tronvillain

Coercion is the use of force or threats to make people do things they otherwise wouldn't do, which can differ from informing people about the consequences of their actions.

It would be coercion to tell someone to give you all their money or you will shoot them, but it would be better than simply asking someone to give you all their money and shooting them when they don't. It would not be coercion for a third party to tell someone that unless they give you all their money when you ask for it you will shoot them, and it would be better than that third party not telling someone that unless they give you all their money when you ask for it you will shoot them. Of course, it would be coercion by you if you deliberately made your intentions known through the third party.

One of these situations should be analagous to God and Hell, and in either case God should inform people of the existence of Hell. Of course, he could simply do so after people have died, and still have many people choose to worship him without all the information.

[ April 18, 2002: Message edited by: tronvillain ]</p>

bd-from-kg

luvluv:

I don't have time to reply to your latest post in full at the moment, but the following might answer your first question. This is from the American Heritage Dictionary; you'll find it under "force".

Now will you finally stop babbling about "coercion"? Under your conception of Hell there is no coercion involved. That's what any number of people have been trying to explain to you for over a month.

While we're at it, here's the definition of "duress" from the same dictionary:

As you can plainly see, there is no "duress" involved either.

hinduwoman

Luvluv, you are saying that God wants us to love Him unconditionally. In that case you are attributing human motives to a Being theists say is unknowable and incomprehensible.
Do you think it is possible for a man to know the Infinite?

luvluv

All right, whatever we decide to call it, my argument is that God will not accept a relationship with Him based on anything but love for Him. If you choose to enter a relationship with Him to avoid Hell or to gain Heaven that is unacceptable. That's all I have meant by saying it was coercive, as I implied in my definition of coercive. Any factor, positive or negative, that would be more determanitive in a person choosing a relationship with God than God Himself.

Hinduwoman, these are attributes God ascribes to Himself in the Bible.

tronvillain

So in other words God doesn't care about free will or choice at all, he just wants people to love him. If they don't love him, they're screwed. Perhaps God should try and be a bit more loveable then - flowers, candy, or a card would be nice.

MadMordigan

Perhaps God should try and be a bit more loveable then - flowers, candy, or a card would be nice.

I'd settle for him returning my calls.

uhcord

If god is all-knowing, he would already know if a person is going to hell or heaven.

Why not just skip the short period of life and fast-forward to the enternal part?

He would have already known that Adam and Eve were going to eat the fruit.

He would have already known that the devil was going to turn on him.

He would know everything that was to come and what would happen if he did something.

Thus, it would make completely no sense for him to actually do something. It would be completely pointless.

With an all-knowing god there is no freewill.


Oh, wait. I actually used logic, can't do that.

<img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" />

Really guys, I don't see how this arguement has gone on for 4 pages ....

[ April 18, 2002: Message edited by: vonmeth ]</p>

luvluv

vonmeth:

Can I safely assume that you are not going to accept God.

So, you do realize that if God is real you are arguing yourself out of existence, right? If God is real, and has chosen to go about things the way He has, you would rather not exist?

bd-from-kg

luvluv:

While I’d like to respond directly to most of the points you raised in you last post, it has become clear that this policy will make it impossible to concentrate on things I really want to discuss. So instead, in this post I want to zero in on the question of what would be wrong with having a certain knowledge of God’s existence and a complete understanding (so far as this is humanly possible) of His nature and purposes. This will of course include a complete knowledge and understanding of the existence and nature of Heaven and Hell.

1. What “Christianity” says

Please don’t identify you own highly idiosyncratic position with “Christianity”. Of course Christianity does not say that you are saved by mere belief in God’s existence, but neither does it say that you can be saved only by “entering into a relationship with Him” purely out of love. Thus, you say:

And again:

Having heard quite a few sermons and having read a goodly number of books by Christians about Christianity, I think that I can safely say that Christianity (as it is understood by, say, 99.9% of those who identify themselves as Christians) says that you are saved by accepting Jesus as your Savior. It emphatically does not require that this decision be based solely on the most pure, virtuous motives imaginable. If it did, only a handful of people (at best) would be saved. The whole idea is that even the most miserable sinner can be saved if he accepts Christ. Needless to say, the most miserable sinner is hardly likely to accept Christ as his Savior solely out of a pure, undefiled love for God without the slightest thought that by doing so he will thereby escape the torments of Hell and enjoy eternal bliss in Heaven. Indeed, the very term “saved” is designed to call attention to this point. If you’re right, every Christian church has been leading its followers down the garden path to perdition.

