Theodicy

[Neon Genesis]

I would never base my judgement of another on whether they adhere to my beliefs or not. I do believe there is 'junk' out there and in me. This to me is a fact, not a judgement.

What makes you think this is fact and not your opinion? What evidence do you have to base this on? Once again, you are acting exactly like those fundies who say that they aren't judging others when they tell other people that they are going to hell because they're "only saying what the bible is saying."

 

 

If there is a God who is perfect.......knows all, is everwhere, etc. and this God created us then at our core would be perfection and this perfection

in us could not deny itself. In other words I have said for years that no one can see God as God truly is and deny this God. If this is true then if someone is rejecting God, what they are rejecting is not God but a perverse image of God.

How do you know what truth is if you've never seen God? When people reject God, how do you know that the image of God they are rejecting is perverse and not the truth since you yourself admit that no one can see God? Why must the truth about God be that he's perfect or worthy of worship? For someone who claims no one can know the truth, you sure do act like you have an authoritive opinion of what truth is when you arrograntly claim to know what it is we're rejecting.

 

 

I do see that my wording was atrocious so I do not blame anyone for not seeing my thoughts. You are rejecting garbage, Neon, not God, not truth. Again I equate Jesus Christ with truth as it says in the Bible and this forum is not ex truth. On the contrary I see a seeking of truth unequaled by much of what I see in the Christian realm. This is not judging, Neon, this is what I observe.

Why must Jesus be the truth? Why can't Allah be the truth? Since you say no can see God as he truly is, what makes you think that Jesus is truth because of what the bible says but our rejection of Jesus is not a rejection of truth, even though we are rejecting the Jesus presented in the same bible that you claim says is the truth? Once again, you're exactly like those Christians who claim that we were never "true" Christians.

 

 

 

 

I did not say this. I said or think I said that God is so far out there that I cannot comprehend this supposed God. Whether God is explainable or not is up to God and the individual.

According to dictionary.com, the word comprehend means, "to understand the nature or meaning of; grasp with the mind; perceive." The word explainable means, "to make plain or clear; render understandable or intelligible, to assign a meaning to; interpret." Notice how the words comprehend and explainable have the same definition? So, whether or not we use the word comprehend or explainable, it's irrelevant to the question I asked since they mean the exact same thing. So, please stop dodging my questions and answer them. "And if God is "so far out there" for you to not to be able to understand his mind, by saying that you can't know the mind of God, aren't you in fact claiming to know something about God since comprehending God to be incomprehenisible is in fact a comprehension about God?" Is that a precise enough wording for you now?

 

 

If there is a God as is depicted in the Bible then I do not believe this God NEEDS to do anything. I did not say God does not care about whether it's actions are moral or not.

In response to my question as to why is it moral to worship God, you said, and I quote, "As to why is it moral to worship God. Morality doesn't enter into it in my mind. If you believe God exists and has given you life, then of course you should worship this God and trust that this God may know more about things than you do from your puny perspective but if you don't believe God exists then it would be hypocrtical and meaningless of you to 'worship' Him. " You said morality didn't even enter into your mind as to why people should worship God. You then said that if you believe God exists and created that he created life, that we should worship and trust this God that knows more than us, thus you are essentially implying that morality does not matter God by telling us that we should worship God and trust him because he supposedly knows more about us than we do. You also still have not answered my question as to why is it moral to worship God.

 

 

 

 

God would not be a tyrant if this God's ultimate plan was the creating of man into a better being. In other words if there is purpose, good purpose to all, for evil to exist then the end would justify the means, wouldn't it?

As I said earlier, if a parent had the power to save their child from being raped but didn't do it and in fact encouraged the raping because they thought the child needed to be raped for their own good, we wouldn't let the parent off the hook just because they made it up to their child later on with hugs and kisses, right? No, the parent still would have to pay retribution for their abuse of their child. So, if a parent still has to be punished for abusing their child even if they make it up to their child later in life, why should God get let off the hook for allowing us to suffer and in fact, as you claim creates suffering to create "balance" with "good"?

[Neon Genesis]

Now you may ask "So evil is needed to perfect man?" I would say that if this God is using evil to this end then I would say this God thinks so. Not that there may not be a myriad of other ways to make man but this is the way this God chose to do it. I am just surmising.

