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tonyrey
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“None are so blind as those who** will** not see.” Jesus predicted that even if a man should rise from the dead they will not believe…
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phoenixrrt62
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No,*** I*** don’t want to be a supreme being. I just believe that there IS NO supreme being. I wish I were wrong, but…I see no evidence.Spock
*Then it is neither universal nor absolute. Don’t you know the meaning of these words? *
I certainly do. So does God, since He created them. The only one here who doesn’t seem to understand them is YOU.
God makes the rules. God enforces the rules. God can change the rules at will.
But we cannot. We are absolutely bound to follow the will of God, even when it is contrary to our own.
This is what bugs atheists. They want to be God, but they don’t want God to be God.
As to what the OP wants? I’d gather he’s saying-why would a supreme being be so contradictory? Since this*** is*** a religious forum, this would be the place to debate it, hum-and your moderators welcome debate, I’m guessing, or someone like me wouldn’t even be allowed to join.
Personally, I think he(?) has a valid argument, but as I’m not well versed in philosophy at all, I may be off the mark…
I come here for a different reason, btw. I come searching in hopes I might be wrong…perhaps there IS a supreme being, and I’ve closed my heart to him (her). Who knows? So I search…
Sorry to throw this off thread…if I did…
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phoenixrrt62
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phoenixrrt62
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That’s an amazing story…and while I don’t completely doubt what happened…2 things jumped out at me…they are highlighted.
If the child was on life support, she would NOT have sat up and TALKED to the family…not with an ET tube. Sorry.
Chances are the child was thought to have been brain dead b/c of the trauma, and when the swelling from the brain trauma was resolved, the child recovered.
Regardless, that’s a miracle in itself, that the child recovered, I’m not making light of the sich…but, still…
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ncgolf
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Laws are written because we cannot on our own master ourselves. If you had the ability to choose the good and right always then yes you are exempt from the law. Christians understand that we are free to make choices but we sometimes and maybe more times than we care to admit choose poorly, for whatever reason. Our will is not perfectly aligned with God’s … if it was then we would always choose the good no matter the outcome.
The Christian definition of God is one who’s essence is love and who is all knowing. You make the assumption God is doing evil and for Christians this cannot be so. Is God allowing Satan to tempt and torture Job mean God is not loving or rejoices in the sorrows of his creatures.
God’s cannot do anything that is not out of love. We know from Isaiah 55 God says
8 “For My thoughts are not your thoughts,
Nor are your ways My ways,” declares the LORD.
9“For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are My ways higher than your ways
And My thoughts than your thoughts.
This tells me that I cannot nor will I ever fully understand God’s ways. If you knew all that God knew you probably would not be writing this post. You will not ever be satisfied with an answer from any of us. Aquinas and Augustine cannot fully answer your questions. This tells me personally that things will happen in my life that I will not understand, things that will cause me to say “why have you forsaken me.” Christians are not exempt from the happenings in the world. The atheist and theist both feel the same real pains in this life.
I also think that by reading your poosts you are not as open minded as you think? You come here with preconceived notions of what you perceive as contradictions or errors. I think if you really search yourself your motives are not truly for intellectual discussion but rather to convince yourself that you are right.
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Mijoy2
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I too think you are asking good questions worthy of good answers. I don’t profess to be the one with enough knowledge to answer you satisfactorily. So take my comments (I won’t call them answers) witha grain of salt.
I don’t know just how fine a granularilty God involves His intention with our life. But how can God intervene in each and every aspect of life and still have us somehow in control of our destiny; still somehow responsible for our own actions; still potential victims and victors in our own daily activities and walks?
Think about your question at a lower level. If God were to intervene in our smallest activity He’d see to it that when we brushed our teeth we never missed a spot therefore never had any cavities. Or at a deeper level He’d have designed for us better teeth that never needed brushing.
We live in this fallen world. If God were to fix everything for us (avoid all car accidents; never let us fall off a cliff, prevent us from beingbitten by a dog or eaten by a lion…etc) then the world would not be the world as we know it. It would be some utopian society OR we’d already be in heaven.
