LOL, you're continuing to post right? Forget about the Bible for the moment... in your system, one's conscience is the standard of morality. This means that ultimalely NO ONE IS WRONG as long as they follow their conscience. Your conscience may tell you that murder is wrong, while my conscience may tell me that murder is right. Who's correct in the matter? We both are, so long as we follow our conscience. There is no objective source to appeal to, and right and wrong become relative to one's conscience. You cannot, therefore, rightfully condemn a murderer, since there is to objective morality to appeal to. You can only appeal to your conscience, and in return, he can appeal to his. You can't even say that Mother Theresa was a better person then Hitler!
How has christianity made this any different? The difference is that a god has been used as a tool to support your conscience. example: God (or the bible) tells one man that vengence is his alone and to not throw stones. Therefore capital punishment is wrong. God (or the bible) tells another man that a man who sheds the blood of men shall have his blood shed by men for man has been made in the image of god. Therefore capital punishment is just. How is it more oblective? The bible can be interpreted to mean anything. homosexuality slavery and racism capital punishment social equality Christians still can't decide whether the bible is literal or allegorical. How is that more objective than my conscience?
The existence of an absolute God makes possible the existence of absolute moral law--right and wrong become God imposed irregardless of what your conscience says, there's is a standard to appeal to. Now for you, there is no possibility of there being any absolute moral law. There is no right or wrong, because you've made conscience the deciding factor. What if one's conscience tells him it's alright to kill you and your family? How can this person be wrong? If you say he's wrong because your conscience tells you murder is wrong, then what makes your conscience higher, or of more worth then his? How can you argue that a particular conception of God isn't fair? What is "fairness"? Where does this standard of "fairness" come from, and why should anyone but YOU comply to it? What's the point of arguing the matter if your conscience has no validity over anyone elses? If this is biblical where is this found? What's the context? Show me your exegetical argument from the relevant biblical passages. Didn't I say forget about the Bible for the moment? If this is hypothetical how does making vengeance God's only, make capital punishment wrong? Show me your reasoning process behind this. ...and just what is a reasoning process? How did you learn to reason? How do you know about logic? Where did it come from? If this is biblical where is this found? What's the context? Show me your exegetical argument from the relevant biblical passages. Didn't I say forget about the Bible for the moment? If this is hypothetical, how is what was spoken by God not an act of vengeance on God's part? After all, didn't God command this? Anyone carring out this command would only be carring out the God's command. I see no point in this hypothetical where God says He can't use humans to carry out his wrath. Agian, show me your reasoning process behind this. What is a reasoning process? How did you learn to reason? How do you know about logic? Where did it come from? Didn't I say forget about the Bible for the moment? This does little but assert that the Bible can be interpreted to mean anything. Have you read the Bible? How many times? Which commentaries did you use? What conclusions did you come to regarding homosesuality, salvery, racism, capital punishment, and social equality? Have you taken any courses on systematic theology, and/or read any books? What about biblical hermanutics? What do you know of this subject? Do you know Hebrew or Greek, if not, do you use sources that do? Have you studied the culture to ensure you have relevant understanding of the cultural context of passages?
There have been plenty in history who have done all these, yet we still see very wide differences in the interpretation of the bible. What's your point here?
