Prismatic567 wrote:Note it is also true no court of law can arrive at the ultimate truth whether a person is a murderer or not especially if the accused do not confess to the crime.
Even when people confessed, that may not even be the actual truth as evident in many such cases.
Random analogy. And you have no way of knowing if it applies or is equivalent in the least. There is a difference between being 100 per cent sure and not being able to measure at all. Jesus made it critical that the internal states be in specific ways, and we cannot look at those at all. A murder case can include all sorts of physical evidence, witness accounts, etc. And how do we know Jesus meant that this was to be measured like we measure guilt in courts. In terms of process, degree necessary to be judged OK and more. You are just making up stuff and saying it is relevent or equivalent.
I agree, no humans can determined the ultimate truth whether a person is truly a Christian or not.
What counts in my case is God the omnipresent and omniscient will know whether the person is a true Christian or not.
OK, fine. God can tell, but we sure can't. It's not a definition of what a Christian is that we can use to figure out who are Christians. The phrase ultimate truth implies that we can do a pretty good job potentially. But actually, we don't even have a way to start seeing if people meet Jesus criteria for the internal states of believers. We don't know how much he would have considered enough. And the problem of other minds precludes measuring even if we did.
You seem to be claiming you can be a good stand in for God or Jesus. Sure, you might make a few mistakes, like the courts in murder cases, but still you'd come up with a fairly good number for the number of Christians. LOL. You would have no ideas if you had come many orders of magnitude off the actual number.
What humans especially using the epistemological approach is to research all the necessary evidence and arrive at a justified definition which can be tested. I have already listed all the necessary properties/elements to who qualify to be a Christians.
What is critical is the covenant [implied or otherwise] and you cannot deny this.
I worked with your criteria and demonstrated that no humans can determine how many Christians there are and who can be included in the set of Christians.
If you are saying that you have the correct definition, but it is one that only God can decide if it applies in some case or other, fine.
Nah, humans [God recognize as fallible] need not be perfect to be a Christian.
You just added a word that I did not use. Nor did Jesus. He seemed pretty clear these were strict criteria, using the words he used.
But even worse for this 'argument', we have no way of knowing how much love, how equivalent Jesus wanted us to love others, God, neighbors. How little anger one must have. How little lust. We have no way of measuring and even if we could measure we have no idea how much we are looking for.
As I had stated in a post,
Many of the covenanted terms from God are ideals to be striven by humans to the best of their abilities.
God will not expect Christians to love their enemies in the stupid way, e.g. if the enemies attack, they are to stand there with open loving arms to hug their enemies.
And I don't believe God literally meant giving the other cheek.
And now you are raising issues, I did not raise. And doing more work as a Christian theologian on irrelevent points.
God issued the ideals [absolving God from condoning violence, etc.] but God knowing humans are exposed to various practical conditions must use their discretion wisely to Optimize any situations [threatening or otherwise].
It is then for God to judge the merit of what is performed to the best of their ability.
And now you are acting as if you are a Christian theologian again. Also acting as if you know how he would measure and as if this could in any way be used by us to figure out who is Christian.
Note if you sign a contract with someone to provide you 1000 widgets but on delivery your testing and checking found 10% are defective, it is not 100% perfect.
In this case you can reject the whole delivery based on terms of the contract or you use your discretion to accept the 90% and pay for it while rejecting and returning the 10% of defects.
An utterly irrelevent analogy. And you have no idea if this is how God, an entity you do not believe exists, thinks about sin or doing what He wants. And you have no idea how to measure 90% even if this was God's number. Courts may have such criteria to measure physical products. But this may not be equivalent to how God does things, and even if he does, we can't.
Here's the underlying absurd assumption even bringing up this analogy...
God runs his evaluations like contract law does.
Utterly absurd.
It is the same with God. God always set the highest ideal and will not compromise in his standards but God is compassionate enough to recognize human are fallible and limited, thus God will use his discretion to judge the human performance on whether s/he has performed to the best of his/her abilities or sufficient to avoid hell.
Again you are writing as if you are a Christian theologian. And how fallible. And we can't know how fallible they are. How well they are loving neighbors. certainly not by behavior. There can be people with good behavior who act this way from their egos and have little love for anyone. And all sorts of shades of grey in between. We don't know how much God wants and we have no way to measure.
We cannot determine who is Christian
even if
your Christian theology is correct.
Sicne you are not a Christian, there is no reason to consider your interpretations relevent.
That's it. I will ignore you. If you seriously cannot see that
1) the murder trial analogy is irrelevent - it is a human court dealing with another issue - and further note that Jesus specificially was increasting the demands of the commandments and equated anger with murder.
2) you made up theology and theology that does not match what Jesus said. Perhaps you have guessed correctly what a God you do not believe exists would think about what Jesus really meant, but you are just guessing
3) it's all irrelevent since we cannot determine which humans even meet God's criteria if it is 90 percent, as in your business analogy. We have no way to measure how much love, how little anger, how much lust, how well someone loves their neighbors, especieally because Jesus clearly and specifically internalized the criteria.
Seriously, you just made up stuff.
Wait a week, relook at your 'arguments'. It's seems just you defending something because it feels like it must be correct. And notice how you did not directly interact with the parts of the Bible I brought up, nor with the arguments I made. You jumped to secular analogies as if they must apply, when it is a completely different situation with completely different epistemological problems since it has to do with internal states.
This is not honorable philosophical discussion on your part. You just created a lot of distraction and work. You're a smart guy. You should just throw a bunch of illogic salad at people because you don't want to re-evaluate your own position.
It's like I startled a skunk. I'm done.
(this is not me assuming I can read your mind, by the way. It's the experience of suddenly having a bunch of unpleasant 'smells' in my face, I am going at via the skunk metaphor) I think you are smarter than this kind of response on your part would lead one to believe, so it's frustrating to find it here)