qua belief is subject to uncharitable judgments.

So you wish to entrap me in order to teach me a lesson? I hold such beliefs provisionally as you claim to so it isn't evident to me that you are in a position to teach me.

O- no more arrogant than being so sure that is not the case because of one confession. Or no less arrogant than thinking that because you can quote a historical document you have the essence of Christianity. You show the same faith as the drafters of those documents. But these licenses are necessary for the possibility of communication so I don't consider that arrogance but convenience that you and I needed to take.

I didn't claim that the Nicene creed is an essence of Christianity. Subscribers to that creed do make that claim include the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Churches and the mainstream Protestant Churches. I challenge you to come up with a more authoritative definition of what Christianity is without recourse to the New Testament or the creeds established before the eastern churches split from Rome.

--- I am referring to the historic Christian church. That church always includes Paul who's standard was "not I but Christ" according to the Book of Galatians which is part of the New Testament, the accepted Christian canon. The subject here is the Christian God not predestination. This matter is not relative to the knowledge of a percentage of Christians. It is a matter of the official doctrine of the historic church.
O- yet you quote the Westminster creed which is disputed within the Presbyterian church and the formulation an eventual heresy in the eyes of the catholic church... You know, those "other" orthodox.

Would you now divide your would be "clients?" I cited The Westminster Catechism as an example. The Catholic Catechism states "The grace of Christ is the gratuitous gift that God makes to us of his own life, infused by the Holy Spirit into our soul to heal it of sin and to sanctify it. It is the sanctifying or deifying grace received in Baptism. It is in us the source of the work of sanctification". The Big three churches Roman, eastern and Protestant all accept Grace as a central concept. There are differences in the way they employ the concept. Your emphasis on choice is similar to Pelagianism the heresy that Augustine fought against with his doctrine of Grace. Of course in the Roman Church teaches that it is the Church itself that dispenses Grace via the Seven Sacraments. The Eastern Church holds similar teachings on that. Protestant Churches teach otherwise. But they all accept the power of Grace to some degree.

It is true that Protestantism tends to be more on the eschatological side of my putative conflict, the Roman church on the opposite side and the Eastern Church somewhere in the middle. But these are broad generalizations. The conflicting tendencies are present throughout Christianity in numerous combinations the complexity of which we can hardly hope to do justice to here.

--- I'll answer your question when you explain what you mean by religious and how it is relevant to the topic of this thread.
O- very defensive aren't we? It's your Choice.

Not at all. Religion is a term that is difficult to define and has a variety of connotations. I was merely asking for clarification before I respond. It seemed like a reasonable request to me.

--- This is wrong according to standard Christian doctrine. The presence of the smallest sin renders a person completely unacceptable for fellowship with the perfect God.
O- so Job was unrighteous? Or was he Jesus? Sin is not a taint but a choice. This is Christian doctrine. According to their deeds...choice is only absent and inconsequential only if you subscribe to Calvinism.

The book of Job leaves that question open and opinions on the issue vary. "Job" was pre-Christian, so it is irrelevant anyway. If sin is always a choice without the influence of genetic pre-disposition to it, then there is no Original Sin, a concept you argued for previously. Since you have no real commitment to the truth of this subject matter, you can just throw out arguments post hoc with no consistency to any internal position that you actually hold. Its a sophistic strategy to defeat my position, but it doesn't work and it doesn't advance the dialogue with respect to the truth or falsity of the issue under discussion.

--- Those whom God effectually calls, He also freely justifies; not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous; not for any thing wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ’s sake alone; nor by imputing faith itself, the act of believing, or any other evangelical obedience to them, as their righteousness; but by imputing the obedience and satisfaction of Christ unto them, they receiving and resting on Him and His righteousness by faith; which faith they have not of themselves, it is the gift of God. { The Westminster Confession of Faith}
O- Calvinism. This is not Christian orthodoxy but Presbyterian orthodoxy. The Catholics for example do not agree.

I addressed this issue above. Please let me know if there is some aspect of the issue I did not cover there.

--- Empirical data are data produced by an observation or experiment. The Biblical accounts of Paul's vision vary significantly. For example, in Acts chapter 9, it says "The men who were traveling with him stood speechless, hearing the voice but seeing no one."
O- Says nothing that they understood but that they heard
--- In Acts chapter 21 Paul states "Now those who were with me saw the light but did not understand the voice of the one who was speaking to me." {The Holy Bible, English Standard Version} Given the discrepancies, the empirical status of Paul's experience is questionable.
O- what is the discrepancy? Both state that they heard not that on one occasion they understood but not on the other.

The second verse I cited was actually Acts 22 verse 9. It is also translated correctly “And those who were with me indeed saw the light and were afraid, but they did not hear the voice of Him who spoke to me." According to that translation Acts 9 says that the bystanders heard a voice and Acts 22 says that they did not hear a voice. The critical difference comes down to one word ακουω which is translated as understand in some versions and heard in others. The English word acoustic is derived from ακουω so the literal meaning of the word seems to me to favor the translation hear over understand. But both meanings are correct according to Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener's Interlinear Greek New Testament Bible so the issue appears to be open to controversy.

