I stole the idea for this from a comment by Tony on his blog. It is a passage from Randy Alcorn’s book, “The Grace And Truth Paradox.” It is a wise way of illustrating how gracious God was in providing a path back to him and how empty it is to argue that it is unfair to “only” have one way.
Imagine a great and generous king. In the midst of his benevolent reign, he hears that his subjects have revolted. He sends messengers to investigate. The rebels kill them. So he sends his own dear son, the prince. They murder him viciously, hanging his body on the city wall.
What would you expect the king to do now? Send his armies and take revenge, right? Kill those rebels! Burn their villages to ashes! That king certainly has both the power and the right to avenge himself.
But what if the king turned around and offered these criminals a full pardon?
“I will accept my son; whom you murdered; as the payment for all your rebellion. You may go free. All I require is for you to admit your transgressions and embrace my son, who purchased your forgiveness.”
We would be studded; blown away; to hear this, would we not? But the king is not finished.
“I invite any of you to come live in my palace, eat at my table, and enjoy all the pleasures of my kingdom. And I will adopt you as my own children and make you my heirs, so everything that is mine will be yours forever.”
Incredible.
Than he says, “I will not force you to accept my offer. But the only alternative is spending the rest of your life in prison. The choice is yours.”
Can you imagine someone responding, How dare the king send anyone to prison? “What a cruel tyrant!?
The book is terrific. You can read it in a couple hours or less. Lots of profound points about Jesus being full of grace and truth and how things go wrong when we get the two out of balance. Too heavy on the truth and you crush people; too heavy on the grace and they don’t realize they need Jesus.
Filed under: Christian living, Christian worldview
This post should be re-titled to “Christianity 101″.
Good post Neil.
But if this king is alleged to be incapable of self-centered or vengeful motives, desiring only to love, it’s not so incredible at all; it’s disappointing.
And let me repeat, prison is just a social necessity to curtail those who would infringe others’ freedoms and rights. It keeps people in line through negative feedback, or in rarer cases imposes an opportunity to take stock of oneself. (Unfortunately it’s quite as likely to harden shrewdness and sociopathy). It also deters others from bad behavior. Eternal punishment, however, neither teaches or deters. It only avenges. It’s plain as day that this cannot be reconciled with an infinitely loving and forgiving God.
(If you’re *infinitely* loving, by the by, you don’t need to forgive anyway: there was no prior occasion of resentment. But so long as the word isn’t used in that active sense, it can still be legit).
On unworthiness: thinking about how sinful you are (and what better possible story for unquenchable guilt than “Oh! I myself murdered GOD”)–(though he was only pretending to die)–thinking about how sinful you are is just more pride, more self-involvement. Why not just look at yourself lucidly and calmly, like an adult, and raise your eyes to your neighbor? The helpful response when you realize how self-centered you are is to tread carefully, not to wail and gnash.
Full understanding equals full sympathy, for yourself and others.
Theologians say something like, he loves us but he’s obliged, against everything in his nature, to send us to Hell anyway, since he also respects us too infinitely to abridge our free will. (Or even worse, without Clive Lewis’ fancy footwork: he’s obliged to punish us). Do you actually believe this? And why do we lose the free will to change our minds once we get there and see how hot it is? This is virtuosic rationalization; these are not the parameters of free inquiry.
A bit of levity, at least: I won’t force you to do this, but the only other alternative is spending the rest of your life in prison.
Neil said: Yes, the other alternative is to be personally accountable for every one of your sins. Glad we have that cleared up!
SOBJ:
Did someone say that the King is incapable of self-centered or vengeful motives?
He is, after all, still King, so doesn’t the whole universe emanate from and operate by His will and pleasure?
And don’t the Scriptures record where God said, “Vengeance is mine”?
Hi Vance, so his love and forgiveness are limited, not infinite?
Seas, I hardly know where to start.
1) I for one don’t believe that prison is merely a corrective, a deterrant, or a sort of social quarantine to protect the law-abiding. It is — and it ought to be — a form of retributive punishment. To deny that humans are capable of acts that deserve such punishment is to deny our dignity as human beings, capable of moral choice.
2) It’s not at all “clear as day” that eternal punishment is irreconilable with infinite love and forgiveness. God loves us so much that He honors our free will: He doesn’t impose a loving relationship upon those who steadfastly rebel against Him, and He doesn’t impose forgiveness on those who arrogantly refuse to ask for it.
3) You’re absolutely wrong that theologians argue that God’s punishing us is “against everything in his nature”.
God’s nature is perfect justice, and the just punishment for willful rebellion against Him is eternal separation from Him. God’s justice is so inseparably part of who He is that He refused to offer grace “on the cheap.” That is what motivated the cross: at Cavalry we find the perfect expression of — and reconciliation between — God’s just and holy hatred of sin and His overflowing love for the sinner.
4) Specifically, I know C.S. Lewis’ writings very, very well, and I don’t think he ever argued that justice was contrary to God’s nature. If you can cite a quote to the contrary, I welcome you to do so.
5) I don’t see how it’s a manifestation of pride to believe the truth, that we are sinners in need of God’s grace and forgiveness. It’s not self-involvement to an unhealthy degree to acknowledge an external standard of morality, to acknowledge that one cannot meet that standard, and to cry out for help from the One who made you. And, frankly, looking to see how your neighbor is doing can give a person a false — and proud — sense that he’s alright, when the question isn’t, how are you doing compared to your imperfect neighbor, but how do you measure up to the perfect standard that we’ve all been given?
6) Last, but certainly not least, Christianity is emphatic that Jesus was not “only pretending to die”. His death was real: so was His resurrection, so His death wasn’t permanent, but that makes it no less genuine. Neither His death nor His resurrection was some sort of charade, deception, or illusion.
The agony in Gethsemane should be enough to put that ridiculous idea to rest.
Seas, to answer your follow-up question, God’s love is indeed infinite.
He loves us so much that He created us with free will. We’re not mere automata, we are persons in the fullest sense of the word. Because we have free will, we are truly capable of returning God’s love and not just giving the appearance of love.
But, because love requires free will, the capacity for love also necessarily entails the capacity to hate. We are capable of hating God, and in our sinful state that is exactly what we do.
God loves us so much that He won’t impose on our free will, so He won’t force those who hate Him into (a facsimile of) a loving relationship with Him.
Them’s the rules: God loves us so much that He wanted to make us capable of truly loving Him. But, in order to create a people who are capable of truly loving Him, God had to give us the free will to choose to hate Him. And He loves us so much that He will not impose Himself on those that hate them, and He thus allows them to choose to condemn themselves to Hell.
He loves us so much that He approaches our free will with a deadly seriousness. Those who demand that He do otherwise do not really know what they’re asking for: they are asking either for the impossible — a loving relationship in which free will is absent — or for God to be a tyrant.
Sounds like a great book
I will add it to my wish list.
I have heard simular stories to slow the free gift that is available to us.
I never heard the added ‘balance’ part that you mentioned.
Good stuff.
Barb
SOBJ: I’ll answer your question after you answer mine.
Hi Neil, great thoughts to ponder…thanks man!
Too heavy on the truth and you crush people; too heavy on the grace and they don’t realize they need Jesus.
This post brings to mind the Parable of the Vineyard Owner in Mark 12: 1-12. We would do well to remember that the chief priets, elders etc.. were indeed aware Christ was condeming their actions, but instead of it leading to repentance, it aroused only more hatred. Inorder to maintain their power and greed they had to kill the son. Corrupting God’s word today is in fact simply ‘killing the son’ but again because it is only the gospel preached that saves.
Matthew’s account of the Marriage fest sheds some light as well. Matthew 22:1-14. v. 7 the ‘king was enraged’ – judgement. v. 11 they refused to accept the proper wedding garments offered by the King – Christ’s righteousness, and would not admit their own spiritual poverty and were casts to the outter darkness – Hell.
I think an excellent verse regarding being too hard in gaining repentance is 2 Corinthians 7:9-10 ” I now rejoice, not that you were made sorrowful, but that you were made sorrowful to the point of repentance; for you were made sorrowful according to the will of God, so that you might not suffer loss in anything through us.
10 For the sorrow that is according to the will of God produces a repentance without regret, leading to salvation, but the sorrow of the world produces death.”
Paul did not regret sending the church of Corinith this letter because it caused them sorrow, but he was concerned that he might hvae driven some away v 8-9.
Nevertheless …..
Our free will, will never usurp God’s complete Sovereignty.
Well at least I pick up some tidbits of theology here, if nothing else. It’s a scrap of compensation for my time in case I don’t manage to save all your souls. And let it be known that I’m not one to object if people quote Bible verses at me. We both know I don’t take it as proof of anything, but I get some free in-context education and you get to quote the Bible, everybody wins.
Bubba said: God’s just and holy hatred of sin and His overflowing love for the sinner
Why hate sin? Why not just deeply understand it, and all the sorrow that attends upon it? “Just and holy hatred,” this is a pungent phrase. Hatred gives you a headache. Tibetans who were tortured for years in Chinese prisons will tell you that forgiveness, understanding, was essential for their literal sanity and survival.
Bubba said: I know C.S. Lewis’ writings very, very well, and I don’t think he ever argued that justice was contrary to God’s nature.
It was the free will thing I had in mind, not the “against his nature” part. I was referring to Craig’s paraphrase (in “Poor Arguments…pt. 2”), “there is no one in Hell who didn’t choose to be there.” Really, if God respects our free will above all, why does he perfunctorily remove it for eternity? I’ll tell you, burning people aren’t too proud to change their minds.
I was dramatizing the situation with “against his nature” rather than making a strict theological statement: (theological statements are poor psychology anyway): I meant, as a father he feels tenderly for his children, he really doesn’t like roasting them on the stove although he’s just got to. If you say he does like roasting them on the stove, fair enough.
Bubba said: His death was real: so was His resurrection, so His death wasn’t permanent, but that makes it no less genuine.
So while he was *really* dead, the universe was briefly godless? For a spell there was neither morality nor meaning and a thing could be both itself and not itself at the same time? Or was the Father able to cover for the Son while he took his polytheistic vacation?
Speaking of a thing can’t be both itself and not itself at the same time…God’s trinity would seem to suggest he’s the *worst* possible basis for the law of identity.
Bubba said: I for one don’t believe that prison is merely a corrective, a deterrant, or a sort of social quarantine to protect the law-abiding. It is — and it ought to be — a form of retributive punishment. To deny that humans are capable of acts that deserve such punishment is to deny our dignity as human beings, capable of moral choice.
In your own words then, you support acts which have no possibility of helping or ennobling *anyone*, but a certainty of making someone suffer—the ultimate of which retribution, is Hell. (…Compare to: ” I now rejoice, not that you were made sorrowful, but that you were made sorrowful to the point of repentance”). (I know you can also find passages supporting retribution, plenty. I’m just saying).
There’s no dignity in roasting in shame and flame for eternity with no chance to repent and be redeemed. It actually insults our dignity to say that we need punishment in order to know the proportions of the harm we’ve done—it overlooks our quietest heart, where every crude act registers and makes us more desperate to be whole. Brain research, statistics and all life experience point to the conclusion that making others suffer makes oneself suffer. It’s just bad for everyone. My interest is in easing pain. We have no time for projects of perpetuating it gratuitously. What do you think of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission?
“To deny that humans are capable of acts…” Humans are capable of terrible acts. (Terrible FOR somebody: insert this after every ethical evaluation I make). One can acknowledge this without saying they deserve punishment. I don’t know what this “deserve” really means. It strikes me as another of those arbitrary and harmful “transcendent” monotheistic morals derived from considerations other than happiness and suffering.
And “justice” considers a truncated biography. Very often a criminal will have suffered terrible “punishments” earlier in life which were equal to what he later came to “deserve.”
Bubba said: He doesn’t impose forgiveness on those who arrogantly refuse to ask for it.
Do you take that as a model—do you decline to “impose forgiveness” on those who don’t ask for it (i.e. most people), but rather resent them out of respect for their sovereignty? Have you ever felt someone’s quiet acceptance of you as an imposition? These are the twists we’ll get ourselves into by seeking to explain a (contradictory) phenomenon (a forgiving and gratuitously punishing God), before making sure it’s really there. -In seriousness and in a less adversarial mode: I’d love to hear anyone’s personal accounts of God in their lives. I feel like history and philosophy and textual criticism can’t be you-all’s main reasons for belief in God. I would endeavor to curb my irony while debunking personal testimonial. I don’t doubt or devalue spiritual experience, just the conclusions people draw from it. And getting inside Christians’ heads is a second educational compensation for the failure of my mission.
Bubba said: “looking to see how your neighbor is doing can give a person a false — and proud — sense that he’s alright”
I don’t mean comparison or judgment, just sympathetic understanding. Awareness has no inside or outside: it must illuminate all if it illuminates anything, all of the present moment, whether in you or your neighbor, without distinction. Your neighbor’s inner workings will be somewhat more inferential. But you can sense a lot through being present, and without coming to exclusive conclusions.
There’s no question of judgment whatsoever—just clear discernment. Judgment is something wholly distinct from clear perception. (This is how we get theistic morality, so far removed from immediate sensitivity to what each moment asks). Judgmental thoughts, too, can be clearly discerned as they arise–the seeing does all the work! It clarifies and orders everything! You don’t have to consider yourself a sinner or a saint or consider your neighbor a sinner or a saint. What we are is indescribable, changing from moment to moment. We will never ever “know” what we are in the sense of a description, yet every moment of direct present awareness is a moment of unmediated self-understanding, of no part left out—and nothing stored! No formula of understanding need be stored, when awareness itself is always available to illuminate what is. (Memory takes care of business marvellously without our help—all the more so when the mind is vivid and unbound).
You just see from moment to moment, vividly, wordlessly, what’s operating in either of you. This is all we need to make things whole, to awaken love.
Hi Vance, okay:
Vance Said: He is, after all, still King, so doesn’t the whole universe emanate from and operate by His will and pleasure?
No.
Great post and analogy Neil! Wonderful comments too! Mark, you shared some awesome Bible verses that truly added to this post!
The problem is that we are ignoring God’s holiness. His holiness is stressed far more than His love, and it is out of His holiness that He demands retribution for those who have sinned against Him. When we sin, we sin against a holy God. In other words, we rebel against Him. It’s not as though we have made some minor mistake, but we have made a major affront to God, in a real and personal way. (It’s not like the Mafia movies, “hey, it’s just business” as one gangster knocks off another.) It is all personal against God because He is OUR creator. He has given us life, health, food, the enjoyment of His creation, and despite all of that, we still sin against Him, thinking we deserve it all.
Sin is heinous not matter what level it is. It’s the same as spitting into the face of God. So He has every right to withhold His love from us. He is under no obligation to share His infinite love with us (it is infinite, because He is infinite. It is not infinite in whom He gives it to. He will have mercy on whom He has mercy upon). It is out of His love that He shows anyone mercy, grace or kindness. Again, He is under no obligation to do so, and that doesn’t deter from His goodness at all. He is the One who defines goodness, not the atheists or well intentioned moralist.
So if He shows wrath to some, and love to others, that is His decision, and we should rejoice if He has shown us the latter. He doesn’t owe it at all.
In view of all that, He still must deal with sin, and does so in one of two ways: hell or the cross. Since we have sinned against an eternal God, then eternal punishment, not correction, or time for reflection but punishment for our transgressions against Him, is just. Anything less than that, is mercy.
I don’t expect the avowed atheists to accept any of this. But write for my brothers and sisters in the Lord.
Neil,
Very good post. I love the quote and may use it tomorrow in my sermon.
Blessings
f we fail to see His holiness, we can never truly appreciate His love.
Seas,
I think you make the common mistake of judging God by human standards. He is not human. You also make the mistake of questioning the “rules of the game” as it were. Life for us is bound by certain expectations from God and we only have our lifetimes to fulfill or ignore them. He leaves it totally up to us, but it must be done now, while we live. That’s the way He laid it all out. You could just as easily ask why you weren’t born of another family and all you’d get is speculation. So it is with questioning God’s methods. Much of it has no explaination imparted to us and unfortunately for you, can only be answered at Judgement. I have similar questions of my own, but prefer to live as Christian a life as possible (accepting Christ as Savior, etc, etc, etc) and ask my questions then. That is, if I still care to know.
SOBJuice,
May I ask, what is your source for truth (if you believe there is such), and why should anyone believe it?
you say Why hate sin? Why not just deeply understand it, and all the sorrow that attends upon it? “Just and holy hatred,” this is a pungent phrase. Hatred gives you a headache. Tibetans who were tortured for years in Chinese prisons will tell you that forgiveness, understanding, was essential for their literal sanity and survival.
I hate sin, because God hates sin and that is deeply understanding it my friend. You don’t ‘hate’ only because it gives you a headache. you, you you Marsha Marsha Marsha!. Did you not know, God could give a rats arse how you or I feel?
I was in tortured in prison for 8 years and it was my hope of hate and revenge that was essential for my “literal sanity and survival”. Do you see how poor your “source” and or ‘arguement” is yet?
For those who haven’t read Alcorn’s “Grace and Truth Paradox” book, I HIGHLY recommend it. It is a quick read and a great book to have to lend to your fundamentalist, liberal, or postmodern friend.
tr
Hi Marshall Art,
You may have missed my earlier posts: do you think I’m struggling with faith or searching for faith or something…? I can’t quite tell how you took what I wrote. I actually don’t think in terms of God at all, it’s a foreign concept to me. My very faint hope with posts like the above, trying to point out contradictions etc., is that someone here might question some part of the edifice of their Christian belief. Even more than before, with this thread, I’m understanding what I perceive to be the onerous shackles placed on a psyche by a totalistic mental structure like Christianity. (At least in its very literal versions). I’m even catching hints of a built-in mechanism that says it’s dangerous to your very soul to give questions a thorough hearing. Thanks for trying to help; I’m sorry if my slippery rhetorical use of Christian language led you to believe I was some sort of Christian. I think I slightly forgot about the audience beyond the folks I’d already been dialoguing with.
Seas, the notion that we don’t question our faith is one of the biggest false arguments out there. Some may not, but most do. We’ve dealt with literally hundreds of objections and difficulties. Christianity says to “Test everything. Hold on to the good.” (1 Thessalonians 5:21 )
Seas,
You said “the onerous shackles placed on a psyche by a totalistic mental structure like Christianity.”
If I’m held by shackles, I ask for more. I’m a Christian because of my love for him, because of what He did for me.
“I’m even catching hints of a built-in mechanism that says it’s dangerous to your very soul to give questions a thorough hearing.”
I have questioned Him several times. He has given me answers in most cases. In a few cases, I acknowledged that He is greater than I and that He may answer me at a later time. He’s God and I’m not.
Hi Mark,
I was waiting for “SOBJ” to escalate…you did it tastefully the first time, so there’s still some mileage there.
My source of truth? Honestly the most trustworthy bedrock for me is not-knowing: listening deeply to all that’s here and now without any conclusions. The deeper truths of life, to me, are not any verbal propositions, they’re lived by the whole body and mind. Not knowing, mindfulness, actually has a fresher intelligence than any knowledge. Because it’s quite unmediated. And, it makes me happier and gentler and better humored and more appreciative of trees and rivers and babies.
That’s for the really important truths of living. For the truth or falsehood just of some point of knowledge, I do like anybody: I fiercely parse and exhaust the evidence, then go with whatever seems to best reflect my bigotry.
What’s your source of truth? If it’s the Bible, I’m sure it’s not *only* that. All day long each situation asks you what its truth is. The world is too big for any book.
You raise a good point about forgiveness, that it’s close to impossible when someone feels powerless and hunted. It can’t be forced anyway, it’s not something you DO. It comes with allowing everything that’s going on in you with full vulnerability. Hatred, terror, whatever, you just listen to it like it’s telling you its troubles. Sometimes when you get a good gentle look at some knot of resentment you may directly realize, I don’t really want to carry this around anymore. You’re doing yourself a favor before anyone else. And, allowing/forgiving others is impossible while not allowing/forgiving yourself. I mean physiologically impossible.
Is it unforgivable pedantry to ask for an exposition of you you you Marsha Marsha Marsha? That was pretty intriguing, kind of inspired. Seriously! Is a Marsha actually a something, like a Pollyanna or something…?
Neil said: Seas, the notion that we don’t question our faith is one of the biggest false arguments out there.
