Stephen T-B

Amos: “...in case you don't understand, in Catholicism salvation is from God, for sinners, through faith.”

Sometimes, Amos, your sentences resound with clarity; what puzzles me slightly about this one is the “in Catholicism” bit.
Don’t all Christians believe that?
(I sometimes get the impression that your Catholicism IS a religion. I am aware that it is very distinct from the Southern Baptists, say, but aren’t you and they Christians above all else?)

Christian: Bill Snedden got in first with his comments about Resurrection; I’d only add that the resurrections we see in Nature are subject to Nature’s laws, while Christ’s resurrection was a violation of them.

Bill’s quote beginning “A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms,” is one of the most powerful rebuttals of the loathsome doctrine of Original Sin I have seen. Thank you for posting it, Bill.
I don’t know how to take Gambit’s “So it would seem to me that not only do they remember you, they can see you in your suffering and torment and still have no problem with it. They see the people they loved on earth but agree with God that this eternal punishment is Just and Fair.”
Is that irony? If it isn’t, then it seems to me that you seem to think that people who get to heaven lose their compassion. My mother minus her compassion and empathy would become something I should not be able to recognise; they were her outstanding qualities.

Darth Dane - your post compounded my conviction that you, Amos and Christian have much to sort out among yourselves.

My OP was intended to illustrate an inconsistency at the heart of Christian belief; it seems to me that the inconsistencies within Christianity and its scriptures breed inconsistency as its followers attempt to smooth over them but choose different ways of doing so. Schism is the inevitable result.

What draws me to natural law, as opposed to the unnatural laws which the Judeo-Christian God depends upon for its very existence, is its consistency. That means reliability. I like knowing that when I get on my bike to cycle to the office, its wheels won’t have turned into frog spawn over-night, and its frame become chalk. I like knowing that the road I’m on won’t suddenly rise up into a mountain, or turn into the stretched-out neck of a very large lizard. I like knowing that when the sun rises in the morning, it will set in the evening, and not do a little jig in the sky at around mid-day.
The disorderly, monstrous god of the Bible - making the rules up as he goes along - is inconsistent with a universe which depends for its very existence on inviolable laws.

Rhea

For a tangent on the nature of freewill (Darth Dane's post) please see new thread . Curious about Christian replies???

Amos

Maybe, but our definition of "from God" is different than theirs.

I have never claimed to be a Christian and I am more into the philosophy of religion. In my opinion that would be asking too much.

Proctors_Gambit

No, the suggestion I'm making, Stephen, is not that people in heaven lose their compassion, but they understand that this is the best way to do things.

I find the idea of electrocution horrible, but in the right frame of mind I could perhaps understand that it is necessary as a form of execution.
I haven't lost my compassion, I just understand the scenario.

Perhaps, when you get to heaven, you understand as God does why these people have to be in hell and why it is right.

The verses I posted from Luke would suggest that people in hell and people in heaven can see each other and converse but cannot reach each other.

On one side of the ravine is hell and people burning.
On the other side is heaven and people happy.

Each is aware of the other.

But the people in heaven have no feelings of injustice about the eternal sufferings of those in hell.

Reading on, the people in heaven (Abraham in this case) justifies the man's existence in hell to the fact that he had Moses and the Prophets to listen to but chose to ignore them, thus he deserves to be in hell.

It seems quite harsh to us, that this man be punished with eternal damnation for simple unbelief, but we can assume from the passage that once you get to heaven you will see that it is fact right and fair, and you will see no injustice in it at all.

-Gambit

Christian

Bill,

The myth became fact. What nature as well as all of those resurrection myths suggest culminated in a historical Person. What was true about them became real and walked the earth and died and rose again.

Not to overstate my point ... this is not conclusive evidence Jesus really died and came back to life, but it does remove the objection that Christianity is just another resurrection myth. All of those resurrection myths make Christianity more credible in my mind. It's easier to believe in the culmination of what nature and myth tell us over and over again, than it would be to believe in something that really does "break the rules of normalcy with which I have every-day familiarity." I don't see any validity in this specific objection to Christianity that Stephen raised, and I'm trying to explain why.

An "abusive husband" on earth is not at all just. The abused wife certainly does not deserve the punishment given to her. The sinner fully deserves every bit of punishment they ever receive from God. This is a big difference.

God also sees all of your true motives. He knows your secret thoughts and your secret actions. Because of this He can judge completely accurately and fairly. A human husband has no such advantage.

I'll again state that while the sin of unbelief is pivotal, eternal punishment is for every single one of a person's sins.

If I havn't touched on the point of your analogy let me know and I'll try again.

It is a fascinating book. Lewis was really good at allegory.

