Fallacies about Faith

by tec 340 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  tec

  Can someone/thing have "will" without a "mind"? I don't think so (I don't expect you to answer that btw, you said you don't know... I'm just thinking while I type).

  Makes sense to me. But I don't claim to understand everything, and I do not grasp this about death, except in an abstract way. Still learning; still listening on that.

  We at least have an image so that we can understand and know God.

  See it? I lived it, I saw the damn thing so many times I still dream about gmork (wolf dude) from time to time.

  Ah... Gmork. Thank you. I remember watching it as a kid and struggling to wrap my head around this 'great nothing' also.

  But if what you're saying is true - shouldn't we be worried about Death rather than Satan? If Death is the Devil's bossman and he has his own purpose? Sounds like the Devil is just Robin to Death's Batman.

  Well aren't we? More worried about death I mean? Not mainly as a personification, but as a state of being (or rather non-state of being)? Satan hopes to lead us away from Christ.. the LIFE (also personified, btw.. in Christ, as Christ IS the Life)... and so toward death. So the adversary is serving death... rather than serving Life (Christ)

  Tyvm, but no. You have a better response rate when it comes to answering.

  Talking/discussing is one thing. As long as you are not looking to me for truth or listening to me. Because I am not the truth, and I can do nothing more than witness TO the Truth. If you want truth... well, that would be Christ... so look to Him... over anyone, and that certainly includes me.

  I am not saying that you are looking to me for truth. I understand that we are just discussing, and also that you were just teasing above. But... if one wants to know the truth on this or any matter... then Christ is the one who knows. Listen to and follow Him. Definitely not me; not any other person or religion or thing.

  Just a witness here, and one who is learning from Him. Some truths i know because He has taught me (but you cannot and should not just take my word for it). Some things I am still learning, like this particular topic.

  Thanks for the answer. I don't really know what to say in response to death has a will and possibly a mind...

  It is really new for me to consider and ask about as well, and I may well not be explaining anything well... since, how can a person explain something that they do not fully understand themselves? I would not even have considered it on my own (at least not yet) had someone else not mentioned what she had received on the matter of death. So I am still asking and learning myself. I previously thought that the 'angel of death' passed over and took the firstborn. But i hadn't yet gotten around to asking what that meant: the spirit of death; an agent of death; the destroyer/abaddon BEING death.

  So I apologize if I have caused confusion.

  Perhaps just take it as something to keep in mind, and so to ask about yourself. That is what I do when someone states something that is not against Christ... but i do not know if it is true or not. Just something to keep in mind.

  Peace to you both,

  tammy
• 

  Band on the Run

  The Rule Against Perpetuities. Still Thinking. Still Listening to the Legal Beagles. The Elements of Negligence. Still Thinking. Prosser whispers in my ear.

  Mark, Matthew, Luke, John - don't bother with text or Christian commentators. Just put on my handy dandy receptor hat and waiit for inspiration from Christ directly. Jesus Christ! The Superstar! Who are you? Oh, I don't know how to love him. He is just a man and I've know so many men before in many, many ways. He's just one more. Walk across my swimming pool! Well, you are the Christ! Come, hither. Jesu, man of my desires. O, come, zap me with an orgasm. How cosmic sweet.

  The best thing about this Christ speaks to me - and also does other things. His human side is underdeveloped in Western theology - is I can have Jesus all to myself. Centuries of thought and scholarship are meanignless. Now, the Bible, oh, I know those Hebrew stories so well. Judaism just started. There diid not preexist. Oh the Bible tells me so. Wait, I don't like the scripture. Well, sometimes I don't like resoundiing Supreme Court cases. No problem. Scribal error. Clerk error. Oh, this gig is sweet. It centers attention on the proper party -MOI!

  Oh, some people end up in Bedlam or Bellevue. Not me. I just post on JWN endlessly. Of course, I can't sustain any theological discussion but I get attention. Well, not as much as my predecessor. Oh, baby teeth will save you so you can be ressurected. God cannot overome cremation. Some junk yard contains our baby teeth. God can search through massive tons of waste and find my baby teeth. Star Trek asked what God needs with a starship. May I ask what God needs baby teeth. Oh, visit my website, where I am deep. Visit it and compare. I promise it makes this site seem lightweight. Oh, glory be to Christ for searching me out and imparting baby teeth wisdom. I refuse to discuss God's very bad and amoral acts. Oh, Isaac had one jig. Oh, be a loon like me.