wow! ive read it all form start to finnish and picked out all the issues that have been forgotten or not touched on enough. theres too much looping on the fairness of stuff, fairness is so overrated. sorry if i ruin this thread with this utterly huge reply but its 3 am or so now so i may as well work till sunrise... lets get straight into it! Freewill! (its a Rush song) Ok lets first talk about the original topic, of freewill. what is freewill? well freewill is where one is free to go about their will. free from waht? well, free from everything, caus anything less would not really be freewill, it would be semi-freewill. So noithing at all can change the choices you make in life directly. only YOU can make the decision no one else. well, we actualyl dont always have freewill but ill touch on that much later. People have asked how gods knowing becomes a cause. its not really the same as that, but is. ill explain it simply, if you dont understand this then your going to have to follow advgice given to jesuslovesu neat the start. there are two choices. A and B god is apparently allknowing, and also is everyhwere in time and space at once (both of which are contradicted like every time god appears in Genisis, ill go to that later). so before you make the decision, and forever after your decision, god knows your decision. God knows you will choose A. he knows it before you do it. he knows it when you do it and he knows it after you do it. You come up to the choice, A and B. you have freewill, and so, nothing can affect your choise (or, nothing should affect your choice, for thats the nature of freewill). You can choose anything you want, go on, choose. If you chose A, well obviosuly you dont see where this is going. IF you chose B.. uh oh..... god was wrong.. howd he get wrong? he knew you were going to choose that... what the hell? no thats not right, you have to choose A! wait... no, you dont HAVE to do anything, caus its free will right? Now if you dont understand how freewill and omnipotence then im sorry but you never will. this is the simplest way of expalining it (of course vie added in rhetoric for effect) now onto the stuff largely missed. tyrannical god Ok well first off, since when was god not a tyrant sometimes? Is it not tyrannical to kill THE ENTIRE POPULATION because they dont follow your rule? even if you think its more tyrannical to disallow people to live because you know theyre gonan be bad to you than to let people choose to go to hell, the people god killed did not choose to die. he gave them no choice. he jsut killed them. he let them live, then kille dthem. it doesnt say if they went to hell or not, lets hope not! now, on teh question itself, it all depends on which you think is better. no not be born at all, or to exist in eternal pain. well in order for not being born to actually be relevant to anything at all, your soul, or your essence of self, must be around before the concept of your birth comes up at all. otherwise, nothing would be taken away form you, because you would not exist. so in order to beleive that, you need to beleive that everyones soul is created at teh beginning of time, waiting for a parent to concieve your human form. this leads open ideas of 'before life' and such which you can ponder on, for they are your beleifs not mine lol. if this is the case though, youd need to factor in what an eternal before life would be like. before any furhter discussion on this question is done, you need to clarify your standing on this issue. god all points in time at once well first we can assume that sometimes god needs to jump into our world chronologically in order to communicate. otherwise he would say everyhting hes ever said at the same instant in time (which would actualyl be every instant in time at once) Ok god is not at all points in time at once, nor is he all knowing, according to lots, ill jsut use parts of genisis as example caus thats at the start. if god was all tiem at once, then he would have teh same oppinion at time A as he would time B, for tehy are the same time for him, and he has to have any one oppinion at any one point. however the bible clearly sees god go through many processes. god observes. god changes his mind. god questions. god rests? how can god resting for a day actualyl provide him with restored energy. why would he need to rest? rest would imply that he did work. the original jews most likely would have beleived that god would have put energy into maknig the world but im not going to go into that sort of religious-foundation stuff, ill try to stick ot this topic. anyway as i said, god makes observations. an all knowing entity would not need observations. he would not make observations, yet he does, the first time ever, in 1:1,4. in fact its the second thing he does. the second thing ever recorded of god is somehting that contradicts his very existance as being omnichronic! Gods first sign of utter unknowingess is 1:3,9 he asks 'where are you'. this is the stupidest thing a god can say. the whole point of god is that he sees everyhting, knows everyhting, and the least he can do is tell where you are! its not like his garden is infinitely large. straight after that he asks a more allowable question because it refers to thigns earlier that he wasnt paying attention to (though he manages to pay attention to every single person in teh world atm. did he make a consciosu decision to up his security? that would negate his omnichronology...) oh i jsut noticed here as a side note, any true beleiver in teh bible will beleive that men are superior to women because god said so. its right ehre, sorry, not that i beleive in this myself >>1:3,14 and he changes his mind to.. i dunno if this is the first time but its a pretty plain one. god says kill in 1:9,6, then dont kill in 2:20,13 god cannot change his mind. that would make two differnet choices, one preceeding the other in our chronology, but for him its all teh same time, so he must have some real inner battles goin on there... thats enough of that then, theres examples of each godly imperfection i mentioned. unconditional things ok, J, u asked, if you are forced to be good, does that make the goodness genuine? or smoething like that, like if you are forced to love god, does that make the love still genuine? well, if you had to do somehting, one thing, you couldnt not do that, then that action is done regardless of the conditions, because you dont choose to do so, you dont have the ability to adapt to the conditions (this is in teh case of no free will that the question arose, so you cant choose anything). not changing under differetn conditions = unconditional. gods love is unconditional. you think thats satisfying. so why wouldnt unconditional sinless world be satisfying to god too, or whtever it needs to be satisfying to? or moreso, why are you content with unconditional love when you yourself have shown that wihtout conditional element, there is no value to the action. so wheres the value in