God and god.

:laughing: I’m sure a sentence like that is against the Geneva Convention on English-Usage.

C’mon Ucc. That paragraph was as fine a two-step as I have ever seen. It’s also a paragraph that would have had you burned as a heretic by both Christianity and Islam only a couple of hundred years ago. It would probably still buy you a punch in the face in some States.

What good is God, if he’s not the high endpoint of the bell-curve…?

I’ll ask an easier question then:

Can God make mistakes…?

I don’t think so. Suffering evil sucks.

It’s definitely better to turn the other cheek when somebody is evil to you, because then you’re not helping your society fall apart.

Ucc,

It seems to me that you are qualifying “perfection” as ‘be the best you can be’. The chocolate sundae is only perfect in the context of the moment because it could be more perfect in the next. Perfection or being without flaw is then context bound and as such, dependent on definition. This seems to fly in the face of logos in which ideal perfection exists outside of appearances and is the core of all christian descriptions of God and his various attributes. It would appear that such a God is not perfect in any ideal sense, but just ‘more perfect’ than humanly possible.

Seems to me defining perfect would require a purpose for the entity to which you want to attribute perfection, right?

I mean, perfect for what?

We call certain human attributes good because they help us survive. It is because of our purpose that we consider intelligence to be better than stupity. To prove the point, there are attributes that we consider good in one object, for example, softness in jewelry making metals, and bad in another situation, like softness in metal to be used for construction. The actual attribute of being soft doesn’t have a value of good or bad; this is decided by the context. To claim an object is perfect requires the information “perfect for what?”, or else you aren’t really making a statement about the attributes of the object. I could call a rock perfect, but unless I say for what, it doesn’t tell you anything about the rock and there’s no way you can prove me wrong.

Until we give god a purpose, you can’t devise anything from the fact that he is “perfect”, because the purpose defines what “perfect” means.

I saw that!

Whut…? Not me your honour!!!

Well, okay, I realized I was crowing. Bad manners. :wink:

Crowing? The redneck does not get the redcoat’s slang.

It’s the middle one, but I may be ‘counting my chickens’, or be getting all ‘falconed up’ about nothing.

[size=75]*okay - so I made ‘falconed-up’ up.[/size]

Who’s defeat were you crowing over?

Tabula
I’m sorry Tabula, I’m really trying to fly straight on this one, didn’t mean to give the impression of waffling. I sincerely don’t think there’s a good enough definition of ‘perfection’ to apply it to rigorous logical argument. That’s bad news for some atheistic arguments sure, but it’s also bad news for current forms of the Ontological argument as well.

Anyways, that’s for throwing me a slower pitch:

No, I don’t believe so. Since there’s critters with free will other than Himself, though, I do think things can happen that He regrets.

tentative:

I'm still not content with perfection being 'without flaw'. If that's all we want it to mean, then fine, God is perfect, I don't have any problem with that. But I've seen the word used and stretched to cover so many things, and so many angles, that I've really just abandoned it, barring clarification. 
What I do think is that God is as He had to be- He's a necessary being, His essential qualities are necessary, He could not have been otherwise.  I suppose that's a sort of perfection, too. It still doesn't cover all the ways I've seen people try to use the word, though. It's that word 'perfection' that leads people to claim that God should be able to make a stone He can't lift, and other such nonsense.

My grandfather gave me sound advice: NEVER piss into the wind. Obviously I didn’t follow his sagely advice. Apparently, I have a lot of company… #-o

“Falconed up”??? Thats… Oh, I forgot. You have a literary license. :unamused:

This talk of what perfection is or isn’t reminds me of Bernard Williams’ idea about how we have our own world views, but desire to reconcile ours with everyone else’s different ones in a shared universe. So we conceive (ironically) an ‘absolute conception’ that contains all possible variations of world views (amongst which we can pick and choose), labelling this the Ultimate Truth. It’s a need to believe in an ultimate truth that transcends any individual view, based on our illusory belief that the world exists independently of us and in a way not conditioned by our view of it.

A house of cards at best.

Seems dictionaries are not so coy.

God=perfect
scripture=perfect (in abstract)
religion=static
society=non-static
religion=proved imperfect (in practice)
scripture=increasingly found incompatable
God=perfection ‘doubted’ [size=75](aka - ‘flawless, yet not perfect etc.’)[/size]
scripture=no longer ‘perfect’ - reinterpreted with regard to current social requirements.
religion=flexible, but lacking real… Oomph. Fades.

Job done.

Webster be damned. If he doesn’t like my philosophy, he can post here and argue his points, same as anyone.

Sorry - edited. ^^^^^

And… Everyone’s gone home. I’ve hailed a cab. The dictionary says I win. Can’t argue with the book. =D>

Yeah, just when I thought I had you, you start quoting scripture on me.

Ucc,

I’ll leave off the ‘perfection’ argument because I too think the term is almost as mis-used as the word God. I do find it interesting that your concept is a ‘something’ that is somehow external to humanity. It may be comforting to view that which is as a self contained entity, personally involved in human affairs, but it seems that in order to do that, we must return to faith in a human constructed vision. I have had those experiences that made me aware of ‘something’, but what that something is and isn’t is beyond language. If not, certainly beyond my poor use of metaphor. More to the point, it becomes the continued asking of questions for which there are no answers. In Dao it is said that the Dao that can be named is not the eternal Dao. I find the same is true of the discussions of God. The God that can be named,and described is not the eternal ‘that which is’. The God named is a human construct with attributes projected from human mind. Who knows the way of heaven? It isn’t to be found in religion. Projecting our human needs and desires into the universe may be necessary and expedient to make sense of things, but erecting an idol shouldn’t be neccessary to be in awe of the mystery…

tentative

Hmm, I wasn’t really trying to be interesting when I said that. :slight_smile: Pretty traditional stuff for a Christian, right? Even my criticism of ‘perfection’, I don’t consider to be unorthodox doctrine, just unorthodox vocabulary.

I think every belief system has aspects of it that are comforting, and other aspects less so. What do you think?

As it turns out, this is entirely consistent with Christianity, I have no problem with this sort of statement. I’ve had those sorts of experiences too.

Mm. There’s something to that. In Christianity, we would say that because of this mysteriousness, the only hope we have of understanding what you’d call The Ineffable, is for It to reach out to us from It’s own desire to be understood. That’s why there’s such a strong emphasis on revelation, is that acknowledgment that there’s pretty much nothing interesting to be said about these things that can come wholly from our wisdom.

If Christ wasn’t really who He claimed to be, then yes, that would have to be the case. Though, there’s something to be said for the Jewish claims of revelation as well.

Uccisore asks:

I suppose most traditional religions would fall under that label since they are a cradle to grave and then beyond system. Just do as you’re told and the way you’re told to do it and you will live forever. Pick the right religion and you might get a chance at seventy virgins, although I’m not sure what you would do with 'em… :stuck_out_tongue: You won’t like this, but I see religion as only necessary for those who are insecure enough to need a closed system whereby all things are knowable, even after death. Not only do I know how to live and what to do in this life, I’m guaranteed a rosy life after death. It is the ultimate insurance plan…

Few are those capable of living in ambiguity where life is simply seeing what is in front of you, living it as best you can, and what happens after death is of no particular concern. For me, and a few others I know, it isn’t about comfort or discomfort, but simply matching up this sensed life with what is apparent with as few preconceived notions as possible.

But if you can guarantee me say… three or four virgins (I’m not greedy) I might be willing to reconsider…