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

The snag is that the bible portrays this god as unloving and vengeful. The Gladiator

I simply disagree of course.

I don't think it's difficult for someone who knows their Bible to cherry pick passages to present God in this way. But it is not a fair or accurate reflection of God as presented in the Bible as a whole.

The Watchtower Society's, with all its faults, does at least have answers as to why the Christian god acts as it does, why it does not intervene in disasters, and what it wants from humans. You have typed so many words, yet arrived nowhere.

I find the WT answers to be incomplete. Therefore as a logical argument to theism I don't choose to use them. As far as where I've personally arrived you have no way of knowing since that was not what this thread was about. I simply have pointed out the logical flaws in Cofty's assertions. If I turn this thread into why I personally believe in the God of the Bible then I would (rightly) be accused of taking the thread off-topic.

24

World's Greatest Music: Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, voted # 1

by compound complex in

jw
friends

now playing at kdfc.com.

interesting that dvorak's symphony no.

9 was voted to the number two spot .

flamegrilled

My favorite is Bach's St. Matthew's Passion. It's very moving emotionally. Oubliette

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

If the tsunami is an act of love how do we determine what love is? Cofty

I already dealt with this multiple times. You are the one trying to logically conclude that the tsunami must be an act of love, not me.

Not every action or inaction taken in isolation should be used to interpret the characteristics of a person.

Again you are all very excited about the 250K figure. But whether it is 250 trillion, or it is only 1, the question remains the same. Collectively all of God's perceived inaction to natural disasters over millenia form a single question, not multiple questions. Either there is a reason for it, or there is not.

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 why did he drown a quarter of a million innocent people?

The god of christian theism knew about the earthquake in advance

He observed the wave rise from 19 miles below the Indian Ocean.

He watched it for another hour as it rushed towards the countries around the pacific Rim

He knew for a certainty what the death toll would be.

He knew that the lives of a further 5 million would be devastated

He only had to say the word to stop it in its tracks

He did not.

For an omniscient, omnipotent god, to send the tsunami or passively observe the tsuanmi is morally equivalent.

If the tsunami is an act of love how do we determine what love is? This is not a non sequitur or a trivial question and you don't get to dismiss it so easily.

Cofty

As I already stated, you are making no allowance for the information you may be missing. Yes, He only had to say the word to stop it in its tracks. No, we do not know what the consequence of that would have been except to prevent one "natural" disaster.

I accept that you are not obliged to make allowance for the information you may be missing. Obviously if you've predetermined an atheistic position and you are just looking for a club to bash theists, then the missing information is just a convenience for now.

But one thing is for certain. If there is a Christian God then He DOES have information that we do not have. Therefore there is no reason to conclude with certainly that his apparent inaction must be contradictory to a loving nature.

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

But none of those things would directly contradict things that the christian god had previously revealed to humans.

God explained what love means and commanded us to follow the example of Jesus.

We can be certain that perfect love does not mean drowning a quarter of a million innocent people.

I can agree with all of that.

If we can't be certain of that fact then christians have no way to follow Jesus' command to love.

Non-sequitur.

Should they give generously to the poor or drown the poor? Who knows? Both are perfectly loving acts.

Silly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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.