This is raised by just about everyone: Priests and ministers, college students and housewives, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers.
It’s one of the hardest questions anybody ever asks.
Just a few days ago, a close friend of mine, Laurin, passed away after a fierce 18 month battle with cancer. What a horrible experience this was for him and his wife Diana.
I’ve visited the slums of Sao Paulo Brazil, where 500,000 homeless street kids sniff glue and steal for a living. Sometimes the police hunt them down and kill them, just to reduce the crime rate.
Last year my wife spent a week in Mozambique where she saw an infant in her mother’s arms, dying of pneumonia in a hospital waiting room. She met hundreds of other kids with malaria and malnutrition. We’ve given some money for a medical clinic, and every bit helps. But the problems are so huge, what little you try to do still seems like a teardrop in the ocean.
If you took all the parties, the humor, the success and happiness in the world, and put it side by side with the suffering and pain, the comparison would be almost absurd.
There’s a lot of sickness and sadness in this world.
How can God let it go on?
Well, I can’t give you an answer. I can only tell you a true story.
~~~
A certain man threatened the Religious Gestapo, who in turn convinced the Roman government that He was a threat to them, too.
His followers were disappointed that He didn’t overthrow the Romans and declare himself King, like the Messiah was supposed to do. So they abandoned Him.
The ancient Romans pioneered what was possibly the most cruel form of torture ever devised by man: Crucifixion. They would drive spikes into their victim’s ankles and wrists, smashing his nerves. He would hang there in blinding sheets of pain, slowly suffocating and dehydrating for days, until he finally expired.
Jesus was whipped and beaten, literally beyond recognition, then nailed to a cross between two common criminals.
One of these criminals was cursing and shouting at Him in a fit of rage: ‘HEY! If you’re the KING, why don’t you get yourself down from there! And US, TOO!!!’
The other guy went along with this… for a little while.
But he saw that Jesus wasn’t hurling insults at his torturers. Instead He was asking God to forgive them (?!).
He sobered up. He said to the other criminal, ‘Hey dude, you and I are here because we deserve it. But this man Jesus has done nothing wrong.’
Then he said to Jesus, ‘Remember me when you take charge of your Kingdom.’
Jesus simply replied, ‘Today you’ll be with me in Paradise.’
~~~
Stop the camera.
What you have here, in this brief conversation, is a snapshot of the entire world.
You have two criminals who have gotten themselves into a horrendous, awful mess. And you have the Son of God, who has not only chosen to live with us in our world of pain and suffering, but has personally taken all of it upon his own shoulders.
Even though he is completely innocent.
One thief refuses to accept any responsibility for his actions. He’s unwilling to admit that he created the very mess that he’s in.
He lives in denial until the bitter end. He grits his teeth and dies in his sin.
The other thief comes clean. He recognizes that Jesus possesses divine authority. He admits his guilt. He is required to do nothing, other than to let go of his pride.
He asks for forgiveness.
Forgiveness granted.
Jesus’ pardon doesn’t make the cross or the agony go away. But finally the struggle ceases and this man crosses the Great Divide. The intense pain dissolves and he steps into a New World, designed by God Himself — with renewed body and soul.
That’s a picture of the entire world, right there. You and I are in this mess together, and we’ve all contributed to it.
We’ve all rejected God in some way or another, we’ve all committed some kind of crime, and we all experience suffering.
The situation is what it is.
So we have a simple choice: Accept that fact that God has suffered with us — or mock him and be furious because the suffering exists in the first place.
Which way do you want it???
The decision is yours. You and I will never get a true ‘answer’ about the pain and suffering we experience in this life. But in the midst of our pain, we have a companion. You and I can have the same conversation with Jesus that this criminal had, and we can experience the same forgiveness. All we have to do is ask, just like the thief on the cross did on that sad day.
~~~
This is the last of the Seven Great Lies of Organized Religion. I pray that I’ve helped to strip away all the baggage that the Religious Gestapo adds to the story and reduce it to the bare essentials. I hope this has stirred your mind and your heart.
Are you trying to strip away the baggage and get to a deeper truth? We’d like to hear from you. Simply submit a comment below.
We often run behind, but will do our best to respond.
Respectfully Submitted,
Perry Marshall
www.CoffeehouseTheology.com
- Read the whole conversation between the two thieves and Jesus
- Hear my extended presentation of the 7 Great Lies
- The prophet Ezra asks God why his people suffer so much. God sends an angel with an answer. Story continues here.
Listen up! Kay Jay and Conway, ye ‘would-be’ judges of God! Your problem is quite like that of Job, who could not understand his own suffering. The main difference between you and Job is that while Job did not curse God, even though his wife suggested it to him, you two needed no prodding to do the same.
Did God explain it to him? Not one bit. He only showed Job how meager his understanding was. Where were you when I was laying out all the cosmos? (Job 38:4-41). And so, neither will I attempt any further explanation. If you really want to understand, ask God!
I don’t think you have read my posts carefully, Carl. At no point do I curse God, if only because I won’t waste my time cursing an imaginary being. It would be kind of like cursing Wile E. Coyote or Daffy Duck.
But I do find it hard to understand how anyone who does believe in the real existence of the entity called “God,” or “Jehovah,” or “Allah,” or “Yahweh,” whatever, could forbear cursing him, when they consider the many unpleasantnesses that that entity, whom they claim is the author of all, has arranged to make them subject to on this plane of existence. Yes, yes, I know that the standard counter-argument is that it’s not God but Satan who has arranged the bad stuff, but taking that tack immediately raises the question, within the religionists’ cognitive framework, of who arranged for Satan to exist.
Let me add that, in my universe, Satan, too, is entirely a figment of the imagination of men, and that when religionists invoke Satan, they are simply compounding their error, referring to one imaginary being to get another imaginary being off the hook, so to speak.
As for Job, well, that little story is the one that, when I was in Sunday School longer ago than I care to say, first spurred me to begin thinking critically about what I was being taught, rather than just sitting there nodding my head and thinking, “True, true.” I mean, here’s Job, God’s good and faithful servant, going along minding his own business, and here’s God, who, to prove a point to Satan, his arch-enemy, allows Satan to mess Job over big time. My thought then was that God was being a bit of a dick; his failure to explain to Job what was going on just made his being a dick more egregious. In my almost 75 years I have read little in the Bible, and heard nothing from people who claim to know about such things, that has changed my opinion.
But I do not curse the nonexistent, Carl. I’m much more likely to curse those who attempt to foist superstition, legend, and mythology off on the gullible as “Holy Truth.”
I suspect, but cannot prove, that the only reason you will attempt no further explanation of the logical contradictions to which a belief in the real existence of a deity inevitably leads, is that, ultimately, there is no viable explanation. So here is the choice: either shit-can your ability to reason and embrace the multitudinous contradictions and inconsistencies inherent in being a True Believer, or begin to think and reason and as a result move from Bronze Age darkness into the light.
Sorry to interrupt your private feud (though I guess you didn’t notice the last time, either), but what more horrible thing can you say about someone/thing than that he/it does not exist? Sounds like a curse to me.
By the way, “in my universe”… doesn’t that sound a little bit hollow to you? Are you alone in your universe? Do you assume that we each live in our own universe, and that whichever beliefs we choose to endorse are real to us and therefore real in our own universes? If that’s the case, these web comments are actually your own sub-conscious speaking to you–SO much to say on that–or you share the universe with the rest of us, and that means there is one universe (a bit redundant to point out, what with “uni-” in the word), one reality, one truth… and it comes down to this: A) you’re right, there is no God; you gain nothing, I lose nothing; or B) you’re wrong, there IS a God; I gain everything… you lose everything.
Please, think again. As with most Christians, I don’t believe I’m always 100% right in everything, but this I know for sure: when I die, my soul is safe; Jesus loves you, despite your doubt; and, whether you believe in them or not, both God and the devil believe in *you*. God wants to save your soul, the devil wants to destroy it, and only you get to choose which of them will succeed. If you’re almost 75, then you may not have much time left. Don’t be like the captain of the Titannic, stubbornly certain that his ship won’t sink… and find out too late that you were wrong.
One more thing: if you’re concerned with people saying “I told you so” then you don’t need to tell us if you change your mind. What does it hurt, really, to just ask God, with an open heart, if He exists? If you like, I will ask Daffy Duck and Wile E. Coyote if they are real. I’ll ask them sincerely and honestly; I’m fairly sure I won’t get an answer, but I’m willing to try. Would you be willing to do the same? Honestly, sincerely, ask God if He’s real, and listen for an answer. What can it hurt?
God bless.
I’m using my usual format for answering postings on this site, Stef: Your comments I’ve enclosed in quotation marks, and mine I have not thus enclosed.
“Sorry to interrupt your private feud (though I guess you didn’t notice the last time, either), but what more horrible thing can you say about someone/thing than that he/it does not exist?”
Oh, I dont know, Stef. But how about, “He/it exists but is unspeakably evil.” Seems to me that, for horribleness, that trumps saying “He/it doesn’t exist.”
“Sounds like a curse to me.”
Sorry, Stef, but you can’t curse someone/thing that doesn’t exist, except in a metaphorical sense. So when I say God has no real existence, that is less a curse than a statement of what I take to be fact.
“By the way, “in my universe”… doesn’t that sound a little bit hollow to you? Are you alone in your universe? Do you assume that we each live in our own universe, and that whichever beliefs we choose to endorse are real to us and therefore real in our own universes?”
You’re really grasping at straws here, Stef, in an attempt, I presume, to convince a reader that my position on the real existence of a deity is untenable. The line of reasoning would be, I suppose, that a thoroughgoing solipsism is untenable, and that a thoroughgoing solipsist is likely to hold other untenable beliefs. But anyone with a dram of understanding of the use of figurative language would have recognized that the turn of phrase, “in my universe,” is equivalent to “as I see it,” or “in my opinion,” and does not permit the reasonable inference that I hold a solipsistic point of view.
“If that’s the case, these web comments are actually your own sub-conscious speaking to you–SO much to say on that–”
Oh, and are you now an authority on my subconscious, Stef? Hmmm… Seems to me you have a penchant, at once presumptuous and arrogant, for pretending to be a some kind of telepath or empath, a Betazoid, if you will. In one of your prior posts you seemed to be claiming to know what I know to be true deep down in my heart. I asked you to spare me this presumption, but you appear determined to ignore my request.
“or you share the universe with the rest of us, and that means there is one universe”
Evidently you’re unfamiliar with the modern cosmological concept of “multiverses.” But no matter.
“(a bit redundant to point out, what with “uni-” in the word), one reality, one truth”
Oh come on Stef, think, if think indeed you can, which I’m beginning to doubt. There may indeed be only one objective reality, but there are as many subjective realities as there are perceivers of that one objective reality, as is easily demonstrated any time two people look at the same thing/event and report perceiving something differentfrom what the other has reported perceiving. This plays out in courtrooms every day that court is in session, and is one of the reasons eyewitness reports have proven to be so unreliable and are so assiduously deconstructed by prosecutors and defense attorneys alike.
“… and it comes down to this: A) you’re right, there is no God; you gain nothing, I lose nothing; or B) you’re wrong, there IS a God; I gain everything… you lose everything.”
Thank you, Blaise Pascal, from whom you cribbed this specious argument, without, I note, giving him credit. But if God has no real existence, and I do think the available evidence points in that direction, then I have been spared wasting my time on meaningless rituals, prayers, worshippings, and adorations, time that I could have put to better use, and you have not been thus spared. On the other hand, if God has a real existence, what’s to assure you that when I stand before this God, he won’t say, “Hey, with what I gave you to work with in the way of evidence, I can understand why you didn’t believe I existed.”? And what’s to assure you that when you stand before him, he won’t say, “You know, I gave you a brain with which to reason, and I gave you the tools of logic and observation to use in support of your ability to reason, yet you chose not to use any of these gifts. I don’t want your kind in my Heaven.”? Just asking, Stef.
“Please, think again. As with most Christians, I don’t believe I’m always 100% right in everything, but this I know for sure: when I die, my soul is safe; Jesus loves you, despite your doubt; and, whether you believe in them or not, both God and the devil believe in *you*.”
My mind boggles trying to grasp what you can possibly mean when you say that imaginary beings believe in me. What would you make of it if I told you that whether or not you believe in their real existence, Daffy Duck and Wile E. Coyote believe in *you*? Such a statement would be arrant nonsense, and so is yours, Stef.
“God wants to save your soul, the devil wants to destroy it, and only you get to choose which of them will succeed. If you’re almost 75, then you may not have much time left. Don’t be like the captain of the Titannic,”
That’s “Titanic,” Stef. The “Titannic” was another ship, made entirely of the yellowish or brownish bitter-tasting complex phenolic substance present in tea, some barks, grapes, etc.
“stubbornly certain that his ship won’t sink… and find out too late that you were wrong.
One more thing: if you’re concerned with people saying “I told you so” then you don’t need to tell us if you change your mind. What does it hurt, really, to just ask God, with an open heart, if He exists?”
All it would hurt would be my belief that, to date, I have been relatively free of psychosis. I gave up talking to, or asking questions of, imaginary playmates, a long, long time ago, and see no reason to revive that practice now.
“If you like, I will ask Daffy Duck and Wile E. Coyote if they are real. I’ll ask them sincerely and honestly; I’m fairly sure I won’t get an answer, but I’m willing to try. Would you be willing to do the same? Honestly, sincerely, ask God if He’s real, and listen for an answer. What can it hurt?”
As I said, it would do damage only to my perception of myself as a person more sane, I like to think, than not.
Let me know how it goes for you when, despite knowing what the outcome is going to be, you query Daffy Duck and Wile E. Coyote about their real existence, because whatever answer you get is precisely the answer I would get if I chose to squander my time and effort asking God if he really exists, to wit, utter silence. Your suggestion strikes me as being ludicrous to the point of making you sound mentally unbalanced. While we’re at it, Stef, I’m not going to be organizing any safaris to hunt unicorns, basilisks, gryphons, dragons, centaurs, rocs, or leprechauns any time soon, either. I’ll leave that to all you True Believers who seem determined to ascribe palpable reality to the irrefutably imaginary.
So here’s a task for you, Stef — go sky-diving from 5,000 feet without a parachute, and pray to God to preserve you from all harm when you smash into the earth. Are you willing to do that? Or does your faith in goofy stuff go only so far?
Sorry to butt in….You believe in Multiverse?????? String theory???? Colliding membranes and these sorts of stuff? These are theorized by scientist that even science has not proven or accepted it. It will remain a CONCEPT ( a faulty concept BTW). They will never ever prove the origin of everything. Is it easier to believe these than to accept the creation’s point of view? There billions of galaxies out there our technology could not even find one planet that is like ours. Now you want a proof of God.
“So here’s a task for you, Stef — go sky-diving from 5,000 feet without a parachute, and pray to God to preserve you from all harm when you smash into the earth. Are you willing to do that? Or does your faith in goofy stuff go only so far?”
— My answer to this that your sense of right or wrong is imbalanced. Your logic is way out there. This kind of flow of thought is too familiar. Did Satan tell Jesus to jump from the top of the temple? I thought so.
As usual, your comments are enclosed in quotes; mine are not.
“Sorry to butt in….You believe in Multiverse?????? String theory???? Colliding membranes and these sorts of stuff? These are theorized by scientist that even science has not proven or accepted it. It will remain a CONCEPT ( a faulty concept BTW).”
First, I never said that I accepted the idea of a multiverse, or string theory; I only suggested that those who speculate about such matters think these things are possibilities, and, barring evidence to the contrary, that I, too, accept that they are possibilities.
Second, how do you know these concepts are faulty, RoyJover? I rather doubt that you have the mathematical smarts to follow the reasoning that supports these speculations. The scientists who have put these ideas forward will be the first to abandon them when evidence that they are faulty comes to light. You’re sounding a bit like the learned Catholics of Galileo’s day who balked at accepting his observation that the earth orbits the sun rather than the other way around. But if the mark of the rational person is to change his/her views as new evidence becomes available, it is the mark of the religious ideologue to hold opinions that are impervious to facts and logic alike. Tell you what, if one day the heavens open and a golden staircase unfurls, down which descends Jesus Christ attended by choirs of cherubim, seraphim, thrones, powers, and the other mythological denizens of a mythological heaven, I will be the first to admit I was wrong. After, of course, having assured myself that what I was seeing didn’t come out of the Pixar or Dreamworks studios.
“They will never ever prove the origin of everything. Is it easier to believe these than to accept the creation’s point of view? There billions of galaxies out there our technology could not even find one planet that is like ours.”
Yet. Of course, planets have been detected circling distant stars, but our technology, at present, is not sufficient to detect any planets roughly the size and mass of the earth. Stay tuned, though.
“Now you want a proof of God.”
Nope. I don’t want proof of God, RoyJover. What I want is for those who insist on believing in the real existence of God to account for the multiple illogicalities and inconsistancies that such a belief entails. So far no one, least of all you, or Stef Coulombe, or Carl Dick, or Perry Marshall, has risen to the challenge.
It has been amusing to watch Stef Coulombe’s convoluted reasoning about the existence of evil. He seems to be arguing that since evil is simply the absence of good, it doesn’t exist in its own right. He is wrong on two counts, the first one being that evil is not a material substance but a quality that we humans assign to various events and circumstances, depending, it seems, on how harmful, either physically or psychologically, those events/circumstances are perceived to be to humankind. According to you True Believers, our sense of what is evil and what is not derives from God, but if that is so, one has to explain how it is that at different times and in different places, different events/circumstances have been labeled “evil.” The second count of Stef’s errancy is this: if evil is the absence of good, and if God is absolutely good and also omnipresent, as is usually claimed, then there is really no place from which good can be absent. Stef Coulombe, far from solving the problem of the presence of evil in a frame of existence created and ruled over by an all-good, all-powerful, ever-present deity, has made his position even more difficult to defend.
“‘So here’s a task for you, Stef — go sky-diving from 5,000 feet without a parachute, and pray to God to preserve you from all harm when you smash into the earth. Are you willing to do that? Or does your faith in goofy stuff go only so far?’
— My answer to this that your sense of right or wrong is imbalanced. Your logic is way out there.”
How so, RoyJover? How, exactly, is my sense of right or wrong “imbalanced?” How is my logic “way out there?” It’s not enough to make a bald assertion; you should also be able to adduce evidence, or develop a line of reasoning, that supports your assertion. This comment of yours reminds me of your equally bald assertion about the multiverse and string theory, to wit, “It will remain a CONCEPT ( a faulty concept BTW).” Well, I ask, “As evidenced by what?”
“This kind of flow of thought is too familiar. Did Satan tell Jesus to jump from the top of the temple? I thought so.”
How are these three statements of yours, one of them a question, even relevant to the suggestion I made to Stef Coulombe? After all, if I have faith in something, I have no problem behaving in ways that demonstrate that faith. For example, each morning when I awaken I have faith that when I swing my legs out of the bed, the floor will be waiting there to support my feet, and consequently I do not hesitate to swing my legs out of the bed. So I fail to see how my logic is “way out there” when I suggest that if Stef has faith that God can do all things, then Stef should be as willing to behave in ways that demonstrate that faith, as I am to demonstrate my faith that I won’t fall into an endless void when I get out of bed. To make my request less outrageous, I might have suggested that, should Stef contract a life-threatening illness or injury, he should refrain from seeking medical attention and rely on God, The Almighty, to handle the situation. Of course, that is what hard-core Christian Scientists, and members of certain other quasi-psychotic sects, do, and the result is almost invariably worsening of the illness/injury, followed by death. And when the decedent has been a child below the age of reason, whose parents have denied him/her medical care on the grounds that they had faith that God would fix things, some kind of court action also ensues, and the parents are punished. I don’t know Stef Coulombe personally, but I would be willing to bet you that when he gets sick, or when he injures himself, depending on the severity of the sickness or injury, he goes to a physician. If so, where’s his faith in God?
Conway Redding
Conway Redding does not exist.
I have decided to exercise the blind faith of which I’ve been accused, and put it towards something constructive: a object lesson in blind faith itself.
All the postings that are labelled as having been written by Conway Redding are clearly a prank by some college kids; no real person could be so arrogant and insolent. (Many other postings here are, indeed, insolent–including some of my own!– but the beauty of *blind* faith is that I don’t have to examine the evidence that carefully.)
Show me a picture of this fictional “Conway Redding” and I will examine it in photoshop and find some error or irregularity that “proves” the photo is a fake; of course, I could just as easily claim that the photo is simply of somebody else, a paid actor, perhaps.
Let me meet him in person, and I can still pretend he’s not real–I can use the “paid actor” argument again, or simply refuse to see him. If he hits me, I can still pretend that it was somebody else. Or, I can claim that his whole life, his whole being, is a fraud–after all, a psychologist who “suggests” that I jump out of an airplane without a parachute is obviously fake, or he would have encouraged most of his clients to commit suicide, right? (By the way, it doesn’t matter whether this fictional character ever actually claimed to *be* a psychologist; in my blind faith, I’m allowed to make assumptions based on the texts ascribed to him, without reading them that carefully. Anything goes, as long as it supports my blind faith.)
Driver’s license? ID? Government records? All falsified, to be sure. Blind faith is remarkably like paranoid conspiracy theory, when you think about it.
So, I believe that Conway Redding doesn’t exist. You know, I feel much better now. I don’t need to worry about his eternal soul, just as I don’t worry about Bugs Bunny going to hell–he seemed to enjoy it in the last cartoon I watched.
I don’t need to reply to his comments, anymore, either, because he doesn’t exist–it’s like disagreeing with Lord Voldemort about his morality and personal lifestyle choices.
Blind faith is loads of fun, and carries no consequences that I can see. (Obviously, I can’t see the consequences, because I don’t believe they exist!)
Let’s recap: I have reasons for believing in God; personal experiences, testimony from people I trust, my ability to reason (question it if you like)–it all points to the God of the Bible being real, and being Who He says He is. My faith in God is not blind. I will examine other arguments, and consider them; at the end of the day, I still believe in God. It is FAITH.
My faith in the non-existence of Conway Redding, however, is blind. I have decided that he doesn’t exist, and view all possible “evidence” in a prejudiced, predisposed light. You could be the best lawyer in the world, and convince every member of every jury, and I will still, stubbornly, cling to my blind faith.
In fact, every effort you make to convince me, I will simply twist and mis-interpret to support my blind faith. Teehee. This is actually quite fun.
Of course, I’m not cursing or insulting Bugs Bunny by saying that he doesn’t exist, so my comments about Conway Redding not existing aren’t insulting either, are they?
Wow. Blind faith is so much easier than real faith. ;p
(Now, the people pretending to be Conway Redding have actually brought up an interesting point, in God’s omni-presence being supposed to cancel out all evil everywhere. I’d be happy to continue this discussion with a real person, perhaps in a couple weeks, after our school drama is finished.)
Hi Mr. Redding,
You said in your post
“You’re sounding a bit like the learned Catholics of Galileo’s day who balked at accepting his observation that the earth orbits the sun rather than the other way around.”
Please read below the real story of what happened, which has come to light after so many centuries of misinformation by vested Protestant interests.
During Galileo’s time, the Jesuits had a highly respected group of astronomers and scientists in Rome. In addition, many notable scientists received encouragement and funding from the Church and from individual Church officials. Many of the scientific advances during this period were made either by clerics or as a result of Church funding.
Nicolaus Copernicus dedicated his most famous work, On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs, in which he gave an excellent account of heliocentricity, to Pope Paul III. Copernicus entrusted this work to Andreas Osiander, a Lutheran clergyman who knew that Protestant reaction to it would be negative, since Martin Luther seemed to have condemned the new theory, and, as a result, the book would be condemned. Osiander wrote a preface to the book, in which heliocentrism was presented only as a theory that would account for the movements of the planets more simply than geocentrism did—something Copernicus did not intend.
Ten years prior to Galileo, Johannes Kepler
published a heliocentric work that expanded on Copernicus’ work. As a result, Kepler also found opposition among his fellow Protestants for his heliocentric views and found a welcome reception among some Jesuits who were known for their scientific achievements.
Anti-Catholics often cite the Galileo case as an example of the Church refusing to abandon outdated or incorrect teaching, and clinging to a “tradition.” They fail to realize that the judges who presided over Galileo’s case were not the only people who held to a geocentric view of the universe. It was the received view among scientists at the time.
Centuries earlier, Aristotle had refuted heliocentricity, and by Galileo’s time, nearly every major thinker subscribed to a geocentric view. Copernicus refrained from publishing his heliocentric theory for some time, not out of fear of censure from the Church, but out of fear of ridicule from his colleagues.
Many people wrongly believe Galileo proved heliocentricity. He could not answer the strongest argument against it, which had been made nearly two thousand years earlier by Aristotle: If heliocentrism were true, then there would be observable parallax shifts in the stars’ positions as the earth moved in its orbit around the sun. However, given the technology of Galileo’s time, no such shifts in their positions could be observed. It would require more sensitive measuring equipment than was available in Galileo’s day to document the existence of these shifts, given the stars’ great distance. Until then, the available evidence suggested that the stars were fixed in their positions relative to the earth, and, thus, that the earth and the stars were not moving in space—only the sun, moon, and planets were.
Thus Galileo did not prove the theory by the Aristotelian standards of science in his day. In his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina and other documents, Galileo claimed that the Copernican theory had the “sensible demonstrations” needed according to Aristotelian science, but most knew that such demonstrations were not yet forthcoming. Most astronomers in that day were not convinced of the great distance of the stars that the Copernican theory required to account for the absence of observable parallax shifts. This is one of the main reasons why the respected astronomer Tycho Brahe refused to adopt Copernicus fully.
Galileo could have safely proposed heliocentricity as a theory or a method to more simply account for the planets’ motions. His problem arose when he stopped proposing it as a scientific theory and began proclaiming it as truth, though there was no conclusive proof of it at the time. Even so, Galileo would not have been in so much trouble if he had chosen to stay within the realm of science and out of the realm of theology. But, despite his friends’ warnings, he insisted on moving the debate onto theological grounds.
In 1614, Galileo felt compelled to answer the charge that this “new science” was contrary to certain Scripture passages. His opponents pointed to Bible passages with statements like, “And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed . . .” (Josh. 10:13). This is not an isolated occurrence. Psalms 93 and 104 and Ecclesiastes 1:5 also speak of celestial motion and terrestrial stability. A literalistic reading of these passages would have to be abandoned if the heliocentric theory were adopted. Yet this should not have posed a problem. As Augustine put it, “One does not read in the Gospel that the Lord said: ‘I will send you the Paraclete who will teach you about the course of the sun and moon.’ For he willed to make them Christians, not mathematicians.” Following Augustine’s example, Galileo urged caution in not interpreting these biblical statements too literally.
