Philip Osborne

"Not saving a single being that one could choose to save is inconsistent with loving nature - almost by definition. With due respect, this apologetic defense sounds like a claim that God's full knowledge might include a disproof of the Pythagorean theorem in Euclidean geometry."

You are correct if one defines "perfectly loving" as "all loving." However, it is intelligible to say that some beings are worthy of more or less love than others. In all probability, Pol Pot or Stalin would deserve less of our love than the people we hold dear in our own lives, and we are not immoral for being this way. This idea also has grounding in Christianity; Christian doctrines hold that we should love God above all things. According to this interpretation, perfect love accords each and every being the exact amount of love that being deserves. It is therefore intelligible that a perfectly loving being could choose not to save people he could save, if he decided that those people did not earn enough of his love to earn salvation.

Sincerely,

Philip

Tom Sawyer

What determines how a person earns this love? If the man is a loving husband and father, lives a good life, works hard, helps out in his community, etc, does this mean he earns God's love?

Or is just that he accepts Jesus as his personal saviour?

Is living a good life an irrelevant secondary point in God's decision of who to love? If so, why? If not, why would accepting Jesus matter?

Philip Osborne

"What determines how a person earns this love? If the man is a loving husband and father, lives a good life, works hard, helps out in his community, etc, does this mean he earns God's love?

"Or is just that he accepts Jesus as his personal saviour?"

I tend to think that both are required, and I don't think that one can truly accept Jesus in the sense that God desires without doing things like working hard, helping out in the community, etc. I don't see this as an important issue to my argument, however; it is a theological question, rather than a question directly relating to the argument's soundness.

-Philip

Jesus Tap-Dancin' Christ

What a callous bastard. He just sent someone to ETERNAL SUFFERING and doesn't feel the least bit of regret about it. Certainly loving.
So Satan was planned? The war in heaven? The Holocaust? Sweet christ, this is NOT what I would call not making mistakes
I understand why things die, and that all things must die. But dammit, when my grandfather dies (which will be soon, unfortunately), I will feel quite sad, and suffer quite a bit. It's part of human nature--undertanding does not wipe away the pain, it helps you deal with it.

Any God who can explain away the hurt is a bastard, pure and simple.

hinduwoman

In heaven, you should not have a body and so all the chemicals that produce emotions should not be present. If you become transfigured, you are no longer human, but something more. Such a creature should not feel grief.

Koyaanisqatsi

If God doesn't make mistakes, then why the flood? Why evil?

Saying that man deserved and/or created either doesn't follow, since, ultimately, it is inescabably God's fault for designing us that way, which in turn means that evil was purposed by God, which is impossible due to God's omnibenevolence and you do the hokey pokey and you turn yourself around and around and around and around and that's what it's all about...

Infested Kerrigan

What I have been told concerning this part of the arguement from Christians (specifically Catholics) is that time in heaven and for God is not measured the way we measure time. I think it's been claimed that while to us time is linear, to God/heaven time is an existence. In other words, Christians may say that to humans, Jesus' death and supposed resurrection occured in the past, but in "God's time" those events are happening at the same time you read statement.

Thus the young Christian that got flattened by a truck and went to heaven would not have to wait, since his friends would have spent their lives and be there already.

It's very confusing and illogical. But that's how an educated Christian may explain it.

[edited to fix UBB code]

[ September 09, 2002: Message edited by: Infested Kerrigan ]</p>

Thomas Metcalf

Hi again.

Originally posted by Philip Osborne:

"In all probability, Pol Pot or Stalin would deserve less of our love than the people we hold dear in our own lives, and we are not immoral for being this way"

I hope you can explain to me how desert works. I assume it has something to do with God's perfect justice; by some metaphysical arrangement, a human who does evil creates a metaphysical state of injustice, and this injustice is not corrected until this human is punished sometime after she dies. Is this adequate?

My question is what use punishment after death is. It can't serve as a warning to other humans, because we never really know they're in hell until we, ourselves, die. It won't correct the offenders, because they're already dead, so it's really too late. Is the reason humans are punished posthumously only that it produces justice?

Keith Russell

Thomas:

Do you really expect that the 'reasons' why a person might claim that there is 'justice' in the 'after-life' are going to make sense?

The concept of 'after-life' is so much like the concept of 'square-circle' as to be indistinguishably nonsensical.

The idea of claiming that there is a God, who punishes us in a very, very horrible fashion, after we die, if we've died unforgiven sinners, or non-believers, has nothing to do with any 'after-life', 'God', or 'justice'.

It is to attempt to manipulate human behaviour the only place it exists or counts: right here, on earth, in this life.

And that is, IMO, the only context in which the claim can ever hope to make sense. (And, it doesn't make much sense, even then.)

Keith.

Philosoft

This has been said many times on this board and I have yet to form a concept of it. Try as I might, I can make no sense of, "events are happening at the same time." I have little doubt that these words are simply strung together for apologetic convenience and have no more meaning in a theist's mind than in mine.

<strong> I know you're simply repeating this position, not advocating, but do you see what I mean? 'Time' is bizarrely defined as some physical force that can be observed, along with events themselves, on an infinite number of points. And the only way to deal with that is to special plead that God is somehow infinite as well.

<strong> It's really some of the worst dissonant thinking I've heard. Luvluv, for one, enjoys simply repeating it as necessary, as if it was an actual concept that rational thinkers are supposed to be able to understand.

[ September 09, 2002: Message edited by: Philosoft ]</p>