So, then how is a God that allows people to be raped, abused, and murdered so that others can feel a "balance" of good in their lives worthy of worship? And please explain how you did not just now justify rape, abuse, and murder?

 

 

 

You evaded my question. Neon, would you know cold as you do now apart from knowing hot?

According to the bible, God supposedly is perfect and without sin. If the bible is true and God can be perfect without sinning, then it is in fact possible to know what hot is without knowing cold since God apparently can know perfection without sinning. If it is impossible to know hot without knowing cold, then the bible must be a lie and God is an impossible existence because he can know perfection without sinning.

 

 

You ask a good question. To respond to it I would say that I don't think so. At least I don't think I would know and understand cold as I do without knowing hot. I have a hard time applying 'weak and strong' to God.

Weren't you just saying earlier that we can't comprehend God? If we can't comprehend God, why are you making a comprehenision about God by saying that God couldn't create a world where we can feel hot without cold?

 

 

 

I once asked you how you know whose prayers are answered and whose are not. How do you know some are not answered?

And I told you to go ask HanSolo if God ever answered his prayers. Also see the following pages, http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/, http://www.boston.com/news/globe/health_sc...yer_for_health/, and

http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/ap_060330_prayer.html

 

No we shouldn't because we don't need to. People will commit crimes without encouragment from us.

Then, why did God encourage Satan to commit crimes against Job just so he could win a bet against him?

 

 

 

Why would I choose not to stop him sometimes in this manner?

Please see my earlier analogy of a parent that has the power to save a child from being raped but allows their child to be raped.

[Grandpa Harley]

One has to admire the level of hypocrisy of the Thing telling Neon he's evading question, while the Thing makes up its own damned language to justify its crap...

[sojourner]

This has been very good for me reading all of these posts.

 

It just seems to me the more I wrestle with a God and all the evil in the world, that all religion seems to be human beings wrestlings with this same delimma. I cant help but think this had to be one of the main ingredients in the beginnings of all religion, trying to understand this.

 

I dont think we have to have hot to grasp cold. If I never knew hot somehow I just still know if I walked into a meat locker I would still say this room is ???? something....lol

 

I dont think we need hate to understand love, nor darkness to grasp light. I guess I just dont. Therefore, I dont get it.

 

so back to the drawing board

 

sojourner

[Grandpa Harley]

It's one of those things... 'good' is things we like, 'evil' is stuff we don't like. In the end it's just an even, and the context we place on it is just someone's likes or dislikes... Hell, I do it too, but I don't see what God's got to do with it...

[Ouroboros]

It's one of those things... 'good' is things we like, 'evil' is stuff we don't like. In the end it's just an even, and the context we place on it is just someone's likes or dislikes... Hell, I do it too, but I don't see what God's got to do with it...

Give the man a cigar.

 

I agree. "Jesus is the truth" or "Jesus is love" or "God is good" is just ways of projecting our value judgments unto something above and beyond ourselves and beyond society itself. In other words, when we can't explain why we feel a certain way, we blame something outside of what we know and understand. Just like thunderstorm for the old pagans were caused by the gods, and now when people can't explain why they feel love or why they can judge "goodness" in a way or another, they have to invent where these ideas and feelings come from. Since they can't accept that it's hard to explain, they need a simple, easy-fix, solution, "God is it". It's a way of cheating the brain of thinking about the reasons. It's the lazy minds way of snooze the clock and sleep 5 minutes more.

[Grandpa Harley]

Lewinskied?

[Ouroboros]

I dont think we have to have hot to grasp cold. If I never knew hot somehow I just still know if I walked into a meat locker I would still say this room is ???? something....lol

Sorry, but you do need hot to have cold. If you removed hot, lets say anything above 100 degrees, then hot would be the word for anything above - lets say - 50 degrees instead. Without relative values, how can you establish context for the fixed values? Or put it this way, ask yourself at what temperature is hot, hot?

 

I dont think we need hate to understand love, nor darkness to grasp light. I guess I just dont. Therefore, I dont get it.