Your position, it seems to me, amounts to saying that we can be “saved” only by acting in such a way as to be deserving of salvation. This is a profoundly unchristian idea. The Christian idea is that none of us is deserving of salvation; that we are by nature indescribably debased and depraved, and that no matter what we do we are utterly undeserving of salvation or redemption. But that Christ took it on Himself to accept the punishment due to us, and we need only accept this gift in good faith to attain salvation in spite of our continuing unworthiness. You’re setting the bar so high that hardly anyone can reach it, whereas the “good news” is precisely that Jesus took that high bar and lowered it to the point where everyone can reach it.

While it is certainly true (according to Christian doctrine) that God wants you eventually to serve Him based solely on love for Him, the basic Christian idea is that once you have accepted Jesus as your Savior, God will guide you and exercise His benevolent influence on you until, at long last, your soul is purified and refined to the point where you can choose to serve God solely out of love. This is not a condition of salvation, but its ultimate result.

2. It appears that you have changed positions in midstream. Your original explanation for God’s hiddenness was as follows:

This looks very much as though the critical decision is the decision to love God (or perhaps to love and honor Him). This is the decision that you say we must be free to make, and it is the freedom to make this decision which you claim would somehow be interfered with by knowledge of God’s existence.

But now you say that it is the decision to serve God after having come to love Him which is the critical one. And this is the decision which you now say would somehow be interfered with by knowledge of God’s existence.

Now as to this second decision, it is at least logically coherent to say that it is only “acceptable to God” if the motive for making it is love of God. But as to the first decision, this makes no sense at all.

And in any case, since we are talking about the reasons for God’s hiddenness, this clearly relates far more to the “upstream” decisions than to the “downstream” ones. That is, the earlier decisions, like the decision to seek God (or to be “willing” to “receive” faith) or the decision to love God (which is really a long series of decisions) are the ones on which His “hiddenness” has the most impact. And here you have so far had little relevant to say. Are only some motives for these decisions acceptable, and if so which ones and why? To what extent is it acceptable for God to “influence” these decisions? What about the strength of one’s “faith” in God’s existence? [I know that this isn’t all that faith is about, but you have argued that this belief must be based on faith rather than evidence.] How much influence is it acceptable for God to exert to strengthen this faith? Some influence must be OK since this faith “comes from God” in the first place, but too much influence is apparently not OK.

3. On “acceptable” motives

The central issue here is my claim that the desire to reach Heaven and avoid Hell based on a complete understanding of the nature of each and of one’s own nature is an entirely virtuous motive, and therefore one that should be acceptable to God. This is admittedly not self-evident, and it rests squarely on you conception of Hell. So let’s review this once again. You describe Hell as follows:

On the basis of this description, I reasoned:

So far you have found no fault with my description of the nature of Heaven and Hell, or with my characterization of the reasons that a person with full understanding of these natures (and of his own) would have for choosing Heaven over Hell. Your argument is that these are unacceptable reasons for choosing to serve God. Thus:

I objected:

And I might have added that such a complete understanding would include an understanding (as I tried to say in the passage above) that the joy of Heaven would consist in the fact that one was living with God, that one’s nature was coming more and more into conformity with God’s, that in doing so one was fulfilling God’s intent and purpose in creating you.

Such motives for choosing Heaven over Hell do seem to be worthy ones. but apparently they aren’t, or at any rate they’re not worthy enough to satisfy God:

In other words, choosing to serve God in order to become more like God is not an acceptable motive! Apparently we would be expected to serve God even if the result were that we became vicious, hateful, depraved, and utterly wicked, and the result of rejecting God were that we became supremely virtuous, loving, benevolent, etc.

And the desire to conform to one’s true nature, to realize the destiny that God intended for you and suited you for, is also an unworthy, selfish motive!

If you are going to describe motives like these as “selfish”, then wanting to sacrifice oneself to benefit others because one prefers the prospect of living virtuously, or to avoid harming others to benefit oneself because one is repelled by the prospect of being wicked, are “selfish” motivations. Using the word “selfish” this way robs it of any meaning; it no longer makes sense to condemn someone for acting out of “selfish” motives if such motives as these count as “selfish”.

