At 6/13/11 02:58 PM, thdrkside wrote: You know what? I believe in Christ, and that he saved us all, but I am not a Christian, because I dont go to church.
Would you object to being called a Christian [that does not go to church]?
All people should be allowed to choose what to believe.
This is a matter apart from distinguishing what is reasonable to believe (or rationalizing that which you do believe). I sure hope you realize this considering what you said just prior... "why should I go to a place that may be entirely wrong" and "Why should I beleive things that are skewed interpretations of Jesus Christs teachings."
You do realize that me telling you {I think you're unreasonable} is not me saying {you're not allowed to believe}, right?
You do realize that witnessing is not necessarily coercive, right?
Just ignore those people, if you dont believe you dont believe. I know that we are called to convert people, but I also know that annoying the piss out of you will only cause you to run away from, and not towards, God.
What an awful awful mentality to have about the whole thing.
When I was in college I was approached by a Christian (don't remember the sect anymore) and I wasn't annoyed at all. He was a pleasant guy.
At 6/13/11 01:09 AM, LazyDrunk wrote: What makes you think I'd owe you anything, including definitive proofs, of my existence, let alone true nature, if I'm the guy who built your sadistic asses?
I'm not suggesting that God owes us anything.
I'm not asking for definitive proofs of his existence or true nature.
Oh and by the way all you "I'm no atheist, I'm agnostic," people out there... if you've ever disbelieved someone, even thought there were lying, or so much as held anything as a fact - you're hypocrites failing to live up to the standard of open mindedness and acceptance you seek to assign yourselves by labeling yourselves agnostics in the first place.
Never mind that being an atheist doesn't mean you're a stubborn insensitive jackass, or outright denying the divine or Christianity. Though you probably are stubborn, and probably jackass at times, but that's cause you're human.
At 6/12/11 11:34 PM, Chdonga wrote:At 6/12/11 11:29 PM, Bacchanalian wrote: If only a person could be both agnostic and atheist.... oh wait...You can't be both agnostic and atheist.
Agnosticism is not being sure whether there's a god or not.
Atheism is the disbelief in a god.
By being atheist, you're automatically not agnostic.
Agnosticism is not: being unsure as to whether there is a god or not. It is a position whereby you deem something (not necessarily God or anything even supernatural) unknowable. This does not necessarily preclude conviction.
By being atheist, you are not automatically agnostic.
By being theist, you are not automatically agnostic.
While being agnostic, you may also be atheist or theist.
If you're not theist, you're atheist.
If you're not atheist, you're theist.
If your un-assuredness of a god's existence renders you unable to claim by knowledge or conviction that there is a god, then you are atheist.
***
Would be nice if the lot of you would just admit that this has much more to do with the stigma that the term atheist carries, more to do with the virtue that the colloquial use of the term agnostic implies, and much less to do with what any of these words actually mean.
If only a person could be both agnostic and atheist.... oh wait...
So, Lazydrunk, now that you have a base reading on me...
At 6/12/11 07:47 AM, CryptKeeperZach wrote: I was just assuring that this site wasn't full of morons who don't let anything serious occur.
Assuring =/= seeking assurance.
At 6/10/11 06:45 PM, LazyDrunk wrote: I'm asking you if you've ever thought or felt the divine, during a song that brings you back by igniting memory neurons with rhymes and a heartbeat, for example, or whatever it is that makes you glad to be alive.
I just need a baseline on you, think of me as God and you got one chance.
Uh well... lots of things, mostly falling under 'art', make me glad to be alive. And most of those things do, though inconsistently, give me a feeling that I'd assume other's more spiritual would call transcendent or divine.
At 6/9/11 01:07 AM, LazyDrunk wrote: Ever thought for a moment throughout a particularly nice day that we might be living in what constitutes "heaven" right now? A feeling, ya know?
Are you departing from Christian philosophy here by redefining heaven or saying that on a nice day one might experience transcendence - an inkling of the greater beyond - without actually dying? Or what?
Matt and Trey want you all to know that they hate dubstep.
At 6/8/11 02:04 PM, LazyDrunk wrote:At 6/8/11 12:17 AM, Bacchanalian wrote: Lazy, what is Christianity requisite for?You should understand I'm only responding to you because you're easy.
I'd be worried if I wasn't.
And Christianity is requisite for ______?God's Word.
Next?
Well, is there a 'next' without traveling back up the regression?
At 6/8/11 02:08 PM, LazyDrunk wrote:I think you need to ask yourself what the function of Heaven is.Are you really asking why the afterlife isn't available to the living today?And in so doing, in the manner I'm doing it, I'm asking if the system is contrived by God or not.
