Re: Burn baby burn. . . .
My apologies for the long post, but I want to address your questions as best as I could...
Originally posted by Michael
God knew that by creating this universe (in this manner) that man would make the choice he made and god would have the pleasure of punishing man. Not only in this life but perhaps, for a few, in the next as well. Of course if god is all powerful he could have avoided the situation entirely. As god already knew what choice man would make and also set the circumstances up in such a way so as to force man to make the choice – well then we can agree man did not have a choice in the matter. God had already made the choice for him prior to creating the universe.
This is the classic puppetmaster fallacy. I'll emphasize it for your convenience:
we have been given true free will - not some wool-over-our-eyes, God-actually-does-everything lie.
So what your saying is if a child abuser loves his children then it’s OK to abuse them. Yeah, great. It sounds to me like your defending a pedophile and doing a poor job of it.
Man abused, God saved.
Jenyar, this is wrong. It should read God knew it was a certainty man would sin before he even created man. God doesn’t do possibles he only works in already knowns
1) He created the players (/the people)
2) He created the situation (/the definition of sin)
3) He created the outcome (/the future itself)
To punish man for god’s sin seems a little masochistic to me.
Puppetmaster/clockmaker fallacy. God created, we climbed out from under His sustainance, becoming our own authority - and having to fight our own battles. God only approves of His original creation, what people have made out of it is against His will.
What do you mean here? Don’t forget he already knows the outcome. I don’t think “trust” is a workable verb for god.
Why not? We either live dependent or independent of God. He knows the outcome of our decisions, but He does not make them for us. He trusts our good judgement, our patience, tolerance, love - our free will. What He
did do was warn us which choices would lead where. Suffering is a warning in itself, because of injustice, but not a punishment.
and some know suffering in ways that we can not even imagine. So what’s the point?
This is true. (but honestly this sentence is of god’s actions if you think about it).
The point is that you can hardly use suffering as a gauge of
God's involvement, because suffering is a
human condition. God
identified with our suffering through Jesus - who sufferred most innocently, so that we might have hope of surviving it. God did not plan His creation to make himself suffer, but He partook in our suffering to redeem His original creation, as He intended it to be.
The third creation I was talking about is his new kingdom. But this one will be as you described it in #2 (and much more): no sin can enter it, and all choices will have been made eternal. The downside is that those who choose sin or guilty of sin can't enter it.
Just as the condition of peace is non-violence, the condition for paradise is sinlessness.
Is that why there are 1000s of different religions with 1000s of different rules?
There aren't that many different sets of rules, when you start looking into it. You basically have a few angles:
1) Personal natural gods: watching you from a distance, and you have find ways to please them and find favour with them. Here "laws" are basically ways of manipulating the gods to work for you - prevalent in "pagan" and animalistic religions.
2) Impersonal natural gods (like Medicine*Woman's): who are basically reduntant as "religions", because the gods is whatever you want it to be and has no external influence. Every person is a law unto himself, and the worst consequence of breaking any "law" is your own loss of spirituality. It is our centre -
we are its personality.
3) Impersonal supernatural gods: The cosmic unknowable gods who are almost just as irrelevant because they are so far removed from "creation" (or so much
part of it), that they have no discernable "interface". We are simply a facet or a figment of this kind of god, and their laws are indiscernable from nature itself. We are
its centre, simply from a point of perspective.
4) Personal supernatural gods: gods who expect, who act, who can be understood from within a human paradigm, but are "foreign" to it. Their laws are independent but also reveal their own "personal" nature, and points of reference with people. They are known by divine revelation and "avatars", like messiahs, prophets, sages, etc. The Judaio/Christian/Muslim God falls into this category.
Many problems arise when you confuse the differences. For instance, an
impersonal supernatural god cannot be known, for it has no "common ground" with it creation, and there is nothing to know other than what you can learn on your own - but a
personal supernatural god can make himself known to his creation, and is able to identify with it at least on a personal level, if not a supernatural one. The definitions of attributes like omniscience, omnipresence, etc. are also affected: a personal natural god is usually territorial and unpredictable, like a "god-animal", while an impersonal natural god is like a "soul of nature" - nature
is its presence, its senses and expressions.
1) God doesn’t “trust”. That is not a useable verb for god. Trust in this sense involves an element of unknown and that isn’t possible with god.