  Has anyone noticed that Jesus tends to talk with women more than men? Strange. Has anyonen noticed how many more sisters there are than brothers? Is there some sort of psychological pull with women? No way. Nothing is purer than a woman and Christ. La La. La.
• 

  adamah

  TEC said-

  Ah... Gmork. Thank you. I remember watching it as a kid and struggling to wrap my head around this 'great nothing' also.

  Holy Hades, what is the incessant fascination that some people have with paradoxes, thought-stopping literary devices that are NOT 'deep' or 'philosophical' or 'hard to grasp', but only give the perpetuator of these trite sayings the appearance of being wise, when they're merely showing how they are able to withstand incredible levels of internally-contradictory logic that would kill a 'normal' human, and promise that you can, too, if you only work hard enough at it?

  There's no mystery to be resolved in paradoxes, since many combine the extremes from both ends of the spectrum with each other, eg "cold-heat" (i.e. temperature extremes). However, that hard-to-wrap-one's-mind-around concept already has a term to decribe it: 'lukewarm'.

  In the example TEC cited above ('great nothing' as if describing the state of non-existence), the controlling portion is the word, NOTHING, and nothingness prevails (great or insignificant as it may be, since the mind that is non-existent won't be able to make value assessments like 'great').

  People forget that simply because a grammatically-correct statement can be constructed that follows all the rules of proper English, that doesn't mean it HAS to make any kind of logical sense! I can say ANYTHING ( eg "I saw a bowl of fruit salad driving a car down the road yesterday!") but it doesn't mean the statement is logical, much less TRUE. Such statements can be dismissed out of hand as completely absurd and ludicrious, as they're so completely contradictory to ALL past experiences of human life that to accept them as true would require appealing to believer's liberal use of faith.

  Besides, are all the truly-relevant and potentially-answerable questions (eg investigating the ACTUAL cause of death in humans?!?) just too boring for flighty minds to engage in, so they feel entitled to engage in pointless discussions of trying to excuse even MORE ignorant conceptions by making up MORE stuff which wasn't even part of the old 2,500 yr story?

  Wouldn't it be nice if all internet browsers were required to display a built-in warning like this:

  

  Adam
• 

  tec

  Do you remember saying this Band just 12 hours ago?

  This is way too much for me. No more bait.

  You are a hypocrite. Because the next time you complain about some other poster "bullying you or insulting you or berating you", etc, etc... you just remember the posts like the above that you CONSTANTLY make to me, especially after you have been proven wrong in somthing that you think the bible states.

  Hypocrite.

  Other than that, if you want to put your faith in scholars... if you want to sound smart, be accepted, show everyone how intelligent and refined you are (even though your post above is more like someone stamping their feet in a tantrum because they were wrong again about what is written regarding Israel)... then you go right ahead. I'll put mine in Christ. If that makes me look foolish... then I am happy, grateful, humbled, thrilled... to be foolish.

  I also don't know someone can belong to Christ, follow Him, love Him... and then use Him to be as vulgar as you were above when speaking of Him in order to mock me.

  But that is for you to work out and for you to be responsible FOR.

  I still wish you peace in Christ.

  Your servant and a slave of Christ,

  tammy
• 

  tec

  I was a kid, Adamah. Maybe you should have read that warning before you hit submit.

  Peace,

  tammy
• 

  zound

  had someone else not mentioned what she had received on the matter of death.
• 

  adamah

  TEC said- I was a kid, Adamah.

  Hate to break the news to you TEC, but you still display child-like thinking (65% of children have an imaginary friend as a stage of their early childhood social development).

  Most of us tired of our tiny imaginary friends as a child, when one day we woke up and outgrew the need, or simply forgot about our 'old friends' with the passage of time when we learned to make the leap of dealing with reality, AKA making friends with other humans, which is much messier in real-life.

  http://www.aboutourkids.org/articles/when_your_child039s_new_friend_imaginary

  Others persist in imaginary friends throughout their lives, and even engage in piling fantasies upon fantasies to justify their reliance on imaginary friends. They react to challenges to their imaginary friends as if they're being personally attacked, since deep-down they understand they ARE being attacked; they know their friends don't exist, and realize what game they're actually playing is only in their minds.

