TedM

Please explain. You're the one claiming God would or wouldn't do things.

It may well be that all you are doing is questioning but I read into your questions very strong opinions about what you think God would or wouldn't do. It sounds to me like you've formed your conclusions about what kind of God created us, if one did. That's what I'm objecting to. Your opinions might be correct but they also might be very incorrect because they are limited by your limited mind.

sotto voce

Be fair. It's difficult not to, when dealing with Catholicism.

TedM

I'm not sure why you can't wrap your mind around the idea of a Creator. That's all I'm talking about. I'm not saying he has to sit on a throne, have a white beard, be all-knowing, all powerful, care about us, etc... I AM saying he would be nearly infinitely more intelligent than you or I are, and thus our 'rational' judgements about His nature could be extremely wrong, and to 'TRUST' in them may be misguided.

TedM

Sotto, I wasn't writing about Catholicism. What in the world happened to cause you to hate Catholicism so much? It's clearly off the map in terms of your emotions.

sotto voce

Oh.

TedM

It's not that I don't want to understand but I realize that I never will be able to understand why God would create a world like ours for many of the reasons you provide. However, there ARE reasons that you haven't put forth that MIGHT explain any one of the things you mention. I just don't see the point in discussing them because we can't know the mind of God. We can only pretend to know it. What's the point in pretending? Do you really think you'll discover something?

I think it is one thing to use our rational thought to live our lives with actions and consequences, and a whole other thing to use our rational thought to try and figure out things we are incapable of figuring out -- ever. Why bother?

aa5874

Your statement is contradictory. Why are you pretending to know that there might be reasons??

You can only Pretend to know that there might be reasons.

spin

This is not entailed in anything I have said.

This is not entailed in anything I have said.

This is not entailed in anything I have said. As I indicated, you've converted speculation, questioning, and irony into assumptions.

My use of conditionals and the equivalent don't allow this either.

I didn't say that either. You are having difficulties with basic English usage. Here is what I said:

What are you going to do on those long eternal nights for intellectual stimulation? Watch reruns of WWII?

Somehow, you reconstruct that into me making an assumption about god.

Another sad false claim by you. On a universal scale the difference between humans and ants certainly isn't much. That doesn't mean that I assume anything about god.

At least you are using creative license here. I'm sure if a god could create anything they pleased, that could include stupid people without reflecting on his purported small time nature. It's just, again, on the universal scale (which I clearly indicated) humans are in fact small time. It ultimately comes down to anthropocentric vanity to object here.

I have a little difficulty parsing this. Is it really "could have preferred and would have preferred"? I seem to see more of that anthropocentric vanity oozing round the edges here, but I could be wrong. And I don't understand why the verb "prefer" is injected here at all.

As this was my speculation, I didn't intimate that god would prefer anything, I asked, given the universal scale, "why bother?"

Again, nothing that I said.

You should have been content with this.

But then, you wouldn't know either way. You just argue here based on what you don't know.

When one speculates, one forms tentative conclusions. It's normal, TedM.

spin

This is religious claptrap. What do you mean by "know the mind of god" other than rehearsing biblical cliche?

Green will still be green. The size of your intellect and range of experience will not change that.

You're talking to yourself with this stuff.

You owe it to yourself. How do you know that you are not building on bullshit?

Jaybees

Nah! His god's punishment is like a surgical strike. Even the best drones produce some collateral damage. That doesn't mean that the dead non-combatants were being punished.