God and free will

[Mythra]

I thought we got this H thing resolved already. What's with this Hubert shit?

 

Our Father, which art in heaven HAROLD be thy name.

 

Jesus Harold Christ.

 

C'mon guys. We're not gonna make much progress here if we keep having to go over re-hashed shit.

[JeffXL]

I heard that the "H" stands for "haploid." Since God raped Mary, Jesus the C. would be shortchanged in the chromosome department.

[JeffXL]

 

Boy, you really did some pretty impressive acrobatics in that paragraph! Talk about multiple personality disorders! They put people on pills who speak to voices and have voices tell them what to do, no wonder there are so many schitzophranics...the creator is ONE!

105793[/snapback]

 

 

The mental contortions the Christians employ are truly astonishing, as are their bizarre crimes against logic. And there's just what Christians *always* do: Just make things up! Whee!

[Guest Thegoodbook]

What you refer to as human "imperfections" the Bible refers to as sin (moral evil). But you speak of it as if it is a "thing": a substance or commodity. This is the flaw in your argument.

Moral evil, when you think about it, is what? It is a DISORDERED act of the WILL. It is a wrong relationship and nonconformity between Gods will and our will. He did not directly CREATE sin; He allowed man to CHOOSE. Man is responsible, not God.

 

God created a perfect world. But a world in which NO sin is POSSIBLE must also be a world in which sin IS possible. It is illogical to argue that God could have offered man choices among only "good" things. Making a "moral choice" has within it's own meaning the possibility of sin. It is a self-contradiction to create a world in which there is genuine CHOICE between good and evil; and at the same time no possibility of choosing evil.

[JeffXL]

What you refer to as human "imperfections" the Bible refers to as sin (moral evil). But you speak of it as if it is a "thing": a substance or commodity. This is the flaw in your argument.

Moral evil, when you think about it, is what? It is a DISORDERED act of the WILL. It is a wrong relationship and nonconformity between Gods will and our will. He did not directly CREATE sin; He allowed man to CHOOSE. Man is responsible, not God.

 

God created a perfect world. But a world in which NO sin is POSSIBLE must also be a world in which sin IS possible. It is illogical to argue that God could have offered man choices among only "good" things. Making a "moral choice" has within it's own meaning the possibility of sin. It is a self-contradiction to create a world in which there is genuine CHOICE between good and evil; and at the same time no possibility of choosing evil.

106133[/snapback]

 

Typical Christian tactic. Defining for us what we're saying. Great.

 

God might have been drunk in that fable, but he half-assed created the Garden of Eden as a perfect world, without "sin." Then he tempted Adam and Eve [you really believe this bullshit?] with the Tree of Knowlege, after which a sinful serpent (sinning before sin existed, apparently) convinced Eve to have that snack.

 

Again, the God character is mighty clumsy and stupid. And quite an evil bastard, speaking of a disordered will.

 

BTW, you don't think God's commands for genocide and murder are evil? Heil, God!

[Amethyst]

Umm....I don't know if anyone has mentioned this to thegoodbook yet, but threw in that syntax is spelled through. Please take the effort to learn proper grammar.

[crazy-tiger]

What you refer to as human "imperfections" the Bible refers to as sin (moral evil). But you speak of it as if it is a "thing": a substance or commodity. This is the flaw in your argument.

Moral evil, when you think about it, is what? It is a DISORDERED act of the WILL. It is a wrong relationship and nonconformity between Gods will and our will. He did not directly CREATE sin; He allowed man to CHOOSE. Man is responsible, not God.

 

God created a perfect world. But a world in which NO sin is POSSIBLE must also be a world in which sin IS possible. It is illogical to argue that God could have offered man choices among only "good" things. Making a "moral choice" has within it's own meaning the possibility of sin. It is a self-contradiction to create a world in which there is genuine CHOICE between good and evil; and at the same time no possibility of choosing evil.

106133[/snapback]

God created everything, right? That means that God created humans with the inbuilt ability to sin.

Problem... you cannot have the inbuilt ability to sin without sin itself. Which means that sin must have existed BEFORE humans were created. Ergo, God created sin.

 

God also created a perfect, sin-free world... according to the gumpf in the Bible. That would mean that even if humans had the ability to sin, they wouldn't be able to since there would be no sin.

Problem... A perfect, sin-free world is claimed to have existed yet is also shown not to have existed in the Bible.

 

 

 

God created humans. Humans sin. God didn't directly create sin, therefore humans are responsible... Is that your argument?

