Tercel

Thanks ManM for those suggestions.
Unfortunately searches in the catalogues of my local libraries turned up blanks for the majority of titles you listed, however it also turned up some other titles which look promising.

As far as "The Orthodox Church" by Kallistos Ware goes, my searches turned up the following two:
1. "The Orthodox Way" by Archimandrite Kallistos Ware
2. "The Orthodox Church" by Timothy Ware

A google seach found <a href="http://www.fatheralexander.org/booklets/english/history_timothy_ware_1.htm" target="_blank">this page</a> which seems to be the book you're refering to. Since the page's url is .../history_timothy_ware_1.htm I'm guessing the second book is the one I want. How come he's called both Timothy and Kallistos?

ax

Hello again,(I don't have access to computers on weekends).Well, where should I start?! I'm sure someone asked what problems I have with original sin and the like,well here goes:
Why did God put the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden? What purpose did it serve? Did God Himself need the knowledge of good and evil. Did any of the animals of the Garden need the Tree? We can assume not. What kind of tree was this? An apple tree, an orange tree, a banana tree? The bible does not tell us. How could a tree, an organism of wood and sap, contain the knowledge of good and evil? What capacity did it have for storing such knowledge, and how was that knowledge passed on by eating and digesting it? Allow yourself to think about that... Why, therefore, among all the useful and decorative trees in the Garden of Eden, did God deliberately include this tree, the tree that carries the warning: "in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die"?
Did He put it in the Garden as a temptation to tempt Adam and Eve? The bible says very clearly that cannot be the case. God does not tempt: "Let no man say . . . I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth He any man." (James 1:13) Therefore, we have a tree of a nature that we cannot comprehend, whose fruit is so sinful to consume that it would result in the immediate and eternal damnation of humankind, placed in a location so precarious as to make that outcome an inevitability, all apparently for no purpose whatever. Imagine a caring, loving parent leaving a loaded pistol in the playroom of a five year old child, knowing full well what the result will be, and watching from a crack in the door as the child blows his brains out.
Did God know Eve would eat the fruit? Of course He did! We are told by the bible that God knows all things from the Beginning unto the End. Did He not know Eve would give it to Adam? Of course He did. Did He not know that the serpent would tempt Eve? He did, if we are to accept the bible. Therefore, did Eve have any free will in the matter? Could she have acted in a manner other than God had foreseen for her? Of course not! How could she? How was the serpent able to speak? Did it give itself this remarkable ability? How does the mouth of a snake, with no lips or proper teeth, and no articulate tongue, form human words? How did the tiny brain of a snake become wise and subtle? Who made it so? Who was responsible for putting the principle actors-- Adam, Eve, the serpent and the Tree-- all together in the Garden of Eden? God, of course. The inescapable conclusion? That He put all the pieces on the game board, and enacted His own little drama, resulting in the deliberate, eternal damnation of Humankind. In the words of Ingersoll: could a devil have done worse?
We are told that at their creation, Adam and Eve, like small children, did not posses the knowledge of good and evil, of right from wrong. I wonder why God wanted to withhold this from them... Should Adam and Eve therefore be held responsible for committing an action prior to them having the Knowledge of Good and Evil? I would not think so. They disobeyed an instruction before they knew it was wrong to disobey. Was this the Ultimate Sin, for which every human being ever born was to pay with their eternal soul? Was that the worse thing that Adam and Eve could have done? They could have beaten and slaughtered each other, and destroyed their paradise. But they did not do anything so cruel or barbaric. They ate a piece of fruit, contrary to the will of an arbitrary god. People disobey God's commands millions of times every day all over the earth-- from lying and stealing to murder and worshipping other gods... why then was Adam and Eve's simple disobedience to carry such a heavy price? It would have been fair of God to give Eve this same warning...but He did not. He uttered it before He pulled out Adam's rib and made a whole woman. (Why did He not use the dirt again, I wonder?) We have no record of God or Adam telling Eve of this dreadful warning, so why should she be held accountable? I can only guess that Adam told her.
Now come on-this story is stupid!! Oh and prayer, if you think it helps to pray for me then go right ahead.But surley God's will shall go on whether you pray or not? Or can we change god's mind? But I thought he is in a state of omniscience?? The bible is a collection of tales with moral themes-THATS ALL!! Some people say things like " But just look at the amount of moral teachings, surley man could not make that up". I say, " yes but but you can apply that to buddism for just one example, and that statement still works, after all, budda was the one who came up with the golden rule that so many attribute to jesus", then they say "your problem is you havn't got the spirit of God" and walk away.-christianity is stupid, just go to the library section here at infidels, and read all of the essays listed under christianity. I hope I've established where I'm coming from.

