CRAPPING DEAD DINOSAUR MEAT....and the religious implications...

by Terry 125 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  Terry

  Are you saying that the life of a cow is far more importanrt that the life of the grass it consumes?

  Without sliding completely off the slippery slope......

  If we want to posit a superheroic GOD of love, justice and pussycat whiskers who can do ANYTHING HE WANTS......why not imagine a God who allows all living things to live off of sunlight as a source of energy instead

  of sinking teeth into another living thing?

  The reason we can't offer such a God up for belief and worship is that REALITY INTRUDES.

  We are stuck with the world as is and must reason our way backward from effect ot cause....effect to cause....in a chain which EITHER goes back to evolution (blind chance) or a peculiarly malevolent God fascinated by death.

  Are we such a God's idea of mindless entertainment such as WWF wrestling?
• 

  PSacramento

  We are stuck with the world as is and must reason our way backward from effect ot cause....effect to cause....in a chain which EITHER goes back to evolution (blind chance) or a peculiarly malevolent God fascinated by death

  Or a combination of evolution (not by blind chance) and a God that understand death in a far different way that we as humans do.

  As simply a change in energy state.

  We do we view the death of an antelope at the hands of a lion anymore horrific than than the death of grass at the chewing of a cow?
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  Xanthippe

  From Alfred Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam A. H. H., 1850. The quotation comes in Canto 56 (it is a very long poem) and refers to man:

  Who trusted God was love indeed
  And love Creation's final law
  Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
  With ravine, shriek'd against his creed
  
  'Tooth and claw' was already in use as a phrase denoting wild nature by Tennyson's day; for example, this piece from The Hagerstown Mail, March 1837:

  "Hereupon, the beasts, enraged at the humbug, fell upon him tooth and claw."
  
  A.H.H. was Tennyson's friend Arthur Henry Hallam and the poet used the elegy to pose questions about the apparent conflict between love as the basis of the Christian religion and the callousness of nature. If nature is purposeless and heartless, how can we believe in creation's final law? But, as a Christian, how could he not?

  The wide-ranging poem didn't attempt to provide an answer, but did become part of the debate over the major scientific and theological concern of Victorian thinkers - Charles Darwin's theories on natural selection, as expressed in The Origin of Species, 1859.

  www.phrases.org.uk
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  jgnat

  One of the reasons I moved up here on the fringes of wilderness is that I sensed a deep mystery. I wanted to understand this. This is one of the few places on earth where nature rules. People die if they don't pay attention. I've asked myself as I've observed, does Mother Nature care? On the one hand, I see the dance of Life spinning, spinning like a mad whirling dervish. None dare stop else perish. On the other I see how death stalks us on velvet feet, golden eyes impersonal, uncaring.

  
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  james_woods

  OK - so what Terry is saying (to me) seems to be this:

  If God created the predatory animals, then he created killers who were designed (by God) to kill each other.

  Terry thinks that this violates the general principle that God supposedly created all creatures sin-free, until man voluntarily sinned. This is a valid point, if you accept the premise that for man or animals in Eden - killing animals and eating their flesh would have been sin.

  My counterpoint (for the purpose of argument only) is that the old testament does not specifically state that killing animals, either by man or by other animals themselves - is in fact sin.

  Disclaimer - this on my part is purely for the purpose of the intellectual argument. To me it is perfectly obvious that the Garden of Eden story is totally religious myth and has no real meaning in the context of earth & biological historical science.
• 

  MeanMrMustard

  To me, this all seems like brain surgery....
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  Terry

  I actually wouldn't consider SIN as any part of the argument except in passing reference to the attribution of it as the introduction of death into an otherwise "perfect" setting.

  The problem with the definition of SIN (missing the mark) is that God sets the mark beyond the range of (the nature of) the created one. Effort (I try but fail) yields only failure (sin).

  JW's try to counter this by pretending a very strange premise: human perfection.

  As any engineer will tell you: perfect is as perfect does.

  In the superhuman effort (i.e. superstitious) to explain a less than perfect world (i.e. death) a sort of Rudyard Kiplingesque "just so" story is offered for naive children to absorb.

  DEATH is built in to Jehovah's cautionary warning to ADAM without any consideration for Adam's total lack of actual experience making moral decisions. What human parent would offer

  a child a choice between obedience and DEATH rather than a "time out"?
• 

  Terry

  To me, this all seems like brain surgery....

  Oops! wrong thread :)
• 

  PSacramento

  My counterpoint (for the purpose of argument only) is that the old testament does not specifically state that killing animals, either by man or by other animals themselves - is in fact sin.

  ANd you are correct, but I think Terry's pojnt is that no loving God were create a carnivore.

  Hence either God is not loving ( because we do have carnivores and worse actually) or there is no God.

  Of course the issue with that view is that Terry has to prove WHY God can't be a God of love is He created carnivores.

  Terry has to show there is a contridiction between God's Love ( Not our love or our understanding of love mind you) and the existence of carnivores.
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  james_woods

  To me, this all seems like brain surgery....

  Not only that, but brain surgery on a brain which had nothing wrong with it...