I trip someone up... they fall forwards onto someone else, causing them to fall forwards. They fall onto a spike which kills them.

I didn't directly kill them, therefore I am not responsible.

 

It is the primary cause of the result that is responsible for the result. In this case, by creating humans, God is responsible for the creation of sin. In this case, by creating humans with the ability to sin, God is responsible for sin.

 

If God really wanted us to be sinless, he wouldn't have created us in such a way that sin was an option.

 

 

In the end, God is responsible for everything... He created it all, he is the primary cause.

Stop trying to hold humanity to a higher standard than you hold God.

[Asuryan]

...God (this may also merit a discussion of God and time) had reasoned before he made the world, to have something for people to be redeemed from namely sin. Which means that God determined that man would fall and become in need of a Savior.

 

Why?

Wouldn't it have been so much simpler to just create humankind without sin?

God tortured, killed, made a lot of people suffer because of this plan of his.

If he had created humans with both free will and the absence of sin or capability to commit evil things, there would have been no need to kill all the firstborn in egypt... drowning all of the world population exception made for a single family... (and death by drowning is one of the worst ones, at least so it is said...)... and what about killing all of sodoma and gomorra's citizens? A rain of fire, I think that, too, must be pretty painful...

So god could:

1) Create mankind without sin, but with free will. So that man can choose, but at the same time he feels such a repulsion toward sin that he simply chooses not to sin and do evil things. No one dies, no one suffers, no need to drown and burn and torture and hell, everything goes smoothly, and there is peace on the earth.

2) Create mankind with sin and with the propension to choose sin over virtuous behaviour. Create the talking snake. Put the talking snake inside the garden of eden, so if adam and eve won't eat the f*cking fruit, they will be talked to it by this talking snake (they can't win, poor guys).

Then drown people, burn them, torture them, close them in hell for eternity, at his leisure.

He chose 2).

How STUPID is that??

 

 

God planned to exhibit his goodness.

 

And in Exodus he exhibits his power.

The guy has serious self-esteem issues, if he needs to create a whole race just to feel worshipped and loved. And I thought he was perfect...

[Cerise]

But a world in which NO sin is POSSIBLE must also be a world in which sin IS possible.

 

 

Hur??

[crazy-tiger]

But a world in which NO sin is POSSIBLE must also be a world in which sin IS possible.

Good grief... I don't believe I missed this gem. (thanks Cerise)

 

 

The horrendous lack of logic makes me want to cry...

[Ouroboros]

...

If I am God and I talk to the trinity and I say something to the effect of, let us create a man in our own image. I know all of the effects that such a thing will cause. I know that if I give the man reason, he will rebel against me and I will have to curse him because of my holiness. I know that, in order to redeem man, I will have to send my son to die on the cross to redeem man. I know that man will commit atrocities and that I will have to mete out justice. I deem that overall, it is good to create man in my own image and I give him reason and then...

...

105788[/snapback]

Did God know what the trinity would agree on doing, before he talked to them? Was he omniscient enough to know what he would do before he had this little chat with JC and HG? If so, why did he have a chat at all? And did he know before he knew that he would have this chat, and did he know it before that? Did he know for eternity back in time what he already would do, then why talk about something.

 

So is God bound to the temporal constraints of making decisions or is he omniscient and already know everything he's going to do?

[crazy-tiger]

Isn't talking to yourself the first sign of madness? And is God talking to JC or HG anything other than talking to himself?

[Ouroboros]

Isn't talking to yourself the first sign of madness? And is God talking to JC or HG anything other than talking to himself?

106223[/snapback]

Good point. God has MPD. That's why everything is so screwed up.

[Cerise]

It's not talking to yourself, it's when you start to answer yourself that's the first sign of madness.

[Mr. Neil]

Isn't talking to yourself the first sign of madness?

No. Being a Christian is. *ba-dum-tsh!!!*

[Ouroboros]

It's not talking to yourself, it's when you start to answer yourself that's the first sign of madness.

106231[/snapback]

But that's the best part. Talking to yourself always guarantee that you get the last word!

[crazy-tiger]

Isn't talking to yourself the first sign of madness?

No. Being a Christian is. *ba-dum-tsh!!!*

106232[/snapback]

[The Holy Ghost]

You people think you have it rough? What do you think it's like being Me? No matter who I'm talking to, I'm always talking to Myself.

[seeker]

...