Yeah, but note the “I’m even catching hints” and “to give questions a THOROUGH hearing” qualifications. The theology is byzantine enough that it must take quite a lot of questioning to make sense of it. But the emotional weight on the questions–salvation or damnation–doesn’t make for an atmosphere of the lightheartedness of discovery. More than once–you’ve done it yourself–someone has said something like “all very well for your fun and games, but there’ll be no debate on the day of JUDGMENT.”
And basically, there’s just too much agreement among members of an organized religion, agreement about unseen things. I’m unaccustomed to it. It doesn’t happen in any other realm. The multiple tenets of the faith are decisively not presented as a buffet: it’s all or nothing about certain things.
Neil said: Just an observation, but sometimes atheists say Christianity isn’t true because we disagree on too much, yet you are saying we agree too much. You guys should pick one bad argument and just go with that
, because both arguments could work against atheism as well.
Randy: If you’d like to say, how did the answers come when you questioned God?
My standard whoops comment: First sentence: Should read: “You did it tastefully this time”
Seas,
The last time I questioned God was after a major loss in my life. Through prayer, God spoke to me. He pointed me to His Word. Through the help of some good Christian friends, He pointed me to His answers.
I also found someone new to fill the void that was emptied. There’s a verse in Genesis where Eve declares (I think after the birth of Seth) that God has given her another to replace the one she lost. That verse never made sense to me until I experienced the same feeling.
I searched the scriptures for answers and found His promises. I know that someday I’ll have all the answers. Today I see dimly, then I will see clearly.
I am concinced that if you (you personally or anyone else) search the scriptures with an open heart, He will show you His promises also.
Scanning this thread again, I notice a little coda I should offer Bubba.
Bubba said: I don’t see how it’s a manifestation of pride to believe the truth, that we are sinners in need of God’s grace and forgiveness. It’s not self-involvement to an unhealthy degree to acknowledge an external standard of morality, to acknowledge that one cannot meet that standard, and to cry out for help from the One who made you.
It’s a pretty fair point, and it shows me where my statement was too sharp. (Which can be a weakness of mine, you may have noticed). I’d said “thinking about how sinful you are is just more pride,” which might sound like I think self-examination is morbid. On the contrary, I think the outer life has no life without the inner life. I think any social good someone achieves is likely to be hollow if it doesn’t flow from the tender center of her life.
Only, the self-examination I favor is one of directly looking into one’s workings in the present moment, too closely for a description. It’s emotive regretting that strikes me as too theatrical. Your flawedness may be a melancholy point, but it shouldn’t be surprising and it isn’t really personal. How much more both effective and ennobling it is to take your foibles as the trouble of humanity itself, no more and no less–so you get to do work directly on the human condition, right here at home. It gives more enthusiasm for the study when it’s all just interesting and workable, impersonal data, the lab of yourself.
Randy–thanks for that statement of what it means to you.
Neil–Oh, I think you disagree too much, you agree too much, everything!
(Really).
Seas, said “the self-examination I favor is one of directly looking into one’s workings”
I agree with that and that’s how I found God’s promises when I was searching. The difference is, it wasn’t JUST self-examination. I did the examination in light of the Scriptures. I searched the Scriptures looking for feelings like I found in my heart (David’s writings were especially helpful to me).
In my examination, I knew that if I found something that the Scriptures did not support, that it was from Satan.
My search for answers was made easier because I knew that God loved me and that He sent His Son for me. I knew I might not have all the answers, but I knew that He told would tell me enough to ease my pains.
Thanks for letting me tell you this. I’ve been looking for the right opportunity to tell anyone who would listen how great He is.
Hello, “seasofbrightjuice”:
Your posts are interesting, and quite candidly, take at least a
couple of readings for me to begin to understand what you
are saying. You remind me of a philosophy professor I once
had at university.
Admittedly, I am somewhat obtuse, so perhaps you can help
me out of my fog by clarifying an item.
You stated: “And, allowing/forgiving others is impossible
while not allowing/forgiving yourself. I mean physiologically
impossible.”
I have balked every time I have read/heard the notion of
forgiving oneself. Here is why: I thought that forgiveness
can only occur if we forgive somebody else, or we are for-
given (by somebody else). It takes two to tango?
Forgive me if I seem dull, but I find it difficult to forgive myself
for my slowness of understanding. You would have to do that
for me according to every dictionary I could lay my hands on.
I hope you will respond, “seasofbrightjuice.”
“To forgive oneself”M? No, that doesn’t work: we have to be
forgiven. But we can only believe this is possible if we
ourselves can forgive.
I apologize: please ignore the paragraph after “I hope you
will respond . . . ” I should have used an editor.
Evening Randy and Dick, (don’t ever give Mark an occasion to address you both in the same comment…),
Randy: Thanks for the insights into your devotions. It’s a poignant account. I like those tales, but I should give fair warning: no chance of saving me! None. Doesn’t mean you can’t try–heartfelt pleas are very nice, more fun than apologetics. I like the attention.
I readily accept that a devotional relationship to life has benefits. I can see the value in living closely with numinous sayings from the Bible over weeks and years, how they might frame your days. I can imagine the devotion which the grand story elicits–that God became a very man to die on your behalf, and eternity is yours. I see how the image of an omniscient eavesdropper is a most effective embodiment of your own nobler aspirations, your own livelier awareness. When you’re looking to see gifts of God in your life, I understand that this will prime you to notice your blessings, while your hopeful engagement will create more positive situations. I see how prayer clarifies one’s desires. I see how the release in “I can’t do it myself!” opens up a space for life to live you. I just don’t begin to conclude therefore that Jehovah exists.
Where are David’s writings to be found? I found a David in Chronicles, but did he write some psalms or proverbs or something…?
Dick: Thanks for your interest and the chance to expand on what I mean by forgiveness. Good of you to read my posts twice, I appreciate it. I know my writing could stand to gain some clarity.
“Forgive” really just means to tenderly accept the reality of yourself and others—that this is how it is. You see the consequences of your actions, you understand how someone you’ve hurt can’t forgive you yet, you feel a little or a lot sad about it. But condemning yourself serves no good purpose. Wide and deep undertsanding is quite enough to make you repent of your folly. (If I can use “repent” without the sense of wailing and hair shirts).
Notice that when a parent, teacher, friend condemns you, you contract in defense. It’s the same when a voice in your own head condemns you. It isn’t conducive to kindness. Kindness needs strength.
It’s present awareness that “forgives”–it just reveals how things are without a smudge of extra interpretation. Its inherent atmosphere is perfectly understanding, relaxed, it cannot be otherwise. (Thus it allows all your feeling about the matter to blossom and release into unimpeded space—lets sincere sorriness flow, where before there had been armor against the pain of having hurt someone). Condemning yourself is extra interpretation, worse than superfluous for understanding how some regrettable situation has come about.
If you have the chance to apologize, that’s great. The other party may find some relief when you don’t hold yourself aloof but admit the harm you’ve done, and offer to make amends to whatever extent and in whatever way it is possible. If what they need is to shut you out of their lives, then that’s the way it is. Probably you’ll remember the episode with a pang from time to time. But to avoid repeating it, you need to walk on as lightly and alertly as possible. Let the memory’s feeling guide you clearly, not cloudily.
What I DON’T mean by forgiving yourself is a mere mental band-aid, “aww, don’t worry, you’re okay, you’re not so bad, you’re a good person really.” True tenderness comes when you’re willing to let everything reveal itself nakedly, without blame or justification. Truth and Reconciliation. I agree with you about the cheaper kind of self-forgiveness, and I was hesitant to use the words since people often mean it that way. The way I mean isn’t even a thought process, just an inevitable effect of receptive listening.
Seas,
David wrote much of the Psalms and much of Proverbs. Both helped me in my days of despair.
More important though, was the underlying faith I had going into those days. The Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles helped me build that faith, as did the rest of Paul’s letter. They gave me the confidence to look for God’s answers.
Two more comments, you said there’s “no chance of saving me”. That’s ok, it’s not my job to save you. I just have to tell my story.
You also talked about “a devotional relationship” and “living closely with numinous sayings from the Bible”
It’s much more than that. Jehovah (not a name I use often – but still His name) is a loving Father, who wants to spend time with us. I don’t have the devotion that I should, but my daughter recently told me that the reason she has a daily devotion was that she saw me reading my Bible and praying on a daily basis. She saw my walk with God and she realized how important it was.
Now, I’m a father (and a grandfather) and with kids moving away, I treasure the time I get to spend with them. I crave more time with them. That’s a reflection of how my Father feels for me. And for you.
Neil’s very gifted with apologetics, I’m glad. Someone needs to do that job and I’m simply not capable of taking the abuse he gets here. I can simply tell my story and hope it helps someone.
Neil, said it before, but it needs to be said again. Thank you for what you do here. Thanks for allowing me to play a part in your ministry.
SOBJuice says And, it makes me happier and gentler and better humored and more appreciative of trees and rivers and babies.
One day you will get past the ‘me’. We all have a ‘me’ just like opinions, niether make a truth.
I fiercely parse and exhaust the evidence, then go with whatever seems to best reflect my bigotry.
I would assume that you need no ’savior’ then, just a justification for bigotry? Like Neil said, those of us who are saved / believers have indeed questioned the evidence. One’s conclusions are indeed different, hence saved and unsaved, eh?
The world is too big for any book.
Common response, yet inadequate to a sincere seeker. The ‘book’ is God’s word. The paper it is wriiten on is man made. The truth it reveals is reality. Reality is flesh and blood. Christ was flesh, nailed to a cross, and resurrection is truth, eternal, and fullfillment to a text (reality and historical) to a promise made long ago. A promise and gift that will be rejected by those who flock to a more familiar mode, a universal mode of truth being personal. I recall a man named Diocletian AD 303, who made it a decree to kill all such Christ believers. By the year AD 305, he quit, went home to grow cabbage, unheard of in the Roman empire! The blood he had shed of those who had a knowledge, not a belief or opinion, had only multipled the good news of Christ. Poor Diocletian, eh?
You raise a good point about forgiveness, that it’s close to impossible when someone feels powerless and hunted.
I am sorry, it is not impossible. Christ did what we could not. Being powerless and feeling hunted are irrelevant to those whom are saved.
Hatred, terror, whatever, you just listen to it like it’s telling you its troubles. Sometimes when you get a good gentle look at some knot of resentment you may directly realize, I don’t really want to carry this around anymore.
Like I said, back to reality, flesh and blood. Your mystical spiritual double talk is transparent and been done spoken before and rejected for centuries. It may attract some agian in 2008, and those to whom it does, it will be you held accountable. That’s not my ‘bigotry’, that is historical and based in reality.
Is it unforgivable pedantry to ask for an exposition of you you you Marsha Marsha Marsha?
Brady bunch, get some air dude.
SOBJ:
To your question: Not any limits that I know of.
To your answer to my question: Cute, but evasive. If the universe does not emanate from him, then why call him Creator? If God is not sovereign, then why call him God?
If God is sovereign, and if the universe runs according to his will, is that selfish? And if so, so what? Somebody has to be boss!
And if the sovereign king decides to dispense justice or vengeance or mercy, who are the created to question him?
I know that view is a little old-fashioned. So sue me.
Seaser,
I did not take you for a Christian struggling with the faith. Nothing in your comments suggest that. Rather, you struck me as one determined to provoke struggle in others. If true, shame on you.
My point was in reference to your first comments way up above that questioned eternal punishment. Frankly, at first hearing, and often there afterwards, many wonder why it’s necessary. But all who do, so so due to their own human standards of cruel and unusual punishment. Again, God is NOT human. Things that offend Him don’t always offend us. Generally, those things offend us BECAUSE they offend Him. For example, I have no personal problem with porn, EXCEPT that it offends God. I understand the downsides for our culture and society, but for me personally, not offensive. Frankly, without God, there’s no need to care about porn’s affect on the culture. Why should one care about anything? Only for self protection and preservation, but those with the firepower, literally or otherwise, can get through life just fine no matter what.
As for forgiveness, it is the granting of or requisition for relief for a debt. In the case of harming another, justice demands compensation. The harmed is entitiled to it, but he can “forgive” the debt. The aggressor can request forgiveness out of feelings of remorse or fear of retribution.
What you seem to be looking at is dealing with guilt and/or remorse, the mere presence of such is a display of kindness. It is retroactive kindness. “I hurt you. I don’t like to hurt people. I wish to make amends.” Forgiveness can only be granted by the one owed the debt. I suppose that one could forgive one’s self for self-harm (I’m such an idiot—How could I?—Don’t sweat it dude, you’re way cool!) and in a sense, one harms one’s self when harming others.
I don’t believe it is healthy to wallow in guilt or remorse, but to be free of it completely is to be cold and indifferent. In fact, it’s logical to assume that being completely free of guilt can lead to more harm done to others.
I-yi-yi, this conversation is getting a tad too diffuse for me to handle. My replies will all be a little rushed tonight, apologies for that.
Hi Randy,
Thanks for the David tip, and for bringing up the Father angle, which is something I’d like to go into some time. I’m gonna have to give it short shrift tonight though, since you’re not arguing exactly (thanks for the respite), while Vance and Mark and Marshall are.
I don’t know whether you thought so but just in case, my “more fun than apologetics” wasn’t a dig at Neil. (Sledding’s more fun than homework). Sometimes apologetics do seem like after-the-fact reasoning though, like rationalization.
Hi Vance,
‘Twas a necessary cuteness. I couldn’t answer any other way. Okay, so you were asking me, if God’s sovereign can’t he do what he likes? Sure. I just don’t see how you can square that with the limitless love business. If my love were limitless but became spite when it met a limit like someone disobeying me, this love would not be very limitless! What could you possibly mean by “limitless” then?
Vance said: “…is that selfish? And if so, so what?”… “Somebody has to be boss! And if the sovereign king decides to dispense justice or vengeance or mercy, who are the created to question him?”
You could say the same of Saddam Hussein. Might makes right? Might makes GOOD? Might makes worthy of ecstatic worship? So do you opt for the first horn of Plato’s dilemma, that things are good because God does them (rather than that God does them because they’re good)? A God who throws tantrums is not a perfect being in my book.
God got lonely and made a universe, but he made it all about him? Doing good works and healing the sick is less important than recognizing him? I’d like to see all the faces around me as equally worthy of a reverent heart, but God would burn me forever for revering my fellows in a democratic fashion when he is more equal than others. (An invisible book character! When real hearts are in front of me all day).
Do you not find this an odd plan for Creation? Where reverencing it and caring for it can still result in my being damned, since I was meant to see it as all about him–while I can get saved despite treating the creation somewhat callously? See if you can objectify it just for a second instead of treating it as the real order of things–consider it like a piece of science fiction, and tell me that this isn’t a curious overarching aim for a Creation, to worship him.
Hi Mark,
Feeling small and hunted is a condition of the mind, of thought, a condition which can’t occupy the same mind at the same time as the condition of forgiveness. Of course forgiveness is possible in any *external* conditions. It happens *inexorably* with stillness and understanding, in any mind that performs the experiment. Therefore Jesus is quite redundant. (Though prayer, as a gesture of willingness and helplessness, might serve as a trick to point out to yourself the qualities of open awareness).
My mystical moves are anything but doubletalk, and they’re all flesh and blood. They’re directly observable and as reproducible as a cake recipe. “Saved” and “grace” and “savior” are the vague mysticism. I want to know moment by moment what’s going on in your head, body, relationships that you’re calling these words. I believe it’s nothing more or less than certain thoughts producing certain feelings.
The thought of an omniscient parent who will be with you every moment for eternity, for instance, is one of the most powerful thoughts ever thunk. We see what a powerful incentive for good behavior even a temporal parent’s approval provides. But some of us can’t help but notice that all the voices in our heads come from our heads, so that avenue to an orderly life is closed to us. Luckily it’s not hard (with a little maturity) to find good reasons to be beautiful to oneself at all times and in all places. Namely, that it’s happiness unsuspected on this earth.
Truth isn’t personal in meditative seeing. Everyone has different stuff in their heads, but the light that illuminates it is the same for everyone, since it’s not a thing at all, just nondual transparency and clarity. (Nondual: no separation between the light and what’s lit. It’s all awareness). Everyone who looks close finds the same thing: a total flux, not one cubit of their experience remaining the same for more than a single moment. When you take this good look, it’s as undeniable as your hand in front of your face that there’s no stable, independently existent self anywhere in you, in any of the whirling thoughts and feelings and flesh. And each constituent (thought, feeling, sensation) is *itself* without self — made entirely out of other things, entirely temporary.
And when you see that nothing in the universe has any truly, independently existing self (of course there are provisional selves, patterned systems like you me Marsha etc.), just a nowness of compound transience with nothing outside it, you find a super-Self highly unlikely. What is God made out of that is permanent and changeless? Not his thoughts, not his feelings, these all change. Any *thing* that exists, physical or mental, is compound and transient. If God is a something, he has no self; he too is subject to conditions, decays and diffuses into conditions. If he’s not a thing, well, then we’re in agreement.
And what of me, then, could spend eternity with God? Remove part of my brain and you can give me a new personality. Which of the two would join my grandma in heaven?
So, I want you to give me a cake recipe account of what happens in your mind and body when you ask Jesus for help to forgive.
(“SOBJuice:” once was enough, brother. How about “Sob Juice,” that’s a little gentler).
Hi Marshall Art,
I actually realized on a second reading that maybe you did consider me an unbeliever, and I meant to write as much, but I was tired and I forgot. Apologies for that.
M.A. said: Rather, you struck me as one determined to provoke struggle in others. If true, shame on you.
My motives are various, but a desire to provoke strife is not among them. They include straightening my own thoughts (…who was it said that criticism of religion is the beginning of all philosophy?); venturing out of the Atheist ghetto to speak to living theists instead of strawmen; learning how to speak productively with believers, where to prod and where to be gentle; what might I value in religion, what would it be merely destructive to debunk; and, indeed, my grand experiment whose failure seems very probable: seeing whether I could sow doubts. I don’t want to sow doubts to cause strife. I would just love if those old eggs of revealed religion cracked a little so we could together enjoy the omelette of truly experimental and evidentiary spirituality.
I would also like to point out that no-one says “shame on you” to someone debating politics, economics or any thing else besides religion. (Mmm, possible exception of astrology). Yet it’s not an inconsequential matter–as long as any book is the word of God, it’s beyond the bounds of reasoned argument, and this has countless bad effects. (Persecution of gays, opposition to stem cell research, too-sharp divisions among a common humanity–what could be sharper than saved vs. lost–I notice it acutely on this blog–, etc.). I would love for the prestige of religion to erode in our consciousness–the more painlessly and victimlessly the better–since its popularity is self-perpetuating: people figure there must be something to those myths if so many believe them (rich, poor, black, white, smart, dumb).
M.A. said: The harmed is entitled to [compensation], but he can “forgive” the debt.
Material compensation is something quite different from revenge. Making amends is something quite different from indefinite mental self-torture.
First, please note that when I first brought up self-forgiveness, it was in the context of advice on how to forgive others. It had nothing to do with getting off the hook on the cheap or any such.
I don’t advocate either trying to get rid of guilt or perpetuating it—just looking at it deeply. Deep, honest looking into something leaves you both more tender (remorseful, if you like) and freer to move on. Free BECAUSE you’ve told the whole truth to yourself, but nothing extra. Remorse, you could say, is nothing extra, just a clean perception of the sorrows attendant upon something I’ve done, sorrow for others and sorrow for myself; while guilt is all about *me*, a repetitive narrative of how bad I am. Guilt will be likely to provoke a reaction of defensiveness in me, which is not conducive to saying I’m sorry. With a general compassion and understanding for all concerned, I have the strength and desire to make heartfelt amends.
Again I emphasize: seeing, understanding, does all the work. There’s no manipulation in any direction, so no chance of stifling constructive feelings. It’s the very opposite of cold and indifferent, it’s rediscovering your total humanity.
Two more brief notes. For Mark: I got to rambling and I forgot to make it clear that with all that no-self stuff, I was addressing the charge of “personal” truth. I was saying there’s no democracy in what a person sees when she examines her moment-to-moment experience really closely, you either see the truth or you don’t, to a certain extent.
And a general point, it’s a note Marshall’s hit most recently but he’s not the only one: “it’s not for humans to make God’s rules” is a place where reasoned discussion has broken down. It’s circular and nonsensical to me, since I’m convinced men and women have made all God’s rules and God himself.