We don't have to hate to know love, but we have to understand hate to understand love. You have to have a frame of reference, or your frame is limping. You can't have left without right. You can't have south without north. Imagine removing the word "left" from the vocabulary, how would you be able to drive? By going in circles to the right? You need concepts, and they won't disappear because someone doesn't like one side of the concept. What is freedom, unless you can define what freedom is not?

 

 

so back to the drawing board

Yes. Good idea.

[sojourner]

Then if you lived in light, never night, you dont think you could know that light? So what would it be to you? Why does it seem we have to have opposites for everything to grasp what we would be experiancing without them. If there were no hate why would we then need to invent it to understand love if we lived with loving and being loved? Or if there were no hot but only cold why could we not know the cold till we had hot?

 

I guess to me my line of thought though shallow as it probably is , is why cant I know something if it were all I had, really know it? Why would I need its opposite to know it?

 

Also, I was thinking how these questions that this thread is about, it seems to me religion develops from really dealing thru them, for instance

 

we cant grasp a good god in a world where there is so much evil so we come up with a devil and assign all the bad to him

or we assign it all to man or both

 

or

 

we decide God is not necessarily good, the foundation for some religions, or even many gods good and bad

 

or

 

He is unknown, the unknowable, which is the foundation for some religions

 

or

or

or

 

lol

 

anywho, might not make sense to anyone but me but I still think that I could know love without ever having known hate, I mean really know it because Ive been loved.

 

sojourner

[Ouroboros]

I guess to me my line of thought though shallow as it probably is , is why cant I know something if it were all I had, really know it? Why would I need its opposite to know it?

Because without it you have nothing to compare to.

 

Let's invent a word for something that only have one side: Zurg.

 

Do you know what a Zurg is, unless I explain what it is, and what it is not?

 

When I start doing that, do you think you'll be able to think up any things in the world that would be Non-Zurgs?

 

Lets say I start with saying Zurg is blue.

 

Does this mean that anything green, red, orange, that is not a zurg, now suddenly seize to exist? I can't. Because when you define something, you create a category within a structure, which means that everything outside that definition, outside that category, is by definition it's negation, the non-X. Do you understand?

 

Everything has opposites of some form.

 

Besides, is hate the exact opposite to love? What is despise? How does one measure love? What defines love? If you define love, does non-love exist still or does it disappear magically?

 

Also, I was thinking how these questions that this thread is about, it seems to me religion develops from really dealing thru them, for instance

 

we cant grasp a good god in a world where there is so much evil so we come up with a devil and assign all the bad to him

or we assign it all to man or both

Our understanding of the world, and religion, and philosophy, and everything we know, is based on words. What is in a word? Most words are elliptical and are defined by other words, and those words are in turn defined by other words. Where does it end? Language is tautological by definition, and we create the opposites through language. Remove a word for a concept, and new word for that concept is invented. If you want to remove hate, you have to remove that notion and inclination in people rather than the words before the word as an opposite to love can disappear. But can you? Even the Bible say that God hates certain things. So even without the devil or hate in humans, hate has a source, just as love. (religiously speaking)

 

we decide God is not necessarily good, the foundation for some religions, or even many gods good and bad

Either the definition of God is good according to what we consider good. - which means good is preexisting and transcendent to god himself, and god is a slave under "goodness" and morality just as us.

 

Or whatever God is, it's good regardless if we consider it good or not. - which leads to an amoral god, he dictates what is good by acting it. Killing children is good as soon as God does it.

 

anywho, might not make sense to anyone but me but I still think that I could know love without ever having known hate, I mean really know it because Ive been loved.

I think you missed something I said earlier.

 

You don't have to hate, or have hated, i.e. you don't have to have experience of hating, to know hate and respectively love. But you will understand what hate is when you understand what love is, and vice versa.

 

If everyone in the world were loving each other, we wouldn't have a word like "love". No one would say: "oh, look at John how loving he is", because you're response would be: "so what? I do the same, and so do you, and everyone else." What does love mean, if only love exists?

[sojourner]

Hi Hans,

 

Ok I get ya.

 

I think we are saying similar things according to your last few sentences as in here:

 

think you missed something I said earlier.

 

You don't have to hate, or have hated, i.e. you don't have to have experience of hating, to know hate and respectively love. But you will understand what hate is when you understand what love is, and vice versa.

