Posts by flamegrilled

2596

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

by cofty in

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.

flamegrilled

There is a good reason Flamegrilled refuses to engage in anything except a flawed analogy.

The only reason that I didn't move beyond the logical example is because you refused to answer it, and/or insisted that it be turned into an analogy to fit the tsunami specifically, which I explicitly had said I never intended.

Now that you say that you grant the point made I am happy to discuss it beyond that. But as long as you grant that the point is made then the assertion made in your OP is not necessarily true. It might well appear that the existence of a loving higher being is impossible in the light of the tsunami or any other "natural evil", but since we can already conceive of circumstances under which such a conclusion would be false based upon limited information we cannot be certain that reaching such a conclusion would be true in this case.

I have company right now, but I will try to respond to the further points later.

2596

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

by cofty in

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.

flamegrilled

No, because it is not an analogy about the tsunami as I have said several times. It is not intended to parallel the experience in any way. It simply demonstrates 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.

2596

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

by cofty in

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.

flamegrilled

bohm - no, that's a different analogy which would be attempting to demonstrate a different point.

2596

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

by cofty in

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.

flamegrilled

So far you have offered nothing apart from insisting that forcing unpleasant medicine on your dog is morally equivilent to drowning a quarter of a million people for reasons we can't possibly understand.

Where did I say this?

I think we both know the answer to that too.

2596

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

by cofty in

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.

flamegrilled

I read that entire post and nowhere did it answer the question as to whether the dog would be logically correct.

You can reject the application if you choose, but why are you finding it so hard just to answer the question? I think we both know the answer to that.

2596

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

by cofty in

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.

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.

2596

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

by cofty in

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.