Doctor X

Spin:

I have an answer, but you will have to go through intense training for many years . . . it is very inexpensive at $100,000 though. . . .

--J.D.

spin

Hey, I still haven't finished writing OT10. Have you been spying? I'll have to get my copyright lawyers onto you.


elron spin

(No, OT ain't that xian thang.)

rlogan

???????????????????????

I must be out of the loop.

Doctor X

rlogan:

Nothing to be embarassed about.

Sit.

Right, a "Mummy" bird and a "Daddy" bird, who love each other very much, develop certain urges. . . .

Seriously, it was a reference to Scientology which has various levels that cost $$$ to advance. The "OT" refers to Operative Thetan. Scientology has a history of suing anyone who is against them.

--J.D.

LP675

Sven- [snipped the rest, gives nothing more substantial]

Sorry, I thought I should progress the argument as slowly as possible so you might understand it (That was not meant to be an insult).

Sven- “So, what you are saying essentially is: Christians define "ombibenevolence" to be compatibel with Hell…”

Yes

“But this doesn't help your case that God is omnibenevolent regardless of the existence of Hell and unnecessary suffering”

I don’t recall making a case that ‘God is omnibenevolent regardless of the existence of Hell and unnecessary suffering’. I didn’t make the case because your premise already assumed he was (i.e. your argument was that the biblical story of the flood was not logically / morally compatible with a Christian’s belief in the omnibenevolence of God as a Christian understands omnibenevolence. (Sven-“My premise is an omnibenevolent… God, as accepted by almost all Cristians.”)

So I will simply repeat it and hope you understand. You started with the premise a Christian believes God is omnibenevolent, and you claimed that the flood story is incompatible with that belief. I tried (successfully I think) to refute your case that the Flood story logically contradicts what a Christian believes about Gods omnibenevolence.

Sven-“… this only shows that Christians can redefine words so that their original meaning is completely lost…”

No it shows no such thing. But that is not the subject of the debate you started. If you had meant to start a debate that ‘the Christian God is not omnibenevolent if one is to believe the flood story’, then you should have done that.

Sven-”If you reread what I posted, I nowhere said "force" - I was talking about "influencing"/"a little bit".

‘Influence’ or ‘force’ (whatever you want to call it), it makes no difference if the ‘influencing’ or ‘forcing’ violates their ‘free will’ (according to the ‘old free will argument’ you talked about).

If you mean God should have ‘influenced’ in the sense that he somehow attempts to lead them to stop being wicked, but never takes the choice away from them, then I would assert he did try to influence them. Noah is said to be a ‘preacher of righteousness’, and so God no doubt tried to persuade or influence them through him. I suspect Noah would have even mentioned the fact God was threatening to kill them all, and some might say that is trying to ‘force’ them to repent.

But the main way God did try to influence people of Noah’s day to abandon wicked ways was through working of the Holy Spirit on their hearts and conscience (I will discuss conscience below).

Sven- Given enough time, a tiny small influence - far from "forcing" - would have made these people better.”


Now what you have said here is particularly interesting. I wonder what you meant when you say that God’s ‘tiny small influence’ would have made these people ‘better’? Do you mean they might not have acted in quite such a depraved manner, or perhaps might have been kinder to each other, or perhaps they might have acted in a more ‘moral and decent way’, or done all of the above, the result being they wouldn’t have been deserving of death or punnishment?

Now up to this point when I have discussed what people need to do to avoid damnation or punishment of some kind, I have usually put it in terms of refraining from wickedness (although often I said things more like ‘love God’, ‘turn from rebellion’, ‘follow God’ etc.). But people do not avoid eternal punishment by behaving in a ‘moral way’. (Although if anyone could refrain from wrongdoing they would not be punished)

Ultimately every wicked person will be punished, unless they are a part of Gods Kingdom. So anyone who repents, and turns to God, to love and obey Him (becoming part of the Kingdom), will escape punishment. ANYONE, including me, you or B. Steven Matthies. (Who wrote what promises to be a particularly interesting article on this infidels web site called ‘Christian Salvation?’ http://www.secweb.org/asset.asp?AssetID=192, which I think is about the apparent myriad of ways Christianity claims one can be saved)

So I suppose my point is that some minor ‘influencing’ of God that didn’t lead to these people to turn from rebellion to loving obedience of God is (from the perspective of their punishment) irrelevant. And although God tries to influence people to follow him, they have the option to reject his influence. And this is what they did.


