flamegrilled

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Posts by flamegrilled

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  2596

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

  by cofty in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

  we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

  they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

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  flamegrilled

  Way to miss the ENTIRE point of the analogy, since it's inexplicable to the dog: he cannot explain it!

  This is true, although I no longer accept that they are missing the point. They are just unwilling to answer the question, because to do so would be to acknowledge that the OP is logically flawed.

  Trying to pretend that I am illustrating the tsunami is silly. Calling the dog dumb is irrelevant, unhelpful and inaccurate. If the dog were truly "dumb" in the absolute sense, then it wouldn't feel malice toward Louie CK either. We ourselves are NOT omniscient, therefore we can be lacking certain information just like the dog.

  We can logically conceive of a situation whereby a being of lower intelligence is not capable of understanding the situation. If it makes what seems like the obvious conclusion it would be wrong. This is simple to understand people.

  zound made the best contribution by saying that "God CAN communicate with his 'pets' if he wants to." But this also presumes that such communication would be in our best interests. There is no particular reason to logically presume that.
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  2596

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

  by cofty in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

  we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

  they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  flamegrilled

  Alright, since my primary response to the OP has been repeatedly ignored or made out to be something that it is not, I'll reframe it once more with a minor modification:

  Cofty: My owner punched me in the face, threw foul tasting liquid in my mouth and nose, and watched while I choked and threw up.

  Dog 2: What a bast#$rd

  Cofty: I know. It PROVES that I cannot possibly have a loving owner.

  Would Cofty be logically correct?
• 
  2596

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

  by cofty in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

  we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

  they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  flamegrilled

  In the Genesis account, the Bible claims that humans were "made in God's image", which gave the author(s) carte blanche' to have God reasoning and feeling humanlike emotions (eg anger, sadness, etc). Humans obtained parity with God's and angelic morality by stealing the "wisdom of the Gods", such that Jehovah admitted as much, in Genesis 3:22

  Or it could just be true that humans were made in God's image in the sense of having his qualities in a limited sense.

  The ONLY difference at that point was that spirit beings had immortality, and the humans mortality

  I understand how you are applying this to the immediate context, but the Bible does not say in general that spirits are immortal.

  To discuss the traits of Almighty God according to the Biblical narrative would certainly take this off-topic. I'm not being funny, but I truly don't wish to be accused of "hijacking" the thread as happened at the outset. It doesn't take much apparently.
• 
  2596

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

  by cofty in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

  we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

  they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  flamegrilled

  @flamegrilled - you are arguing for "this is possible"

  I am beyond that to "what is probable"

  Besty - I have no arguments with you on that score. Once we get down to assessment of what is probable we will entertain a lot more data than 250K deaths in the Asian tsunami.
• 
  2596

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

  by cofty in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

  we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

  they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  flamegrilled

  Adam - I appreciate your thought provoking comments. Although I'm evidently not on the same page as you in terms of my faith, I think you have made the most valuable contribution to the discussion in terms of logic and reason.

  I completely acknowledge and agree that the "values" and "emotion" variables must necessarily have a hand in our personal conclusions, and that as a result full objectivity remains elusive.

  I did not set out to prove that my foundation in Christian theism is truth. I only sought to counter Cofty's view that the tsunami presents a fatal flaw to it.

  Of course, I know that you know this. I am simply reitterating it for the benefit of those who do not.
• 
  2596

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

  by cofty in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

  we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

  they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  flamegrilled

  We're not stupid. We're not pets. We're sentient beings who can reason. Simon

  I agree we're not stupid. I agree we are not pets. I agree we can reason.

  Furthermore I believe that some other animals can make decisions based upon available information just as we can, but to a different degree . I don't think that sentience and reason are binary things which your statement above implies.

  I believe that higher beings can reason to a greater degree than lower beings. I believe that higher beings can work on a data set that is greater than that of lower beings.

  In this context "stupid" is not a useful definition of anything.

  If sentince and reason were to equate to omniscinece then I would see your POV, but they do not.
• 
  2596

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

  by cofty in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

  we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

  they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  flamegrilled

  besty

  I guess that was aimed at me.

  What is the logical alternative? We either claim that we know everything (in which case it's pretty clear that the claimant is a fool), or we deal in some way with the fact that we don't know everything.

  The two ways to handle that are:

  1) Dismiss everything we don't know as irrelevant.

  2) Acknowledge that some of what we don't know might be relevant.

  Which is it? If it's #1 then on what basis is that sound?

  You might hate my analogy of the pet. It might be intellectually revolting to you. But that is not important. The only question is whether the line of reasoning is valid.

  If it is, then Cofty's assertions as to the fatal blow to Christian theism are null and void.
• 
  2596

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

  by cofty in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

  we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

  they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  flamegrilled

  I'd like to draw on the Louie CK incident (referred to by Humbled) to present my reasoning in another way:

  Dog 1: My owner punched me in the face, threw foul tasting liquid in my mouth and nose, and watched while I choked and threw up.

  Dog 2: What a bast#$rd

  Dog 1: I know. It PROVES that I cannot possibly have a loving owner.

  Would Dog 1 be logically correct?
• 
  2596

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

  by cofty in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

  we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

  they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  flamegrilled

  cofty, Christian theism has had other moments to wonder why their god has allowed death and destruction in the natural world kill people. The Lisbon earthquake and tsunami in the mid 1700's destroyed most the churches on All Saint's Day and yet let stand most of the red light district.So it is reported.

  This is why I made the point that the numbers are irrelevant. Cofty makes much of the statistics of the Asian tsunami as if the 250K clinches the point of reason. What if it were 150K? What if it were 10? It makes no difference to the question, nor to the information available to us.

  If 1 person suffers and dies due to what Cofty calls a "natural evil" then the question remains the same. Death by old age is surely a "natural evil" by this reasoning.

  People die. Is this God's intent? The Bible says no. Can we fully comprehend why it occurs right now? Some people say yes, the Bible fully explains it. Personally I disagree with that. The Bible partially explains it, and I do not dismiss the information that is there, but like the pet that cannot fully comprehend the big picture I accept that there is some information that is outside of my range right now.
• 
  2596

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

  by cofty in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

  we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

  they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  flamegrilled

  What is Z in your argument, flamegrilled?

  The evidence for a loving Christian God.