In any case who they were and what they heard or saw we only know by hearsay via Paul. I can accept that Paul had a subjective experience. What if anything bystanders experienced is unknown.

--- Lack of a single standard for diverse disciplines in science doesn't help make the case for theological empiricism.
O- now yo think that i am defending theological empiricism? I brought that up to suggest that empiricism, like evidence, is a POV

Yes. It just happens to be the most valid and reliable we've got.

--- Unanswered questions about T. Rex don't make theology empirically supportable.
O- i bring that up because the same set of bones yield different interpretations. Same with theology.

Well yes they do. The easiest explanation for the conflicts in the Christian God are the differences in interpretation of the subject matter over time. Early on, eschatology held sway. Jesus and his followers viewed the world controlled by Rome as under the dominion of Satan and thought the coming of the Kingdom of God in full to vanquish Rome was immanent. This view was more compatible with a dualistic view of reality. Later when the Church became Rome official religion, a new monarchistic monotheism made more sense. Of course it was achieved through Trinitarianism which brought a new set of conceptual difficulties.

--- One can imagine the kinds of evidence that could resolve your question about T. Rex by falsifying one of the other hypothesis. The same cannot be said of God.
O- only a scenario that resembles Jurassic park would answer that question to the exclusion of the other since what you are talking of here is behavior.

Behavior sometimes leaves evidence so it's possible.Sometimes a mosquito's behavior gets it trapped in the amber. Although our friend Mutcer seems to be searching for a God caught in amber, you, I hope can see the absurdity of such an image.

--- Not at all. Revelation involves inner ecstatic vision not external public evidence.
O- revelation is a meeting, a connection to something that is public, ie god. The point Paul makes is that revelation is public and his confrontation with Christ, as you quoted earlier is , again, public.

God as God is not publicly observable...ever.

--- I had a number of pastors in a number of churches. My experience is far from unique.
O- so you were also a catholic or a baptist as well?

I was a Baptist but not a Catholic. But there are plenty of Catholics who have the experience of not being able to accept every point of official doctrine and either having to stuff their true belief or leave the church which is the kind of dilemma I was referring to.

--- Ha Ha! Church attendance hardly guarantees saintly demeanor. Look at the Religious Right. I don't have a fixed set of dogmatic beliefs. That would be inconsistent with the present state of human knowledge. I have a faith connection to the ultimate which is mediated by sacred symbols.
O- What do you mean by "faith connection"?

I mean that I feel connected to the ground of being, to the ultimate that I believe in but cannot know. Everything that is participates in in Being. Those of us who are conscious, sentient have the potential for awareness of this fact.

--- The state of research regarding the historical Jesus is such, that many critical questions about him cannot be answered conclusively. Yet for me he was a wisdom sage who revealed in his teaching and character the god of love.
O- did Jesus preached about hell? How is that reconciled with this god of love.

Jesus taught object lessons through parable. The object was to be a perfect realization of justice through love or in other words the Kingdom of God. He used as metaphors the available tropes of his time including gehenna and hades and the ignorant have stumbled over those words ever since.

--- A line you are taking out of context and distorting it's meaning. You would distort Christianity in order to win an argument. Placing God's omnipotence in opposition to His Plan of redemption is unacceptable to the Christian POV.
O- free will is not in opposition to his plan but part of it. The objection you raise is a Protestant objection not a catholic one. Certainly that was not what was in Erasmus mind.

Show me where Erasmus said that God could have saved humanity in any way other than the Incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

O- if you take Westminster as THE Christian orthodoxy then the misrepresentation is all yours.

I used that as an example. I repeat again that by orthodoxy I refer to the New Testament and the Creeds and theology accepted by the Roman, Eastern and Protestant churches.

--- Grace is Biblical and a universally accepted concept by orthodox churches including Roman Catholicism and the eastern Orthodox churches.
O- explain to me then the dispute between Erasmus and Luther

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_libero_ ... e_collatio

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Bondage_of_the_Will

Their dispute seems to illustrate the conflict in the concept of God that I'm talking about with Luther on the dualistic leaning side and Erasmus on the monistic leaning side. They both accepted the efficacy of Grace to different degrees.

Finally I notice that you did not respond to my speculative solution to the problem. Oh well, can't say I didn't try.

Ciao

[felix dakat]

Still, the idea of people suffering for eternity in hell or the lake of fire [Revelation 20:15] is incompatible with a God who is love [I John 4:8]. That's one of the incoherences in the concept of God I was alluding to in the OP.

God is Love BUT what most people don't know is that God is also just and he is a good judge who will always judge rightly. consider this say someone raped and murdered you mother, he is tried and found guilty, however he tells the judge yes i did do this terrible thing, but look at all the good things i have done! i give over $100000 yearly to the red cross and help at the soup kitchen every thanksgiving! if the judge would agree with him and let him off would everybody praise him and say what a good judge he is? No! he would be fired! if we would think this with a judge why would we think God to be any different?

