I’m getting mobbed here…my own fault for putting my foot into this thread I guess.
What has this got to do with the question in the OP? You are assuming that these things actually came from God, and that they were perfectly transmitted by God to the humans who then passed them along, and, again, what Gods possible motives were for presumably giving them to us. What if God gave those simplistic commandments because by doing so, western civilization would emerge eventually? What if it’s because when we put our first colony on Mars, it has a profound effect on the moon colony and will save humanity? What if it’s simply to cause a world war that will wipe out humans and pave the way for sentient bears?
Maybe so. Maybe Jesus was just a man, or maybe it was part of Gods plan for an eventual US domination of the world leading to world peace. Or…well, you get the idea. We don’t KNOW the motives of such a being, so we can’t predict why it would do anything. If one is a theist though, one would have to hope that the long term motives of such a being are ‘good’…though, I think that makes a lot of flawed assumptions as well.
Sure, but impatience is a human trait, and probably has a lot to do with the fact that we perceive time in a certain way. You are impatient because you only have so much time, and you have other things you would probably rather be doing. I don’t think we could reasonably project our own emotions, motives, passions, or anything else on such a being. We simply aren’t equipped to think on time scales longer than our own life times.
Um, no, you don’t get to leave aside the part about ends justifying means to an all powerful, immortal being, because that is the whole point. To an all powerful being, there is never a reason to do anything you don’t want to do, or to allow something you don’t to happen to happen. If such a reason existed it would mean that you were restricted from achieving your end through an course of action that did not incur undesired consequences.
The direct ramification of this is that if there is an all-powerful god involved, then everything that happens is, logically and unavoidably*, what God wants. You can’t put an omnipotent God in a situation he doesn’t want to be in, and he literally can’t be in the situation of regretfully shaking his head over the regrettable suffering his plan requires to reach his end. It’s simply not possible for this to be occuring, because being omnipotent he has a better way of doing things that avoids everything that he doesn’t want.
So, logically, if there is an omnipotent god, then everything that happens is exactly the way he likes it. Period.
(It may surprise some people that free will doesn’t change this, and it’s at least somewhat possible to make a relatively convincing argument to the contrary, but that doesn’t even enter into the current discussion. We’re talking about an earthquake. If there’s an omnipotent god, then he wanted the earthquake to happen, and he wanted every consequence of it to happen. Period.)
unless you avoid thinking about it logically at all, anyway.
Is he unknowable or ain’t he? Make up your freakin mind!
Because in this post you are both criticizing me for projecting traits onto God, and then doing exactly the same thing yourself, by asserting that he does not get impatient with whining. (Which has nothing to do with being short of time, of course.)
I’m not sure. I was responding to your claim about the impossibility of knowing God’s mind.
If they weren’t then there is absolutely no reason to obey them.
All good questions, which only buttress my point that if God is intrinsically unknowable, and we will never understand anything about Him, including what he tells us to do, then there is no reason to follow his commands, since we can’t possibly know what they mean. Maybe when He said “Thou shalt not steal” He meant “Wear red shoes every other day.” Who can say?
Ok…what are the ends that God wants done? What are the means? What are the motives? What is ‘justified’ to such a being? Justified to who? How? Why? Since you don’t seem to be getting my point, why don’t you explain yours?
Exactly. It’s what God wants, assuming there is a God and that said God had direct control of the event. I never put said omnipotent God in a situation where he/she/it did what he/she/it didn’t want to do…you aren’t following me at all if you think this. MY point is that YOU (and me, and every other human) doesn’t KNOW what those motives are, or WHY said God did what he/she/it did. Seems rather simple to me, if one makes the basic assumptions…and I pretty much said all this already.
Um, yeah…that’s pretty much what I’ve been saying. I’m glad we are on the same page. The ‘period’ part was a nice touch, though.
Dude…either you aren’t tracking well, or I’m doing a worse job than usual of conveying my points. I’ve said all along that s/he/it is unknowable and s/he/it’s MOTIVES are unknowable. I’m unsure why you got any other impression.
What traits was I projecting onto God?? I’m saying that you can’t project human traits or motives on an omnipotent and immortal being…the only traits I’d be projecting are the assumptions of immortality and omnipotence…
Except that no wars have been fought, or people executed, or lives controlled, or etc. etc. etc. over a physics singularity. Except for that they are exactly alike.
It just seems to me that once someone asserts that God, his motives, his mind, et. al. are completely incomprehensible to us, that’s pretty much a conversation stopper. What else can one possibly assert after saying that?
My point is that the “mysterious ways” and “unknowable god” argument is bullcrap when you’re dealing with an omipotent god because there are no justifications, no “means” to such a being. All there are are ends, which are arrived at without having to jump through hoops. Which means that rather than being mysterious or unknowable, we can know what his ends and goals are just by looking around. The way things are? They are his goals. What you see is what he wants, because if he didn’t want it, you wouldn’t be seeing it. This is the good and the bad - all of it is what he wants.
So, ineffable my butt - I know what he’s like. When people are dying necessarily, that’s the kind of stuff he likes, because if he didn’t like it, it wouldn’t be happening.
This all follows directly from him being an all-powerful god. “Omnipotent” and “unknowable” are logically contradictory.
That is my point. God can’t be both omnipotent and unknowable - and anybody who claims both is simply wrong. To repeat myself: Period.
Because you argued against my post, which wasn’t saying what God WAS motivated by, it was saying what God MIGHT be motivated by. To refute this you have to claim knowledge about his motivations, either through some logical deduction (like noting that he’s supposedly omnipotent), or through special knowledge.
You tried to make such an argument - a bad one, by the way, since it wasn’t that kind of impatience - so you were claiming knowledge about God’s motivations. You don’t get to do that while claiming he’s unknowable, sorry.