 

That sounds to me like what I was saying but perhaps not very well

 

If everyone in the world were loving each other, we wouldn't have a word like "love". No one would say: "oh, look at John how loving he is", because you're response would be: "so what? I do the same, and so do you, and everyone else." What does love mean, if only love exists?

 

So your saying if only love existed it would be common place to us therefore, it wouldnt mean as much to us and in fact we might not even assign a language or word to it? correct

 

Am I getting you?

 

have to think about this more

 

sojourner

[Ouroboros]

So your saying if only love existed it would be common place to us therefore, it wouldnt mean as much to us and in fact we might not even assign a language or word to it? correct

 

Am I getting you?

Correct.

 

We have words like "breathing" because we also have people who's dead that don't breathe. But do we have a word for "We exists of particles"? All of us do. Dead or alive. Humans as well as animals. So do we have a terminology to specify what is matter-consisting-life and what is not... on another thought, yes we do, but when spirits and ghosts, who does not consist of matter is regarded, they're not humans nor alive in the same sense as us, and they're not biological life. So the analogy I think still holds, you don't have a specific word to explain the difference between matter-consisting-humans and non-matter-consisting-humans of the simple reason the other kind doesn't exist and you need no word to describe the difference. Words are concepts to frame ideas, and those frames inherently have to exclude something else that is outside that frame. A painting within a frame is not the wall. And the wall is not the painting. And the frame separates those two. Would a painting within a frame exist if no wall existed, no frame existed, and everything was just one painting?

[sojourner]

You know Hans Ive lived 49 years now and never really thought about this , language and the evolvement of it and how naming something automatically names what it is not.

 

I find the whole language thing incredibly insightful and its giving me new paradigms , now if I can just follow these new trails and see where they take me.

 

 

thank you for sharing

 

sojourner

[Ouroboros]

thank you for sharing

My pleasure. Understanding that words are symbols for mostly abstract concepts will make you start thinking about knowledge, the world, science and religion in a completely new way.

[Neon Genesis]

If love needs an opposite to define what love is, is it possible to love to hate something?

[Grandpa Harley]

Actually, Hans, you've ended up less with opposites, and more boundary states... at least with the painting analogy... it's an arbitrary opposite.

 

The stuff outside the frame is not painting (¬P) the stuff inside the frame is painting (P) Thing is, ¬P is not 'anti-P', thus it's a region outside the domain of P, not its negative, thus, in set notation, using your logic ¬P=P' (P complement) which is everything outside the set P since e=P+P' Thus the ¬P was a fallacy. There really never was a ¬P, just P'

 

Thus you don't need an 'opposite' to define something, just a boundary. In the case of the boundary P' -> P we have F which the frame, and is almost a member of P and almost a member of P'

 

I hate set theory.

[MathGeek]

I am a late entry into this foray.

 

In a roundabout way, I guess it did. When my wife had her miscarriage, it took me a while but I finally had the will to blame God for it. My thoughts were royally screwed up. I figured if an all-benevolent God could have taken my innocent, not-yet born son, why didn't he take me instead because my list of crimes against him was lengthy since I was living in sin. It made no sense to me and God gave me no reason for the death.

 

Now, with fresh eyes, I can honestly say that the problem of evil stems from Yahweh and his entrapment of mankind in the Garden of Eden. He told them NO and yet, he didn't really stop the serpent from enticing Adam and Eve. Why did the serpent tempt them? What grudge did he have against the LORD? These ideas are never explained in the Bible and the apologists are lacking in their answers.

 

Theodicy is bunk.

[Grandpa Harley]

Completely off topic... Why the incremental factor of the tonic scale?

[MathGeek]

Completely off topic... Why the incremental factor of the tonic scale?

 

I love anything that is mathematical, usually within the numerical realm. I have a weird obsession with irrational numbers and how they came to be discovered. Plus (insert rimshot), I really like music and musical structure (I have a rudimentary knowledge). I figured it would make a great avatar photo. Lastly, if you viewed my ugly mug, your eyes would bleed.

 

[Grandpa Harley]

My eyes often bleed here... but that's due to the realy appalling special arguments the tumbleweed Christians use...

