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

by cofty 2596 Replies latest jw experiences

  • cofty
    cofty

    Flamegrilled - Your deliberate misrepresentation of other's points, and the way you ignore inconvenient questions, makes me seriously question your sincerity.

    I'm just in from work, will get back to you soon. How about we try to make page 84 an analogy-free zone?

    Summary so far...

  • flamegrilled
    flamegrilled

    how many boys would I have to leave to die in the woods before you began to question if the earlier reports about my goodness was fully accurate or if I was sometimes good and sometimes not so good like everybody else? bohm

    Precisely one would be sufficient if it could be proved that there were no mitigating circumstances.

    All analogies are the weaker argument because they can only be roughly equivalent. They often appeal to emotion. Puppies, kittens, parents and children. jgnat

    That's a false generalization. Certain analogies very much help to simplify moral questions down to the core principles. For an analogy to work it has to demonstrate the principle and be correctly understood and not misused. Analogies may genuinely be weak, or they may simply appear weak when they are extended to mirror elements of a situation that were never intended.

    If we are talking about appeals to emotion on this thread the atheists are pretty far out front. If I compiled a list of emotive and vitriolic quotes from the past 84 pages no theist could compete.

    Bringing up 'cost' in the analogy is a red herring and a cop-out. Simon

    I didn't bring it up. But in dismissing this variable you implied an assumption that all the cost would be to God.

    As I said earlier, God could eliminate all human suffering – natural and otherwise – by painlessly eliminating all humans. How do you like the cost of that solution Simon? You are possibly right that it costs God nothing in the grand scheme.

  • Viviane
    Viviane

    I'm just in from work, will get back to you soon. How about we try to make page 84 an analogy-free zone?

    That's like fixing the barn door after you watched the pot boil!

  • bohm
    bohm

    Lol@viviane

  • cofty
    cofty

    hahaha

  • jgnat
    jgnat

    I didn't say analogies were useless. I just said they are inferior. A + B = C is unambiguous. And always will be, much more than an analogy.

  • Simon
    Simon

    Did you know the moon is smaller than the sun but larger than an orange?

    My fist is bigger than both the moon AND the sun - it covers them both. I truly am a god.

    But powerless when confronting grapefruit-god with fists like, erm, grapefruits.

    And also that girl at the supermarket with the big mellons ...

    ... in the produce isle.

  • Bart Belteshassur
    Bart Belteshassur

    Cofty - Do the original preconditions still apply or have we gone beyond that now? As I understood that the question is:

    Accepting that God exists (nothing esle defined) and that he is Omnipotent why did he either produce the tsunami directly or fail to prevent it, and is therefore responsible for the consiquences etc.

    Is this the correct question?

    BB

  • snare&racket
    snare&racket

    Analogies, useful for ....

    *Teaching children

    *Explanatory slight of hand.....exchanging an illogical scenario for a logical one.

    Snare x

    Framegrilled, if your point was logical you would not need to evoke sick dogs, simply state your parameters in the topic being discussed, god, the tsunami, death and suffering. We are not children. We will get it. But will your statement seem moral or logical?....lets see.

  • jgnat
    jgnat

    Bart, I interpret the question differently, and Cofty is phrasing it carefully. How does the theist's conventional view of an all-loving, all-powerful God reconcile with the evidence of natural disasters like the tsunami?

    I've offered an unconventional view, which does reconcile.

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