Unfortunately, throughout Church history there have been those who insist on reading the Bible in a more literal sense than it was intended. They fail to appreciate, for example, instances in which Scripture uses what is called “phenomenological” language—that is, the language of appearances. Just as we today speak of the sun rising and setting to cause day and night, rather than the earth turning, so did the ancients. From an earthbound perspective, the sun does appear to rise and appear to set, and the earth appears to be immobile. When we describe these things according to their appearances, we are using phenomenological language.
The phenomenological language concerning the motion of the heavens and the non-motion of the earth is obvious to us today, but was less so in previous centuries. Scripture scholars of the past were willing to consider whether particular statements were to be taken literally or phenomenologically, but they did not like being told by a non-Scripture scholar, such as Galileo, that the words of the sacred page must be taken in a particular sense.
During this period, personal interpretation of Scripture was a sensitive subject. In the early 1600s, the Church had just been through the Reformation experience, and one of the chief quarrels with Protestants was over individual interpretation of the Bible.
Theologians were not prepared to entertain the heliocentric theory based on a layman’s interpretation. Yet Galileo insisted on moving the debate into a theological realm. There is little question that if Galileo had kept the discussion within the accepted boundaries of astronomy (i.e., predicting planetary motions) and had not claimed physical truth for the heliocentric theory, the issue would not have escalated to the point it did. After all, he had not proved the new theory beyond reasonable doubt.
Galileo “Confronts” Rome
Galileo came to Rome to see Pope Paul V (1605-1621). The pope, weary of controversy, turned the matter over to the Holy Office, which issued a condemnation of Galileo’s theory in 1616. Things returned to relative quiet for a time, until Galileo forced another showdown.
At Galileo’s request, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, a Jesuit—one of the most important Catholic theologians of the day—issued a certificate that, although it forbade Galileo to hold or defend the heliocentric theory, did not prevent him from conjecturing it. When Galileo met with the new pope, Urban VIII, in 1623, he received permission from his longtime friend to write a work on heliocentrism, but the new pontiff cautioned him not to advocate the new position, only to present arguments for and against it. When Galileo wrote the Dialogue on the Two World Systems, he used an argument the pope had offered, and placed it in the mouth of his character Simplicio. Galileo, perhaps inadvertently, made fun of the pope, a result that could only have disastrous consequences. Urban felt mocked and could not believe how his friend could disgrace him publicly. Galileo had mocked the very person he needed as a benefactor. He also alienated his long-time supporters, the Jesuits, with attacks on one of their astronomers. The result was the infamous trial, which is still heralded as the final separation of science and religion.
Tortured for His Beliefs?
In the end, Galileo recanted his heliocentric teachings, but it was not—as is commonly supposed—under torture nor after a harsh imprison- ment. Galileo was, in fact, treated surprisingly well.
As historian Giorgio de Santillana, who is not overly fond of the Catholic Church, noted, “We must, if anything, admire the cautiousness and legal scruples of the Roman authorities.” Galileo was offered every convenience possible to make his imprisonment in his home bearable.
Galileo’s friend Nicolini, Tuscan ambassador to the Vatican, sent regular reports to the court regarding affairs in Rome. Many of his letters dealt with the ongoing controversy surrounding Galileo.
Nicolini revealed the circumstances surrounding Galileo’s “imprisonment” when he reported to the Tuscan king: “The pope told me that he had shown Galileo a favor never accorded to another” (letter dated Feb. 13, 1633); ” . . . he has a servant and every convenience” (letter, April 16); and “[i]n regard to the person of Galileo, he ought to be imprisoned for some time because he disobeyed the orders of 1616, but the pope says that after the publication of the sentence he will consider with me as to what can be done to afflict him as little as possible” (letter, June 18).
Had Galileo been tortured, Nicolini would have reported it to his king. While instruments of torture may have been present during Galileo’s recantation (this was the custom of the legal system in Europe at that time), they definitely were not used.
The records demonstrate that Galileo could not be tortured because of regulations laid down in The Directory for Inquisitors (Nicholas Eymeric, 1595). This was the official guide of the Holy Office, the Church office charged with dealing with such matters, and was followed to the letter.
As noted scientist and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead remarked, in an age that saw a large number of “witches” subjected to torture and execution by Protestants in New England, “the worst that happened to the men of science was that Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof.” Even so, the Catholic Church today acknowledges that Galileo’s condemnation was wrong. The Vatican has even issued two stamps of Galileo as an expression of regret for his mistreatment.
Infallibility
Although three of the ten cardinals who judged Galileo refused to sign the verdict, his works were eventually condemned. Anti-Catholics often assert that his conviction and later rehabilitation somehow disproves the doctrine of papal infallibility, but this is not the case, for the pope never tried to make an infallible ruling concerning Galileo’s views.
The Church has never claimed ordinary tribunals, such as the one that judged Galileo, to be infallible. Church tribunals have disciplinary and juridical authority only; neither they nor their decisions are infallible.
No ecumenical council met concerning Galileo, and the pope was not at the center of the discussions, which were handled by the Holy Office. When the Holy Office finished its work, Urban VIII ratified its verdict, but did not attempt to engage infallibility.
Three conditions must be met for a pope to exercise the charism of infallibility: (1) he must speak in his official capacity as the successor of Peter; (2) he must speak on a matter of faith or morals; and (3) he must solemnly define the doctrine as one that must be held by all the faithful.
In Galileo’s case, the second and third conditions were not present, and possibly not even the first. Catholic theology has never claimed that a mere papal ratification of a tribunal decree is an exercise of infallibility. It is a straw man argument to represent the Catholic Church as having infallibly defined a scientific theory that turned out to be false. The strongest claim that can be made is that the Church of Galileo’s day issued a non-infallible disciplinary ruling concerning a scientist who was advocating a new and still-unproved theory and demanding that the Church change its understanding of Scripture to fit his.
It is a good thing that the Church did not rush to embrace Galileo’s views, because it turned out that his ideas were not entirely correct, either. Galileo believed that the sun was not just the fixed center of the solar system but the fixed center of the universe. We now know that the sun is not the center of the universe and that it does move—it simply orbits the center of the galaxy rather than the earth.
As more recent science has shown, both Galileo and his opponents were partly right and partly wrong. Galileo was right in asserting the mobility of the earth and wrong in asserting the immobility of the sun. His opponents were right in asserting the mobility of the sun and wrong in asserting the immobility of the earth.
Had the Catholic Church rushed to endorse Galileo’s views—and there were many in the Church who were quite favorable to them—the Church would have embraced what modern science has disproved.
I’m using my usual format for answering postings on this site, Stef: Your comments I’ve enclosed in quotation marks, and mine I have not enclosed in quotation marks.
“Sorry to interrupt your private feud (though I guess you didn’t notice the last time, either), but what more horrible thing can you say about someone/thing than that he/it does not exist?”
Oh, I don’t know, Steff. But how about, “He/it exists but is unspeakably evil.” Seems to me that that, for horribleness, trumps saying “He/it doesn’t exist.”
“Sounds like a curse to me.”
Sorry, Stef, but you can’t curse someone/thing that doesn’t exist, except in a metaphorical sense. So when I say God has no real existence, that is less a curse than a statement of what I take to be fact.
“By the way, “in my universe”… doesn’t that sound a little bit hollow to you? Are you alone in your universe? Do you assume that we each live in our own universe, and that whichever beliefs we choose to endorse are real to us and therefore real in our own universes?”
You’re really grasping at straws here, Stef, in an attempt, I presume, to convince a reader that my position on the real existence of a deity is untenable. The line of reasoning would be, I suppose, that a thoroughgoing solipsism is untenable, and that a thoroughgoing solipsist is likely to hold other untenable beliefs. But anyone with a dram of understanding of the use of figurative language would have recognized that the turn of phrase, “in my universe,” is equivalent to “as I see it,” or “in my opinion,” and does not permit the reasonable inference that I hold a solipsistic point of view.
“If that’s the case, these web comments are actually your own sub-conscious speaking to you–SO much to say on that–”
Oh, and are you now an authority on my subconscious, Stef? Hmmm… Haven’t you pulled this telepath/empath stuff before, as when you pretended to know what I must know deep down in my heart? This pretense is both arrogant and presumptuous.
“or you share the universe with the rest of us, and that means there is one universe”
Evidently you’re unfamiliar with the modern cosmological concept of “multiverses.” But no matter.
“(a bit redundant to point out, what with “uni-” in the word), one reality, one truth”
Oh come on Stef, think, if think indeed you can, which I’m beginning to doubt. There may indeed be only one objective reality, but there are as many subjective realities as there are perceivers of that one objective reality, as is easily demonstrated any time two people look at the same thing/event and report perceiving something different. This plays out in courtrooms every day that court is in session, and is one of the reasons eyewitness reports have proven to be so unreliable and are so assiduously deconstructed by prosecutors and defense attorneys alike.
“… and it comes down to this: A) you’re right, there is no God; you gain nothing, I lose nothing; or B) you’re wrong, there IS a God; I gain everything… you lose everything.”
Thank you, Blaise Pascal, from whom you cribbed this specious argument, without, I note, giving him credit. But if God has no real existence, and I do think the available evidence points in that direction, then I have been spared wasting my time on meaningless rituals, prayers, worshippings, and adorations, time that I could have put to better use, and you have not been thus spared. On the other hand, if God has a real existence, what’s to assure you that when I stand before this God, he won’t say, “Hey, with what I gave you to work with in the way of evidence, I can understand why you didn’t believe I existed.”? And what’s to assure you that when you stand before him, he won’t say, “You know, I gave you a brain with which to reason, and I gave you the tools of logic and observation to use in support of your ability to reason, yet you chose not to use any of these gifts. I don’t want your kind in my Heaven.”? Just asking, Stef.
“Please, think again. As with most Christians, I don’t believe I’m always 100% right in everything, but this I know for sure: when I die, my soul is safe; Jesus loves you, despite your doubt; and, whether you believe in them or not, both God and the devil believe in *you*.”
My mind boggles trying to grasp what you can possibly mean when you say that imaginary beings believe in me. What would you make of it if I told you that whether or not you believe in their real existence, Daffy Duck and Wile E. Coyote believe in *you*? Such a statement would be arrant nonsense, and so is yours, Stef.
“God wants to save your soul, the devil wants to destroy it, and only you get to choose which of them will succeed. If you’re almost 75, then you may not have much time left. Don’t be like the captain of the Titannic,”
That’s “Titanic,” Stef. The “Titannic” was another ship, made entirely of the yellowish or brownish bitter-tasting complex phenolic substance present in tea, some barks, grapes, etc.
“stubbornly certain that his ship won’t sink… and find out too late that you were wrong.
One more thing: if you’re concerned with people saying “I told you so” then you don’t need to tell us if you change your mind. What does it hurt, really, to just ask God, with an open heart, if He exists?”
All it would hurt would be my belief that, to date, I have been relatively free of psychosis. I gave up talking to, or asking questions of, imaginary playmates, a long, long time ago, and see no reason to revive that practice now.
“If you like, I will ask Daffy Duck and Wile E. Coyote if they are real. I’ll ask them sincerely and honestly; I’m fairly sure I won’t get an answer, but I’m willing to try. Would you be willing to do the same? Honestly, sincerely, ask God if He’s real, and listen for an answer. What can it hurt?”
As I said, it would do damage only to my perception of myself as a person more sane, I like to think, than not.
Let me know how it goes for you when, despite knowing what the outcome is going to be, you query Daffy Duck and Wile E. Coyote about their real existence, because whatever answer you get is precisely the answer I would get if I chose to squander my time asking God if he really exists, to wit, utter silence. Your suggestion strikes me as being ludicrous to the point of making you sound mentally unbalanced. While we’re at it, Stef, I’m not going to be organizing any safaris to hunt unicorns, basilisks, gryphons, dragons, centaurs, rocs, or leprechauns any time soon, either. I’ll leave that to all you True Believers who seem determined to ascribe palpable reality to the irrefutably imaginary.
So here’s a task for you, Stef — go sky-diving from 5,000 feet without a parachute, and pray to God to preserve you from all harm when you smash into the ground. Are you willing to do that? Or does your faith go only so far?
Dear brother, I’m really sorry for the depth of ignorance you’re in. If you are really a knowledge seeker, please read Dr.Michael Delton’s Nature’s Destiny, and Evolution, A Theory in Crisis. There you will get the Creator’s Wisdom. I believe that the author of this article (Lie #7: ‘If God was really powerful and good, he wouldn’t allow so much evil and suffering to go on) will not tempt God the Almighty because he is wise and knows his Heavenly Father very well. I advise you to try to be wise too, by seeking your Heavenly Father if you are one of the lost sheep. If not, I’m really sorry for your end will be eternal condemnation. If you doubt that there is Hell, please read Dr.Rawlings To Hell and Back documentary stories at his site. So please try to be a knowledge seeker, be multi-visionary not a cart-horse. I pray that God help you, my brother.
A man went to a barbershop to have his hair cut and
his beard trimmed.As the barber began to work, they began to have a good conversation. They talked about so many things and various subjects. When they eventually touched on the subject of God, the barber said: “I don’t believe that God exists.”
“Why do you say that?” asked the customer.
“Well, you just have to go out in the street to
realize that God doesn’t exist. Tell me, if God exists, would there be so many sick people?
Would there be abandoned children? If God existed, there would be neither suffering nor pain. I can’t imagine a loving God who would allow all of these things.”
The customer thought for a moment, but didn’t respond because he didn’t want to start an argument.
The barber finished his job and the customer left
the shop. Just after he left the barbershop, he saw a man in the street withlong, stringy,dirty hair and an untrimmed beard. He looked dirty and unkempt.
The customer turned back and entered the barber shop
again and he said to the barber: “You know what? Barbers do not exist.”
“How can you say that?” asked the surprised barber.
“I am here, and I am a barber. And I just worked on you!”
“No!” the customer exclaimed. “Barbers don’t exist
because if they did,there would be no people with dirty long hair and untrimmed beards,like that man outside.”
“Ah, but barbers DO exist! ” answered the barber.
“What happens, is, people do not come to me.”
“Exactly!”- affirmed the customer. “That’s the
point! God, too, DOES exist! What happens, is, people don’t go to Him and do not look for Him.
That’s why there’s so much pain and suffering in the world.”
DID YOU KNOW THESE FACTS?
Death is certain but the Bible speaks about untimely death!
Make a personal reflection about this…..
Very interesting, read until the end…..
It is written in the Bible (Galatians 6:7):
“Be not deceived; God is not mocked:for whatsoever a man sow, that shall he also reap.
Here are some men and women who mocked God :
Here we go…..
John Lennon (Singer):Some years before, during his interview with an American Magazine, he said:
“Christianity will end, it will disappear. I do not have to argue about that. I am certain.
Jesus was ok, but his subjects were too simple, today we are more famous than Him” (1966).
Lennon, after saying that the Beatles were more famous than Jesus Christ, was shot six times.
Tancredo Neves (President of Brazil ):During the Presidential campaign, he said if he got 500,000 votes from his party, not even God would remove him from Presidency.Sure he got the votes, but he got sick a day before being made President, then he died.
Cazuza (Bi-sexual Brazilian composer, singer and poet):During A show in Canecio ( Rio de Janeiro ),
while smoking his cigarette, he puffed out some smoke into the air and said:”God, that’s for you.”
He died at the age of 32 of LUNG CANCER in a horrible manner.
The man who built the Titanic
After the construction of Titanic, a reporter asked him how safe the Titanic would be. With an ironic tone he said: “Not even God can sink it”
The result: I think you all know what happened to the Titanic
Marilyn Monroe (Actress):She was visited by Billy Graham during a presentation of a show.
He said the Spirit of God had sent him to preach to her.After hearing what the Preacher had to say, she said: “I don’t need your Jesus”.
A week later, she was found dead in her apartment
Bon Scott (Singer):The ex-vocalist of the AC/DC. On one of his 1979 songs he sang:”Don’t stop me; I’m going down all the way, down the highway to hell”.
On the 19th of February 1980 , Bon Scott was found dead, he had been choked by his own vomit.
Campinas (IN 2005):In Campinas , Brazil a group of friends, drunk, went to pick up a friend…..
The mother accompanied her to the car and was so worried about the drunkenness of her friends and she said to the daughter holding her hand, who was already seated in the car:My Daughter, Go With God And May He Protect You.” She responded: “Only If He (God) Travels In The Trunk, Cause Inside Here…..It’s Already Full ” Hours later, news came by that they had been involved in a fatal accident, everyone had died, the car could not be recognized what type of car it had been, but surprisingly, the trunk was intact.The police said there was no way the trunk could have remained intact. To their surprise, inside the trunk was a crate of eggs, none was broken
Christine Hewitt (Jamaican Journalist and entertainer)said the Bible (Word of God) was the worst book ever written.In June 2006 she was found burnt beyond recognition in her motor vehicle. Many more important people have forgotten that there is no other name that was given so much authority as the name of Jesus. Many have died, but only Jesus died and rose again, and he is still alive..
Leoul, that story about the barber is a really good one. I think I’ll use that one myself, in the future.
Just to give credit where due: Perry Marshall is the author of the site/article; I only make comments as I feel led; and, God Himself is, of course, the source of any/all Truth in our words. ;p
God bless, eh!
Dear Leoul,
I believe in God, and His good works. But I am not convinced of the arguments you have made to prove the existence of God.
In your barbershop parable, the barber is not responsible for making people’s hair long and dirty and giving them untrimmed beards; but God is responsible for everything- including the Devil,and evil and dirty hair, and hair filled with lice, and all the other sufferings in the world. So you cannot compare God’s position with the Barber’s in this context.
Afterwards, you give a long list of people who died – mostly untimely deaths. Everybody – good as well as evil people die of some reason- cancer, heart attacks, accident, explosion, drowning, etc. Also irrespective of whether they are good or evil some people have untimely deaths. But can you say that all people who have untimely and cruel and gory deaths are evil? If that is true where will you place Jesus Christ who had an untimely gory cruel death at the age of 33?
Tony, since when is “God responsible for everything”? Obviously, you choose not to believe what God says about the devil, so you are making a choice; freedom of choice means that God can NOT be held responsible for everything. Are you responsible for the choices your children make? You can be a good, loving parent, and still see your children make bad choices. The devil himself CHOSE to rebel against God. How is that God’s fault?
Incidentally, the list of people who died is clearly in reference to Conway Redding’s suggestion (for me) to jump out of an airplane. The Bible says “God is not mocked”. The people who challenged God–who mocked Him– are examples. Yes, everybody dies; however, it is particularly foolish to mock God, and there are consequences. Leoul did NOT say that “all people who have untimely deaths are evil”.
“Tony, since when is “God responsible for everything”?
From the time He started creating.
“Obviously, you choose not to believe what God says about the devil, so you are making a choice; freedom of choice means that God can NOT be held responsible for everything. Are you responsible for the choices your children make? You can be a good, loving parent, and still see your children make bad choices. The devil himself CHOSE to rebel against God. How is that God’s fault?”
Will a good loving parent leave his child on the ledge of a window of a high rise building, and give him freedom of choice to jump into the building or jump out of the window?
“Incidentally, the list of people who died is clearly in reference to Conway Redding’s suggestion (for me) to jump out of an airplane. The Bible says “God is not mocked”.
How can my own creation mock me, if I do not teach it how I can be mocked?
“The people who challenged God–who mocked Him– are examples. Yes, everybody dies; however, it is particularly foolish to mock God, and there are consequences. Leoul did NOT say that “all people who have untimely deaths are evil”.
If not, what was he trying to infer from the examples?
Stef: ““Tony, since when is “God responsible for everything”?”
Tony: “From the time He started creating.”
Stef: Ah ha ha, good one, you really crack me up… oh, wait, you were serious.
Forgive the commoness, but: from the time you first slept with your wife, you are responsible for everything your children do and say, and by extension, everything their children will ever do and say.
I hope your great-grandkids never break the law, ’cause you’ll end up in jail.
I start to suspect that “Tony Francis”, like the late Conway Redding (“late” because he no longer exists, if I apply his own logic to his own self), is really just a group of University kids blogging for laughs. In Conway’s case, I suspect that because his answers don’t match his supposed profession; in Tony’s case, because of the wide-ranging inconsistency in his answers. First, “God is too amazing to comprehend”, then “God would be bored without sin”; first, “God is good and loving and forgiving”, then “God is petty and not only did He create evil, but He also *wanted* Adam to sin and fall; first, “Really, I’m searching for truth, please help me” and then this nonsense.
Now, I’m trying to be offensive, because you, sir, are being offensive to my God. I hope you’re getting a good laugh out of all this, but one day you’ll have to pay for it.
– – – – – –
Stef: ““The people who challenged God–who mocked Him– are examples. Yes, everybody dies; however, it is particularly foolish to mock God, and there are consequences. Leoul did NOT say that “all people who have untimely deaths are evil”.”
Tony: “If not, what was he trying to infer from the examples?”
Stef: …?! Maybe that “…it is particularly foolish to mock God, and there are consequences.” Holy stink, man, you remind me of my students:
“Teacher, I don’t understand.”
“Read the instructions.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Read the instructions.”
“But I don’t know how to answer the question…”
“Read the *£$*%*ing instructions!”
“Oh, ok. Now I understand. Thank you, teacher!”
The only difference is that you are still stuck somewhere in the middle; even my “least cooperative” students eventually get to the part where they quit whining and try following the directions!
I’m using my usual format for answering postings on this site, Stef: Your comments I’ve enclosed in quotation marks, and mine I have not enclosed in quotation marks.
“Sorry to interrupt your private feud (though I guess you didn’t notice the last time, either), but what more horrible thing can you say about someone/thing than that he/it does not exist?”
Oh, I dont know, Steff. But how about, “He/it exists but is unspeakably evil.” Seems to me that that, for horribleness, trumps saying “He/it doesn’t exist.”
“Sounds like a curse to me.”
Sorry, Stef, but you can’t curse someone/thing that doesn’t exist, except in a metaphorical sense. So when I say God has no real existence, that is less a curse than a statement of what I take to be fact.
“By the way, “in my universe”… doesn’t that sound a little bit hollow to you? Are you alone in your universe? Do you assume that we each live in our own universe, and that whichever beliefs we choose to endorse are real to us and therefore real in our own universes?”
You’re really grasping at straws here, Stef, in an attempt, I presume, to convince a reader that my position on the real existence of a deity is untenable. The line of reasoning would be, I suppose, that a thoroughgoing solipsism is untenable, and that a thoroughgoing solipsist is likely to hold other untenable beliefs. But anyone with a dram of understanding of the use of figurative language would have recognized that the turn of phrase, “in my universe,” is equivalent to “as I see it,” or “in my opinion,” and does not permit the reasonable inference that I hold a solipsistic point of view.
“If that’s the case, these web comments are actually your own sub-conscious speaking to you–SO much to say on that–”
Oh, and are you now an authority on my subconscious, Stef? Hmmm… Haven’t you pulled this telepath/empath stuff before, as when you pretended to know what I must know deep down in my heart? This pretense is both arrogant and presumptuous.
“or you share the universe with the rest of us, and that means there is one universe”
Evidently you’re unfamiliar with the modern cosmological concept of “multiverses.” But no matter.
“(a bit redundant to point out, what with “uni-” in the word), one reality, one truth”
Oh come on Stef, think, if think indeed you can, which I’m beginning to doubt. There may indeed be only one objective reality, but there are as many subjective realities as there are perceivers of that one objective reality, as is easily demonstrated any time two people look at the same thing/event and report perceiving something different. This plays out in courtrooms every day that court is in session, and is one of the reasons eyewitness reports have proven to be so unreliable and are so assiduously deconstructed by prosecutors and defense attorneys alike.
“… and it comes down to this: A) you’re right, there is no God; you gain nothing, I lose nothing; or B) you’re wrong, there IS a God; I gain everything… you lose everything.”
Thank you, Blaise Pascal, from whom you cribbed this specious argument, without, I note, giving him credit. But if God has no real existence, and I do think the available evidence points in that direction, then I have been spared wasting my time on meaningless rituals, prayers, worshippings, and adorations, time that I could have put to better use, and you have not been thus spared. On the other hand, if God has a real existence, what’s to assure you that when I stand before this God, he won’t say, “Hey, with what I gave you to work with in the way of evidence, I can understand why you didn’t believe I existed.”? And what’s to assure you that when you stand before him, he won’t say, “You know, I gave you a brain with which to reason, and I gave you the tools of logic and observation to use in support of your ability to reason, yet you chose not to use any of these gifts. I don’t want your kind in my Heaven.”? Just asking, Stef.
“Please, think again. As with most Christians, I don’t believe I’m always 100% right in everything, but this I know for sure: when I die, my soul is safe; Jesus loves you, despite your doubt; and, whether you believe in them or not, both God and the devil believe in *you*.”
My mind boggles trying to grasp what you can possibly mean when you say that imaginary beings believe in me. What would you make of it if I told you that whether or not you believe in their real existence, Daffy Duck and Wile E. Coyote believe in *you*? Such a statement would be arrant nonsense, and so is yours, Stef.
“God wants to save your soul, the devil wants to destroy it, and only you get to choose which of them will succeed. If you’re almost 75, then you may not have much time left. Don’t be like the captain of the Titannic,”
That’s “Titanic,” Stef. The “Titannic” was another ship, made entirely of the yellowish or brownish bitter-tasting complex phenolic substance present in tea, some barks, grapes, etc.
“stubbornly certain that his ship won’t sink… and find out too late that you were wrong.
One more thing: if you’re concerned with people saying “I told you so” then you don’t need to tell us if you change your mind. What does it hurt, really, to just ask God, with an open heart, if He exists?”
All it would hurt would be my belief that, to date, I have been relatively free of psychosis. I gave up talking to, or asking questions of, imaginary playmates, a long, long time ago, and see no reason to revive that practice now.
“If you like, I will ask Daffy Duck and Wile E. Coyote if they are real. I’ll ask them sincerely and honestly; I’m fairly sure I won’t get an answer, but I’m willing to try. Would you be willing to do the same? Honestly, sincerely, ask God if He’s real, and listen for an answer. What can it hurt?”
As I said, it would do damage only to my perception of myself as a person more sane, I like to think, than not.
Let me know how it goes for you when, despite knowing what the outcome is going to be, you query Daffy Duck and Wile E. Coyote about their real existence, because whatever answer you get is precisely the answer I would get if I chose to squander my time asking God if he really exists, to wit, utter silence. Your suggestion strikes me as being ludicrous to the point of making you sound mentally unbalanced. While we’re at it, Stef, I’m not going to be organizing any safaris to hunt unicorns, basilisks, gryphons, dragons, centaurs, rocs, or leprechauns any time soon, either. I’ll leave that to all you True Believers who seem determined to ascribe palpable reality to the irrefutably imaginary.
So here’s a task for you, Stef — go sky-diving from 5,000 feet without a parachute, and pray to God to preserve you from all harm when you smash into the ground. Are you willing to do that? Or does your faith go only so far?
Ha, you caught my one typo. Good job! (The wry smile with which this is written is being described only for the purpose of conveying my answer to most of your previous response: it seems my sense of humour did not communicate itself clearly to you, and so I apologize for the misunderstanding.)