Is this like a what-is-it-to-you type thing or are you asking me to produce an answer myself without prodding you to do it for me? For now I'll take it as the latter since I don't think the former is your style...
The function of heaven is to satisfy God's interest in having us by his side for eternity. I've colored it with the context of my argument but it's not far off is it?
At 6/8/11 02:11 AM, SteveGuzzi wrote: ummm it's conjecture over religious shit. no, 'we' haven't established anything. i replied to a couple things i noticed on the back page of some big religious thread, and i did it outside the context of whatever debate was already going on.
So then demonstrate that the accusation is actually misplaced. "In your opinion," would a Christian be mistaken to say that God is omniscient? "In your opinion," would a Christian be mistaken to say that God is omnipotent?
***
Anyway I'm getting kinda of tired of this conversation being constantly re-bracketed to slip God out of the picture.
If heaven, then why, ultimately, not heaven on earth?
By "ultimately" I do not mean "eventually" nor "in the end." I mean: why, to the nth degree.
Follow the regression to its termination. If you don't find God there, something is amiss, is it not?
So among all the apologeticism here, we've established that God is neither omnipotent nor omniscient?
Lazy, what is Christianity requisite for?
At 6/7/11 05:48 PM, CacheHelper wrote:At 6/6/11 05:38 PM, Bacchanalian wrote: Why is it not a contradiction of free will to restrict human ability solely to those things that do not involve magic?Because God never gave us magic. He gave us 'free will'.
Yes. I know that. How does the former not impinge on the latter, when you're more than willing to argue that rigging ones options renders them no longer subjective?
I give you 5 dollars and told you that you can do what you want with it. Because I'm a truthful honest person I won't take that 5 dollars away from you or control how you spend it. But it doesn't mean that you also get 20 dollars. No, you get five. You can do what you want with that five dollars. If something cost 10 dollars... too bad, I never gave you ten dollars.
This example demonstrates that five dollars is limited, both in quantity and function.
At 6/6/11 04:26 PM, TheOneNed wrote: If you are living like there is no God you had better be right. If I am wrong I don't stand to lose much, but if you don't believe that God exists and you are wrong?????
At 6/6/11 04:46 PM, CacheHelper wrote: His powers do have limits. That's what started this whole Adam and Eve conversation. God cannot lie, God cannot deny his own existence, God cannot contradict himself.
Allow me to pull the car back around...
Why is it not a contradiction of free will to restrict human ability solely to those things that do not involve magic?
At 6/6/11 12:06 AM, Dubbi wrote: Except not everything can be related to the supernatural. For instance, a debate about what economic policy to pursue is not a supernatural or metaphysical debate -- it's is concerned with graphs, data, logic, numbers, history, philosophy etc. The debate on God on the other hand is entirely supernatural, as it's concerning something that is allegedly beyond us, beyond humans, unlike economics, which is a purely human invention. Thus you can't prove disprove God with numbers or graphs; either the logic of a divine being makes sense to you - intuitively resonates with you on a deep personal level - or it does not, However, you can never prove or disprove his existence.
I know of no belief in the supernatural that is primarily and solely implicative of the supernatural. By the same token that any supernatural belief implies an empirically knowable thing, any empirically knowable thing can be abstracted as a supernatural phenomenon.
Economics as a science, would no longer be economics should it involve the supernatural. This is a semantic issue.
But here's the thing. However you or anyone else wants to restrict the scope of economic debate doesn't matter. According to the construct given by juytedawirldz, as long as you introduce something supernatural to the discussion, all bets are off - all that matters is what one wants to believe. It defeats the notion that any field of knowledge may be off limits to supernatural speculation.
It's self defeating because it relies on a distinction that it itself nullifies.
At 6/5/11 03:45 AM, Senmetsu wrote: Do I want da sex? Naw.
Then you cannot be trusted.
[ Intelligence ] So you say you have a girlfriend that picks the bloody mess perk.
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At 6/5/11 11:10 PM, juytedawirldz wrote: in this way, i come to the conclusion that i would rather not believe in god. and since god is not something that can be proven to exist or not exist, that's really all that matters.
So as long as you can excuse your belief or opinion via an appeal to the supernatural, all that matters is that you want to believe or think it? You do realize this is in no way an issue unique to the matter of a god, and that anything can be abstracted into allegedly supernatural terms - that essentially anything can become as a god, 'not something that can be proven or disproven'?
The very argument you make renders the distinction between refutable and irrefutable null and void. It's self defeating.
At 6/3/11 06:30 PM, LazyDrunk wrote:At 6/3/11 02:04 PM, Bacchanalian wrote:Chistianity.At 6/3/11 07:46 AM, LazyDrunk wrote: Can you have forgiveness and/or redemption without evil?Ok. Good and evil are requisite for forgiveness. Forgiveness is requisite for _____?