When God’s ways can’t be explained, are utterly contradictory, then reason cannot be very loudly trumpeted as the road to belief. Theism rests content and complacent with its own made-up mysteries, while intolerant of real mysteries in science.
Neil said: Seas, please at least come up with something original. The “intolerant of real mysteries in science” straw man line is old, tired and frankly rather stupid.
Seas, you said “But some of us can’t help but notice that all the voices in our heads come from our heads.”
When I heard the voices in my head, I wanted to know where they were coming from. I realized that some came from my head, some from the words of people around me. But some came from God. I searched His word and saw that the voices I heard were Him speaking to me.
But you have to be careful with voices. God is not the only power in the universe. I’m not just talking about Satan, I don’t think I’m anywhere near important enough to deserve a visit from him. Rather, he sends out his lowly minions to take care of tempting me.
You have to have a basis for distinguishing God’s voice vs. Satans (or his minions). That basis is the bible.
You also said your motive was to see what might you value in religion. Trust me, religion will get you no where. God will save you.
Then you said “Everyone has different stuff in their heads, but the light that illuminates it is the same for everyone when you see that nothing in the universe has any truly, independently existing self …just a nowness of compound transience with nothing outside it, you find a super-Self highly unlikely.”
Wow, that’s deep. The last time I heard words like that, the air was think with smoke and it wasn’t from tobacco. At the risk of trying to put words into your mouth, this sounds like trying to say “I am one with the universe”.
This just doesn’t fit. I won’t get into a deep discussion on this, I’m not capable. I just know that I’m separate from the universe and that I am an “independently existing self .”
I’d suggest if you really are seeking more value, that you seek in His Word. Asking questions about His Word will help, but trying to sow doubts here, you’re wasting pixels.
Oh, I didn’t take your comment about apologetics as a dig at Neil. And I suspect he didn’t either. I don’t think you’ll catch him apologizing for apologetics.
Randy said: When I heard the voices in my head, I wanted to know where they were coming from. I realized that some came from my head, some from the words of people around me. But some came from God. I searched His word and saw that the voices I heard were Him speaking to me.
Randy, why are you sure it’s God’s voice, and that you’re not suffering from Schizophrenia?
It’s guess it’s great that you’re ignoring the “bad” voices, but you might be better served by seeing a mental health professional.
Neil said: Cute but pointless ad hom, Havok. Christians test things in light of scripture to know if they are sound or not.
Hi Neil. “Intolerant of real mysteries in science” may have been too bluntly stated and misinterpretable, but it’s literally accurate. I don’t mean Galileo. I mean substituting “God did it” where a point is still debated. Rushing to an answer is being intolerant of questions.
Morning Randy. We certainly are individuals in a conventional and provisional sense, but not in an ultimate sense. This is directly observable. What are you calling a self in you? What is there in you that isn’t compound and transient? (You don’t have to get into it if you don’t want to, that’s fine. I anticipate I’ll have my hands full anyway).
When you explore this experientially, meditatively, it’s more than stoner entertainment. It’s liberating. At any given moment when there isn’t awareness–have a look!–you’re identifying with some combination of thought, feeling, an internal picture of the body in space, etc. as a substantial and persisting self. Set against a world. But the second you look at it, it relaxes–you see how makeshift it is, that you’re in fact identifying with a constant stream of changing phenomena as “self.” The only continuing factor is identification, rising and falling with each phenomenon.
Each moment of identification includes anxiety, is part of a pitched or low-level battle between self and threatening world. Take identification with some argument you’ve just made–the feeling can be almost that it threaten you bodily to be proved wrong. But when awareness comes to it, when you listen mindfully to the anxious sounds in your head, that anxious psychic body collapses. You dwell as awareness again, or as emptiness, observing the rising and falling of self rather than taking birth as each psychic body that comes along. Your flesh feels more porous and loosey-goosey, more generous.
In this open condition, you’re less defensive. In not defending against people, intimacy becomes possible. Your provisional self functions much more alertly, harmoniously, when you’re sensitively aware of its movements in this way rather than dramatically inhabiting each movement in mental darkness.
SeaSo,
I sea you didn’t answer why should anyone believe you?. Be honest eh? You have nothing but an opinion. Knowledge is quite different. All opinions are not of equal value. If you disagree, and believe all opinions are equal, please say so. Believers have hard evidence, historical, archeological, and all are based in reality (flesh and blood, the physical bodily Resurrection of Jesus).
Believers are not intolerant of real mysteries in science, what ever that means. I am quite sure the presuppositions you have about the definition of ’science’ and ‘reality’ are quite different from mine. In fact, “God did it” can be argued with a much larger degree of evidence in the natural world than, “poof” we have change without a agent of cause for change, or the fact that we have living cells consisting of parts that cannot survive without the existence of the others parts. Humm, did they just poof togther? Is your answer based in a mystery or reality? The historical account of God’s creation, the evidence in reality (flesh – Jesus), and the continued Archeologist’s shovel turns, continue to validate what you dismiss, and I give thanks.
Have a bright day!
Morning, Mark. You should believe me if you have a good look into your own consciousness and discvover it to be so. An opinion is a product of thought. What a meditator sees is not seen through thought, just direct attention. Contemplative findings (including the absence of a self) are confirmed piecemeal by brain science, but we’re still dependent on first-person exploration. (And of course for liberating contemplative perspectives to permeate a life, that’s entirely a first-person endeavor).
You can get a glimpse of non-self in a minute if you know what to look for, what the proposition really means. But meditation is a subtle art, not quickly learned, and to see it to your total satisfaction requires a non-ordinary stillness and clarity of mind. (At least at first–once you’ve had a decent look at it you can see that it’s the case whether the mind is still or turbulent). The chaotic mind most of us are satisfied with throws out ridiculous views of things incessantly; it has little hope of perceiving what’s true.
The subtlety of meditation forever slowly increases, year after year. There are observable changes in the brain and palpable shifts in the daily texture of consciousness.
To conserve energy for my multiple sparring partners, I hope you’ll forgive me if for the moment I avoid opening new fronts on intelligent design and historical evidence for magic. But *those* are decidedly matters of opinion.
But, evidence? The Christian story has a mountain of improbable points to prove. An interventionist God is observable nowhere in this lawful universe. Perfectly redundant. What *do* you make of the total statistical failure
of intercessory prayer in that study?
I like SeaSo much better, thanks. I vote for Seesaw.
You should believe me if you have a good look into your own consciousness and discvover it to be so
You can get a glimpse of non-self in a minute if you know what to look for, what the proposition really means.
on these notes, I will leave this conversation with folks much more patient than I or perhaps just bored silly.
What *do* you make of the total statistical failure
of intercessory prayer in that study?
ROTFLMAO….
Where is Shirley Maclaine when you really need her???
Seas, I’m not going to try to wade too deep in your writing that, honestly, I often cannot wholly penetrate. Maybe your intent isn’t primarily to communicate clearly, to make your abstract ideas comprehensible to others, and so maybe I’m wrong to expect that.
But I do want to address your claim that, “An interventionist God is observable nowhere in this lawful universe.”
Almost immediately before this claim, you seem to dismiss as “decidedly matters of opinion” eyewitness claims of the miraculous. Perhaps this isn’t true of you specifically, but I have seen people engage in a great deal of question-begging on the matter of miracles.
Presuming that miracles don’t occur, they discard as untrustworthy or even irrelevant all eyewitness testimony to the contrary. Having discarding that evidence, they then claim that there’s no evidence that miracles occur to prove what they just presumed.
–
A more basic question, though, would be, just how in the world do you know that this universe is “lawful”?
Theism accounts for a ordered and predictable universe: though it cannot rationally exclude divine intervention, theism gives us good reason to believe that — excluding those instances of intervention — the universe proceeds in a well ordered fashion.
Without theism, the idea that the universe is ordered can only be assumed, and that assumption can never be proven.
–
And, for myself, I don’t find the results statistical studies into the efficacy of intercessory prayer to be the least bit conclusive.
If the claims of Christian theology are true, the object of intercessory prayer is a personal yet omniscient deity. God would certainly not be ignorant of the scientists’ ludicrous attempt to treat Him as a thing to be studied rather than a Creator to be worshipped and obeyed.
Simple reason will tell you that, if you’re trying to create a psychological study to guage a person’s natural reactions, the results are not necessarily valid if the person becomes aware that he’s part of a study. Since God is omniscient, there’s no way He can not be aware of the scientists’ real intent, so the results of trying to study Him in a clinical sense are never necessarily valid.
Appeals to just such an attempt to study God in this way is an indication that a person a very long way to go in thinking about theology.
This all reminds me of when Jesus spoke with Nicodemus.
John 3:7-9
“7. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again.
8. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.
9. Nicodemus answered and said unto him, How can these things be?”
And also,
1 Corinthians 2:13-15
“13. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.
14. But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.
15. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man.”
If one is to understand the things of the spirit, one needs to be spiritually born… spiritually alive… eternally saved through trusting repentance toward God on their part and forgiveness to them by God.
Btw, nice post Neil… the picture painted in that quote is wonderful. It makes me want to get that book hehe.
Hi Bubba,
Your orderly posts are always easy on the head. I know too well the same cannot be said of mine. Of course I want to communicate clearly, though! Cut me some slack when it comes to non-self and non-independent existence of phenomena, these are subtle matters. I grant that they sound quite abstract when they’re unfamiliar, but when you understand what they’re getting at they’re directly observable and indeed delightful. Not speculative, like eternally existing Creator and substitutionary atonement.
Bubba said: just how in the world do you know that this universe is “lawful”? … Without theism, the idea that the universe is ordered can only be assumed, and that assumption can never be proven.
This is getting too fancy. I doubt your belief in God precedes or causes your trust in gravity. An atheist baby (i.e., any baby who hasn’t learned to talk) engages full-time in the study of the universe’s laws. She trusts gravity through hearing the word of gravity, not the word of God.
(I guess there might be randomness or such like at the quantum level, but there’s lawfulness enough for a baby’s studies).
Lawlessness would still be a law–a universe has to be *some* way.
“Without theism, the idea that the universe is ordered can only be assumed”–what do you mean exactly? More of this business about how making sense requires a mad scientist? That’s a stretch. “And that assumption can never be proven”–how can it be proven *with* theism? You’d have to prove God.
Speaking of which.
Bubba said: …ludicrous attempt to treat him as a thing to be studied rather than a creator to be worshipped and obeyed … Appeals to just such an attempt to study God in this way is an indication that a person a very long way to go in thinking about theology.
That’s theology as the sewer into which all contradictions flow, the activity of redefining God so he can’t be caught. Without something observable, theology’s definitions have no more validity than astrology’s.
In order to intervene, God would have to move some molecule or other where no other cause could be traced– even just in order to answer someone’s prayer for inner strength. You can’t define an interventionist God out of physical measurability.
So God declined to heal 1200 people in order to spite some scientists?
Still, I don’t say it’s conclusive. I’m just asking whether some part of you would have been hopeful that there *would* be some effect, and whether you think that intervention is in principle measurable.
Cpt_starfox said: If one is to understand the things of the spirit, one needs to be spiritually born
Not picking on you, captain, just want to use this as an example. While Christianity may counsel reason, its many statements like the above seem like they should force the admission that faith is not reason. The place where the “leap of faith” happens is a place where reason is not. Can we agree on that? (Anyone)?
Havok,
Neil did a good job of answering for me (although I have been accused of being schizo on occasion).
Simply put, test the voices, or better test the answers to your questions against the scriptures. If they match, it’s an answer from God. If they don’t or if you can’t find the answer, keep trying.
God speaks through his messengers too, so if a preacher or blogist says something, it may be a Godly answer, but it should be tested against the scriptures.
Neil said: Cute but pointless ad hom, Havok. Christians test things in light of scripture to know if they are sound or not.
Not sure how indicating that hearing voices is possibly a sign of schizophrenia is an ad hom, but whatever.
Mark said: Believers have hard evidence, historical, archeological, and all are based in reality (flesh and blood, the physical bodily Resurrection of Jesus).
Well, not quite evidence, but Neil has tried to show the Gospels are reliable before, so we’ll leave it there.
Mark said: In fact, “God did it” can be argued with a much larger degree of evidence in the natural world than, “poof” we have change without a agent of cause for change, or the fact that we have living cells consisting of parts that cannot survive without the existence of the others parts. Humm, did they just poof togther? Is your answer based in a mystery or reality?
And that simple sentence shows you’re ignorant of evolutionary theory. I think that was what seasofbrightjuice was getting at.
Mark said: The historical account of God’s creation, the evidence in reality (flesh – Jesus), and the continued Archeologist’s shovel turns, continue to validate what you dismiss, and I give thanks.
A book which was written in the past is likely to include historical features. This does nothing to validate the miraculous claims of the Bible.
Bubba said: Presuming that miracles don’t occur, they discard as untrustworthy or even irrelevant all eyewitness testimony to the contrary. Having discarding that evidence, they then claim that there’s no evidence that miracles occur to prove what they just presumed.
And if we accept the eyewitness testimony for Christian miracles, we then have to accept the hindu, the muslim, the UFO encounters, big foot etc etc etc. How do you judge which are “real”?
Bubba said: Without theism, the idea that the universe is ordered can only be assumed, and that assumption can never be proven.
That’s exactly how science works. We don’t “know” that the universe is ordered. But so far it appears to be. I can’t accept a universe with an interventionist God being lawful and ordered, as there is no knowledge of when and where those laws would be broken – it would be a capricious universe.
cpt starfox said: If one is to understand the things of the spirit, one needs to be spiritually born… spiritually alive… eternally saved through trusting repentance toward God on their part and forgiveness to them by God.
So, to understand you I have to believe something which to me is unbelievable and just go with it? Not to mention you guys usually say that God chooses people to be saved. So I not only have to suspend my rationality, but hope that something which I don’t think exists will choose to save me? Its a bit of a tall order cpt
Randy, what do you mean “test against the scriptures”? If you mean simply whether the voice matches what is found in the bible, then I think that is a terrible way for you to test the voices.
You’ve likely studied the bible, so you know it fairly well. The voices come from your own mind, therefore since you understand scripture, the voices are possibly in accordance with it.
Hearing voices is a symptom of schizophrenia, whether you believe one/some/all of them are God or not. Even if it were God, how do you know He isn’t lying to or misleading you, as the Bible says He has in the past?
Seas, I didn’t say a belief in God precedes my trusting that the universe is predictable: what I’m saying is that that trust has no grounding if God doesn’t exist.
No amount of observing that the universe appears to behave predictably can prove that it actually is predictable: the attempt to assert otherwise is to commit the logical fallacy of affirming the consequence. The only thing that can provide real confidence in the predictability of the universe is if its Creator tells us His universe is predictable.
–
I didn’t say that God’s presence cannot be observed, only that God is not subject to the whims of a scientist who thinks He can be studied like just another organism. God reveals on His timetable, in a manner of His choosing, and He cannot be induced to do otherwise.
And it seems to me that all mentally competant adults can perceive from their own experiences three things that materialistic reductionism cannot possibly explain and for which theism offers a very compelling account:
Free will. Human rationality. Objective morality.
We are truly free beings, but that is only because God has made us at least partially independent of the physical universe around us. We are capable of rational thought, but that is only because God has allowed us to perceive the transcendent maxims on which all logic is based. And we know that we are obligated to obeying a transcendent moral law, but that is only because God has revealed that law to us.
In order to intervene, God would have to move some molecule or other where no other cause could be traced– even just in order to answer someone’s prayer for inner strength. You can’t define an interventionist God out of physical measurability.
Actually, I can. A timeless and eternal God can respond to a prayer made this very night (or tomorrow night) by having already built this universe with that prayer in mind. It could be that many answered prayers are built in to the universe’s initial conditions.
But I do think that God intervenes directly, at least in those miracles — such as the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection — that seem to require such intervention.
The question is, how could you prove that a miracle did or did not happen after the fact? Suppose I presented you with a bottle of wine from the feast at Cana, wine which Jesus miraculously produced from water — or a man with perfect vision who Jesus cured of blindness. You can verify that the bottle contains wine, but you can’t prove that it was never water.
(Well, it was water, at one point: as C.S. Lewis pointed out in Miracles, many of the miracles of Christ were doing locally and immediately what God does universally and slowly: wheat reproduces, and so does marine life, so the multiplying of the loaves and fish isn’t inconsistent with what the Father does already in nature.)
And, you can verify that the man can see, but not that he was previously blind. In both cases, you have to rely on eyewitness testimony.
You say, regarding divine intervention, that “God would have to move some molecule or other where no other cause could be traced.” I can agree with that, but let’s take the simple case of a terminally sick woman becoming well: do her doctors have a comprehensive account of every atom in her body, each of the seven billion, billion, billion atoms in a human body? Even if we know the laws of physics perfectly, we wouldn’t be able to exclude the possibility that God intervened in that body without such a comprehensive account, right?
If God does intervene in the universe, that intervention would be measurable, but only in theory. At least at the moment and for the forseeable future, we do not and could not have a sufficiently comprehensive account of the universe to detect or discount most measurable interventions.
And to this…
So God declined to heal 1200 people in order to spite some scientists?
…I ask, were these scientists concerned about these people’s health out of good, decent Christian charity, or were these patients means to the end of proving or disproving God? If those scientists have such disregard for God’s commandment and their fellow man that they care for the health of others only in the confines of a juvenile experiment, why should God indulge these skeptics?
–
And, to answer your question, faith isn’t reason, and faith requires more than reason, but faith is contrary to reason. The truth is, the greatest enemy to consistent faith is rationality: it’s irrational emotions.
SOBJ:
Your questions are good ones, actually, and interesting to ponder.
I think you make some presumptions about my position that are incorrect. Unfortunately, I do not have the time right now to read all these comments. I would like to do so before I can comment further. Perhaps I will make it back before you lose interest in this thread.
Vance
Rather, faith is NOT contrary to reason.
Briefly, Havok:
And if we accept the eyewitness testimony for Christian miracles, we then have to accept the hindu, the muslim, the UFO encounters, big foot etc etc etc. How do you judge which are “real”?
It’s not logically necessary that belief that some miracles occurred means that one must accept that all accounts of the miraculous occurred, but it’s worth noting that Christian theology doesn’t preclude the possibility that people in non-Christian environments have witnessed genuine miracles, as part of God’s general grace: it’s only that we will disagree about its source.
One thing that helps determine the reliability of a claim to the miraculous is the credibility of those making the claim: the Apostles, for instance, were in an excellent position to know for certain whether they personally encountered the resurrected Christ, and their claims that they did lead to persecution and death. Few people knowingly die for a lie, so that lends credibility to their claim.
The other thing that helps validate the central miraculous claims of Christianity is that the miracles and their meaning explain so much of what’s around us. The universe contains both tremendous beauty and horrific cruelty, in opposition to both the hedonists and the gnostics: Christians claim that the universe isn’t simply good or evil, but fallen, and the Crucifixion and Resurrection help explain this by pointing out both the cause of our fallenness (our sin) and God’s ultimate plan in dealing with it (His redemption of us).
I grant that this second explanation isn’t going to be helpful to you: I think it’s something that must be seen from within a maturing faith, but the way that I would explain it is that the apparent riddle of the Cross and the empty tomb unravels the mysteries of life around us, to the degree that it appears that all of history and the universe itself were made for those events. The miracles prove to be the lynchpins or fulcrums of existence, and that lends them credibility as being from the Source of all existence.
You write:
I can’t accept a universe with an interventionist God being lawful and ordered, as there is no knowledge of when and where those laws would be broken – it would be a capricious universe.
It would be a capricious universe only if it were created, guided, and intruded upon by a capricious creator.
Instead, if God is consistent — eternal, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and perfect — He will intervene only when it makes sense for Him to do so, for instance when doing so is the only or best way to reveal Himself and who He is to the men and women He created.
Lewis used the analogy of art, of writing a poem or a song. The true great artist knows the rules of meter and rhyme, of chords and rhythm, but he doesn’t slavishly obey them: he typically obeys those rules, but he also breaks them occasionally, at just the right time to make just the right point.
God is an artist — the Artist, really. He created the rules by which the universe operates, created the universe to obey those rules most of the time, and sustains the universe as it moves along in history. But every so often, He adds the artistic touch of the miraculous: the creator of the rules of His art, He is not the slave to those rules, and He will break them — rarely and judiciously — to make His masterpiece.