You also offered the following:

But if one regards living with someone as a source of infinite joy and living apart from him as an infinite misery, in both cases deriving from your innate natures rather than external circumstances, it is incomprehensible how one could regard him as a “bitter pill”. This flies in the face of the most elementary aspects of human psychology.

In fact, it seems to me that regarding living with someone as a source of joy and living apart from them a source of misery is a pretty good operational definition of love. To be sure, such an attitude isn’t quite the same thing as love, but it is inconceivable that it could exist in the absence of love, or that it could be caused by anything but love. Thus choosing to serve God because one regards living with Him as a source of infinite joy, etc., is indistinguishable from choosing God out of love for Him.

This is especially the case when the object of one’s love is God. It is impossible to feel a physical attraction to God, since He isn’t physical. We cannot love Him for his perky personality, or for His sense of humor, etc. God is a purely spiritual being, so our love for Him must also be purely spiritual. But what could be the nature of a spiritual love? It seems to me that the only meaning that this could possibly have is that we love His good qualities –His goodness; His virtue, if you will. But in that case to love virtue and hate vice is to love God.

Now as I pointed out in the passage quoted above, to choose Heaven over Hell for the reasons listed earlier is to choose goodness itself over wickedness itself; that is to choose virtue over vice for no other reason than that one prefers virtue to vice. But is this not the same thing as loving virtue and hating vice? And isn’t loving virtue and hating vice the same thing as loving God?

Finally, the argument that one might “really” be choosing Heaven over Hell in spite of rejecting God doesn’t hold up under analysis. For the unrepentant sinner, an eternity with God will not be an attractive prospect, but a supremely horrible one. Hell, bad as it is, would be far preferable to Heaven for such a soul. Thus a true understanding of the nature of Heaven and Hell would not induce those who do not love God to choose Heaven nonetheless, with the presence of God being merely a “bitter pill to swallow”. Such knowledge would instead simply make the nature of the choice facing each of us perfectly clear.

4. On God’s “love”

A fundamental tenet of Christian theology is that God loves us; that he desires our good above all other things. But this seems difficult to reconcile with your position. What God seems to desire above all other things according to you is to serve Him unreservedly and unconditionally. Of course, this might ultimately be the only means by which we can achieve our good, but it appears that God doesn’t desire our love and servitude for the sake of our good, but for its own sake.

The problem here is that this violates what seems to be a self-evident principle: If you desire X, it is irrational to find it unacceptable that someone else also desires X and acts accordingly. In fact, an even more self-evident principle applies in this case: If God desires X, X must be intrinsically desirable. But what objection can God possibly have to someone desiring something that is intrinsically desirable?

You might reply that the problem here is that the desire for one’s own happiness is a self-interested motive. But I fail to see why this makes any difference. In fact, it can easily be shown that this cannot be the real problem. Thus, suppose that you want Susan’s happiness above all things, but that you know she can only achieve this happiness by becoming a sculptor. Eventually she comes to realize this as well and becomes a sculptor. Are you now going find this unacceptable because her motive for becoming a sculptor was to be happy? This makes no sense.

So God cannot find it “unacceptable” to serve him because (say) one is irresistibly attracted to the idea of becoming more and more virtuous – i.e., more and more like God – and totally repelled by the idea of becoming increasingly wicked, simply because these are “self-interested” motives. But in that case, what is unacceptable about it?

To illustrate: suppose that you love Susan, and want her happiness above all things. ( I understand that happiness is not the supreme good, but this is an analogy.) You know that the only way that she can be truly happy is to love you and serve you unreservedly and unconditionally. (Never mind how you could know that or how it could be true.) In time she comes to love you. Her motives for loving you are that she admires your virtue, your mercy, your benevolence, your unquenchable thirst for justice, and above all your love. She doesn’t love you quite enough to serve you unconditionally solely on the basis of this love. But she decides to serve you anyway because she has also come to understand that this is the only way that she can be truly happy.