Hi justintimeforonce, Welcome to ILP. Mind if I call you jitfo? Well since your asking me, I don't think any crime humans can commit could be worthy of ETERNAL punishment. So, if someone murders someone I can see punishing the murderer for a lifetime with additional time sentenced for a rape/murder. Hey, go a head and double the time for that. If someone murders a million people I could see punishing the murderer for approximately a million x 70 years. Hitler might justly get a sentence of 420 million years [70 x 6 million]. But ETERNITY is a long time. I don't see how anything we could do in our lifetime would warrant eternal punishment. It doesn't seem proportionate to me.

[V-OutOfTheWilderness]

But ETERNITY is a long time. I don't see how anything we could do in our lifetime would warrant eternal punishment. It doesn't seem proportionate to me.

If God has or allows an eternal cosmic torture chamber it is not justice but vengeance. And vengeance doesn't become a God. Such a god is Dystheistic.

[felix dakat]

But ETERNITY is a long time. I don't see how anything we could do in our lifetime would warrant eternal punishment. It doesn't seem proportionate to me.

If God has or allows an eternal cosmic torture chamber it is not justice but vengeance. And vengeance doesn't become a God. Such a god is Dystheistic.

Right. Torture is absolutely anithetical to God who is love! to torture.

[V-OutOfTheWilderness]

Right. Torture is absolutely anithetical to God who is love! to torture.

An eternal cosmic torture chamber brings two more things to mind, concerning such a god :

Maltheism is an ad-hoc coining appearing on Usenet in 1985,[8] referring to the belief in God's malevolence inspired by the thesis of Tim Maroney that "even if a God as described in the Bible does exist, he is not fit for worship due to his low moral standards."

Misotheism - atheos of "rejecting the gods, rejected by the gods, godforsaken". Strictly speaking, the term connotes an attitude towards the gods (one of hatred) rather than making a statement about their nature.

[felix dakat]

Right. Torture is absolutely anithetical to God who is love! to torture.

An eternal cosmic torture chamber brings two more things to mind, concerning such a god :

Maltheism is an ad-hoc coining appearing on Usenet in 1985,[8] referring to the belief in God's malevolence inspired by the thesis of Tim Maroney that "even if a God as described in the Bible does exist, he is not fit for worship due to his low moral standards."

Misotheism - atheos of "rejecting the gods, rejected by the gods, godforsaken". Strictly speaking, the term connotes an attitude towards the gods (one of hatred) rather than making a statement about their nature.

When I was a fundamentalist, I was taught that revelation is progressive. [Remember Scofield's reference Bible?] To reframe from an humanistic historical perspective, the conception of God has evolved over time. As moral standards evolve culturally, our understanding of what would be a moral God changes. So, looking at the bible across thousands of years, it isn't surprising to me that the moral standards are different and unacceptable to the modern mind. What we expect from each other and what we expect of God defined as a being which no higher can be conceived have changed and continue to change. Our conception of God changes. The orthodox Christian definition catalogs an understanding of god as it existed when the definition was formulated. Theologians reinterpret that definition for their times. We live in a time of rapid and turbulent change which is testing the traditional conceptions of morality and of God.

[omar]

Hello Felix...or should I say "Ciao bello!"

--- Oh, I see. Please explain what putative facts of the Christian faith that are believable that you choose not to believe and why you choose not to believe them even though they are believable.
O- Well, take St Alselm's proposition, and that is what it is, just a proposition. It is believable that God, if there is such a thing, is the highest thing we can think of. Did Plato not come up with a similar formula? I reject such logical attemps because they make whatever is out there into a total idea. You accept such and such proposition and you can, from that initial agreement, fall into idolatry, and not even a good one at that. This is what happened to Augustine, his great error, the one that thankfully, his correligionist do not remember him for. Another believable belief is that reason can aquire God, that what is out there is rationally organized and thus understandable. I have no such faith.
By the way, some of these beliefs were absorbed to some degree by the later scientists, without the "hang-up" of a conscious God.

--- I disagree. What is true is what corresponds with reality whether it is chosen or not.
O- Fine. But it is YOU who decide IF such correspondence exists or not, and such conclusion is drawn from what you happen to believe in, such as the uniformity of reality and the laws that regulate it without exception.

--- That which is reasonable but untrue is not worthy of belief.
O- I guess I go with Nietzsche in this regard. No matter how many studies MIGHT show that we are just the puppets of our genes, I consider the belief in freewill as worthy of belief.

--- It can only be acceptable as reasonable if its truth status is unknown.
O- To me a lot of things that we know through science are known by virtue of a sample, a sample that is then expanded and made the universal rule. Whether "it's truth status" is known or unknown remains the choice of the person to believe or not the premises that render IT either known or unknown. Not everything is a slam dunk, like the belief that the earth was the center of the universe, that it's refutation can be so complete that even the vatican had to concede the fact and apologize to Galileo and Copernicus.

--- Once it is known to be false, a proposition can no longer be held to be reasonable.
O- Only very few things, like the aforementioned position of the sun relative to the earth are so easily proved among the things that religion claims. Religion is more like theoretical science. It hypothesizes X which makes the observations of Y more consistent with held beliefs.