“Not picking on you, captain, just want to use this as an example. While Christianity may counsel reason, its many statements like the above seem like they should force the admission that faith is not reason. The place where the “leap of faith” happens is a place where reason is not. Can we agree on that? (Anyone)?”
Seas, keep in mind that when Christians explain our worldview we use the Bible. We have arrived at the conclusion that it is God’s word and know it is the truth. We don’t use that as the reasons you should believe it, but it is logical for us to use it to explain our worldview. The faith is grounded in reason and evidence.
“Intolerant of real mysteries in science” may have been too bluntly stated and misinterpretable, but it’s literally accurate. I don’t mean Galileo. I mean substituting “God did it” where a point is still debated. Rushing to an answer is being intolerant of questions.
That’s just it – we don’t just rush to an answer. We’ve actually thought quite a bit about this. Materialists substitute “naturalism did it” just as often.
Bubba said: The only thing that can provide real confidence in the predictability of the universe is if its Creator tells us His universe is predictable.
Which requires proof of the Creator. Are there specific references in the bible to the universe (or at least the cosmology as represented within) being ordered?
Neil said: Yes.
Bubba said: Free will. Human rationality. Objective morality.
In the face of an omniscient, omnipotent creator, there is no free will.
Neil said: I disagree. There are different views on free will within orthodox Christianity, so one must be careful to define “free will” before one makes such statements. For example, reformed Christians will assert that we have free will, but that within our sinful nature we can’t turn to God on our own.
Human rationality (well, as much humanity is rational) can be explained as an evolutionary trait.
“Objective” morality as much as we actually see agreement within humanity, can also be explained from an evolutionary viewpoint. There is no need to invoke transcendant morality, and even if there was a reason to invoke it, there would be no reason to invoke them being derived from a Creator.
Neil said: We’ve been through this. You can’t explain “morality” through evolution without changing the definition of “morality” to mean something different than what people normally mean it to be.
I’m really quite tired of pointing this out, which means future comments repeating this evolutionist assertion may not get posted. (Just fair warning.) If you think you have a great case for it then you’ll want to put that on your blog.
Bubba said: Even if we know the laws of physics perfectly, we wouldn’t be able to exclude the possibility that God intervened in that body without such a comprehensive account, right?
Without that comprehensive knowledge, we cannot assert that God did intervene. While there is a “natural” explanation, then God is not required. Doesn’t necessarily mean He didn’t do anything, but that what was observed didn’t require His intervention.
Bubba said: At least at the moment and for the forseeable future, we do not and could not have a sufficiently comprehensive account of the universe to detect or discount most measurable interventions.
That’s why the weak atheist position is to assert that God is unlikely, not that He certainly doesn’t exist.
Bubba said: I ask, were these scientists concerned about these people’s health out of good, decent Christian charity, or were these patients means to the end of proving or disproving God?
The scientists were likely concerned about the patients health, as most humans would be. The patients were presumably getting the best medical attention they could. The scientists were simply trying to see if prayer had any additional effect. Nothing about proving or disproving God, simply a test of the touted power of prayer.
Bubba said: One thing that helps determine the reliability of a claim to the miraculous is the credibility of those making the claim: the Apostles, for instance, were in an excellent position to know for certain whether they personally encountered the resurrected Christ, and their claims that they did lead to persecution and death. Few people knowingly die for a lie, so that lends credibility to their claim.
Would the apostles have been spared had they simply recanted the resurrection of Christ? I don’t think so. Also, the Apostles didn’t write the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s life, so we have to take the anonymous writers word on that.
Neil said: If you study church history you’ll find that yes, countless followers would have been spared the loss of property, freedom and even lives had they recanted.
Bubba said: Christians claim that the universe isn’t simply good or evil, but fallen, and the Crucifixion and Resurrection help explain this by pointing out both the cause of our fallenness (our sin) and God’s ultimate plan in dealing with it (His redemption of us).
Science shows us that the universe is indifferent, which explains the beauty and cruelty pretty neatly. The cause for the “Fall” is not born out by investigation. The myth of the fall bears all the hallmarks of a prescientific cultures explanation of things. If the “fall” never occurred, then why did Jesus have to die for us?
Bubba said: but the way that I would explain it is that the apparent riddle of the Cross and the empty tomb unravels the mysteries of life around us, to the degree that it appears that all of history and the universe itself were made for those events. The miracles prove to be the lynchpins or fulcrums of existence, and that lends them credibility as being from the Source of all existence.
We only have the Gospels to attest to the empty tomb. Most of the universe is completely unaware of the earth, let alone mankind on the earth – Light reflected from the earth has only travelled ~4 billion light years. The universe is rather larger than that. This validates the scientific explanation of indifference, but is difficult to explain within the Christian view, as the earth is special in Christianity, yet there is no indication of that.
Neil said: You are making an error in assuming that a large universe would be difficult for us to explain. Just because we’re a small part of the universe doesn’t mean we’re not valuable. That’s a common mistake skeptics make – sort of like when pro-abortionists think the unborn aren’t valuable just because they’re small.
Bubba said: It would be a capricious universe only if it were created, guided, and intruded upon by a capricious creator.
But we cannot know God’s will. We have an incomplete guide, which shows a God who is at times capricious and vindictive. Who seemed to change his mind on a whim. That you postulate that God is orderly does not mean it is the case – it seems it’s simply theological tradition. The only laws of God were those given from him, which have been changed over time.
Neil said: We can’t know God’s sovereign will, but we can know his moral will. With all due respect, your other comments reveal a lack of Biblical understanding.
Neil said: That’s just it – we don’t just rush to an answer. We’ve actually thought quite a bit about this. Materialists substitute “naturalism did it” just as often.
A perfectly good answer, when evidence is scarce of theories are speculative is “I don’t know”. It tends to be the response which scientists use when explaining, for example, the origin of life on earth, and the origin of the universe. Theists tend not to be so reserved. The answer tends to be “God did it”.
Neil said: Actually, materialists invent all sorts of silliness, up to and including the multiverse theory.
Design implies a designer. Most people get that rather intuitive concept. They understand irreducible complexity as well, even if they don’t know it by that name, and even if they haven’t had the flaws of the materialists’ misunderstandings of it shown to them.
By the way, it might be nice to get back on topic.
Hmm, looks like I’ll get to bed tonight! Most excellent. Havok has answered all questions with dispatch, and I think I can just endorse it. Tomorrow I’ll check if he left any scraps on the bone that I’ve got to deal with still. It may be time for me to find another hobby for a wee while anyway…night night all.
Havok,
Maybe “voices” is the wrong word. Have you ever just had an idea pop into your head? Where did that come from? Or maybe remembered something that your mother/father/preacher/neighbor said? All of these are potential answers to questions you have.
Now compare those to the scriptures. If they match, it’s a good bet it’s from God.
I’m truly sorry you think that’s a terrible way to test “voices”. I find it’s the only Way.
You are right, the answers probably often come from my previous studies. In fact, during the trials I spoke of earlier, God’s Word came back to me over and over. It was reassuring to know that He was preparing me, even before the problems.
How do I know He wasn’t lying or misleading me? Well, I’ll leave the tough questions to Neil. All i can say is that it was faith.
I don’t claim to be the expert. I only know what happened in my life. I truly believe that you can find the answers the same way.
Neil said: (Biblical references to ordered universe) Yes.
More than creating the heavens and the earth, fixing the lights in the firmament, and the globes, one greater one lesser in the sky, to provide signs of seasons etc?
Is there anything clear such as “And thy universe shall obey laws and rules”?
Neil said: I disagree. There are different views on free will within orthodox Christianity, so one must be careful to define “free will” before one makes such statements. For example, reformed Christians will assert that we have free will, but that within our sinful nature we can’t turn to God on our own.
But with the presence of an omniscient creator, we can do nothing other than that which He already knows.
Neil said: Knowing what someone will do doesn’t mean you made them do it. One can easily argue that there is more free will in Christianity than in your nothingness-to-molecules-to-man worldview.
Does that mean the reason I’m not a Christian is because God hasn’t chosen to save me (yet)?
Neil said: Those who hold to reformed theology (aka Calvinists) would say, “Yes.” You have free will but within your sinful nature you don’t have the ability to choose to believe unless God grants that through his grace. Arminians would say you have the ability to choose to trust in what Jesus did for you. Try it and see
Neil said: If you study church history you’ll find that yes, countless followers would have been spared the loss of property, freedom and even lives had they recanted.
I wasn’t talking about countless followers, I was expressly meaning those who might have been eyewitnesses to the resurrection (Apostles etc).
Neil said: Thanks for the clarification. Read the book of Acts for glimpses into the persecutionof the early church ( http://bible1.wordpress.com/2007/10/11/acts-7/ is a good example), see Paul’s accounts of his profession before he became a Christian evangelist, etc. Converting from Judaism was not received well and the Romans didn’t appreciate the exclusivity of the Christian faith. Peter was crucified in Rome, James (the brother of Jesus) was killed, and more.
Neil said: You are making an error in assuming that a large universe would be difficult for us to explain. Just because we’re a small part of the universe doesn’t mean we’re not valuable.
Of course we’re valuable – to us. There is no indication that the universe or anything else in it (or “outside of it”) cares that we exist.
Doesn’t the genesis account say that all of the lights were fixed in the firmament solely to provide signs of seasons etc for the earth?
Seems to imply that everything is there for the earth, and yet there are countless star whose light hasn’t even reached us yet.
Neil said: Not sure how you arrived at that conclusion. There are many species we continue to discover, for example. God may just enjoy having them there. There may be other reasons for planets far away other than giving us light.
Neil said: We can’t know God’s sovereign will, but we can know his moral will. With all due respect, your other comments reveal a lack of Biblical understanding.
As I’ve said before, I’m on my first reading through, and I don’t get much time to read. I’m happy to admit that I’m somewhat ignorant of the bible, and more so of the countless tomes which have been written about interpretations of its passages and books.
How do you know God’s moral will? Are those passages in the bible open to interpretation, or is spelled out in unambiguous language? Or it an internal dialog you have which points you to the “truth”?
Neil said: His moral law is written on our hearts (don’t murder, don’t steal, etc.) and is more fully revealed in the Bible. I find the passages to be rather unambiguous: Don’t steal, don’t kill, etc. Or Ephesians 5:3 “But among you, there must not even be a hint of sexual immorality, or any kind of impurity, or of greed, which is idolatry.”
Neil said: Actually, materialists invent all sorts of silliness, up to and including the multiverse theory.
To be fair, the multiverse theory is more of an hypothesis, but I think elements of it are open to empirical testing. Quantum mechanics seems pretty silly, but it is difficult to argue with the supporting evidence. “I don’t know” is still the current answer, even if it is followed with “but it could be ‘blah’”. Pre big bang stuff is still speculative and abstract (as far as I know).
I’ll leave the “Designer implies design/irreducible complexity” thing for another time – back on topic (maybe, but probably not)
Randy said: Have you ever just had an idea pop into your head? Where did that come from? Or maybe remembered something that your mother/father/preacher/neighbor said? All of these are potential answers to questions you have.
Yeah, this is generally called thinking and memory. The brain is complex, and we don’t understand it all. From what we do know, we have no reason to suppose that random thoughts and memories, including “free association” of thoughts or ideas seeming to come from nowhere, are anything other than normal occurances.
Randy said: Now compare those to the scriptures. If they match, it’s a good bet it’s from God.
Why? Again, you’ve read the bible. You find yourself in some situation, and you brain makes an association between the situation and some part of scripture. I don’t see why that would be attributed to God.
It’s great that you found something to help you through difficulties in your life, but in my view you’re undervaluing your own contribution, and putting all of the praise on something else which had nothing to do with it (because I think God doesn’t exists, obviously).
Seas,
“And a general point, it’s a note Marshall’s hit most recently but he’s not the only one: “it’s not for humans to make God’s rules” is a place where reasoned discussion has broken down. It’s circular and nonsensical to me, since I’m convinced men and women have made all God’s rules and God himself.”
You have to be more plain about when you’re arguing on the actions of God, and when you’re agruing the existence of God. If the former, my comments are totally appropriate. “Why would He do this? Why would He do that?” When you get answers to those types of questions, and you did ask as much originally regarding eternal punishment, you yourself break down the reasoned discussion by then stating you don’t believe He exists. Well fine. From which context are you working? Pick one and let me know when you wanna bail.
“…evidentiary spirituality.”
I don’t get how one who doesn’t believe in a deity can even speak of spirituality with a straight face. Spirituality indicates, or at the very least, suggests the supernatural. Without the supernatural, without a deity, spirituality is entirely a fraud. Or do you mean that you seek or expect proof when you use such terms?
“I would also like to point out that no-one says “shame on you” to someone debating politics, economics or any thing else besides religion.”
You haven’t heard me debate politics or economics. There is much for which the left should be ashamed.
“M.A. said: The harmed is entitled to [compensation], but he can “forgive” the debt.
Material compensation is something quite different from revenge. Making amends is something quite different from indefinite mental self-torture.”
I didn’t indicate the form in which compensation could take. The harmed might require only a sincere apology as compensation. He might require the offender to simply be gone from his life.
I would say that you seem to make a distinction between guilt and remorse that I didn’t find in Merriam-Webster. I see them as pretty much the same.
Hey Neil,
What was the topic again?
Havok,
)
I fully admit that I have some circular reasoning going on. I believe the Bible because it’s from God and I believe God because the Bible says so. I can’t explain that. If I could Neil wouldn’t have a purpose in life (glad to give you a reason Neil
Two comments and then I think I’ve said it all (which never stopped me before). You said “It’s great that you found something to help you through difficulties in your life.” Please don’t think that it’s just the difficulties. If I left you with that thought, I’m wrong. It seems that each and every day, He speaks to me, through all sorts of ways, to let me know he’s there. Nine years ago, I struggle with the idea of moving and he clearly moved to make things happen. Only later did I learn he was preparing me for my struggles. This past weekend, someone broke into my car. I can even see God’s hand in that. In the Bible, God once spoke through a donkey, he can speak through a lot of jackasses now.
You also said “you’re undervaluing your own contribution.” When I examine myself, I’m not capable of contributing on His level. There’s no way that coincidence can explain some of the events in my life. When I look for the explanation, God’s hand is in it.
Havok said:
“Well, not quite evidence, but Neil has tried to show the Gospels are reliable before, so we’ll leave it there.”
You may want to read “Testimony of the Evangelists” by Professor Simon Greenleaf of Harvard Law School. He was also a foremost authority on the laws of evidence & wrote a textbook on the subject used in law schools for decades. He set out to disprove the gospels & specifically the account of the resurrection using the laws of evidence. Here’s a link –
http://www.bibleteacher.org/sgtestimony.htm
Give it a read. You may find it interesting.
“Hey Neil,
What was the topic again?”
I’m pretty sure it was the economy. Details are sketchy, though.
Hi Marshall Art,
*I point out contradictions in the alleged nature of God quite in order to argue that we’ve made him up.
*Sure, “spirituality” is a word with baggage. But I need some sort of shorthand for peace and well-being that transcend conditions of gain and loss, praise and blame, health and illness.
*As for unmaterial compensation, of course I’m all for healing relationships and making amends in whatever way possible. But do you say that until someone forgives me, I should set aside 30 minutes every morning to remind myself that I’m stained–and once she says I’m forgiven, from that moment I’m innocent and free? Whether forgiven or not, my acts were what they were and her forgiveness is what it is, something hopeful for the future. Understanding is all.
*”There is much for which the left should be ashamed”–that would be something shameful about their positions, not the mere fact of arguing them.
*Re: guilt and remorse: you may not wish to follow me in my use of the words, but you understood the distinction I was making, no? My whole interest is in seeing what a word like “guilt” or “forgiveness” actually refers to, what are the thoughts that make up the mind state. If they’re thoughts unreflective of reality, I expect them to be less productive for all concerned.
Hi Bubba,
Bubba said: The only thing that can provide real confidence in the predictability of the universe is if its Creator tells us His universe is predictable.
Better get Him to do that then! Until then I guess we’ll just have to assume.
It’s hard to argue that we can know anything absolutely, but that’s not much of an argument for any particular worldview. The same would go for knowledge given me directly by a burning bush. If things are not predictable, then it’s a damned impressive illusion, much more difficult to stage than the predictable universe I assume.
Regarding free will, I think a naive conception of free will existing in some void is just that. If your will has reasons, it’s not exactly free, and if it’s random it could hardly be called “will.” And anyone heard of that interesting study that showed a decision had already been made (physiologically) by the time a person consciously felt he was making it? (The decision was something simple, which of two levers to pull or something).
When compulsions run in darkness–without awareness–there isn’t much freedom to act other than by their dictates. And when awareness is bright and present, the next thing to do is so plain that in a sense there’s no choice then either. Awareness itself guides your hand.
Re: the prayer study–we have no reason to think the scientists were skeptics. It was funded by the Templeton foundation and run by Herbert Benson–they hoped and expected to find that prayer worked.
“Faith isn’t contradictory to reason”–even when it’s faith in, say, an infinitely loving but rather petty God, or an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God whose creation is full of pain? I expect a statistical study would show that 95% of the occasions when faith is invoked are occasions when either sense or evidence fail.
Neil said: Seas, you make assertions that God is petty but haven’t proven that point. And to say he is rather petty is blasphemous, and I counsel you to choose your words much more carefully on this blog (One, because blasphemy is bad, and two, because your keystrokes will be for naught). If you want to ask how we understand a particular Biblical example in light of God’s attributes that is quite acceptable.
Hi Neil,
Hmm, maybe that was poorly said. I was trying to be concise, not provocative, with “rather petty.” Sorry. I was trying to summarize Marshall Art’s assertion that an infinitely loving God could still act in a vengeful, self-centered or tyrannical fashion. Also eternal punishment *would* be petty since it serves no constructive purpose, only a retributive one.
But when I speak ill of God, I think our conversation would be better served if you understand my intention to be consciousness-raising parody, highlighting the absurdities of what I consider a *human* invention. I have no animosity toward God, I don’t think he exists. As has been said, blasphemy is a victimless crime.
Neil said: Actually, what is most absurd is the rationalization that a nothingness-to-molecules-to-man scenario would yield a species that overwhelmingly believes in a creator. Hmmmm.
Assertion after assertion, my friend, and ironic ones at that. In the materialist worldview why would being self-centered be a bad thing? Or being vengeful or tyrannical? And on what possible basis could one draw conclusions about appropriate punishments? You guys are so judgmental – just one sermon after another about what is moral and immoral
There is a problem with the “God is love only” definition of the LORD. (Christians sometimes are more guilty of this than non-believers.) True, He is love in the best sense of the word. People by thinking this only, have made the most High, look like a wishy-washy wimp. (See those stupid church sign sayings so prevalent now days for a starter.) His love is not His only attribute. His other characteristics point to how great His love really is. To think only that He is love, is limiting Him. He defined Himself in other terms as well as loving. He is jealous as a lover is towards a cheating spouse when we worship other things than Him. He is Holy. He is just. That means He will not tolerate sin and wrong doing. He will seek vengeance against His enemies and the enemies of His children. Sin and disbelief makes Him angry. When we sin, we sin against an eternal being, therefore deserving of an eternal punishment. He, being perfect and sinless, will issue fair judgments and punishments. There are those who will suffer His dreadful, terrible wrath, (but that wrath is fair and they have been given chance after chance.) That’s what makes His love so great. He, because He is also the Creator, does not “owe” us, who have sinned against Him myriad times, forgiveness, mercy and love. But, He gives it to some, out of His mercy and great love for His creation. He is self-sacrificing for He sent His Son to be a perfect sacrifice for our sins. Jesus Christ took on God’s wrath and punishment for our sins. There is no greater love than this. These attributes of God work hand in hand.
As for the “blasphemy being a victimless crime,” it is not true. God is sinned against. He is the “victim.” By denying Him, people break His first commandment. It is far worse to commit this sin against God than sin against a person (which is bad enough). Without recognizing that God is to be worshipped alone, there is no basis to “act morally.” Man’s morals change when someone else is in control and dictates what is right morally. (100 years ago, it was not right for women to wear pants. Now we go to the beach in bikini’s and wear pants to church, without gloves and hats.) God’s law never changes. He is not fickle and arbitrary like we are.