If I am God and I talk to the trinity and I say something to the effect of, let us create a man in our own image. I know all of the effects that such a thing will cause. I know that if I give the man reason, he will rebel against me and I will have to curse him because of my holiness. I know that, in order to redeem man, I will have to send my son to die on the cross to redeem man. I know that man will commit atrocities and that I will have to mete out justice. I deem that overall, it is good to create man in my own image and I give him reason and then...

...

105788[/snapback]

Did God know what the trinity would agree on doing, before he talked to them? Was he omniscient enough to know what he would do before he had this little chat with JC and HG? If so, why did he have a chat at all? And did he know before he knew that he would have this chat, and did he know it before that? Did he know for eternity back in time what he already would do, then why talk about something.

 

So is God bound to the temporal constraints of making decisions or is he omniscient and already know everything he's going to do?

106220[/snapback]

 

Awesome post. I love how Christians speak for an infinite all knowing "thing". Failing to realize anything they as a human bring up is completly limited and completly worthless when speaking of something infinte. I love how they can believe that 1 + 3 = 1. And how they can beleive in stories that sound EXACTLY like a childrens bed time book. Its truly amazing to sit and listen to grown men and women talk about "tree's of life" or "tree's of knowledge", happy garden's where humans live forever, a boat with hundreds of thousands of animals on it. Are you serious? I mean wtf?

 

Does this not sound like a freaking movie script? Or a play made up? How can Christians not see this? You are ok with God making a play house to pull the strings on *its* dolls? You can't argue the free-will vs predestination topic. As a human it DOES NOT EQUATE, but yes maybe if there is a God there is a way....who the fuck knows!! You can chop it down as small as you like but what you don't get is all you are doing is breaking it down far enough so that your "limited, finite" brain can understand it. The point is ITS A WASTE OF BREATH! Complete and total waste of brain cells. And how come you Christians cannot see how all you do is make Image's of God with your arguments? "God likes this, God hates that, God wouldn't do that , God would do this"...How the hell do you know what an INFINITE, UNCOMPREHENDABLE "thing" likes, dislikes, does,doesn't do....these are HUMAN ideas yet you attribute them to God...again breaking God down to your limited human understanding of things....

 

True arrogance.

[Ouroboros]

...

Does this not sound like a freaking movie script? Or a play made up? How can Christians not see this? You are ok with God making a play house to pull the strings on *its* dolls? You can't argue the free-will vs predestination topic. As a human it DOES NOT EQUATE, but yes maybe if there is a God there is a way....who the fuck knows!! You can chop it down as small as you like but what you don't get is all you are doing is breaking it down far enough so that your "limited, finite" brain can understand it. The point is ITS A WASTE OF BREATH! Complete and total waste of brain cells. And how come you Christians cannot see how all you do is make Image's of God with your arguments? "God likes this, God hates that, God wouldn't do that , God would do this"...How the hell do you know what an INFINITE, UNCOMPREHENDABLE "thing" likes, dislikes, does,doesn't do....these are HUMAN ideas yet you attribute them to God...again breaking God down to your limited human understanding of things....

 

True arrogance.

106631[/snapback]

Ramen and Almond to that!

[Guest Thegoodbook]

Wouldn't it have been so much simpler to just create humankind without sin?

 

Since I am not God, I doubt I could answer this in any authoritative manner.

 

God tortured, killed, made a lot of people suffer because of this plan of his.

 

Remember you don't get to assert things until you have shown them and you have a long way to go from "God allowed sin" to "God sinned" or from "God allowed murder" and "God killed" to "God murdered". There are a great many things that must be defined and shown first.

 

 

Remember you don't get to assert things until you have shown them and you have a long way to go from "God allowed sin" to "God sinned" or from "God allowed murder" and "God killed" to "God murdered". There are a great many things that must be defined and shown first.

 

If he had created humans with both free will and the absence of sin or capability to commit evil things, there would have been no need to kill all the firstborn in egypt... drowning all of the world population exception made for a single family... (and death by drowning is one of the worst ones, at least so it is said...)... and what about killing all of sodoma and gomorra's citizens? A rain of fire, I think that, too, must be pretty painful...

So god could:

1) Create mankind without sin, but with free will. So that man can choose, but at the same time he feels such a repulsion toward sin that he simply chooses not to sin and do evil things. No one dies, no one suffers, no need to drown and burn and torture and hell, everything goes smoothly, and there is peace on the earth.

