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

by cofty 2596 Replies latest jw experiences

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  Qcmbr

  Mormonism does partially solve the evil /good god paradox by implementing a pre mortal state for the spirit in which a decision must be made by each individual to come to a state of mortality and experience good and bad in order to increase the experiential knowledge of that spirit in prepapration for a later potential higher state (being a god.) So God says it will hurt do you still want to go? - in effect repeating the Eden scenario for each individual who must choose knowledge (a corollary and requirement for exaltation) via mortality with its pain, suffering and death. Mormonism also now timidly states that God also went through this process to become a god.

  Mormonism also makes you wear stupid clothes to gain exaltation which is one of many areas where the interesting philosophy then all goes to crazy sh*t :)
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  flamegrilled

  If the tsunami is an act of love how do we determine what love is? Cofty

  I already dealt with this multiple times. You are the one trying to logically conclude that the tsunami must be an act of love, not me.

  Not every action or inaction taken in isolation should be used to interpret the characteristics of a person.

  Again you are all very excited about the 250K figure. But whether it is 250 trillion, or it is only 1, the question remains the same. Collectively all of God's perceived inaction to natural disasters over millenia form a single question, not multiple questions. Either there is a reason for it, or there is not.
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  jgnat

  Surely living up to an invisible ideal can be helpful. Even if it is impotent against disaster, even if it is imaginary.
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  jgnat

  flamegrilled, there is a reason surgeons use anaesthetic. To reduce pain and suffering is compassionate.
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  Viviane

  As I already stated, you are making no allowance for the information you may be missing. Yes, He only had to say the word to stop it in its tracks. No, we do not know what the consequence of that would have been except to prevent one "natural" disaster.

  Flamegrilled, according to you, that information is, at best, a potential unknown graspable unknown. There might be information that we don't know we don't know, and even if we did know that we don't know it, there would be no way understand or use. Because of that, there is no allowance for it because it could never possibly affect any decision we made. There's not even a way to find out if there is some information about this that we don't know we don't know, so it's a complete non-factor.

  It's a mystery!

  Obviously if you've predetermined an atheistic position and you are just looking for a club to bash theists, then the missing information is just a convenience for now.

  No, see what I wrote above. Even if you are a Christian, it only works if God is impotent to the point that he can't solve the superhero's dilemma.
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  humbled

  Cofty, I enjoyed looking up "parimonious". But you must have meant it would be LESS not MORE tight-fisted of me to cashier the idea of god than to invent a weak one.

  Here is my problem with the discussion--the word,the definition of "god".

  Subtract POWER from GOD's qualities there may not be anything left of GOD. I just don't know what to call it--Zeus, Venus, Mars?

  those names are taken and don't apply anyway. Normally a word has a fixed orbit in conversation--that's how we communicate--but as this thread shows, in striving to define the character of Christian theism words are delicate/difficult to choose. Look in a dictionary and see the varied meanings behind a single word: god, much less the 2-word "Christian Theism"
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  THE GLADIATOR

  flamegrilled I have read all your posts on this thread. Your argument seems to revolve around the idea that we cannot know the mind of the Christian god, so therefore we can’t make a moral judgement about his action or lack of action. In other words it is a mystery. We have to decide for ourselves what love is and how it motivates us to act as individuals.

  An atheist is free to draw his own moral map, but my understanding is that Christians are told to follow the example of their god who demonstrates love. The snag is that the bible portrays this god as unloving and vengeful. If we discard the bible as a collection of fables and learn through observation, what do we see the Christian god doing? Nothing; that’s it, nothing. A blessed few claim that the Christian god talks to them, but they have nothing of value to report.

  So, the rest of us struggle on alone drawing our own moral map. Understandably, some eventually come to the conclusion that the Christian god is not absent but does not in fact exist. You have not offered a single pointer that might help someone weak in faith to come to know ‘god’s love.’

  The Watchtower Society's, with all its faults, does at least have answers as to why the Christian god acts as it does, why it does not intervene in disasters, and what it wants from humans. You have typed so many words, yet arrived nowhere.
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  humbled

  "Surely living up to an invisible ideal can be helpful. Even if it is impotent against disaster. Even if it is imaginary."--Jgnat
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  Simon

  Actually, theistic belief is typically amoral - theists are lacking a moral compass and want someone to provide it to them. They will accept something evil as immediately being good just because it's ascribed to someone else (god) even though they have zero evidence to support it. Their moral compass is faulty. They are like a drowning man, floundering, trying to find some meaning and explanation that fits an illogical narrative and of course they can't

  Atheists morals tend to be based on the human experience which is a little more measurable. Human kind KNOWS what is good and what isn't. Studies have shown that even babies just months old can judge which characters are nice and fair and which ones are not. We survived as a species because of this ability.

  And one more thought ... wasn't the ability to know what is right and wrong, the knowledge of good and bad, the thing that theists believe man received when they disobeyed god? If we didn't get the goods then why are we being punished? By the bible's and god's own admission WE are perfectly capable and can both understand and decide.

  No mystery required.
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  Viviane