emur

After moving and unpacking (partially), I'm back.

In the OP, I posed two problems that I have with the evangelical, biblical God. A being who acts arbitrarily and with partiality is not righteous or good. Neither is one who allows his children to harm his children and does nothing to address it.

A good and righteous God would be impartial and would address the disgusting behavior of his children. It's that simple really.

Mel

Radorth

Re Dr Rick:

Can we quote you on that?

Oops, wrong discussion. LWF appears to have that one well in hand. When the other side resorts to gratuitous ad hom, you know you are winning. (Hint to Lyricist: The readers here are not morons).

Re: Scombrid

This argument assumes that he knows the outcome for every individual person which I'm not sure he chooses to decide that. In any case many "hardened skeptics" seem to have been converted without any overt intervention by God and have tremendous testimonies. So even if predestination refers to individuals, we cannot say you are immune from conversion. Nor can we say some miracle by God would necessarily help you change your mind.

I don't know about "any."

Even Jesus, "through his sufferings learned obedience. And you will never live life to the max without him, or be truly free IMO. You have to be completely free of sin to have all possible efficacious choices. You have to believe and follow Jesus' teachings to, for example, recieve maximum rewards in this life as well as the next. (They work whether you believe he was divine or not, but that's a bit beside the point).

Well OK, the guy had a muscle for a brain apparently. Surely you don't believe everything Christians tell you.

God uses negative circumstances to get our attention. He starts with commandments. That only worked for Enoch apparently. Then he sends counselors. If that doesn't work, he sends circumstances. Surely you can see he has few options left after we have ignored the first two signals. I'm afraid working miracles for disobedient people would only make them more presumptious and spoiled. We learn more from our mistakes, and it is a wise earthly parent who, after teaching and warning a child, let's the rebellious one go his or her own way, I think.

Again if you can't see the difference in the personal examples of Christ and Muhammed, and the apostles and Muhammed's warmongers, I can't help you. You would need to have an inate sense of right and wrong. You would have to make distinctions between Peter's teachings after his conversion and those of Muhammed's apostles.

(Yeah I know. Peter killed Ananias in the kitchen with a knife for the money. God has no such power to kill.)

Rad

Radorth

What's less simple is how he goes about that without forcing people to serve him- an obvious dilemma.

Well obvious to us anyway.

'Round the little track we go.

Rad

Dr Rick

Slavery limits freedom, not free will. A god could make us all slaves and still allow free will. Of course, and you can even address it directly, too: Do you believe slaves have no free will (as opposed to no freedom)?

It's the intelligence and reasoning of some of the posters that's in doubt...

Llyricist

Ad hom?? I critiqued his use of logic (or lack thereof), and he has done this before, and will no doubt do it again, I did not attack his character in any way that was irrelevent to the discussion at hand as the the definition of ad hom states, you are correct, the readers aren't morons, they know this!!

His arguments and his redefining of terms HAS led to a few contradictions, and he has not come back to deny this, and neither have you. If you need them spelled out, here they are:

1. As scombrid pointed out, by allowing fundamentalists (of whatever sort) to freely choose to follow him, but still be wrong, the god of LWF's paradigm is in fact subverting the very freewill that LWF claims is so important to his god that it trumps the reduction of evil. This is a clear cut contradiction.

2. Since we cannot know which group in the example given before is actually wrong (the example I refer to is two CHRISTIAN groups, one harming the other), We cannot learn anything from it, all we have is the bare fact, "well SOMEONE must be wrong" but that's already presupposed in LWF's Paradigm, so we haven't LEARNED anything from this mistake, since we don't even know who made it! Hence his loving father analogy fails.

3. As LWF implied with his mocking "oh God can't love me if he let's me be wrong" LWF's god doesn't seem to give a rat's ass, so much for his benevolence!! a contradiction in what HE claimed (I realize you don't go for the omnibenevolent aspect, but LWF clearly does)

4. LWF's Slave analogy, which you so helpfully brought up, is actually an analogy that WORKS WITH the Christian paradigm!! Quite the opposite of what he intended. A slave was free to do whatever he wanted but there were severe consequences if that didn't jibe with his master's wishes. Just as God allows us free will to choose evil, BUT face the consequences of eternal torture for doing so. He contradicted himself by providing this as a supposed COUNTER example.

long winded fool

Then have we abandoned the "all-loving" premise? You must remember that the premise is an omnimax God. This includes omnibenevolence. An omnipotent God could easily eliminate evil and suffering. He could make a race of slaves who are incapable of doing anything against His will. If we assume He is all loving, He wouldn't logically want to do this unless it is loving to force a person to live how you want them to live instead of how they want to live. Your proposition that God could allow evil without it being actualized makes no sense. Evil must have been actualized sometime in the past and must be capable of being actualized sometime in the future. Without these two requisites evil can have no meaning, therefore it would be impossible to ever desire evil. This necessarily implies that evil must exist. If it didn't, there'd be no freedom of choice. All actions would lead to A. If evil is the absence of good, and if every action that it was possible to take was always 100% good, then free will becomes meaningless. There would exist no basis for comparison.