2) Why should it matter how we raise out children? Oh, I see. Here you demonstrate that even you understand the unfairness of this game god is playing. He doesn’t give everyone an equal break does he? That’s why you feel it’s important to “teach” your children what god expects from them. If everyone was treated equal it wouldn’t matter what you teach them, right? Just another funny quark of god.
1) (Impersonal) Puppetmaster fallacy.
2) The starting point is the same: everybody are equally "creations of God", with equal value. Everybody everywhere has purpose and a valid reason for existing. Not immediately evident in our relationship with them, but implicit in their relationship with their creator. Children grow up first among their parents and siblings, second among their peers, third in their society, etc. Values and experiences start at home. Bad parents raise children with bad rolemodels, bad experiences, and little trust or self-worth, so does
their children, and so on. God's laws were for adults
first, and then children are ordered to honour their parents.
God treats everybody with equal respect, but they can lose His respect by harming those He loves, or ignoring Him - because He knows their children will usually bear the consequences. He meant children to be humanity's future, which started with Cain and Abel. Whose child was Cain? His sinful parents'. And Abel? God's - he rose above the legacy of sin, and loved God. The difference wasn't their financial status, success, or even their circumstances: it was whether they followed God or not.
Why warn people you have already condemned to begin with? Why play the game out? So that god can say to the person – well you had your chance. You see how ridiculous this sounds. If god is going to make a brand new universe with wonderful people then why didn’t he do it the first time? So that he can have the pleasure of condemning some people to horrid fates (either here on Earth, in the afterlife, or both). If he already knows the outcome then why not just create a wonderful universe to begin with? Which leads us to the original statement: So that god can say to the person – well you had your chance. Sounds petty and masochistic to me. Yeah – OK that is how god works.
Whatever condemnation God gives is deserved. Not because we are born to deserve it, but because we
prove we deserve it. Choice comes first, consequences after - cause, then effect. Paradise -> sin -> Paradise without sin/Death with sin
God establishes a complete universe along with its governing laws and parameters permitting free will, interest, beauty, experience, etc. -> people sin -> sin and paradise cannot co-exist -> people
out of paradise -> our lives are affected by decay and death -> God provides a means to maintain contact, get
back and regain life.
This is not true. A fetus can die. Is a fetus sinning Jenyar? A baby can die – is a baby sinning Jenyar?
Death is a direct result of biological functions not “sin”.
If you stare yourself blind against physical decay leading to physical death (governed by an indiscriminate nature) - then there is no justice, just death and taxes. But if you realize this world is a decaying paradise and that you are trapped in its decay, you can start thinking about
moral decay and [/i]spiritual[/i] death, where their can be justice, mercy, love, and all those wonderful abstracts, governed by God. We are to nature as God is to us. But we and nature are both temporal creations, whereas God is eternal and supernatural. We can only delay, manage and subvert - but God can lift up and out and create. We were extremely fortunate that someone like Noah existed, and that God was persuaded to keep His original creation - us. We can make this world a better place for each other, or just sit like Job on a heap of rubbish and feel sorry for ourselves.
We live in a world we can change. We have that power. But death comes to us all, because we live in a world ruled by it. Sin plunged us into such a world, and only God can save us from sin. Our own best efforts only scratch the bottom of paradise.
He made the decision – so nice of him to accept his own decision.
So now you don't think you have free will anymore? Then howcome you have the option
not to believe me, if what I said was true? It's
up to you to decide whether you
accept God's decision, or reject it (and his offered hand of help) and live with your limited freedom - complete enough for this world, but woefully insufficient for the next.
I acept whatever happened has happened, and that I am too simple or ignorant to understand God - but I realized how my life could hurt people who have no control over me, so I give myself over to God's control - and I've never been more free. The fact that I can help people even though I am in need of help myself, shows that God can help me. Death is advancing on me like a wall, but it won't stop me. It is a wall that belongs to a decaying nature, not a supernatural eternity.
If I could see God, I would be worried that He might die as well... wait, that has already happened...
1) Where did we get this “sin” from. We made it ourselves?
2) As we agreed god already knew the outcome. Not only that he made it so that it was impossible to have any other outcome except the one that came about. Impossible for any other outcome. We already agreed to that. So we were expelled from paradise because that’s the way god likes it. Therefore “Sin” was just an excuse so god could say: See I gave you your chance.
1) We inherited it from the first rebel: Rebellion itself, the Lie that told us we could be God, and there is no God. Now we
live in that self-created world where "there is no God" - a world of sin.