2) Create mankind with sin and with the propension to choose sin over virtuous behaviour. Create the talking snake. Put the talking snake inside the garden of eden, so if adam and eve won't eat the fruit, they will be talked to it by this talking snake (they can't win, poor guys).

Then drown people, burn them, torture them, close them in hell for eternity, at his leisure.

He chose 2).

How STUPID is that??

 

This is a remarkably insightful question but I have to get to the nature of the actual objection, and this is not it, at least not yet so you have to answer a couple of questions for me.

 

1. Does evil exist?

2. Who is responsible for evil?

3. How do you define Good and Evil?

 

I do not want the Christian views for evil because I already know them. If you are not a Christian, and I am assuming that you are not, then your answer to these questions are very important.

 

1. God is omnipotent

2. God is omniscient

 

There is no problem here until you add this

 

3. Evil exists in the world

 

Now we have something that appears to be contradictory so we must establish the premise, does evil exist in the world? If we cannot show this to be the case then there can be no objection.

 

I will deal with the rest of your assertions once we establish that evil can exist in your worldview.

[Ouroboros]

Wouldn't it have been so much simpler to just create humankind without sin?

 

Since I am not God, I doubt I could answer this in any authoritative manner.

And yet you claim authority in other subjects!

 

Since you are the representative of God's will on Earth, you have the Book you claim is infallible and complete with all answers, and that Jesus is the truth, the way and the life, how can you claim not knowing the explanation to the most fundamental question? Extremely disappointing! It only shows that you don't know God, you don't know why, how or when, and you prove that your "All-Answers-Book" doesn't explain this.

 

God tortured, killed, made a lot of people suffer because of this plan of his.

 

Remember you don't get to assert things until you have shown them and you have a long way to go from "God allowed sin" to "God sinned" or from "God allowed murder" and "God killed" to "God murdered". There are a great many things that must be defined and shown first.

Bullshit. When you get on to explain all the other things, they won't be explainable unless you explain yet another 50 billion other things, and at the end you only have played around the question with smoke and mirrors to avoid answering that you don't know, and there are no answers.

 

Remember you don't get to assert things until you have shown them and you have a long way to go from "God allowed sin" to "God sinned" or from "God allowed murder" and "God killed" to "God murdered". There are a great many things that must be defined and shown first.

 

If he had created humans with both free will and the absence of sin or capability to commit evil things, there would have been no need to kill all the firstborn in egypt... drowning all of the world population exception made for a single family... (and death by drowning is one of the worst ones, at least so it is said...)... and what about killing all of sodoma and gomorra's citizens? A rain of fire, I think that, too, must be pretty painful...

So god could:

1) Create mankind without sin, but with free will. So that man can choose, but at the same time he feels such a repulsion toward sin that he simply chooses not to sin and do evil things. No one dies, no one suffers, no need to drown and burn and torture and hell, everything goes smoothly, and there is peace on the earth.

2) Create mankind with sin and with the propension to choose sin over virtuous behaviour. Create the talking snake. Put the talking snake inside the garden of eden, so if adam and eve won't eat the fruit, they will be talked to it by this talking snake (they can't win, poor guys).

Then drown people, burn them, torture them, close them in hell for eternity, at his leisure.

He chose 2).

How STUPID is that??

 

This is a remarkably insightful question but I have to get to the nature of the actual objection, and this is not it, at least not yet so you have to answer a couple of questions for me.

 

1. Does evil exist?

2. Who is responsible for evil?

3. How do you define Good and Evil?

Evil is a word that has been invented by the human mind to separate what is considered being right or wrong in certain situations. There is no evil, per se, but there are people that might do things that in a secular morality is not considered legit, because it breaks the foundations of what we strive for and the stability of society.

 

No one is responsible for evil, it's a man made concept. Right and wrong, exists, but is extremely depending on context.

 

Good is when you're hungry and have a piece of chocolate.

 

I do not want the Christian views for evil because I already know them. If you are not a Christian, and I am assuming that you are not, then your answer to these questions are very important.

 

1. God is omnipotent

2. God is omniscient

 

There is no problem here until you add this

 

3. Evil exists in the world

That's exactly right.

 

Now we have something that appears to be contradictory so we must establish the premise, does evil exist in the world? If we cannot show this to be the case then there can be no objection.

 

I will deal with the rest of your assertions once we establish that evil can exist in your worldview.

106906[/snapback]

 

And you will show that something completely absent of evil, can create evil, and indirectly be the mother of all evil.

