Wiploc

If the PoE were an argument about probabilities, then you might be right. But the PoE is an absolute proof that a perfect god doesn't exist. Since it is a proof, any flaw would amount to a total failure. The FWD needn't show a plausible way Jehovah could exist in the presence of suffering; it only needs to show that such a thing is possible. If it is possible, then the PoE fails, and the conversation can go on from there.

If you like talking plausibility, and you think the PoE fails, then you can argue the evidential PoE.

But the PoE doesn't fail. The FWD doesn't work at all; it doesn't produce even a bare possiblity of a perfect god tolerating suffering. Therefore the evidential PoE is unnecessary.
crc

Family Man

Wiploc --

I really don' t think we're that much at odds here. I totally agree that the FWD has failed to show that it is possible that God and evil to coexist -- that's what my second point is about, even if it may not be stated as well as others might have put it.

My third point is the weakest, and I think I see what you mean about it being an evidential point. But I don't see why arguing both points -- evidential and logical -- is necessarily a bad thing.

I'll concede this though. Of all the threads on the FWD that has popped up in the past few days, mine is perhaps the weakest. But that's ok. I look at it as being the least in a line of really strong threads.

Wiploc

Cool. And it never hurts to point out, as you did, that even if they think they have refuted the PoE, that means they have only gone from impossible to possible, not that they have reached plausible, let alone probable.
crc

Amos

Hello Family Man. That is not exactly true because in my free will argument humans are divided in their own mind and a Beatific Vision is needed to jar these two hemispheres. After this it is impossible to be determined by our subconscious mind which is kind of the reverse of what happended in Eden in that the two trees now become one.

Here's a poem by Thomas Hardy that tells about this collision:

The Convergence of the Twain
(Lines on the loss of the "Titanic")
I
In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
II
Steel chambers, late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.
III
Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls - grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
IV
Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.
V
Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?"
VI
Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
VII
Prepared a sinister mate
For her - so gaily great--
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.
VIII
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
IX
Alien they seemed to be;
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,
X
Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,
XI
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

Ted Hoffman

Incorrect. They remain what they are: figments of the imagination - even if their constituent parts are derived from actual objects/ things, they remain illusionary objects in their totality. Dragons do not exist in reality. Mermaids do not exist in reality. Unicorns do not exist in reality. I might also add: God does not exist in reality. This reality.
We do die (with death in the sense we understand it today) whether it is thinkable or otherwise.
The Goatherders also liked meat. So much that they assumed the God they constructed also liked meat. Thats why Cains Vegetarian sacrifice was rejected in favour of Abels. The Goatherders had good hearts, but they were simpleminded men who were not even aware that their anthrocentric mentality got the best of them.
Man did not fall. No more than the heel fell compared to the scalp. To the goatherderd, the slithering of the serpent on its belly on "dust" represented "fallenness". And to them, with abasement, came the necessary guilt of evil. They did not know that even for the plant that has very beautiful flowers, the roots are what make the flowers beautiful: they focused on the flowers and shunned all else that did not fit their motif of beauty and purity.
Love is an abstract thing its existence or lack of it has absolutely no consequence in the scheme of things. Life is a high-level property that is emergent from a complex arrangement of matter.
You need to demonstrate that life can be created out of light.
So the mythmakers say, but they never proved it.
We are maintained by the light of common day? What if we decided to use artificial light and lived in shelters away from sunlight? would we then die?
Pleasure and pain is a result of evolution.
We are matter that have the property called life: we can reproduce, grow etc. There is nothing particularly supernatural about life - compared to eg. electricity or magnetism.
It does not follow. I think you made this conclusion based on the false reasoning behind the "pink unicorn" example: that both pink and "unicorn" are derived from real entities.
Perhaps you would like to review your line of reasoning?

People have imagined hell. Though its based on real life experiences : fiery+pit, it still doesn't exist. You have comitted the fallacy of division. Even if it is a reflection of reality, that offers it no validity at all to the ilussions as far as examining reality is concerned - precisely because they are not part of it.

Love (eros) is a romanticization of the mating instinct. And other needs that enhance the survival of our species - mothering instinct, territorial, security etc (agape). Hate is an emotion developed to help avoid pain. (whether or not the pain is illusionary is another matter altogether).