I still think “you don’t exist” is the worst insult, and thus curse, but we don’t need to agree on everything. As to the “multi-verse”… yeah, it’s a fun concept, but not a very reliable one. Too much relativism and there is no basis for morality at all, and therefore no reason not to start killing everybody just because you feel like it–and also no basis at all for the concept of “sanity”.
If this life is all there is, then time is rather meaningless; you can’t “waste” something that has no lasting value. The only way you can “waste” time is by not putting it to “eternal” use; otherwise, in 200, 2000, or 20,000 years, who is really going to care what you spent your time on? An effort at understanding an eternal Creator is about the only intelligent way to spend what time we have, and if He doesn’t exist, then your life couldn’t have meant anything anyway.
By the way, my mind “boggles” that you assume that, just because *you* think God is imaginary, He really is. I could pretend that you were imaginary, but it wouldn’t make you stop existing (even with all that subjective reality talk, it wouldn’t stand up in court–other people can see that you exist, even if I refuse to).
Sorry to Pascal; I had no intention to steal his words, I simply didn’t realize where they were from. Oh, and on the Betazoid complex–I make assumptions on your thoughts and sub-conscious based on what I know of my own. Sorry, I thought that was fairly normal; at least, to date, you’re the only one that has ever take such insolent exception to it. I’ll try not to offend again. ;p
As to the host of imaginary friends we seem to be accumulating… on one hand, you talk of subjective reality, and on the other, you mock any reality different from your own. Many things were believed to be imaginary by many people (like, um, atoms, and, er, germs, and even black holes and other universes…); some people still don’t believe that living near high-intensity power lines can cause cancer. Heck, some people still refuse to believe that smoking causes cancer. Just because *you* don’t believe in something doesn’t mean it’s not real. (Oh, sorry, I already said that.)
As to sky-diving without a parachute… well, it would be kind of stupid to “test” God, when He specifically says not to. (I know what you’re going to say–oh, stink, I did it again, sorry… anyway, *somebody* is going to say, “That’s mighty convenient, ‘God’ telling us not to test him…” Well, do you have kids? Grandkids? Did you let them jump off the couch to see if you would catch them?) However, if for some unforeseen reason I should find myself at 5,000 feet, without a parachute, you can be certain I’ll be praying, and either God will “catch” me, or He won’t–instead, He’ll take me home. Either way, I win. ;p
Now, I still notice in other comments that you’re hung up on the crucifixion as needlessly cruel. I’ve said it in other places… but here it is again: if the crucifixion were painless, it would be a “cop out”; if it were some kind of mental torture, instead of bloodily physical, then people would say “but He didn’t have to suffer physically, so He doesn’t understand my pain”. Do you second-guess *everyone* with such animosity? I don’t know if you like Da Vinci, but do you accuse him of not finding a prettier model for the Mona Lisa? What about Whistler’s mother–couldn’t he have made her more attractive? And hey, while we’re at it, let’s redesign the automobile, because all those “experts” out there don’t know what they’re doing. If God exists, then He probably knows what He’s doing better than you do; if He doesn’t exist, then why keep obsessing over what He “did”? If you’re trying to prove that our belief in Him is irrational because you don’t understand why He did what He did, then you’re kind of like the English-speaking janitor complaining about the Latin professor writing “gibberish” on the blackboard.
You don’t understand our God; you don’t want to. I get you. Will you say that “understanding” is irrelevant, because He doesn’t exist? Yeah, try that one with a virus some time. It’s a good thing for all the “ignorant masses” that there have been doctors to find “non-existent” problems and cures.
(I notice that my comment to your other reply, up above, is finally “approved”. It was a bit kinder than this response; perhaps I have less patience today.)
Didn’t you say before that you are responsible when you have a wife? How can God say not to? It is you telling yourself not to. How can god do some things but not others and all of those things seem to be what you choose but not whoever else chooses?
God created Satan, hence he created evil. God created eve as the story goes he told her not to pick the apple. Hence he created a woman that picked an apple. He created the temptation in her mind. He created the brain to produce the temptation. He created all the planets. Come on. You can’t have God create some things and not others. It seems your God only creates what you believe he creates but not what other believe he creates. Does this make you a God?
“God created Satan, hence he created evil.”
Again with this argument. Look, as long as you believe this, then no other argument is going to matter. You hate God, you blame God, ok, fine, I understand you. Still, for your own sake, think it through: what if you’re wrong?
God didn’t create evil, anymore than He created darkness, because, well, darkness doesn’t exist. At the risk of sounding like a broken record (and I’m sure Tony will comment on this), before there was light, there was no absence of light; after God created light, well, there was light, and there was “absence of light” which for the sake of convenience we’ll call “darkness”. So, did God create darkness? Um, no. It is simply a definition we give to a condition where something that God *did* create is absent.
Where God is, where His love is, there can be no evil. When men harden their hearts, and remove God from their lives… there will be evil.
Lucifer was not evil, until he rejected God’s love; by removing God from his heart, he allowed evil to “exist” the same way you can block the sun and “create” a shadow.
Eve did the same, and so did Adam, and so every person since was born “in the shadow”… but God has a plan to bring people back into His light. It’s easy. Let His love and light shine in your heart, to “banish the shadow” as it were, and you will experience love as God intended it to be.
Or, hang on to your rejection of Him, and miss out. He loves you. Believe it or not, He loves you. Aren’t you tired of the hurt?
Yes Steph Coulombe I asked God if He/She was real by putting out a challenge, only about a month ago. When my ex took my 15 yr old daughter on a Harley ride, him wearing no leather jacket,I insisted he cover all skin for safety. he laughed at me, when I said he should try to be a good role model, then rode off. so I said to God (out loud), “please God give him a little lesson to teach him to wear protective leathers, and to prove to me you exist. Please, -not today but soon, when he is wearing a jacket -give him a very small accident that will not injure him but will remind him of the danger he faces riding a motorbike without protection and show his daughter that she should not copy his irresponsible behaviour”. Within a week he had just such a small accident! (I felt so guilty I’d prayed for it to happen, I did not tell him). But get this it was whilst he was wearing a leather jacket and it hardly injured him at all=-just some scratches- that would’ve been much worse if he were wearing no leather pants. He had been sitting stopped at the traffic lights and a young driver was slowing down behind him, whose foot “suddenly slipped off the brake”, making his car bump lightly into my ex’s motorbike. Sure, you could say this just coincidence, but the fact is my ex has never had a road accident before, in 30 years of riding and car driving. This story actually also may answer why bad things happen to good people. Some bad things may be preventing something worse that is due to occur (eg. worse accident with no leathers). Maybe some bad things are the answers to bad prayers,(or inappropriate ones with good intention as I saw mine then, but not in hindsight- I know it was a bad prayer).
Somtimes I wonder whether my mother died suddenly when I was a young kid because she may have prayed to God to take her away from her impossible family. Under many atheists is a broken angry heart not ready forgive a God they know in their soul must exist. I was a staunch atheist for many years, but have done so much soul searching lately and have found proof of survival of our soul’s eternity through actual psychic mediums (eg they really do find dead people and their murderers), books on near death experiences and past life hypnosis. You sceptics should try that path too. Oh and if you try challenging God to prove he/she exists, try something less risky than I (and do be specific-God finds it difficult to have to interpret what you want).
Perry Marshall, I love what you do and how you do it. You are bringing R-E-S-P-E-C-T back to our debates about the bigger stuff. Oh and by the way, I am very appreciative we have the freedom of speech to do this debating- its invigorating and stimulating and makes us learn more- its what democracy is all about. I also like the term “Intelligent Design” as opposed to “Creationism” as the latter has a negative connotation with atheists, related to literal interpretations of the Adam and Eve metaphore. Much love to you in your journeys. May Peace, Truth and Love be spread in at least one small way by you today (and see God bring it back to you in abundance-test that challenge!)
Kewi
Kewi,
What a GREAT story. And I’ve gotta say… there are LOTS and LOTS of people with stories just like this. “God if you’re there I want to know it” is a dangerous and thrilling prayer to pray.
Yes, you are right underneath the ferocious front of atheism is a desperate sadness and disappointment. They hate the idea of God because they secretly wanted God and came to believe they could not have such a thing. That it was just a big hoax. They feel ripped off, exposed, shamed. One of the most popular atheist videos is called “The God Who Wasn’t There.” Encapsulates that disappointment perfectly.
I hurt for atheists but I cannot help them if they won’t be forthright with the story of what their real struggle is or was. And I will not permit them to desecrate science with theories of randomness and purposelessness (that’s not science, it’s anti-science) or rewrite history…. or propagate a belief system that has murdered 100 million people in the last 100 years. Atheism in the 20th century has a genocide rate of 1 million people per year. Inexcusable.
As for psychics, again you are absolutely right. There is a reason police departments hire them. One of my very best friends had a mother-in-law who was psychic and was hired by a local police department in California to solve a disappearance. She had a vision of a man at a campsite. I forget the exact details but he was waking up in the night to go to the bathroom, falling over the edge of a hill and stumbling to an outhouse; snagging his shirt on a nail and then passing out somewhere. I forget exactly how he died.
They found the footprints, threads from his shirt on the nail in the outhouse, and his body was exactly where she said it would be found. Just as there are pockets of people who are democrats or NASCAR fans or tattoo enthusiasts, there are pockets of people with seer gifts. If you know some of them you hear stories like this all the time and there is no way to ‘explain them away’ unless you somehow feel you have to.
At the same time I GREATLY caution you that many psychics draw from the dark side and there is a lot of danger there. Rather I would encourage you to explore the prophetic ministry within the church – which does not come from the dark side. Most evangelicals deny this but charismatic churches embrace it. I know dozens of prophetic people and they’re absolutely uncanny. Prophetic ministry properly done in the church is one of the most beautiful things you will ever see.
Glad you’re enjoying the debate. Yes, let’s bring RESPECT to these discussions.
Some people call it «malavista», others «voodoo». It has nothing to do with God. It is related to the psychic powers we all have to some extent. We can wish bad things to happen to other people. We can feel things happening in the future, in the past or far away. We don’t need to involve God in any of that.
Look there are coincidences all the time. I prayed to god to meet a girl and low and behold, next door to me she arrived. I also didn’t pray that she would leave and never come back because i truly thought the world of her more then anyone i have ever met but that is exactly what has happened and my life is over becausee of that. 2 years or so it has been this way for me. Did i pray for that? No i don’t think so. I prayed to marry her and have children with her and be together with her forever because she was the girl from my dreams and trust me, that is who i envisione. It took me more then 20 years to meet her and guess what, my life is over because i aint wasting another 20 to find her again or even 2 or 1 or any. I didn’t pray for her to be taken from me but it happened. I prayed for things to work for me and i have prayed to win the lotto but the opposite has happened instead and i have never won the lotto. That argument or senario is irrelevant really.
Conway,
I am in no way a theologian and nor am I schooled in the bible or scriptures; however, my view on Jesus’ life, death and resurrection is that he came here to teach and illustrate as well as to absolve.. by appearing on earth and teaching and illustrating how God wished us to live, as he did, his lesson may have lasted a generation or two.
God knows what it takes for us to truly listen and learn lessons. The horror of what he allowed his son to suffer for us was something quite extraordinary that has continued to impact until today. The very fact that he allowed this horror on our behalf resonates within the human psyche and soul in a way that teachings alone would not have.
A quick question for you Conway – you believe God to be non-existent, if this is your firmly held conviction, do I understand that your posting here is to persuade Christians to atheism? Or looking to see if someone can refute your convictions? general exchange of views?
Nothing wrong with any of those, just curious as to what you are looking to achieve in this forum – if you are of a mind to share.
Regards,
«… just curious as to what you are looking to achieve in this forum… »
I have also contributed to this forum, and if you permit I will try to answer that question.
I have been attracted to this place first because I found Perry Marshall’s scientific arguments for the existence of God convincing as I also believe in God and I am also looking for scientific arguments to prove the point.
But when I read the rest of the story I realized that we were actually not at all talking about the same God.
What I see here is people setting up the scene for another round of Inquisition. I feel no love, no compassion, only the urge to prove the others wrong.
So I post here not to persuade christians to atheism, but to prevent people who pass here out of curiosity not to fall for your particular brand of christianism.
Luke West, I have enclosed your comments in quotation marks, and have left my responses to your comments not thus enclosed.
“Conway,
I am in no way a theologian and nor am I schooled in the bible or scriptures; however, my view on Jesus’ life, death and resurrection is that he came here to teach and illustrate as well as to absolve.. by appearing on earth and teaching and illustrating how God wished us to live, as he did, his lesson may have lasted a generation or two.
God knows what it takes for us to truly listen and learn lessons. The horror of what he allowed his son to suffer for us was something quite extraordinary that has continued to impact until today. The very fact that he allowed this horror on our behalf resonates within the human psyche and soul in a way that teachings alone would not have.”
Luke, are you proposing that God, omnipotent as he is conceived to be, could not have come up with a less gruesome way to teach whatever lesson he wanted to teach? If so, you are asserting, in essence, that God acts under a set of constraints, which is the same as saying that God is not omnipotent. Certainly many merely human teachers have managed to impart lasting lessons without horrifying their students, and without harming them in any way. Could not a Supreme Being, with all the resources at his disposal, such as infinite knowledge and power, do better? This same objection holds — that God, being omnipotent, could accomplish his aims without causing any human misery –against those who claim that the misery occurs to teach us something, or is part of some divine plan that is incomprehensible to us. Once again, if God has a real existence, and is truly all-powerful, then, whatever his divine goals, he could bring them to fruition, as I have said, without distressing us poor mortals, to whom he is said to stand in the same relationship as that of a loving father to his children.
“A quick question for you Conway – you believe God to be non-existent, if this is your firmly held conviction, do I understand that your posting here is to persuade Christians to atheism? Or looking to see if someone can refute your convictions? general exchange of views?”
My postings on the Coffeehouse Theology site are in the service of speaking out against irrationality, as that irrationality is embodied in certain religious beliefs. If someone chances to be spurred by my postings to begin to think logically about what has been foisted off on him/her as Holy Truth, and ultimately gives up those beliefs, that is frosting on the cake, so to speak. At the same time, yes, I am looking to see if someone can sensibly rebut my objections to the core religious belief, the real existence of a deity, something that so far has not happened. If/when it does, I will modify my thinking on the subject of religion and the real existence of God.
Now, as to the existence/non-existence of God, I do think, as you have no doubt gathered, that the available evidence suggests strongly that God, as that entity is usually conceived to be, to wit, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, all-loving/compassionate, and deeply concerned about and involved in the affairs of mankind, can be demonstrated to have no real existence, but only the sort of existence enjoyed by any one of a number of figments of the human imagination, such as Sherlock Holmes, Daffy Duck, Mickey Mouse, Uriah Heep, Dick Tracy, James Bond, Wee Willie Winkle, etc. So when I am asked if I believe in God, I usually respond, “Yes, absolutely, but only in the same sense as I believe in Sherlock Holmes, Daffy Duck, Mickey Mouse, Uriah Heep, Dick Tracy, James Bond, Wee Willie Winkle, and the like.”
The general tenor of your posting suggests to me that you are less interested in knowing what my aims are in posting, than in letting me know that you don’t agree with me, which is okay. You are surely not alone in that. But what I would hope for from someone who stands in opposition to my views on matters religious, is a reasoned exposition of that opposition. You don’t have to be a theologian to think rationally about these things. Indeed, it seems to me that schools of theology have as one of their unacknowledged purposes the crushing of the rational impulse. It does help, though, to be somewhat familiar with various religious documents, such as the Bible and the Qur’an.
Regards,
Conway Redding
My apologies to you, Conway, for tying you up with Kay Jay. It was K.J. who actually cursed God, but you didn’t because you don’t believe He exists. Now I will try to answer you in as civil a manner as I possibly can.
Seeking truth is commendable but you have gone a step further in concluding that God does not exist because it makes no sense to you. There was a time when I, like you, had similar thoughts. But let’s get on with it.
Consider Solomon, the wisest man that ever lived. He was a seeker of wisdom and the Bible says God granted him the desire of his heart. Through him, we have the book of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. But how much did that help him? Against his own advice, he ended up with 700 wives and 300 concubines besides being an idolater. This tells me that having knowledge is simply not enough. It is all about FAITH!! “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the EVIDENCE of things NOT SEEN”. The evidence you are seeking is only going to be revealed to you through faith.
Also consider the advice of Jesus to His disciples when He sent them out on a mission to declare the Gospel. If they didn’t believe, they were to wipe the dust off their feet and move on. It was not about logical arguments, it was about FAITH!
Now a little about me. I was witness to a miraculous deed along with five other friends at about the age of 30 and could never understand it as I was an electrical engineering student and taking physics classes at the time. It didn’t make sense to me and no one I knew could offer an explanation. However, at age 75,(now 79) I once again observed the phenomenon, but this time, mentioning it to a pastor and offering to show him evidence, he simply said “I don’t need to see it, I know it exists, but I have to tell you, this is not of God, for He has not given that kind of power to us.” Immediately, like a flash of lightening, it all came to me and I shouted “What have I done with my life?” Since then, everything in nature provides evidence of God to me.
I realize I have not revealed the nature of the phenomenon, not wanting to spark a new series of debates, but only to show that revelation does not necessarily come by education, knowledge, sight or wisdom. But the Lord knew what I needed to believe. He knew what Saul of Tarsus, (now Paul), needed and I certainly hope He will do the same for you.
Carl,
As usual, I have laid out my answer as follows: I have enclosed what you wrote in quotation marks, and have left my responses unenclosed by quotation marks.
“My apologies to you, Conway, for tying you up with Kay Jay. It was K.J. who actually cursed God, but you didn’t because you don’t believe He exists. Now I will try to answer you in as civil a manner as I possibly can.
Seeking truth is commendable but you have gone a step further in concluding that God does not exist because it makes no sense to you. There was a time when I, like you, had similar thoughts. But let’s get on with it.
Consider Solomon, the wisest man that ever lived. He was a seeker of wisdom and the Bible says God granted him the desire of his heart. Through him, we have the book of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. But how much did that help him? Against his own advice, he ended up with 700 wives and 300 concubines besides being an idolater. This tells me that having knowledge is simply not enough. It is all about FAITH!! ‘Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the EVIDENCE of things NOT SEEN’.”
Sorry, Carl, but on the topic of faith I’m with Mark Twain, who, putting his comment in the mouth of a fictional schoolboy, wrote, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”
“The evidence you are seeking is only going to be revealed to you through faith.”
Carl, I’m looking less for “evidence” than for logical consistency.
“Also consider the advice of Jesus to His disciples when He sent them out on a mission to declare the Gospel. If they didn’t believe, they were to wipe the dust off their feet and move on. It was not about logical arguments, it was about FAITH!
Now a little about me. I was witness to a miraculous deed along with five other friends at about the age of 30 and could never understand it as I was an electrical engineering student and taking physics classes at the time. It didn’t make sense to me and no one I knew could offer an explanation. However, at age 75,(now 79) I once again observed the phenomenon, but this time, mentioning it to a pastor and offering to show him evidence, he simply said “I don’t need to see it, I know it exists, but I have to tell you, this is not of God, for He has not given that kind of power to us.” Immediately, like a flash of lightening, it all came to me and I shouted “What have I done with my life?” Since then, everything in nature provides evidence of God to me.
I realize I have not revealed the nature of the phenomenon, not wanting to spark a new series of debates, but only to show that revelation does not necessarily come by education, knowledge, sight or wisdom.”
I agree, but I do think that the verification of the truth of what may have come by revelation does depend on the use of observation, logic, and reason. The German chemist, Friedrich Kekule had a revelation, in a dream, of the circular shape of the benzene molecule, but confirmed the truth of that relevation with observation, logic, and reason. And I think that the essence of the long conflict between science, which leans heavily on observation, logic and reason, and religion, which leans heavily on faith, is that the revelations stemming from faith have tended not to be borne out in those cases in which it has been possible to bring observation, logic and reason to bear on them. For example, faith, based on Holy Writ, told the fathers of the Catholic Church that the earth was stationary, but Galileo demonstrated otherwise, and was punished for it as being in error, because it conflicted with what faith said was the case. Martin Luther made quite explicit the enmity between faith and reason when he wrote, “Vernunft … ist die höchste Hur, die der Teufel hat;” or, “Reason is the Devil’s greatest whore.”
“But the Lord knew what I needed to believe. He knew what Saul of Tarsus, (now Paul), needed and I certainly hope He will do the same for you.”
See, Carl, as far as I am concerned (and this is a thought, one of many the expression of which got me kicked out of Sunday School more than once, lo these many long years ago), Saul of Tarsus had some kind of epileptic seizure, probably located in the temporal lobe. In my long career as a psychologist I have encountered many people who have had unusual experiences which they believed to be real, but which, by objective standards, were not. Now, I can by no means deny the subjective reality of any experience a person reports, but I do tend to have questions about the objective reality of some of those experiences. One case in point of many possible such: when I was still riding with law enforcement out here in the San Diego area as part of something called the Psychiatric Emergency Response Team, my deputy partner and I responded to a complaint from a man that his neighbor was burning him from a distance with some kind of particle-beam energy device. The man showed us the spot on his arm where the burning was occurring, but neither I, nor my deputy partner could see any evidence of a burn or any kind of dermal irritation at all. More to the point, the neighbor who was said to be responsible for this assault proved not to exist. Now, I have no doubt that the man was feeling a burning sensation on his arm. But I did, and do, have reasonable doubt about the source of that sensation. And I have no doubt that Saul of Tarsus experienced something unusual on the road to Damascus, but I sure have doubts about its source, much as the pastor to whom you spoke about whatever event it was you observed when you were around 30, and again at age 75, that you deemed “miraculous,” had doubts about that event’s source.
It’s curious to me that though the pastor to whom you recounted the event, whatever it was, told you it was “not of God,” it nevertheless generated an epiphany for you of the truth of various religious assertions, such as that an entity who created all things visible and invisible, and who is omnipotent, omnipresent, all-loving/compassionate, all-good, and is directly involved in and concerned about the doings of we mortals, to whom this being is said to stand in the same relationship as that of a loving father to his childreen, has a real existence.
Having said all that, let me add that insofar as what you believe sustains you and makes it easier for you to deal with the vicissitudes of life here on Planet Earth, it makes no difference whether what you believe can be objectively verified. As I have made it clear, I do not think that beliefs embodied in the mythologies of any religion, and particularly in the mythologies of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), can be objectively verified, and further, I think, and am convinced I can demonstrate, that they entail self-nullifying logical contradictions. Speaking for myself, I am very uncomfortable with such things, partly because so many evil deeds have been done on the basis of beliefs that, by me, just ain’t verifiably so. Remember, it was faith that Allah would reward them with a place in Paradise and access to 72 comely maidens who had never known the touch of a man, that encouraged Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, and 17 other fools to hijack those airliners on 9/11/2001 and fly them into the twin towers in New York City.
Meanwhile, congratulations on having survived for 79 years in a frame of existence in which such survival is by no means a foregone conclusion — according to the Bible (Psalm 90, Verse 10), you’re now 9 years past the divinely allotted life-span of “threescore and ten.”
You know Conway, believe it or not, I feel a great empathy towards your position, having been there myself. In case you may be thinking I was hallucinating or having a vision of some kind like you think Saul of Tarsus had, remember that I said there were six of us in my group (and many others who were not of my group and it was in broad daylight). The question ultimately boils down to this. Is the universe logical, or is it magical? In this analysis, let us agree that if even a single event ever occurs that is contrary to logic, then we must conclude that the universe is magical.
Thus, the Big Bang theory renders the universe magical, as there is nothing logical that could be assigned to its cause. Something being made out of nothing certainly qualifies for magical! The only thing that offers an answer is the Bible. If we don’t accept that, we are left with nothing. It seems the Author of the Book knew that it would be difficult for some when He wrote: (Isa 55:8) For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD.
If only a logical universe will satisfy your curiosity, then I see no way out of your dilemma. I was hoping I could secure a promise out of you to let us know if and when you have a change of heart; not trying to win a debate, but to celebrate a new convert. And thanks for the kind words regarding my age. You, too are into overtime, my friend.
Mathematician Kurt Gödel showed that all logic ultimately rests on things that are unprovable, thus defining an integral relationship between faith and reason: http://www.cosmicfingerprints.com/blog/incompleteness
Any good logic will have a boundary within which that logic will surely be true. The Pacific ocean to man is a comparatively calm and peaceful ocean like most big entities are. But inside these huge entities, there can be a lot of strife, competitions, sacrifices, births and dyings and killings. One component may become the food for another. Altogether, these strifes and dying s and killings complement each other, giving the Pacific ocean an external appearance of stability, calmness, and age-less-ness.
We can see the same thing if we observe a sleeping man. Under his external appearance of calmness, there will be a lot of activity in his blood and brain and muscles. There would be white corpuscles killing alien viruses, spent cells dying, and getting excreted, etc.
God who is the biggest all encompassing entity will have internally different shades of colours of everything. Altogether,they complement each other, and God as one Being will be age-less, change-less, and at peace, though internally, there may be hunger, and thirst, and quenching, and killing.
Sitting inside a boundary,without any mode of passing information, one would never know what happens outside, and will not be able to make any logical statements about it.
Who said there was no logic in magic and no magic in logic ? Certainly someone with a very closed mind.
«Something being made out of nothing» is what quantum physics is all about. This is both logical and magical. And the Bible is certainly not the ONLY answer on that matter. Besides, if there is a God, then that God must be involved in each and every book that was ever written, not only in the Bible. A God that takes sides doesn’t make sense.
Serge, you equate the Bible with every other book, but to us, who believe, the Bible is God’s Word, inspired by Him and delivered to us by His prophets. All other books are the products of man’s intelligence. God is not taking sides. He is not in competition with anyone. HE IS SOVEREIGN. And because He is sovereign, it is His prerogative to intervene in His creation any way He sees fit, whether by logic or magic (miracles). He answers to no man. All this talk about what God would do if He were really all-powerful is simply ignoring this fact. That is, a fact TO US who believe.
Quantum physics brings us a step closer to understanding God’s creation, all of which the Bible predicted long ago. (In the End Times knowledge will increase and …there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known.) No other book could have said those words.
Questioning God in this manner, as many do on this site, is seen by Him, according to His Word, as arrogance. Please do not be offended; far be it from me to offend. As you are a non-believer, I can understand your saying that, as it reflects your understanding of reality which I have to respect.
There are many reasons to believe the Bible to be the inerrant work of God. Some of the most compelling reasons are the fulfilled prophecies as only God can know the end from the beginning. I would like to recommend to all who visit this site with doubt in their minds to the following site: http://www.ellisskolfield.com where you may download THE FALSE PROPHET for free. You will see the fulfillment of no less than 13 prophecies with mathematical precision that are easily verifiable in history; in particular, the return of the Jews to Israel in 1948, and their control of the land after the six day war in 1967, all foretold 2536 years ago. This is a serious work done with the rigors of mathematics that cannot be found elsewhere. You will also see the reason why these prophecies could not be deciphered prior to 1967!
