AS THE DAGGER PLUNGES:the intervention of God in the Act of Free Will

by Terry 8 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

Terry

When is the best time to INTERVENE?
Ask a referee in a Boxing match and he will tell you. "When the rules are broken."
Is there a better time to intervene?
What if a friend is very drunk and wants to drive home? Intervention before an accident can occur is best!
Friends don't let friends drive drunk. That is prevention by intervention.
When bad judgement threatens the life of anybody it is time for those with BETTER judgement to step in and INTERVENE.
Keep all that in mind as we take brief survey......
In the days of Nimrod it was mankind's intention to build a tower. It was a tower into the heavens! A rather pathetic tower.
In the ancient world 480 ft (Great Pyramid) was about as high as they could go. Today, the world's tallest building is almost 3 thousand feet high.
By today's standards a Tower in Babel would be something none of us would look at twice.
It is laughable that this puny tower "into the heavens" would trigger outrage.
Jehovah sprung into Prevention Mode. No free will buildings allowed! Man's intention was as good as deed done.
Intervention was God's tool. God is said to have "confused" man's one langue into many languages.
It seems man was choosing badly. Is man "allowed" choice? Really? Whose life was at stake?
Contrived plot points stick out as bad writing rather than the workings of a Supreme Being.
Conflicted values? Inconsistency? Bad writing?
No, this isn't another of those tiresome opinion-fests about whether man has Free Will or not. Been there; done that.
What if somebody you cared about was about to exercise free will in a very bad choice that would lead not only to their own death....
but the deaths of every person who would ever be born?
Would that be a good and proper time for INTERVENTION by prevention?
For example: in Eden. The wrong choice would bring death for Adam, Eve and any children they may be permitted to conceive.
Would it be a loving and caring intervention to reach and and prevent terrible choice that ends in death?
Jehovah DID allow Eve & Adam to choose genocide for humanity.
The fate of mankind was in Eve's ovaries and Adam's testicles. We know the bible's answer: God DID allow THAT choice.
Put on your thinking cap for a minute.
When Abram raised the dagger in his hand to plunge death into the heart of his son Isaac---who intervened??
God's angel! The free choice of Abram was considered the moral equivalent of the deed AS THOUGH DONE and completed.
But wait---there's more!
Jehovah prevented the actual death while counting the intention as the same as accomplished---without harm coming to Isaac.
What about Eve raising her hand to pluck the forbidden fruit?
No divine intervention prevented the actual deed which would have saved all Eve's offspring!
Eve's intention could have been "counted as having been done" without permitting contamination to all of potential humanity.
Stay focused with laser-like intensity on the central issue: INTERVENTION by Almighty God.
This record is spotty, arbitrary, capricious and whimsical....at best!
If something is true it is consistent with reality.
Why allow wicked men to prosper on earth for thousands of years?
In the days of Noah he destroyed all but 8 people.
It is said that the "intentions of their heart" were on bad.
Death teaches dead people nothing by way of a lesson to be learned.
In our Sunday School class we were told all this was Lesson and a shadow of things to come. How much sense does it make to teach one set of humans a lesson at the cost of the deaths of another set?
On the one hand humans aren't really worth much--so--they are destroyed. On the other hand God loves them sooooo much.
Which is it?
If the Wages of Sin are Death it is JUST to pay those wages. Right?
Denying the worker his wages is UNjust.
But, eventually, this turns out to be the Divine Plan all along! Denying Justice is the Divine Plan!
God intervened to get the Jews out of Egypt just to see to it that they receive His perfect Law. Why?
God hardened the heart of Pharoah (manipulated his intentions) by intervention in his will.
The balance and fairness of perfect justice is God's shining intervention....only to be tossed aside as the fulcrum of the Divine Plan.
Why say it was "tossed aside?" Because of this reason: Justice had nothing to do with Jesus's ransom sacrifice.
Those who received mercy got it FREE of all JUSTICE. How so? Sin is paid by death. That is Justice.
Jesus was sinless yet his wage was death. That is not justice.
If Jesus were the same as Isaac an angel would have prevented his Crucifixion and Jesus' willingness counted as just as good as deed done!
But, no.
How does this all add up as consistent, logical, rational or sensible?
Does it pass any sniff test?
INTERVENTION in the first instance (Eden) would have saved the necessity of intervention in all the rest!
One thing is clear.
Ad Hoc explanations are the work of many minds over many centuries with little regard for consistency of "plot".
Finkelstein

In the prevalence and history of human ignorance, god(s) were a needed acquired necessity to fill in the gaps of that recognized inherent ignorance.
In the minds and eyes of the ancients the gods had it all, they had perfection, power and immortality, in contrast mortal humans who had inherent evil,
imperfection and mortality. With that entailing perception in mind, its no wonder there were are so many attempts by mankind toward making a
connection to the deities !
In making this endeavored connection, mere man created power for himself, immortality and offered possible answers to the many
unknowns of the world.
Was it god who purposefully place the fruitful tree of knowledge right inside the garden of Eden or did man intensionally place it there for himself ?
Terry