There’s probably a lot more I can write, but right now I have a three-year-old raiding the freezer and just brought me frozen chicken he wanted to eat.
A majority believe in a creator now (”overwhelmingly” might be going too far, certainly in western Europe). There was a time when the majority believed in multiple local supernatural powers. A majority of scientists–who understand how things that look designed needn’t be–are unbelievers. A majority or close to it also believe in life after death; karma, in this country, even Christians; astrology, in this country…in other words, people believe what they’d like to be true. The idea of a cosmic parent is one of the most obviously desirable to a certain way of thinking, to us who can even lose our own living parents.
Neil said: I didn’t claim those views were true, just that they make no sense in a materialistic worldview.
Neil said: In the materialist worldview why would being self-centered be a bad thing?
I was merely pointing out that it’s incompatible with omnibenevolence. But in any case you haven’t answered my arguments about ethics in previous threads; until you do, you can’t keep asserting that I have no way to draw ethical conclusions.
Neil said: I have addressed these arguments them many times. You may have missed them.
Briefly–but you should consult my less brief arguments if you want to have this discussion–of course there’s nothing moral or immoral at the level of physics, of molecules.
Neil said: Ah, yes, then when did morality get added in a materialistic worldview? Which incremental evolutional step added it? The “science of the gaps” to the rescue!
Do believers think there is? It’s a category mistake. Ethics are at the level of happiness and suffering, how to cooperatively maximize one and minimize the other. And our ethical instincts have logical flaws in them, in places where you’d expect to find them thanks to evolution: in-group bias, finding the suffering of cuter animals more wrenching, etc. We’re also complex enough creatures that we have latitude around these instincts, we can see underneath them with other (more sophisticated?) cognitive functions.
Neil said: Circular references . . . the unexplained “ethical instincts” used to critique the alleged ethical errors.
And again, if ethics come from a rule book in heaven rather than from learning how to live together in the happiest fashion, how can you avoid theocratic tendencies? You may not *have* them personally, but are you not then being inconsistent?
Neil said: Sigh. Once again, broad, imported terms like “happiest fashion” mean nothing. If it makes people “happy” to do female circumcision, who are you to complain?
As I wrote before:
“If ethics lie in principles of social harmony (in the broadest sense—social harmony with all life), the emergent will of the people should make law and policy. If ethics lie with God, then power should go to whatever government can best divine his rules.”
Neil said: yes, “majority rules” often makes up laws that legalize things like slavery. But in that view slavery itself can be immoral in one place and moral in another, depending on majority rules or local customs. But of course that isn’t true “morality.”
I recognize that Christianity’s theocratic tendencies would be more muted than Islam’s, since Christians will say we can’t know the will of God perfectly. But they don’t say we have no clue about it; it wouldn’t be much good then.
Neil said: Christians are to focus on the kingdom of God first. The Christian worldview understands the nature of sinful people. Our founders did as well, which is why they wanted a balance of powers.
P.S. Back on topic if you would like to comment, please. Repetitive comments need to find homes on other blogs.
(Oh, I forgot to address the above post, sorry: that was for you, Neil).
seasofbrightjuice,
“While Christianity may counsel reason, its many statements like the above seem like they should force the admission that faith is not reason. The place where the “leap of faith” happens is a place where reason is not. Can we agree on that? (Anyone)?”
Almost… but not quite. Faith and reason/logic certainly go hand in hand. If I did not believe that existence of God was reasonable/logical, why would I put my faith in Him? What faith is… is belief in something that can not for now be tested or physically observed. While I say that science offers evidence that is in favor of the existence of God, I can not say that science itself can prove God’s existence through testing and observing. I’ve seen the evidence, I personally reason by logic that the evidence points to God, but have I seen God with my physical eyes? Thus comes faith.
“‘Faith isn’t contradictory to reason’–even when it’s faith in, say, an infinitely loving but rather petty God, or an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God whose creation is full of pain?”
God is all powerful, all love, all justice, and all holy… and His creation is full of pain… but it is not His fault… and despite that He did not cause it and that it is we who have chosen the path of destruction, He still offers a Way to redemption… a Way to forgiveness… a Way to salvation… and that Way is Jesus. The way is through trusting Him to save you and keep you saved and repenting of sin asking forgiveness of God the Father. And when we trust and repent, God’s justice will accept the payment for sin that is Jesus death on the cross, and the love and mercy of God will forgive us and save us and keep us saved forever… and His, justice, mercy, and love will guide our new lives through punishment to show us right from wrong and loving, merciful forgiveness when we see the right from wrong and turn back to Him.
Havok, (and seasofbrightjuice you may wish to read this…)
“So, to understand you I have to believe something which to me is unbelievable and just go with it?”
To me it is believable… and even logical and reasonable… but if to you it is unbelievable, then yes, that is what you must do… you must believe what you think is unbelievable. If you want it to be more believable, then seek God. He will show you if you seek Him. When my belief lacked, I sought Him, and He proved Himself to me… and has since not stopped proving Himself to me. My story in short: I was almost an evolutionist. At one point I had been a Christian, but I had pretty much forsaken God. Evolution just made sense to me at the time and God did not. But I decided to “give God the benefit of the doubt,” and so I prayed to Him. I said in so many words “God if you want me to believe, then you personally will have to remove my doubt.” Well, much to my surprise, He did just that. Right after I was done praying, my doubt was gone. I can not explain it, it was just gone. I am NOT the type to change my mind on a whelm. Even I will admit I am hard headed and can be close minded at times. This amazed me… my mind had just suddenly changed! You know you hear of Jesus raising the dead and healing the sick, but to change a person’s mind… wow. Since then He has seen fit to continually re-affirm my faith by the same things that once made me doubt. Nature which made me doubt now re-affirms my faith. Amazing!
“Not to mention you guys usually say that God chooses people to be saved…. Its a bit of a tall order cpt”
God chose that all those who accept Jesus’ payment for their sins would be saved… but the choice to accept is up to you.
Neil,
“Seas, keep in mind that when Christians explain our worldview we use the Bible. We have arrived at the conclusion that it is God’s word and know it is the truth. We don’t use that as the reasons you should believe it, but it is logical for us to use it to explain our worldview. The faith is grounded in reason and evidence.”
*nods* That is at least part of it. The other part is, we are led by the Spirit that people can not physically see and others are not and therefore do not understand all that we say and do.
I am seriously considering not making lengthy replies to those like Seas who are skeptical of our having free will. It’s nothing personal, but I don’t see the point in debating with a person whose position logically leads to the conclusion that the person cannot be responsible for what he or she writes: after all, responsibility cannot exist if free will is an illusion.
They are not going to understand our faith at all. With out the Holy Spirit, they cannot, as we could not once before He moved. I think it so very intriguing to see how interested in the things of God these atheists are, yet at the same time absolutely against Him they are. Paul was so correct when he wrote the letter to the Romans. It is also very intriguing to see them think how brilliant they are, open minded they are, yet cannot grasp the reality of God, something even a believing child with Down’s Syndrome can understand. They think we are stupid for having faith and believing in God and His Son, yet in all their blasphemy, they look really foolish. After all, how can we understand mysteries that they, “great educated ones,” can not? It is obvious here that the Christian faith boggles their minds.
Actually, what is most absurd is the rationalization that a nothingness-to-molecules-to-man scenario would yield a species that overwhelmingly believes in a creator. Hmmmm.>
Neil, that is what I was referring to when I commented about evolution and whether I was still evolving. How does the evolution begin and how is it determined to stop and if it does not stop, then I may turn into a shaggy dog.
That theory takes WAAAAAAYYYYYY more “faith” than it takes to look around and believe in a Divine Creator. I wonder if those who choose to disbelieve in God are satisfied, or are they in a continual search which has still not proven anything to them?
I always had a hard time understanding how some slime ball slithered out of the primordial soup, then reproduced, divided or did whatever prehistoric slime balls did, so that part of it bacame plants, trees, etc while the other part became animals all the way to us.
Guess I’ll just stick with “In the beginning GOD created…”
Neil said: If you don’t like the soup model, go for the pizza hypothesis. Oops – looks like that one is being abandoned as well.
Wow – I’m getting tired. Spelling is really bad. How about “became”.
Hi Captain,
Justice can be an extension of love, of goodwill: redistribute wealth, create equal opportunities, that sort of thing. By this definition a person could easily be both all-just and all-loving. But if your definition of justice includes retribution from which no party whatsoever benefits, then it’s impossible for a person to be both all-just and all-loving. A person can still be part-loving! But not all. Someone who wishes only the best for everyone doesn’t deliberately harm them (unless that harm is somehow ultimately more helpful). So, how is eternal punishment helpful?
Cpt_starfox said: you must believe what you think is unbelievable
When something’s unbelievable to you, it isn’t possible to believe it! Tautologically. You can pay it lip service, you can find reasons good or bad to believe it one day, but as long as you don’t believe it, you can’t believe it. Yet more than once on this blog (you haven’t done it…Neil has) I’ve seen suggestions that an atheist is necessarily in rebellion against God’s truth. If this were an indispensable component of your faith, that alone would convict it of falsehood in my mind. I know God just doesn’t make sense to me, and this is the reason I don’t believe.
Neil said: It wasn’t my idea, but the Bible does clearly teach that denying God is done by supressing the truth in unrighteousness. I don’t use that to convince you, but as a statement from a Christian worldview that explains why people hold those views.
Romans 1:18-20 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.
Some atheists say they need some special proof from God, but it is already here. They say they’ll tell God on judgment day that they didn’t have enough evidence, but when that time comes I doubt that they’ll speak a word. In the moments after we die we’ll know how we should have lived our lives.
Hi Elisa,
Nothing wimpy about love. As a mother, you know that.
I never said you were stupid, nor did Havok. Just mistaken.
Out of curiosity: a couple times someone has written that God is not just loving but also just and holy. I don’t think I know what “holy” means in this context, as a contrast to merely loving…?
Seas, “holy” means separated or consecrated or set aside. In the context of this discussion, those of us who say that God is holy means that God is perfect and — specifically — that God is perfectly just.
Forgiveness, as you seem inclined to define it, treats sin — willful rebellion against God and the willful assent to evil — as trivial. But if God treated sin as trivial, He would no longer be just and thus would no longer be holy.
The cross is what reconciles God’s perfect justice with His infinite love: Jesus — fully God and fully man — died in our place. His death satisfied God’s requirement of justice, and the fact that He died in our place is the evidence of God’s love for us.
Wow, you go to bed on the other side of the world, wake up and find a couple of books have been written
Neil said: Actually, what is most absurd is the rationalization that a nothingness-to-molecules-to-man scenario would yield a species that overwhelmingly believes in a creator. Hmmmm.
A species which attributes intention to other animals, would have a survival advantage – it would be able to somewhat discern the intent of the other – predator or prey. Since those who can better discern intention are more successful, the trait is selected for. The species gets better at it as a whole. Given the species is pretty ignorant, it starts attributing intention to things which are mindless – lightning, rain, earthwuakes, rocks falling, volcanoes etc etc. The species becomes smarter, which is also a survival asset, and starts reasoning crudely about things. It understands that the big cat is just a big cat, and will eat it if it’s hungry. But what about the lightning? Well, it seems the species attributed it as the action of another creature somewhat like itself, only much more powerful. Wash rinse repeat and you’ve made your way from primitive intent to Yahweh and Christianity. Not particularly absurd as far as I can see, but then again I’m not a believer.
Elisa said: When we sin, we sin against an eternal being, therefore deserving of an eternal punishment. He, being perfect and sinless, will issue fair judgments and punishments.
It seems He holds us up to his perfect standards, which we are never able to meet (and being made imperfect were created to never be able to meet), and then punishes us for it.
He made us imperfect.
He rigged the game such that Adam & Eve would sin. For some reason punishment falls on me, a supposed distant ancestor of some guy and gal who ate some fruit they weren’t supposed to, but were to ignorant and naive to know better (no knowledge of good and evil, after all). In my opinion as an outsider with nothing invested in the story, it was a setup.
Elisa said: He is self-sacrificing for He sent His Son to be a perfect sacrifice for our sins. Jesus Christ took on God’s wrath and punishment for our sins. There is no greater love than this. These attributes of God work hand in hand.
So the anger God felt at his flawed creation acting in a flawed manner (and being omniscient, he knew how this would all unfold before he even began his creation – prior to the first day) he took it out on himself (as he knew he would), and now I have to believe in the part of himself which gave up a long weekend (to go to missouri, according to the mormons) in order to placate the part of himself which is upset with me, though he knew exactly how I’d behave before the first day, that I wouldn’t believe the sketchy evidence of the bible. That I’d follow all of the carefully laid down fakes within the fossil record etc etc etc.
Elisa said: As for the “blasphemy being a victimless crime,” it is not true. God is sinned against.
Given that myself and seas think your God is fictional (not that we can prove it, mind), I’d say seas is correct with his “joke”.
Elisa said: God’s law never changes. He is not fickle and arbitrary like we are.
Laws to Adam, Noabite (sp?) Laws, 10 Commandments (2ish version which differ, if I’m recalling correctly), revised view of commandments after Jesus. Seems God has change the laws for his children a number of times. Doesn’t Ezekiel 20:25 say something about God giving laws, knowing his people would be unable to live by them, simply to show them who was boss? That seems a little bit fickle and arbitrary to me.
Neil said: Neil said: Ah, yes, then when did morality get added in a materialistic worldview? Which incremental evolutional step added it? The “science of the gaps” to the rescue!
“Science of the gaps”? Which evolutionary step added it? Any of them which increased our group cohesion, including the changes which caused us to become social animals.
Neil said: yes, “majority rules” often makes up laws that legalize things like slavery. But in that view slavery itself can be immoral in one place and moral in another, depending on majority rules or local customs. But of course that isn’t true “morality.”
Yes, and laws are written to try to address the morality of the people. Slavery is a good example of in group/out group thinking. Slaves were generally from the out group, at least until it became an economic item. Most of the world has moved on to that, as our social behaviour has changed.
Given that morality has changed in time and place, I can’t see how you stick with your “true” morality ideal.
cpt starfox said: If you want it to be more believable, then seek God.
Well I guess that might be part of the reason I’m discussing things here – to understand how you guys tick. It is however kind of hard to seek a fictional entity in the real world.
cpt starfox said: But I decided to “give God the benefit of the doubt,” and so I prayed to Him.
Why? This is one thing I don’t understand. Before giving God the benefit of the doubt, you obviously believed He existed. To me that statement is similar to saying “but I decided to give the tooth fairy the benefit of the doubt”.
Elisa said: I think it so very intriguing to see how interested in the things of God these atheists are, yet at the same time absolutely against Him they are.
I’m not against Him – I’d have to think He was real for that. I’m interested in you folk, not God
mom2 said: How does the evolution begin and how is it determined to stop and if it does not stop, then I may turn into a shaggy dog.
Evolution began as soon as a simple imperfectly replicating “thing” occurred. Up until that point is the domain of “abiogenesis”, which you people are happy to point out is still speculative. Not unworkable, but not on solid experimental ground.
Evolution stops when there are no more imperfect replicators around.
I know you’re having a joke, but individuals don’t “evolve”. If the traits for shaggy hair, quadrapedalism and a fetish for scratching were selected for, then sometime in the future your decendents might resemble shaggy dogs
Neil said: It wasn’t my idea, but the Bible does clearly teach that denying God is done by supressing the truth in unrighteousness. I don’t use that to convince you, but as a statement from a Christian worldview that explains why people hold those views.
Which makes sense, since the christian worldview assumes the evidence pointing to the existence of your God is there and is undeniable. Presumably I’ve seen much of the same evidence, so I must be denying God somehow, right? Nothing to do with the evidence being unconvincing
Neil said: Some atheists say they need some special proof from God, but it is already here.
But you can’t point to anything which shows the existence of your God, except an old collection of books written by men who were ignorant of much that we now know.
Neil said: Yeah, no evidence other than the universe and life itself.
Back on topic. How is the economy going? You guys been having a stock market slide like we have?
Neil said: Oh yeah! Who needs to retire?
I’m curious as to why sharks appearantly ceased to evolve thousands of years ago. Were they done? At least thats what you find in school library books.
Neil said: Yeah, I saw an aquarium that had to do a change on a sign about a fish. They had made this big point about how it evolved, only to find out it hadn’t supposedly hadn’t changed in hundreds of thousands of years.
Hi Neil,
Neil said: Back on topic if you would like to comment, please. Repetitive comments need to find homes on other blogs.
You started it!!! You get on topic first! Word of honor, I’m not drooling for a repeat of the absolute basis arguments. I’m asking YOU not to make repetitive (and off-topic) charges that require me to cover ground I’ve already covered.
However, in comments prior to that one I had spaced out and strayed from the narrow road in other ways. For this I do duly chastise myself.
Neil said: I didn’t claim those views were true, just that they make no sense in a materialistic worldview.
I was giving commonsense explanations for why people believe them even though they’re not true—i.e., showing how our situation makes perfect sense in a materialist worldview. (Although I prefer “naturalist” worldview to describe my own position, since consciousness isn’t a settled question and “materialism” suggests that we can say with confidence what stuff the universe is made of. Quantum weirdness raises questions).
Neil said: I have addressed these arguments them many times. You may have missed them.
“These” arguments maybe, but mine? Not that I’m looking to have the argument again! I’ve answered the questions rather to my satisfaction. But I understand (, my son,) why you’d need to keep bringing up morality. Arguments for the necessity of God are few and tortured, and that one comes with an old echo of believers’ alleged moral superiority for free. (I’m kinda just teasing. I know the charge that you’re banking on that echo wouldn’t hold up in court).
Sob Juice said: of course there’s nothing moral or immoral at the level of physics, of molecules.
Then Neil said: Ah, yes, then when did morality get added in a materialistic worldview?
So you DO think there’s morality at the level of physics? Or you just don’t believe in physics?
Neil said: Circular references . . . the unexplained “ethical instincts” used to critique the alleged ethical errors.
Logically, ethics have much to do with the greatest good for the greatest number. Such extrapolation (from evolved cooperation behavior) is something made possible by our complexity as organisms. Instinctively (since we need a quicker reference than a philosophical process), our intuitions reverberate with the survival pressures that have roughly hewn them, thus they’re often distorted compared to logical standards (see above e.g.). Other high social mammals show comparable intuitions. Did you hear the nice story recently about a group of dolphins that circled a surfer and kept a shark at bay after it attacked him? Nice story.
Evolution echoes in the very formulation of the golden rule: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” A formulation based on transcendent ethics (an “ought” with no “in order to”) might read, “do unto others as they should absolutely be done unto.”
Neil said: Sigh. Once again, broad, imported terms like “happiest fashion” mean nothing. If it makes people “happy” to do female circumcision, who are you to complain?
If it made everybody happy, I wouldn’t complain. Same goes for slavery. Obviously they do something rather different. How is “happiest” imported?
Neil said: Wow, that is one bizarre worldview. Thanks for your candor, though.
Neil said: yes, “majority rules” often makes up laws that legalize things like slavery.
I know an effective democracy has buffers against mob rule. But that’s a different question than, say, a religious test for some offices, or Christian bias written into the constitution, which are sorts of things which I submit you cannot on principle avoid supporting if you believe in a heavenly rule book.
Hi Bubba, thanks for the help with “holy.” I’m still not sure I really get it, but that’s some help. Are the qualities all listed together somewhere in the Bible and that’s why we’re seeing them together here? Is “loving, forgiving, holy and just” or something like it a quote?
Bubba said: His death satisfied God’s requirement of justice, and the fact that He died in our place is the evidence of God’s love for us.
He didn’t die in my place if my unbelief in him condemns me to Hell.
–
Bubba said: Forgiveness, as you seem inclined to define it, treats sin — willful rebellion against God and the willful assent to evil — as trivial.
Who says it’s treating it as trivial? Huge harm done is huge harm done, not trivial. It’s just that retribution doesn’t help to set huge harms right. (Corrective punishment, obviously, has its uses). “Trivial” and “justice” (in the retributive sense) boil down to name-calling, they do nothing but obscure: what we need to do to make sense is ask what is the PURPOSE of something. I’ll ask you the same thing I asked cpt_starfox: how is eternal punishment helpful?