This is a must for all serious seekers of truth.
Best regards, Carl Dick
He talks to no man but christians pray to him and some even say god talked to them. So does he or doesn’t he.
So if he is takes no sides or is a loving god then why answer your call for help but then destroy you for no reasoning?
God created us all, remember this. If he created us all he created the books that man writes. Afterall man wrote the bible too. Since the bible is so old, do you think it could have been distorted just like news crews do with every single story they tell. It reminds me of john caught a 10 pound fish. By the time it gets to the last person, John caught a 50 pound fish.
Everything you are saying, i am saying and everyone else here is saying is the creation of god. You can not have it both ways. It is either one way or the other. The only way is if there are 2 Gods, one is Satan, Satan created all bad people etc. But seriously do you think God would allow Satans bad people to inhabit his earth alongside his good people. This really gets more and more ridiculous.
As usual, Carl, your comments in quotation marks, mine not.
“You know Conway, believe it or not, I feel a great empathy towards your position, having been there myself. In case you may be thinking I was hallucinating or having a vision of some kind like you think Saul of Tarsus had, remember that I said there were six of us in my group (and many others who were not of my group and it was in broad daylight). The question ultimately boils down to this. Is the universe logical, or is it magical? In this analysis, let us agree that if even a single event ever occurs that is contrary to logic, then we must conclude that the universe is magical.”
Carl, unexplained phenomena are not necessarily magical, but simply unexplained. Now, I don’t know what you and your friends observed, or thought you observed, but, without having been there myself I would hazard a guess that an experienced magician (not a “true” magician, but an illusionist; those who deem themselves “true” magicians call what they do “magick,” to distinguish themselves from the David Copperfields, David Blaines and Criss Angels of the world) like James Randi, might have a different take on what you observed. Indeed, I believe Randi has a standing challenge that if anyone brings him an event that seems to them to have been caused by “magical” or supernatural means, he will reproduce it using means he can easily explain. Of course, this would not prove that the original event didn’t involve magic or the supernatural, but it would destroy the certainty that it did involve magic or the supernatural.
Now, for a little fun, if you have the time. Go to the site indexed by the following URL, and play the game you find there. There are people who have pretty much decided that this little curiosity involves some kind of “magick,” or real “mind-reading.” I send you to it as a demonstration that not everything that seems really strange is in fact “magickal.”
http://www.regiftable.com/regiftingrobinpopup.html
But Carl, I’m still curious to know how an event that a pastor assured you was “not of God” led you to a belief in the real existence of a deity.
“Thus, the Big Bang theory renders the universe magical, as there is nothing logical that could be assigned to its cause. Something being made out of nothing certainly qualifies for magical!”
I attended a lecture a couple of weeks ago by a physicist/philosopher named Victor Stenger, who said that, in the higher mathematics entailed in an understanding of so-called string theory, there is a derivation from which it can be inferred that something can indeed come from nothing. Granted, I am not nearly enough of a mathematician to follow the derivation, which the physicist certainly didn’t attempt to explicate to his lay audience, and I didn’t take him entirely at his word, but I found the idea provocative.
In any event, before I’d call the Big Bang “magickal,” I would simply call it “unexplained,” and leave it at that. And even it it was truly magickal, the universe (or possibly multiverse) that ensued, does seem susceptible to logical analysis and understanding, as demonstrated by the way science has over the centuries begun to dope out many of its phenomena and how and why they occur.
“The only thing that offers an answer is the Bible.”
Actually, every culture known to man has a creation myth, as you probably know. As you probably also know, the myths do not all agree. The Bible’s creation myth is simply one of many.
“If we don’t accept that, we are left with nothing.”
And I’m comfortable with that, Carl, more comfortable than I am with answers that, as I’ve said, seem to me to lead to incontrovertible contradictions.
“It seems the Author of the Book knew that it would be difficult for some when He wrote: (Isa 55:8) For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD.
If only a logical universe will satisfy your curiosity, then I see no way out of your dilemma. I was hoping I could secure a promise out of you to let us know if and when you have a change of heart; not trying to win a debate, but to celebrate a new convert.”
If I change my mind, the people on Coffeehouse Theology will be the first to know. But I suspect that, like my late Mother, unless my mind becomes enfeebled by some kind of senile dementia, I will go to my death still doubting and still unwilling to accept what seems to me to be patently absurd. My Mother never said much about what she believed or didn’t believe about religion, and, along with my father, insisted that I receive religious instruction as a child, but the little she did say was telling, as when she once remarked to a minister, “You, sir, need to get yourself an honest job.” When, at age 94, she was close enough to death to have been placed in a hospice (her mind was still clear; it was her body that was going south in ways she found it hard to tolerate), and the hospice caretakers asked her if she would like to talk to a “spiritual counselor,” she answered, “No. I had no need of their kind while I was alive, and if I’m about to die I have no need of their kind now.”
“And thanks for the kind words regarding my age. You, too are into overtime, my friend.”
Don’t I just know it, Carl, and with increasing frequency I’m getting reminders that my own exit ramp impends — last week one of my oldest friends from my college years died, at the age I will be on my next birthday.
Onward, and with wishes that whatever time remains to each of us on Planet Earth is more pleasant than not.
Conway Redding
My dear Conway, I’ve got to hand it to you. You have got to be one of the most honest and sincere persons I’ve ever met. Yet, I can’t but question the openness of your mind. It seems to me that you have a kind of loyalty to your beliefs that won’t let you question your own beliefs. I know that you are a psychologist and will probably give me a thorough going over for saying that.
As for your little game, it took me about 10 minutes to figure it out. Have you? If not, here goes: subtracting the two digits that make up any two digit number will always render a multiple of nine, 9,18,27,36,etc. The designer of the game needed only to place the same object in every multiple of nine to amaze his audience.
So you see, my dear Dr. Watson, aka Conway, I’m not so easily deceived. Please excuse the humor, just couldn’t resist it. Besides, it makes the reading enjoyable. Now here is a more serious part. There is magic and then there is REAL MAGICK. That’s what makes it so confusing and, I suspect, is one of Satan’s most brilliant tricks. I now see on TV a program that discloses magic’s greatest tricks. It takes a lot of discernment to tell the difference. The devil is not about to blow his cover! I know you don’t believe in Satan either, but please bear with me. I will delve into that matter at a later time if the debate warrants it and if it becomes necessary.
I owe you an answer to your query:
“But Carl, I’m still curious to know how an event that a pastor assured you was “not of God” led you to a belief in the real existence of a deity.”
The answer is not expected to impress you one bit, but here it is: It was none of my doing; when I heard the words, that belief in God was impressed upon my mind. Suddenly, everything became clear to me, and I understood! Now it is said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but I say an experience is worth a thousand pictures which equate to a million words.
I don’t believe a man can simply decide to believe; it doesn’t work that way. The most a man can do is to leave himself open to belief. God does the rest. Man has no active part in salvation, “lest any man should boast”. In my case I was prepared (pre-disposed) or what the Bible calls “Behold I stand at the door and knock, if any man opens, I will come in…) Get the picture?
It seems to me you run a tight court. One that will admit no circumstantial evidence; you need to see the man pulling the trigger in order to convict. There is much I could bring in the way of evidence, but you already stated that evidence is not what you’re looking for, it has to be rigorous, logical, mathematically sustained, which is one of the reasons I stated that I don’t foresee a way out of your dilemma. If you would agree to consider some evidence, I would be glad to present them.
Just suppose for a moment, Conway that I may be right, and the promises made to believers were true. Would you not want me to present all possible evidence (and there are some really good ones) in support of my position? If I am right, the stakes are really high.
While there’s life there’s hope. But life is running out! We are in the End Times!
Best wishes, Carl
Usual layout, Carl — your stuff in quotes, mine not. And may I say these exchanges with you have been a pleasure, despite the fact that if it were possible to be more diametrically opposed than 180°, that is the relationship in which we would stand to one another.
“My dear Conway, I’ve got to hand it to you. You have got to be one of the most honest and sincere persons I’ve ever met. Yet, I can’t but question the openness of your mind. It seems to me that you have a kind of loyalty to your beliefs that won’t let you question your own beliefs.”
You’re right about that, Carl, but only in the sense that I don’t question such beliefs as that, in a base 10 number system, 2 + 2 = 4, or that such logical canons as “modus ponens” and “modus tollens” are valid.
“I know that you are a psychologist and will probably give me a thorough going over for saying that.
As for your little game, it took me about 10 minutes to figure it out. Have you?”
Of course, and I’ve sent the solution, starting with the algebraic demonstration that subtracting from any two digit number the two digits that comprise it will always produce a multiple of nine, to those friends of mine who seemed prepared to believe that something truly uncanny was going on here.
I thought that you, with a background in electrical engineering, would suss out this little bit of “magic” pretty quickly, Carl, but my point is that there are those who have not done so and who have allowed goofiness to rush in to fill the vacuum created by their problem-solving deficit. Now, I don’t mean to sound harsh, but from where I stand, you are one of the ones who hasn’t figured out yet the true state of affairs in the area of theology, to wit, that God has no real existence and is an imaginary construct. Nor do I expect you to figure it out, because, just as I don’t question the validity of the arithmetic statement 2 + 2 = 4 or the logical proposition ((p.(p→q))→q), you are loath to question the validity of the statement, “God has a real existence.” Instead you, and other True Believers, will use all kinds of convoluted, often metaphorical arguments in support of what you already assume to be true, which is that God has a real existence.
As you are no doubt aware, there are other reasons for believing something than, that it is true.
“So you see, my dear Dr. Watson, aka Conway, I’m not so easily deceived. Please excuse the humor, just couldn’t resist it. Besides, it makes the reading enjoyable. Now here is a more serious part. There is magic and then there is REAL MAGICK.”
As evidenced by what, exactly, Carl?
“That’s what makes it so confusing and, I suspect, is one of Satan’s most brilliant tricks. I now see on TV a program that discloses magic’s greatest tricks. It takes a lot of discernment to tell the difference. The devil is not about to blow his cover! I know you don’t believe in Satan either, but please bear with me. I will delve into that matter at a later time if the debate warrants it and if it becomes necessary.
I owe you an answer to your query:
‘But Carl, I’m still curious to know how an event that a pastor assured you was “not of God” led you to a belief in the real existence of a deity.’
The answer is not expected to impress you one bit, but here it is: It was none of my doing; when I heard the words, that belief in God was impressed upon my mind. Suddenly, everything became clear to me, and I understood! Now it is said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but I say an experience is worth a thousand pictures which equate to a million words.
I don’t believe a man can simply decide to believe; it doesn’t work that way. The most a man can do is to leave himself open to belief. God does the rest. Man has no active part in salvation, ‘lest any man should boast’. In my case I was prepared (pre-disposed) or what the Bible calls “Behold I stand at the door and knock, if any man opens, I will come in…) Get the picture?
It seems to me you run a tight court. One that will admit no circumstantial evidence; you need to see the man pulling the trigger in order to convict. There is much I could bring in the way of evidence, but you already stated that evidence is not what you’re looking for, it has to be rigorous, logical, mathematically sustained, which is one of the reasons I stated that I don’t foresee a way out of your dilemma.”
Carl, it is not a dilemma to me.
“If you would agree to consider some evidence, I would be glad to present them.”
Present away. But understand that I would expect said evidence to stand up to critical evaluation. Case in point: several months ago a couple of hunters down in Georgia claimed to have in their possession the carcass of a Sasquatch or Bigfoot, and had pictures of the carcass as it lay preserved in a huge ice-chest. Turned out to be a bear-skin rug, or something like that, wrapped around some scraps of offal.
“Just suppose for a moment, Conway that I may be right, and the promises made to believers were true. Would you not want me to present all possible evidence (and there are some really good ones) in support of my position? If I am right, the stakes are really high.”
You seem to be referring here, somewhat obliquely, to Pascal’s Wager, which basically sets up a 2 X 2, zaro-sum game matrix, in which the cells are C1: “God exists and you believe,” C2: “God exists and you don’t believe,” C3: “God doesn’t exist and you believe,” C4: “God doesn’t exist and you don’t believe.” Pascal suggests that the winning strategy for this game is to believe, because if God has a real existence, you have gained everything but lost nothing, and if God has no real existence, you have neither gained anything nor lost anything. There are a couple of objections to Pascal’s proposal. First, as you yourself point out above, belief is not a matter of decision, and if God has a real existence and you have been pretending to believe, which is all you can do if you don’t really believe, do you suppose that God, constituted as that entity is usually deemed to be constituted, would not know that you are a pretender and deal with you accordingly? So you would have spent your life living a lie, and would be doomed anyway. Second, if God doesn’t exist, and you have lived your life in the belief that he doesn’t, you have been spared wasting a lot of time on prayers, adorations, and various worshippings, time you might well have put to more productive use.
While we’re fantasizing, let me offer another scenario: God exists, and when I stand before him, he says to me, “You know, with the scant and logically inconsistent evidence that I gave you on which to base a belief in my real existence, I can understand why you didn’t believe. You’re wrong, as you can see, but you reasoned well, and that’s really what I was looking for.” And when you stand before him, he says to you, “I gave you a brain, and the tools of reasoning and logic to employ in operating that brain, and yet, though reason and logic pointed in the direction of my having no real existence, you disdained my gifts, and did not use them to reach the conclusion, false though it has turned out to be, that I did not exist. Well, I have reserved heaven for those who used the gifts I gave them, so you’ll have to go elsewhere.”
A further fantasy: religion has been created by Satan, to lead mankind away from the Path of Reason that God had hoped they’d follow. To put a new twist on an old religious aphorism, “The most brilliant trick of Satan is to convince mankind that God exists.” Yeah, I know, that aphorism leads immediately to paradox, but in the land of the imaginary, paradox is not penalized.
“While there’s life there’s hope. But life is running out! We are in the End Times!”
Well, you and I are certainly in our personal End Times. But I hope you’re not talking about an impending Biblical Apocalypse and the Second Coming of Christ, because it seems pretty clear to me that that’s not going to happen. True Believers will say, of course, that it simply hasn’t happened YET, but to me the Bible itself is unambiguously clear on that subject when you read, in Matthew 16:27-28 (New International Verson), “For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what he has done. I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.” My understanding of this passage is the same as my understanding of a statement made by an anti-aging researcher up in San Francisco, which was to the effect that “There are people now living who need never die.” And no, he wasn’t a Christian idealogue referring to the promise of Life Eternal to those who embrace Christ; he was referring to his expectation that within the next 120 years or so, biological science will discover how to stop aging completely, or maybe even reverse it, and delay the occurrence of death indefinitely. Time will tell whether or not he is right. But, back to the Biblical passage, time has already rendered a judgment on the truth of the passage, because the Book of Matthew is believed to have been written between 50 and 70 A.D., and it is plain to see that in the 1,940-1,960 years that have elapsed since then, within which time period certainly everyone living when the Book of Matthew was written has died, the re-arrival of the Son of Man and his angels has been conspicuous by its nonoccurrence.
Ever onward, Carl, if not always ever upward.
Conway
Dear Mr.Redding here are my latest comments:
“Instead you, and other True Believers, will use all kinds of convoluted, often metaphorical arguments in support of what you already assume to be true, which is that God has a real existence.”
Can’t argue with that. I do assume it to be true. I do accept it by faith, which is the only way I can know it. If people waited till they had logical sustainable reasons, there would be no Christians, no religion, no hope.
“As you are no doubt aware, there are other reasons for believing something than, that it is true.”
Fortunately so, and I think that’s the way God would have it.
“As evidenced by what, exactly, Carl?”
By the Big Bang for starters. All nature declares the glory of God.
“ and if God has a real existence and you have been pretending to believe, which is all you can do if you don’t really believe,”
I don’t see any cells in the matrix corresponding to “pretending to believe”.
“but you reasoned well, and that’s really what I was looking for.”
I have tried to follow you into your fantasy. But my fantasy is that what God is looking for is FAITH; not reason. I would venture to say that faith is the premise of the whole Bible. (Heb 11:6 But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is…’)
“…I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”
Seems you almost had me there. Actually, you had me scurrying to the original Greek text, which is what I do whenever there appears to be some inconsistency. You see, the Bible is only inerrant in the original text. All translations cannot be said to be inspired, which is the reason there are so many different versions. The problem here is the word ‘coming’, which is defined by Strong’s number G2064 as follows:
G2064
ἔρχομαι
erchomai
er’-khom-ahee
Middle voice of a primary verb (used only in the present and imperfect tenses, the others being supplied by a kindred [middle voice] word, ἐλεύθομαι eleuthomai or ἔλθω elthō; which do not otherwise occur); to come or go (in a great variety of applications, literally and figuratively): – accompany, appear, BRING, come enter, fall out, go, grow, X light, X next, pass, resort, be set.
Capitals mine for emphasis
The translators had to decide on which term to use and chose ‘come’ rather than ‘bring’, which is more consistent with what was being said, for a man cannot be said to be ‘coming in his kingdom’. If, on the other hand, they had chosen the word ‘bring’, the passage would then read:
“…I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man bringing in his kingdom.”
The kingdom here spoken of is the spiritual kingdom (the church), which hadn’t come into being until Pentecost, which most, who were then alive, could have seen. Remember the words of Jesus to Pilate: My kingdom is not of this world. If not of this world, which is material, then what world? The spiritual, of course, where the body of the True Believer is His temple, and He is King, reigning in our hearts. This kingdom is eternal, and will continue in its present state until He returns, at which time our bodies will be miraculously transformed into incorruptible bodies (entropy proof). And that is what we True Believers believe. Have a laugh at my expense.
I kinda like upwards more that onward, thanks, Carl
Sorry to interrupt again… but thanks for that answer. It is a valid question, and although I know *I* have no problem with it, for me to explain that to somebody else would require a bit more study than I currently have time for. So, thanks, Carl, and God bless.
Usual format, Carl — your comments in quotes, mine not.
“Dear Mr.Redding here are my latest comments:”
Instead you, and other True Believers, will use all kinds of convoluted, often metaphorical arguments in support of what you already assume to be true, which is that God has a real existence.
“Can’t argue with that. I do assume it to be true. I do accept it by faith, which is the only way I can know it. If people waited till they had logical sustainable reasons, there would be no Christians, no religion, no hope.”
I dispute that a world without Christians and without religion would be a world without hope. I would consider it to be a world without one of the major repositories of ignorance, superstition, and irrationality. As for hope, such a world would have to rely on mankind to seek out solutions to the many problems facing it, rather than praying to an imaginary being for succor.
As you are no doubt aware, there are other reasons for believing something than that it is true.
“Fortunately so, and I think that’s the way God would have it.”
Your response, immediately above, to my comment about there being other reasons for believing something, other than that it is true, suggests that you think God wants us to believe things that are untrue. What I was getting at is the fact that people believe many untrue things, and that there are reasons for their doing so, such as wishful thinking and unconscious needs of various sorts. I was by no means suggesting thatthe wishful thinking and unconscious needs that might account for someone’s believing something that is untrue — such, as, for instance, that the TV medium John Edward is actually in touch with the dead — renders those beliefs valid. But it does make them understandable.
” All nature declares the glory of God.”
Does amyotrophic lateral sclerosis declare the glory of God, Carl? How about glioblastoma multiforme? Anencephalic terata? Multiple sclerosis? Supranuclear palsy? Hansen’s Disease? The 1931 China floods, for which the death count was 1-4 million? All of these phenomena are part of “nature” or “the natural order.”
… and if God has a real existence and you have been pretending to believe, which is all you can do if you don’t really believe…
“I don’t see any cells in the matrix corresponding to ‘pretending to believe’.”
No, you don’t, but you yourself acknowledge that belief is not a matter of choice or an act of will. As you worded it, “I don’t believe a man can simply decide to believe; it doesn’t work that way.” It follows, then, that if one does not believe, and if one is going to try to take Pascal’s Wager, the only option one has is to pretend to believe.
…but you reasoned well, and that’s really what I was looking for…
“I have tried to follow you into your fantasy. But my fantasy is that what God is looking for is FAITH; not reason. I would venture to say that faith is the premise of the whole Bible. (Heb 11:6 ‘But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is…’)”
I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom. (My citation of Matthew 16:28.)
“Seems you almost had me there. Actually, you had me scurrying to the original Greek text, which is what I do whenever there appears to be some inconsistency. You see, the Bible is only inerrant in the original text.
You realize that such a statement, “…the Bible is only inerrant in the original text”… immediately makes it impossible to know what in the Bible is inerrant, since the only people able to read the Old Testament in the original text, Old Hebrew, with full access to all that language’s multifarious and nuanced cultural associations, have been long dead; the same is true of the only people able to read the New Testament in the original text, Koine Greek. Everybody else must perforce rely on translations. In this sense, the original text is lost, and our only recourse is translations. One might suppose that native speakers of modern Hebrew and modern Greek might have an advantage, since their languages evolved directly from those languages’ Biblical predecessors, but the rest of us, including you, of course, must translate. Hence resources like Strong’s Biblical Concordance.
“All translations cannot be said to be inspired, which is the reason there are so many different versions.”
So how do you determine which translations are inspired, and which not, Carl?
“The problem here is the word ‘coming’, which is defined by Strong’s number G2064 as follows:
G2064
ἔρχομαι
erchomai
er’-khom-ahee
Middle voice of a primary verb (used only in the present and imperfect tenses, the others being supplied by a kindred [middle voice] word, ἐλεύθομαι eleuthomai or ἔλθω elthō; which do not otherwise occur); to come or go (in a great variety of applications, literally and figuratively): – accompany, appear, BRING, come enter, fall out, go, grow, X light, X next, pass, resort, be set.
Capitals mine for emphasis
The translators had to decide on which term to use and chose ‘come’ rather than ‘bring’, which is more consistent with what was being said, for a man cannot be said to be ‘coming in his kingdom’. If, on the other hand, they had chosen the word ‘bring’, the passage would then read:
‘…I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man bringing in his kingdom.’
The kingdom here spoken of is the spiritual kingdom (the church), which hadn’t come into being until Pentecost, which most, who were then alive, could have seen.”
Carl, despite your scholarly references to Strong’s #G2064, which you cite in the service of supporting your speculation that the Koine Greek verb ερχoμαι in Matthew 16:28 has been mistranslated, I must disagree that the passage from Matthew that I cited refers to the events of the Pentecost, which, if one believes that the Bible is historically accurate in this matter, certainly did occur during the lifetimes of some of those living when the Book of Matthew was written. Aside from the fact that my Liddell’s Greek Dictionary gives the primary meaning of ερχoμαι as being “to come back” or “return,” (the form used in Matthew 16:27 is actually ερχεσθαι, the future tense, or “will return”; the equivalent form in Matthew 16:20 is ερχομενον, a noun, meaning “a coming back,” or “a returning”), the preceding verse, Matthew 16:27, from which Matthew 16:28 flows seamlessly, clearly makes reference to the Final Judgment, when it says, “For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what he has done.” This is not, however, what happened on Pentecost. The Holy Spirit descended, but there was no Final Judgment. Furthermore, Matthew 16:27 makes reference to Christ coming with his angels in all his father’s glory, and that is something else that did not happen at Pentecost — there’s no mention, in Biblical accounts of the Pentecost (Acts of the Apostles, Chapter 2), either of Christ appearing, or of any angels, only “a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind,” and “cloven tongues like as of fire,” and the bestowal upon the Apostles of the gift of tongues. I conclude, then, that Matthew 16:27-28 is indeed referring to eschatological even of the Second Coming of Christ, which is generally conceived of as a bit more than a merely spiritual event, what with the resurrection of the dead, the Last Judgment, the meting out of just rewards and punishments, and the inauguration of a Holy Millennium on Earth. I also conclude that the Bible was wrong, whether read in Koine Greek or in any translation therefrom, when it averred that this event would occur before some of the people who were alive when the Book of Matthew was written, had died.
Your apologia for what I take to be Biblical error demonstrates the kind of convoluted thinking that you True Believers begin to employ when attempting to refute those who question the basis of your beliefs, or who point out that those beliefs entail illogicality.
“Remember the words of Jesus to Pilate: My kingdom is not of this world. If not of this world, which is material, then what world?”
So, Carl, is the Second Coming of Christ to be a spiritual event alone, or is it to involve a material Christ walking a material terrestrial sphere, raising the material dead, judging every material human being, both the materially quick and the formerly materially dead, giving those deemed worthy an incorruptible material body, assigning those deemed sinful to a material Fiery Pit, and so on?
“The spiritual, of course, where the body of the True Believer is His temple, and He is King, reigning in our hearts. This kingdom is eternal, and will continue in its present state until He returns, at which time our bodies will be miraculously transformed into incorruptible bodies (entropy proof). And that is what we True Believers believe. Have a laugh at my expense.”
When I was interacting with the intractably deluded in closed, locked psychiatric facilities, laughter at their expense did not seem appropriate. Nor does it seem appropriate in interacting with True Believers.
“I kinda like upwards more than onward…”
And so do I, Carl, but have noticed over the years what I like and what I get do not always coincide.
Conway
I hope the passage quoted below from Davies will give a clearer picture of how matter can be created from nothing.
There is a remarkable possibility, for creation of matter from a state of zero energy. This possibility arises because energy can be both positive and negative. The energy of motion or the energy of mass is always positive, but the energy of attraction, such as that due to certain types of gravitational or electromagnetic field, is negative. Circumstances can arise in which the positive energy that goes to make up the mass of newly-created particles of matter is exactly offset by the negative energy of gravity of electromagnetism. For example, in the vicinity of an atomic nucleus the electric field is intense. If a nucleus containing 200 protons could be made (possible but difficult), then the system becomes unstable against the spontaneous production of electron-positron pairs, without any energy input at all. The reason is that the negative electric energy can exactly offset the energy of their masses.
In the gravitational case the situation is still more bizarre, for the gravitational field is only a spacewarp – curved space. The energy locked up in a spacewarp can be converted into particles of matter and antimatter. This occurs, for example, near a black hole, and was probably also the most important source of particles in the big bang. Thus, matter appears spontaneously out of empty space. The question then arises, did the primeval bang possess energy, or is the entire universe a state of zero energy, with the energy of all the material offset by negative energy of gravitational attraction?
It is possible to settle the issue by a simple calculation. Astronomers can measure the masses of galaxies, their average separation, and their speeds of recession. Putting these numbers into a formula yields a quantity which some physicists have interpreted as the total energy of the universe. The answer does indeed come out to be zero wihin the observational accuracy. The reason for this distinctive result has long been a source of puzzlement to cosmologists. Some have suggested that there is a deep cosmic principle at work which requires the universe to have exactly zero energy. If that is so the cosmos can follow the path of least resistance, coming into existence without requiring any input of matter or energy at all. (Davies, 1983, 31-32)
One problem: you still need a catalyst. Absolute nothingness will remain absolute nothingness unless impelled to change; remember inertia? Just because zero *can* be split into +1 and -1 does not mean that it will spontaneously do so of its own accord. So what if the “sum total” of the universe is zero? If there is zero mass and zero energy… there is zero force/pressure/cause for change. The whole “big bang” joke is exactly that–to even call it a theory requires either a twisted sense of humour or a lack of perception of the obvious.
