Albert Cipriani

Dear Salmon,
You say,
One must distinguish between one’s own understanding of something (which is always necessarily incomplete) and the object of that understanding (which is ultimately always awesome and mysterious). You’ve conflated these two distinct mental processes. Ergo, the scientific method is our means (like how our eyes and ears are means) of being awed by reality. Reality does the awing, the scientific method merely does the presenting of that awesome reality to us upon a silver platter of our empirical understanding.

You ask,
As I’ve already said, it was Satan’s doing vis a vis Original Sin. By being the father of lies, he has become the prince of this world.

You ask,
Yes. Even in Satan’s fallen state, the angels are still awed by him. And we ought to be as well. Satan’s awesome reflects the awesomeness of his Creator. In the same way that an artist is more awesome than an artist’s awesome art, a creature’s awesomeness is contingent upon the awesomeness of its creator.

The difference between those in hell and those in heaven is that the awesomeness of those in hell has not been added to by their free will. Whereas, the awesomeness of the angels and saints consists in the hybridization of their created awesomeness and their actual (i.e. freely willed) awesomeness.

You ask,
Yes. Even Satan continues to fulfill the aim of his creation. God can do nothing in vain. As God created Satan and you, you both will continue to fulfill God’s aim, which is by you being awesome and being awed by God’s glory.

You ask:
Yes. Even the functional atheist Albert Einstein said as much, something to the effect of the greatest experience we can experience is to experience the mysterious.

You ask, No, ya gotta die first.

Seriously, my answer is that I can only exercise my three theological virtues regarding your question. By way of hope, I hope so. By way of charity, I dialogue with you and with God that it may be so. By way of Faith, I answer your rational objections. Beyond that, from my perspective, there is no other answer I can give you.

Even Saint Paul wrote that he knew not how to judge himself and awaited judgment with “fear and trembling.” So perhaps to the degree that you can share in Saint Paul’s worry of achieving heavenly bliss you may be more assured of achieving heavenly bliss. Perhaps to the degree that you are not at all worried about your status before God, you have greater cause to be worried.

This is your most insightful and interesting question:
No. Not just all emotions, but all events (even the most ghastly) must be attributed to God. The technical term for this is “providence.”

Your follow up question puts the head on the pin. It demonstrates your rational acuity:
Allow me to overstate what you tentatively stated. Everything you feel, think, do, and all that is done to you relate to God in every way. At first glance, having God’s providential hand in all things seems to manacle our free will. At second glance, we should realize that our freedom consists not in what we do, think, or feel, but in our acceptance or rejection of what we do, think, or feel.

So the road to salvation can be conceived of as a road upon which we are merely going for a ride. We either approve of or rebel against our view of the passing scenery. To the degree we approve, we are real. To the degree we reject our view, focus on our own feet, to that degree we are less real.

The destination (God, the ultimate reality) is the same for us all. But for the less real people, whose pupils are spread wide from staring at the relative darkness of their own two feet instead of the landscape, it will be a painfully hellishly blinding experience. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Salmon of Doubt

Ok, well this leads me on to a discussion of why God felt the need to create Satan in the first place, which doesn't seem too much of a loving action. But that's probably a point to raise in another forum.

But what about all the other things that Christians say I have to do first? Seems to me that by your arguments if I just sit back and be awed by things and maybe also be nice to other people, I don't have to do a whole lot else in order to get in to heaven. I can see a whole load of Christians disagreeing with this.

OK. Correct me if I misinterpreted what you said, but what I gathered is that you think our free will is restricted by God in that everything we think or do is related to him, and all we get to do is to accept or reject that.

If that is the case, the arguments commonly used by Christians for why God won't perform any more miracles seem to be demolished. The argument is usually along the lines of "God won't perform any more miracles because that would take away our free will to believe in him." But if we don't have free will at all, only the choice to accept what we feel or reject it, God could perform as many miracles as he liked without worrying about removing free will. We would just have to accept the evidence of our eyes or reject it, just like when we witness the wonder of nature.