Now if you’re any kind of decent person, this will be more than good enough. Besides wanting to serve you out of love, her only other motive is that she wants exactly what you want for her, namely happiness, and understands that serving you unconditionally the only way to achieve it. If you truly desire her happiness above all other things, the fact that she also desires her happiness is all to the good: she wants the same thing you do. There is no way that the presence of a desire that you share with her as one of her motives should make her decision unacceptable. Unless, that is, what you really desire more than anything else is not her happiness, but that she serve you purely out of love.

This is all the more strange when the choice in question is the decision to serve God, because in this case the “self-interested” motive that you say God rejects is not the desire for happiness per se, but the desire to be virtuous – i.e., to be more godly; more “like God”. To me this is simply incomprehensible.

luvluv

"Having heard quite a few sermons and having read a goodly number of books by Christians about Christianity, I think that I can safely say that Christianity (as it is understood by, say, 99.9% of those who identify themselves as Christians) says that you are saved by accepting Jesus as your Savior."

To accept Jesus as your personal savior DOES entail a commitment to Him. The commitment may be small and the love may be small, but they cannot be absent. Otherwise, what does it mean to accept Jesus as your personal savior? These are not magic words that can have no meaning to the heart of the person who says them.

I will come again to this later, but I believe I said that God will accept even the SMALLEST love as a reason to commit to Him. It is quite EASILY possible for the simple story of the Gospel, the story of a God so in love with humanity that He sent His own son to die for them, to invoke this kind of love. It is not the high and lofty mountain you are making it out to be. Most people who have been converted did so from a loving response to the love of God. It's true in my case and in the case of the vast majority of the Christians you will meet. That this much love is required does not in anyway make accepting Jesus inaccesible to the average person.

Also, nothing I am saying means that God is only accepting our commitment to Him if we are deserving to enter into the commitment. It means He will only accept our commitment to Him IF WE ARE REALLY COMMITTING TO HIM. If we are commiting to Heaven, or commiting to not Hell, or commiting to earthly rewards, or anything else we are not commiting to Him. None of us do deserve a commitment to Him, but if we really are willing to make one He will joyfully accept. But if we don't REALLY make one, He really can't, can He?

"While it is certainly true (according to Christian doctrine) that God wants you eventually to serve Him based solely on love for Him, the basic Christian idea is that once you have accepted Jesus as your Savior, God will guide you and exercise His benevolent influence on you until, at long last, your soul is purified and refined to the point where you can choose to serve God solely out of love. This is not a condition of salvation, but its ultimate result."

Serving God is not and has never been the issue. We are dealing with reasons to accept God. As I said, the only valid reason is love for Him which generally occurs in response to the love He has shown us. It is still accesible to anyone because God is capable of motivating a response of love from anyone who is willing to receive His invitation.

"But now you say that it is the decision to serve God after having come to love Him which is the critical one."

No, as I have said before the fact that you must accept God out of love has nothing to do with serving Him after the fact.

"Are only some motives for these decisions acceptable, and if so which ones and why?"

I've already said that ANY motive, including a desire to DISPROVE HIS EXISTENCE, is totally fine to God as a motive to pursue Him, but that only love is a motive for accepting Him.

"How much influence is it acceptable for God to exert to strengthen this faith?"

I think it flows one hundred percent from your willingness to allow God into your life should He exist. The more willing you are, the more God will allow you to believe. If you are totally unwilling, I don't think He will help you at all. If you are a little willing, I think He will help you a little.

"Some influence must be OK since this faith “comes from God” in the first place, but too much influence is apparently not OK."

Basically.

"And I might have added that such a complete understanding would include an understanding (as I tried to say in the passage above) that the joy of Heaven would consist in the fact that one was living with God, that one’s nature was coming more and more into conformity with God’s, that in doing so one was fulfilling God’s intent and purpose in creating you."