Think about it–if nothing can spontaneously become positive and negative something, then it would be happening all the time. My empty bank account does not arbitrarily split into “cash in hand” and “credit due”; *I* must use my credit card in order for that to happen. Empty classrooms do not magically sprout “good” and “bad” students. (Ok, now I’m mocking the whole idea… but I hope the point is clear.)
Even *if* God used the “big bang” for Creation, we still have a much more important issue: God is real. Why do we feel the need to discuss hypothetical physics and dictate to God how He did it, when He tells us Himself, plainly and simply?
The issue we are discussing is not whether God initiated the Big Bang, or was a catalyst. The question is whether “Good can be created without a equal amount of “Evil” also.
Back the old “cold is the opposite of heat” argument, eh? Still no “cold-emitting” ray gun as evidence? (No cheating: something that just “steals heat” isn’t good enough.)
SOME SCALES HAVE AN ABSOLUTE ZERO. Sheesh, why is that so hard?
Just like all the unaccounted for insect to be named as yet. Or new species that are being found of different fish or plants or viruses or whatever. That is the key. What hasn’t been found is unexplainable as thus far.
I’m afraid I think that the replies here miss the point of the question; I mean replies like “god is the source of good, we are the source of evil”, “this suffering is part of god’s ultimate plan, trust him”.
The real problem is that if god is all powerful, why does he not eradicate evil and suffering? If he can do anything, why does he not come up with a new “ultimate plan” that does not include suffering, and keeps all the good elements of this one that does?
A reply like “god wants us to have free will, so he lets us choose between good and evil ourselves” does not work, because if god is all powerful, he should be able to give us free will without needing evil.
Simply put, if god is all powerful, he created evil and suffering ALTHOUGH HE DIDN’T NEED TO – since being all powerful he could have achieved anything he wanted without including evil and suffering.
That’s the heart of the problem: that god incorporated evil and suffering in his creation without there being any intrinsic need for them. It was simply his will that little children should die of cancer, though he could have done it otherwise.
The alternative, of course, is that he is not all-powerful.
Amazing, Stjepan, someone who is posting to this site who actually recognizes the core problem with belief in the real existence of a deity, as that deity is usually conceived to be constituted! Rabbi Harold Kushner, the man who wrote “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” resolved the dilemma by deciding that God is not all-powerful, a conclusion that pretty much eviscerates God, and immediately raises the question of why anyone should have any truck with this deity, who is now only “sort of powerful.” I myself resolve the dilemma by concluding that God has exactly the degree of reality as that ascribed to Daffy Duck, Frankenstein’s monster, Count Dracula, and other creations of the human imagination.
Thanks. Just to be clear, I am not exactly an atheist – tough I certainly don’t go to church.
But I do recognize the immensity of this problem.
I agree – a non-all-powerful god is just a big bully.
Suffering and pain are not necessarily evil. If we did not experience pain, we would be like leprosy patients, destroying ourselves. Leprosy patients don’t feel any pain when they hit or twist or tear their limbs accidentally. This results in them losing their limbs.
Our ability to experience pain is a grace given to us by God, who has designed the complex nervous system, so that we will not lose our limbs and destroy ourselves.
Suffering is a warning signal to us individually, and to our society, that something is amiss. If we correct ourselves, suffering will end.
Love also can end suffering. When a mother carries a heavy load of food items from the market to feed her children, she enjoys what she is doing; but she would groan with pain carrying half the load while doing something she didn’t like.So also most mothers “enjoy” the pain they suffer during the birth of their children,- in anticipation of the bundle of joy that they are delivering.
Sacrificing your joys for someone you love is the the sweetest experience possible in this world. People who have really loved would have experienced it. Others will never understand what I am saying, even if they are Phds in Logic or Science or Technology. They will also never understand why a patriotic soldier will lay down his life – protecting his country.
Everybody will suffer pain, and die. Some people do them against their wishes. While some others are prepared to sacrifice their everything for protecting what they love, and believe in.
Though Jesus cried out “Why did you forsake me ?”He surely must have felt a deeper satisfaction and fulfilment while going through his crucifixion. That is why, even though he could easily have escaped from the Romans, He went ahead and became the scapegoat for Man’s sins, instead of running away from pain.
To take an extreme example, a chicken would rather be killed to be eaten by a man, than die of old age in a forest. It must be enjoying getting sacrificed to become food for man, because then, it will become part of a living man, while if it dies a natural death, it will go back to lifeless dust.
you mean to say that god has little children die of cancer as a “warning signal” that something is amiss in our society?
Well, that very helpful of him. What a nice guy.
What other “humane” disease would you like children exposed to toxic waste, nuclear radiation etc. die of?
but why have it in the first place. God created us, without it we would know no different. This pain is a traesure bull is really no argument. I still insist that why give pain in ther first place. For instants, my pain started in early childhood. It then grew to be out of control but i tell you, what chance did i have as a child and why cause the pain in the first place. Now i have learnt my lesson so my time is up, i feel void, useless, no zest, couldn’t be bothered all because of the pain created by this god, if real, my parents really, to now have caused me major life problems as an adult, that in turn has completely ruined my life. Now what is it exactly i was meant to learn. Afterall i didn’t create this pain in the beginning and if i never had this pain in the beginning, i would then not know any different but i am sure my life now would be much greater. I guess i am just Gods puppet or his slave, i don’t deserve love. Or it doesn’t matter that i can love my little girls and my future wife so much but now its over. Has been for years. Yep i really needed that lesson. It has made me a much better personm, NOT. Always the same argument that never has any real value. Take it from me your lesson theories and God theories, which is all it is, a theory or a marketting scheme. A fiction novel written by man. It not as if God wrote the book himself and left it on Mary’s table have nevre made me any better off. Instead have caused more and more misery over the years to where i am now, where i have turned bitter and angry and hate everything. I don’t associate or have any friends. I can’t connect to any women when once i was a don juan. I am just gods puppet. Anyone who believes in God is his puppet.
so what lesson is a child born in ethiopia learning. Mustn’t choose parents who live in poverty area next time around. Even though i am 1 years old, can’t walk yet, i will become a better person and i will create food just by thinking about it. Yep great lesson god is teaching this child of his, i am sure. Or is that poor little child going to be labelled the devils child because only the devil causes bad things, god wouldn’t do any such thing.
Another theory on God is this. As with probably all of us we have had our share of good and bad things happen to us. Since God is teaching us all a lesson for what i have no clue. what lesson exactly? Conway doesn’t believe in a God, as he said resembles Daffy duck. He has made it to the ripe old age of 75. For all any of us know he could have lived his dreams without believing in god and had the greatest life, he seems very litterate and well educated to me. He could be a hardened criminal that found education boring because it was easy to him. He could be poor living on the street venturing to a warm library getting on the internet to waste his time talking to us so he has somewher to stay warm. Point is, what lesson is God teaching him? since god has some great path for us all. All i see is my path was great for 3 months out of my piece of shit existence. It just gets worse no matter how hard i try or even not try as some say is best as if they know all the answers to everyones problems. It seems to me that Conway has a great life, which is exactly what i said before. Why do bad people (figuratively since not believing in a god is supposed to be a sin)get great things happen to them and then some innocent loving person be treated like a piece of trash ad never get anywhere. Gives without any reimbursement loves unconditionally and all the rest of gods so called ten coomandments. But never gets anywhere? I mean, these days you can be a prisoner and have all your meals for free, a TV, warm bed, Gym equiptment al at the expense of others and because of humane society live a much easier life then what a criminal should live while we on the outside starve, try to find shelter, etc etc. Who really are the criminals in this world? Another point, who says you are right over a drug pusher or anyone else? What says your way is better then my way? It seems Conway is 75, doesn’t believe in God but he is 75, has an internet connection, must eat to still be alive at that age. Seems to be in good health to be able to write the poetry he writes and have a good mind since he can debate with the best.
God theories just don’t stand up anymore.
God created us to have freewill which means that we often suffer for the bad choices of others, not because of what God did, but because of what other people did.
Some dictionaries list “dark” as the “opposite” of “light”– but any high school student should know better. “Dark” is the *absence* of “light”. It’s not that hard.
“A reply like “god wants us to have free will, so he lets us choose between good and evil ourselves” does not work, because if god is all powerful, he should be able to give us free will without needing evil.”
Um… who defines what an all-powerful being should be able to do? Before somebody makes some smart-alec comment about the definition of “all-powerful”, let’s consider another “definition”: what is “evil”? As mentioned before, darkness does not “exist”; it is the absence of light. Cold does not exist; in fact, the “cold, dark vacuum of space” is quite simply where there is no heat, light or matter. (Yeah, ok, even in a vacuum there’s some matter, because we can’t make and haven’t yet found a perfect vacuum. The point is still clear and valid.)
God doesn’t “need” evil; He didn’t “create” evil. It’s a simple answer, really. Evil is the absence of good. It’s not a question of “limiting” or “re-defining” God’s power. This argument is but an excuse for ignoring God.
You can’t redefine evil as an entity unto itself and then claim that God created it. Currently, there is no “schloznar” in the universe; does that mean that, if somebody “creates” schloznar, he automatically must also create “anti-schloznar”?
Choose not to believe in God if you will; choose to believe in some false, limited god if you will; but at least admit that it’s because you don’t *want* to believe in a real, all-powerful God. If He is real, then we are responsible for our choices and actions–and nobody really wants that, right?
So is it OK if we understand the following from your statements?
EVIL = NOTHING
COLD EMPTY SPACE = NOTHING
Therefore
EVIL = COLD EMPTY SPACE
Did I say COLD = DARK, or that EVIL = NOTHING? No, I’m quite sure I didn’t. I said that cold, dark and evil are all the *absence* of something, not the *opposite* (and therefore, “somethings” on their own). Just as the value of “zero” can exist in different directions–something can have a value or position of (x,y)=(2,0), for example–you can’t equate the absence of “good” with the absence of “light” or the absence of “cold”. In the real world, there are number sets where only positive values and zero are valid. Have you ever seen -2 apples? Me neither. Either there are one or more apples, or fractions thereof, or none at all. Is zero apples the same as zero oranges?
(Yeah, I didn’t think so.)
“Currently, there is no “schloznar” in the universe; does that mean that, if somebody “creates” schloznar, he automatically must also create “anti-schloznar”?”
In modern physics, there is no such thing as “nothing.” Even in a perfect vacuum, pairs of virtual particles are constantly being created and destroyed. The existence of these particles is no mathematical fiction. Though they cannot be directly observed, the effects they create are quite real. The assumption that they exist leads to predictions that have been confirmed by experiment to a high degree of accuracy. (Morris, 1990, 25)
I am quoting below from Hawking, for the benefit of people who have difficulty understanding why every matter and action and force or anything and everything in this Universe has to have an opposite.
Every good therefore must have a corresponding evil.
So one way of creating something positive is to make something negative, and lock it up, far away out of reach of anything positive. A corresponding positive will be formed automatically.
This is probably why God first made a Kingdom for a bad Son of God (Satan), so that a Kingdom for a Good Son of God who sits at His right hand is made possible.
“There are something like ten million million million million million million million million million million million million million million (1 with eighty [five] zeroes after it) particles in the region of the universe that we can observe. Where did they all come from? The answer is that, in quantum theory, particles can be created out of energy in the form of particle/antiparticle pairs. But that just raises the question of where the energy came from. The answer is that the total energy of the universe is exactly zero. The matter in the universe is made out of positive energy. However, the matter is all attracting itself by gravity. Two pieces of matter that are close to each other have less energy than the same two pieces a long way apart, because you have to expend energy to separate them against the gravitational force that is pulling them together. Thus, in a sense, the gravitational field has negative energy. In the case of a universe that is approximately uniform in space, one can show that this negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero.”
(Hawking, 1988, 129)
This means, that at the end of creation, when God wakes up after resting on the seventh day we will have a Jerusalem which will have no COLD EMPTY SPACE. It will be ONE unit comprising of components and creatures and spirits that complement each other, loving each other and working for each other like one body. Empty space or EVIL or chaos will be out of bounds within this City of Peace.
You’re equating good and evil with positive and negative again. Um, I don’t see you trying that silliness with heat and cold. Go on, try it. How about negative light? Please, show me a “dark projector”. Sure, light is little packets of energy, which sometimes behave like particles instead of waves, and therefore they must have opposite “anti-particles”…
Some scales have an absolute zero. “Good” is one of those scales. Deal with it, and move on. In the mean time, tell me this: if everything has an opposite, then what is the “opposite” of God?
–“When God wakes up…”? Dude, seriously, which Bible are you reading?
…And finally, all due respect to Mr. Hawking, he is NOT the final authority on the physics of the universe. God is. I’ll believe God over Hawking any day; God says that Satan is NOT His son–he was an angel who rebelled–and I believe Him. If you choose not to believe God, well, that’s your choice.
If Hawking cannot be trusted, I hope you will trust
Hendrik B. G. Casimir, a Dutch physicist, who in 1948 showed that two uncharged parallel
metal plates alter the vacuum fluctuations in such a way as to attract each other. The energy density between the plates was later calculated to be negative. In effect, the plates reduce the
fluctuations in the gap between them; this creates negative energy and pressure, which pulls the plates together. The narrower the gap, the more negative the energy and pressure,
and the stronger is the attractive force. The Casimir effect has recently been measured by Steve K. Lamoreaux of Los Alamos National Laboratory and by Umar Mohideen of the University of California at Riverside and his colleague Anushree
Roy. Similarly, in the 1970s Paul C. W. Davies and Stephen A. Fulling, then at King’s College at the University of London, predicted that a moving boundary, such as a moving mirror, could produce a flux of negative energy.
And when or where has God told that there is no negative energy?
“And when or where has God told that there is no negative energy?”
And when or where did I claim that there is no negative energy? You seem intent on misunderstanding me.
Now, to be clear: there is no negative LIGHT. You can argue mathematically that removal of light is a “negative” process, in the same way that you can describe an endothermic reaction as having “negative heat” (because as a PROCESS it REMOVES heat), but the truth is the heat itself can not be negative, nor can the light.
Light may very well, as a particle, have an “anti-light” particle; however, darkness is an absolute: having an abundance of “anti-light” particles may cancel out existing light, but can not make it darker than the absolute absence of light. This is by the very definition of darkness–it can’t get darker than “I can’t see squat”. Cold can not get any colder than zero atomic movement (at which point, theoretically, the atom would collapse and self-destruct…hmm, sounds like a God-less society…). “Negative movement” of particles would in fact result in positive heat! This is very different from positive/negative electric or magnetic values– there is no “absolute lowest” value, because you can keep adding electrons to the mix, indefinitely, until the universe is empty of them… and then God is still creating more.
To quote myself yet again, “SOME SCALES HAVE AN ABSOLUTE ZERO.” Can anybody prove this wrong?
P.S. Back to the source of this discussion: You can’t redefine evil as an entity unto itself and then claim that God created it… which deflates all of those silly “God can’t be good because He created evil” arguments.
Hi Stef,
I am offering this explanation because I am repeatedly seeing in your posts, an argument suggesting impossibility of having anti light or heat, because of the impossibility to go below absolute zero temperature or darkness.
An antiparticle is something which in contact with a particle results in annihilation of both.
To have an anti-particle for photon (particle of light or heat), we do not need to go below absolute zero of temperature or darkness. Since light and heat are waves of forces or fields, they already have the positive and negative in themselves. So a photon can be the antiparticle of another similar photon. One photon can annihilate another photon of light of the same frequency if it is out of step by 1/2 phase or 180 degrees angle. So in the case of photons, 1+1 can be any none or one or more photons of a total value between 0 (zero) and 2.
I know it is not written in the bible, but I hope that it will give you a good reason to look for truth in other books also.
So, you’re basically saying now that one particle of “good” can cancel out another particle of “good”. Or, that “good” by nature is paired with equal and opposite “evil”, so that in the end, we have no hope of salvation whatsoever, because all good will ultimately be cancelled out by evil.
I never said that there are no good books beside the Bible; the Bible itself, however, claims that it is the inspired Word of God, and that Jesus is the ONLY way to God. SIMPLY: a book that disagrees with the Bible is NOT a good book. A book that disagrees with the Bible is NOT truth.
Now, at this point I’m going to “give up” on you, at least for a while. It is one thing to examine the different sides in an argument, but to keep attacking the foundation for one side of the debate (ie., the Truth of the Bible), you clearly place yourself on the other side of the table. You do not acknowledge it when you have no further argument against my “answers”, but rather keep trying to find weak spots in the basic belief of Christianity; this is not a search for truth so much as a search for an excuse to discount the Bible.
So: it’s your choice. If you don’t want to believe in the Bible, then look in your “other books”; the answers may “satisfy” you for now, but you’ll find out one day that they can’t save you. Sorry.
how can god be told anything when he is apparently the creator. He created negative. he had to have created it.
God created us in his likeness, with freewill. We can tell him anything. And sometimes he listens.
Don’t forget the difference between “positive/negative” and “existence/absence”. Negative is often associated with evil, but that is a vocabulary issue (and perhaps also because people assume that all loss, monetary or otherwise, is bad.)
From a fixed reference point, all three axes (X,Y,Z) go off in both directions, positive and negative; how can one be “good” and the other “evil”?
God created “+” and “-“. Why not?
Evil is not “-“.
Evil is “0”.
“0” is not “create-able”.
(Before someone *ahemTony* confuses things again, not all “0” values are the same, so don’t go quoting me as saying that “cold is evil”, ok? “0” apples is different from “0” oranges; “0 heat” we call “cold”, and “0 God’s Love” can can call “evil”.)
“The assumption that they exist leads to predictions that have been confirmed by experiment to a high degree of accuracy.”
For non-scientists, let us give a gentle reminder: a scientific model is considered successful, perhaps valid, if it works; it is NEVER considered to be the only possible explanation, or the final answer, because that is unscientific. So, in other words… so what?
Sorry to be so dismissive, but that doesn’t *prove* anything. It is an assumption that so far has not been proven wrong. Whoopee. Let’s examine this argument in another fifty years, and see whether the theoreticians haven’t abandoned these assumptions.
(By the way, anybody who has taken a class in statistics knows that “a high degree of accuracy” can mean just about anything at all.)
As to particles and anti-particles… sorry, but does that mean that every time I eat an apple, the anti-me does not eat an anti-apple, or something? As previously stated, there are values with no negative equivalent in the real world. Talking about negative apples–yes, that is mathematical “fiction”.
Does your perfect vacuum have energy? Because if there’s no energy and no matter… it can’t be observed, and its “effects” can’t be observed either without introducing energy and matter into the experiment… and making assumptions based on that kind of theory is rather like me claiming that there are invisible, mass-less fairies, with impenetrable energy-masking fields, who are responsible for making gravity work. You can’t prove me wrong, can you? Because anything you say, I’ll be able to explain away with my fairies’ magic. Experiments? Sure–I don’t need to be a “wizard” to manipulate numbers and prove that my fairies do what I say they do… especially if it means more funding for my “fairy research” department.
Oh, and I don’t believe I ever used the word “nothing”. ;p
From the accounts of the Bible, we were made to understand that before the creation of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, God had created the heavens & all the beings in it. Lucifer the great angel of Light was a cut above other heavenly beings, in the hierachy of heaven.
A perfect God creating perfect spirit beings. To be sure perfection connotes a lack of defect, balance, or in our case a lack of evil. But Lucifer, the perfect being created perfect by God, was soon to acquire a new reputation. He who later became known as the Devil had a choice in obeying God or not. If he did, then it is proof conclusive that Lucifer did not create evil, he only discovered it. Choice implies options, options will have to exist for anyone to exercise free will. So if Lucifer did not create evil, who did?
The beings in heaven that presumably did not rebel against God also knew about the existence of evil. Did they also have to eat of the fruit to aqcuire this information, or did they know just by virtue of the fact that they are heavenly beings? Why do we have evil in the world? Why do we have day and night, black and white, big and small, hot and cold? why cant everything be just good, why do we not live forever,eat cake, merry and party for ever and ever?
The seasons, weather, and climate provides certian clues that may be important to note. Winter, spring, summer, autumn, exists for certian purposes, beyond the obvious need the ecosystem has for activity and rest, we as individuals have different responses to these seasons.
All life moves according to certian cycles, and there is no thing living or non living that does not obey this law, there is a time of birth, growth, maturity,and then death. Nothing escapes this pattern. So if it exists in nature, then there must be a reason. The arguement that mosquitoes drank nectar, and ate pollen is laughable. Death and what we call evil had existed long before Adam and Eve. The Dinasours existed and ruled long before we did.
So why evil, or the negative power? Evil exists to remind us of the good that also exists, and of the need to learn and grow. The nation of Isreal exists today because Hitler killed millions of Jews. When we lose our loved ones, it reminds us of the need to draw even closer to those that are still with us. When we see hunger and pain, it reminds us to be grateful for the little we have, and the need others might have of them. Great acts of compassion and love always follow great calamities, the heart begins to open in ways hither to unappreciated, and understood.
Perfection in our physical universe is not the absence of evil, but the balancing of both good and evil. Balance, both within and without. That is why the mosquitoe and other diseases exists, to teach us the leasons of clealiness, personal responsibilty, and service to ourselves and each other.
Evil starts with dis-obedience of laws.
There could not have been evil when there were no laws.
In the Bible, the first instance of dis-obedience is seen in the Garden of Eden.
Satan probably was created to do what he is doing.
I once saw how rats were trained to get out of a mace, using electrified wires lined along the walls of the mace. The rats soon learned to get out of the mace without touching the walls.
Satan and his bunch of devils might have been created to punish men who stray from the correct path (following Jesus, who is the Way).
It is difficult for me to believe is an omniscient God made a mistake creating Angels who would do things contrary to His plans.
Satan and his team must be God’s labourers, who are loaded with a program to find loopholes in God’s systems and eliminate them. Once the program has completed its job, he may destroy it or keep it safely locked for later use.
It is difficult for a seed to take roots in un-tilled soil. So before God sent his seed to this world, he sent his labourers (devils) first to till it well, and prepare the earth for receiving God’s seed (Jesus- The WORD- God’s DNA).
The word (the order) can be written only in a contrasting background. If man is to read the word, the Word has to be written (in say white – because the Word is pure)on a black background. So the purity and goodness of God’s WORD will be seen by men only if there is evil all around(in a Black background). So we can say that this world is a blackboard painted black by the evil of Satan, on which God wants to write HIS WORD (in White), so that Man can know GOD, and learn the path to reach HIM.
“The arguement that mosquitoes drank nectar, and ate pollen is laughable.” Then laugh at God, and laugh at His record of creation. Why even pretend to believe in Adam and Eve, if you won’t believe in the other verses in the chapter? Read Genesis 1:30 again. Choose to laugh, if you will, but then at least make up your own names for Adam and Eve to go along with your own version of creation.
It was never about “balance”; that’s a human concept. If there is something/someone to “balance” God, then there is no hope whatsoever for the future, because the balance against God’s creation out of nothing is absolute destruction back into nothing.
Laugh as much as you like; the Bible says it, so I believe it. (It’s called “faith”.)
I don’t have too much time to go into specific details or comments, so I’ll make a quick statement:
The immovable object/irresistable force argument disproves that God (or anything else for that matter) can be omnipotent. Therefore, no matter how much power God has, He must have some limit.
The fact that the world is such a mess proves that God is either a masochist who enjoys torturing others and himself with unspeakable horrors (because he saw it coming and went through with it anyway), or he is cannot know everything for all time (Omniscient). I don’t like to think of God as a sadistic masochist, as it’s woefully depressing, so let’s go with knoledgable and wise, but short of Omniscient.
As for the “Why God lets bad things happen/Why God does not help people in need” question, I present this answer:
Why should God interfere to stop evil, when Humans are perfectly capable of stopping it themselves, together with peace, love and a handful of common sense and logic?
This brings me to an interesting conclusion that will hopefully make people think:
God made Humans in his own image-we look like Him.
God can predict the future to an extent-Humans can forsee events that will happen in the limited future.
God has great power, but is still limited-Humans can do incredible things together, but are not unlimited in their power.
God is kind, compassionate, gentle, loving, wise, intelligent and caring-All aspects of Humanity.
God is jealous, angry, vengeful and cruel-All aspects of Humanity.
God is everywhere-Everywhere Humans go, there Humans are.
When you really think about it, the only real difference between Humans and God, is that God is simply greater and more advanced than us.
Therefore you could argue that God is Human, Humans are God.
As for Miracles: “Any technology sufficiently advanced is indestinguishable from Magic and Miracles.”
You could buy a lighter for $10 at the corner shop down the road. Show it to a caveman and he will revere you as a God. Tell him he must sacrifice the first kill of the day to you as a burnt offerring, and he must follow your word or his family with die, and you’ve just performed a miracle, and created a faith. Wouldn’t that make you God?
I leave you with this to ponder as I’m 20 minutes late and need to go home in my magical, indestructible, four-legged, terrifyingly loud, red-scaled beast.
One major problem, Marko: eternity.
An eternal God must be infinite, or even He eventually must die. He must be all-powerful, or He must eventually be overcome by His creation. He must be omniscient, or eventually, He must be faced with an unforeseen and insurmountable problem in His plans. A limited God can not be eternal; therefore, “Someone” must have created “Him”. (The Greeks, and others, solved that problem by having a “father” for their gods, and then a father for him, and someone before that… and then getting their civilization destroyed before they really had to worry about what had started it all.)
The “perpetual motion machine” made by human hands can never be truly perpetual, because no matter how refined our equipment, no matter how many generations of computer technology go into it, it is still ultimately flawed–and after thousands or millions of years, a microscopic speck of dust, or a molecule of contamination, will eventually cause enough friction or loss of energy to bring the machine to a halt. You can not “refine your way to perfection” (at least, with uncountable concepts) any more than you can “add your way to infinity”. A billion to the power of a billion, billions of times, is still finite.
Interestingly, infinity plus one is the same as infinity plus a billion; our pitiful number values mean nothing when compared to God’s infinity, but His grace in offering us His infinity means that our actual “value” is not what can save us–we just need to accept His gift. (Mathematical salvation… sorry for the digression.)
So, if God exists, He must be infinite. Honestly, a finite, limited god wouldn’t be worth following–if, as you put it, “… the only real difference between Humans and God, is that God is simply greater and more advanced than us.” Sorry, I don’t worship no finite god.
