Enigma

...The Dungeon Master, The One, The Way, The Question to the Ultimate Answer of 42, The Kwizats Haderach(sp?), the "Big Guy", and Winner of the Necromancer Club's "Largest Gratuitous Body Count in a Serious Novel" award.

Did I miss anything?

So if an engineer makes heavy lead shielding for a nuclear reactor, he should have the right to destroy the shielding at his whim, right?

So THAT'S what caused Chernobyl......

Enigma

A whip or a commonperson?

Magus55

And while humans are enormously more valuable than that pot, God is infinitely more in control and sovereign over the potter. Yes humans feel pain, but life on earth is an eye blinkcompared to an eternity in Heaven. And of course, if you aren't saved and go to Hell - what difference would suffering on Earth make, when Hell is much worse?

Magus55

No he isn't. I think you have the wrong understanding of free will. Free will is not a supernatural ability that allows you to do anything you want, including choose not to die, if death is upon you. Free will is being able to make choices, good and evil, right and wrong while you are live. You have no control over death, therefore free will never enters the picture - you can't choose to live for as long as you want.

Magus55

How are we God's slaves? Does he force you to do anything? He doesn't force you to do anything. He gives you options, and its your choice of which path you want to take. How is that slavery?

Mageth

How are we God's slaves? Does he force you to do anything? He doesn't force you to do anything. He gives you options, and its your choice of which path you want to take. How is that slavery?

Options? "Be my servant OR ELSE suffer for eternity in Hell."

I can imagine slaveowners in pre-Civil War America making very similar statements. Like us under god's plan, they weren't given the option to live as free men if they so wished. Their free will was limited.

Mageth

Yes humans feel pain, but life on earth is an eye blinkcompared to an eternity in Heaven. And of course, if you aren't saved and go to Hell - what difference would suffering on Earth make, when Hell is much worse?

It's statements like this that expose the moral bankruptcy of such a worldview.

Enigma

How are we hostage to the mugger pointing a gun at your head? Does he force you to do anything? He doesn't force you to do anything. He gives you options, and its your choice of which path you want to take. You can either lose your money or your life. How does that make you his hostage?

There comes a point where all "options" are unacceptable. At that point, do you really have any true options at all?

Icarus

Magus55,

I have a problem with the account of Job and God’s testing of human beings in general, other than his manipulation of individual’s lives and the resulting illustrations generated for hundreds of future generations. I do have a problem with such manipulation, but I think Job presents a greater dilemma for the Christian than whether God’s behavior is just. This is the Atheist’s objection. For the Christian, the more pertinent and potentially devastating challenge is in knowing if God’s love is comprehensible.

In order to have a vibrant ‘personal relationship’ with God, the Christian must be confident that God loves her and that his love can be quantified and experienced. The lessons from Job make this task very difficult, in my opinion impossible. If God loves me, what does his love look like? How am I to know that he loves me? Was God loving Job when he allowed Satan to take everything from him except his life? If so, how was Job to know? He might as well have considered himself blighted, as Eli was, when his children were taken from him. He might as well have considered himself cursed, as Pharoah was, when boils covered him from head to toe. He might as well have considered himself betrayed, as Samson was, when abandoned by his trusted friends. So how was Job to evaluate God’s love, given that his condition was just as indicative of God’s wrath as of his hesed?

Fortuitously, posterity has the benefit of knowing God’s intentions, having been outlined in chapters 40-2, so we know what to make of Job’s ordeal. I for one, however, cannot remember the last time God intervened in my life in order to outline the course of events in my recent past and their place in his plan. Not that the type of God who replied to Job has any obligation to do so on my behalf, but how am I to love a god when I do not have the capacity to distinguish his love from his rage or the myriad of happenstance that fills up my life? Similarly, if both my good and bad fortune fall within the realm of God’s love, I no longer have any meaningful measuring device with which to determine what God’s love even is—much less trust that he has my best interests in mind.

I have come to believe that God’s love, as presented in Christian theology, is an empty, meaningless expression encompassing all possible interpretations of every subjective experience one ever has, and Job is the perfect illustration of this truth. One cannot know anything about God through the subjectivity of experience and inconsistency of intention, so one could never learn to love him. It is only when one begins with the assumption of God that one might project his love into given life experiences in such a way as to quell the mind’s questions, but were one to start from scratch, nothing of God’s love could ever be known. This is why you may see God’s love working in Job, but the Atheist never will.

Icarus

Spenser

Magus

Lets just cut to the chase with the whole 'free will' argument. You seemed to have skipped the part about predetermination. If God knows what is going to happen, then only that is going to happen. If God knows that I am going to make a left turn at the corner of State and A, then how could I possibly make a right? I can't even if you postulate that I had the choice to but didn't. It suggests more that I just didn't know I didn't have a choice, and if I didn't have a choice how could I have free will?

Better yet, how could God give us something he himself cannot possible have; free will. Omniscience means that God knows everything, and if God knows everything then God knows the future. If he knows exactly what is going to happen, then he himself cannot change or stop it from happening. This of course means God himself has no choice, no 'free will' and yet somehow he can give us something he himself lacks.

To counter another statement of yours, you claim God exists outside of space and time, yet has the ability to intervene when he wants. Does this not suggest that his original creation of the universe was flawed seeing as how he should have known how everything was going to play itself out, therefore design it in such a way as to not need to intervene? Intervention suggests lack of foreknowledge of his own creation. The fact that he exists outside of time yet seems to watch over us also suggests that he must watch over us in time in order to know when to intervene.

You claim to know a lot about "God." You claim to know a lot about a being that you say exists outside of observable space and time. What can be known about anything outside of space and time? Nothing.

(God = Nothing)

Now its time to kiss a flute :banghead: