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.

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  flamegrilled

  P.S. Try to respond without too much bluster to mask the answer.
• 
  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

  Those who died in the Tsunami - do you KNOW beyond any possibility of error where they (as conscious beings) are now, and/or where they may be in the future?

  If so, how do you know?

  Remember, we are NOT talking about probability here. We are ONLY talking about what we know for a certainty.

  [I will just add that this is in no way a subtle attempt to preach. In fact I don't have a firm opinion of the answer. I just want to see how you logically respond, and whether you allow any room for error in your response. If not, then the "how do you know" portion becomes very important.]
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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

  Then forever after I will refer to your alleged god. jgnat

  Absolutely you should do that. In fact you will see that I qualified quite a few of my early comments in this thread by "if he exists". I just dropped it after a while when I saw that few were interested in the strict logic of the argument, and more interested in blasting other peoples' world view based upon an incomplete set of information.
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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

  ...if one person appears to be betrayed by God then it raises a question about whether God truly betrays people... [emphasis mine, jg] - flame

  You have a bias to maintain your belief in an all-powerful, all-loving God. jgnat

  This whole thread has been about what God is alleged to have done if he were to exist.

  My whole argument is that there is no logical reason to reach the conclusion that Cofty is promoting based upon appearances. I therefore phrased my reply accordingly.

  It's perfectly reasonable when a person's guilt has not been proven to refer to his or her crime as "alleged".

  I have also firmly stated my position about turning this into a full discussion of the existence of God. Cofty initially insisted that it wasn't about that. Now he wants it. But only on his terms. I have absolutely no desire to go down that road. Cofty and others may pretend to be indignant about that now, but I engaged in this discussion based upon Cofty's rules. The OP is flawed. I have no need to justify my entire belief system, in order to further that point.
• 
  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

  Disappointed at FG accusations.

  They haven't come out of the blue Cofty. I've pointed out every time you've done it. And it's been with remarkable frequency.

  You have spent 50 pages saying "its a mystery" while studiously avoiding the word.

  Acknowledging that there are missing pieces to a puzzle does not make the entire thing a mystery. If it did we would have to write-off some very important areas of human knowledge.
• 
  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 if one person is betrayed by God, we can challenge His existence or His compassion? (If quantity does not matter). jgnat

  If zero people are betrayed by God, you can challenge His existence or His compassion. That's up to you.

  But if one person appears to be betrayed by God then it raises a question about whether God truly betrays people, the same as if it appears to happen to two or more people.
• 
  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

  @flamegrilled - you are giving God a free pass on natural disasters because 0.1% potential disconfirmation* of your worldview is an acceptable cost to you

  atheists (me, us, cofty, whoever) have used a different scale in our observation. Massive scale death of the innocents are yet more evidence 'He' probably doesn't exist.

  Well this is part of the problem. Using 250K, as if the quantity multiplies up the evidence, is not logical given the matter under consideration. As I have stated many times whether it 1 person or 250K, it's still one question.
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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

  besty - If a good friend told you the truth 999 times, but then said said something that appeared to be untruthful, would you forget about the big picture or immediately conclude your friend was a liar?

  Of course if the person in question is not someone known to you and you simply hear the one out of place statement then you would think that the friend who believes is just gullible.

  Obviously atheists have a completely different perspective to theists. But from my perspective it is not "without evidence" by a long shot.

  Please don't bother asking me to make the entire case for God as Cofty keeps doing. I don't ask anyone in this discussion to believe, and I'm not about to preach.

  The discussion was about whether Cofty's conclusion is logical and whether Christian theism is fatally flawed. The answer to both of those is no. That is not in itself any argument towards the existence of God, which is a separate and much larger conversation. I can completely understand why people are happy to take Cofty's superficial argument and keep repeating that it proves something (their preferred world view). But it simply doesn't.
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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

  Without evidence you have the hope, the faith to believe in a god who has not acted love and power.

  You value love? You are trusting that God will indeed restore with tenderness the poor sufferers who had no relief in this life--and no knowledge of Jesus as Christ.

  That is a faith in a theodicythat the NT has never supported,as far as I know. humbled

  I'm not sure I follow, so there is a chance that I'm going to answer your point incorrectly, but due to misunderstanding.

  Are you saying that from my point of view you think I don't believe that God has given evidence of love and power?

  If so then that would be a wrong understanding. I believe that my existence and the existence of the universe give evidence of God's love and power.

  Then you seemed to say that the NT doesn't support the idea that those who have suffered or never had a chance will be restored. According to the way I read the NT it does.
• 
  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, no offense, but I'm not wasting any more time on this thread (as flamegrilled seemingly decided not to do), since you've shown a willingness to flip-flop (AKA moving goalposts) as it suits your purposes, arguably right up there amongst the worst theist offenders (and I was willing to cut them some slack for them, but you? You know better, and it's hard to imagine it's not intentional....). Adam

  Mainly I was busy, but I was also not in a hurry to remain engaged for the reasons you've given Adam, and more. I lost count of the number of times Cofty misquoted me, or stated that I said things that I didn't. That starts to get ridiculous.

  Cofty wants me to lay out my beliefs, but he wants to define the paramenters for me to do that. At the same time he was quick to say of himself ...

  We are not discussing my spiritual journey here. If you want to start a new thread on the topic carry on.

  Well that's true of me too. I am not about to spend time laying out a complete belief system to someone who has already demonstrated that they will not hesitate to rehash my words in any way that suits them, or simply add things I didn't say. Also, I have seen what happens to people who lay out their belief system in this discussion.

  As far as S&R's comments about death being a punishment, death is simply a withdrawing of the gift of life. In your atheistic world death is the default anyway, so why kick up such a righteous fuss against God if he exists?

  Your whole rant is based on the premise that if God exists he must be cruel for allowing, or even applying, death. But if death is the default then why would you not be grateful for the chance of life?

  If the ultimate purpose is to have beings of free will that choose to adhere to a moral standard set by God for the benefit of all, then who is to say that God is presently doing somethng wrong, either through action or inaction? Several analogies spring to mind, but since this discussion suffers from "analogy allergy" I won't bother.

  How do you give a being free will, and ensure that he will not misuse it? In isolation it doesn't much matter, but if you are creating a society of such beings then it obviously does. I don't know the way to do it, and neither do you.

  If intervention in natural disasters at this time is counter to God's ultimate purpose for his creation then I am prepared to accept that there is good reason for that.