As to the “immovable object/irresistable force argument”, well, I disagree with Conway Redding on almost everything else, but when it comes to logic, he knows what he is talking about, and his answer to that one is quite sound. (Basically, he says that they are mutually exclusive–by definition, they can not both exist.)
It’s nice(?) to be able to “put God into a box” because then we have the comfort of “having” Him, but not the inconvenience of “having Him everywhere”. Sorry, but no respect for believing in a limited god. My God can save my soul and give me eternal life, and what’s even better, He can out-think me, so an eternity with Him won’t be boring (harp-playing stereotype, anyone?). I’m looking forward to an infinity of surprise and wonder, without any fear, because after my God’s “goodness” is everywhere, there will be no “evil” (absence of good) anywhere. I have no idea what He is going to do, but I can trust that it will be beyond limited, human imagining *because* my God is infinite, all-powerful, all-knowing.
Why would I want to exchange that for a non-omnipotent, boxable god? Why would anyone?
Here’s something that came up in a conversation that I’d like to share. “Eternity” we usually look at as a moving forward concept. How about moving backwards? Ready for this? What if we are the 1526th universe of creation? Our universe could be the 1,000,000,000,000,423rd too because eternity with no beginning goes back a long time. Anybody ever had that conversation come up? And here is something perhaps even more off-center: “Did Jesus have to redeem before?”
Comments, no matter the flavor are expected and welcome!
Eternity? – What will happen after the final judgement, when all the good people are in heaven, and all the bad guys and the devils are locked up for ever in Hell. Life from then on will start becoming really boring with no evil men, and no damsels in distress, and no villains to save them from. Or will God replay the same soap again with a few variations here and there?
Ok, so God can create an infinite universe, but He can’t keep us occupied? The more I read your comments, Tony, the more I worry about your view of God. Certainly, you don’t believe in the God of the Bible; HE is an infinitely creative God, Who will continue creating an ever-increasingly interesting universe for us to explore and play in. The fact that we can NOT guess what God will do is an indication that we will constantly be being surprised and amazed anew. Bored? Sorry, but no. Have you lost your wonder at God’s awesomeness? In the earlier comment you made, below this one, you seem to appreciate His greatness… do you not believe your claim that “All the scientists, and all the mathematicians and all the atheists and all the religious leaders and all the king’s men would never be able to figure out even an iota of the mysteries and magic that exists even in a grain of sand”?
We don’t need an adversary, villains and damsels in distress, to spend an eternity in wonder and joyous exploration of His creation.
Why can’t God get “bored”? If He can be angry, sad, or greived, why can’t he get bored? If God has made man in His likeness, and if Man can get bored, so can God. What God can he be if he is not allowed to get “bored”?
Moreover, in an earlier posting, I had asked why God made this Universe at all. I am sure it must be out of boredom. If everything today, is like yesterday is like tomorrow, how can God say He is a God of the “Living” ?
If something is alive, it should be change. There should be some purpose in its life, and some satisfaction at least to its maker when achieving it. God also must be looking forward to the day when “Man” is saved from the clutches of “satan”. God could of course switch off the whole thing and go to sleep, but he must be playing this game to kill “time” which must be God’s real enemy. God just want’s to kill “TIME”.
Satan and demons and Angel Michael and men must be chess pieces in a big chess board which is our universe. God needs both white and black pieces to play. Just imagine God playing chess with only white pieces, just because He is God, and omnipotent, and all powerful, and can burn and destroy all the black pieces!
For something to live, it must breathe, and eat.
there should be a constant cycle of want and fulfilment, of positiveness and negativeness. There should be a lack of oxygen followed by a inhalation followed by exhalation of carbon dioxide. There should be a hunger followed by eating followed by an urge to excrete waste. There should be an urge (thirst ) to drink fresh water followed by an urge to excrete waste water. If everything is at peace, and rest and there is no want and no hunger, and no thirsting for water, and no breathing, how will a living Stef be different than a piece of dead stone? All matter and space and energy are waves which are nothing but cycles of positive and negative forces, charges, rarefaction, and compression, of wants and excessiveness.
Though I cannot prove it, I believe the Universe also breathes. It must be having an expansion phase, in which it is now, when entropy may be increasing, and a contracting phase, when entropy will decrease with time. If Stef can have his pet theory of God and Universe, why should I be deprived of one?
Cute. A quotation from Robert Heinlein, if you will: “Men rarely (if ever) invent gods superior to themselves. Most gods have the morals and manners of a spoiled child.” Perhaps he’s not an authority on God, but he does bring up a valid point.
A limited, bored god is an invented one, and not one I’d serve because he’d have neither interest in saving me, nor even ability to do so. You warn me not to under-estimate God; you suggest the ability to get bored is a pre-requisite for His omnipotence. You miss the defining element of His nature: love. God’s love existed before *we* or even the angels existed, so who did he love?
Perfect love *includes* love for oneself. How could God be bored? He is, and always has been, and always will be, with the One He loves. How could He not be in love with Himself? He’s (literally) perfect. (Don’t go off on some homosexual auto-erotic tangent, here–His love is perfect, and as such, is perfectly right; if I “love” myself in some limited capacity, of course it will be a different situation!)
Why did He create? Why not? He wanted to share His greatness with somebody. Why else is the purpose of all creation to praise Him?
If God were limited, such self-involvement would be petty, selfish and probably cruel. Because He’s perfect… the single most wonderful thing He can give anybody is Himself.
You have yourself described the wonder and glory of God. Do you not believe it? Or, is the god you believe in limited and defined by what he created?
P.S. Genesis 2:2 “…; so on the seventh day He rested from all His work.” ON. Not SINCE. He’s said and done an aweful lot since then. Psalm 121:4 “indeed, He Who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.” If you’re going to read (mis-read, actually) one verse out of the whole Bible, and ignore the rest, then you can’t possibly hope to understand the Book, now can you?
*”How could He not be in love with Himself? He’s (literally) perfect. (Don’t go off on some homosexual auto-erotic tangent, here–His love is perfect, and as such, is perfectly right; if I “love” myself in some limited capacity, of course it will be a different situation!)
Why did He create? Why not? He wanted to share His greatness with somebody. Why else is the purpose of all creation to praise Him?”*.
In the above sentences quoted from your posting, You say in the same breath, First, that God was perfect and contented and at peace with himself, and then that He is craving for attention, and praise, and created some creatures for doung it -for boosting his ego?
The picture I have of God is different.
I said nothing about boosting His ego. Imagine you had the most wonderful, most awesome thing in the universe; being full of love, you want to share that thing with somebody. Incidentally, the “most wonderful, most awesome thing” happens to be you. Where’s the problem?
“The picture I have of God is different.” Yes, well, obviously. The picture you have of God is someone who created out of boredom–I really hope He doesn’t get bored again!–and created evil for, well, I’m still not clear on why *your* “God” created evil.
I’ll stick with “my” God, thanks. In my search for truth, I’m not seeing any better choices. ;p
In the postings so far, we can see that people are believing or not believing in God or his Powers- on the basis of what happened to them in their personal life. Since all people had different experiences in their lives, their views about God differ considerably from each other. So we are seeing in the postings, a pre-occupation with petty feuds, in which even their ability to spell “Titanic” correctly is used to justify their views, and put down others’. This is not very different from what happens in the real world, where people go to war with each other, kill, and shed each others blood, simply because they have different views about God. And afterwards, we have some people blaming GOD for all the violence and carnage and chaos.
To really analyse logically the various stands, we have to establish a standard set of postulates acceptable by all, before we can start arguing about the logic of statements derived out of them.
For that, whether we are Christian, Buddhists, Muslim or atheists, we should be able to answer at least the following questions, if we are to arrive at a reasonable logical conclusion.
I invite your answers and your explanations.
1. Was God a happy contented person, when He was alone, before he created angels, and the earth, and man? If He was, and if He had everything he wanted, why did He create something new?
Atheists can explain why the world is always changing, what it was in the beginning (before the Big Bang or what ever) , and what it is going to be in the future, and why it is not already in its final stable state if the beginning was so far ago?
2. If there was nothing else other than GOD himself in the beginning, did He give birth to His first creature out of Himself (like a mother gives birth to her child, or Did He create something new external to Himself? In other words, does God encompass His creatures, Is He omnipresent, or does he visit his creations only when He incarnates Himself into a being there?
Atheists can explain why we don’t see what we see in our world – cows and grass and butterflies etc.- in the other heavenly bodies. In a billion trillion years and in a billion trillion stars, if dust could evolve itself into monkeys and human beings, why did it happen only in this world? Why do we see only dust and gas in the millions of stars around us? How are they so very different from our sun? I would have agreed with your view even if I saw one pointed eared one eyed three-legged alien breathing ammonia drinking liquid sulphur, and crunching on plutonium crisps- just passing by.
3. If God was something and everything before He created, where was nothing and emptiness- was it within Him or outside Him?
Atheists can tell us what they believe exists outside the all encompassing universe we are in now.
I can go on asking a lot more questions, but we can start with these three for the time being.
If we cannot answer them using evidence, or logic available to us, there is no point in writing postings after postings on more complex truths.
This is where faith comes in. If we know something, or can deduce it, then we don’t have to believe in it, because we already know it. We have to believe only things that we cannot verify using available means, and for which we have no explanation for.
Actually everything is a miracle, because we do not have an explanation for anything. Just because we see the sun rising everyday in the morning, we consider it as a common thing, and not a miracle. For a person seeing sunrise for the first time, it must be such a glorious miracle. Just because we can predict what time the sun will rise tomorrow, we think we know everything about the sun. We know even less about the fishes in our seas, and the animals in our forests. Everything we see around us – the birth of a baby, a blooming flower, is magic, or magik, depending on what you believe.
All the scientists, and all the mathematicians and all the atheists and all the religious leaders and all the king’s men would never be able to figure out even an iota of the mysteries and magic that exists even in a grain of sand. Because the One who has designed all this is a Super artist- who wants to entertain you and wants you to open your mouth in awe of the Splendour of His creation which is something more spell- binding, and more magical and more mystery filled than any performance by a David Copperfield or Chris Angel. But instead of enjoying the show, we chose to fight over it, and kill each other because of it, and again blame GOD who has provided everything for your happiness and enjoyment.
This is like the caveman who when given a lift in a Cadillac, instead of enjoying the free ride, wanted to kill the driver, and become the owner of the car, even though he didn’t know how to drive, or maintain the car.
Tony, while I disagree with your earlier suggestion that Satan is “God’s workman”, this comment above is one fine answer. Thank you, and God bless.
Tony, while I disagree with your earlier suggestion that Satan is “God’s workman”
Dear Stef,
I do not for sure know whether Satan is God’s workman.
But I have seen that in this world, most of the evil persons would any day sacrifice principles and truth to gain more money, gold, buildings, hotels, theatres, factories, and other earthly assets, to which they are more attached -(more or less like Judas). In spite of their earthly riches, I have found that they are the ones who rarely sleep peacefully, or enjoy a vacation.They usually are worried all the time about their assets, and work day and night to safeguard them, to the extent that they become heart patients and diabetics, and some even commit suicide when they make a financial loss, or if someone else struck a goldmine.
But I have seen that their drivers and gardeners and other employees usually enjoy almost the same assets as their employer, though they do not own them. They have less tension, and though their income is much less, enjoy good sleep and vacations, have better family relations, and usually live longer and more regular and peaceful lives.
Who then is the laborer, and for whom do you think they labour for?
Not really parallel–Satan labours *against* God, not for Him. The Bible makes that clear. I agree, many times it seems like the maid gets all the perks, and none of the stresses, of the owner of the mansion. The rich worry about their riches; the poor are “easily” satisfied. However, that has nothing to do with God and Satan. God will ultimately destroy Satan, because Satan refuses to repent and can not co-exist with God.
After all the other comments/replies/…, I think the basic problem is still this: evil is NOT the opposite of good. As long as you try to define everything according to some arbitrary concept of balance, you will be stuck trying to equate Satan with a negative version of Jesus, or of God Himself. After all is said and done, if the “sum total” of everything is zero, then God must also be cancelled out by His “equal but opposite” force/power/being. So, the physicists are wrong, because God says there is no such thing, and if I’m going to believe in Him, I can’t simultaneously believe that He is lying to me.
From where I come from, in a duel, a gentleman ensures that his opponent is armed with the same weapons as he is before starting the fight. I believe in a God who is much more than an average gentleman.
You believe in a god who would risk all of creation for the sake of “gentlemanly behaviour” in a fight with an unworthy opponent. Do you derive your understanding of a duel between “gentlemen” from Hollywood’s dictionary of the abnormal romantic? Don’t you realize that the actual purpose of a duel between “gentlemen” is really just to allow them to waste their time and money in yet another extravagant way? Check your history–it’s just a high-stakes poker game, which in most countries and most times arrogantly flaunts the ability of the noble rich to ignore the law!
Are you so simple-minded that you honestly think a duel is an honourable fight, fought for honourable purposes? Is your god “defending the honour” of his creation with a duel because he can’t appeal to the universe’s corrupt sense of justice?
Dude, where I come from, a person thinks before he writes on serious matters like this. I guess we’re from different countries.
I really have to stop replying to you.
Tony,
1. Was God a happy contented person, when He was alone, before he created angels, and the earth, and man? If He was, and if He had everything he wanted, why did He create something new?
Atheists can explain why the world is always changing, what it was in the beginning (before the Big Bang or what ever) , and what it is going to be in the future, and why it is not already in its final stable state if the beginning was so far ago?
The answer to this is simply “why not?” If you had ultimate power, would you not want to exercise it to see what you were capable of doing? Being happy and contented is no excuse for being idle. Why should God just ‘be’ and not be permitted to do whatever He chooses to do, whenever He chooses to do it? As long as God is doing things, experimenting with His powers, the universe will not be stable. Stop thinking of God as a “person”. My next answer explains why.
2. If there was nothing else other than GOD himself in the beginning, did He give birth to His first creature out of Himself (like a mother gives birth to her child, or Did He create something new external to Himself? In other words, does God encompass His creatures, Is He omnipresent, or does he visit his creations only when He incarnates Himself into a being there?
Atheists can explain why we don’t see what we see in our world – cows and grass and butterflies etc.- in the other heavenly bodies. In a billion trillion years and in a billion trillion stars, if dust could evolve itself into monkeys and human beings, why did it happen only in this world? Why do we see only dust and gas in the millions of stars around us? How are they so very different from our sun? I would have agreed with your view even if I saw one pointed eared one eyed three-legged alien breathing ammonia drinking liquid sulphur, and crunching on plutonium crisps- just passing by.
I suppose that you could say that God “gave birth” to the first creatures, but not in the same way that a mother gives birth to a child. God is not a solid entity: He is pure energy, which some religions translate as “spirit”. All matter is “compressed” energy … and there is other life in the universe. Mankind is hopelessly naive and arrogant to think that ours is the only inhabited planet in the entire universe.
3. If God was something and everything before He created, where was nothing and emptiness – was it within Him or outside Him?
Atheists can tell us what they believe exists outside the all encompassing universe we are in now.
Most of the universe is comprised of “nothingness and emptiness”: each atom, every cell, is mostly “empty” of solid matter, but waves of energy sweep back and forth across these spaces all the time. These wavs of energy are all part and parcel of God, which is how He is “omnipresent”.
I stopped asking this question long ago. The reason that God does not step in and stop all the suffering in the world is simple to me. If he did it would negate free will.
If he stopped the murderer from killing someone else then free will would not exist and for that reason is why God does not step in to stop such things.
Im sure there will be those that say well why the natural disasters right?
Natural disasters occur in our natural world because this existance revolves on cycles. Every thing has a beginning and an end and the natural world is no exception. In order for us to exist on this planet the cycles must keep renewing themselves and the natural disasters are a part of that. Sh&t happens.
Those that want to make this more complicated than that are just fooling themselves. These things happen because they have to in order for us to exist here simple as that.
That by no means is saying God dont exist but has created this place for us so we can fully exercise free will as he wants us to. Of course he wants us to do the right thing but the choice is ours.
So you expect to see the same “cycles” of disasters in heaven also? or will the logic be different there?
Dear Tony, your quote “There could not have been evil when there were no laws” is quite interesting. So laws preceeded evil, so what did these laws describe evil as, and could it be possible that these laws could describe what did not exist? Your arguement is like saying there could not have been electricity before it was discovered by modern man, and that the laws of science applied to the generation of electricity actually created electricity. Discovery, can never be equated with creating. You discover what already exists, but is not commonly known.
You are right God actually created Lucifer/satan for a purpose, not to punish, but to teach man. In this Physical universe, Satan exists as the ‘Wicked School Master’. He sets the tests, or exams, which we either pass, or fail. The reward for passing the examinations are not found only in Heaven, the rewards exists here too, the consequence of failing is not punishment in hell, but a repeat of the leasons, especially in the form of hardships, discomfort, illness etc. The best way to get gold from dross is to subject it to the fire test. To beat it continiously untill we begin to see perfection reflected.
There can never be any loop-holes in Gods programm. All that has existed, exists, and will exist, has, and will always be because God wants it so. There are no errors in creation, there have never been.
The theory of original sin and the need for redemption, is like attempting to solve a mathematical problem from the answer. The result might look plausible, but will not hold up under proper scrutiny.
God’s love for us is unconditional, the opportunities we have to unfold – learn Satans leasons – are limitless. We did not Sin, and so could not have fallen short of the glory of God. Soul exists because of God’s unconditional love for it. So Jesus dropping the physical body has nothing to do with the rest of humanity. As Soul, the spirit side of man, we are perfect beings. Soul is eternal, but lives only in the moment.The only thing Soul carries from life time to life time, are its memories. Thats why people come into certain life times with baggages they have no idea how or from where they acquired them.
A belief is not necessarily true because billions of people have them, a belief is just a state of acceptance. What we accept as true, is true to us, and we will look for evidences to support them. There will never be a time when the whole people on earth will have the same beliefs. The church had tried to use force to make this a reality, and has failed.
This forum is testament to the multiplicity of views that exist, because we now live in a world where an increasing majority of people are becoming confident enough to express, the doubts they’ve had all their lives. These are no end times, these are beginning times, a period where we are constantly re-evaluating the very foundations of our faiths.
“Your arguement is like saying there could not have been electricity before it was discovered by modern man, and that the laws of science applied to the generation of electricity actually created electricity. Discovery, can never be equated with creating. You discover what already exists, but is not commonly known.”
The laws of electricity are not obeyed by man, but by electricity. Since eletricity does not have freedom of choice, it obeys the laws always, and therefore there is no evil.
But the laws for generation of electricity, consumption, transmission etc have to be followed by men (contractors, consumers, engineers, etc., who do have freedom of choice.
These laws are for men, and would have come to existance only after man invented, or discovered electricity, and learnt how to generate and use it. Breaking of these rules by corrupt contractors, engineers and consumers are evil, and will result in punishments.
You can apply the same logic to road traffic rulesand all regulations. How can somebody break traffic rules at a time when there were no roads or cars or other traffic?
“The only thing Soul carries from life time to life time, are its memories. Thats why people come into certain life times with baggages they have no idea how or from where they acquired them.”
If the above is true, why am I not able to remember what wrongs I did in my past lives, so that I can avoid them in the present? I asked a few people around, and they also don’t remember. Do you recall who you were and what you did in your past life?
If it is possible only for a few men, God surely is not fair to all the rest, and can’t blame them if they repeat the mistakes.
Another suitable title for Satan is not “Wicked School Master” but one from the Bible, which is “The accuser”. His job is more or less like a quality controller’s in a factory. In Bible’s words, – Satan prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone weak to overcome and devour. So his job is basically to destroy flawed human beings.
Initially, God gave Satan and his team, who were spirits, the job to build this world & all the universe for His Son of Man. But when Satan saw what a marvellous world it was, he became very arrogant. He forgot about God, and thought we was God, or coveted God’s position. He refused to hand over the universe he had made, back to God, because he wanted to rule it instead of leaving it for the Son of Man. So there was an uprising (mutiny) in heaven, in which a part of God’s creation separated from the whole.
Separation is the key to all evil. If creation is putting together of things in a certain order to serve a specific purpose, evil destroys it by separating them into dis-connected and dis-ordered parts.
Evil, and satan, and his gang was defeated in Heaven by the good angels, and sent to Hell. But the war is not over in this world . This world is still under the dominion of Satan. That is why, Satan was able to tempt Jesus in the desert with all the kingdoms of this earth.
Because Satan knew that he would be kicked out of this world also, he destroyed everything he had made in this world and left it in a chaos. God created the present world out of that chaos (see Genesis) and initially planted Adam and then Eve in the Garden of Eden, from whom was to develop a Kingdom for God’s Son to rule. Some angels were entrusted to see that the human beings grew into a peaceful law- abiding nation loving and helping each other. But Satan managed to corrupt those angels, who in turn had intercourse with women, which resulted in them giving birth to evil men and monsters in the world. They got them addicted to worldly things and made man forget God and the purpose for which they were created. Satan challenged that human beings also will be as corrupt as they were if given a chance. So God has given free will to man to choose between good and evil. Satan uses every opportunity to expose corruption in men, and destroy them and their world, because he is very jealous of Jesus who is going to rule this Universe for Eternity.
The question that remains is why God does not kill Satan immediately, and why is he allowed to roam around creating havoc and destruction everywhere.
God will one day do away with Satan altogether (Revelation 20:3, 10). That will be no injustice to Satan. Nor would it be unjust for God to do it today. So why doesn’t He, in view of how much misery Satan causes?
Satan roams like a devouring lion to destroy faith (1 Peter 5:8); he makes people sick and diseased (Acts 10:38); he tempts to sin (Luke 22:3-4); he blinds the minds of unbelievers (2 Corinthians 4:4); he takes people captive to do his will (2 Timothy 2:26); he kills (Revelation 2:10). One day God will stop him from doing this. Why doesn’t He stop him now?
Could it be that there is a chance the devil and his angels will repent? Is God is giving them time? No. The Bible teaches they are irredeemable. Jesus said that “the eternal fire . . . has been prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41). Jude confirms this when he says that the fallen angels are being “kept in eternal bonds under darkness for the judgment of the great day” (Jude 1:6).
Why then does God tolerate Satan? The key is that God aims to defeat Satan in a way that glorifies not only his power, but also the superior beauty and worth and desirability of his Son over Satan. God could simply exert raw power and snuff Satan out. That would glorify God’s power. But it would not display so clearly the superior worth of Jesus over Satan. That will be displayed as Christ defeats Satan by his death and then by winning superior allegiance from the saints over the lies of Satan.
Central to this plan is that God defeats Satan in stages through the work of Christ. Paul says that when we were forgiven all our trespasses by Christ’s death on the cross, God thus “disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him” (Colossians 2:15).
This was the first stage of Satan’s defeat. How was he defeated by the cross? The lethal weapon of soul-destroying sin and guilt is taken out of Satan’s hand. He is disarmed of the single weapon that can condemn us – unforgiven sin. We see this in 1 Corinthians 15:55-57, “O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting? The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Without sin and law to condemn us, Satan is a defeated foe. He is disarmed. Christ has triumphed over him, not yet by casting him into hell and nullifying his influence on earth, but by letting him live and watch while millions of saints find forgiveness for their sins and turn their back on Satan because of the greater glory of Christ.
That is a second stage of defeat: the conversion of people by the power of the gospel of the cross. Jesus says to Paul that his mission to the Gentiles is “to open their eyes, so that they may turn . . . from the power of Satan to God” (Acts 26:18). This is what happens when God removes the blindness caused by the devil and gives us the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ (2 Corinthians 4:4-6). This enables people to see the ugliness of Satan and the beauty of Christ so that their choosing Christ glorifies not only God’s power, but Christ’s superior beauty and worth over Satan.
This way of defeating Satan is a costly triumph. Christ suffered and the world suffers. But God’s values are not so easily reckoned. If Christ obliterated all demons now (which he could do), His sheer power would be seen as glorious, but His superior beauty and worth would not shine so brightly as when God’s people renounce the promises of Satan, trust in Christ’s blood and righteousness, and take pleasure in the greater glory of Jesus over Satan.
This means that our treasuring Christ above all the promises of sin and Satan is part of the triumph of that God designs for this age. Take up arms! Be glad in the Son of God!
Mr. Francis, either you have multiple personalities, or you write conflicting arguments for the sake of dispute. This last comment of yours displays a deep understanding and appreciation of Salvation and God’s purpose in creation. Why is it that earlier (above) you refer to Satan as a “bad Son of God”?
I suspect, sir, that you may be presenting certain arguments for the sake of arousing debate. While questions like that may be valid for discussion in Bible Study groups at Church, on a forum such as this one it is more damaging than helpful when Christians challenge the Word of God as the final and absolute truth. You also previously suggested that God’s gift of eternal life will get “boring”, that God is “responsible” for Satan–even that He should be blamed for all the evil in the world!–and that a rebellious, spiteful soul is perfectly prepared for heaven. The inconsistency in your answers is very suspicious. If you really are a Christian, then you should take to heart God’s warning to those who teach falsely.
Your suspicion is base-less.
I call Satan a son of God, because in several places in the bible, and other scriptures, fallen angels are called sons of men. They are “bad” sons of God because they instead of glorifying God and thanking Him for their existence, they were trying to go against God’s wishes and Plans. Men are also called children of God (when they are alive, and not dead “in sin”.
Even “waste” or a by-product of a factory can be called its”product”, because it was produced by the factory. It is a necessary evil, when something is produced.
You need to have a villain to have a hero.
“I call Satan a son of God, because in several places in the bible, and other scriptures, fallen angels are called sons of men. They are “bad” sons of God…”
They are sons of God only by your calling. Why call Satan a son of God if you’re not trying to equate him with Christ (which, looking at your other comments, seems the best way to interpret it)? My suspicion is well-based, I fear.
“You need to have a villain to have a hero.”
It is much like light and dark: you need dark, for light to have *definition*, but not for it to have *existence*. Or do you actually believe that you need the devil in order to have God?
From my own comments: “You also previously suggested that God’s gift of eternal life will get “boring”, that God is “responsible” for Satan–-even that He should be blamed for all the evil in the world!-–and that a rebellious, spiteful soul is perfectly prepared for heaven.”
No answer?
Please, be careful. If you mean only good, then watch that your commentary is not made too quickly, or without sufficient thought and prayer. Your analogy to a factory “producing” waste, for example, suggests that God has produced waste, or at least some un-wanted by-product; this allows blame to be put on God for “producing” Satan and all the evil things in the world. You are suggesting that God made a mistake! Obviously, you are not describing the God of the Bible–or, you are NOT thinking this through.
(Once more, friend: if a factory makes a toy, and I play with it poorly, break it and throw it out, does that mean that the factory “produced” that garbage?
Read Genesis 1 again. When God created it, it was GOOD. There was no waste. You can still do great good by speaking/writing the truth of God, but remember that the most effective lie is the one that is 90% true. Please be careful!)