--- You have no client. Like me, what you have are ideas about Christianity that are more or less accurate. I frequently consult Christian sources to check my ideas about Christianity for validity and reliability.
O- I used to spend my afternoons abusing the Chapel's open door policy (Navy).

--- Since your idea of truth favors choice over correspondence to fact, I suppose you are not under any obligation to do likewise. However, your ideas may suffer from a dearth of truth as a result.
O- As I mentioned, and you forgot, several members of my family are religious...and I don't mean casual, but teachers within their respective communities. The pastor that married me and my wife was a Lutheran pastor, serving in Sicily with me. I spend a lot of time talking to him as it was a time of growth for me, and though I did not agree with him, I respected him. I learned tremendously from that relation. The difference between you and me is that you bounce your ideas off what YOU DECIDED to be "Christian sources", while I have bounced mine off actual Christians. You check with what is written, I check with what is said. Because of that faith you have in correspondence, you proceed as you do and you judge what you obtain as you do. Me on the other hand reach opposite conclusions based as well on disimilar suppositions. And as I mentioned before, your approach, your belief is reasonable, though, IN THIS CASE (concerning religion) I disagree, because I am not interested in an idea but in what is vitally true, what is true to men of flesh and bone. The religion of the book is not my religion. I do not place greater steem on a claim because it is in print, but that is what exactly happened with the three major ones. Reciting a creed does not make a Christian, for example, nor writing a set of beliefs down make it the essense of something. I know that there is a certain convenience (which is why you had Constantine involved) to nail down the essense of something, but it is only a belief that makes it so, a choice.

--- So you wish to entrap me in order to teach me a lesson? I hold such beliefs provisionally as you claim to so it isn't evident to me that you are in a position to teach me.
O- But what beliefs are these? I think that so far I have revealed a whole lot more than you.

--- I challenge you to come up with a more authoritative definition of what Christianity is without recourse to the New Testament or the creeds established before the eastern churches split from Rome.
O- It's authority was manufactured, not inherent to the definition or creed that was only imposed on Christianity. It became the yardstick or measurement of what IS Christianity but not by a quiet process of assent but to an active process of supression. Christianity is however much more than the belief in the mystery of the Trinity. Just because they agree on this did not prevent them from going to war over many other things. Today we classify denomination because religion became depolitized. It was no longer needed to be the "Holy" X and so there was little point in one absolute Church. But that does not mean that orthodox acknowledge themselves as one denomination among others, or the others as valid versions of Christianity. So again, in our day and age it is quite difficult to pin-point a universal definition of Christianity, and while similarities exist, thus making their classification as "a form" of Christianity possible, differences exist, making the qualification of them as "X Christianity".

--- Would you now divide your would be "clients?"
O- Well, do I have clients? Now who is fixated with these clients? Seems like you miss them. Shall I bring my position as lawyer back?

--- The Big three churches Roman, eastern and Protestant all accept Grace as a central concept. There are differences in the way they employ the concept.
O- It is the availability of the concept that is an issue. Calvin believed that some were predestined for Hell. That's it. You were born and brought up, with care, for nothing else than your destruction. To the catholics, grace is something that available to all, but rejected by some.

--- Your emphasis on choice is similar to Pelagianism the heresy that Augustine fought against with his doctrine of Grace.
O- His victory over Pelagious was a low point in his career. What he was against was not freewill but too much enthusiam over freewill. Augustine believed in freewill, but only in that freewill could do no good, that man could not choose freely what is good. That it was with the intervention of God that man's will could then elect what was good, which was Jesus

--- Of course in the Roman Church teaches that it is the Church itself that dispenses Grace via the Seven Sacraments. The Eastern Church holds similar teachings on that. Protestant Churches teach otherwise. But they all accept the power of Grace to some degree.
O- The devil is in the details.

--- Not at all. Religion is a term that is difficult to define and has a variety of connotations. I was merely asking for clarification before I respond. It seemed like a reasonable request to me.
O- Well, religion can be defined as a regulative belief system. Some suggest that religion translates as "law", but unlike common law, religion has to do with laws about the sacred. Do this...because it pleases the gods; don't do that, because it upsets the gods. Buddha had no time for gods, but did not refute them either. Just as the Logos, the Buddha law is sacred. That revernce to the idea one has received or obtained(for Buddha did receive a revelation, an enlightment about the ultimate truth). Where do your ideas come from? If you state that you hold your beliefs provisionally, then those are not religious beliefs by the proposed definition. If your beliefs are eternal principles, then you have religious beliefs. So the character of your belief system will dictate whether they are religious and not whether they have anything to do with God.

--- The book of Job leaves that question open and opinions on the issue vary. "Job" was pre-Christian, so it is irrelevant anyway.
O- If it was left out of the jewsih canon then I would agree. But fine. That leaves me with Noah for example (Gen 7:9). Predestined? Check out Samson, Jeremiah. Amos says that Israel should repent for they have done against the righteous and Paul's argument in fact rested on the belief in righteousness, for he taught that "Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness".
Righteousness in the Bible is not an impossibility...maybe denied here and there, but for the performance of a salvidic plan and not as a normative feature of creation and of the creature made in His image.