Do you yearn for any more obvious answers?
And Christianity is requisite for ______?
At 6/3/11 06:00 PM, CacheHelper wrote: Are you implying that I'm not allowed to inform people of my lack of knowledge until someone asks me about it or informs me otherwise?
You are allowed.
Why does something have to 'happen'?
Yes, but not entirely in the thread.
Why can't I just volunteer the information on my own accord?
You can.
Contradiction with me (the non-expert) or with the Bible?
Would you, in either condition, demand that I not bring up previous arguments that seem to or could create contradictions?
You said they could sin any way they wanted. However, according to your arguments (well some of them), murder was not an option. In other words, they could not sin any way they wanted, as they (derived so far) could not sin in one particular way.Why couldn't they murder?
By, "murder was not an option," I mean to say that pursuing murder would not have been pursuant of sin. It is not to say that Adam could not have killed Eve. It is to say that, supposing an array of options by which to disobey God, murder was not one. Furthermore, their will was restricted, in that they could not disobey God by murdering.
Free will says that they can do anything (within their physical limits(which is obvious shouldn't need any further specification))
Actually the matter of limitation is incredibly important.
I don't know... I see it more as a "need to know basis" type of thing.
So Adam and Eve needed to know not to eat from the tree because God knew they were going to?
Free will says Adam could murder Eve if he chooses too. Adam never chose to murder Eve so I don't know what God would have done had that been the case.
This specific dilemma is not a matter of divine prudence, but of the ramifications of divine action.
So then what did God command that subsequently provided Adam and Eve the option to disobey Him?Don't eat from the tree.
After that.
God sees right and wrong objectively. Right is always right, wrong is always wrong. Murder, is always wrong.
Do make any distinction between the dichotomies: wrong and right, bad and good?
Raise a hand... any hand you want, doesn't even have to be your own hand. If all the hands in the world weighed 40,000 tons except your left hand, which hand would you choose to raise? If you don't see how making all hands but your left hand weight 40,000 tons alters the scales of "fair choice" then I don't know what to tell you. Get use to the short bus I guess. Maybe get your head scanned for a debilitating tumor.
This game where you keep switching the discussion from subjectivity to fairness is getting boring.
I was wrong about the Tree being better then the others.
Alright.
This is why it's important that you realize that I'm not an expert.
Complete the sentence...
It is important that I realize you are not an expert so that I do not ______?
Good thing I know enough about the Bible to understand the story and the main aspects of such stories. You know, things like what the tree represents, and why it's not behind a 100' stone wall. You know, the important things.
Main points tend to be important, yeah. But so are the points from which main points are derived.
Even if I didn't specifically know how the choices are equal, they are still indeed equal... and the flaw in the story lies in my lack of knowledge and not with the religion itself.
A religion itself is what people believe of it. How many people do you figure you've now said are wrong about their religion because the Tree of Knowledge wasn't any more dazzling than the rest?
The text itself in most and current cases doesn't tread deeply enough into it's own subject matter to be discussed like this without contributing third party insights such as yours and mine.
If the options weren't equal then the choice wouldn't be fair and the story wouldn't work. If the story didn't work then God is wrong, and/or has lied, and the entire religion falls apart.
Affirming the consequent.
To assume that you're the only person smart enough to question the existence of the tree implies that all the people who follow the religion are too stupid to ask such an obvious question
The questions I'm asking are obvious? I was under the impression the questions I was asking were so obscure you called to question their very relevance.
for if they were the fault of the religion, the religion wouldn't exist.
A sneaky argument ad populum.
Also, the choices are fair because God says 'eat and die' and the serpent says 'eat and don't die'.
See, I don't think the threat of mortality would be all that big a deal to two beings of grand naivety. While they didn't know death, they knew God. They had some shade of an idea of what the latter entailed.
At 6/3/11 03:50 PM, CacheHelper wrote: Evil isn't really a thing to be created. [...]
So where did evil come from? Well, who was the first to ignore Gods commands and disobey Gods orders? Lucifer.
Did God create darkness?
At 6/3/11 07:46 AM, LazyDrunk wrote: Can you have forgiveness and/or redemption without evil?
Ok. Good and evil are requisite for forgiveness. Forgiveness is requisite for _____?
At 6/2/11 09:59 PM, Crazyhobo51 wrote: fools and children will hide behind love, believing it to protect them on some vague, metaphysical basis, when in reality they will be torn apart at the slightest glance by those possessing even the slightest molecule of power, but lacking the self-designed morals to focus and temper it.
For example...
Eh. It comes off as though you just played mad libs with the existing scripts.
I catch myself using "[insert pronoun] was like," rather than specifying the action, a lot - and I hate myself for it every time.