–
I’m not saying “no free will” wouldn’t trouble me. But as we know, wanting something to be true doesn’t make it true. It’s just a question I have, I’m not at this moment arguing for perfect determinism; it’s all somewhat beyond me. Anyway I don’t think “no free will” very often amidst everyday choices. I suspect that it’s ultimately subtler than our categories, free will or determinism. It’s more, perhaps, that there’s no ultimate individual to be subject to either free will or fate. (Enigmatic, I know. I don’t really want to get into this complex stuff, just telling you where I’m at with it).
Presumably society would still function much as if there’s simple free will, since we see through a glass darkly and the surface of things looks a lot like free will. It’s at the roots that it gets muddy. (Choose my metaphor, I know).
Even if it were true, there are pleasant mythologies we could derive from it too. Such as, the universe is one being (by which I don’t mean any supermind or spirit substance) manifesting in unspeakable diversity—only one real “agent” driving every flower through its green fuse, and trillions of apparent agents. Marvelous. Israeli and Palestinian are one being, etc. It fits better into a Hindu type mythology, where the divine is the source of good and evil and beyond both—a more mysterious, less moral-category-ordered universe, but which is yet somehow whole and wholesome. (Mark: I’m not claiming that *this* is cake-recipe mysticism).
What I would like to argue against is the Christian conception of an absolute and metaphysical free will in every situation—as I say, in some void—independent of mitigating factors, independent of the neuroses we’ve inherited through being poorly used. Thus SINS ON YOUR HEAD, ABSOLUTE GUILT OR INNOCENCE, SALVATION OR DAMNATION. Those booming-voiced categories are why y’all need a savior in the first place. (Uh oh, I seem to have wandered on-topic. It won’t happen again). These categories are also why you think a poor scared creature, thrown naked into the world and scrambling for what he can get, can come to deserve eternal fire.
Anyway, to keep it simple: how can you deny that the Christian conception of free will in a metaphysical void is naive, when, to quote a great man, “If your will has reasons, it’s not exactly free, and if it’s random it could hardly be called ‘will’”? (We don’t have to get into whether there’s no choice whatsoever, you understand, just the transcendental form).
Some preemptive cites (note no wikipedia)
If it passes the selection filter, no change required. These organisms are excellently adapted to their particular niche in their environment. (like sharks: the “perfect eating machine”, right?)
Like the brachiopod Lingula, and the cockroach, identifiable through most of the phanerazoic and still with us. If an organism is well adapted to a niche it can readily occupy, then why should it evolve?
http://www.talkorigions.com
They predate the dinosaurs, going back more than 400 million years and haven’t changed much in all that time.
Dallas Morning News Sept. 7, 2004
Tuatura Fossils unchanged for 200 million years
Shark teeth haven’t changed in 400 million years Dr. Sue Turner
“This shows Lampreys morphology has been astonishingly stable for 360 million years”
Nature Oct. 2006
Bubba said: The cross is what reconciles God’s perfect justice with His infinite love: Jesus — fully God and fully man — died in our place. His death satisfied God’s requirement of justice, and the fact that He died in our place is the evidence of God’s love for us.
But he didn’t die – it was more of a sleep in
Being God, he knew exactly what was going to happen, that the death wasn’t going to be permanent, and knew this from before creation.
Why set up the system such that you’ll need to have yourself killed and then bring yourself back to life, simply to assuage some “sin” that you’re responsible including in creation in the first place?
Could God not have created a world where free will still occurred (often cited as required, being created in Gods image, and the cause of original sin) yet sin was unknown? What if he created eden without that pesky tree of knowledge?
Neil said: Yeah, no evidence other than the universe and life itself.
Which can be explained without reference to the Christian God (or any God for that matter, but we’ve been here before).
Craig said: I’m curious as to why sharks appearantly ceased to evolve thousands of years ago. Were they done? At least thats what you find in school library books.
Neil said: Yeah, I saw an aquarium that had to do a change on a sign about a fish. They had made this big point about how it evolved, only to find out it hadn’t supposedly hadn’t changed in hundreds of thousands of years.
Yeah, looks like the environment the sharks are in hasn’t changed too much in that time. Though sharks have evolved – there is always some selection going on, they’ve simply evolved less dramatically than other species.
There is a niche to fill, and had they died out, suddenly got bored and hoped on to the land, or something else, something else would have filled it somehow. Same with the other examples you cite.
talkorigins is a good reference site – especially, for you guys, the “Creationist claims” section
Hi Neil,
Neil said: If it makes people “happy” to do female circumcision, who are you to complain?
Seasaw said: If it made everybody happy, I wouldn’t complain. Same goes for slavery. Obviously they do something rather different. How is “happiest” imported?
Neil said: Wow, that is one bizarre worldview. Thanks for your candor, though.
Seesaw says now: why is it bizarre? I was just pointing out that such abuses are obviously not a strategy for maximizing happiness. Which, again, is the domain of ethics; nothing transcendent. Transcendental ethics get you into trouble, they concern you with moral imperatives for which reasons are not given.
Havok,
You miss the point, the quotes say specifically that there has been no (zip, zero, nada) evolution in X hundred million years. They don’t say “evolved less dramatically” they say ‘haven’t evolved’. The rest is a nice “theory” but once again you are lacking in empirical evidence.
Re: “something else would have filled it somehow” I guess that means that all the hoopla about endangered species is no big deal because, something else will fill it somehow.
Evidence, please. Talkorigins seems a little light on empirical evidence also. Pretty much, because I (or some unnamed scientist) say so.
Seas,
“Justice can be an extension of love, of goodwill: redistribute wealth, create equal opportunities, that sort of thing. By this definition a person could easily be both all-just and all-loving. But if your definition of justice includes retribution from which no party whatsoever benefits, then it’s impossible for a person to be both all-just and all-loving. A person can still be part-loving! But not all.”
1. “a person ” We aren’t talking about people are we? I thought we were talking about God.
2. “retribution from which no party whatsoever benefits” … you mean judgment of evil? Judgment of evil is justice. Evil is evil and 1. must be punished and 2. Will not live eternally in the presence of God because God can not look upon evil (sin) with favor.
To Budda: “But if God treated sin as trivial, He would no longer be just and thus would no longer be holy.
The cross is what reconciles God’s perfect justice with His infinite love: Jesus — fully God and fully man — died in our place. His death satisfied God’s requirement of justice, and the fact that He died in our place is the evidence of God’s love for us.”
*nods firmly* =D
Back to Seas,
“Someone who wishes only the best for everyone doesn’t deliberately harm them (unless that harm is somehow ultimately more helpful). So, how is eternal punishment helpful?”
“harm” in my context is punish for evil – evil which they would not have to be punished for in eternity if they believed in God and had accepted Jesus’ payment for it. You can question God about it being helpful… I say it is justice and justice is helpful and the mercy that is offered is helpful and should be accepted… God punishes, and that is just the way it is, but God also offers a way out too. We can choose to take it or leave it. Also, God is Holy and must be separate from sin. Hell is to separte the devil and all sin from God for ever. It isn’t made for people, and this is why God offers such an easy way out for us. But, people refuse to believe Him and therefore suffer with their sins. You can question it and tear it apart comparing God to people and His ways to our ways and His thoughts to our thoughts… but the thing is… He is God and is not human, and He knows what He is doing. Just because you feel you can explain Him away, doesn’t mean He isn’t there holding His hands out to you wanting to help untill the very last moment.
“When something’s unbelievable to you, it isn’t possible to believe it! Tautologically. You can pay it lip service, you can find reasons good or bad to believe it one day, but as long as you don’t believe it, you can’t believe it.”
I know that… I as kinda speaking… metaphorically or something… whatever… let me make it clear. You must come to find what you now think is unbelievable to be believable and this in the case of God is done by seeking to believe Him. If you do not want to believe, then certainly, how will you ever believe? The only way is if you are forced by undeniable evidence… at that can and will be arranged in the futur when Jesus comes back… but then may likely be to late to suddenly decide God exist…. I’d suggest now is the time… but play with time if you wish, but what I hear is there is never enough of it.
Now to Havok,
You said: “It seems He holds us up to his perfect standards, which we are never able to meet (and being made imperfect were created to never be able to meet), and then punishes us for it.
He made us imperfect.
He rigged the game such that Adam & Eve would sin. For some reason punishment falls on me, a supposed distant ancestor of some guy and gal who ate some fruit they weren’t supposed to, but were to ignorant and naive to know better.”
They were warned.
“So the anger God felt at his flawed creation acting in a flawed manner”
Who made the creation flawed? God created everything perfect, and created man with freewill. Man chose to fall (as God knew he would but still created man because He loved us). Thus the sin nature is passed down… thus we are sinners by nature, but we are also sinners by our own choices. We can not blame it all on Adam, and we can not blame our flaws on God.
Also…
God gave His people the best laws… He knew they could not keep them, but the law was to show them that they were not perfect and that they needed Him and His forgivnesss. He did this for their own good because He not only wanted them to feel they needed Him (which you might call selfish something), He KNEW that they needed Him in order to be saved from hell, and so He wanted them to know that need as well. (to which I say thank you for letting me know and for offering help!)
I said: If you want it to be more believable, then seek God.
You said: “Well I guess that might be part of the reason I’m discussing things here – to understand how you guys tick. It is however kind of hard to seek a fictional entity in the real world.”
Before you can even begin to understand how we really “tick” you need to believe in God and be saved… untill then you will not understand. Seeking God as far as is concerned for you at the moment seems to need to consist of seeking His existance. Until you find it believable and trust in Jesus… you might as well give up trying to understand Christains. Seek to believe God, and He can help you do so. You don’t have to believe He exist to seek to believe… but hopfully, you will when you are done seeking.
I said: But I decided to “give God the benefit of the doubt,” and so I prayed to Him.
You said: “Why? This is one thing I don’t understand. Before giving God the benefit of the doubt, you obviously believed He existed. To me that statement is similar to saying “but I decided to give the tooth fairy the benefit of the doubt”. ”
You don’t have to believe something exist to “give it the benfit of the doubt”… I for one had pretty much dropped God and forsaken any belief in Him… so basically my “benefit of the doubt” would mean something like “if you exist, God, then you will have to personally take my doubt away” And He did… and it was amzing. You can believe what you want and scrutinise it to the ends of the earth… but what happened did happen and I know it happened because it happened to me, and I know it wasn’t just me faking myself out or something stupid… the only explaination is God did it. Again, drill it to the ends of the earth with psyco-babble and mumbo jumbo… I’m a rational, logical thinking, person, and I know right well better than anyone else what happened, and I can not logically explain it any other way.
Bottom line to both Havok and Seas…
Don’t try to figure out what “makes me tick,” focus your efforts on something that can be done because for now that understanding is beyond your reach. If you really want to understand try to find God. Try to believe… how will you ever believe (before the end) if you do not want to.
Please do not try to discuss theology with me… please do not further quote me or try to pick apart my likly flawed language… I am urging you to not waste your time on me who can not answer your questions satisfactorily… Maybe after (if ever) you believe, then I can help answer your questions by the word of God… until then… the main thing I can tell you that can help you is this:
God exist… seek Him and try to believe. If you ever believe, seek salvation. All you must do to be saved is Believe Jesus died for your sins and repent of sins asking forgivness of God and then trust and ask Jesus to save you and keep you saved, and He will do just that!
Once you are saved, belief in and understanding of the other things concerning God can come.
cpt starfox said: (on adam and eve) They were warned.
True, but without having eaten from the tree of knowledge, how were they to know it was evil to do so?
Didn’t God look at everything in the garden and find it to be good? I assume the serpent was in the garden, so the serpent was good, right? If the serpent wasn’t good, what sort of “father” was God, leaving his naive and ignorant “children” with an evil character. If the serpent was good, then why was following a good servant of God and eating from the tree evil?
cpt starfox said: Who made the creation flawed? God created everything perfect, and created man with freewill. Man chose to fall (as God knew he would but still created man because He loved us). Thus the sin nature is passed down… thus we are sinners by nature, but we are also sinners by our own choices. We can not blame it all on Adam, and we can not blame our flaws on God.
If Adam were perfect, yet freewill caused him to be flawed, his free will was a flaw, surely?
God loved us before he created us, knew that we’d suffer, he’d have to torture untold billions of us “loved children” for all eternity, and did it anyway?
Being omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent, he couldn’t work out a better way to create things?
cpt starfox said: He KNEW that they needed Him in order to be saved from hell, and so He wanted them to know that need as well.
Yet he created hell, dictated impossible laws, which he knew couldn’t be followed, and then punishes those who can’t follow them. That behaviour is usually attributed to totalitarian regimes.
cpt starfox said: Seek to believe God, and He can help you do so. You don’t have to believe He exist to seek to believe… but hopfully, you will when you are done seeking.
From the outside, looking at your holy book, your God seems very capricious. He’s all love and forgiveness until you actually do something wrong, then it becomes hellfire and damnation. Lets not forget that God knew all of this before he created anything, and therefore knew that I would find all of the evidence before me unconvincing (including your somewhat silly circular method for finding God – hope to believe in Him so you can hopefully believe in Him). He could have set things up differently. Made it so I was a more open to the “evidence” you present. More willing to believe in belief. Yet He didn’t, and as a result your all loving God will consign me to hell for something which, from the point of view of an omniscient being, I had absolutely no choice in. Why should I give this being the benefit of the doubt?
cpt starfox said: the only explaination is God did it
Really? You’ve studied the literature concerning psychology, neuro science etc and haven’t found anything which can explain your experience?
Studied all the other religious and spiritual traditions to see if anything else fit?
Or you found yourself in a quandry with respect to a scientific theory which seemed to discredit whatever your beliefs about God were. Really wanted to believe in God over the science which had caused you problems, and bam, you throw out all the inconvenient scientific “gobbly-de-gook” and find yourself safe in your beliefs about God again?
cpt starfox said: how will you ever believe (before the end) if you do not want to.
What end? It’s a fallacy that the world is getting uglier and more violent. See http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/163
If your God is real, why wouldn’t I want to believe? It’s the whole “Does the God of the bible, or any other God exist?” that I tend to get stuck on.
cpt starfox: God exist… seek Him and try to believe
How do you know? Not meaning to make an ad hom here, but your stories about trying to believe until you actually did, sound an awful lot like someone practicing self delusion.
Just quickly, because you sound like you’re not likely to address any further points here anyway.
Would I be far of base in thinking you had a crisis of faith, caused by the theory of biological theory of evolution, prayed really hard to want to believe, and got what you wanted?
Sorry if the above is incoherent or a little snippy. It’s late on this side of the world
Enjoy
Seas:
I’m not sure it matters whether there’s a single verse that teaches, in something of a formal doxology, that God is holy and loving and just.
Expressed in one verse or throughout, the Bible is absolutely clear in its repeated affirmation that God is all these things, so those of us who believe the Bible is authoritative must accept the seeming tension between God’s justice and God’s mercy, rather than favor one over the other.
But, as think about it, I think the Lord’s Prayer touches on all three attributes:
- We pray to “Our Father” — “abba”, a term of intimate affection like the modern term “Daddy” — because He is loving.
- When we affirm that His name is “hallowed”, we affirm that He is holy.
- And when we pray for forgiveness as we forgive others, implicit is the acknowledgement that we need forgiveness in the presence of a just God.
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You write, He didn’t die in my place if my unbelief in him condemns me to Hell.
I believe He did, but I will reiterate that God loves us too much to destroy our free will: He will not compel you into His family in the teeth of your unbelief.
We believe that salvation is by God’s grace, in Christ’s death, and through the individual’s faith. His grace is unchanging, and Christ has already died for the sins of the entire world: the determining factor is now whether a person will accept God’s free offer of forgiveness.
Because grace is free (i.e., at no cost to us, though it was very costly to Him), there’s nothing you must do to earn it. But because you are free (i.e., you have freedom), it is possible for you to refuse that gift.
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It seems to me that, by excluding the retributive and focusing only on the theraputic (or, as you say, corrective) aspect of justice, you undermine the dignity of man. The end result of such thinking is to approach a man’s decisions as something for which he should not be held accountable: he’s suffering from a disease and it is merciful to cure him, he’s an animal who’s misbehaving and he needs to be retrained. The more noble view is that he is responsible for his own decisions: he’s not suffering from a disease or poor training, he’s guilty of a sin or a crime, so he doesn’t need a cure or correction, he deserves punishment.
And, I’m really not interested in entertaining the notion that we have no free will, and doing so with someone who keeps using the first-person singular pronoun, “I”: without free will, the self is an illusion, so the consequence of a skepticism toward free will is that undermines any trust that there really is an “I” or a “you” to discuss these things. You take for granted the fact that you are someone and not just something, a person and not just a complex chemcial reaction: the fact absolutely hinges on your having free will, so I don’t see the sense in trying to justify the foundation of something you already presume.
All that said, I don’t think free will means that all of us are wholly responsible for all our actions: there are such things as psychoses, and a body or brain may be so damaged or abnormal that a soul’s free will cannot be expressed very well at all in the physical world. I trust in God’s mercy as well as His justice, and I believe both attributes would stay His hand from eternally damning a soul for physical behavior that the soul really couldn’t help. Being omniscient, God knows precisely where the line is between what we have chosen as free men and what we were compelled to do as biological organisms.
But that shouldn’t be wholly comforting. God’s omniscience means that He knows when we really choose to rebel against Him and His moral law, and when we choose with both eyes open, knowing that we are choosing what is elicit and forbidden and evil. The thought should make one tremble.
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Havok:
The Bible teaches that Jesus emptied Himself of what it means to be God, and the Gospels document behavior that is puzzling for a man who claimed and demonstrated divinity. Jesus admitted partial ignorance about the apocalypse, and the anguish in Gethsamene is more than enough proof for me that, while He remained sinless, He really did experience everything that is common to humanity. He prayed with passionate sincerity that the cup might pass,and that request implied a hope that His task could be modified, not an omniscience that knows it could not.
Doubt, anxiety, exhaustion, agony, culminating in a cry of abandonment on the cross: “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?”
The Gospels record a Deity whose incarnation was far more complex than what skeptics conceive in their generally shallow thinking on the subject.
In general, the mistakes I see made so frequently are either not wrestling with God’s timeless nature — that is, not trying to grasp that God exists outside of time so that the Incarnation of the Son wasn’t an event in a seqential existence — or seeing that God emptied Himself (while remaining fully divine) so that He could become fully human.
But these and other mistakes are corrected with a healthy does of knowledge about the Bible. We Christians are imperfect and are not yet as spiritually mature as God intends, so we sometimes overlook communicating a key aspect of God’s message to us, but the Bible is comprehensive.
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God did not include sin in creation: He did not create sin, only the opportunity for man to sin. He could have created a world without the possibility for sin, but that would have precluded free will: being omniscient, God can do all things, but inherent contradictions are non-entities that cannot be brought into existence, and free will cannot exist without the possibility of choosing to do right or choosing to do wrong.
Why set up the system such that you’ll need to have yourself killed and then bring yourself back to life, simply to assuage some “sin” that you’re responsible including in creation in the first place?
Again, God did not create sin, but why did God create the universe, populate it with human beings, and give those beings free will and the intrinsic opportunity to abuse that freedom? Did He not know what was coming, that we would rebel and sin and bring on ourselves His judgment? Did He not know that He would have to become a man and die in order to rescue us?
He knew. So why did he do it?
Simple.
God is love.
God loves us so much — God loves you, personally, so much — that He created the universe knowing that He would have to die on the cross to save you from your sinful, corrupted nature. He loves you so much that He will respect your freedom and He won’t force a relationship on you; if you decide never to relinquish your rebellion against Him, it will break His heart, but He will let you rebel and face the consequences.
But He also loves you so much that He has done everything in His power, short of intruding on your free will, to reconcile His relationship with You.
He offered Himself on the cross. The Son died so that you wouldn’t have to face the consequences of sin: you would be declared righteous in His eyes and adopted into His family.
He now offers Himself to you, to abide with you and within you. The Holy Spirit can abide with you and give you the knowledge and ability to do God’s will, so that you won’t have to live with the permanent sinfulness of your heart: in time you can become righteous in reality and grow into maturity as His adopted son.
I can think of no greater expression of God’s love than this, that, though we now deserve nothing from God but His judgment, He paid everything to give us everything.
We would be in no position to judge the merits of His decision to create us and give us free will, knowing that it leads to the cross, but in my best moments my heart soars at the thought of the sheer beauty of that decision.