--- If sin is always a choice without the influence of genetic pre-disposition to it
O- While I argued that point, I was acting as a lawyer, I said that predispositions existed but that none were sufficient to determine a behaviour. I like sex. I am predisposed to wanna have sex, but it is ultimately my choice whether I have sex or not with such and such.

--- Since you have no real commitment to the truth of this subject matter, you can just throw out arguments post hoc with no consistency to any internal position that you actually hold.
O- No, because that would have made me a bad lawyer. As a lawyer I did not necessarily have to believe in the same things as my client, but I do have to present something that is defendable and something that is inconsistent is not defensible. The committment one has to X does not prove the truth of the belief one is committed to. For example, martyrs died, yet, do you believe that what they believed and died for is the truth as YOU define it?

--- Its a sophistic strategy to defeat my position, but it doesn't work and it doesn't advance the dialogue with respect to the truth or falsity of the issue under discussion.
O- The truth or falsity of what? Of God? How do you, dear Felix, prove the falsehood of God or the truth of God? I, as a negative theologian (self-fashioned), I take minimalist positions and projects. Thus, I do not believe that by argument, one shall know the truth or falsity of the divine, as define by you. If truth is correspondence with reality, then we are disqualified from determining the truth or falsity of God because we lack an observation of eternity or reality as a whole.

--- The second verse I cited was actually Acts 22 verse 9. It is also translated correctly “And those who were with me indeed saw the light and were afraid, but they did not hear the voice of Him who spoke to me." According to that translation Acts 9 says that the bystanders heard a voice and Acts 22 says that they did not hear a voice. The critical difference comes down to one word ακουω which is translated as understand in some versions and heard in others. The English word acoustic is derived from ακουω so the literal meaning of the word seems to me to favor the translation hear over understand. But both meanings are correct according to Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener's Interlinear Greek New Testament Bible so the issue appears to be open to controversy.
O- "both meanings are correct according to...."
There in lies my point. It all starts with a choice. One choice leads you to a path where faith, naive faith perhaps, is still possible while the other choice leads you away from such innocent faith.

--- Yes. It just happens to be the most valid and reliable we've got.
O- Because of what you have accepted to believe.

--- Behavior sometimes leaves evidence so it's possible.
O- What evidence from archeology do you believe will settle the dispute about whether T-Rex was a hunter or a scavenger? What is this smoking gun?

--- Sometimes a mosquito's behavior gets it trapped in the amber.
O- There isn't a tree big enough in the archeological record with the capacity to produce enough resin to entrapt a T-Rex.

--- God as God is not publicly observable...ever.
O- Then God is not an object of scientific evidence? Breakthrough!

--- I was a Baptist but not a Catholic. But there are plenty of Catholics who have the experience of not being able to accept every point of official doctrine and either having to stuff their true belief or leave the church which is the kind of dilemma I was referring to.
O- I believe you, but I think that not everyone or even a majority demand either of themselves or their Churches such level of consistencies or are even aware of such discrepancies ever, because at the end of the day their belief is limited by what is discussed on Sunday...if ever. Their level of committment, involvement, is minimal, which is usually the case. The Church expanded so admirably, in part, because the recital of this or that creed allowed them to count very easily this or that number of people that otherwise had not really considered all the intricacies of the faith. For a long time the Church persecuted heresies and burned literature of even innocuous nature because it knew that once that innocence was lost the strenght of their argument was not enough to sway belief. Before Paul admitted this and vaunted himself that it was the power of the Spirit that moved people to believe. But once the Church was enhanced by imperial resources, the bishops abandoned Paul's reliance on the Spirit in favor of the power of the state.
In the case of my family, whom I give credit as being highly intelligent believers, they approach these challenges as challenges. They often speak of their struggle with faith and prefer to claim ignorance about the actual meaning of a passage than to disobey God over His own revelation. Again I respect their choice, but I remind them that that is what it is. One thing about my family is that they do not buy into the idea that one should force one's religion onto another. This is in line with the inclusivism of the liberal state. Because of that the Church can afford today to exist among others and it lacks disputes about fine details that may condemn your soul eternally.

--- I mean that I feel connected to the ground of being, to the ultimate that I believe in but cannot know.
O- In that sense then you are religious. What evidence do you have for this belief? probably none, and so how you define this feeling is your choice. You feel this connection. Is this true? Does it presents a correspondence to reality, or is it just a quirk of your prefrontal cortex? Are you connected to the ground of being or to the effect of a deficient organ? If the former then you would be unable to know but to believe, and if the later then you would be able to know, diagnose and even treat.

--- Everything that is participates in in Being. Those of us who are conscious, sentient have the potential for awareness of this fact.
O- I would say that we all participate in being and non-being, and that the one leads to another and is within the other. Death is giving life and life is taking life away.