Well, in this case I think you will be asking for a fantastic maturity in the average human that I do not think exists. Heaven will be a sort of omnipotent Disneyworld. A place good BEYOND OUR WILDEST IMAGINATIONS, even in the physical sense. Even absent God, most humans, particularly ones living in squalor and lack, would look upon Paradise and desire it simply because it was Paradise. In fact, if our concept of Heaven is correct, it would be nearly impossible for a human being to see it and NOT have an almost compelling desire to abide there. C.S. Lewis described it in Suprised by Joy and The Pilgrims Regress as that inarticulate longing within us that creates this dissatisfaction in us, the sense that we are not truly "home". Well, when your average human being could see their actual "home" they would have a strong desire to be there, even though, as was the case with C.S. Lewis's character in the Pilgrims Regress, they did not want a relationship with God. I think most humans, even ones as intelligent as you, would not be capable of witnessing heaven and not having an almost compulsive desire to be there just from a physical sense without regard to the benefits of a spiritual relationship with God and the other people there. Heaven would probably be a stronger incentive than Hell would be a disincentive (is that a word?), since Heaven has more goodness than Hell has badness. Again, this kind of incentive would simply overwhelm whatever pure intentions that humans are able to muster.

"But if one regards living with someone as a source of infinite joy and living apart from him as an infinite misery, in both cases deriving from your innate natures rather than external circumstances, it is incomprehensible how one could regard him as a “bitter pill”. This flies in the face of the most elementary aspects of human psychology."

The essential part of these analogies that you are missing is that most people would not get that God was the best part of heaven. That would take some spiritual maturity which most people would not have. All they would know initially was how great heaven was. In fact, some people might be so distracted with how great it was that they would be totally useless on earth. I kind even easily imagine, in such a situation, people killing themselves to get there sooner. It is possible to crave Heaven from something entirely other than spiritual motives, and that is how people who have not first accepted God out of love would crave it. You assume that the average Joe on the street would be perfectly capable of seeing the incredible, nigh-euphoric glories of heaven and still manage to desire for "pure" motives. I am of the opinion that THAT flies in the face of human psychology.

"In other words, choosing to serve God in order to become more like God is not an acceptable motive!"

Not in and of itself, but realistically: who would want to be like God who did not first love Him? Do you want to be like anyone you hate?

"We cannot love Him for his perky personality, or for His sense of humor, etc."

Not true, I think God has a pretty good sense of humor.

"It seems to me that the only meaning that this could possibly have is that we love His good qualities –His goodness; His virtue, if you will. But in that case to love virtue and hate vice is to love God."

Again, I think it's fine to love Him because of His qualities. But you were suggesting commiting to Him, without loving Him, simply because you loved virtue. Subtle, yet significant, difference.

A girl and myself might both want children. I think its fine if one of the reasons this girl falls in love with me is because I want children. But if a girl doesn't love me, and wants to commit to me anyway simply because I am a means by which she might acquire children, that would be a problem.

"Finally, the argument that one might “really” be choosing Heaven over Hell in spite of rejecting God doesn’t hold up under analysis. For the unrepentant sinner, an eternity with God will not be an attractive prospect, but a supremely horrible one. Hell, bad as it is, would be far preferable to Heaven for such a soul. Thus a true understanding of the nature of Heaven and Hell would not induce those who do not love God to choose Heaven nonetheless, with the presence of God being merely a “bitter pill to swallow”. "

This is what I was trying to tell you when I was saying that you would have reason to be afraid when standing before a God even if you were perfectly rational. It's not a question of rationality, but of your willingness to submit. But as to why this would be a problem, again, Hell would be so bad, and Heaven so incredible, that a person may be overwhelmed. To have the incentives of Hell, totally revealed, Heaven, totally revealed, and God's great power, totally revealed, would be so influential that a person would be nothing more than a ragdoll getting pulled around by incentives that were too strong for Him to ignore. Whatever decision He reached would hardly be totally his own.

"What God seems to desire above all other things according to you is to serve Him unreservedly and unconditionally. Of course, this might ultimately be the only means by which we can achieve our good, but it appears that God doesn’t desire our love and servitude for the sake of our good, but for its own sake."

Again, I think this is the only way it is possible. As I said before, I think you can only enter into a commitment with God by commiting to Him. This must entail some kind of love to really involve a commitment TO HIM, as opposed to a commitment to heaven, or virtue, or a commitment against Hell. I think God only accepts love because it is the only real offer.

With your Susan analogy, I think you are missing that for 90% of the people who have ever walked the earth, if they saw Heaven they would not be spiritual enough, on their own, to desire it for the right reasons. They would simply desire it. If they could see Heaven, they would have no ability to see the goodness that is there that flows from God, they would be influenced enough by the goodness that is there that is seemingly undependant of God that they would want to go there anyway, and probably want that more than anything else.

I'm going to play with my nephew now.