Chili

It says that there is two of you with only one of you banned from Eden. To return to Eden you'll have kill your other half and raise it again in Eden. Caution, this makes suicide an intuit urge so make sure you don't kill the wrong one.If you don't know the difference between shit and gold there is no need for me to purify it some more.You condemn yourself to be doomed if you fail to show the rest of the world who is in charge of your life. I said that if we do not have free will we must at least pretend that we do.The failure is all yours since I have shown you the victory. There is no failure nor is failure possible if every bush is a burning bush . . . unless you just want to pick berries in thorny bushes.The Universe has no existence of it own. It is like time wherein we find existence.Well if you see failure it is because your faculty of reason tells you so which is not possible inside Eden. Prevail, yes, but not proclaim judgement.I did.
Dominion onearth over the rest of creation to say that it will be our playgound to fulfill our hearts desire.

Chili

All you have to do is burn every translation that says otherwise! :rolling:

muidiri

Good point. Nothing prcludes him from doing whatever he wants to... EXCEPT for calling himself Perfectly Good. If we accept the given description (for the sake of argument... which it certainly is ), then we're going to have a REAlLY hard time defining god as only good and never evil.

Of course, if the fundamentalists in the world would accept that the creation story is just a myth, and is certainly not a literal history of creation... then I have no argument, and everyone can laugh as I fall on my face :thumbs: .

Plognark

I understood that part. I see no basis for this assertion, but feel free to show me where you got it from, I could be wrong. It seems rather...specious to me.

So post the relevant biblical source if it's so golden. This is the worst non-answer i've seen from you yet.

It basically translates to "well, you didn't get what I said, so you're not worthy of an explanation. Hoo doggy, I dodged my way out of that one pretty darn well!" :banghead:

What??? this has nothing to do with what I said, or the context under which I used the word doomed...

The failure is yours because you can't give a straight answer to a simple question.

I still can't see the relevance of this at all :banghead:

Then you did a really lousy job of it.

Which still has no bearing whatsoever on the conversation....

Then please put your money where your mouth is and show me some scriptural support. If it's so ubiquitous, i'd imagine this would be an easy feat...or is it just an artifact of translation and a ridiculous use of the inadequacies of language? My money's on the later.

muidiri

I'm confused. It seems to be my natural state these days.

Are CHili and Plognark actually arguing, or just arguing for the fun of it? I can't really tell if Chili's statements are serious, or if they are tongue-in-cheek just to add some spice to my otherwise blase post...

Plognark

Honestly, I can't tell either...i'm actually arguing, if that helps :huh:

Half of Chili's responses don't actually seem to have any bearing on the topic at hand or what I said at all. Color me confused.

All I want to know is how there can logically be free will when God is supposed to have:
1) Created, at the very least, everything in our visible universe.
2) Created us
3) Was aware of everything our species would do if he did make us
4) Made us anyways.

I also want to know how all this sin and punishment nonsense isn't ultimately god's fault under these circumstances.

Of course, I have yet to be shown how any of this is plausible without tossing a good chunk of logic in the trash. So far all i've gotten, and continue to get, is "it is because people and this here book say so".

Edited to add: This is admittedly a bit off from the OP, but tangentially related, I think.

muidiri

My OP. I hereby give you permission to wander, but I reserve the right to reign you back in if you wander too far. :thumbs:

I gave up on trying to argue the free will thingy already. The concept of free will is fundamentally incompatible with the concept of an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good, eternal, creator-of-everything god. But trying to convince certain groups of this is like... :banghead: :banghead: :banghead: . The worst argument I've heard for free will was "God doesn't MAKE these things happen, he just ALLOWS them to happen". I still fail to see how god having made everything the way it is on purpose, and knowing everything about all times, leaves any room for free will.

Plognark

Me either. Well, time to head home, i'll check back here tomorrow.

newtype_alpha

You can speculate all you want about the implications of the whole Adam and Eve thing, but you'd end up leaving out the original context of the story and the people it was written to/by/about.

Genesis is a good bit of historical mythology. Almost every character in the book is the ancestor of some country or ethnicity the hebrews would eventually allign with, enslave, or massacre by the thousands, thus most of the things in Genesis were probably written in light some racial or cultural conflict. Hence the reason Cain killed Abel--the classic struggle between nomadic herdsmen (Abel/Hebrews) and agrarian societies (Cain/Sumerians). There's another hint of this too, since Cain's son eventually "built a great city," as in ancient Mesopotamia the Hebrews almost never dwelt in cities while Sumerians almost invariably did.

The apple story is probably just one of those creation myth things, similar to the greek the story of Pandora's Box. Modern interpretation has fudged out alot of the intending meaning though; to the ancients, the serpent was never identified with "the devi" or whatever, but was identified with wisdom (Even Genesis seems to allude to this, "[3:1]Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made"). Funny thing is, the serpent was telling the truth; he tells Eve "You will be like God," and God echoes him when he says "Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil..." The tree of knowledge gave them moral accountability; therefore, to the ancients it was really more of a "coming of age" story for all mankind. Possible hint: Adam and Eve were naked and felt no shame. Small children are this way too

Adam's punishment? God kicked him out of paradise so he would have to grow his own food and work his own fields from now on, THAT'S ALL. Up till then, God had let them loaf around the garden for free (again, like little kids). The ancient Hebrews had no concept of eternal damnation or spiritual death; "Salvation" to them was basically "salvation from he/she/it that threatens me."

So as for Adam and Eve's expulsion from Paradise, it's a bit closer to a father coming home one day and catching his lazy son smoking his cigarettes; he gets mad and says, "Okay, if you think you're grown up, TIME TO GET A JOB!"

Chili

In the shame/no shame distinction between before the fall and after the fall.

"Naked with no shame" before the fall and "naked with shame" after the fall means that after the fall there was an ego to protect and that is the second identity that is called Adam. Therefore, the bible should never refer to man as Adam until after the fall (consumer from the Tree of Knowledge). But God never said that evil is [intrinsically] bad. He just said that if we eat from "that tree", which is the tree wherein we can distinguish between good and evil, we will [also] know that we will die (for the simple reason that we will remember that our loved ones did). Then please tell me what you mean by doomed. You don't mean you say that we are destined for hell are you? If so, you better burn all your bibles because they warped your mind in addition to your acceptance of hell. I don't get it. Just because you listen to a preacher and read the bible you now think that God is trying to get you? What is wrong with the world wherein you live except your ideal of that world? Don't forget here that your neighbor might be the saint who is laughing at the folly and courage of humans who are trying to come to grips with the confusion within their own mind. And yes, they will kill each other to get somewhere in life.Life is a ball wherein the earth is our playground, the world our capital and sun pays us divident to enrich our life as promised by the Morning Star (who is satan). And you say that life is not good?Maybe this made it better.There is a difference between "subdue the earth" and have dominion "over" etc. while we are "on earth." This difference is the difference between heaven and earth.No I am very clear on this despite my language barrier (I never hide behind that). The bible clearly makes the distinction that man was placed in Eden and the creation of the ego caused the fall of man. Notice that the ego was never formed to have an existence of being while the created man of Gen.1 found his corporeal existence when he was formed in Gen.2 Therefore, the ego as second identity is an illusion that tell sus something about the fate of the being that was created and formed before the fall -- or what has become known as the fall in our mythology that caused the dual nature of man who is therefore called hu-man instead of man.