--- Jesus taught object lessons through parable. The object was to be a perfect realization of justice through love or in other words the Kingdom of God. He used as metaphors the available tropes of his time including gehenna and hades and the ignorant have stumbled over those words ever since.
O- Isn't it possible that he used the metaphors that made sense to him and by which he himself defined the world? Is it so improbable that Jesus, a galilean, belief in the same things as his fellow galileans? That he was a man of his time, teaching other men from his time what his time usually believed in? It seems quite consistent with jewish belief to posit a day of wrath from the Lord. The wrath of the Lord is an idea that would resonate and come to a galilean mind, while a God of love, without any capacity for wrath, is not. So what is more reasonable? That Jesus taught about a Yahweh, yes, this God that decimated the entire world with a global flood, who would punish his enemies, or that he taught about a loving God? Why in fact even preach? To save us from what if all that there is is His love?

--- Show me where Erasmus said that God could have saved humanity in any way other than the Incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
O- that was not Erasmus objection, but that you retained the responsibility to either believe in him or not and that only if you believed would his sacrifice affect you. He died for the remision of sin, for what you did, but not from what you did not believe.

--- Their dispute seems to illustrate the conflict in the concept of God that I'm talking about with Luther on the dualistic leaning side and Erasmus on the monistic leaning side. They both accepted the efficacy of Grace to different degrees.
O- The efficacy of grace was not the issue but the power of the will, or whether we have freewill.

--- Finally I notice that you did not respond to my speculative solution to the problem. Oh well, can't say I didn't try.
O- You did not offer any such thing, except in your own light, as I doubt that Aldous Huxley will be viewed as a doctrinal authority by the orthodox of these Churches.
Ciao

[felix dakat]

Omar

We meet again!

O- Well, take St Alselm's proposition, and that is what it is, just a proposition. It is believable that God, if there is such a thing, is the highest thing we can think of. Did Plato not come up with a similar formula? I reject such logical attempts because they make whatever is out there into a total idea. You accept such and such proposition and you can, from that initial agreement, fall into idolatry, and not even a good one at that. This is what happened to Augustine, his great error, the one that thankfully, his coreligionists do not remember him for. Another believable belief is that reason can acquire God, that what is out there is rationally organized and thus understandable. I have no such faith. By the way, some of these beliefs were absorbed to some degree by the later scientists, without the "hang-up" of a conscious God.

You state that propositions are believable and than point out arguments for why you do not believe them. So apparently by believable you mean by someone other than yourself. Maybe you mean believable by a person who is not as smart as you, or a person who has not thought the matter through as far as you have. Please spare me the ideas you think are believable by others that you don't hold yourself. I want your A game not your discards.


O- Fine. But it is YOU who decide IF such correspondence exists or not, and such conclusion is drawn from what you happen to believe in, such as the uniformity of reality and the laws that regulate it without exception.

That's right we are each the king of our own epistemological castle unless we abdicate. Even if we abdicate, we still are kings if the will is free, as you believe.

--- That which is reasonable but untrue is not worthy of belief.
O- I guess I go with Nietzsche in this regard. No matter how many studies MIGHT show that we are just the puppets of our genes, I consider the belief in freewill as worthy of belief.

Most of us experience ourselves as free most of the time, so to deny free will is to deny your own experience. So, worthy or not, free will gains acceptance because it seems normal.

--- It can only be acceptable as reasonable if its truth status is unknown.
O- To me a lot of things that we know through science are known by virtue of a sample, a sample that is then expanded and made the universal rule. Whether "it's truth status" is known or unknown remains the choice of the person to believe or not the premises that render IT either known or unknown. Not everything is a slam dunk, like the belief that the earth was the center of the universe, that it's refutation can be so complete that even the Vatican had to concede the fact and apologize to Galileo and Copernicus.

Yeah a lot of stuff is ambiguous which makes its truth status fuzzy. Whether or not we accept fuzzy propositions often depends on how high the stakes are.

--- Once it is known to be false, a proposition can no longer be held to be reasonable.
O- Only very few things, like the aforementioned position of the sun relative to the earth are so easily proved among the things that religion claims. Religion is more like theoretical science. It hypothesizes X which makes the observations of Y more consistent with held beliefs.

Right. Religion is both fuzzy and high stakes. Hence, religion generates a lot of cognitive dissonance. Actually I'm a true believer who will never relinquish my faith. I just don't think that we humans have an adequate concept for God and Christianity is no exception. The Christian hierarchy claimed too much for itself.


O- I used to spend my afternoons abusing the Chapel's open door policy (Navy).

"A seeker of knowledge you are," said Yoda.