Sven-“As an aside, God's laws where only given to the people far later (Mose…”)

That depends on what you mean by ‘God’s laws’ and ‘the people’. (If you mean ‘written laws’ and ‘the Israelites’, you are probably right).


Sven-"... thus they didn't even have an idea which way God wanted them to behave."

False (according to Christianity). Paul tells us in Romans that even those who don’t have the ‘written law’ know what God requires of them. Consider 1:18-21, which claims from creation men knew ‘what may be know about God’ (i.e. including he doesn’t want them to be wicked), and it is for the reason they did have an idea of how God wanted them to behave they ‘are without excuse’;

“The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.”…


Also the same passage proceeds to name a whole list of sins, and talks about the people in question : (v32)…“Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things (i.e. the sins listed) deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.”


Paul says later 2:14-15 that gentiles despite not having the ‘written law’, “show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them”.

So Christians believe people now and then do know what God wants them to not do.

Sven-Let's look at an analogy: A kid behaves bad. What would a typical benevolent father do? Trying to influence the kid…

Try to influence the kid, which God does do, and has done (via our conscience, the scriptures, preachers etc).


Sven- We obviously have different definitions of "free will". You seem to think that it is restricted to the choice to "follow God or not".

No I suppose ‘free will’ entails more than an ability to follow God or not. I focused on this aspect of ‘free will’ because it was pertinent to your misunderstanding of ‘the old free will defense’, and how God’s killing someone related to a violation of free will.

Sven-“Even if this is the case, as I pointed out above, the rule to follow only Yahwe was not given to the Israelites before Mose. So God did expect them to follow a rule which they didn't know? Hmm, is "perfect" consistent with "silly"?”

No. God did not expect people to follow a rule they didn’t know. As I hope I have shown above, people (including you and me), do know well enough what God expects of us to be ‘without excuse’.



Sincerely LP

Doctor X

Unfortunately, the Flood Myths remain incompatable with a benevolent deity.

--J.D.

Jack the Bodiless

LP675:
"Almost all Christians" reconcile the Flood story with omnibenevolence in the following fashion:

It is a myth that got incorporated into the Bible. It never happened. It is irrelevant.

Of course, there are still non-mythical disasters that need to be reconciled with an omnibenevolent deity. But only fundies need to address the specific problem of the Flood.

Answerer

There is no point telling him that. But I do hope and encourage him to post his claims and physical evidences about the great flood in the Creation thread since he is so confident that Flood occurs.

I don't believe there is any point in talking about the Flood and proclaiming to us just how 'mighty' and 'merciful' it is, if he doesn't have any supporting evidences.

Doctor X

Well you see he stated he proved it was . . . considering that is incompatable with reality, I had thought perchance I had finally seen a miracle!

Anyways, indeed, the waffling unsuccessfully on minor points grows tiresome . . . bring the evidence for the Flood Myths or move on!

--J.D.

spin

I'm sure this is old hat, but I'm still marvelling over the Cain descent in Genesis 4. What is interesting as I've said elsewhere is not the fact that it is an alternative to the Seth descent and a number of names are shared, implying that they seem to come from the same source at some stage, but the fact that the Cain descent does not presuppose a flood. It in fact presupposes a continuation from the lines of Lamech's three sons. For this writer there was no flood, otherwise he would have found it absurd to say that Jabal would sire those who live in tents and raise livestock, and that Jubal was the ancestor of those who play the lyre and pipe. He would know that both lines would be doomed to extinction, if there were a universal flood. Maybe it was just early M.I.B. humour.


spin

(Yeah, Men In Black)