[ June 30, 2002: Message edited by: ax ]</p>

ManM

Tercel,
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140146563/qid=102" target="_blank">This is a link to the book.</a>

By the way, Timothy changed his name to Kallistos between revisions, so it is the same book. I have no idea why he changed his name.

I don't know if you found this too, but there is a huge reading list on the bottom of <a href="http://www.fatheralexander.org/booklets/english/history_timothy_ware_2.htm" target="_blank">web page</a>.

philechat

ax:

Beautiful piece of prose. Congratulations!

An average non-fundy Christian usually regards the story of Adam and Eve as an allegory anyways, so your questions would not matter because it DID NOT happen. Also, with regards to other religions, a (very) liberal Christian might said God revealed Himself similarly to the Buddhists and other world religions.

Again, however, such an argument would actually fail in my eyes because the property of God is defined differently from one religion to another, and to say that the Christian God is the same as Hindu Vishnu or Buddhist Nirvana or Plato's The Good is naivete.

So there left several interpretations:

1. The God of one religion is true. If it's Allah then all Christians are casted into Hell for eternity with the atheists.

2. Many gods, unevenly revealed in different parts of the world. If this is true then it would render monotheism and atheism equally false.

3. A God exists, but He is completely outside of human comprehension. This is the Deist position, and they usually regard all religions as containing both truth and error.

4. Finally, the atheists and agnostics who have no believe in God. Religious texts in this case are manifestations of human phenomena and contain no supernatural Truths. Most atheists think religions are either records of human existential needs, a tool for social/cultural control, or a purely philosophical speculation.

It is up to you to decide which system is the most comprehensive to you, using your native intelligence.

ax, don't worry about where the doubt might carry you. A period of searching and uncertainty usually accompanies deconversion, and might remain with a nonbeliever his/her whole life, but life is still valuable without a spoon-fed religious system.

[ June 30, 2002: Message edited by: philechat ]</p>

ax

I've been flicking through a book and I've found a monk or saint Thomas Aquinas who writes
the proof of god:
1 from motion.( there must be a prime mover of the cosmic train)
2 from causation (there must be a cause of all causes, which must itself be uncaused.
3 necessity (there must be a self sufficiant first cause of the universe, because we can't explain it )
4 from example ( for morrality, there must be a force which makes us aware of it
5 from design (which is at the mercy of science)

Personaly, the existance of God doesn't depend on what we can imagine, but what we can EXPERIENCE!!and even IF a God exsists, it doesn't have to be the christian one! my heads starting to hurt again..

philechat

ax:

I think the Sec Web library refuted all the arguments used by Thomas Aquinas. I read his Summa Theologica before and still was not convinced about the existence of such a God. His cosmological argument, design argument, and moral argument are all systematically refuted by the philosophers of later age.

Tercel

Hi ax,

I think Philechat has fairly well summarised possible responses to your questions about the Garden of Eden.
As a liberal, I am inclined to regard the whole thing as metaphorical, insofar as I think the absolutely literal course of events described in the Bible is absurd. However, I can see in my own life and in the world the reality of the tendency of humankind towards evil. Whatever the reason for it, the doctrine of Original Sin seems to me a clear matter of experience (as well as the teaching of the Bible of course).

Without being certain whether the passage is literal or metaphorical my general thoughts would go something like this:
The sin of Adam and Eve was not something in the fruit, but rather the disobedience of God's command. The fruit in itself, being a creation of God was good, and knowledge in itself is good when used properly. However it was God's command that the tree's fruit be not eaten and hence the deliberate breaking of that command by Adam and Eve served to separate themselves from God. They immediately recognised this separation as they went and hid themselves. The results of their separation from God was death, both spiritual and physical. This was a natural result of them separating themselves from the life-giving spirit that is God, not some retributive act of God - for God is loving to both the good and the wicked alike and like the sun, shines his love upon all. But God is light and in him there is no darkness, and in creating the darkness in themselves - that is, by rejecting the light - Adam and Eve separated themselves from God and subsequently from Life itself.

And like Adam and Eve we sin and separate ourselves from the light of God by our own darkness.

Ultimately the purpose of the tree was that it might be eaten from. For it was God's design that by the fall of man and the subsequent salvation acheived through Christ, he might bring all creation together under himself.

It is standard Christian teaching that our actions are free and that God foreknows our actions. The how of this is not doctrine, however with reference to the Theory of Relativity and that God completely encompasses time, it can be seen that this doctrine poses no serious problems.

The serpent is generally accepted as representing Satan.

How has God eternally damned Humankind? The whole point of Christianity is the Good News that God has saved all mankind!