But this is not God’s plan for us. It WAS the beginnings of the plan, the Garden of Eden was a place much like what you seem to want to illustrate that the world should be like now if God we “moral” and watched over us. God, now, lets us wallow in the world that is fallen. He is moral and does watch over us, yet he is true to his plan which includes three basic premises (as I see it).
- Whether it be in the long or short term, He has us reap what we sow. We sow’ed a fallen world. We reap the results.
- He does this allowing us our free will. Else we would not be persons at all, we’d be robots with no will of our own.
- He devised a plan for salvation. Part of the plan is to struggle with these tough questions you are contimplating. It is humble to not expect immediate satisfaction. It is humble to accept that His plan is a good plan of which we will have to grow spiritually in order to gain a deeper understanding into it.
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JDaniel
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I’m sure she wasn’t doing much of the talking. No doubt, the pastor was. But, she could have communicated something understandable. I don’t know the sequence of events within her room. Having worked for hospitals, I’ve seen patients pull their own tubes, though usually foleys. But, there just has to be some other explanation that is more natural than supernatural. Something the doctors overlooked. something they just didn’t fully understand. That’s the way it always is, isn’t it?
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Reservoir_Dog
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We are talking about a time and place in salvation history where God has not entirely revealed Himself to his people.
There is no indication anywhere that the Israelites are punished or even admonished for this slaughter or for any of the subsequent massacres, and in fact, the only sin arising from Jericho is the withholding of looted goods in Ch. 7 for which the perp is stoned and burned.
I’d say its not inconsistent with God’s salvation plan in 1400 BC. God promised Abraham numerous descendants and their own land and the land in question was occupied by Ba’al worshipping Canaanites. Both the inhabitants and Ba’al worship had to be rooted out if God’s promises were to be fulfilled, you might want to look up the OT concept of “ban”: to prevent contamination from an alien culture and its gods.
Its a theme in the OT that disobedience to God is punished harshly: the man who steals looted gold (not only is the thief executed, but the initial assault on the city of Ai is routed). But after justice is meted out then the attack is successful and another slaughter occurs. Other cities are taken the same way, Jerusalem falls, the execution of the five kings, the sack and massacre at Jerusalem, Hebron, Debir, the phrase “put to the sword” appears repeatedly.
The sin that keeps repeating is the failure of the leadership to fully eradicate Ba’al worship and intermingling with the native population. This interferes with the covenant promises to Abraham. The failure to pull down the “high places” is a sin, the punishment is a string of bad kings (one of whom sacrificed his own child), a divided kingdom, ultimately exile.
So what God’s plans for His chosen people were in 1400BC are not necessarily are for His people in AD 2010. His ways are not your ways. Reciting platitudes is not a direct answer.
Like I said, that other poster deserves a straightforward answer, which, for the most part, he’s not getting.
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The_Exodus
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I agree with you. We ought to be consistent in how we describe the nature of God. But I don’t think it’s true there is a whole separate code or set of rules for God. Perhaps I chose a poor choice of words when I said “there is no parity between God and man.” What I mean is, it is unwise to start from man, and compare God to him. We ought, rather, to start with God, and compare man. The two beings are similar in their moral code, but the standard, as it were, or foundation of morality is anchored in the Godhead. Thus, whatever sense of goodness we have is a sort of sense of God’s goodness. So the code is similar, but we may have faulty reasoning here and there and erroneously think there is contradiction between the two.
This is a good point. The gift of life can be seen in two ways. In the first place, it is given to all beings entirely gratuitously, when they first come into existence. In this sense, God gift of life is never relinquished or taken back, according to Catholic teaching, sense creatures will exist eternally. In the second place, however, God gave a conditional gift: eternal happiness, which he promised were his creatures to obey him. Some, however, disobeyed and justly earned punishment. Now, the particularly heinous part about such disobedience is that it sprang from an innocent and good nature, and was committed without deception on the part of the disobedient. They really disobeyed for no other reason than that their wills were evil.
All creatures have been given sufficient grace to have control over the commands God gives – even those born in original sin. Otherwise, God would be commanding the impossible, and his punishments would not be just but malicious. If in fact we did out of necessity commit sin, that would be unfair. But, supposing we all have sufficient help to resist, would you not say that the accusation of “injustice” does not follow?