--- Since your idea of truth favors choice over correspondence to fact, I suppose you are not under any obligation to do likewise. However, your ideas may suffer from a dearth of truth as a result.
O- As I mentioned, and you forgot, several members of my family are religious...and I don't mean casual, but teachers within their respective communities. The pastor that married me and my wife was a Lutheran pastor, serving in Sicily with me. I spend a lot of time talking to him as it was a time of growth for me, and though I did not agree with him, I respected him. I learned tremendously from that relation. The difference between you and me is that you bounce your ideas off what YOU DECIDED to be "Christian sources", while I have bounced mine off actual Christians. You check with what is written, I check with what is said. Because of that faith you have in correspondence, you proceed as you do and you judge what you obtain as you do. Me on the other hand reach opposite conclusions based as well on dissimilar suppositions. And as I mentioned before, your approach, your belief is reasonable, though, IN THIS CASE (concerning religion) I disagree, because I am not interested in an idea but in what is vitally true, what is true to men of flesh and bone. The religion of the book is not my religion. I do not place greater steem on a claim because it is in print, but that is what exactly happened with the three major ones. Reciting a creed does not make a Christian, for example, nor writing a set of beliefs down make it the essence of something. I know that there is a certain convenience (which is why you had Constantine involved) to nail down the essence of something, but it is only a belief that makes it so, a choice.

Thanks for the self disclosure. It helps me to understand where you are coming from. Dogmatic indoctrinated people [not you] come the closest to thinking alike of anybody, and even among them no two people thinks alike. So yeah, we are dealing with the form not the substance of Christianity because I think that is the part that is amenable to this kind of discussion.


O- But what beliefs are these? I think that so far I have revealed a whole lot more than you.

The life of faith is a matter of the experience of God not a list of "beliefs" about God.

O- It's authority was manufactured, not inherent to the definition or creed that was only imposed on Christianity. It became the yardstick or measurement of what IS Christianity but not by a quiet process of assent but to an active process of suppression. Christianity is however much more than the belief in the mystery of the Trinity. Just because they agree on this did not prevent them from going to war over many other things. Today we classify denomination because religion became depoliticized. It was no longer needed to be the "Holy" X and so there was little point in one absolute Church. But that does not mean that orthodox acknowledge themselves as one denomination among others, or the others as valid versions of Christianity. So again, in our day and age it is quite difficult to pin-point a universal definition of Christianity, and while similarities exist, thus making their classification as "a form" of Christianity possible, differences exist, making the qualification of them as "X Christianity".

I agree with that except I see them as all essentially one in spirit as the canonical Jesus did in John 17.

20 “I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word; 21 that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me. 22 And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one: 23 I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me.

--- Would you now divide your would be "clients?"
O- Well, do I have clients? Now who is fixated with these clients? Seems like you miss them. Shall I bring my position as lawyer back?

I'll happily let it go if you will.

--- The Big three churches Roman, eastern and Protestant all accept Grace as a central concept. There are differences in the way they employ the concept.
O- It is the availability of the concept that is an issue. Calvin believed that some were predestined for Hell. That's it. You were born and brought up, with care, for nothing else than your destruction. To the catholics, grace is something that available to all, but rejected by some.

Don't you mean that not the the availability of the concept but the reality to which the concept refers is the issue? Anyway for me, the only issue here would be, how does grace relate to the Xian concept of God? Since Grace is available on both the apocalyptic eschatological side and on the theological, creedal, absolutistic side, grace is not the issue.


O- His victory over Pelagious was a low point in his career. What he was against was not freewill but too much enthusiasm over freewill. Augustine believed in freewill, but only in that freewill could do no good, that man could not choose freely what is good. That it was with the intervention of God that man's will could then elect what was good, which was Jesus.

What is important about Augustine in the context of this discussion, is his teaching that evil exists because God created the world from nothing (creatio ex nihilo). For him, creations, not being of the substance of God, are necessarily less than good and capable of evil. Evil comes from created things simply because they are less than God. Notice that this argument does not require a anthropomorphic evil god [Satan].


O- Well, religion can be defined as a regulative belief system. Some suggest that religion translates as "law", but unlike common law, religion has to do with laws about the sacred. Do this...because it pleases the gods; don't do that, because it upsets the gods. Buddha had no time for gods, but did not refute them either. Just as the Logos, the Buddha law is sacred. That reverence to the idea one has received or obtained(for Buddha did receive a revelation, an enlightenment about the ultimate truth). Where do your ideas come from? If you state that you hold your beliefs provisionally, then those are not religious beliefs by the proposed definition. If your beliefs are eternal principles, then you have religious beliefs. So the character of your belief system will dictate whether they are religious and not whether they have anything to do with God.

My ultimate concern is with the Truth. Whether it is termed religious or not is of no concern to me.


O- If it was left out of the jewsih canon then I would agree. But fine. That leaves me with Noah for example (Gen 7:9). Predestined? Check out Samson, Jeremiah. Amos says that Israel should repent for they have done against the righteous and Paul's argument in fact rested on the belief in righteousness, for he taught that "Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness".
Righteousness in the Bible is not an impossibility...maybe denied here and there, but for the performance of a salvidic plan and not as a normative feature of creation and of the creature made in His image.

Wait why go back further in the Jewish Bible to find the Christian theodicy? Christianity has its own interpretation of the Jewish Bible. Abraham did not achieve righteousness on his own nor can anyone else, That point is essential to Paul's gospel.