god's unconditional love? if theres no value, why get comfort form it? thats not really to do with this thread but its relevant to your question completely. this elusive 'Choice' first ill start with analogy to get you in the mindframe Everyone has a special pair of glasses. those who are from the places of white light will have clear sunglasses, those from places with red oriented light will have red, and same for blue. the choice is to go through the red door or the blue door, and both doors are displayed on a white wall. those people whove grown up in areas of diverse light will be able to see the red and see the blue and choose. however, those whove grown up in teh re area, the blue door being the wrong door, would only see the blue door (thats how light works through coloured filters, i dont want to go into that if you dont understand) and so would onyl be able to go through that. they have no choice, to them its wlak through the blue door or walk into the wall. the people brought up in the blue area only see the red door, and go through htere. they didnt makea choice. they were jsut lucky enough to have been brought up in teh blue place, and so from how they saw it, the only way at all was the right way. onyl the people from areas of diversity of colours can actually make a decision on which colooured door to open. you keep saying god gives everyone the choice. they are given teh choice to follow him or not. who gives them this choice? obviosuly anyone living in the western world knows about chrsitianity, and almsot everyone aorund teh wordl does too. This wasnts always teh case, isnt teh case, and hasnt been teh case for theabsolute majority of humanity. how does someone whos grown up in say, an aztec city, say 15 hundred years ago, even have the option to choose god and christ? its physically impossible. god knows this. he knows they dont have teh choice. he knows none of them are going to spontaneously spread the word. or maybe he left their fate in the hands of other humans, those guy with the burning tongues? maybe those guys went and tlaked to every single aztec and spread the word? if you beleive that can hapen then.. oh wait you already believe in prety miraculous things :H the guys with tongues could not have gone over the whole globe unless god flew them there himself, and if he did that then he could have jsut appeared to people in those countries himself. he didnt though (or maybe he did, if he did he was pretty unco caus they all thought he was talking about fire gods and stuff ) he didnt give them the freewill of choice to chose to follow him or not. beleive it or not there are still people in this world who have not heard of chrsitianity, and according to you, would go to hell, even though god knows they are going to go to hell, AND have no choice in the matter. god works in mysterious ways does he? when humans loose freewill people dont always have freewill you know. there was talk earlier of animals, and i could tlak about them but that was a bit of a silly thing, since your jsut being ignroant if you dont realise animals intelligence ranges from the intelligence of a cockroach, which will indeed be 100% instinctal, to the intelligence of a monkey, which have shown use of tools. how can you say that the use of tools is not a sign of freewill? he would have had to sacrifice his instincts to try using a rock. then tought the trick to their children and so on. dont be so ignorant as to say animals are all 100% instinct and that freewill is the separation between humans and animals period. there is no line. there is a spread. your jsut plain wrong if you think animals dont have thought processes. wow i ended up tlaking about it anywya. people dont always have freewill for example when on certain drugs, like truth drugs. Or, under certain emotional stress, ones sense of reasoning will go out the window and one might act on total impulses. Apparently certain doses of DXM simulate reptile thinkning, ive read, ive not experienced that though, nor have i reached the cited dose. anwyay, with these things, freewill goes out the window. us atheists believe freewill is a chemical thought process that humans have developed furhter than animals. not some etherial bond with god. but thats a separation between beleiving and not beleiving really... perhaps this is why god says not to drink. jsut something to ponder, not an arguement. btw, do any of you christians beleive animals go to heaven? doesnt tlak about it in the bible i dont think... maybe because everyone in teh bible thought like poeple earlier in the thread about animals... and didnt bother consider it even. Put yourself in gods shoes ok lets put the whole thing into a situation with humans. Theres this guy, bob, and this guy is a real dickhead. you know a lot about him, youve read his diaries, you track his phone, you watch him all teh time, you know exactly what hes going to do. one day, your walking through hte park, and you find bob drowning in the pond. you go to save him, then remember that he had planned, and you know he was going to, kill 20 people and himself. so do you save his life, jsut to give him the respect of making teh decision to kill the people, or jsut not let him live at all? no one tried putting it in teh position of a person so far thats all. jsut another perspective to think about. Final note on words Finally, i think a bit too mcuh ephasis in this debate has been over the definitions of the words omnipotence and stuff. omnipotence has been equated to all power which has then been equated to infinite resources at on point by the christians, and was held i think. these defninitions need to be fixed up. although the defnintion states 'power', this is leading people in different directions. the root of omnipotence is 'potence'. all potence. this does not mean he has infinite resources. it means he has infinite potential. if someone has infinite potential, then they have the potential to do anything. this means they can do anything. it doesnt mean they can do only some things, but to an infinite magnitude. it means they can do annnyyythhhiiinnnggg. thats waht the word means. you cant deny that. however i dont think word defninitions shoudl eb relied on with any biblical discussion because the original words would definitely have been different in a large portion of the bible. the new meanings may mean the same thing on basic translation level but not when you try to break down teh word structure for your arguement (so thats a bad point for both sides here) anyway thats all from me. the sun is coming up, looking out my window loks beautiful.. i jsut with i had som cannabis.. though i know i would not have written this if i did... which you can choose whether its good or bad I hope ive not lost anyonoe there, and i hope i brought up some important issues. you people here are much better than poeple like BANDIT who popped his little head in earlier... i think ill go to bed so i can have enegy for tomo.. this arvo.