Your conclusion that no god exists is a result of your choices. The fact that the ideological position you hold is one which gives you no alternative doesn't mean that in actual fact you have no alternative.

By your reasoning I have no alternative but to trust in Christ. In one sense that is a very true statement (the same sense in which your statement is true), but still a choice actually was made by both of us and that choice has real consequences.

Whether or not God exists is an ideological question. Ideologies are very much a matter of personal choice and conclusion, even if our conclusion seems so obvious to us as to be foregone.

You have been given information. God tells me (Rom 1) that every person is given enough light so that they are without excuse. I don't know exactly what that light is in your case, but if it comes to it God will point it out to you before He renders final judgment.

My response is Proctors Gambit's last post.

That mean that a moral law exists, that you and I have violated it on many occasions, and that God's punishment is no more than exactly what we deserve. In my case I have somehow stumbled into the God who actually exists and His Son is taking the heat for me.

[QUOTE}You made another comment in a later post regarding "what we deserve":

quote:
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You and I deserve eternal punishment completely aside from whether or not we believe in (and trust) Christ for our salvation. We've both screwed enough things up that an omniscient Being who is unwaiveringly just could nail us, dead to rights. (I don't mean this as an insult ... it's the condition of all men.)
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We all deserve eternal punishment? For what? The petty infractions we commit every day?[/QUOTE]

Yes, for those. And also for the great and terrible infractions we are prone to in our weakest moments (and sometimes more often than that).

Nope. That wasn't specifically what I was refering to. Theologians differ on exactly how to interpret Rom 5. I have my own opinion, but original sin seems pretty moot to me as far as explaining eternal damnation. We've all commited a plethora of plain old strait forward personal sins. What difference does it make whether Adam's infraction is added to our particular pile or not on judgment day? If you toss a teaspoon of dirt on the peak of a mountain what you have is still very much a mountain. It would have been a mountain without that extra teaspoon of dirt.

An interesting quote by Ayn Rand. I'm afraid I'm not much of a ethicist. I've never really put much effort into approaching ethics from a philosophical standpoint before. Such intriquing assertions merit consideration though. Thanks.

Respectfully,

Christian

NightWatchman

heaven and hell are states of consciousness.

consider proverbs 15:24 a word to the wise above (using you head) you can depart from hell beneath. from your lower nature.

come on you dont actually believe theres a real heaven and real hell do you now?

Christian

Stephen,

It was a supernatural event. It did not contradict the laws of nature (as I think you are suggesting), it exceeded them. The resurrection wasn't anti-natural, it was super-natural. Miracles are not the contradition of the rules of the system, they are the injection of new data into the system. In the case Christ demonstrated Himself what will one day happen to every single person (physical resurrection - John 5:28-29).

Doesn't the miracle of birth seem greater than the miracle of resurrection anyway? Isn't it more difficult to come into being than to return to it? Isn't the task of creating something that has never been more difficult than the task of bringing back something that once existed?

I have a question. I've never understood what basis there is for ruling out supernatural causes a priori when trying to explain an event. Science, by it's inherent nature, deals with the natural universe. It makes no statement about the supernatural at all. So the basis for ruling out supernatural causes must be philosophical or ideological, or something along those lines. But what is it? The naturalistic approach has always seemed like a highly biased one to me. Why not just go wherever the evidence leads you?

Probably a simple question, but I've not had many chances to discuss such an issue with an actual athiest before. The information age sure has its advantages.

Respectfully,

Christian

HelenM

Hi Christian,

You can expect your beliefs to be very strongly challenged here but hopefully you'll find that most people here are civil to you if you're civil to them.

Helen

NightWatchman

stephen go read lost433 post under existance of god

Rhea

For the record, this statement reflects a judeo-christian bias. It may interest you to know that many people don't see birth as anything "coming into being".

There are the reincarnationists who believe that souls are reborn again and again, hence no new life is created at birth.

And aside from the supernatural explanation, there is the simple fact that eggs and sperm are alive - hence no new life is "created". At best I think we could say that new _cognition_ is developed from these LIVE pieces as they react according to natural drivers.

Hence birth, while complex and quite fascinating is not a miracle. Resurrection (strictly defined as having come from someone who is actually known to have been dead) would violate the natural processeswhich are known to occur.


No it doesn't "add to them". It violates them. It takes known processes and has them operate backwards in thermodynamic and kinetic senses. This is not an "addition" of actions, it is a violation of the way everything else operates.

And addition might be the dual nature of light as both wave and particle. Learning about the wave nature does not violate the particle nature - it adds to it. Light turning around and moving back to the source, on the other hand, would violate the other behavior of light.