A way of explaining things to children: stories with a moral.
"This is how it all began..."
Children are accepting. They trust their parents and believe their peers.
As children grow more sophisticated they interrupt the telling of these stories and ask "how...why?"
Repairs are made. Fill-ins. Patchwork explanations.
In religion it is called Apologia.
Once you have such tales with all those patches and repairs in place firmly rooted within the fabric of a literate society (written down stories) they can no longer be "repaired".
The religious community is stuck with them.
Only skilled interpreters are authorized to spackle the cracks in logic and consistencies.
To a reasonable person outside that community of believers the immediate impact of such repaired tales is non-acceptance.
You see....you have to grow up hearing it all over and over; told with a straight face by sober authorities....for you to dispense with natural skepticism.
But.....if it doesn't smell right......
Finkelstein

Religious organizations like the JWS offer their services toward not making that dagger make its deathly plunge but of course there's a prevailing catch,
you first have to show subservient obedience and devotion to their direction before they will make that intervention on your behalf.
glenster

For a basic idea of God I recommend M.Adler "How to Think About God." I take
Gen. as allegory and take basic meanings from it. I've read various interpreta-
tions--a few I've had:
- Tower. The story has it God told them to fill the earth (9:1) but they
wanted to stay put and build a tower instead lest they spread out and do it
(Gen.11:4), so God spread them. At the least it's taken to refer to the spread-
ing of people and their different languages, but I can see why some add it's a
rebuke of human arrogance intending to supersede God.
- Life and death and God. I make the analogy of how you can believe in life,
with the good and bad and that everyone dies, with how you could believe in a
God that presides over all the cosmos and life. All-beneficent or all bad (or
unjust) wouldn't be credible any more than for life. "Genocide" would stop all
human life, so I think that's the wrong word. (It might better be attributed to
people if they don't bring climate change under control.)
Punishing Eve after indulging herself over God but rewarding Abrahm when he
showed commitment by stopping him from killing Isaac is mentioned. I take from
it disapproval of humans overindulging the self to assume God's prerogative over
human life.
Noah--I basically take the message violent crime is bad, which the story has
it all but the eight were, but not all since.
Humans not worth much yet God loves--which? Worth less than God, who has the
prerogative to to do with them as He will (as in the view of people having that
prerogative over animals), but loved in given life and what's good in it. All-
beneficence wouldn't be credible for God or life.
Pharaoh (manipulated his intentions)--taken with 1 Sam.6:6, Pharaoh, when
confronted with it by Moses, chose a hardened heart against the God of Moses.
- Jesus sacrifice--the GB "one for one" ransom sacrifice justice idea changes
the intention. It's normally taken for God reconciling mankind to Himself, tak-
ing on punishment for their sin in the crucifixion while providing an afterlife
for followers (or all--Universalism). It's more a matter of God's prerogative
to volunteer than that it was required.
Terry

"Genocide" would stop all
human life, so I think that's the wrong word. (It might better be attributed to
people if they don't bring climate change under control.)
I don't think so. Even if humans could actually "control" the climate I could not for a minute find moral equivalency in
failure to intervene to prevent for every man, woman and child the thousands of years of sorrow, hardship, disease, murder, torture, rape and certain death
that rushed in to fill the void created by sin.
The United Nations definition of "genocide" includes this phrase: "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part". That is close enough for me.
Mortimer J. Adler is my favorite philosopher and his How to Think About God was a very honest logical effort to bring god into being using only reason.
Adler converted to Catholicism just before he died, by the way. His was a yearning for the numinous and he found a way to get there by the "leap of faith."
glenster

Again, I make the analogy of ability to believe in life with ability to
believe in a God that presides over it. And owning it all He has the preroga-
tive to do what He wants with it--give life, take life, good or bad life, of any
age, innocent or guilty. as fair game. In other words, if you can believe, for
all that, in being glad for life, just add God and you've got it. Your mileage
may vary, and definitions are debated, but "genocide" defined as just the crime
of "intent to destroy...." doesn't cover all that. It would be misanthropic for
me as an outlook on life, therefore mischaracterize the basic God concept, and
wouldn't be correct about prerogative.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide
"that life is just to die" (not the "evil mothers" part, lol):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FdWPeHFAMk
An important distinction I'd make about Mortimer is that he provided a
thoughtful way to think about the possibility of the basic God concept. He
didn't claim to prove it, let alone particulars about God beyond that, which
could lead conservatives to punishment and law that could harm or kill.
Terry

He has the preroga-
tive to do what He wants with it--give life, take life, good or bad life, of any
age, innocent or guilty. as fair game. In other words, if you can believe, for
all that, in being glad for life, just add God and you've got it.
Well, certainly if God plays deuces wild it still begs the question of why such a God tinkers with Justice and then abandons it.Newton's Laws make physics predictible because they do not arbitrarily vary. 2+2=4 is the same in Bangkok as it is in Toledo.
Question: how does the arbitrary God reflect the reality of invariance if this deity is so whimsical in nature?
THE GLADIATOR

If there is an invisible consciousness or awareness that pervades the universe, I am certain that it will not resemble the god of anger portrayed in the old testament.' Who needs a friend like that?

AS THE DAGGER PLUNGES:the intervention of God in the Act of Free Will

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