[sojourner]

Grandpa, I had to read it a couple of times but I really liked your post. So in your example would time be an F, a frame for this universe?

 

so your example is a 'set theory'? Why do you hate set theory?

 

sojourner

[Ouroboros]

Thanks Gramps, awesome post.

[Grandpa Harley]

Time is part of the canvas... it's not a frame...

 

and set theory is inelegant maths, underpinned by assumptions, not proofs.

 

An analogy: 2n+1 is an element of the Set of All Odd numbers. We 'know' this to be the case, but there isn't a mathematical proof, although one should be possible using the same ideas as the proof of Fermat's last theorem.

 

The assumptions that under pin Set Theory are not so 'Well, DUH!' as that, and that's why I don't like it as a branch of maths. It lacks rigour.

[Ouroboros]

Time is part of the canvas... it's not a frame...

 

and set theory is inelegant maths, underpinned by assumptions, not proofs.

 

An analogy: 2n+1 is an element of the Set of All Odd numbers. We 'know' this to be the case, but there isn't a mathematical proof, although one should be possible using the same ideas as the proof of Fermat's last theorem.

 

The assumptions that under pin Set Theory are not so 'Well, DUH!' as that, and that's why I don't like it as a branch of maths. It lacks rigour.

 

And from what I understand a lot of paradoxes. It seems all (or most) of the mathematical paradoxes got something to do with sets.

 

--

 

(here's some other random thoughts)

 

And thinking about your post, you're right, it's about boundaries. But my point is that with boundaries you do end up with what something is, and what it is not. So if you define love to be X, then not-X must exist too. You can't say "love is when you care for someone" and at the same time say "not caring for someone does not exist". Or can you? If a supreme being could remove hate from human beings and we all just loved, what would be the definition of "love"? Would we keep the word around to explain something we all do, or would it be redifined and the "more-care for someone" suddenly mean "love", and "less-care" would mean "hate"? The problem with love-hate is that there's no absolute definitions of them, so they're not absolute opposites.

 

If you love your children, do you beat them and punish them for being bad? I don't, but it's common and the Bible suggests that is proof of love, and many people today and in the old days think so. I have a friend that doesn't have any kids yet, but seriously believe that beating your kid is the right way of raising them, because you love them and want to teach them. Now if I compare this to a person that beats their kids for arbitrary rules broken, but doesn't do it out of love, how can I tell the difference? So we can see love isn't expressed by actions, but by intentions. In other words, love is that you care for someone and want to do the best for them, regardless of what you think is the best actions to do so.

 

So what is hate? Is that the same thing, but the opposite? That I don't care for someone or is it that I care for their misfortune? If it's the intent to harm someone, how do we distinct that from someone that just have an anger problem and in rage wants to harm someone, or how do we handle someone that harm someone in defense, or in crime of passion? Do they all hate?

 

So I can see that love and hate is a matter of boundaries too and not real opposites. But how do you define hate so you can remove it from the human mind?

 

---

 

And regarding the tonic scale, I made a program once making music based on the 5-tone scale.

[Ouroboros]

Actually, Hans, you've ended up less with opposites, and more boundary states... at least with the painting analogy... it's an arbitrary opposite.

 

The stuff outside the frame is not painting (¬P) the stuff inside the frame is painting (P) Thing is, ¬P is not 'anti-P', thus it's a region outside the domain of P, not its negative, thus, in set notation, using your logic ¬P=P' (P complement) which is everything outside the set P since e=P+P' Thus the ¬P was a fallacy. There really never was a ¬P, just P'

 

Thus you don't need an 'opposite' to define something, just a boundary. In the case of the boundary P' -> P we have F which the frame, and is almost a member of P and almost a member of P'

 

I hate set theory.

 

Oh, and to clarify, earlier I didn't mean "anti-P" or "anti-Love", but you need "not-P" (P') and "not-Love" (Love') since the boundary establish the complement by it's boundary. Anti-P is part of the P-complement though, but as you say it's not necessary to define P.

 

...

 

And this combined with my previous post... it seems we don't need "hate" to know what love is. But what follows is that we don't need despise, disgust or any other non-love words either, and eventually we still end up with not knowing what love is unless we know what it is not.