I only skimmed this thread, but I didn't see anyone mention rhythm.
As someone who gets accused of using big words often, I usually opt for the word choice that creates the best rhythm in my head (without sacrificing meaning).
At 6/2/11 01:01 PM, CacheHelper wrote:At 6/1/11 06:29 PM, Bacchanalian wrote: Though if your argument is that you're really "just" saying those things, then how are they relevant?Are you fucking kidding me with this? [...]
That's a quite alot of text for something that doesn't satisfy the criteria provided by the question (i.e. for something that doesn't actually answer the question).
It might help to remember back to when I said, "It's not a matter of me taking it personally. I'm not sure how I could. It's a matter of identifying what has happened that you deem it necessary to correct a notion or claim that was apparently never held nor claimed."
In other words, I'm looking for an impetus within this conversation, and not from some (frankly) paranoid attitude that I'm screaming and yelling at you, or some urge to preemptively excuse yourself for being wrong - open ended-ly wrong - maybe right - let's be honest, probably confident until shown otherwise.
These are educated guesses at best. In a week from now don't come screaming and yelling at me that the cough only lasted four days and you got it at school.
So, you're telling me I shouldn't do something... could you be more explicit, without analogy, as to what I shouldn't do here in this forum (due to you not being an expert or knowing if you're right or wrong)?
Just like this... "but you said I got it on the bus... rawr rawr rawr!!!!"
Well wait, this tangent was about you not seeing the relevance of the question.
Did I set up the construct or did the Bible set up the construct.... because there is a very big difference there. If I set up the construct... well then you should probably think back to all the times I told you I wasn't an expert and realize that I might be wrong.
... and don't bring up previous arguments that seem to or could create contradictions?
So then murder isn't an available sin.God knows that Adam and Eve aren't going to murder each other so why even bring it up?
Wrong turn. You said they could sin any way they wanted. However, according to your arguments (well some of them), murder was not an option. In other words, they could not sin any way they wanted, as they (derived so far) could not sin in one particular way.
But to answer your question: God must forbid something in order for there to be an option to disobey God. There must be an option (and means) to disobey God in order for there to be free will.
If Adam had thoughts of murder, God would probably have done something about it...
Is this implying that the notion of sin precedes its corresponding commandment?
Adam wasn't going to murder Eve so it's sort of a non-issue.
The conversation is about free will, not whether or not Adam would ever murder Eve. So it is not a non issue.
God never claimed any of these things to be commandments
So then what did God command that subsequently provided Adam and Eve the option to disobey Him?
If God had not spoken to Cain, and Cain still killed his brother, would Abel's murder be a good thing?Maybe... I don't know. That's not how the story goes.
Except your over-arching argument is implicitly just as hypothetical. Try again, without evading.
How about more abstractly - is murder, in and of itself, ever a good thing?
So what you can do is limited - i.e. you cannot do as you please - i.e. you can only do as you please within a limited field of options.Clearly. You're a human being... and so am I... these things are obvious. I can't just turn into a bucket of water like the Wonder Twins. If you're just now finding this out, you have serious problems.
Do you suddenly feel as if you don't have the ability to make your own choices? If I ask you to go to New York with me tomorrow are you suddenly not allowed to choose 'No' just because you can't also turn into a bucket of water?
"you can only do as you please within a limited field of options."
Read the entirety of the sentence next time.
So we agree?
The tree is still a subjective and moral choice if it's stuck behind a 100' high stone wall.No it's not. If the tree is behind a giant wall then there are outside factors effecting the choice.
By this logic, no choice is subjective.
In this case, not eating from the tree is much easier then eating from the tree... thus they're more likely to not eat from the tree. The choice isn't fair.
Right. We're talking about fairness.
"Where does this new information on the tree fit into your fairness argument?"
The only reason Adam and Eve had to not eat from the tree is because God told them not too. There was no other reasons, or signs, leading them to believe that the tree was bad. All they had, was Gods warning.
Yeah well... I would think making the tree more attractive than the rest would lead them to believe the opposite - along with the word of the serpent.EXACTLY!!! Except, God told them not too... so the choice is, do I obey God or not? There was no other reason to not eat from the tree.
Yeah, and you maintained that this was fair before you did some research and found out that the tree was apparently physically more alluring than the others. I.e. the dilemma is fair when the tree is no better looking nor bearing of better fruit than the other trees.
Better looks and nicer fruit... would that not be an incentive to two people for which an entire garden was built (largely) for their consumption?
By the way, God told them they'd die. So it wasn't just instruction that they shouldn't, it was a threat to their mortality - which, being as they were - probably didn't mean much.And the serpent told Eve they would be like God.
And those two claims would be equally persuasive to Adam and Eve?
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