So... why doesn't God perform miracles any more, if free will isn't an issue?

But even if I reject the idea of God, but am still awed at nature, I'll be ok? Does it make me somewhere in between real?

You seem to have a different view of some aspects of Christianity than some people on the board, and I find it very interesting. Could I ask you your opinion on what will happen to me, given that: I am an atheist and reject the idea of God, but I also try to be a good person and respect everyone and everything else around me, and am fantastically awed by life and the world in general?

Albert Cipriani

Dear Salmon,
You say, A whole load of Christians believe a whole lot of bull. They have no intellectual tradition. Catholicism, on the other hand, is comparable to case law. It is based upon precedent and has an infallible means of resolving questions.

If you set out to be awed and awed more abundantly, you would become a saint. All that is base, tho it may well be attractive to us base creatures, is decidedly not awesome. Ironically, you yourself would become that which you felt the most, awesome.

So I accept your premise and reject your characterization of it as “if I just sit back and be awed.” That’s impossible. Being awed is a dynamically dangerous thing. It will not happen to you. You, if you are worthy of it, must actively find it.

That’s like saying liquids are restricted by the shapes of vessels that contain them rather than the simpler truth that liquids, by definition, conform to the shape of vessels that contain them. God can’t help the fact that everything is related to Him as its Creator and template. Our free will isn’t nearly as free as we imagine. It is only free to want to conform to reality (God) or want to conform that reality (God) to ourselves. Obedience or rebellion.

Yeah, I agree with you here. He’s in no danger of blowing His cover by performing miracles. After witnessing His greatest series of miracles, while He was still in the act of writing the ten commandments in stone tablets the Jews were bowing down to a golden calf. So much for miracles making believers of us.

To whom much is given, much is expected. It’s an act of mercy that He does not render our guilt any graver than it already is by supplying us with even more reasons not to reject Him.

I have no reason to doubt that you are “fantastically awed by life and the world in general.” But if I were God I would doubt you if you were not able to find a way to express gratitude for that awe you feel. Indeed, in time I would withdraw your ability to feel awe if you did not respond to it with gratitude.

Awe is inhaling. The prayer of gratitude is exhaling. The two go together. If they don’t, you are an ingrate and cannot be pleasing to God nor find God pleasing after you’re dead. – Cheers, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Salmon of Doubt

Ok, maybe that was a bad way of phrasing it. I am studying Biology, focussing on evolution, which I find to be one of the most awesome and amazing processes ever to occur. I'm actively searching out that which awes me. Even though I don't see God in this process, according to you, I'm performing my function. Is THIS enough to get me in to heaven?

Lol! That's a new one! Haven't heard that argument before!

But I can see a few problems with it. Surely it would be better, and more loving of God to reveal himself to people with miracles. That way, more people are convinced of his existence, and only the people with really closed minds could reject him, and therefore go to hell. That way God gets more people believing and worshipping him, and a much smaller number of people go to hell. That would seem a better system, and I think a lot of people would prefer that extra expectation if it meant they had proof of God and could believe in him. That's all most atheists need- proof of God. I would think greater expectations would be a small price to pay.

So are you saying if I don't pray to God and thank him for letting me be awed by evolution, he'll take away my ability to be awed? Personally I think that's rubbish. What about all the older atheist scientists who are still awed by evolution after decades of studying it? Please provide me with examples and testimony of people who have had a great awe of something in life - anything at all, and then lost that feeling through lack of prayer.

Oh well. I thought I might be able to get in to heaven using your criteria, but if I still have to pray, never mind. I suppose to get in to heaven I'd have to stop being a lesbian anyway, wouldn't I? You know, deny my true self, the way I was born, and obey what other people tell me for no good reason? In which case, forget it!

Albert Cipriani

Dear Salmon,
If the goal of creation was to just believe the obvious, the existence its Creator, you would be correct. Satan has never doubted God’s existence and what good did that do him? Our prime directive is to choose something other than ourselves over ourselves. The baggage attached to a belief in God generally suffices for the fulfillment of this tall order. But it is not the belief in God that saves us, but the self-abrogation that that entails that saves us. Like a grain of wheat that must die to itself in order to live and produce a hundred fold.