So we are in agreement that eternity does not need love? <Amos nods>. Good.
Conceiving it (you have used "love" and "Love" in an incongruous and entangled manner) as an opposite to love without justifying the necessity for existence of opposites or even providing a basis for that sounds very convenient and arbitrary on your part - care to "build" that assertion?

So are you a moral subjectivist?
How can there be "liberation" yet in your explanation below, a "net" is used. The very metaphor implies captivity and emasculation - not liberation. If implies engulfment, not release. The "stream of consciousness" is a rhetorical glove which conceals the herd-mentality and veils the fluvial attrition that individuality suffers under the current of such streams.
It is a concept that has its underpinnings on ideas that sister fascism.
Now all you need to do at this point is to demonstrate exactly what is so unique about the right brain - in terms of function. And what omniscience has to do with it. It seems you have skipped some pages.
Another contradiction. If they must think, they are striving.

Please tell me what "the whole secret behind omniscience" is. And who is keeping it (secret being knowledge that is hidden from others). Omniscience is the very antithesis of secrecy.
A spring is self-sufficient. We cant be the spring. We are the ones in need of the cup.

God cannot and does not need to create. The act of creation is one that belongs to temporal, limited beings. Creation is part of God. He is omnipotent in the sense that God embodies every ability.
We use those abilities. It is another anthropomorphism to assume that because we (and other higher animals) create, God creates too. God, as I said, can be thought of as the undifferentiated ontological potential. The pool of what is possible.
We only get a glimpse of him (omnipotence) when we go deeper (remember the spring analogy?). When we get to the subatomic level, we find the wavefunction and we can only observe one possibility when the wavefunction collapses because we are limited beings.
That shows us that even what we observe, is just one among the pool of possibilities (what we call the quantum superposition - God).
There is no higher order recognition that we have made. We are driven by emotions we have no power over - just as we have no power over evolution. We cant help avoiding pain, or seeking pleasure. That does not mean we have recognized anything. Its the selfish gene using us to propagate itself.
The Lion did not decide what he wanted to be - he had no choice in the matter (wanting what it wanted) because its whole "being" is a pleasure/dominance/safety-seeking machine and a pain-avoiding one.

A river never chooses to flow downstream. Even if it claims, after reaching the sea, that that is where it wanted to be.
We live to satisfy needs we never chose to have. We evolved to avoid the pain (mortality, pain, hunger, loneliness etc).
Like I keep saying: its incredible how much the ego strives to be sublime. But we dont get to structure the purpose of our egos in the scheme of things.
Its for this very reason that the free will concept is a farce and is a case of celebrating over "breadcrumbs" (normally in the background, is a mean-faced, judgemental and vindictive God looking overbearingly on the landscape with fiery eyes and with a sharp, blood-stained sword on the ready - with hell smoking eternally next to him).
Its an irrelevant concept unless one is thinking of a temperamental, insecure, worship-hungry deity hankering for praise from "lesser" beings - in essence, a being for who, feeding his (its) vanity is his raison d'etre. A nebulous, faceless egomaniac.
They are not two distinct things - its simply a property of our limbic system. It is seated in our limbic system.
Its like the mind and reality. The mind is not greater than reality since the mind is part of reality. Thus mind equals reality. The mind is simply an infocognitive part of reality. That doesnt exclude it from reality.

I agree, but not about the right brain part. It seems you think the brain is so important in as far as our destiny is concerned. FYI, the right brain, the left breast and the left testicle have absolutely no special status: they are just on the the left side of our bodies.
As a metaphor, this is okay with me. The Sumerian epic Enuma Elish has Unapitshim (their version of biblical Noah) and he has to travel many worlds and many rivers in his quest for immortality.

In the same vein, "realizing" we are eternal does not in itself make us eternal.
Facts are not contingent upon our realization of them.

Life, cannot be eternal. Existence can.
Life, by its very "nature", self-configures (evolves) to fight mortality. Life, only exists because its not eternal.

Amos

Hello IronMonkey should we keep going? I am all for it and will correct you where needed.



Agreed and that is what I wrote. God exists because we do and God does not exist so that can we become God ("the sea [that once was] was no longer" of Rev.21:1).

In reality our ego raptures because it was just an illusion to begin with. In our soul we are eternal and "like the bird that builts its nest is hatched therein" are we the continuity of infinity and cannot die. Your point is that we dispose of the carcass when our eternal life ends (because we can't take our ego into the grave).

