AtlanticCitySlave

Not to be mean, but I am not going to take the time to unravel what your questions and responses are in response to. I started to respond to your post, but after getting a little down I had no idea what you were referring to and couldn't check back. If you want to edit your post for some clarity, maybe posting what I said with your responses, you're obviously free to do so, but as things stand now I can't really respond to what you wrote without a lot of confusion.

scumble

Hey, this is fun! Just answers to the stuff I can unravel.

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Probably a bit of personal attention. Maybe he could come and have a chat with ReasonableDoubt

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Nice one. Sounds like you're repeating the usual stuff. From my own investigations, I've verified that real archeological evidience confirming events in the Bible is quite weak. Textual confirmation only confirms a literary tradition - there is a lot of this, but it's not really good enough. The record of accurately predicting the future is only shown in the bible. If the people who wrote the texts knew about the earlier texts, doesn't this make you a bit suspicious?

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Some personal experience maybe? Something that doesn't depend on old texts and zealous priests?

</strong>

Can you think of anything else? If we are supposed to obey God, how do we do it without a consistent guide, eh? Don't say The Bible, or I'll ask you if you think everyone who works on Sunday should be put to death.

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Well, you don't need a God for it, necessarily. These things are necessary so we end up surviving in the long run. With no co-operation, commitment etc. people could not function in a society. On the whole though, most people don't do immense amounts of good. A lot of people can't manage to concede a parking space.

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You see, all this relies on the Bible and particular interpretations of it. The vibe I tend to get from the Old Testament is that humans are totally mortal. From dust to dust, as it were. The immortal soul business comes from Dark Age theological interpretation.

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Another case where God is not stricly necessary. It's possible for us to learn from our mistakes of our own creation, or random events of no purpose. It seems to me that when anything that can't be seen by humans to be any good, a Christian is supposed to shrug and say we can't understand what God is up to. Must be this faith business I've been hearing so much about. However, our not understanding things does not necessarily mean there has to be a point to certain things.

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Human experience, on the whole. People are happier not killing and stealing from each other, and so on. We probably forget this living in mostly peaceful nations where most people behave. My experience as a child certainly showed me that stealing, lying, etc. is not immensely productive. I feel bad if other humans are upset - does this have to emanate from God?

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You sound like a bloody parrot! You could have just dictated this. Anyway, God couldn't make a stone too heavy to lift, because he'd still be able to lift it anyway, being all-powerful. He could certainly engineer a sitiuation where he'd be unable to lift a stone, just for the experience, like he's supposed to have experienced death.

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Abuse of free will. Perhaps I could concede God creating free will, but it would have to be a totally amoral act, to be honest. In this sense, you can have God creating only a possibility of good. Humans are not created with a tendency towards good, maybe.
In any case, free will can exist without God quite easily.

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4 - We need Christ to stop us having sex on Sunday?

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Got to Samuel so far. So far, God has been rather tetchy, flies off the handle on small points of ceremony. Many of the people are not actually blessed with free will, God regularly takes control to make people behave in a certain way for his own purposes, so far in the story, at least.

phlebas

Good dodge

I do think happiness is the most important thing, but I admit it's a subjective thing.

Regardless, what makes free will preferable to an eternity free of torment? Why was it so important to your god to give it to us, even though it meant all the suffering that has gone on since Eve and the serpent?

Truly, I have no idea. What is the amazing upside of 70-odd years of free will if you also get 70-odd years of suffering plus an extra eternity for exercising your free will in the wrong direction?

RogerLeeCooke

Yes, I've heard all these answers from Christians before. They are called "theodicies" (literally, justifications of God). I've always considered them very poor answers. Just try any of those words in a hospital ward full of little children suffering from cancer. It's very hard to believe that "most of our suffering is the result of our own choices" when you see those kids. And, as Russell pointed out, it is not sin that causes volcanoes to erupt or rivers to overflow. It is not sin that brought the tubercle bacillus into the world. I think only a tiny fraction of our suffering is due to human perversity, but perhaps a war would change my mind.

Heathen that I am, I think I can create a better theodicy than the Christians. It goes like this. We need to take time into account. We talk of the "present" tense and the "past" and "future" tenses. ONLY THE PRESENT TENSE IS REALLY EXPERIENCED. The past is only remembered, and the future only anticipated. The headache I had last year is not even remembered. As far as reality goes, that headache has been "unmade," made "as if it had never been." Even if I could remember it, I would not be experiencing the pain of it.

So, when God "wipes away every tear," and when his elect are rejoined to their loved ones, never to know the pain of separation from them again, when there is no sickness or pain or death, then all those things will have been unmade, made as if they had never been.

Jayhawker Soule

Sorry, Kalestia, I just now noticed the question. The brief answer is: any unambiguous and verifiable contravention of natural law. It need not be new or complicated: a rerun of Joshua 10:13 sans bloodshed would suffice.

Now, was there a reason you avoided my question?

Jamie_L

But this is not a logical conclusion for an omnipotent God. He can achieve any result by force of will alone. To say that he requires suffering to achieve some end is to deny his omnipotence.

How "not necessarily"? Do people sin because they don't want to? Do they sin by accident? Sin is "rebellion against god". Rebellion is a conscious act. You don't do it unless you want to. In order to give us the "option" to rebel, God must make us with desire to rebel - or make us at random.

I think you are missing my point. You implied that God teaches us using "traps" because it is more effective that way. But again, God is omnipotent. Whatever knowledge or wisdom he imparts through his traps, he could also impart without traps. To say he can't teach us as well without traps is again to deny his omnipotence.

I find that hard to believe, considering how well hidden he is.

Seems like an awfully inefficient way for an omnipotent being to search me out. Why not just pop by for a chat?

Jamie

scumble

Why doesn't God post on the forum? That would be clever.

DarkBronzePlant

Kalestia,

A word of advice: you'd probably wind up being more productive by not feigning the role of a non-theist when you begin a thread. Just pose the questions that you have, and don't hide them under the guise of "This is a CHRISTIAN point of view."

-DBP

queue

The pot handle/child metaphor shows that by removing something (the pot handle or sin) that it does not necessitate that the person loses free will.

Echo

This is a very inefficient and problematic means of "searching us out," given that there are so many purported "words" of this supernatural agent and many sincere and passionate believers in those different and often mutally exclusive "words."

Given that the only literature I have ever encountered has, to the best of my knowledge, been authored by human beings existing within the universe, I'm not sure why someone would conclude that a particular book was the lone exception, being the one book authored by an unverifiable, unobservable, inscrutable supernatural being.