and jatom, why do you think people kill eachother? its not because theyre unreligious. often theyre catholic or soemthing. but anyway, morals should be decided by waht is best for everyone. the chrsitian values are good for everyone if followed. jesus really did sum it up when he said 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you'. I live my life by this rule, not beacuse it was apparently inspired by god, but because if everyone follows this, everything is fair. If everyong follows this, then it actually allows for eye for an eye philosophies, wihtout the negative moreal implications.
You're correct, I believe everyone has a religion, or worldview, therefore everyone is "religious." How do you decide what is "best" for everyone? Who decides what is "best"? Why is he allowed to choice what's "best"? What if someone else has a different opionion of what "best"? Is he wrong or equally right? Why are they good for everyone? Who decided this? By what standard? "Fair" by whose standard? What if John Doe thinks that state of affairs wouldn't be "fair"? Is he correct, or are you correct...or are you both correct? What makes certain implications negative? Who decideds this? What if John Doe feels certain "negative" implications aren't really negative at all? Whose right in the matter? Can anyone really be right?
I was saying that there have been plenty of well qualified historians, translators, pastors, etc...that cannot seem to come up with one absolute meaning in the bible. Asking anyone who wishes to comment on their and other's interpretation of the bible if they have the following qualifications is moot, simply because it doesn't matter.
True, but many differences are minimal at best, and the overall "absolute meaning" of the bible remains the same.
Minimal at best?? I'm sorry, but that is just not true... My church thought it was wrong for women to wear pants, and my fiance's church finds nothing wrong with gay marriage... Far from minimal...
jatom, there are simple ways to find fairness. for teh natural human, pain and emotional suffering is not desired. however of course, each person is hte individual. do you not see that waht jesus tought allows forteh mos fair world to live in for it takes into account every single person's own beleifs at once? the only time these thgins are not fair is when someone enjoys a certain pain. but then, someone might enjoy pain and tehrefor would have eternal happiness in hell too, so those people jsut dont fit into any moral standards. however the rule's essence works on the pain they recieve. so if you think theyre gonna react worse to something to you, you need to think about those things. fairness is where you get the most happiness out of the whole community. thats waht fairness is. the whole point of fairness is that it takes into consideration everyones beliefs. for somehting to be trully fair, it apeases everyone's beliefs. it jsut so happens that practically nothing in life is trully fair. It also jsut so happens that your god teaches mostly the fairest teachings out of msot of the other gods feared by humans. quite simply though, a rapist would not want to feel the same pain emotionally and physically as the person they are raping. it is the most fair personal principle because on teh whole, it takes into consideration every single persons preference. I think theres a difference between fair and just. not thought about it all that much really though. lol wont anyone aknowlege my post :&
What has this to do with fairness? You keep speaking of fairness, but what is fairness? Who defines it? Are you atheist or theist? Says who? You? What if they're inclined to believe otherwise? What has this to do with fairness? React "worse"? Who defines a "worse" action? You? Where did your ideas of "better" and "worse" come from? What of the murder, rapist, or pedophile who finds happiness in their crimes? What of the murder, rapist, or pedophile's beliefs in their crimes? Does "fairness" take into account their beliefs as well? What about the person who believes your definition of fairness is absurd and should not be followed? Does fairness take into account his beliefs also? Fairest how? Are you saying that the Christian God is the most tolerant? Why? I'm sure a football coach doesn't want to feel the same pain he puts his team through either. But so what. What has this to do with fairness? Explain. You keep calling things "fair" but you not explaining what fair is, or who defines it. Do you define it?
dude you quoted almsot all of them as standalone sentances as if you didnt even read the whole thing. I did in fact define waht fiarness was, and i stated that there is no absolute fairness. i made the distinction between fairness and justice. and yes your god is the msot tolerant. he is so tolertant in fact that he will forgive any level of sin concievable. that is why. so yeh i think teh smot important thing to adress out of it is my distinction between being fair and being just.
you are right on teh topic of jsutness though, because rules have to be set by people and so the only legitimate laws would be those put forward by the ultimate, being god. but that onyl adds to the sociological requirement of religion to keep order and a controlled standard with which people are not allowed to argue with.