The fall of man just identifies the left brain (reason) to become our
primary source to guide us through life.

The Love/Life thing is just a delineation of God from the first to the second cause. The third cause is 'like god' wherein only evil can be conceived to exist.

I am not really smart enough to do this but yes, we could probable survive with artifical light. Plants do and lower forms of life even thrive without light.

That can't be true because it exists only in our imagination or there would be sickness and pain in heaven. (hypnosis still can make childbirth painless).


We are life (Lord God) and have a property called matter. We can copulate but conception must validate our actions before new live is conceived.

I can use the above as another example to show that the essence of life (God) must first exist (have pre-sense) before the conception of a new creation (Lord God) is formed. Later, about three months later, the fall of man occurs already within the womb (when rational consciousness, or the ego, awakens-- but never forms corporeal substance and therefore remains the illusion I am pointing at).

Hell is just as real as heaven because both opposites are needed to make each other known. In this sense a divine comedy can only be a comedy if a tragedy could have been possible, and, if the crisis moment of "real life" is indeed a crisis moment a change must follow and his change will either land us in heaven or in hell.

I have no objection to the above analogy but would like to point out that romanticizing is needed for Romance to exist just as that eros is needed for [your] "agape" to be possible, and vice versa. Instincts are the memories of our soul (yes, all sentient beings have a soul) .

Eternity can't have love because love is an extract from Love and these two are opposites. The existence of hate in the love-hate dichotomy is evidence that love cannot be part of [eternal] Life because that would negate the existence of God (Truth).

Here's how Love (agape) is opposite to love (eros). Eros is selfish, protective, objective, jealous, etc. while agape is just opposite this.

Whow! I don't know what I am, but you did get a good understanding of my idea of how religion works . . . or at least how religion is supposed to work. Do you see "faith seeking understanding" at work in this? I like your "net" response because that is really what is supposed to happen. "A thief in the night" also implies this idea and that is why "shepherd-sheep" image is ideal wherein the Catholic church outlines the arena wherein this melodrama takes place. Infallibility now means the imputation of an arbitrary stream of consciousness against which sheep must stray to be found by the "good [night] shepherd" which is not the day-shepherd that leads the sheep hither and thither-- which is obvious or he would be able to lead the entire flock into heaven.

BTW, your "net" image is romanticized with Michael the dragonslayer and Mary the serpent trampler (Michael is Mary's right hand angel).

Yes agnostics must think while gnostics know and therefore do not have to think. I see no contradiction. The -ism of Gnosticism is misleading because we cannot "belong to freedom" (Gnostic is a Freeman) or seek to understand that which we already know.

In my kind of omniscience the seeker has managed to enter his own subconscious mind where he journeys into the unknown of his own past. It is called the Thousand Year Reign in the bible and is, for example, why Methuselah was that old. Hardy, De Mille, Zamjatin and many classics are full of this stuff. I think it also was the Wonderland of Alice but I have never really read this fairy tale.

The secret is in getting there and for this a mystery religion is needed. Hence, heaven is religion specific and for Catholics only.

We are co-creators with God and our input is very important. In fact, without me God could no longer be and so [in the universal] I am the reason why God could further the kingdom of Abraham (notive the reversal) and made it flourish and blossom into the greatest ever. We are co-creators because in our right brain we are the blueprint of God and in our left brain we are 'like god' and Lord God/God after realization (in the exclamation "my Lord and My God"when all doubt was remeoved).

Only while in oblivion are we driven by emotions but when the supernatural blends with the natural we are in charge of our faculties- hence no pain or sorrow.

That is why it must be placed subservient to our intuition and from there enjoy life to its fullest It's just that simple. I further don't see how we cannot be free after we have crucified and raised our ego into this so called "upper room."

Yes, metaphor and in this sense are we all ark builders and not "water dividers" to get into the promised land. Notice that parting the waters is evil because we must first learn to walk on top of the water (celestial sea) before we enter the promised land (subconscious mind).No, essence precedes existence so existence can evolve orderly (or chaos instead of beauty would be real and flowers would look like hell).

Ted Hoffman

Amos,
I have enjoyed this discussion and perhaps I will still continue but I have been caught up in a more critical discussion and I am swamped at work.
I hope you dont mind my stepping out for now.

Amos

Not at all. Thanks.