2) He "set us up for a fall"? If I could believe that I would be an atheist in the strongest sense of the word. Think about what you are saying for a second. What if I tell you God knew for certain that had Even not listened to the tempter but continued to listen to God, we would be living in paradise... did
that happen? Yet even
we know that would have been the outcome. Where is the weakness of the argument?
In the uninfluenced and unadulterated, independent human choice.
A human without choice would not be human being at all, much less "created in God's image". With the gift of free will comes the crisis of decision, and the burden of choice.
Sure he does. As the creater of the universe god created suffering. The concept itself was a creation of god. He could have created a 14 dimension pure energy universe where suffering was never a possibility. So why create a universe where it is possibility – one would ONLY do that if one had a secret desire for that very suffering to take place. And if one already knew in advance it would take place – well then I would say that is one sick puppy.
Let me describe paradise again in other words: everything was created "good" - everything in its place and as it should be, and should have
stayed. But by a convolution of free will, rebellion, selfishness, greed, temptation and relegation of responsibility, some things stepped outside their place and purpose. God knew in advance it would happen if those rules were ignored, which is
probably why he warned Adam and Even
not to "eat from that tree", don't you think? I think it's very likely
precisely why. But things escaped, and people were tempted to step outside the circle of life.
A person who can suffer can also feel. A person who feel can touch, and a person who can touch can create. Our ability to experience our world depends on our senses. You can reverse engineer it and end up with no creation, but that is hardly what God had in mind when He ordered the chaos.
Gee how nice of god. Create suffering and then create rules to get around suffering (at least after you die your horrible death). Wow what a great guy God is!
By coming to earth to serve his creation, having Himself nailed to a cross and suffer the agony of death, to free us from it, and to prove to us for our sake that even death is subjected to God. I know of no greater guy...
This analogy doesn’t make sense. God created the universe specifically to lead to suffering. Why would our suffering separate us from god? He created the “concept” of suffering when he created this universe.
The concept of suffering existed only like darkness exists where there is no light. Suffering exists away from God, outside is will. He only included it for our sake, so that those who suffer might still have hope. If it was truly outside God's reach, nobody would have any hope. In God's creation, suffering
had no power, but it
gained power as we moved away from God. Did God create the antichrist? Indirectly, yes, because without Christ there would be no antichrist - but without Christ the antichrist would have just have ruled us without a name...
This really is making no sense. What do you mean foreign to God?
1) Does god know what sin and suffering are?
2) Did god know before he created the universe that it would contain sin and suffering?
3) Did god know the pain, suffering, and sin each person would commit before he even made the universe?
4) When given the choice of making a universe where suffering and sin where not possible and making one where suffering and sin where not ONLY possibilities but inevitable outcomes. God choose the later.
1) Sin is rebellion against God, so He knows well
what it is, but is logically not affected by it. With suffering, however, He is personally acquainted
2) There was no sin when it was just God, so there was nothing to know about it. It is not a force, it's just a word describing a concept. Same with suffering. As I said, it had no power, no manifestation, no force.
3) Hard for me to say - it's not really a part of God we can have knowledge about. I'd say each person was born out of and into known circumstances. If if the eventual destination is known, it is not decided by anyone other than the person him/herself.
4) God was not "given" the choice in such simple terms: it was a choice to create the universe or just leave it. A world of suffering and sin was possible in all circumstances in which we could exist not as mindless unfeeling robotic beings, but as humans with free will, made in God's image. Questioning the "options" serves no real purpose, because in a reality the only options are the ones we can make. God is not a man - even if we knew the options we could not even begin to ponder the alternatives.
Sounds to me that God knows all about suffering and sin. There’s as close to god as stink is to shit.
...Because God is still with us. It didn't abandon those who still believe in Him to such a world, no matter how disagreeable it is to Him. Jesus prayed: "My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one."
This world is not just one "of suffering and sin" - it has given me two wonderful parents who love me, a brother and two sisters, buddies I've known for 13 years, a gorgeous ex-girlfriend, and even more gorgeous (as yet unmet) future wife
two dogs, people I can care for and people who care for me. Sunsets, poetry, music, beaches and sundowners on summer holidays... thanks to God. I will fight jealously for anyone who is being hurt by someone's selfishness or agression, because I have experienced such injustice and hurt myself - I know it can be avoided; and so can most suffering and sin.
