Most of my logic is drawn from breaking down the odds of everything.
My theory of life has the odds…
5000000000000000000000000/1 …that I am wrong. Therfore I presume that I am right.
God existing…
5000000000000000000000000/1…That he exists.
Therfore he does not exist for me.
I’m not using exact odds by the way, but very rough examples.
dont take offense to this
but no matter who started this all existence is very smart
ide like to congratulate a higher being that would be a awsome experience
between real and fake your in control
between god and satan you manifest your fears and questions
and you cannot escape being a tool between freedom of sin
and torture from law (virtue,commandments).
Uccisore, don’t you just love this time of year. The leaves turning color in Maine…now that is a spectacle. Do you really live in Maine?
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If God has no weight, or height, mass, velocity or anything that can be found in public objects such as air, trees and light, then the analogy is weak, if not impossible. That was the point. You compare God with things when God is no-thing.
Again, I still fail to see the point of this: We’re still talking about things we both already know, as though you are waiting for me to reveal to you that God is immaterial.
O- You don’t have to reveal to me, my friend; it is I who must reveal to you such things…but I know the power of faith.
But, to your point, God does have a number of properties in common with external objects (…) For example, God (allegedy) knows things.
O- Wait a second. First you say that “God does have”, very matter-of-factly. Now we humble ourselves to “allegedy”? Not so confident in the commoness of these external objects which can only be alledged.
He has aims. He possesses self-awareness, and there is such a thing as ‘what it’s like to be God’. In other words, He posseses the qualities of a Mind. Now, a mind defies your classifications. It is not exactly a public object, since a group of people cannot analyze a mind together. On the other hand it is not a personal idea either- I take it for granted that your mind is not a figment of my imagination. It is as external as a tree, even if I can only observe it indirectly.
O- Let’s agree that God is unlike my mind or yours. It has no brain and no body and we find, that in humans, laking a brain prevents a body from having a mind. The mind is an intractable thing and even now it’s definiting is debated, but I can imagine you or another human having a mind by a simple generalization with a bit of parsimony. That is based on a little faith. But to impute God with a mind does not mean that I have before me a body like me, or anything called God before me. Indirectly? How so? We assume that God has a mind or that He is a Mind first and foremost by accepting the stories read to us about All that there is.
Again, God is an idea within a theory.
God is a mind. No-- God must be, has to be, cannot be anything, but a Mind, or have a Mind, or else the theory makes no sense. The theory preceedes the judgement of God. For example, I could say that God exist but has no mind. That would not fly not because it is impossible but because it disagrees with scripture. Again, Scripture dictates what God is and can be though of. As you might recall, a revelation from a vision MUST agree with scripture in order to be takes as comming from God.
The shackles put on “God” reveal this god to be not a god of experience, or external qualities independend of all else and to His own pleasure and choice. But is an idea-God. It is the idea deified. We hold that having a mind is a “good”, thus God must not lack any of it. God is an idea within a theory.
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God might well exist, as well as unicorns and Sasquash; but God is a theory, or an idea within a theory.
This sort of talk confuses me. If God is a theory or an idea, then it without question exists-
O- As much as we can say that extraterrestials, Sasquashs or unicorns etc also exists.
I know this because I myself have the idea, and hold the theory.
O- You have FAITH my friend.
But the notion that the God we consider is only a theory becomes false if you ask yourself the simple question- what does this theory state? It states that there is an external Being like I discribe above that created the Universe. That postulated Being is God, and the theory has no use but to suggest there is such a thing as He.
O- So let me get this straight.
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For example, you say that God was the creator. You imply as a done fact that the universe WAS indeed created.
Do I? My points are twofold:
- Theists hold that God is a real, external Being, just as individual humans are external to each other.
O- I shall continue to disagree in your mismeasurement of the situation. “just as”? Anthropocentrism is your only end here.
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Why can’t the universe be eternal? I see no reason.
You don’t? Nothing we see in the universe is enternal
O- How do you KNOW?
and as far as we can tell, everything we define as ‘the universe’ is going to come to an end we call heat death.
O- Under one theory. Another states that the universe will experience a Cold Death, where all motion stops. Based on some models, the mass of the universe cannot overcome the rate of expansion in the universe. There shall be no rewind…under some theories. What do I know? These are only speculations.
As far as scientists can tell
O- “Some scientists” you should say. This generalizations are unwarranted.
everything we call the universe began a measureable amount of time ago.