Not at all. If you guys had your proof, God would simply have to raise the bar for you. In addition to your belief, you’d have to trust Him. If He infused trust into your souls, then you’d be required to also be willing to die for Him etc. etc. Point is, as Rosanna Anna Danna would say: “It’s always something!”

No doubt at this late date of godlessness Saddam Hussein in his bunker is still capable of being awed by the power of, say, our bunker buster bombs. Point is, children are awed by almost everything (“Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.”Mark: 10:14) and the older we get, generally the more jaded we become. Unless we actively seek to be awed and nurture it with gratitude, we will lose our sensitivity to it… including older scientists who may still manage to work up a head of steam for evolution.

If you think your true self is made manifest by your sexual preferences, then I pity your conception of self. If you were born blind or deaf or dumb, would you call those innate characteristics “your true self”? Then why call your innate sexual preferences your “true self”?

It matters not what you must deny, but deny you must to get into heaven. It’s the price of admission. Some of us have less to deny than others, but all must deny themselves multiple ways or another. Self-denial for the sake of God is the currency, the means of our exchange, for a new self and relationship with God. It proves to ourselves and to God that we love Him, have a personal relationship with Him, and it transcends our lip service and mere belief in Him into a real metaphysical response to Him.

Homosexuality is a sin. Like all sin, it must be denied. But we are all sinners and do not deny all our sins. Those of us who go to heaven try to, or at the very least want to. That’s what separates them from the damned, from the ones who only want to fulfill themselves. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Jobar

Albert, most of this discussion does not belong in E/C, but in EoG or GRD. But it's all so mixed that I don't see how to divide it up and leave anything sensible.

Let's try to get back to Scigirl's point, which after reading this thread I do not think you have really addressed. In sober fact, there are human beings born on a regular basis who are not male or female- they may be both, or neither. This is not referring to sexual practice but sexual morphology; they are born with seemingly male (or female) genitalia, when in fact they are genetically female (or male). (Or even with both sets, or no set, or some strange and misfunctioning mix of both.)

I see no problem with this fact when it is looked at from the viewpoint of biology, because the nature of sexual reproduction and genetics explains it flawlessly. For the creationist however, it poses vast problems, because it seems to imply that God does not care that some humans are incapable of being male or female in the ways approved by your church, and yet are indubitably human, and are capable of understanding their misformities. Don't you see how cruel and self-contradictory that must make a God who supposedly loves us?

scigirl

Thank you Jobar. No I never did get a satisfactory answer from a Christian regarding this specific topic.

scigirl

Albert Cipriani

Dear Jobar,
You say,
You forget that our creation is ex nihilo, from nothing. Compared to nothing, ANYTHING is an infinite addition. So if God created me as an ant or a slug, He's done me an infinite unmerited favor. Even if He created me as an ant with a gait, or a slug that was really sluggish!

How much more of a favor God has done me by creating me human, something almost as infinitely removed from being an ant as an ant is removed from being nothing. So what if my x and y chromozones got scrabbled in the process. How dare you look a gift horse in the mouth.

How you and Scigirl get "cruel" and "self-contradictory" out of this is beyond me. It's like the bartender saying the drinks are on the house and then only filling some of the glasses half-full. Does that really make the bartender "cruel" and "self-contradictory"? Me thinks ye both doth protest too much. -- Sincerely Sober Albert the Traditional Catholic

Nostalgic Pushhead

All I know, is that if I found out God existed, I'd give him a swift kick in the arse for making me transsexual.

So whats the reason for it? Is God imperfect? Or does he just not care?

Oolon Colluphid

Well it's obvious that no copying process is ever going to be 100% perfect, and genes, chromosomes etc are copied entities. But one would have thought that if god did not want evolution to take place, he of all 'people' could have invented a perfect system! Hey presto, no evolution!

That the genetic copying process -- that he created -- is imperfect kinda implies that god wants evolution to happen...

DT