The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

by cofty 2596 Replies latest jw experiences

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  jgnat

  The answer I read from flamegrilled is, "not necessarily true". As in, could it be part of a larger loving plan?

  If I could play "devil's advocate", and forgive me for using a human-led disaster Cofty, it could be argued that the deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the sheer horror of them, woke the world up to the deadliness of this new weapon, and national conflicts went underground (Cold War), peace talks got serious, and conflicts more local. Nobody wants to see the consequences of a THIRD world war. So some sense out of the senselessness. Like a teenager waking up to his own mortality, humanity as a whole decided, "Ain't gonna do THAT again."

  But what sense could come out of a natural disaster? What could humanity possibly do to prevent a re-occurrence? Be more vigilant with our early-warning systems?

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY
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  cofty

  Its not a trick question Flamegrilled.

  Was the tsunami a loving act when seen as part of a bigger picture? If not, what is the alternative?
• 

  cofty

  Sorry jgnat our posts overlapped.

  That is the challenge for Flamegrilled to show at least a possible example of how the tsunami can be loving if seen in a bigger context.

  Its nothing but sophistry to assert that it is loving in some mysterious way we can't explain.
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  Viviane

  The analogies were only there to help people who are unable to grasp simple logical statements.

  Underhandedly calling people stupid isn't fixing your broken analogies.
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  cofty

  The only thing left was love getting to transcend life's horror - Maeve AKA Humbled

  How does that work if Jesus is god in christian theology?
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  Viviane

  Cofty, would you say that flamegrilled's idea of there being and unknown ungraspable unknown is a mashup of "it's a mystery" and "just have faith"? I ask because, as I think about it, he is saying it's a mystery, but one we could never understand even if we had the information, so just have faith.
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  cofty

  I think that is precisley what Flamegrilled is doing.

  He is taking refuge in inscrutibility despite all the other truth claims he makes about god as a christian theist.

  Hiding behind a series of vague analogies which you then refuse to explain and accusing everybody else of being too stupid to grasp is not honest conversation.
• 

  bohm

  Have any of you read Richard Swinburne? flamegrilled is doing the Swinburne summersault aka. "it is possible there is something that could possible etc. etc. etc. therefore it is not logically impossible".
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  Simon

  If I could play "devil's advocate", and forgive me for using a human-led disaster Cofty, it could be argued that the deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the sheer horror of them, woke the world up to the deadliness of this new weapon, and national conflicts went underground (Cold War), peace talks got serious, and conflicts more local. Nobody wants to see the consequences of a THIRD world war. So some sense out of the senselessness. Like a teenager waking up to his own mortality, humanity as a whole decided, "Ain't gonna do THAT again."

  But what sense could come out of a natural disaster? What could humanity possibly do to prevent a re-occurrence? Be more vigilant with our early-warning systems?

  Sorry, I don't think that is valid as the reasoning is really concerned with 'averaging out' the human suffering and loss of life involved. If anything, it's simply another example of terrible deaths experienced that a loving, imnipotent god would surely prevent if he existed.

  It's easy to come up with better scenarios of any example - make the tsunami miss, if you want to give a warning then tell people, send a prophet, give someone a vision. Why suppose he's both interfering to help and aid people on the one hand but then doing the worse thing possible on the other.

  The simplest explanation that fits the facts is that the theist stories aren't real. But most theists already argue that! Given that there are many many thousands of theist stories simple deduction means that 99.9999% of them must be wrong and any theist simply argues (against all common sense) that theirs happens to be the one exception even though there is no difference between them other than historical and geographical happenstance.
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  Simon

  Have any of you read Richard Swinburne? flamegrilled is doing the Swinburne summersault aka. "it is possible there is something that could possible etc. etc. etc. therefore it is not logically impossible" .

  Yes, it's like trying to have a discussion with someone who claims that dinosaur bones could have been put there by god (thus negating the evidence of evolution and age of the earth) or that the light in transit to us from distant galaxies was part of the creation of the universe (this negating evidence of the age and expansion of the universe).

  As Sam Harris said: How do you reason with someone who doesn't recognise and value reason and won't agree on basic facts?

  "I simply chose to believe in [xyz] based on faith" is the end of the discussion. There is no reasoning with the faithful because reason destroys their comfort blanket / stops the opium working.