O- According to the M-theory, there was something before the Big Bang.
We know a great deal about nature, and enternity is not a property we can give it.
O- Why not?
Omar- What was there before the universe?
Theist- The Big Bang.
Omar- What was there before the Big Bang?
Theist- There was God.
Omar- What was there before God?
Theist- That cannot be asked nor answered. It is like asking what is north of the north pole.
Omar- Nope. North of the pole are the stars. Perhaps we will find there among the stars the limits that math postulates to our expanding universe. There, I would like to scientifically demonstrate the finitude of the universe. I shall throw a rock at this limit. If it bounces back, then I can believe that the universe has limits and ends. If the rock drifs and never returns, then in my death bed I shall remember and believe in no such limits but in the infinity of the universe.
(The dialogue is meant to show that eternity and infinity are not demonstrable while finitude is. The problem then is that we stop asking when no reason is there not to ask.)
I have as much right to ask about who created God in light of the theory you support. If you deny me that right then I shall deny you the right to ask whether the universe has a beginning. Again, just because some theory claims to measure the age of creation, it is taken on faith rather than on experience. Other theories instead deny the limits set within the first one, such as string theory.
What I do say is not that X or Y is true but that if we could find the origin and birth of the cosmos, we should not doubt that the same can and will be done with God and any and all other Gods we find after the fact indefinetly. Only by faith do you secure the trace to…whatever idea you decide to call God.
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It is because of this that I say the obvious-- that God, within a religion, secured not by eyes or ears but by faith, by imagination, by the belief in the infallibility of a story-telling book, is and can only be an object of the mind. It is not always like this. For Abram, for Moses, God was an object.
You paint a view of religion that isn’t true. Having spent a lot of time in a religious community, I would say confidently that well over half of Christians can point to events in their lives they define as God answering prayer, God talking to them, or otherwise evidence of God’s being in their life. I would say those experiences are equally important as ‘belief in the infallibility of a story-telling book’. In other words, there are a great many Abrahams and Moses’ running around out there.
O- What do muslims experience? Remember what I said about empiricism. And unless these mystics had experiences that included the parting of a sea, a column of fire, or were told something as unpleasant as the duty to kill their child, then I would say that they experienced only what they wanted to experience and my scepticism levels them to Ghost hunters, Crop circle enthusiast or an alien-abductee.
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No, and you are being very forgiving here in your analogy, but I shall accomodate it within the discussion. What is the point of nutrition? A healthy body. But can we agree on just what a healthy body should be?
The problem with nutrition is not that people can’t decide what ‘healthy’ is. Define ‘healthy’ in some extremely simple, agreeable way like “Living past 65”, and you will STILL get a thousands different conflicting ideas on the best diet to achieve that.
O- I disagree. The more simple and agreeable, then the less different and conflicting ideas. The more ambigious the definition, the more egalitarian the word or concept. The farther away you look at something, the more things within the picture you will have yet the less details as well.
One danger of tolerance is that it requires often efforts to make dominant religions ambiguous. If one requires little from their concept of God, other religions become acceptable and tolerable, such is the case with judaism and christianity. They sing in the same choir because the song they sing is sung without words, but with ambiguous sounds. Were they to sing with words, they would find that the music might be the same but the song is so different that they lose rhytim and melody. What they do? They concentrate on God = G-d, and ignore that while the concept shares some letters, the former denotes a man called Jesus.
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Let the heads roll. It is not just that God allows evil; as we see in the ancients God “create(s)” evil and darkness. Now, not why, but How can a merciful God create evil? Is like asking: How can we think of Mother Teresa dipping newborns in boiling oil or smashing their heads against the rocks? I am sorry for the image, but that is extreme enough not be a relative reference to what we could call an Evil.
The first step is to stop comparing God to Mother Teresa.
O- Why? Does Mother teresa have no mind?
The second step is to realize, like the above, the only way to make the Problem of Evil work is to draw on heartstrings. It presents no contradiction.
O- I am tired of showing you why there is a contradiction, an inconsistency, a departure. His ways are not our ways. God is trancendent yet we talk of him as if we talked about a man. That IS THE INCONSISTENCY. That is the POE. We speak of Good and of evil, but how do they apply to a God? They do not. If you imagined a man like God he would not be called “good” all of the time in fact even most of the times. Yet God is no man. God is the Creator. God is the master, man His born slave. That is your contradiction. You can argue the external existence of God etc. Yet, He exists unlike anything that we know to exist. Not mind, not tree, rock table, breeze, light etc. God trancends them. “like” is a heresy, if you think of it and it’s application the reason for the contradiction. His ways are not our ways.