Havok said:
“Would I be far of base in thinking you had a crisis of faith, caused by the theory of biological theory of evolution, prayed really hard to want to believe, and got what you wanted?”
Based on a lot of recent information coming out of the scientific community I’d definitely agree that the biological theory of evolution has caused a “crisis of faith”. Interestingly enough, it’s not among Christians. :>)
Hi Bubba,
Thanks for the further “holy” assistance. I wasn’t making an argument about anything by asking whether it was a direct quote from the Bible; just curious about the source and context. By the by, I’ve always found the Our Father quite pretty.
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I’m also happy to let the free will discussion go, though I’d like to clarify some implications. (Happy to let pretty much anything go at this point. I need a new hobby). I’m glad to hear that you recognize mitigating factors, even if in a quite contradictory fashion: you still hold out for a metaphysical chamber in which free will remains perfect, and you depend on God’s pardon (mercy instead of justice) since you’d still hold a psychotic etc. 100% accountable. If free will cannot be EXPRESSED, how is it still perfect free will? What can that possibly mean?
You’ll note I even used “I” when I was explicitly claiming there’s no ultimate self. It’s very simple: I recognize the apparent self operative at the social level. Sometimes “I” means “this body,” sometimes “this locus of thoughts,” etc. There is no one THING to which “I” ultimately refers. It’s sort of like the “it” in “it is raining.”
Personhood? Sure, I’ve got consciousness, a rich subjectivity, and decisions are mulled and made all day long. I’m just not certain there’s any individual “I” that makes them. I don’t need to assume free will (again, it’s beyond me) to enjoy this temporary individual manifestation of the only true in-dividual, which is all that is.
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Bubba said: I believe He did [die in your place], but I will reiterate that God loves us too much to destroy our free will: He will not compel you into His family in the teeth of your unbelief.
It doesn’t follow that if I don’t want his company, then out of respect for my free will he’s got to send me to an inferno for eternity. Wouldn’t Vegas be more appropriate? And that he loves me too much to destroy my free will is patently false. He destroys it for eternity.
And if Jesus’ help is incumbent on my believing he’s the Son of God (which, I reiterate, I CANNOT do any more than believe the sun orbits the Earth), then he hasn’t helped me at all. If he’s saved me from Hell, but I’m going to Hell, he hasn’t saved me from Hell. (To save us from repetition: I know you’ve said it’s me who’s refusing his gift, and he has to respect that. I’m just pointing out that he has not yet given me any material benefit).
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Bubba said: It seems to me that, by excluding the retributive and focusing only on the theraputic (or, as you say, corrective) aspect of justice, you undermine the dignity of man. The end result of such thinking is to approach a man’s decisions as something for which he should not be held accountable: he’s suffering from a disease and it is merciful to cure him, he’s an animal who’s misbehaving and he needs to be retrained.
It’s a non sequitur. I could consider myself accountable for my actions without considering that someone should beat me up for them. And holding someone accountable (even if s/he actually has no free will!) is generally central to the cure. (And again, I have no illusions that psychopaths or deeply damaged people are easily cured. I fully recognize the need for prisons etc. Hell is the irrational measure under discussion). “Dignity” is more vague name-calling. You can’t, of course, answer my question; there is no possible help offered, utility served, by eternal punishment. But I think we’ve somewhat understood one another’s arguments, so maybe we can leave it there? I don’t think we’re going to express many new thoughts on the matter.
Do you imagine that an irresponsible life can make someone happy, while a generous life is only one of sacrifice? That would help explain why you think retribution is an absolute necessity. I feel that harm I inflict on anyone is also harm to myself. Not vaguely, but like a physical law. (Well actually, no, I have to admit, there are probably exceptions: I kill the lettuce I eat, but still I don’t think it injures my psyche to eat it. Maybe the rule only applies to less necessary harm). I grant, however, that hardly any of us are refined enough to perceive this consistently. We’ve got all these anxious me-thoughts distracting us, always telling us we need things we don’t need and which don’t really make us happy (vanity, the upper hand in an argument, etc.).
SOBJ:
Is it fair to say that you cannot (or will not) believe in a god that does not make sense to you?
Hi Vance, sure, that’s fair. It doesn’t mean I deny that things are much stranger than I suppose or can suppose, and that my “sense” is very limited when it comes to grand orders of things. But to me, the Christian God has none of the hallmarks of real paradoxes, and all of the fingerprints of a couple centuries’ perfected sophistry and message discipline.
Curious where you’re going with that.
Nowhere in particular. Just curious.
Guess I’m the opposite. I’d have trouble believing in a god that I can explain.
“Yet He didn’t, and as a result your all loving God will consign me to hell for something which, from the point of view of an omniscient being, I had absolutely no choice in. ”
“If Adam were perfect, yet freewill caused him to be flawed, his free will was a flaw, surely?”
You acknowledge that you do have freewill… and that you do have a choice… even if you believe it is a flaw.
“God loved us before he created us, knew that we’d suffer, he’d have to torture untold billions of us “loved children” for all eternity, and did it anyway?”
Those who regect Him are not His children… although He loves them and wants them to be.
“Being omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent, he couldn’t work out a better way to create things?”
I supose He could have made us all robots and programmed us to all love Him without question… But then what kind of love is love from something that can not chose to love? – It is near meaningless… not to mention I imagin you value your freedom of choice very much.
“and then punishes those who can’t follow them. That behaviour is usually attributed to totalitarian regimes.”
The punishment of Hell comes not from not being able to keep the law… it comes from not accepting the Way out (Jesus on the cross) that God has offered. I can not keep the law… it shows me that I am flawed by my own choices and need help. However, I know that I will not go to hell for “breaking the law” because Jesus took the punishment that I should have recieved for breaking the law… He paid the price for my wrong doings so that I can go to heaven.
“Just quickly, because you sound like you’re not likely to address any further points here anyway.”
Depends on the point I supose… I do not want to discuss theology with you. Salvation (maybe you classify this as theology) yes, theology (other theology) no.
“Would I be far of base in thinking you had a crisis of faith, caused by the theory of biological theory of evolution, prayed really hard to want to believe, and got what you wanted?”
You could say that I had “crisis of faith”… because I pretty much had lost all faith. I guess you can call that a crisis. Evolution was what made sense to me, but I did pray hard and told God that He would have to take away my doubt if I was going to believe in Him. And suddenly *BAM* I believed and all doubt was gone. Call this a “infrindgment on my freewill” if you want… the way I describe it is this… I challenged God to do it… and He did… it was my challenge to God, and He had the right to meet it and prove Himself. It has been some years now and I am still believing. If I was faking myself out then I would not think I could fool myself this long lol. The doubt would come back, the things that trapped me before would trap me again… but no… it is all reversed. I do not just trow out things like the “gobble-de-goop”… I think heavily on them and process them in detail… I do not just throw things out for convienace sake, that is not my way of thinking. My way of thinking is to challenge what I believe. Like I said I am a rational, logic person… pysco-babble would say I am faking myself out in so many words… I know when I’m faking myself out… this is nowhere in the same ball park. For me, this is how it worked…
For you, I said seek to believe… ya ya you can pick that apart… it sounds like self delusion… my language is flawed. Let me see how else I can put it… Give God a chance. Put aside for a bit the fact that you find Him unbelievable and give Him a chance anyway. I dunno really how to say it… maybe I mean to say… seek proof… If He does not exist what does it matter?
Seas, I’ll try to be brief, though I know that’s usually a losing battle.
You write, you still hold out for a metaphysical chamber in which free will remains perfect, and you depend on God’s pardon (mercy instead of justice) since you’d still hold a psychotic etc. 100% accountable. If free will cannot be EXPRESSED, how is it still perfect free will? What can that possibly mean?
What I mean can be explained by the concept of a soul that transcends the body. I believe that a genuine psychopath still has a soul, and he will be judged by the decisions of the soul makes even if those decisions cannot be expressed perfectly (or even at all) in his abnormal brain or body.
It’s like judging a driver instead of the car, especially if the driver can’t help that the car he was given was broken beyond repair and never behaved exactly as he would like. A fair and all-knowing judge — and God is exactly that — would judge the driving for how he tried to drive the car and discount the effect the jalopy had on the driver’s performance.
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About punishment, I believe that your question ultimately is, what good does eternal punishment accomplish? I have an answer, it’s just one you don’t like: the punishment itself is the point.
Our sins and crimes aren’t diseases to be cured or poorly trained behavior to be corrected: they are sins and crimes to be punished. Punishment is the just dessert of crime — that is, what is justly deserved when one commits a crime. In some circumstances other benefits accrue from the punishment, but those benefits aren’t the point: the point is the punishment itself.
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You’ll note I even used “I” when I was explicitly claiming there’s no ultimate self. It’s very simple: I recognize the apparent self operative at the social level. Sometimes “I” means “this body,” sometimes “this locus of thoughts,” etc. There is no one THING to which “I” ultimately refers. It’s sort of like the “it” in “it is raining.”
Sorry, this isn’t coherent. Your use of verbs like “recognize” here require a personal subject: to say “it is recognized” implies that someone, somewhere actually does the recognizing.
“I recognize the apparent self operative at the social level.”
The “I” in this sentence must mean your real self and not just an apparent or social self. Complex chemical reactions do not recognize truths, nor do they make claims: I have never consulted molding cheese nor do I expect a bonfire ever to produce a manifesto. For real thought and real communication to be possible, there must be a real self that transcends the physical form that the self indwells.
To try to communicate the ideas that you really believe and then suggest that one of those ideas is that you’re not sure there’s a “you” that believes those ideas is gibberish.
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It doesn’t follow that if I don’t want his company, then out of respect for my free will he’s got to send me to an inferno for eternity. Wouldn’t Vegas be more appropriate?
The problem is, Vegas depends immensely on God’s perpetual sustaining. All good things come from God: joy, happiness, peace, He alone is the source of these things. It would not be just to allow a soul to rebel from Him for all eternity while benefiting from all His blessings: what is just is God withdrawing Himself and all the good things that He alone provides, and that utter separation is Hell, and it is the only logical alternative as an eternal destiny.
And that he loves me too much to destroy my free will is patently false. He destroys it for eternity.
That’s actually somewhat speculative, as C.S. Lewis wrote that he believes Hell may be locked from the inside.
But, either way, free will entails not only the opportunity to choose, but the actual choosing. God is gracious enough to give us the undeserved opportunity to accept His free gift of salvation, and He’s longsuffering in His giving all of us more than enough time to accept that gift.
In light of what He’s already given, I think it’s ungrateful to bristle at not being given a literal infinite amount of time to decide to accept His gift of grace, and it’s flippant toward His justice.
–
Finally:
And if Jesus’ help is incumbent on my believing he’s the Son of God (which, I reiterate, I CANNOT do any more than believe the sun orbits the Earth), then he hasn’t helped me at all. If he’s saved me from Hell, but I’m going to Hell, he hasn’t saved me from Hell. (To save us from repetition: I know you’ve said it’s me who’s refusing his gift, and he has to respect that. I’m just pointing out that he has not yet given me any material benefit).
I’m fine with this particular formulation: I just believe that Jesus has already died for the sins of the entire world even if many refuse the gift of forgiveness that resulted from His death.
(Way I see it, that refusal is so pointless: He died and rose again so that we all could live, so it’s senseless to allow the soul to die a death that’s so unnecessary in light of the cross.)
But to say that you cannot believe that Jesus is the Son of God… what would convince you? More to the point, what criterion is reasonable to evaluate this central claim of Christianity? I believe the claim exceeds any reasonable criterion, but the key is that the assumptions behind that criterion should be sound.
Seas said “the Christian God has none of the hallmarks of real paradoxes, and all of the fingerprints of a couple centuries’ perfected sophistry and message discipline.”
I love a good conspiracy theory, always have. But it sure seems to me that a conspiracy lasting a couple of centuries (or more like dozens of centuries) is a little hard for me to buy into.
Now if you throw Jimmy Hoffa or JFK assasination into the mix, then it might make sense
Hi Bubba,
My God, I’m starting to realize, we’re not making it easy on ourselves here. We lurch from pitched battle to pitched battle on not so small questions, and when it starts to die down I seem to feel the need to say there’s no self or there’s no free will. So with some trepidation and not a little preference to go out dancing instead, let me try to do better with explaining the no-self stuff. I’ll deal with only that question for now.
It’s tough stuff indeed, since the words are fancy but what they’re pointing to is much less fancy. Very simple and ever-present, but usually quite unnoticed, and with unsuspected liberating potential. My advice, take a quiet pause every sentence or two to check it out in direct experience. The superficial, reactive mind will too quickly misfile words like “self” and “no self” and presume it knows what they refer to. So that’s my humble request, that you see if you can set aside all the implications for a moment—soul or body, free will or not—and just have a look. If you really wanted to try the experiment, you might let awareness rest with the sensations of the rising and falling breath for a minute first, letting thoughts come and go but resting with the simple sensation, in order to carve out a little space in the mind.
The first category you’ll need to suspend, of course, is the one that says I’m a heretic who’s greatly mistaken. That I may be, but this experiment need not be part of the God argument. It’s an experiment which a number of Christians perform regularly without feeling it contradicts their faith. A pretty good friend of mine among them. It’s a basically secular (not atheist) examination of consciousness.
There’s awareness just now, that is undeniable. There are sounds, sensations, thoughts and the simple sense of being in which it all comes and goes. But awareness itself has no “I.” It has no form whatsoever. “I” comes and goes with thoughts, with suddenly bundled waves of thought-feeling which then disperse again while the next one rises. “I” arises along with objects, with “yous” and “its” and past and future, like “what should I have for dinner” or “I hope Joe isn’t mad at me.” “I” arises along with a world of things to be negotiated. But just now, there’s just what is, nothing to be negotiated, not I or it or you—just sounds, the breath rising and falling, thoughts making their little noises, sensations pleasant or unpleasant. None of it needs to be negotiated, it can all be let be.
Any “I” that arises to negotiate it is an object, not the ultimate subject—the ultimate subject (awareness) cannot have any form, cannot be seen, it can never be a thing. Moment by moment we substitute this thought, that feeling, this body-image, that position in an argument, for the ultimate subject. But they’re always objects, and all the while the subject remains behind them.
The ultimate subject is indistinguishable from all that is, from the universe itself. All phenomena change, however, while being remains: it’s more than the sum of its parts. It’s not different from anything in your experience just now, but neither is it identified with any thing. None of the rising and passing phenomena are self or what belongs to a self.
Incessantly taking birth as SOMEONE moment by moment—imagining yourself to be someone—always a frayed and pressured and changing someone—is a process of stress with no end, endured by most of humanity every moment of their long lives with never a suspicion that it’s based on a misapprehension. But you don’t have to be anyone in particular. Just life happening, here, that’s enough.
What you see when you look closely into your moment-to-moment experience is more accurately described without a personal pronoun—but the locutions would be tortuous, so I use “I.” Looking closely at what’s really happening when we say “I recognize,” “I think,” “I feel,” there are actually not two things going on (I and RECOGNIZE), but one: recognition is happening, a thought is happening, a feeling is happening. “I” is just another thought, a momentary self-image, another object taken as the subject. The subject is nothing and everything.
So! Can’t blame a guy for trying.
Huh? seas, do you need to do all that to live? Maybe I better check, maybe I’m not alive.
Hi mom2, it takes a lot longer to describe than to do! To do it takes no time at all. It’s all implied in just being present, aware, which is the zestiest and deepest way to be.
If I were just introducing someone to meditation or something, I wouldn’t be nearly so fancy. I seem to have opened up some cans of worms in rarefied philosophical realms though, so I’m just doing my best to wriggle with them. (Don’t look at that metaphor too closely).
Check out this adorable gnome, he goes over much of the same ground in a rather more straightforward way. He can sound a little new-agey sometimes, but don’t let that fool you, he knows whereof he speaks:
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=tolle+&hl=en&sitesearch=
He’s fond of quoting Jesus, too, in a perfectly heretical way I’m sure.
Whoops, did the link wrong:
seas, I invite you to meditate on God’s Word, the Bible. If you seek Him with your whole heart, you will find Him. Try it, you will like it!
I’ll do yours if you’ll do mine!
“. . . and then it’s so easy when you realize you are that deep undercurrent of stillness . . .”
10 minutes of that?! For a guy trying to get you not to think about your “self” he sure dwells on your “self” a lot.
Hi Neil, Sorry you didn’t like it. I owe you 10 minutes’ Bible reading I guess. Can I just pray instead? My eyes are tired.
No! You have to read the Lamentations of Jeremiah – the long version. OK, I guess you can pray. Just not to yourself.
P.S. And sorry, I should have been more gracious about your guy.
Bubba said: Because grace is free (i.e., at no cost to us, though it was very costly to Him), there’s nothing you must do to earn it.
How was it costly to him? He suffered for a few hours, died, gave up the weekend, and then bodily went to heaven, as he knew he would (even if he had the occasional doubt, from being fully human). Maybe I’m just being stubborn, but I don’t see what the big deal is with an incarnation of a God dying, in the bigger picture.
There is something I have to do to earn it. I have to somehow convince myself to believe the unbelievable, though everything I’ve seen goes against the truth of his “reincarnation”. That’s a mighty tall order, and something which would cost me dearly
Bubba said: The Bible teaches that Jesus emptied Himself of what it means to be God,
So how was he “fully divine” if he’d emptied himself of his “Godly” attributes. How did he empty himself of everything which made him God, and become fully human, while staying fully divine? It seems to be a contradiction. Also, surely he wasn’t fully human, as he could do cool “magic” tricks.
Bubba said: Again, God did not create sin, but why did God create the universe, populate it with human beings, and give those beings free will and the intrinsic opportunity to abuse that freedom?
So God did create sin then. God created man in such a fashion that man would sin. God, being omnipoten and omniscient, could have set things up such that our free will was not taken away (from our perspective, from His, we have none), and yet Adam & Eve would not have “rebelled” against him.
Bubba said: But He also loves you so much that He has done everything in His power, short of intruding on your free will, to reconcile His relationship with You.
But from the perspective of an omniscient being, I have no free will. What do you by “intruding” on my free will? Do you mean appearing to me in some fashion? How would that intrude upon my free will? How did it not intrude upon the free will of the Israelites, or those who witnessed Jesus’s miracles, or event the supposed intervention which cpt starfox experienced?
WOZ said: Based on a lot of recent information coming out of the scientific community I’d definitely agree that the biological theory of evolution has caused a “crisis of faith”. Interestingly enough, it’s not among Christians.
Care to elaborate? What information? Was the theory of biological evolution falsified last night while I was sleeping?
cpt starfox said: You acknowledge that you do have freewill… and that you do have a choice… even if you believe it is a flaw.
No, I was responding to your assertion. I think I’d side with SOBJ on the freewill issue. I’m not sure I can do anything other than I do do, even though I can entertain the notion that I can (and am I able to do anything other than thinking that I can have made another choice after making the choice that I think I didn’t have to make)
cpt starfox said: I can not keep the law… it shows me that I am flawed by my own choices and need help.
By Gods own words in the bible, no one can keep the law. Doesn’t suggest to you, in the slightest, that the law is unfair and unrealistic? No, of course not. It’s Gods law, and he’s perfect
cpt starfox said: He paid the price for my wrong doings so that I can go to heaven.
What about the untold millions of humans who dies prior to Jesus’s crucifixion (and of hearing about it)? I assume they were judged against the law in some fashion? I assume, since you’ve admitted above that the law cannot be followed, that they were found wanting, and subject to hell?
cpt starfox said: Put aside for a bit the fact that you find Him unbelievable and give Him a chance anyway. I dunno really how to say it… maybe I mean to say… seek proof… If He does not exist what does it matter?
He can drop by anytime he’d like. Also, I’d welcome Allah, jewish Yahweh, Zeus, Odin, Vishnu etc etc etc. In “seeking” proof of one or the other, they all seem pretty much the same in substance, differing only in details. And the proof I’ve seen so far has been less than convincing
Bubba said: For real thought and real communication to be possible, there must be a real self that transcends the physical form that the self indwells.
This could be taken as a scientific statement, and yet there is to date no indication that this is the case. None. It’s a baseless assertion on your behalf, and one you seem to take as fact.
randy said: I love a good conspiracy theory, always have. But it sure seems to me that a conspiracy lasting a couple of centuries (or more like dozens of centuries) is a little hard for me to buy into.