Paul preached that it was necessary that Jesus die in such a way in order to absolve our sinful nature in the eyes of God. Jesus was sacrificed for the good of all people who would believe and have faith in that sacrifice. Paul expected the imminent end of the world and the resurrection of all the righteous dead, but in the meantime, he had to explain the continuing evils in the world of his present day. Paul’s responded to innocent suffering by asking "Shall we say that God is unjust?" . . . "By no means!" (Romans 9:14). 1 He taught that there is suffering because people are wicked and all deserve to die. "The wages of sin is death." We suffer because of the guilt of our ancestors. The sin of Adam shows the human tendency to evil. According to paul, suffering is educational in that it builds character and shows need for God.The creator himself suffers because of Jesus’ death on the cross and because of our evil ways, we must share his suffering. But for Paul, suffering is only temporary, since those elected for salvation, a gift from God, will receive an eternal blessed life. That summarizes Paul's theodicy.

O- The truth or falsity of what? Of God? How do you, dear Felix, prove the falsehood of God or the truth of God? I, as a negative theologian (self-fashioned), I take minimalist positions and projects. Thus, I do not believe that by argument, one shall know the truth or falsity of the divine, as defined by you. If truth is correspondence with reality, then we are disqualified from determining the truth or falsity of God because we lack an observation of eternity or reality as a whole.

In all this I agree with you. How many times has anyone ever told you that?

--- Yes. It just happens to be the most valid and reliable we've got.
O- Because of what you have accepted to believe.

I have been persuaded by the evidence. I am a product of this age.

--- Behavior sometimes leaves evidence so it's possible.
O- What evidence from archeology do you believe will settle the dispute about whether T-Rex was a hunter or a scavenger? What is this smoking gun?

Behavior sometimes leaves evidence and sometimes it doesn't in which case we will never know. If there were tire tracks on the content of the stegosaurus in the stomach of the T-Rex, we would have evidence that it was road kill before he ate it...hence he was a scavenger.

--- Sometimes a mosquito's behavior gets it trapped in the amber.
O- There isn't a tree big enough in the archeological record with the capacity to produce enough resin to entrapt a T-Rex.

I think we're talking paleontology not archaeology here. It was a metaphor my friend. Not every question will be amenable to the scientific method. But them damn scientists are clever at finding ways.


O- Because of that the Church can afford today to exist among others and it lacks disputes about fine details that may condemn your soul eternally.

There are plenty of churches out there insisting on the fine details.

--- I mean that I feel connected to the ground of being, to the ultimate that I believe in but cannot know.
O- In that sense then you are religious. What evidence do you have for this belief? probably none, and so how you define this feeling is your choice. You feel this connection. Is this true? Does it presents a correspondence to reality, or is it just a quirk of your prefrontal cortex? Are you connected to the ground of being or to the effect of a deficient organ? If the former then you would be unable to know but to believe, and if the later then you would be able to know, diagnose and even treat.

The evidence is my experiences and the perennial philosophy embedded in all the major religions. Yes, doubt says it is just a figment of my imagination.

--- Everything that is participates in in Being. Those of us who are conscious, sentient have the potential for awareness of this fact.
O- I would say that we all participate in being and non-being, and that the one leads to another and is within the other. Death is giving life and life is taking life away.

Yes we participate in being and non-being. From, this come existential anxiety and the leap to Being Itself i.e. God.


O- Isn't it possible that he used the metaphors that made sense to him and by which he himself defined the world? Is it so improbable that Jesus, a galilean, belief in the same things as his fellow galileans? That he was a man of his time, teaching other men from his time what his time usually believed in? It seems quite consistent with jewish belief to posit a day of wrath from the Lord. The wrath of the Lord is an idea that would resonate and come to a galilean mind, while a God of love, without any capacity for wrath, is not. So what is more reasonable? That Jesus taught about a Yahweh, yes, this God that decimated the entire world with a global flood, who would punish his enemies, or that he taught about a loving God? Why in fact even preach? To save us from what if all that there is is His love?

What do we know of the Galilean mind? Some scholars think that Galilean was a the center of a sophisticated Hellenistic culture that produced the Lost Gospel Q that was the source for most of the wisdom saying of Jesus in Matthew and Luke. Certainty eludes us in this area.


O- that was not Erasmus objection, but that you retained the responsibility to either believe in him or not and that only if you believed would his sacrifice affect you. He died for the remission of sin, for what you did, but not from what you did not believe.

That seems like a pretty standard Xian position to me.

--- Their dispute seems to illustrate the conflict in the concept of God that I'm talking about with Luther on the dualistic leaning side and Erasmus on the monistic leaning side. They both accepted the efficacy of Grace to different degrees.
O- The efficacy of grace was not the issue but the power of the will, or whether we have freewill.

It seems that St. Paul, St. Augustine, and Calvin all reached the same conclusion as to God’s sovereignty, unchangeable will, and the inability of fallen humanity to contribute anything to its own salvation.

O- You did not offer any such thing, except in your own light, as I doubt that Aldous Huxley will be viewed as a doctrinal authority by the orthodox of these Churches.

Where are you getting Huxley? In any case, I am not delusional enough to suppose that anything I come up with here will have the slightest effect on the Church. I pursue the Truth for its own sake.