God doesn't allow anyone to freely choose to follow Him but still be wrong. By definition, if they are wrong they are not following Him. They are sinning. They are following their own desires. Worshipping man (symbolized by the number 6) instead of God (number 3.) Mark of the beast (animal instinct.) 666. etc.

Why can't we know which group is wrong? If any group does something that contradicts the will of God, wouldn't this be wrong? Once you define God as omnimax, you can tell the difference between things that logically follow and things that contradict this. My quote was merely a reference to logic. If two people come to conflicting conclusions, (A as opposed to B) one or both of them is wrong. Because we may not currently know which is no reason to abandon logic and assume that we can't learn anything. We can learn, we just have yet to apply ourselves to figure it out. Unless we assume God wants automatons, this presents no contradiction. The existence of wrong is merely evidence that learning is possible.

Why do you assume He doesn't give a rat's ass? Because He allows us to choose wrong? Does allowing someone to make a mistake always imply a lack of love for that person? Does it mean I "don't give a rat's ass?" If someone is not rational enough to keep himself out of trouble no matter how clearly you communicate it to him, is it loving to put him into a box where he'll be safe until he dies? Unless I do this, can you assume I don't care about said person?

Or perhaps you think He doesn't give a rat's ass merely because He doesn't tell us not to choose wrong like a loving Father would? Perhaps that's what the human conscience is. Perhaps that's what the Bible is for. To give us the advice we need to do the right thing. Not everyone has to take the advice. Those who do listen to it don't have to follow it to the letter. They can take portions of the good advice out of context and use it to justify things that the advice when taken into context does not in the slightest justify. "Dad once told me I shouldn't do things that make me uncomfortable. Not dating the really cute guy with the drug and violence problem would make me uncomfortable, therefore dad would want me to date him." Does this mean the Father must be unloving to give His daughter such poor advice? Isn't it rational to assume that she's ignoring all the advice that doesn't tell her what she wants to hear? Does this mean that she's actually following her Father's advice? Can we logically assume that her Father gave her bad advice? Isn't she wrong? And if so, does this conflict with the fact that her Father loves her unconditionally? Would this conflict with omnibenevolence? On the contrary, physically disallowing her to date the jerk would conflict with omnibenevolence, assuming she is of legal age. How can he love her if he doesn't let her learn from her own mistakes? How can he love her if he doesn't allow her to choose to be a rational human being on her own?

Putting someone in a box is preventing them from learning how to be an honest, reasoning, and loving individual. According to the Bible, these are the types of people God wants us to be. Free will must exist for this to take place. Free will=not in a box. No mistakes=in a box. Therefore, free will cannot exist without the accessibility of mistakes/failure to be good/evil.

emur

So you are saying that God is partial so that people will not be forced to serve him? And that he is not about to address the harmful things his people do for the same reason?

Yet the bible has God speaking out and intervening into life on earth. Based on your response to my post, is this not forcing people to serve him?

Mel

Llyricist

As Rad says, round and round YOU go, this is circular, you are using your conclusion as your premise and proof. The fact is, under your paradigm, the only way of reliably actualizing our free moral choice is to choose evil!!! Which takes your god straight out of the omnibenevolent box.
NO, NO, a thousand times NO. They are following what they sincerely believe to be GOD'S desires. It is NOT their fault there is no reliable way of DETERMINING God's desires.
HUH??? This is irrelevent.
This is an awful lot of words for a bald assertion, you are certainly living up to your nick name .

Go ahead and DEMONSTRATE that we can learn anything from this.

Assertions assertions assertions, the fact is under your paradigm, ALL we CAN reliably do is MAKE MISTAKES, if we get it right it is purely by accident and little to do with will OR knowledge, which rather kills any notion of actually learning ANYTHING. Because by the time we actually KNOW we got it right or wrong.....we are already in heaven or hell and cannot pass along the knowledge. The best YOU can do is hope like hell YOU got all the interpretations right, and (a least) 95% of the rest of the people in the world are wrong.

Llyricist

I cannot believe I missed this before, but this statement makes mincemeat of your whole free will defence!! Because under the free will doctrine we MUST desire to do as God wills, but here you say that it would be a sin to do so?? Gives new meaning to "damned if you do and damned if you don't" LOL

Dr Rick

Umm...no. What are you talking about?

Golly, I kinda' figures' that part out all by my 'widdle' self...

Do you have anything relevant to say, or do you merely wish to persue your time-honored habit of posting drivel?

The "all-loving" assertion about the character of god (not 'premise', it's a Christian assertion) is demonstratable nonsense; reality and the misery that is its hallmark impugns your irrational claim to the contrary.