Or:EndTimes:
Or…
Father to children: “Do not make faces at me, or I will beat the living daylight out of you! And chase you out of the house!”
Force?
or
Loving Guidance?
You keep trying to avoid to prove your principles by asking others to disprove them. You realize we’re on to your game, and refuse to play by your invalid rules… right?
Why do I have to repeat it, then? Can you demonstrate sufficient certainty? If not…
Agreed. And yet, this doesn’t mean that any observation – or set of observations – suffices to render valid judgment. That’s what you continue to refuse to prove that your assertions show. The “blind men and elephants” is the counter-example to your assertions… unless you successfully show that there is a point at which observations warrant conclusion. Still waiting, K…
You keep on trying to say “I said it, so you must disprove it.” You realize that this is invalid logic… right?
Outstanding! Therefore, by your own standards, there’s no one who can assert “unnecessary suffering”. So… will you finally give up the silly game that “unnecessary suffering” exists? C’mon, man… we all know that you’re in the realm of “smoke and mirrors” now, unless you can demonstrate the validity of your assertions…
If your assertion is accurate, then I agree with you. Your assertions – “an elephant is merely a trunk” is just wishful thinking and blind faith… unless you have anything else to rely upon. (And, by your assertions… you don’t. Therefore… QED.)
I agree. Your lack of substantiation of argumentation is getting boring.
Nah. In K’s case, it seems merely to be histrionics, not force.Challenge my basic assumptions and I shall go ballistic!
Force? or Force?
The failure of the analogy is that parents can’t control the harmfulness of fire. Its not like God just happened upon these harmful things and warned us about them, he deliberately created them harmful. A better analogy would be a parent just arbitrarily setting up a bear trap in a toddlers room and telling the toddler not to step on it “as a test.”
The failure of this analogy is that even if we grant that hell exists necessarily, there is no necessary reason why God must grant us only a single choice. That is, God is the one who made it such that we can’t ever “come to our senses” after experiencing hell.
So let me understand you:goout:
I wonder, how many times do I have to explain the difference between “suffering” and “unnecessary suffering”?
I use the Catholic definitions.
That’s not an insult, it’s an observation of the way atheists typically discourse. Atheist almost always reflex to easily refutable fundamentalist stereotypes. You are doing it.goout:
Yes. The concept of necessary suffering is that is LOGICALLY necessary to achieve a certain “greater good”, which MORE than compensates the “painful means”, AND which suffering cannot be eliminated or even slightly decreased without jeopardizing that “greater good”. That is the definition of “necessary suffering”.
Of course I have never heard of a suffering which would be necessary when approached by an omnipotent being. Of course there might be one, but I am not aware of it. But without an actual example you have no argument. Anything and everything that we can eliminate and / or prevent and / or minimize is by definition NOT necessary.
Your next error is in your “example” of a padded room. God’s omnipotence means that he does not have to DO anything special, expect WILL the suffering away.
Just another empty insult. Try to do better next time.
Not a good analogy … For you appear to fail to understand Free Will and the Why of its Necessity
yes I saw that.goout:
It would NOT be an insult, if you provided an argument. I gave you the proper definition of what constitutes an unnecessary pain and suffering.
Gorgias:
Catholicism says it.
Q.E.D.
- God “wants” everyone to be with him.
- We are not with God.
- God could bring all of us to him, if he so desired.
If God could micro-manage the creation so it would be in synch with his desires, but fails to do it, then it is his fault that the state of affairs is in discrepancy as opposed to what he desires.
Just another incorrect observation. But it is true that I am not an OMNIPOTENT parent. Whatever I don’t like about the state of affairs, AND have the ability / knowledge / power to fix, I DO fix it.
Is your death necessary? Your cruel parents! Giving life to you knowing full well you will rot in the ground for no purpose, unnecessarily.goout:
I gave an objective definition of what constitutes necessary and unnecessary suffering. You can either accept it, or provide a rebuttal, and a better definition.
If the definition of unnecessary suffering is applicable to almost all sufferings, that is an irrefutable argument against God’s omni-benevolence. Any suffering that we, humans can prevent or lessen is an argument for unnecessary suffering and as such, against God’s benevolence. You are unable to provide a counter argument.
Unnecessary suffering disproves God’s benevolence.
However, we haven’t reached consensus that they’re “self-evident”; we only have your claims that this is so. Therefore, you need to demonstrate why it’s reasonable to assert such a claim – especially in light of the objections to your claims!
All I’m asking for is the heuristic: at what point is the duck principle sufficient in order to reach a conclusion? (And then, how does it apply in the case of your so-called “unnecessary suffering” claim.)
I think we’re done, then: we’ve devolved into you saying “I’m gonna make a claim, and I refuse to substantiate it; I simply require that you accept it because it came outta my mouth.”
A-ha! NOW we’re getting somewhere! Finally, you’ve begun to explain what you mean when you say “duck principle”! Brilliant!
Sure you are – you are simply loathe to admit it: Christ’s passion and death, which opened the possibility of salvation and eternal life to humanity.
Maybe we can turn a poster’s own standard back on him: does it look like a duck? sound like a duck? feel like a duck? Then yep… it’s a fundamentalist atheist duck.
I’m just asking for how you frame up the ‘duck principle’. I’m not debating that it exists. I just disagree that it applies in all cases and in every possible way. So… show me that it does what you say it does, in the case of your proposed “unnecessary suffering,” given what you’ve said about that concept.
You asked for a counter-example. I gave it. It has everything to do with the rest.
A couple of thoughts:
That is exactly the situation described by the analogy. Please describe specifically how free will and “the why of its necessity” invalidates the analogy.
No, that is not how analogies work. We are considering the culpability of God in creating things harmful to us through the use of a parental analogy (i.e. the analogy of a parent deliberately creating a harmful environment for their child.)
So, if you start a fire in your fireplace and give your children open access to it, you’re not at fault if they jump in, but God is – because you didn’t create the nature of fire to burn?
Man’s Free Will… puts the culpability of all our decisions upon Man… .