This is an interesting point. I admit that it would be nice if such a thing were created, but I don’t think it follows that it is the duty of the Church, for interpretations of the Scripture could invite even more skepticism, not because the Church taught fallible interpretations, but because such interpretations would be speaking to the weak and fallible intellect of men, who are slow to submit to their minds ideas they are not comfortable with. How many people have read the entire Summa of St. Thomas with diligence and humility of mind? Don’t many more people simply read bits here and there, and therefore come away more confused than when they came to the text? Nevertheless, I understand your point. You really want to know what a text means, definitively, because you seek the truth. And that much I can heartily relate to and appreciate.
This is another good point. I do not think the comparison here follows however, and so neither does your point. This is why. Firstly, God has indeed extended his hand to every man, by sufficient grace given to them. God created the world, through Christ, who is “the true light who enlightens every man.” But men reject that light, because they are evil. Now, God allows this to happen. He allows some created beings to fail of themselves. He neither wills that they fail, nor wills that they not fail, but permits them to fail, and this is a good, because he can both bring about greater good from them, and gain glory from executing justice. God’s justice can never be unjust nor malicious, and so all he does out of justice is in line with our understanding of justice.So God desires all men to be saved (1 Tim 2:4), but they of themselves put up an impediment to his grace.
But man, on the other hand, is indeed commanded to help his neighbor for the very reason of imitating God, who causes it to rain on the just and the unjust, as Christ said in his great sermon. That is the reason he gives for turning the other cheek. “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” Matt. 5:45
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tonyrey
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Reservoir_Dog
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I’m not a fundamentalist asserting that all OT material is literally true, but we are dealing with books that are broadly considered historical records of the Israelite people: Joshua, Judges, Kings, Chronicles. Picking and choosing what facts to believe here, and how to spin others, ventures into a special pleading or ad hoc fallacy. You have to redact a lot of “put to the sword” passages to revise this record into something other than what it plainly appears to be.
While these themes of punishment and redemption are correct as stated, 1400 BC was not in NT times and applying post-salvation derived ethics to an early stage of salvation history doesn’t seem to work too well, obviously. Calling the manner of the conquest of Canaan a “just war” is a stretch.
I personally don’t think that the lesser of two evils is solid thinking. God doesn’t ask anyone to do evil, lesser or otherwise. The Joshua and Judges books show God ordered the wholesale slaughter of the Ba’al worshiping Canaanites – and that is clear by the examples given above because those acts are not punished but in fact rewarded (e.g., the sack of Ai after the theft sin but not the slaughter at Jericho is punished). That said, His will cannot, in any way, be called an evil.
Why this is so I understand at an intellectual and theological level, but not emotionally. Hence, the meaning of the phrase God’s ways are not mine. If I could see this through His eyes, I wouldn’t be troubled by the relentless slaughter, but I can’t, although I can accept it and try to explain it as something necessary in 1400 BC.
To the OP, this slaughter isn’t outshined by the coming of the Messiah. Asking why the conquest of Canaan was bloody is not an attempt to discredit Christianity; it is a legitimate question that can be answered forthrightly.
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Seeker2010
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That’s a very, very interesting comment, especially coming from a believer.
Is it not a core tenant of your faith that Jesus’ death was ‘the ultimate sacrifice’? Yet, as you point out here, material death to a soul bound for heaven, as Jesus assuredly is if he is who he claims to be, would it not therefore follow that his ‘sacrifice’ was actually meaningless? To be sure, there were a couple of hours of physical misery, but compared not only to an eternity in heaven, but an eternity in heaven as the head dude in charge no less, that’s no sacrifice of any import it seems to me.
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Seeker2010
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I am happy for your happy story, but feel the need to point out that correlation does not imply causation. I had a very similar situation a few months ago with my mother. She suffers from COPD, and she had what the medical staff described as an exacerbation. I don’t know if that’s a technical term, or if they were trying to explain it in lay terms, but that doesn’t really matter.
Though her heart stopped during the ambulance ride, they were able to resuscitate her, though she was in a medically induced coma and on a ventilator. We waited several days hoping for improvement, and there was none. As my mother had made her desire to not be kept alive in such a manner, ultimately we, her sons, decided to pull the vent. We expected her to die. The doctors did not guarantee she would, but they came as close to guaranteeing it as doctors come. (My sister in law, who is a nurse, also told us the chances of recovery were virtually nil.)
Yet she did not. Not only that, she recovered to the point that she is more healthy now than she was before the incident. She’ll never be healthy compared to ‘normal’ but for her she’s better.
And no intercessory prayer was done.
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The_Exodus
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All are implicated in the sin of Adam, both spiritually and analogously, and so death is required of all men, save the Mother of God and Christ, who rather died freely. So in a word no, the death of even children are not “meaningless,” for they are under the penalty of Adam, and therefore must pay it.
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TheRealJuliane
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By YOU and your family. You don’t know if anyone else was actually praying for her, do you? Including the saints in Heaven. If you don’t believe in miracles, then nothing that happens will ever seem like a miracle.
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Neil_Anthony
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Hi,
Jesus’ death was painful and difficult. It wasn’t necessarily the “ultimate” sacrifice in the sense that it was the most painful. But it would have been “ultimate” in the sense that as the Son of God, his sacrifices are worth more than ours. I’m sure that as you point out, dying was easier for him to endure than for the average person.
His death shows us how much God loves us, and gives us an example to emulate.
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runningdude
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Yes you are correct in this assessment. if you include God as part of the “universe” encompassed by the term “universal”, then this law is indeed “neither universal nor absolute”. However, God is not generally considered to be a member of group “universe”. God is generally considered to be external to everything.
If God were bound by these “absolute” and “universal” laws, then that would imply that something exists externally to God. However, nothing exists independent of God. By the Catholic definition of God, all persons and things exist solely because He wills them to exist.
God can choose to abide by by His laws, or He can forgo His laws. Nothing externally binds Him to obey His own Law. However, because we exist solely at His discretion, and He chooses to bind us by a Law, then we are bound. There is no human authority that can unbind us from this Law. From a human perspective, the law is “Universal” and “Absolute”.
However, God is Absolute. He is not “Universal”, because the God does not encompass the universe. The Universe encompasses only the space God created for it. The Law is Absolute for humans, because if God changes the law, then man is still bound by it.
God, to a limited extent, loosened the law, allowing us to be like Him in that we have free will. We can choose to obey all of God’s law, or disobey and break what few laws we are permitted to break. God gives us the choice, to be with Him, or to work against him. But God limits this choice, and its His prerogative alone as to how evil we are allowed to become.
God could, if He chose, create a counter God of equal power that also existed for all eternity. God is not bound by our puny math. He could if chose, create another absolute power, because He has absolute power. He chose not to (possibly so we, His beloved creation, don’t get a headache
). God is absolute. How could two absolute beings co-exist? That would be up to them!As I said though, as His creation, we are bound by His law. As far as He revealed, He is it, and we are bound to believe Him. Everything, Satan included, is bound and loosed according to His will. We are only as free as He lets us be.
Thus, the short answer is that God is not bound by the simple logic that He gave us. He has absolute prerogative over everything (both the universe, and Himself)!
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runningdude
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An extension of my previous argument is that God is not totally capricious, and created us humans with the use of reason and logic so that we may learn and dicerrn His will, so that we may come to know and Love Him and His Son, and His Holy Spirit.
However God also gives us examples where He shows us that He is not bound by our finite understanding.
However God also gives us examples where He shows us that He is not bound by our finite understanding.
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brumano
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Some of your arguements would be pretty fair on one level if God had only went so far as say the Judaeo Islamic God goes, but all your arguements dissolve in light of the prophecy,birth, life, teachings, suffering, passion, death on the cross, ressurection, ascension into glory, and ongoing life of the real God in His church and in heaven from where He will return some day for all of us.
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Seeker2010
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How, exactly? His existence the day after his death was identical to his existence prior to his birth. What did he sacrifice?
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