“Your analogy to a factory “producing” waste, for example, suggests that God has produced waste, or at least some un-wanted by-product; this allows blame to be put on God for “producing” Satan and all the evil things in the world. You are suggesting that God made a mistake!”
I did not say that God made a mistake.
You are right in saying that I implied that god has produced and is producing some un-wanted by-products.
Why else would he assign eternal destruction of Satan and devils and all evil men in the eternal inferno of Hell- in the end?
“Un-wanted by-products” are either deliberate or accidental; if accidental, then you’re saying God made a mistake; if deliberate, then you’re saying that God isn’t wholly good. If you don’t believe God is good, then you don’t believe what the Bible says (or, like so many looking for excuses to discredit God’s Word, you believe that the Bible is self-contradictory, and you want to pick and choose which parts to believe in).
Make up your mind. If God is responsible for *OUR* wrong choices, then He has no right to punish us. You made the claim, “Personally, I do believe that the Bible is the true “WORD OF GOD””, but truly, you do not, because you keep trying to justify this belief of yours that God is responsible for our sin.
Read it before you make claims like that–and pray that nobody falls away because of the things you say and write.
Really, now, enough is enough.
Dear Stef, may I repeat, I am here seeking Truth. I would not have been here if I already knew it. But to arrive at the truth, I believe that I should not be biased, and should be open to all possible theories and explanations. If everyone here comes here with a similar attitude, I believe we may arrive at a better understanding of God, and His creation, and the purpose of His creation. We all must be coming from different backgrounds, and may have different views of God. Knowing all of them will only improve our understanding of God. I can see that you are a strong believer in the Bible, and have beliefs of a man brought up in a Christian family, which I respect, and am eager to learn about. But we have also, Hindus, Muslims, atheists, and a whole lot of other people, who are also creations of the same God that created you, and I am sure they are as dear to Him as you and I are. They have a different view of God, and who are we to say it is wrong or correct? We have to analyse each of them for its merits, and whether they all logically fit. From what God has created, we can see that God has some laws according to which his creations act and react: like the pieces of chess in a chess board. I have found that God is a fair player. He never breaks His own rules, though he probably can. Most of the so called miracles seem to be miracles because of our lack of understanding of all the rules. So a solar eclipse was considered to be a miracle, and predicting its onset was considered to be a special gift, till we learnt about how and why eclipses happened.
Man is a special creation of God, where he does not move the pieces, but has installed a mobile version of his own operating system into man’s brain. He has given man a choice to move around on the chess board of his own volition, but only in the allowed paths. God has then probably started the game, and gone to sleep, or rest. ( So says your Bible, because after the sixth day of creation, he rested, and probably is still resting).
When he wakes up, He will probably see the performance of each piece, and the good ones he will keep, and the ones that were overcome by the black, he probably will destroy, or possibly cannibalise to make new smart pieces. I know that you will not accept this version of creation story, and I have no proofs to show you.
But in nature, I have seen that anything logically possible exists. Physicists have calculated the possible existence of an atomic particle, and looking for it, have found it. astronomers have calculated the possibility of a particular planet in a certain orbit, and have looked for it, and found it. So Stef, do not under-estimate God, and don’t look at God and His creation in mono-chromatic light. God is a very creative, resourceful, colourful, and a very intelligent being , outside the scope of any one book, or one man, or one theory. Collectively, Man was able to achieve many things which would have been impossible for one man to achieve. So let us respect each other’s views, and learn from their experiences in out search for Truth.
“… your Bible…” Well, that answers my questions.
As to why Christianity is exclusive of other beliefs… well, that’s in “my” Bible too. (Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the light. NO ONE comes to the Father except through Me.” John 14:6)
Keep seeking truth, then, but beware what you “teach” along the way.
After some thinking and praying on this matter, I composed this letter to Mr. Tony Francis:
Dear Mr. Francis,
It would seem that I owe you an apology. It is possible that your situation is as you say, that you seek the truth, and as such I must offer the benefit of the doubt.
Please forgive my assumption that it is “not” as you say. The reasons for my doubt are substantial, to my mind: in some comments, you give descriptions of God that sound almost as though they come from the pulpit, even with Bible verse references; however, you make assertions– not always in a question format, as though asking, but rather in statements– that strongly sound like a rebellion against something you’ve been taught; your response to argument looks like someone trying to find a weak spot for the sake of destroying the basis from which the other person is writing (like your “simple” question); and, finally, you make bold claims clearly contrary to the Bible, as though knowing full-well that the Bible says otherwise but choosing to ignore it.
For these reasons, my image of you is someone raised in the church, perhaps in a strongly Christian family, perhaps a son of a pastor, who learned in school that “not everything is black and white”, who learned that not everybody believes as his family believes; who now, perhaps, is rebelling against the concept of God that was taught in Sunday School. Perhaps this person is interested in the truth; for whatever reason, he has come to doubt what he learned as a child. Perhaps he also is eager to share what he has “learned”, thinking (rightly) that others are asking the same questions.
There is nothing wrong with this–until it comes to the “sharing” part. Until fifteen (?) years ago, this kind of discussion would be limited in scope; it would filter back, through that person’s circle of contact, until it reached people able to discuss it carefully, with God’s guidance to the truth. Now, however, with the internet… although there is more opportunity to share “good news”, there is also more opportunity to share harmful, “dangerous” doubt. Because of the “good” that you write, the “bad” (like blaming God for “evil”) is much more harmful. Because of the way you assert yourself, it seems almost malicious. Hence… my warnings. As previously posted, “God is not mocked!” If you do come from a Christian background, then you should know better.
As suggested, in my experience, this pattern is that of a discontented pastor’s kid; at the risk of sounding condescending, many pastor’s children speak out like this basically because they want attention (like a police officer’s child acting the bully, or a teacher’s kid deliberately doing poorly in class). If this is not the case for you–if I am completely off-base in my assessment, and the person I’ve described is NOT you–then you do have my sincere apologies, and I ask your forgiveness.
(Of course, the “beauty” of internet anonymity is that there is no way for anyone to know for sure; we will have to take your word for it, and trust God to reward/discipline according to merit.) ;p
Now, back to that “simple” question: because my child is more intelligent than my dog, I will allow my child *different* freedoms. My dog does not need the freedom to use the phone, learn how to drive a car, use his life savings to buy a dirt bike… Would I use an invisible fence for my child? No, for a very simple reason: by the time my child is old enough for me to leave him alone in the yard, without supervision, he will have enough linguistic ability to understand (and enough maturity to respect) my explanation as to why he should not play in the road.
Do you see my problem with your question? If I answer simply “yes”, then readers (perhaps not you) WILL accuse me of cruelty to children (with the invisible fence, or any other training method used for animals); if I answer simply “no”, then the accusation will be that the example is therefore irrelevant and void, thus nullifying my entire argument.
When my son was too young to speak/understand, but old enough to crawl around the apartment, we did indeed give him a smack or two when he simply refused to stay out of the kitchen. First, we tried to explain (even though he couldn’t understand); we gently encouraged him to play where it was safe; we kept saying “no” as we removed him from the kitchen; and, finally, we found that a light smack to show we were serious went a long way. As he got older, he grew more resistant–and more rebellious–and we needed a “firmer hand”. Even now, old enough to understand us perfectly well, he still disobeys and needs correction.
All this, however, is rather beside the point: God’s “invisible fence” or “smacks of discipline” are NOT the cause of all the evil in the world. Rather, our rebellion *despite* His discipline is what causes the trouble. If I keep telling my son to stay away from the stove, and discipline him with a “time-out” or a good smack, is it then my fault when he burns his hand on the stove anyway? Will you say that I should make it impossible for him to touch the stove? Then how will he learn to listen? At some point, I need to allow him to make choices with painful consequences, so that he will not make choices with *fatal* consequences.
“One simple question will solve both problems.” Short, irrelevant questions are not necessarily simple; even if you truly seek the truth, you should know better.
One final apology: I have been corresponding under the assumption that English is your native language– with a name like Tony Francis, I think it’s a reasonable assumption. If that is not the case, then there is a good chance that our misunderstandings are purely linguistic in nature. So, if that is the problem, then I’m sorry for speaking so harshly; please forgive me.
On what logical premise, do you iterate, or speculate Jesus as the actual “son” of God? Or, a biological son, with reference to the natural procedures to sustain and develop offspring.
Your irrational assertive assumption/allegation is quite spurious. Most people would actually comply with this primitive stipulation, of this aspect.
Why do you even require an understanding of thorough, fairly complex (the interpolation of man, in this case) and misleading religious scriptures and traditions? Why do you not try and achieve adequate spirituality? Which, in my opinion, is the desirable inclusion required.
I have actually analyzed the base of topic discussed in this forum, which would probably be:
A presentation of individual interpretation, or perception regarding the existence/abilities/characteristics of God, and the verity, or spurious existence of God. Remarks regarding the historical religious scriptures, aswell.
This base of discussion, seems quite frivolous. In any case, none of the entities involved in this argument, will comply with any external inference, but instead, opposing the iterations, with no possible gain other than contention.
John 3:16. Jesus refers to Himself as the Son of God. What was the question?
P.S. “Achieving adequate spirituality” is so indefinite as to be meaningless drivel. Sorry, but if all religious traditions and scriptures are “misleading” then any concept of religion or spirituality is baseless and “spurious”. If “spirituality” is enough, I can decide to worship the spirit in my toilet. (Atheists discussing the nature of God is rather like mono-linguistic Chinese speakers discussing Latin grammar. Why do *you* bother?)
Below is part of an interesting article by D.M. Murdock:
Referenced article
Source of Bible Covenant with God discovered?
Archaeologists working in Turkey have unearthed an Assyrian tablet dating to around 670 BCE that “could have served as a model for the biblical description of God’s covenant with the Israelites.” What this fascinating discovery suggests, of course, is that the Bible tale of a divine pact does not represent “history” or a “factual” event, but is instead a fictional rewrite, borrowing or plagiarism of this older Assyrian treaty.
No historical covenant with God?
It needs to be emphasized that this intriguing development concerns not just any biblical event but the very covenant between God and the Israelites – here indicated as not something supernatural that actually occurred but, rather, as mere human propaganda based on older texts from other cultures. This discovery, therefore, would essentially negate the basic premise of the Old Testament: To wit, that the Hebrews, Israelites and Jews are the “chosen people” of the Lord of the universe.
Needless to say, for those of us who have been stating as much for many years – and getting pilloried for our efforts – this archaeological find is very exciting, as it adds to the growing body of hard, scientific evidence that the Bible is not “God’s Word” but a manmade cultural artifact designed for propagandistic purposes.
The Bible in NUMEROUS places, both Old and New Testament, name Moses as author of the Pentateuch. Secular / liberal theologians say no, it was written nearly 1000 years later by various authors, editors etc.
Q: Do you have specific biographical information – names, places, dates, external verifying references confirming the existence any of those alleged later authors? Do any other literature sources from 500BC or before confirm this hypothesis?
“Archaeologists working in Turkey have unearthed an Assyrian tablet dating to around 670 BCE that “could have served as a model for the biblical description of God’s covenant with the Israelites.””
COULD is a funny word. If I found something that “could” prove the historical accuracy of one tiny event in the Bible, the world would mock my discovery, tear it to pieces, and tell me to come back with definitive proof.
You can’t honestly be blind to the way Murdock is twisting words, here? “What this fascinating discovery suggests, of course, is that the Bible tale of a divine pact does not represent “history” or a “factual” event, but is instead a fictional rewrite, borrowing or plagiarism of this older Assyrian treaty.”
“Of course”? This discovery “suggests”? This is not science, it is a witch hunt. Murdock (and his devoted fans) have decided that the Bible is not true, and are searching for “evidence” to prove their faith. How is this different from Christians who believe that the Bible *is* true, and who search for evidence? Simple: it’s not different. Murdock and his disciples are not even true atheists, here– they are anti-Christians (or anti-Jews, if you will, but that carries significant racist connotations).
Of course, the whole issue is irrelevant to anyone who is not searching for an excuse to ignore God. ;p
So, why do Murdock and his flock attack God and His Word? Perhaps, because people fear that which they do not understand. The *good* news is that perfect love drives out fear–God loves you all, and all you have to do is accept God’s love, and you won’t be have to be afraid anymore.
Perhaps, though, because they realize that if God does exist, as the Bible says, then they are responsible to Him. There are those who truly would rather “rule in hell than serve in heaven”– sadly, they will find out too late that the ruler of hell is the one who suffers the most, there.
“…hard, scientific evidence…” Please. Science can not prove non-existence (at least, according to the scientific method), so as soon as you try to disprove God or His Word, you’re not scientists anymore. (This really would be laughable, did it not have such a high price in souls.)
First, Dorothy M. Murdock is a woman. If you don’t know that, what exactly do you know about her work. How can you criticize something you know nothing about ?
The history of humankind is way longer than what they want us to believe, and way more complex than what you catholic bigots know.
There are lots of different positions about God stated here. Mine is that yes there is a driving force behind the universe, but no it is not the one they talk about in the Bible, or in any other holy book that I know of for that matter.
They all think too small. To talk properly about God, one should consider the matter completely independently from planet Earth. When we consider God, we should talk in universal terms, not in terms of something that is only true on some planet at some time.
Instead, you religious maniacs are enclosed in a small box, and you don’t want anyone to tell you there is more outside the box than there is inside. I wish you could come out here to have a outside look at what’s going on inside that box.
“First, Dorothy M. Murdock is a woman. If you don’t know that, what exactly do you know about her work. How can you criticize something you know nothing about ?”
So what? I don’t need to know *her* work in order to recognize deception. She is still manipulating words to pander to those who don’t *want* to believe in the God of the Bible. Like I said, “could” is meaningless except from the mouth of those sowing discord.
“The history of humankind is way longer than what they want us to believe, and way more complex than what you catholic bigots know.”
According to Darwin’s Church of Evolution, sure. As to the charge of bigotry, well, Faith in Evolution has kicked Faith in God out of your schools, and soon enough, out of your country. Who’s the bigot?
“To talk properly about God, one should consider the matter completely independently from planet Earth.”
Why? Says who? Will you write your own holy scriptures on the matter? If God says that this planet is special, that Man is special, then why argue with Him?
You attack the Bible because you don’t like the way it claims you to be responsible for your own decisions. Here’s the thing: Somebody wrote that Book. Examined objectively, there’s no way to claim that it is historically or scientifically disprovable. (Go ahead, try it: to find historical proof that those things “never happened”, you’ll be relying on science… which can not prove impossibility. It does, however, do a good job of proving the *possibility* of an aweful lot–except for macro-evolution, curiously enough.) The Bible presents a God Who is different from all the other gods that people have written books about, and certainly different from this “universal god” concept; it presents a God Who is just, but loving and merciful. He only asks that we accept His salvation–but to do that, we must admit that we are sinners, that we are imperfect, that we can NOT save ourselves. Ooh, that stings the pride, now doesn’t it?
The only “box” is the one that people keep trying to stuff God into: the original sin was arrogance, and not a whole lot has changed in the past 10,000 years.
I have enjoyed the ride.Please the way you explain the truth is so simple.Most of the objections to religion is because of the religious gestapo’s manipulations and inconsistencies. God bless
Stef, spirituality does not imply on worshiping any external supposed deity. I suppose my statements quite clearly asserted on the worshiping of the “individual” God, as nothing else is worthy of worship.
The only possible “misleading” and interpolated, or tampered religious scripture would be the Bible. It is self contradictory, and it does not comply with any concievable logic. I actually agree with Serge, regarding the inauthenticity of the Bible and its other ramifications.
Even if Chinese were discussing Latin grammar, it would be redundant to think of it as an insulting activity. The purpose of language is to communicate, pertaining to the freedom of usage of any linguistic communication establishment.
The verse you quote, is not authentic in any case. Jesus, in other authentic sources, does not claim to be the biological son of God (The Quran) Perhaps you may not have refered to the context. Or the translation is inaccurately replicated. The translators may not have related to the word stated in the original copy, when translating. It is quite clearly an assertive statement, and you may never be able to proccess the actual meaning of the verse without reference to the preceding context. Why does God, Himself say, He does not have any relation, with ANY being. He also says he does not have any offspring. He does say He has no partners. This is the fundamental proceeding to acquiring faith in God.
I have a question for Conway Redding:
When you were born, you could not conceive the thought of identifying your orignation source. How exactly did you agree with certain people claiming to be your parents? How did you know, those certain people would actually be your parents? Or you may have originated from their orgasms? Why do you not believe, God is the only source of creation of everything we visually comprehend/not visually comprehend?
As is my wont, Shayan, your comments are enclosed in quotes; my replies are not.
“I have a question for Conway Redding:
When you were born, you could not conceive the thought of identifying your orignation source.”
Nope, that understanding came later, and I accepted my “origination source” as being my parents because they were the ones who fed, clothed, and housed me, and arranged for my other needs, both physical and psychological, to be met.
“How exactly did you agree with certain people claiming to be your parents? How did you know, those certain people would actually be your parents? Or you may have originated from their orgasms?”
Well, from the orgasm of at least one of them, my father.
I never, by any stretch of the use of the English language, knew that certain people “would” actually be my parents. All I knew, when my consciousness had become well enough formed for me to to know anything at all, was that they said they were my parents, and everybody I had contact with agreed that that was the case. That they might not have been my parents never occurred to me, just as it probably wouldn’t have occurred to me had I actually been adopted as an infant. Later, of course, I had access to a birth certificate which recorded my birth at a certain hospital, and named so-and-so as my mother, and another so-and-so as my father. I didn’t learn about the facts of human sexual reproduction until much later.
“Why do you not believe, God is the only source of creation of everything we visually comprehend/not visually comprehend?”
Because, Shayan, as I have been at pains to point out in other postings to this site, which you may have read but have evidently not understood, belief in the real existence of a deity, endowed with such attributes as sentience, omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience, absolute wisdom, absolute goodness, absolute compassion, and absolute mercifulness, and who created this frame of existence and all that’s in it, both, as the Catholic credo says, visible and invisible, and who also oversees his creation in a daily and personal way, inevitably leads to inconsistencies and illogicalities so glaring that I cannot tolerate them. Furthermore, I doubt the sanity, or at least the capacity for critical thinking, of anyone who can tolerate those inconsistencies and illogicalities.
It seems to me that it is incumbent upon those who profess a belief in the real existence of this deity (God, Allah, Jehovah, Jahweh, Elohim,The Almighty, The Great Spirit, whatever), to reconcile that belief with the presence in this deity’s creation, of a multitude of unpleasantnesses, such as malaria, epidermolysis bullosa, scleroderma, glioblastoma multiforme, supranuclear palsy, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or even the common cold, to name just a few, not to mention the deaths of millions, over the millennia, in various earthquakes, floods, tornados, typhoons, monsoons, droughts, and famines; and, finally, at the individual level, such events as the kidnapping, rape, and murder by burial alive of 11-year-old Jessica Lunsford by John Couey, and the kidnapping, sodomization, and beheading of 7-year-old Adam Walsh by Ottis Toole. And please, before you trot out that tired old argument, per Stef Coulombe, about the deaths of Lunsford and Walsh being attributable to two scumbags exercising their God-given free-will, consider how you might possibly explain how the free-will of their victims figures into what befell these two children.
All in all, it just doesn’t add up.
Conway Redding
The Church of Conway Redding, the fictional character, seems determined to misrepresent “free will”. Where does it say, or who has ever said, that *my* free will is supposed to protect me from the free will of everybody else? What kind of psychotic universe would that be?
If I were the only human being, and everybody else were a figment of my imagination, I could expect that kind of logic to make sense.
“And please, before you trot out that tired old argument, per Stef Coulombe, about the deaths of Lunsford and Walsh being attributable to two scumbags exercising their God-given free-will, consider how you might possibly explain how the free-will of their victims figures into what befell these two children.”
Those who believe in Conway Redding might re-evaluate their belief, if they carefully examine this quotation.
A) According to the Redding Doctrine, there is no God, and therefore no “God-given” free-will; perhaps the assumption is that we all have free will anyway, in which case… the criminals did *not* exercise their free will in harming those kids? (I don’t understand.)
B) The Redding Faith refuses to accept God’s existence, and then suggests that if God does exist, He must be evil, because He doesn’t automatically absolve all sin and simultaneously protect each and every one of us from each and every *other* one? Try this for comparison: there is no flurngnarb. However, should flurngnarb exist, it must be evil. Otherwise, flurngnarb must absolutely follow my definition of its existence, which states that being good and powerful flurngnarb, it must satisfy every wish of every human, cat and mouse, which will obviously be contradictory (what with the cats wanting to eat the mice and the mice wanting not to be eaten) and therefore impossible–and therefore, flurngnarb can not exist. Or, it must be evil.
The Church of Redding may want to recant any suggestions that he once studied psychology, or logic, and redefine their imaginary god to being just a bitter, cynical old man.
Stef, you’re really good. You made me break my silence. That bit about “The Church of Conway Redding” had me laughing so much that I almost fell out of my chair. As I write, I am still laughing! This is hilarious. But Conway has had his laugh, so I feel quite justified in having mine. If laughter is the best medicine, I should be fully cured now.
I believe that all that needed to be said has already been said, but it will be interesting and fun to watch the ‘convoluted’ arguments that are sure to follow. Thanks for this and God bless, Carl
“Other authentic sources…” Look, it’s quite simple: the Bible claims to be the only inspired word of God. Believe it, or don’t; you can’t believe in what the Qu’ran says, and then complain that the Bible doesn’t agree–they are mutually exclusive faiths! The Christian faith is in Christ, Jesus, the SON OF GOD; Islam worships a DIFFERENT god. If the Bible is true, then the Qu’ran is NOT; if the Qu’ran is true, then the Bible is not. (Some Muslims claim that the Bible, or at least a part of it, is “also” holy scripture–but I tell you the truth: there are countries where I would be executed for claiming that “part” of the Qu’ran is Christian holy scripture!)
Now, as to “spirituality” not being related to worshipping an “external” deity, I’m not sure I follow you: at the risk of offending, you do know that Mohammed selected one “deity” (the moon god) out of a whole bunch of others, and proclaimed it to be Allah? How is that different from me choosing a white porcelain idol instead?
As to the Bible being self-contradictory: “there are none so blind as those who will not see.” This has been discussed enough in other places; if your mind is closed, nothing I say will make a difference.
“Even if Chinese were discussing Latin grammar, it would be redundant to think of it as an insulting activity.”
It would be “redundant”, period–nothing could come of it, just as devout atheists discussing God will not accidentally stumble onto the truth. You perhaps don’t know that much Chinese, but because of the character (not alphabet) system, they can’t really decline nouns or conjugate verbs; the whole basis for Latin grammar is irrelevant to Chinese. For those with absolutely no “foreign” language experience, it would be hard to even grasp such concepts as “spelling” and “subject-verb agreement”. The best they could accomplish is to express their ignorance of such things, just as atheists discussing the nature of God.
Do you understand the comparison, now?
It is my belief that if Islam follow the teachings of the Quran and the Quran teaches love and knowledge of God then they teach and learn the love and goodness of The True God. Just the same if those who profess to being Christian follow the teachings of the bible and believe in Christ Jesus they too worship the True God.
I do not believe it is for mankind to refute another faith if that faith honours God and produces good Godly qualities. There are probably many who think they adhere to the Quran who work against the teaching therein and there are probably many differing Christian sects who work against the teachings within the Bible.
Although Muslims call God Allah and the many Christian sects dictate many different names and ideologies in their references to God it is my belief that God answers all who call on him in righeousness, having faith and love for God and neighbour.
I dislike the manner in which I have witnessed many who believe and are taught to dictate using inappropriate scripture to overturn the beliefs of others.
Paul wrote to the Hebrew congregation, Hebrews 8:10,11 “For this is the covenant that I shall covenant with the house of Israel I will put my laws in their mind and in there hearts I will write them and I will become their God and they themselves will become my people. And they will by no means teach each one his brother or his fellow citizen”
What does that mean to you? I think it means we as well as the Israelites must all teach ourselves from the writings and we will then receive instruction and direction from God regarding his will for us.
I appreciate some of the comments you’ve made here, but:
“It is my belief that if Islam follow the teachings of the Quran and the Quran teaches love and knowledge of God then they teach and learn the love and goodness of The True God.”
*IF* the Qu’ran teaches love and knowledge of God… then what Mohammed wrote is not the Qu’ran. I am not an Arabic scholar, nor have I studied the Qu’ran in its entirety, but what I have seen of it makes it pretty clear that Allah is not the God of the Bible.
I’m certain to be denounced for this, but what I’ve learned about Allah is that Mohammed picked one idol, the Moon God, out of dozens of other “gods”, and he declared that the Moon God was “the only true god”. (There’s more, but this may not be the place to discuss it.)
So, I’m afraid we must disagree: Jesus claimed to be the Way, the Truth and the Life, and that *NO ONE* could go to the Father but through Him (Jesus). God still has a special relationship with His chosen people, Israel, but Jesus’ words are clear and unalterable.
Regarding Hebrews 8, yes, I believe it means that we must “teach ourselves” but you *MUST* remember the context: this is the “new covenant” wherein Jesus Christ is the “High Priest”. The reason we can go directly to God is because we have Jesus in our hearts. It does NOT mean that you are not to “teach” your brother/fellow, when that brother/fellow does not know Christ!
Nowhere does Jesus nullify the principle of teaching, preaching, witnessing, …; don’t forget the Great Commission!
God bless, eh!
“I am not an Arabic scholar, nor have I studied the Qu’ran in its entirety, but what I have seen of it makes it pretty clear that Allah is not the God of the Bible.”
You appear not to have looked at the Qur’an at all, if you do not know that the God of the Qur’an is unquestionably the God of Abraham.
You apparently also do not know that the Arabic Bibles of Christians in the Promised Land do not render the Hebrew Yod-He-Vau-He as “Jehovah” or “God,” but as “ALLAH.”
The Arabs of Muhammad’s time knew Allah as the One Supreme God, not as a “moon god.” The claim that “ALLAH” was the Arab “moon god” is absolutely false.
Perhaps you should consider your sources.
The God of the Qur’an (thanks for correcting my spelling) is believed by many to be the God of Abraham, but that is not “unquestionable”. The belief that a human, Mohammed, could be himself “unquestionable” is so far from what the God of the Bible says that it should be blatantly obvious: Allah is not the God of the Bible.
You may claim that Abraham’s son Ishmael was the founder of the Arabic nations, and many believe that God’s blessing on Ishmael was what made the Arabic nations great, but that by no means says that Ishmael himself believed in God, nor that God sent his “ultimate prophet” to the Arabic nations exclusively.
Many cultures have believed in “one supreme god” but sadly did NOT believe in the *true* “one supreme god”. (Many would call “mother nature” their “one supreme god”, for example.)
As to the Arabic-language Bible… so what? The Chinese Bible refers to God as the one, supreme “God of Heaven”. That does NOT mean that the “one, supreme God of Heaven” worshipped in China several thousand years ago is the God of the Bible.
