ex-preacher

Not so. A better analogy: "If god exists, and humans are in control of history, he hates us because of our holocaust against his fellow gods." If God is in control of history, he should be held responsible for it. Almost every Christian I know credits God for every good thing, but refuses to also blame him for bad things. After 9-11, I've heard numerous preachers proclaim that we needn't be afraid because "God is in control." Was he in control on Sept 11? The hijackers sure thought he was. You can't have it both ways.

<strong> By all means, let's hate the holocaust. If there were a god responsible for it then he should be hated also. Since there is no god, we are right to hate the humans who were responsible for it.

Albert Cipriani

Dear Ex Preacher,
You say:


Not even God hates people. He doesn't even hate Satan. Indeed, the only intrinsically evil act we are capable of doing is hating the Creator or his creatures. Yet you recommend we hate people. What ever for?

I am not making a moral argument here. I am making a godless, hedonistic, pragmatic, argument. Hating a being is a corrosive emotional act that, unlike anger, does not even come with the compensating adrenaline rush that could get us to act out a rectification.

Hate buys you nothing. Plus, if you justify its applicability to humans all you do is set up us humans to be hated by God. If God exists, let us hope for your own sake that you are wrong. Let us hope that He agrees with me that none of His creatures warrant hate. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

tronvillain

jj:
Wrong. You are apparently using a different definition of <a href="http://dictionary.msn.com/find/entry.asp?search=parallel" target="_blank">parallel</a> than the rest of us.

HelenM

Technos

Of course, if you're really interacting with a figment of your imagination it's pretty pointless to come up with elaborate theories regarding what realm it exist in.

Albert Cipriani

Dear Helen,


Remember, Satan tempted God Himself with His own word. Proof positive that slinging around bible verses is not the way to wisdom. It’s a cheap substitute for thinking. -- Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Automaton

For the purposes of maths, one could proclaim the dot to be an object that exists wholly in the first dimension, but this would ignore reality. Imagine a black dot drawn on a piece of paper. The "dot" will always have two dimensional width on the paper. With zero width, it would cease to exist. The same can be said of a 2d object and the third dimension. Also, if an entity "exists" for zero time, it does not exist for the blink of an eye, nor a nanosecond, it does not exist at all.
Your original argument was that God exists in some imaginary fifth dimension so to avoid the obvious problems relating to God existing "outside of time" and causing anything. But if God exists in spacetime, and God created spacetime, does this mean God created himself? This does not solve any problems relating to God and temporality, therefore your line of thought's purpose was defeated.
Semantics alert! Questions may indeed "stand unanswered".
Semantics alert! I used the phrase "nothing more than", indicating I was somewhat tautologically rephrasing the original proposition so that parties may understand it clearer. Pointless rhetoric may or may not include nitpicking semantics, however there are many other ways one can be rhetorical.
Wrong, this is not a circular argument, however it is tautological, and all arguments must be tautological to some degree (the conclusion must be contained within the premises, and the premises must be contained in the conclusion.) By the way, I was pretty much agreeing with you in that regard with my statements, but oh well.
Semantics alert! I don't see the problem in using an analogy to explain the flaws in a particular argument.
If a fossil is found in the wrong strata, one cannot say "All fossils are found in the right strata, therefore so was this one. It is an argument from ignorance to claim otherwise."
It is self-establishing. There is no way that A can be ~A at the same time. Causality is an arbitrary construct that only applies for everyday life events but should not be applied to quantum mechanics or cosmology. Indeed, all things do have a condition under which they exist, but these "conditions" are a far cry from any traditional definition of causality (especially when one makes claims about God causing the universe), but these conditions do not lend themselves any more readily to a God hypothesis than a naturalistic one.

tronvillain

Technos:
And you're telling me this why?

ex-preacher

Actually, I agree with you - I was sticking with the analogy of who deserves blame for the holocaust. I find it interesting that you completely sidestepped the gist of my post (if God is in control, he's responsible) and focused on this tangent. Are you agreeing that God is responsible for the holocaust?

BTW, you say that God doesn't hate anyone. Have you read these passages lately?

1 Samuel 2:30
Psalm 31:6
Psalm 53:5
Psalm 119:113
Psalm 139:21-22
Jeremiah 12:8
Hosea 9:15
Malachi 1:3 and Rom 9:13 "but Esau I have hated"
Luke 14:26 "Hate his father and mother"

ex-preacher

Finally something we can all agree on!