When God exist, or is said to exist like things in creation, or like our mind, what exists is our own idol, our concept, man dressed like God. Humanity deified.
What’s wrong with the Free Will defense?
O- The POE cannot be wiped clean by the existence of choice because I cannot choose to bring forth Hurricanes, floods and earthquakes, all of which cause suffering. The problem of evil is as gutwrenching as having to ask why must millions die when all they needed was a little rain. So simple, yet so incomprehensible.
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Let’s get back to Job. Why does God allow Satan to kill Job’s children? God already knows the measure of Job’s character…and for that matter the Devil…so He knew what would happen. Perhaps He wanted to prove Satan wrong, but God then is sacrificing the pearl of Job for the biggest Pig there is? Is this consistent? Can we truly say that God is Good then?
This is neither here nor there. For the sake of argument, let’s just say that the book of Job is a fiction and the things therein never happened.
O- This we cannot do, or at least, it is not allowed by the rules we play by.
The book of Job is found in the Book. Thus, it is the Word of God and “until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen” is questionable by us, born slaves. Job has to be a real person, or thought to be that, or we might as well doubt the very existence of Abram, Isaac and Jacob, if not Jesus as well.
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The problem of the righteous sufferer emerges with the evolution of the state goverment. The more brutal the age, the more brutal the God. The gentler, or more civilized man became, so did his God–which is another reason why we might suspect that God rather than being an independent object out-there is a dependent object within.
Yes, this is an ever-present risk. How we view God changes according to our culture, there’s no way to avoid it completely, but that’s why things like Bibles are so important- the provide a bit of an anchor throughout time.
O- I disagree. 250 years ago, in this nation, slavery flourished, not among pagans, but among christians reading then the same Bible you might read now. Where now, you might see in the Bible the arguments for the inmorality of that institution, back then that same Bible was seen and read as securing the right of a master over his slave.
Second of all, the Bible is a construction. It did not decend from heaven with 65 books nice and neatly bound, but required councils, list and the opinions of an emperor, how ironic!, to give us the “Word” of God.
You are correct at one thing. The Bible was meant to end the strife in the earlier times, when Alexandria and Rome battled; when the wolrd had christianities rather than christianity. But while Rome had won, it was not for all times and after the rise of Protestanism we have returned to a new age of “christianities”.
“Look! This is something new?” It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time."
But yes, I agree that the common view of God has become more gentle as society has changed. This makes the problem of evil worse. A classic example I myself have met, is the person who claims that “The God they know” would never ever allow there to be such a thing as hell, or condemn people ‘just for not believing in Him’ or punish people for their human failings. I often wonder how such a Dr. Spock of a God can possibility be consistant with the world I see on the evening news.
O- Just what is so bad about Mr Spock?! LOL!! But try to see why that God is preferable. I think that humanity needs Hell and that is why people believe in it. Hell and Heaven are outcrops of the POE. They are answers to Ecclesiastes.
This is a controversial line of thought, but what I don’t understand is how the evening news can prove the existence of Hell.
A God who is agreed up front to “bring rain to the just and the wicked alike” may be less pleasent, but makes more sense in the long run.
O- But is by definition less than “good”.
1.god creates evil
2.god destroys evil
3.death is evil action
4.no such thing as good
pure and imperfect are the only things
running this world imperfect humanity
and pure nature we destroy this planet
for no reason so we are imperfect and evil,
nature places revenge on the innocent not by choice
it is only a calm force protecting itself and in the bible
is just a manifestation for god to destroy satan.
(x)satan tempts eve
(xx)eve eats the apple of knowledge and chaos
(xxx)that places us inbetween god and satan
(xx)adam is innocent but accepts and follows eve’s mistake
(x)adam hides from god
(xx)god is enraged and sends them all out of eden
(xxx)why don’t they go to heaven?
eve made a mistake god didn’t fogive her just sent her out of eden
if god really loves man then he would stop eve from offering adam
the knowledge and chaos of our times leading us to a smoother path
into heaven but no we struggle with nature anymore i would know this
because not just because im in florida and another hurrican can hit but
i’m thinking its a setup of a selfish and evil god who says he is good
yet kills the tempter who was just made to be evil he didnt want to be
im positive of that fact.