As to the Arabs of Muhammad’s time… well, if they truly knew Allah as the One Supreme God then what did they need the Prophet for? What history I’ve read of the time shows fairly clearly that there were indeed many gods, largely worshipped as idols, and Muhammad came along and *told* people to worship “one true god”. It’s possible that all our historical archives are entirely wrong on this… but then, it’s also possible that all of yours are wrong, too. It’s the tradition of winning cultures to change historical records to show how they were “right” and their opponents were “wrong”.
My sources are not infallible, but they are consistent, and in other matters quite reliable. (Source*s*, in this case, emphasising that this has been checked with a number of unrelated sources. I would be willing to share the documentation, but as it’s been a while since I’ve looked at the material, it may take some time to put together; of course, this will be seen as a cop-out, but there’s not much I can do about that.)
Just a question: where do you stand on Allah’s supposed daughters? In this matter, I have less “evidence”, and I’m certain no Muslim will even consider the possibility of Muhammad “correcting” what was recorded in the Qur’an. However, there are considerable amounts of fiction written about Jesus as well (like Him sleeping with Mary Magdalene and having kids), so I figure it can’t hurt to ask.
Dear Stef
Thank you for replying. I will have to buy the quran and read it before giving an informed opinion. I thought I could get away with my “ifs.”
Although I am limited in knowledge of the Quran I know Muslims do not deny Jesus. I know they don’t recognise Jesus as Divine but neither do many who profess western beliefs.
In fact in Britain there are a great majority who deny both God and Christ even professing Christians do not have the desire to know or express any belief.
As Jesus said to the Pheonician woman Matthew 15:24 “I was not sent to any but the lost house of Israel”. The Israelite scribes and pharisees who were teaching the people should have recognised and honored Jesus but instead they tried to kill him (once for curing a mans withered hand on the Sabath Mathew 12:14), and another time for saying “Elijah was sent not to the Israelite women but to Zeraphath in the land of Sidon and there were many lepers but he cured only Naaman the man of Syria” (All those in the synagogue rose up and hurried him outside the city in order to throw him down headlong over the brow of the mountain. Luke 4:25) The reason the heavens was shut for three years and six months was because during the reign of Ahab and Jezabelle the Israelites were not faithful to God.
This being the behaviour of persons whom Jesus came to ie Israelites who did succeed in putting the Son of God to death and Modern day Christians who claim Jesus died on the cross but give no glory or praise to God or Christ.. Is it not therefore possible that Jesus is denied less by those following the teachings of the Quran than by those who profess to be the Chosen of God.
Don’t you think that if we are the chosen ones we should be a light to the Nations just as the Israelites should have been. And don’t you think if we want to claim Christian supremacy we should be a living example of truth, goodness and righteousness? Do you see that in our Christian society today? Because I don’t.
I could “profess” to being Buddhist, and be a mass murderer; I could profess to being Muslim, and believe the Qur’an to be entirely fictional; I could profess to being Christian, and not believe that Jesus was the Son of God. In all those cases I would be a flat-out liar.
A Christian is, by derivation of the word, a “little Christ”. A follower of Jesus. How can I follow Jesus and believe that He lied about being the Son of God?
As Jesus Himself said, even the Devil believes in God. So what if somebody believed that Jesus was a real person? I believe that Muhammad and Prince Buddha (sorry, I forget his proper name) were real people too. I do NOT believe that they were divine, or divinely inspired, or infallible, or prophets… and that is why I am neither Buddhist nor Muslim.
People lie about their beliefs all the time. Some “christians” will pretend to believe in Jesus but not believe what He said about salvation; they will find out how wrong they were when they experience how real Hell is.
True “Christian” society is society that follows Christ; look for Him there, and you will find Him. Neither England nor the U.S. are Christian countries, in that the country as a whole is not based on faith in Jesus. As to Muslims honouring Jesus by doing what He said… well, what does the Bible say about “working your way” to salvation?
It is not a comparative scale; it is not a matter of being light gray instead of dark. It is black and white: either you believe, or you don’t. You can’t be “half saved” by believing that Jesus was a real person.
Remember, the Devil believes that Jesus was a real person.
Even if a believer in the Qur’an insists that he honours the God of Abraham, and that he honours the teachings of “the prophet Jesus”, if he refuses to believe that “…God so loved the world, that He sent His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish…” Well, you should get the picture.
I fully agree that many who call themselves “christians” are liars. However, that doesn’t mean that God’s going to “lower the bar” and let “partial” believers in. It’s not a bell-curve, or a “top 50%”, or a “fill the seats with the runners-up”.
Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. NO ONE comes to the Father but by me.” Sugar-coating it is lying.
It is sad that so many “Christians” do not live as they believe, and even sadder that so many more do not believe as their “religious affiliation” would suggest; saddest of all, is that many will blame Christ for the actions of fake christians, and choose to reject salvation because they’re too lazy to search for truth. If I eat one bad apple and decide to never try another one, or even if I eat several apples, and they all taste terrible, I still have to deal with the fact that some people I see are going to enjoy eating apples. If I starve to death because I stop trying… it’s my own “damned” fault.
God will deal with the fake christians. Let us look to our own witness, and watch that we do not contradict Jesus in our efforts to spread His Word.
God bless.
Hi Stef
There is a great commission given to Christians. The 1st century Christians learned from Jesus’ example 1st Thessalonians 1:5-7 because the good news we preach did not turn up among YOU with speech alone but also with power and with holy spirit and with strong conviction and those listening became imitators and an example to those who listened. Paul writes how the faithful disciples preached Christ risen. The Quran doesn’t deny this.
What I observe with the Moslem people is there are Shiite, Sunni and converted Christians who adhere to the teachings written in the Quran. I find no reason why these people (who abide by the teachings and are therefore following a good moral code given by God to Muhammad the Prophet of Islam)should be dictated to by those professing to be Christians.
The Moslems’ who live by the teachings in the Quran and the Christians who live by the teachings in the bible do not need to dictate to each other. There will be discrepancies in application and interpretations of both. Those whom God loves and who love Him will keep the commandments. We have to be careful not to overstep the commandments and teach commands of men and not of God Matthew 15:3
The Hebrew Scriptures have many different names for God so why should we not accept that Our Almighty God gave the Sacred Name Allah and the teachings in the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad?
If you read Galations 4:23:31 There are two covenants. Unless you are one who will die faithfull in Christ and merit everlasting life in the Kingdom of the Heavens (The 1st resurection the covenant through Jesus,given through the promise given to Isaac through Sarah. This covenant incorporates 144,000 who died faithful in Christ and they will rule with Christ over the earth and bring about peace and eventually perfection to all earth’s inhabitants. All discrepancies will be cleared up. Only what is correct and true will stand.
If like me you don’t qualify for the 1st promise you have the promise set before all mankind which was given to Ishmael and Hagar which the scripture says corresponds with Jerusalem today (as spoken in 1st century)this is the promise to all who will inherit the earth. This is the second covenant. If we are to be sharers in that 2nd covenant we must all look to God, praise him, and be in subjection to him in peace.
“If like me you don’t qualify for the 1st promise you have the promise set before all mankind which was given to Ishmael and Hagar which the scripture says corresponds with Jerusalem today (as spoken in 1st century)this is the promise to all who will inherit the earth.”
Who says that the first covenant applies to only 144,000? And who would want the second promise instead of the first one? You may accept Christ, and be a child of God, or you may reject Him, and be a slave; as the slaves will NOT share in the inheritance, rejecting Him is acceptance of Hell.
John 3:16 says “WHOSOEVER believes in Him”, not just 144,000. Believing in Him means not accepting any other God, and again, Allah is NOT the God of the Bible, nor was Mohammad His prophet; no prophet of God is infallible, as humans can not be perfect in this life (only the Son of God, Jesus, could be perfect). Furthermore, the God of the Bible would most certainly not tolerate the suggestion that a prophet could be infallible when that same “prophet” is documented as having significantly more wives (for example) than his own scriptures allow. There are of course other issues with the “prophet”, but again, this belief that he could be infallible is what really makes him stand out as NOT a prophet of God. Does God use imperfect people? Of course; there is no other kind. However, suggesting that the God of the Bible appeared to Mohammad and authored the Qur’an is suggesting that Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross was NOT ENOUGH. God’s own Son died for our sins; what more could you ask?
Anybody who tells you that “Christ dying for your sins isn’t enough to save you” is lying. I don’t know who taught you that only 144,000 Christians can be part of God’s salvation through Jesus’ death on the cross, but it simply isn’t true. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, so that WHOSOEVER BELIEVES IN HIM shall not perish but have eternal life.” That includes YOU if you choose to accept Him. It’s YOUR choice.
Likewise, rejecting Him is your choice; it doesn’t matter if you serve Allah, Buddha or Krishna–rejecting Jesus’ salvation is CHOOSING damnation. Jesus didn’t claim to be “one of the ways”, and if the only begotten Son of God and the Prophet disagree on the matter, you should be able to guess which one is right.
Your choice.
I’ve got three comments here:
“I can only tell you a true story.” Any evidence for that?
“He” should be capitalised only at the start of a sentence!!!
Everything after the “true story” seems like complete bullshit to me.
Grammar note: words, particularly nouns and pronouns (but also adjectives, …), may be capitalized in order to show respect to the one being referred to. Have you never noticed the capitalization in “Her Majesty the Queen”? (No, it’s not the same as simply capitalizing titles, like “Doctor”, which are used to replace names.)
We show respect to our Lord and God by capitalizing references to Him. It would seem, though, that respect is something you have little interest in.
Greetings
This comment is from Baha’i Author, William Sears : “….suffering, pain and persecution are only unbearable to those who had no purpose in life, no hope for the future; if they were withstood for the love of God, then the pain became pleasure in this world, and the sufferings became a means of being closer to God in the next.”
And this comment is from me. Suffering still stimulates much humility, detachment from the world, and sincerity of prayer and heart. It can bring us to our knees. It stimulates seeking. Truth seekers, seeking the Love of God. This attracts His Holy Spirit. Which heals our breaking hearts.
This doesn’t mean that such a “stimulation” isn’t painful. O’ Contrare ! But this does mean that once we urgently deepen our love and intimacy with God, our suffering and pain is transcended or transformed into a new bliss and joy ; into greater faith ; and eventually into the Most Great Peace, which surpasses our understanding.
Thy Kingdom comes !
Cheers
No, but you can’t completely affirm, or accurately conclude the people claiming to be your parents, as a 100% correct. You wouldn’t be able to regurgitate the information of the time period you were born. Hence, you can’t quite personally conclude them as your biological parents (with no consideration to DNA testing).
Similar to this case, if a certain amount of people verify your origination source (witnesses, probably), for your compelling to the belief of originating from two entities, and you seemingly comply with their compelling. Why not understand/consider the information God’s followers provide, regarding the existence of God, and the basic requirements for ease acheived in this partiuclar life.
Such as: If two people claim to be the parents of a child, he would most probably admit to their claim. But, if a group of people ask the child to believe in one God, he would most probably not immediately/imminently consider their ethical welcoming for the belief in God. Why not? God also provides you the basic neccessities for technological advancement, so that man may contrive certain contraptions for ease/pleasure experienced in all aspects of life, eg. Copper, Iron, magnetic materials etc. In other words, everything.
Biological infectious occurences can be counter-acted. The origin of most diseases are related to the acts of man, eg. Diabetes.
Natural “disasters” occur for specific reasons. The occurance of Earthquakes is generally related to the inlclusion of more land mass on the solid surface of this planet, to balance with the sea level (regarding our contributions to the increase in the sea level).
A question regarding the Christian belief in Jesus/Isa as the biological descendant of God:
Why did God prefer to have only “one”, single child, or only “one” wife? Could he not have more than “one” of either relationship classification? Or maybe I should ask His “cousins” about this particular question.
Conway, I would recommend you to read/logically understand the actual text of the verity compatible Quran. I do believe you may have lost interest in acquiring knowledge referent to religion/spirituality because of the mathematical contradictions, logical contradictions and reality obdurating text in the Bible.
Unfortunately, Muslims do not represent their religion as, in a desirable procedure. Personally, I wouldn’t consider the abundant populous of the Muslim community, as compliant with spiritual requirements from God. In my personal opinion, most “Muslims” are not even complying with the actual spiritual establishment structured by God.
Please, do not be decieved by their ignorant proclivities, and google for Quranic verses, and acquire knowledge regarding the requisites presented by God, and not confound yourself by the irrational information in the Bible.
P.S: You do not have to convert to other “religions”, but only involve in an endeavour to attain the correct knowledge.
Hi Mr. Khan,
All Christians are not perfectly following teachings of Christ nor are Budhists following Budha. But you will never find anything wrong with the teachings or Christ, or Budha, or Krishna. You will never find Christ advocating violence to correct anybody- On the other hand, He exhorts you to love even your enemy.
But in contrast, the Koran exhorts Muslims to take revenge on enemies, and kill all non-Muslims, and later lie saying that Islam is a religion of Peace.
Can we ever hope of having Peaceful Muslims, if the book they read and follow is full of violence?
You invite non-Muslims to read Koran, and know more about Islamic teachings. But will a non Muslim be able to say that in a Muslim country? Can a Christian or a Hindu or a budhist build a church or temple or pagoda in the Islamic republic of Saudi Arabia? While a Moslem can build any number of Mosques in the US, or India, a Hindu country, or in Japan, a Budhist country. Just imagine how the world would be if all nations became Islamic.
Whichever way you look at it, Islam is designed by a very evil mind, to bring destruction to mankind.
Hi Perry,
You say:
“There’s a lot of sickness and sadness in this world…How can God let it go on?…Well, I can’t give you an answer…”
In other words, you admit that there is EVIL in this world, but you do not know why it exists.
The answer to the age-old question as to where evil came from and what it’s purpose is, is found plainly in scripture. (You won’t “see” it in your King James version, cause it is hidden in faulty, white-washed translation)
Here it is in a proper translation:
Ecclesiastes 1:13 [Concordant Literal O.T.]
“It is an EXPERIENCE of EVIL God has GIVEN to the sons of humanity, to HUMBLE them BY IT.”
That word “experience” in the Hebrew means “occupation”, (i.e. – job). Also, that word “evil” is the Hebrew word for “evil”, as is used in Genesis: “the tree of the knowledge of good and EVIL [Heb: RA].”
Notice it again. The Evil experience we face on this earth everyday was GIVEN to mankind directly from God and is used to humble us BY it [by evil]. Evil is therefore a TOOL in the hand of God. Evil did not come from some angelic being named “Lucifer”, who then became the devil. That is a complete MYTH.
God creates evil:
Isaiah 45:7
“I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create EVIL [Heb: RA]: I the LORD do ALL these things.”
Second witness:
Amos 3:6b
“…shall there be EVIL [Heb: RA] in a city, and the LORD hath NOT done it?”
Yes it is the Lord that designed evil, but He designed it for a specific purpose; a righteous purpose. All evil is TEMPORARY!
The idea that Adam was created a perfect spiritual being is a total lie and has caused untold confusion in the mainstream church. He wasn’t perfect who then BECAME imperfect. He was “marred in the hands of the potter” from the very beginning. He was NAKED (a spiritual symbol for those who can see) in that Garden! He was made from the DIRT of the ground (another spiritual symbol for those who can see)!
He didn’t realize he was “naked” [physically AND spiritually] until He sinned! Why does this matter? It matters a TON! It proves that God’s purpose IS being accomplished and has NEVER wavered. God is not on plan B, C or D. He is STILL on plan A and that plan A WILL be FULLY realized at the “consummation” [1 Cor 15:22-28]
Here is that plan of God in a nutshell:
– God is MAKING [present future] man in His own image (a long collective process). Every man is included and no one will be eternally excluded.
– He made man “marred in the hand of the potter” [Jer 18:4]. Why? So that man would sin and DIE. So that they can experience evil, in order for them to be HUMBLED. Another reason is so that God can SHOW us His attributes of love, mercy, long-suffering, etc. It is through experience that we understand His attributes. Example: How can God show man His mercy unless men SINNED against Him? See the point?
-God, then “makes it [YOU] again another vessel, as seemed GOOD [see the contrast?] to the potter [God] to make it.” [Jer 18:4b]
The final result will be the salvation of ALL mankind FROM from this experience of evil, sin and death.
Yes, every man who has ever lived or ever will live will be made righteous and given immortality at “the consumation” – Read Romans 5:19, 1 Cor 15:22-28, 1 Tim 2:4-6 & 4:10)
And yes, that means this whole “hell/eternal torments” doctrine is also a complete and utter LIE. Not ONCE does the scriptures teach such an idea. (Too big a study for a blog comment!)
I urge you to go to bibletruths.com (not my site). The material there will challenge every truth-seeking christian! There is nothing on the Internet quite like it.
BTW: I absolutely LOVED your work on how DNA proves an intelligent creator. It was spot on!
Hi J.D.Southern,
it seems as if I blurbed something similar to your explanation of ‘Evil’ – “Say : All things are of God” – (only afterwards I found enough humility to read some of the other posts)
Perhaps you would like to expand on the concept of :
“the consumation” ??
Cheers
Darryl
1) You assume that RA translates directly as EVIL; look it up, and you’ll find it is also used for things like natural disasters and plagues (which is what fits the context of the verses you reference).
2) Jesus tells people repeatedly to “repent or perish”; if there is no “perishment”, then Jesus was a liar.
“And yes, that means this whole “hell/eternal torments” doctrine is also a complete and utter LIE. Not ONCE does the scriptures teach such an idea.”
This is a lie fostered by those who refuse to accept responsibility for their own choices. Jesus uses the idea of hell in parables, and He certainly warns that there will be those who will be shut out of heaven. If every last human being will be saved, regardless of his own choices, then there is no free will after all: “do what you want, but in the end, you’ll get dragged kicking and screaming to heaven, like it or not”. What a load of rubbish.
Bad things happen; we live in a fallen world. God can use those bad things for His glory, and for our good–“in all things God works for the good of those who love Him” (Romans 8:28). However, to claim that God created evil, to claim that He intentionally created a flawed Adam so that Adam was predestined to fall from grace, is to show that you do not know God. Claiming that God does evil things, well, that comes dangerously close to the sin against the Spirit, in my understanding.
One more time: IF you speak the truth, then you may as well not waste your time, because in the end it won’t make any difference–“everyone will be saved anyway”. IF you are wrong, then those who believe your words and decide not to accept Christ (“why bother following all those rules, if there’s no eternal damnation anyway?”) are going to hell because YOU encouraged them to–you are doing the devil’s work for him. Think carefully about *why* you do this, and pray.
What if ‘evil and suffering’ was simply created by our All-Powerful God for the promotion and establishment of goodness ? IE the goodness of our spiritual development – our greatest education while on earth – our progressive movement, individually and collectively, towards Heaven in the next life, and towards creating ‘heaven on earth’ as well.IE “Thy Kingdom come – Thy Will be done on earth as it is in heaven” is God’s long-term Plan for us here. Evil and suffering is ‘His’ catalyst – ‘Her’ Divine teaching tool – our God-ordained remedy. It leads us to true love and unity.
The gift of free will indicates to me that He wants us to learn to volunteer to love one another, to surrender and align our will with ‘His’ from the desire of our hearts, and not the duty of obeying Laws out of fear of punishment/Hell, or even the rewards of ‘going to Heaven’. No doubt God’s Laws are necessary to guide us, to train us, until love becomes ‘second-nature’, such that our obedient behaviour eventually becomes the norm. Such that evil and suffering diminish – replaced by health and joy, and heaven on earth, such that “every tear is wiped from our eyes”
No doubt our All-Powerful God could eliminate all the evil in the world in an instant, but that would also eliminate ‘Her’whole earthly education process. That would be like building a great university for teaching knowledge and wisdom and love, filling it with Divine professors of God’s One Holy Principle, and billions of worthy students, and then giving everyone a degree, without any study/problem-solving/exams. What would we learn ?
God knows what ‘She’ is doing. His (seemingly) evil-Plan is perfect. It makes no difference whether we like it, understand it, dismiss it, or not. It is the ultimate driving force that transforms animalisitc humans into Holy Humans.
Or as Baha’u’llah once said of God : “My calamity is My providence, outwardly it is fire and vengeance, but inwardly it is light and mercy. Hasten thereunto that thou mayest become an eternal light and an immortal spirit. This is My command unto thee, do thou observe it.”
And again : “The true lover yearneth for tribulation even as doth the rebel for forgiveness and the sinful for mercy.”
Cheers
Darryl, it seems to me that an omnipotent, omniprescient, omnipresent, all-wise, all-compassionate deity could devise some better pedagogical technique than that of inflicting suffering and evil on humankind. With the infinite resources presumably at this deity’s disposal, he/she/it could impart whatever lessons he/she/it deems necessary for us to learn, without the infliction of any human misery whatsoever. To say otherwise is to say that this deity is acting under some kind of constraint(s), which would contradict the usual claim that he/she/it is all-powerful. I, for one, am not interested in any lesson the teaching of which would require, say, that 9-year-old Jessica Marie Lunsford be abducted by John Couey, raped, sodomized, and then left to suffocate while buried alive; and I disdain any deity who undertakes to teach anything at all to anybody whatsoever by allowing such an event.
Thanks Conway.
There will come a time when such repulsive, evil and barbaric behaviour will become extremely rare and even cease to be. Yet for now it is difficult to understand why such “evil” is so rampant, or that an All-Powerful God allows it. One perspective is that we are collectively evolving spiritually and humanity is currently in the darkest turmoil of our adolescence. We will, and are, entering our maturity stage, where evil will diminish, and the long-awaited Great Cycle of Peace and Love will finally be established on earth.
Another perspective is that we are unique amongst creation as we humans have a dual nature, a selfish and beastly self, or ego self, and a spiritual Self, which is drawn to true love and unity. This inner battle is ongoing. This is the classic battle of good and evil. The inner/spiritual war of “Jihad” – our inner “believer” and “infidel” conflict.
Abdu’l-Baha explains it so : “Man is in the highest degree of materiality, and at the beginning of spirituality; that is to say, he is the end of imperfection and the beginning of perfection. He is at the last degree of darkness, and at the beginning of light; that is why it has been said that the condition of man is the end of the night and the beginning of day, meaning that he is the sum of all the degrees of imperfection, and that he possesses the degrees of perfection. He has the animal side as well as the angelic side; and the aim of an educator is to so train human souls, that their angelic aspect may overcome their animal side. Then, if the divine power in man which is his essential perfection, overcomes the satanic power, which is absolute imperfection, he becomes the most excellent among the creatures; but if the satanic power overcomes the divine power, he becomes the lowest of the creatures. That is why he is the end of imperfection and the beginning of perfection. Not in any other of the species in the world of existence is there such a difference, contrast, contradiction, and opposition, as in the species of man.”
He also offers the (mind-bending?) mystical perspective that the whole physical creation is only a shadow-reality, (much like the concept of ‘Maya’), and evil is relative, and even non-existent ! ……as follows :
“Briefly, the intellectual realities, such as all the qualities and admirable perfections of man, are purely good, and exist. Evil is simply their nonexistence. So ignorance is the want of knowledge; error is the want of guidance; forgetfulness is the want of memory; stupidity is the want of good sense. All these things have no real existence.
In the same way, the sensible realities are absolutely good, and evil is due to their nonexistence — that is to say, blindness is the want of sight, deafness is the want of hearing, poverty is the want of wealth, illness is the want of health, death is the want of life, and weakness is the want of strength.
Nevertheless a doubt occurs to the mind — that is, scorpions and serpents are poisonous. Are they good or evil, for they are existing beings? Yes, a scorpion is evil in relation to man; a serpent is evil in relation to man; but in relation to themselves they are not evil, for their poison is their weapon, and by their sting they defend themselves. But as the elements of their poison do not agree with our elements — that is to say, as there is antagonism between these different elements, therefore, this antagonism is evil; but in reality as regards themselves they are good.
The epitome of this discourse is that it is possible that one thing in relation to another may be evil, and at the same time within the limits of its proper being it may not be evil. Then it is proved that there is no evil in existence; all that God created He created good. This evil is nothingness; so death is the absence of life. When man no longer receives life, he dies. Darkness is the absence of light: when there is no light, there is darkness. Light is an existing thing, but darkness is nonexistent. Wealth is an existing thing, but poverty is nonexisting.
Then it is evident that all evils return to nonexistence. Good exists; evil is nonexistent.”
(Abdu’l-Baha, Some Answered Questions, p. 263)
God is “Good”.
Evil is illusion and even delusion,like a nightmare !!
Cheers and Fears
my answer to the above question is that Allah-God gave us the freedom to do what ever we desire so when you see the evil its man who is doing it. but as is written in the bible/quran this world will end one day and everyone’s good and bad deeds are held into account. my believe is that everyday life is a test so you decide what you want to do but remember what you do whether evil or good you will be judged one day.
Mr Abdullahi Yussuf
I am searching for a previous comment I believe was from you Abdullahi Aussuf. You stated God’s Holy Name to be
“Yod-He-Vah-He”. Please would you explain to me where this name was sourced and the meaning. I believe this is the true rendering of God’s Great and Holy Name.
Thank you
I know that I am weak in mind and not very smart and do not have much skills or capacities.Now I am worried about my future job after leaving university two months later.In fact,I actually have no idea about my job,and I feel very bad and “hopeless”.
How can seek help from God?
张江伟 –
If you would like to seek help from God, the most important thing is to pray: talk to God and tell him how you feel about whats going on and ask him to speak his truth to you and then listen. Listening is hard but Psalm 46:10 says “Be still and know that I am God.” The second thing is to access a bible and read it. The third thing is to try to find a community of believers who will encourage you. Proverbs 15:22 says “Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisors they succeed.” And if I may encourage you, there is a verse in the Jer. 29:11,12 which says “For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.” It doesn’t matter if things look bad right now. God has made you for a purpose and will bring you through any hard times. Ask God about the things that are important to you and see what he says. I know that the time after leaving university is very stressful. I went through it myself three years ago. But God was and is faithful and has always helped me land on my feet.
Dear 张江伟
Don’t please feel hopeless. Life is very difficult for many people and it has been for me for most of my life. I know that feeling of despair but you must not give up. I can visualise work being difficult to find where you come from. There were times I could not see light at the end of the tunnel.
Trusting in God doesn’t dispel all the problems. But trusting and coming to know the true God strengthens and provides forebearance. Keep praying and I will pray for you also.
University was too difficult this was because you didn’t have enough faith in your abilities. A person needs lots of support from family and friends to achieve results in higher education. You were probably thinking everyone else was more intelligent than you. And you probably were in fear you would let your family down. All these negative vibes would keep you from achieving. Don’t stop seeking education if you can obtain it. You have the same ability as anyone else. It looks to me like you have knowledge of English although of a different nationality. That is a great achievement.
One religion I would say has excellent literature is “The Good News” by The United Church of God. Vist at http://www.GNmagazine.org.
God Bless