I pray because we are commanded to and I hope it makes me a better person. I think God works in the world through those who are prepared to let him work through them. "Through all things God works for good with those who love him." -Romans 8:28
I do not think God is greatly concerned with controlling the natural world, or intervening in response to prayer, but rather on an individual level of how we relate to one another, and is more likely to intervene to alter our attitudes or give us strength to bear our loads when we ask for it.

What all of them?
Before you consign Christianity to the stupid basket based on the rather biased opinions of the writers in the internet infidels library, perhaps you should consider the huge number of careful rational thinkers who have embraced Christianity over the millenia.

Tercel

ax,
St Thomas Aquinas presented perhaps the most comprehensive Natural Theology arguments for the existence of God of all ancient theologians. Natural Theology concerns what can be known about God apart from specific revelation (such as the Bible, miracles etc) and concentrates on what can be known from general revelation (eg the world, science, the mind etc).

Since St Thomas wrote over 700 years ago now, his arguments have naturally been hashed and rehased many times since by hundreds of writers and philosophers.

There now exist numerous Natural Theology arguments which have been expounded by various philosophers over the centuries, and the 20th century especially saw an explosion of new arguments.
St Thomas with what is known as his "Five Ways" gives 3 types of argument.

The first 3 of his five ways are variations of the Cosmological Argument. The Cosmological Argument is an extremely general heading which covers any argument dealing with cause-effect. There is little difference I think between his first two arguments, both of which consist primarily of tracing the cause-effect chain backwards in an attempt to end up at God.

His third argument is the Contigency variation of the Cosmological Argument. In brief:
Something is contingent if it is possible for it to have been different. Something which could never have been different is called a Necessity. (God, if he exists, would exist Necessarily) If an event is contingent then it requires some other event (or cause) to select one outcome from the possible outcomes. Hence all contingent events have causes. Hence a Necessity must be ultimately responsible for all contingent events. If a Necessity is not a being free to choose then whatever it creates would be a Necessity not Contingent. Thus it follows there exists a free being who is a Necessity yet responsible for determining Contingencies. (At this point it might well be noted that our physical universe seems to be contingent since it consists of an apparently arbitrary amount of matter and energy)
I've expanded a bit past St Thomas here , to give you a bit more idea of the sort of things that have been considered with regard to this form of the Cosmological Argument in more recent years.

St Thomas' fourth argument is somewhat wierd and I'm not quite sure what to classify that as. It could be construed as a version of the Moral Argument, though really it's an argument for maximal greatness and thus would seem more like the Ontological Argument despite not sharing any of the same logic behind Anselm's version of the OA.

And of course the fifth "way" is a version of the Argument from Design. This comes in many flavours which argue anything from anti-evolution to that there was an intelligent creator of the universe. Noteable is the recent Fine-Tuning version of this argument.
Before dismissing St Thomas' argument as done away with by science, consider the success of science and our ability to comprehend the natural world. If the natural world was the orderly creation of an intelligent and rational being then we surely could expect to be able to unstanding and identify orderly and consistent workings in the natural world as we have done. However, if the natural world was the result of chaotic chance why should we think that we would be able to fathom the workings of the world or that it would be comprehensible to us or seem orderly and consistent from our point of view?

Yet logical analysis and consideration of the arguments and evidence can be used to give us reasonable surety about the existence of God even before experience is considered.

Tercel

Vorkosigan

The Ware book is quite good, Tercel.

IIRC Bede said Nomad "could get a masters before breakfast and polish off a PHD before lunch",

We are talking about the same Nomad who argued that the Ten Commandments were the basis of western law, aren't we? And then there's his <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=6&t=000329&p=" target="_blank">Taking History Seriously</a> thread, which has always been my favorite of his many error-drenched threads. Take your time and read the whole thread, to about page 4 where he flees because he doesn't know enough to answer the questions he raised. Especially delightful is the string of lies, non sequitors and editing of his claims when they get holes punched in them, as well as his parroting of arguments that we had made first, and of course, his vast ignorance of the history of his own religion which Toto and I ruthlessly exposed. Layman also sticks his foot in it too with a hilarious boner about Islam, but not as badly as Nomad. You have to go all the way to the last page of the thread, where he re-appears to totally reverse himself and gracelessly concede that he didn't know a damn thing. The thread is vintage Nomad.

I suspect Peter's invitation of Nomad to XTALK was just to watch him get toasted by the big boys, which he frequently does.

Vorkosigan

Vorkosigan

However, if the natural world was the result of chaotic chance why should we think that we would be able to fathom the workings of the world or that it would be comprehensible to us or seem orderly and consistent from our point of view?

Evolution, Tercel. The natural world runs on laws and selection processes. We're selected to be able to operate in and comprehend the universe. There's nothing contradictory about it.

Unfortunately, there is absolute no reason for an orderly creator to have made an orderly universe. Orderly humans make disorderly creations all the time.

Vorkosigan