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.

  1. 
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• 

  flamegrilled

  The real problem with the difficulties you have explaining and making sense of everything is because of the start:

  1) If the Christian God exists

  So my open mindedness and application of logic without a fixed starting premise is the real problem.
• 
  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

  Another summary so far:

  1) If the Christian God exists he is by definition omniscient. He knows all things.

  2) We are not omniscient. We do not know all things.

  3) Therefore if the Christian God exists then there are things that he knows that we do not know.

  4) We can conceive of a known situation in which a being of lower sentience would misjudge a being of higher sentience if that lower being tries to reach a firm conclusion despite neither knowing the same things as the higher being, nor being able to assimilate available information to the same degree as the higher being.

  5) Therefore it is possible that if the Christian God exists that a lower being would be capable of misjudging his actions due to an inability to fully access and/or assimilate all of the relevant information.

  As previously stated you can certainly decide what is probable as a separate exercise. But since I was able to explain the point at which your reasoning came unstuck perhaps you could explain which of the above points is in your view logically flawed.

  [BTW – does this posting limit ever get higher? It's pretty restrictive. Cofty was eager to predict that I'd go AWOL for a while, but that was after I declared twice that I'd reached my posting limit. That's quite a prediction Cofty. You must be a prophet.]
• 
  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

  Why is god omniscient if he exists?

  Just working within Cofty's rules. He wants us to talk about the Christian God of love. He is omniscient if he exists.
• 
  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

  No I feel so certain that I understand what love is.

  I'm not feeling it. :)

  And the missing piece of information is that the trivial pain was necessary to help your cat in some way.

  It's not missing. It's the central point.

  Have you any suggestion, however remote or tentative, what the missing information might be ... ?

  The mere fact that you ask the question acknowledges that such a thing might be possible. If not, you couldn't not pose the question. The answer is therefore irrelevant to the fact that your OP cannot be substantiated.
• 
  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

  You can't have the loving god of christian theism who passively observed the tsunami; that is a contradiction. Cofty

  I passively watched someone "hurt" my cat. I love my cat. There was no contradiction.

  Now you want to play the card of God's supposed omnipotence to counter that. If I was powerful enough to find a different way to avoid the suffering of my cat I would have done it. Sure.

  But just as you are saying it's different because of the omnipotence factor, I am saying it's difference because of the omniscinece factor.

  We are not omniscient. God (if he exists) is omniscient. Therefore by definition we would be lacking information since our knowledge is only a subset of all knowledge.

  Once that is combined with my reasons for being a theist in the first place (we can go there if you want), I am prepared to humbly accept the reality of not having the full information.

  You can insist that an intelligent person MUST make a decision with limited information all you like. But as long as there remains doubt as to whether we have the full information then your OP is flawed. And logically that doubt must exist.

  So then we can move to probablility. But that is a different conversation as I think you and others have acknowledged.

  To me the primary weakness of your argument is that you insist we must make a decision against theism based upon very specific criteria that you have determined must become the sole evidence to be presented. First of all I simply don't accept that. Secondly, I am perfectly aware that a being of lower sentience can misinterpret actions and inactions of a being of higher sentience. This is not theoretical. You dislike analogies, but the simple fact is that we can demonstrate the reality of that. And not a single person disagreed with that reality. It was only the application that you didn't like, because you feel so certain as to where humans are on the sentience scale. It's shear misleading hubris as far as I'm concerned.
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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

  Cofty - you will note that I've never conceded that God drowned a single person in the Asian tsunami, never mind about 250K. So just about all that you wrote above is unsubstantiated. You are the one saying "god dun it" not me.

  Might there be a reason for inaction under the circumstance? You haven't proven that such a reason cannot possibly exist, nor that we would necessarily be aware of it if it did.

  You argue that god is so superior to humans that we cannot fathom these mysteries, but christian theism requires that we do.

  I don't see why.
• 
  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

  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.
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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

  So you are saying your reply in the situation above would be:

  If you were super-intelligent and/or super-sentinent I would say you did nothing wrong in leaving the boy to die in the woods because in that case you *might* have an *unknown* reason for doing so.

  No. I'm saying that Cofty couldn't logcally conclude that you didn't exist, or perhaps more specifically that he shouldn't conclude that he has access to more information than you do if you are a super-intelligent and/or super-sentient being.

  Now if there is no evidence to the contrary then based upon this information alone if we have to reach a decision then we are probably going to judge you as bad. I grant that.

  The difference with God and the tsunami is first of all that a theist will not acknowledge that there is no evidence to the contrary. Also we do have the option of reserving judgement.

  [have hit posting limit]
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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

  bohn - you are a being of roughly equal intelligence and sentience to me and the hypothetical judge. That is a very different scenario to the one under discussion.
• 
  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 don't know what we can't know" = it's a mystery

  I accept that this crudely describes the argument. As I said before if we are just crudely reframing the opposing view then Cofty's is "if god exists he dun it". It's an assertion. It's not based on anything logical.