Vanderzyden

Philosoft,

Well, I won't spend much time in reply, since you appear to be unwilling to engage in serious dialogue. Your terse, glib responses are the evidence. I will try to remember avoiding any significant investment of time with you in the future.

Strictly speaking, Philo, you can "prove" nothing. Certainly not the meaning of words. You can't prove your own existence to anyone other than yourself, so you can't prove that words "appear" on a monitor. What's a "monitor", anyway? If you are going to play the game of "proof", you should be well prepared to answer the difficult questions.

How interesting that, without skipping a beat, you immediately jump to "convention". Just as quickly, you categorically exclude any notions of purpose. Of course, you fail to notice that it is only you and a few others who make this unfounded declaration. It is crushed under the weight of the collective human experience.

Vanderzyden

K

Vanderzyden:

That's fine, I won't call God omniscient. That is actually a term that many Christians use to describe their God. Others who don't explicitly use the word often say that God knows everthing - everything that has been and everything that will be. If that's not the God you believe in, that's fine. Like I said, a God that didn't know the future may not have known that He created us with faults. But such a God would also not be one to trust in matters of prophesy. I'm not claiming that you believe in the prophesies in the Bible (I would guess from your comments about omniscience that you don't). But there are many, many Christians who do. Many even use examples of Biblical prophesy to demonstrate its value.

Cthulhu

Someone please give it a smack...it's skipping again.

Jobar

Two comments here. One, I find that each individual theist has his or her own conception of theology- when you ask enough questions (often only two or three) you find that the 'God' of Christian(1) is not the same as the 'God' of Christian (2). Likewise, hell(1) does not equal hell(2), heaven(1)=! heaven(2), on and on. Christians are inconsistent in what they actually believe. And this is not even considering the differences between one denomination and another, much less between one theistic religion and another! If, as Vanderzyden pointed out, this is evidence of God's transcendence of human understanding- we come to my second point, which is that we can't claim to understand *anything*, not word one, of a truly transcendent God. And yet we see all these people talking about what God supposedly wants us to do, say, believe!

"The God who can be talked about is not the true God."

K

Jobar:

I find it even worse than that. I find that the traits of a Christian's God change with different arguements for the non-existance of that God. For instance, God will not know that we would be sinners when He created us so that He can't be held responsible for creating a defective product. But, talk about prophesy and all of the sudden He has a clear veiw of the future again. It's really tough to hit a moving target.

Ron Garrett

K:

That's because it's not actually tied to anything other than a decision to believe absent any reason to do so. They will say it's revelation, but when you attack revelation as indistinguishable from personal preference, they say it's scripture, but when you show scripture does not harmonize, they say it's nature, and on and on, because in the end they have no basis for their belief other than their need to believe for whatever that provides them in terms of security, acceptance, reassurance, or what have you. It is a childish response coming from a childish place, hence the scritpural commendation of being "child-like. " Now we all know that children are self-centered, willful, irrational, domineering and gullible, and they insist on being parented to the point of inventing imaginary parents to replace ones they don't have or have outgrown.

Amos

Hello Vanderzyden

Sorry about that and I agree that you should clarify your own position.

My thoughts were that each one of us is equal distance removed from God because all that is required for us to become one with God is for us to obtain the mind of God and for this only a change of vision is required (for example, a Beatific Vision or a prolonged moment of realization).

God is this sense resides in the very core of our being and all we must do is get to know who we really are (Love the Lord your God with all your heart soul and mind).

From there I postulated that we are divided between our ego awareness and this 'very core of our being' and therefore do not know who we really are but only know who we pretend to be in our ego identity.

This image of our ego identity is wherein we have our Adamic nature and this division is painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to be seen by those who are searching for an answer.

Philosoft

True to form, Vander. Good show. You know, I always thought there should be a commandment against self-righteousness.

<strong> The words on the monitor are the words on the monitor. Law of identity. It's called logic. You might look into it.

<strong> Precisely why I never claimed to.

<strong> Hey, take up your beef with the law of identity.

<strong> No, I said we have no conventional notion of purpose. I'm well aware there are lots of different notions of purpose. As soon as you guys agree on one, let me know.

<strong> I'll make it easy for you. You don't even have to tell me what the purpose of the universe is. Just show me a universe without a purpose, for side-by-side comparison, and I'll call it a day. Deal?

Amos

But the transcendence of God can be described and evidence of this is found in the transparancy of different mythologies from around the world. We can describe the same idea of God using words and phrases that are taken from various mythologies and still know what we are trying to say. For example the poem "A Rivers Merchants Wife: A Letter" describes our alienation as a child and return to purgatory where we meet [our] Mary who is the river merchants wife.

Lovely poem it is and my essay went "from bamboo stilts to rubber crutches."

Amos

You are correct but only to a point because the transformation of our mind soul and body can be ours, and this is without sickness or pain while alive on this earth until we die.

[ October 06, 2002: Message edited by: Amos ]</p>