[Asuryan]

Wouldn't it have been so much simpler to just create humankind without sin?

 

Since I am not God, I doubt I could answer this in any authoritative manner.

 

Remember. God is supposedly omnipotent.

If he wants something to happen, that thing HAPPENS.

Omnipotent means that his power has no limits.

For such a god, creating mankind without sin is automatically as simple as it is creating mankind with sin.

 

Remember you don't get to assert things until you have shown them and you have a long way to go from "God allowed sin" to "God sinned"

 

It is necessary to define sin, right.

Killing should be a sin, according to exodus. God explicitly forbids it.

God kills lots of people, by drowning them, burning them alive, turning them in a statue of salt, sending bears to devour people and so on.

Therefore, if killing is a sin, and if god killed some people, then god sinned.

Nowhere in the bible it is said that sin is sin only depending on WHO committed the act. Sin is sin. God is no exception.

 

or from "God allowed murder" and "God killed" to "God murdered". There are a great many things that must be defined and shown first.

 

Let us say that you go out of your home and kill a 2 months old child.

You murdered the child.

It does not matter if the child could've grown up to became an homosexual (thus something that you (you as in "god") consider an abomination). You killed unnecessarily. Killing can be right or wrong, but murder is always wrong. Killing a child that hasn't done anything wrong is murder. God killed thousands of children both born and unborn. Those children didn't do anything wrong. Thus God is a murderer.

 

 

1. Does evil exist?

 

I personally don't like the word "Evil". It is too rhetoric. It is too easy to claim that your opponent is evil and thus gain moral high ground.

If something is evil, that something is causing unnecessary harm. Something is good when it has a beneficial effect. For something to be evil, I deem necessary a deliberate act of will. If a man is carrying my precious violin in his hands, and he tumbles and falls to the ground and smashes it, it was not because he's evil, even if it damaged me.

"Evil" as an enthity does not exist. An action or behaviour can be evil, in this sense evil exists.

 

2. Who is responsible for evil?

 

I don't think that animals, or nature, can act "evil". Hurricanes and Tsunamis happen because of natural causes. Currents, winds, global warming, and so on. If my CPU becomes too hot and it melts down (it happened to me once), it is not because the CPU is evil. There are natural causes that made it melt <--- the dust in the dissipator, and no, it is not Evil dust.

Human beings can act evil.

I don't think that anyone is "responsible for" evil. This is a typical humanocentric point of view. Is there someone "responsible for" the ice ages? Is there someone "responsible for" an earthquake?

A mix of biological, educational and cultural reasons are the main reason we act evil.

 

3. How do you define Good and Evil?

 

I said that above.

 

1. God is omnipotent

2. God is omniscient

 

There is no problem here until you add this

 

3. Evil exists in the world

 

True.

 

Now we have something that appears to be contradictory so we must establish the premise, does evil exist in the world?

 

Human beings are able to act deliberately wrong. Rapes, killings of babies, torture and so on do exist. So we could say that evil exists in the world (but I object again to the "in the world" part of your sentence, I think that evil exists only limited to human beings. again, nature can be devastating but not evil).

[Guest Thegoodbook]

Since most of your post was once again, unwarranted assumption I will narrow it down to the pertinent details.

 

 

Evil is a word that has been invented by the human mind to separate what is considered being right or wrong in certain situations.

 

So you wish to equivocate between "good" and "right", and "evil" and "wrong".

 

This is an interesting dichotomy and I am curious to how you define what is "right" and "wrong".

 

 

There is no evil, per se, but there are people that might do things that in a secular morality is not considered legit, because it breaks the foundations of what we strive for and the stability of society.

 

Let me see if I follow you here. Stability in the society is the goal of society? Therefore evil (wrong) would be anything that threatens that stability? So stability is the highest morality? This should be interesting because basically you are saying that Stalin killing millions of dissidents was in fact acceptable because it was done in the name of not upsetting society, His society.

 

 

No one is responsible for evil, it's a man made concept. Right and wrong, exists, but is extremely depending on context

 

 

So evil does not exist, therefore God is omnipotent and omniscient. There is no contradiction, and the world is in a utopian state, in fact it is in the "best state" it can be in. You have no objection to the Christian God

[Eponymic]

You people think you have it rough? What do you think it's like being Me? No matter who I'm talking to, I'm always talking to Myself.

106451[/snapback]

 

Usually when people have split personalities they put them in the mental institution.

 

Sad, eh. 55 million people are worshipping a schizophrenic entity.