Oh, but the best conspiracies are those where the conspirators don’t realise there even is a conspiracy
Havok said “He (Jesus) suffered for a few hours, died, gave up the weekend…”
But He had some great parties planned for that weekend and He had to miss all of them..
(Sorry, I have a teenager at home and missing a weekend is a BIG deal to him).
Havok, I can continue to clarify what Christianity teaches — explaining that divine omniscience does not preclude free will, and that God created us only such that we could sin, not that we we would inevitably sin — but I’m not sure it would do any good.
Much of the theology about which Christianity is clear, you misunderstand. Where Christianity asserts something without a full explanation — such as the Incarnation, Jesus becoming fully human while remaining fully divine — you presume that the mysterious must be contradictory.
Because of this you miss the most important thing I wrote about in my last comment to you, and the most important truth God has revealed to all of us: His love.
Maybe someone else can be more effective in grappling with your objections to Christianity. Maybe your objections are reasonable, they just need a response from far better communicator than I.
Or, maybe these objections aren’t the real reason you reject Christianity: maybe it’s something between you and God. In which case, its out of everyone else’s hands.
Either way, there is a point where I should admit that I have done all that I can or should do in explaining my faith to you.
SOBJ and Havok:
Regarding God’s existence: I am convinced that God exists. There is ample evidence to satisfy those who want to believe, but not enough to convince those who do not. This state of affairs is not likely to change.
Regarding Free Will: I rather like what the rabbis said about this: “God knows, yet man is free to choose.”
In our Western culture, we often have trouble because we employ linear logic which tries to resolve apparent contradictions by framing the issue as “either/or.” Yet the Judaeo-Christian traditions originally derive from block logic in which two seemingly contradictory concepts are placed side by side. This oriental mentality recognizes that a person cannot understand one idea without the other.
So is God just, or is he merciful? Is he loving, or is he vengeful? Is he selfish, or is he more generous than you can imagine?
The answer: God is all of these things and more. Just because one cannot fully wrap one’s brain around it, that does not make it less so.
As I mentioned to SOBJ previously, I’d have a harder time calling some entity “God” whom I could fully comprehend or explain.
I suspect that you would, too. The difference between us is, you think you have the Christian god explained, so you can discard him now. In contrast, I’ll wager that the rest of us would say that the more we learn, the less we think we really know about God. Yet to us, this makes him more awesome, more majestic, not less.
I am always amazed at the human ability to rationalize. So who is rationalizing? You? We? Both?
Find what makes you happy and puts your heart at peace. If God doesn’t exist, then you will have been right and we will have been wrong, but so what? We’ll all be dead.
If God does exist, though, and if we have understood even a little of his revelation, then we will not have wasted our time and energy trying to understand the King’s decrees and attempting to live by them. We will have enjoyed our lives more because of what God does for us even now, not to mention in the life to come.
What will become of you? I honestly do not know, but it will be whatever destiny you have chosen. In the end, I imagine we’ll all get what we want, but not what we expect.
Seas:
Let’s imagine that you and I are in the same room, and I show you a marble. I could call it simply a marble, but I will call it “the orb.”
First, I ask you to glance at the mirror at the side of the room and confirm that you have an eye, and you do. (You have two of them.)
Now, I set the orb on the desk and ask you to focus on the orb. I do so through negative statements. Don’t think about the room we’re in; focus on the orb. Don’t think about the desk on which it’s resting; focus on the orb. Don’t think about my voice telling you about the orb; focus on the orb.
After five or ten minutes, I tell you the big, zen-like secret.
THE ORB IS ALL YOU SEE. THE ORB IS ALL THAT THERE IS.
I tell you that the eye you think you have isn’t real. The orb is all there is.
–
If I did all that, I would be, as the saying goes, full of manure.
–
Even if you actually did convince yourself that the marble is the only thing that exists, the only way that you can perceive the marble is because you have an eye. If you stop thinking about your eye, your eye is no less real. If you convince yourself your eye is an illusion, it’s still real and is still the only reason you can see the marble.
Likewise, the only way that you can perceive the presence of the present (the “now-ness” of the “now”) is because you are an “I”. If you focus on the moment, you still are a self who is doing the focusing; if you convince yourself that there isn’t a “you” but only the moment on which you’re focusing, you are still, truly, a “you”: it is you doing the focusing and the self-deluding.
–
Don’t get me wrong, I think meditation can have benefits, physical, mental, even spiritual benefits. It does nothing about the problem of sin and isn’t worthwhile in an eternal sense unless that more fundamental problem is solved, but it can be as beneficial as exercise or solving logic puzzles.
But there are two statements that seem to be made by you and Mr. Tolle:
1) The self’s awareness of the self isn’t always and perpetually explicit.
2) Therefore, the self isn’t real.
The second statement I reject, and it doesn’t follow from the first.
The first statement I concede readily. When I’m looking at a rose, I often am not explicitly aware of (and in that sense, I forget about) the “I” who’s doing the looking, just as I forget about the eye through which the looking is made possible. When I really contemplate a photograph of a rose, I forget that a camera produced that photograph; when I see that photograph on a website, I forget about the computer memory and the network cables and the processors and the monitor that make it possible for me to see the jpeg file.
(And, in a Christian sense, being solely aware of God’s glory or your neighbor’s need, to a degree that self-consciousness is lost and you’re not thinking about how humble or holy you may or may not be, can be very healthy.)
But my forgetting about these things makes no less real: the camera is real, as are the computers, and my eye and even my “I”.
It doesn’t matter if my forgetfulness is by actively trying to force my mind to focus on the rose or the moment, or by passively trying to let go of thoughts on everything except the rose or the moment: the rose isn’t all that there is, and the moment isn’t all that there is.
The realization of “I’m only thinking about the moment, not even myself” — transient as that realization is — doesn’t make the self less real. Each of us probably goes through much of his life not explicitly thinking about his “self”, especially if he’s focusing on a task or an object, but the “self” abides.
Heck, most of us don’t give constant thought to the fact that the earth beneath us is spinning in the near-vaccuum of space.
But the earth still spins.
–
In his book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis contrasts materialism and the religious view that there is a numinous Mind behind the universe. He concludes his fourth chapter with a digression about a “third way” between these two views, and what he says about this “life-force philosophy” seems to apply equally well to your idea that “The ultimate subject is indistinguishable from all that is, from the universe itself.”
Lewis write:
One reason why many people find Creative Evolution so attractive is that it gives one much of the emotional comfort of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences. When you are feeling fit and the sun is shining and you do not want to believe that the whole universe is a mere mechanical dance of atoms, it is nice to be able to think of this great mysterious Force rolling on through the centuries and carrying you on its crest. If, on the other hand, you want to do something rather shabby, the Life-Force, being only a blind force, with no morals and no mind, will never interfere with you like that troublesome God we learned about when we were children. The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen?
The focusing on the moment can provide a person with a sort of numinous awe at the moment, something he previously took for granted. But the subsequent denial of there being a real “self” renders moot the question of whether that “self” must accept responsibility of his decisions.
–
I passed it over, but earlier you wrote, “the Christian God has none of the hallmarks of real paradoxes, and all of the fingerprints of a couple centuries’ perfected sophistry and message discipline.”
I would LOVE to see an enumeration of these hallmarks of a real paradox: Christianity meets none of them? Can you list all of them so we can see what you mean?
And, I would love to know how so-called message discipline disqualifies a truth: if a truth is transcendental and eternal, isn’t it a good thing that the truth is communicated consistently over the centuries?
Regardless, I don’t think that Christianity is fabricated. There are a lot of difficulties that, taken together, don’t strike me as the sort of thing a human would concoct: the Incarnation, fully God and fully man; the Trinity that rejects both polytheism and unitarian monotheism; the view that the universe is fallen, in opposition to both hedonists and gnostics; the firm assurance of both divine omniscience and human freedom; salvation by grace that nevertheless asserts an infinitely demanding ethical system, in which thoughts count as much as deeds and in which we are called to be perfect as God is perfect.
(Compare this to the theology of Mormons or Scientologists. They are strange to our sensibilities but not inexplicable: hard to accept but easy to understand. Neither Mormonism’s polytheistic planet-colonizers nor the Thetans of the Scientologists are as hard to conceive as a triune God. God is three persons in one being: the Father begot the Son, but the Son eternally coexists with the Father; the Son became fully man while remaining fully divine; and the Spirit can reside within us. We believe all of this but admit that it’s impossible to grasp fully.)
But beyond the inexplicable, there is the infinitely humbling: Christianity is the one faith that teaches the need for God’s grace and forgiveness: we are sinners who need to be saved but cannot save ourselves. Often in its history (too often) factions have strayed from this doctrine only to see it re-emerge, so it’s not like even Christians are inclined to admit our spiritual bankruptcy easily. We aren’t, none of us are.
“I need to be saved by God.” That’s the unique admission of the authentic Christian.
Some religions try to drop the phrase “by God” to assert salvation by works, others try to drop the phrase “need to be saved” by denying the need for salvation.
Tolle suggests the most radical (but by no means novel) approach by trying to deny the “I”. If the self is an illusion, surely its depravity is nothing to worry about.
I can speak for no one else, but the self’s spiritual bankruptcy before God seems to me to be wholly true, and something that can’t be permanently suppressed.
The denial of the reality of the self strikes me as just another way to bury the ugly truth.
Vance makes a very good point about the mysterious nature of God.
Think of a soup can or any other cylinder, where its axis is vertical.
Is the soup can rectangular? It certainly looks that way from the side.
Is it circular? It certainly looks that way from the top.
No two-dimensional polygon can be both a rectangle and a circle, but a three-dimensional polyhedron can have the qualities of both.
How can God be one being and three persons? How can Christ be fully divine and fully human? How can God be all-knowing and man be free?
The ideas aren’t inherent contradictions, it’s just not clear how they are reconciled. It is possible that the reconciliation is obvious from the vantage point of timeless eternity. For us, these questions might be as difficult as it would be for the Flatlander to think of an object that is fully rectangular and fully circular; for God, they might be as easy to see as a soup can is to us in our three dimensions.
Hi Bubba,
I appreciate you engaging my points so fully.
It isn’t just a matter of forgetting the self. The subsidence of egoic activity just gives a good platform from which to perceive that activity. Then you can see that even at the height of egoic mentation, an abiding self is only imputed by thought. You catch the illusion in the act of being made again and again. Every time you catch it you’re released into freedom, realizing everything’s here (always was) and there’s nothing to seek or become.
Bubba said: If you focus on the moment, you still are a self who is doing the focusing;
Attention moves from here to there; awareness is always only Here, and everywhere. Realizing the Now isn’t a matter of focusing, of moving the attention (though that often precedes it), it’s just what’s apparent when obscuring factors drop away. Sun behind the clouds. Of course the Now is all that is, past and future being located only in present brains and fossils.
There’s no self being aware, hearing that sound, feeling that chair—there’s no-one DOING it, it all just happens. Because the realm of thought involves more brow-furrowing and dangling between uncertainties than these more obviously unmediated processes, thought provides a picture of a thinker with brow to fist. But it’s really all just happening too.
Bubba said, in attempting to paraphrase me: 1) The self’s awareness of the self isn’t always and perpetually explicit.
It isn’t that the self isn’t always explicit, it’s that whenever you gaze directly on what you’re momentarily considering a self, it is anything but. It’s immediately obvious that it’s an optical illusion.
–
When I said the ultimate subject is all that is, I should have been more alert to possible misinterpretations. I certainly don’t mean anything like a life force. I mean that in *first-person experience*—which is the only way a universe ever appears—everything is awareness, obviously, what else could it be. I’m not arguing for a mind (or a single vague, blind “force”) outside sentient animals. I’m getting at the somewhat paradoxical sense that awareness is no thing—the ultimate subject—but also isn’t other than whatever object appears.
I actually read Mere Christianity as a teenager. Don’t remember a thing about it now though.
–
I would LOVE to see an enumeration of these hallmarks of a real paradox: Christianity meets none of them?
All of its paradoxes are about speculative, unobserved entities. Realities requiring paradoxical expression are found most numerously in vivid presence, in the intimate meeting with life beyond (though not exclusive of) thought. Christianity’s paradoxes are found nowhere in experience, only in a book.
I’m actually sympathetic to, say, the Trinity, or a timeless God who yet was begat—but as mythic metaphors, not actual divine personages. The timelessness of time is a weird reality unnoticed at the foundation of each moment’s experience. (Or recall my earlier comment that we’re both timeless being and lately come children of Creation). That base of every moment’s experience is likewise *impersonal*, yet it forever restlessly throws up puppet mes and yous. (I don’t mean our bodies as individual animals, I mean the thoughts that attribute “me” and “you” and “it” to these bodies).
By the way, the Trinity, a timeless God who yet was born, salvation by grace etc.–these aren’t so distinctive. Take Hinduism’s impersonal divinity which is yet worshipped as an elephant / monkey / blue-skinned pretty-boy, each with a whole life story, and these are considered sort of really Brahman and sort of not. (And of course Hinduism has its own literal trinity, Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva, but I don’t think numbers mean anything. Buddhism has a nontheistic trinity). Or take Pure Land Buddhism, whose adherents are ushered into the Pure Land by faith in Amida Buddha rather than through their own efforts. Amida has made a vow (sacrifice?) not to rest until he’s saved all beings. And this is necessary because we live in a degraded age (fallen?) when sentient beings are no longer capable of extinguishing delusion themselves. So what did they get wrong? Just the pronunciation of Jesus’ name, it seems to me, plus their mythology isn’t quite bloody enough.
And many Hindus depend on guru’s grace, which may be idolatry but at least their savior really exists.
The question of real paradoxes is an interesting one to me, so I do hope to enumerate and examine more fully when I’ve got time.
–
Bubba said: Tolle suggests the most radical (but by no means novel) approach by trying to deny the “I”. If the self is an illusion, surely its depravity is nothing to worry about.
Certainly not novel. It’s pretty much demystified but orthodox Buddhism or Vedanta. It strikes me as moving in the right direction, toward a secular spirituality. Though, Tolle has one or two weird new age ideas too. Here are two lovely women with a little less new-age about them, Catherine especially:
http://www.catherineingram.com/ http://www.pamelasatsang.com/
In the case of Buddhism, I don’t know of any sect which asserts determinism (there are Hindu sects which do); they assume something like choice for each person, each particular mind-stream. I’m not arguing for any particular position here, just pointing out that these traditions’ insight into selflessness hasn’t been motivated by avoiding facing human frailty (“depravity”). They’ve actually tried to understand human frailty with the penetrating insight of a quiet mind. Mainstream Christianity hasn’t even diagnosed the most immediate problem, the chaos of thought which produces incessant greed and aversion. Has it ever wondered how this chaos comes about, how it can subside or grow transparent? It can’t have looked too closely if it blames it all on a snake.
But anyway, you’re mistaken that a person needs Jesus to purify her life. It can’t be done in unconsciousness, it can’t be done through mere will power. But in the light of awareness, compulsions lose their power. Invariably, as awareness brightens and brightens. Try it. (I shouldn’t be too glib, though; “trying it” takes some application when you’re unfamiliar). No-one does the purifying; as the self is seen through, its fabricated needs just drop off.
(Which doesn’t mean we become saints or supermen. Just ordinary but very spacious and beautiful human beings).
Re: message discipline. Well creationism, for one! But I meant the internal consistency but objective absurdity of studied apologetics. Any of the contradictions which I or especially Havok has pointed out, for which the practiced answer is never relinquished, although it looks quite brittle to someone outside the system.
P.S. Starfox said: “Also, God is Holy and must be separate from sin.” Oh, I think I get it now! People have been using “holy” to mean allergic to sin. Okay. Weird.
You know, for an illusory self, you do an awful lot of writing.
That’s one depravity I’d like to sidestep. We’re running a retreat starting tomorrow evening, so you won’t see me much for a week, if at all. My apologies if I’m leaving any discussion hanging.
Hi Vance,
I had your comment in mind, too, with much of what I wrote to Bubba above. You’ll notice for instance that I go in for a little block logic myself. (The term is new to me, I’ll have to look into it sometime). And as I say, someday I’d like to explore paradox more thoroughly with you guys, but not today.
Vance said: In the end, I imagine we’ll all get what we want, but not what we expect.
If Hell is what I really want, that means I’ll enjoy it, so why would you encourage me to get saved before it’s too late? Locked from the inside, C.S. Lewis said. Do you guys consider this psychologically realistic for anyone you know? This is an example of too much message discipline. (Needed discipline, because of course the whole free will thing breaks down with Hell, which means you lose your explanation for why He made a suffering world, as well as your claim to a nice or reasonable God. It’s all highly practiced and interlinked. Eastern religions, in contrast, are gleefully inconsistent—I’d charge that Christianity has actually a very uneasy, ambivalent relationship with paradox. It’s kind of a last resort). Have you really explored the whole thing imaginatively–Hell, or a vengeful all-loving God? These aren’t thesis and antithesis whose synthesis one can intuitively grasp, or touch the hem of. They’re just situations that can’t be explored imaginatively without breaking down as obviously unworkable.
It’s not a matter of demanding that I should be given a neat mental picture of God. It’s that the picture given is nonsense. Not numinousness; nonsense. And indeed for me, the idea of any personal God is nonsense since it contradicts everything I see.
And Satan?!? Another vital pillar of the edifice. Pure and unredeemable evil, the eternal opposite of God? This is hardly psychologically realistic. Bad behavior comes from twisted minds, not a pure and eternal element. What motivates bad behavior? Twisted desires. Not just *badness*.
(Tell me if I’ve got my theology wrong on Satan. Could he in theory repent and return to God’s side one day)?
(Can someone tell me where his fall from grace is told–is that in the Bible)?
I rather dishonored Eastern religion in the comment above: it isn’t *all* gleefully inconsistent. There are loads of schools with highly developed logic. But other areas emphasize the intuitive, Zen being the prime example.
“What about the untold millions of humans who dies prior to Jesus’s crucifixion (and of hearing about it)?”
We believe that He has come… they believed that He would come. The promise was given as far back as Adam and Eve… so there is no-one before the promise (”didn’t hear about it”)… for those having not been directly told, God will make it known to them even if it is by pure strong conviction by the Holy Spirit in their own minds.
Romans 1:19-21
“19. Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.
20. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:
21. Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.”
Titus 2:11
“11. For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men,”
“He can drop by anytime he’d like.”
Good, “keep the door open.”
“And the proof I’ve seen so far has been less than convincing”
I hope the proof you require doesn’t end up being hell.
Btw, as far as making light of Jesus death on the cross… one might try it before they say it isn’t a big deal. On top of it being horendous torture, it was also the only time in all eternity that Jesus was separted from God the Father in fellowship (a break in unity of that magnitude is painful… period)… and why was the fellowship broken? Because Jesus took our sins as His own and died to pay for them… you know what made all this even worse? It was even worse because He knew that people would still not love Him for it and would still die and go to hell… BUT He still did it because He knew some would still receive Him. He loved all and died paying for ALL sins… but He will not force us to accept His payment and love Him. Forced love is not real love.
Vance: “So is God just, or is he merciful? Is he loving, or is he vengeful? Is he selfish, or is he more generous than you can imagine? The answer: God is all of these things and more. Just because one cannot fully wrap one’s brain around it, that does not make it less so.”
Yup.
Seas,
A good book that talks about Satan and his fall is the book Angels, Angels, Angels by Billy Graham. See, Satan was an Angel before the fall.
It’s been a long time since I read it, but I recall that it’s an easy read. Some of the stories in it seem a little unreal to me, but then I can’t disprove any of them. I’m not a super fan of Dr. Graham, but I’ve never been able to point to anything he said that was wrong. Remember when you read it that, unlike the Bible, it’s not inspired by God. It’s good, but not that good.
SOBJ:
I have not tried to convince you to get “saved.” If you don’t see the need, and if you don’t want it, it is your decision. You are an adult…
Where one winds up appears to be, to a certain degree, to be the result of choice. Why would anyone choose something he does not want?
Perhaps Hell will make you happy, but not as happy as Heaven would have. I have no idea, and I spend little time speculating on such things. I am more concerned with this life.
Regarding block logic: The only way I know that one can really come to appreciate what I am talking about and to understand some of the concepts that you seem to struggle with, is to learn Hebrew and read it in the original language. So much of it is not appreciable in English. It is a mindset that is conveyed by the language itself.
Good luck!