  Worse though, you defy the very authority figure you claim to love by making up your own theology 'on the fly', which most believers do to create Divine beings in THEIR image. Everyone played the game, at some point: that's why those who continue to play it into adulthood are so annoying to those of us for whom the fascination of the game passed long ago (and which isn't harmless, which should be obvious to anyone reading on an ex-JW board).

  Paul displays the signs of a classic defense-mechanism (i.e. denial of even having a problem, where denial protects such self-delusional beliefs), when he claimed to be over childish thinking in 1 Cor 13:11:

  When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things.

  Go ahead, TEC, and telling yourself you're over all childish thinking, when deep down you really know it's not true. You can throw in a dash of that legendary Xian persecution complex, if the denial doesn't do the trick. Then, if all else fails, you can just put it out of your mind, and use cognitive suppression and chalk it up as a positive, done in the name of protecting your faith....

  TEC said- Maybe you should have read that warning before you hit submit.

  You don't actually believe that I would post that image without scrutinizing what I wrote, making sure it was logically and factually air-tight before I posted?

  Anyway, that counter is (yet another) variation of a theme of your favorite argument, the "Tu Quoque" ("but you do it, too!) defense. Did you say that as if to prove my point that you engage in childlike reasoning at times?

  TEC, you do have the capability to grow your critical thinking skills, since you often show the ability; however, it's going to take HARD EFFORT on your part to continue to grow (and not just get better at exercising your imagination, which is a valuable skill only for writers of fiction (which includes theologians)).

  You'd really do yourself a favor in this life by learning the principles of logic and contemporary rhetoric, eg:

  http://books.google.com/books/about/Logic_and_Contemporary_Rhetoric_The_Use.html?id=_IIVhDlcCy4C

  (There's even a preview of the book available on that page, so you can try before you buy.)

  Adam
• 

  LucidChimp

  "Makes sense to me."

  What does? That it can have a will without a mind - or that it can't have a will without a mind? (Don't you need a want/desire to "will" something? ["Will" as seperated from a simple purpose - my ashtray has a purpose])

  "We at least have an image so that we can understand and know God."

  Since this was in answer to my question about death having a "will", I'm not sure what you mean? (An image of what, and how does this help us know god?

  "Ah... Gmork. Thank you. I remember watching it as a kid and struggling to wrap my head around this 'great nothing' also."

  Taking this comment with what you then went on to say about death being more worrying than the Devil: I find that curious. When I believed (take into account here Jdub theology and the whole "god's sovereignity" thing), I never understood the whole argument about heaven vs paradise earth... What does it matter? It matters that we prove god right, even if we get no reward at all. (At least that's how I thought. My point being that I cared little about death at all ["The Great Nothing" seemed fairly peacefull a prospect in the end and no more destructive in achieving its goals than god])

  "had someone else not mentioned what she had received on the matter of death."

  To pick up on zound's point here - Is it possible perhaps that someone (you/her/both of you) is simply mistaking the bible's fondness for "poetic" language and taking this too literally? Just a thought. After all, I'm not a believer and claim no insight.

  Ta for the answers btw.

  Pizza.
• 

  tec

  Here you go Zound, from scripture:

  Exodus 12:23

  When the LORD goes through the land to strike down the Egyptians, he will see the blood on the top and sides of the door frame and will pass over that doorway, and he will not permit the Destroyer to enter your houses and strike you down.

  Who is this destroyer? Well, in Revelation 9:11

  They had as king over them the angel of the abyss, whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek, Apollyon.

  Abaddon and Apollyon mean... Destroyer. That is the footnote in my bible on those names.

  You can look up the meaning of the words as well, like the meaning of the word abyss:

  http://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?Strongs=G12&t=NIV

  http://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?Strongs=G623&t=NIV

  http://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?Strongs=G3&t=NIV

  I'm not sure if accepting the personifcation of death changes anything... except perhaps to undersand a bit more about how a ransom could be owed to death, and not that God was demanding his son be killed for himself. If you can learn that lesson another way... then great.

  But regardless of whether you think it was death... or an angel of death... or abaddon/apollyon/destroyer... as another being or as figurative... it is the destroyer who was released and permitted to strike down the firstborn of Egypt... and not permitted to strike down anyone in any house that was covered in the blood of the lamb... again, a precusor for us and Christ.

  Peace to you,

  tammy
• 

  zound

  Maybe I'd better start practising my chess game then.