Only one son? Hmmm? I wonder why god didn’t give his one and only daughter. If you think of the suffering women have endured over the millennia a quick crucifixion would be a walk in the park. ... Also – define “son”. How is that different than a godly “daughter”? How is a godly son different from any people?.
"Son" is just a word we have been created with (nice double meaning). As a term it signifies a broad set of meanings and relationships that God wanted us not only be familiar with, but to apply to Him as well. Why not daughter? It might just as well have been, but for natural reasons (possibly because of characteristics inherently "masculine" and "feminine") cultures developed associating power, rule and authority as masculine properties and love, care and emotion with feminine. God frequently described His people as His bride - another indication of relationship. Just like the seven-day week, "marriage" did not come out of nowhere.
First Jewish and then Christian understanding of God has always been based on rhethoric that has been built up. As in all dialogue, underanding is a result, not a precondition. For Adam, just knowing God was enough, but eventually as selfish people like Cain were born, and paradise first became legend and then myth, people probably wanted to know more and less about God - just as now. Knowledge of God became a science called "religion", but from Abraham onwards, a dictionary of words, laws and usage was being built up that could only make sense within a context of suffering, persecution, enslavement. and
salvation. Judaism and Christianity are called
redemptive and
salvific religions - teaching a path of redemption and salvation - words that have almost no meaning outside them.
Secondly – he “gave his son”. Sounds good but means nothing. “gave” please spell out in absolute specific detail what you mean by gave. No metaphor no cliché. Just exactly and simply what you mean here. Second explain why. Why does god have to give anything? He can do what he wants.
As I said, the Old Testament formed a setting in which God's actions were understood, and ould be understood. The laws were no more than very specific roads along which God wanted to walk - but not just because: they became "roadmaps for peace" (to use current language).
Not just any peace: peace with God. Evidently, it was a bumpy road: going through two major exiles and periods of slavery (Egypt and Babylon), two temple-rebuildings (Jerusalem), ending with a third period of slavery: to the world itself, and a third temple: Christ (King of the "New Jerusalem"). There has since been no no temple or king among the Jews, and Jesus is the only major religious figure not to have a grave or shrine (just like Moses, btw).
The whole of Christianity is based around how and why Jesus is the Son of God and the Son of Man.
The quickest answer to why, is because God loves us(See the quotes below
*). I really can't do it any better than how Paul tried to explain it to the early churches in his epistles. God "gave" Christ as one would "give" His life, i.e. die. Jesus work on earth was as an 'anointed', i.e. authorized by God, to forgive sin.
How exactly this works is described in Colossans and Galatians:
Galatians 4
3... we were in slavery under the basic principles of the world. 4But when the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under law, 5to redeem those under law, that we might receive the full rights of sons.
...and
inherit life from Him, because we had forfeited our own.
You've probably heard that salvation stands on two legs: faith and works. You can try to
balance on either, but you can only
walk if you have both. Apart, neither are very useful and they become tired very quickly
Sin had effectively immobilized God's work, but He incorporated redemption into His creation from the beginning. Like a lock for which only He had the key. The OT described the lock, the NT describes they key.
To the Jews were promised a "kinsman-redeemer" that would restore God's creation to its former glory here on earth. He was to be the anointed king of the Jews, the "suffering servant". "[T]he Messiah, who would crush the head of the serpent and redeem mankind from the consequence of Adam’s fall, was to be born from the line of Judah. He is the one through whom all nations receive the blessing promised to Abraham" After the Jews were freed from Babylon, they returned to Jerusalem to rebuild the second temple, and amidst the constant friction with the Romans there was a heavy messianic expectancy. The temple was restored and Jerusalem belonged to them after the
Hasmonean revolt, the scene was set for the new kingdom, but in 70AD the Romans destroyed the temple and scattered the Jews. Many blamed the Christians.
*
John 3:16
"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
Titus 3
1Remind the people to be subject to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready to do whatever is good, 2to slander no one, to be peaceable and considerate, and to show true humility toward all men. 3At one time we too were foolish, disobedient, deceived and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures. We lived in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another.
4But when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, 5he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, 6whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior, 7so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs having the hope of eternal life. 8This is a trustworthy saying. And I want you to stress these things, so that those who have trusted in God may be careful to devote themselves to doing what is good. These things are excellent and profitable for everyone.
1 John 4
8Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
