skepticdude

The previous discussion about Judas's freewill or lack thereof morphed into a discussion about whether god is temporal or atemporal, see

http://www.freeratio.org/showthread....light=freewill

However, the references to God living in "eternity" in the bible are scant, while the vast majority plainly describe him as being just as involved in the progression of time as humans are, even when describing scenes in heaven:

And pretty much any verse from the Book of Revelation, which depicts many "befores" and "afters" occuring solely within Heaven.

IMO, there is no biblical justification to distinguish time and eternity. "eternity" means only "endless time", it doesn't mean some weird quantum field where everything is an ever-present "now". That's just voodoo language utilized by pastors in fundie churches to keep the sheep ignorant and pregnant.

Petergdi

I just looked it up in BibleGateway and all 26 uses of "before" in the ASV of Revelation are clearly either spacial or metaphors related to the spacial sense - none are temporal. So you just made up this bit of nonsense.

Of the 11 uses of "after", three are non-temporal in sense (Rev 12:15 has "And the serpent cast out of his mouth after the woman water as a river " Rev 13:3 has "wondered after" and Rev 18:14 has "lusted after"), six of them are describing the sequence of the vision "after this I saw" or "after this I heard", and the remaining two (Rev 11:11, 20:3) relate to time (whether real or metaphor) on earth. This is based on the use of "after" in the American Standard Version. Other translations may vary a bit, but they will not change the fact that you simply made up your claim.

You do realise that this directly contradicts the usual atheist claim that fundementalists tend to have anthropomorphic conceptions of God. Anyone who can conceive of God outside of time and space and also present immanently in creation is not anthropomorphising even if they also use anthropomorphic metaphor.

Peter

Elijah

Yea god in the NT is supposed to be atemporal as in a constant sense but I don’t think the understanding of the universe existing into the past and in the future was common enough to be applied to God.

"It is necessary therefore, that every created thing should at times be changed. For this is a property of every created thing, just as it is an attribute of God to be unchangeable." Philo Allegorical interpretation II.

"That which always maintains the same nature, and in the same manner, and is the cause of all other things—that, indeed, is God." Justin Martyr Letter to Typhro

Petergdi

I don't think anyone did the full St. Augustine treatment of God and Time before Augustine, if that's what you mean.

Peter.

Elijah

No I didn't mean that... I was unaware that Augustine was known for that concept.

skepticdude

I wasn't talking about the literal words "before" and "after". I was talking about the fact that descriptions of activities in heaven presuppose the passing of time just as much as if those activities were occuring on the earth. It's pretty funny that you automatically conclude what's metaphoric and what's not by simply alluding to what is stated at an internet site. There is criteria for determining whether a statement was intended literally, metaphorically or otherwise, and the quotation I gave from the old testament gives appearance of nothing other than straight-forward historical reporting. The burden of proof is on any who would insist that all descriptions of God's activity in heaven constitute something other than temporality.

The only reason a need for anthropomophic language arises is due to a presupposition that heaven and God truly are wholly "other". But as my quote from the Old Testament shows (a quotation you avoided commenting on), the early Hebraic viewpoint that God is a big man in the sky is proven. The fact that some books of the bible authored later have more complex descriptions of God does not compel anybody to seek harmony of all biblical descriptions, except fundies who need to have an inerrant bible or risk colon cancer.

Petergdi

Are you seriously claiming that you were unaware that using quotation marks in that way makes your sentence about the occurrence of the words? I don't think your revised claim has much merit either, but it would seem much harder to test since I expect I would see your interpretation as excessively literalminded and you would argue that it was the only reasonable one.

Really? I don't pretend to know much for certain about early Hebrew religion, but whatever it was like, I really doubt it had the remarkable property of actually resembling atheist anti-religious parody.

I do not get any sense that the bible writers lacked the kind of visionary-religious experience that gives birth to metaphors of the type that do not seem to involve straightforward analogy but also seem to make sense. I do not get the impression that they lacked an experience of God as something quite different from a human being. They certainly did not have the background to express themselves philosophically in the manner of Augustine and Boethius, but I think it is absurd to require us to suppose that they were what the popular modern imagination of "primitive" would make them out to be.

But I don't do anything of the sort. I expect that the religion of much of the pre-exilic period is as foreign to later Judaism as Hinduism is. I simply do not proceed on the assumption that this necessarily means they were stupid or excessively literal-minded.

Peter.