Well, since our current knowledge of God consists of what is, IMHO, purely anecdotal (and fairly unreliable) data, what more can we say on the subject in any case.
Understand, I don’t buy the whole ‘omniscient, omnipotent and immortal’ God thingy anyway, so I’m fairly pre-disposed to generally shrug and move on in any case. As an agnostic, my stance is that we don’t know anything about God, can’t and probably never will, and that, at least based on the evidence I’ve seen, the likelihood is that there isn’t such a being in any case.
Well, that is another answer to your earlier comment that you didn’t see your claims as an argument against religion. You are actually arguing for agnosticism. And an argument for agnosticism is also one against religion; at least, one against religion being taken at all seriously.
Last try here…seems futile, but I’ll give it a spin.
No…we can only observe the universe from our own perspective. We see a snapshot in time, which includes neither the means, ends nor anything else. So…we see an earthquake in Haiti and think ‘How horrible!’, but, if we assume it was caused by an omnipotent God, we can’t possibly know WHY it was caused. We can assume (if we are so disposed) that it’s part of SOME plan, but we don’t have even an inkling about what that plan might be. If we are optimistic theists we might assume that said being is ‘good’, therefore said beings plan is ultimately good, even if it appears to do bad things to individuals on our time scale. But that would also be an assumption. However, since that was central to the question asked in the OP, it’s how a certain type of theist can, logically (according to their own internal logic and the internal logic of all these compounded assumptions), continue to worship such a being, even if said being appears (by us humans) to do bad things.
Does ‘he’ speak to you? Tell you ‘his’ inner most thoughts? You know, they have medication for that kind of thing today…
Here’s the thing…you DON’T actually know squat about God, because no one really does. There is, simply, zero data.
You keep saying that, but in the classic words of Inigo Montoya (to paraphrase), I dinna thin’ that word means what you thin’ it means, kimosabe. There is no logical contradiction between being omnipotent (having unlimited power…i.e. all powerful) and unknowable…at least from a humans perspective. In fact, I’d say it’s a logical progression, given the basic assumptions that such a being exists, that an all powerful being could very well keep itself unknowable to other beings who were not omniscient or omnipotent.
If you would like to make your bald faced assertion stick, perhaps you could go into a bit more detail about this logical contradiction. Or, just keep asserting that if it works better for you that way.
Ah…a variation on ‘my post is my cite’. You assert it, therefore it is because, well, you put in the final ‘period’, and that should really be good enough. No need for lengthy and bothersome explanations when you can just do that, ehe?
Um, no…that’s not what I was getting at there. I don’t know how to get the point through to you though, since I’ve said it about 4 different ways now and you simply aren’t tracking.
No. Again, just the opposite. I’d say ‘go back and re-read what I actually wrote’, but I’m not sure there is a point. One last time, I’m saying that you can’t project human emotions or expressions (like impatience) on such a being, since almost by definition such a being wouldn’t react the same way as a human would to any given situation. YOU are impatient (for whatever reason), because that is a human emotion that has to do with the fundamental way we are put together. A being that lives forever is going to be put together, react, perceive, etc, in a completely different fashion than a human would. What those differences might be, I haven’t the foggiest, nor have I attempted to assert any, but that there WOULD be differences, and that they would be profound…well, I’d say that this isn’t exactly rocket science, nor an off the wall speculation.
And of COURSE I get to do that…no need to be sorry. It’s fairly clear you aren’t getting my own arguments in this thread, so I’ll simply leave it at that. I could wish that you were grasping what I was saying better, as then we could talk about all the flaws in my own arguments I see, but I don’t think we’ll get past the hangups between what I’m writing and what you are reading, sadly. C’est la vie.
First, the worshiper is human; so worshiping such a being is stupid from a human perspective. Second, for an omnipotent being there are no necessary evils; it is logically impossible for short term evil to be necessary for a greater good. It doesn’t matter in the slightest how alien such a creature is we are talking capabilities and logic here.
And you are doing something many defenders of religion do; defending a god that no one worships. People don’t worship this god that can’t be understood and which isn’t omnipotent; they worship the all powerful and benevolent God whose existence is contradicted by the world. This concept of an unknowable god is primarily an excuse, as is being done here; very, very few if any people actually believe in such a being.
I am an atheist who dug deep into my pockets and gave generously. Where do you Christians get off thinking you have the monopoly on kindness and charity? And when I do good, I do it for the sake of good. Not because some magic guy in the sky is going to punish or reward me. It is a pretty pathethteic morality that has to be based on the carrot and the stick.
Well, I would agree…but I have to admit my own bias is a factor in that.
Again, it’s a matter of perspective.
I’m not defending religion…simply pointing out how one could logically meet the conditions in the OP of worshiping a being that would cause something like the earth quake in Haiti.
Sure they do. But most of the one’s who think along the lines in the OP also believe that God works in mysterious ways…
Hey, you know, that’s kind of catchy.
It’s not an excuse, it’s fact. We DON’T know anything about God. Most likely that’s because there IS no God. However, if one assumes there is one, then it’s fairly obvious that s/he/it IS unknowable, by and large, and DOES work in mysterious ways.
My late uncle was actually on that show years ago, with his wife, reenacting his heart attack and medical treatment. The way they carried on about it, you’d think he was the only person in the world who’d ever had a myocardial infarction. His wife turned the whole thing into a testimonial/mission thing and made it sound like he practically grew a new heart miraculously or something. I’m inclined to think it was, oh, you know…PROMPT MEDICAL TREATMENT.
What is with you thesists? I and my atheist friends where I live have all given, and generously, I might add. Do you think atheists are incapable of BOTH giving and asking why you would pray to the God who allowed this to happen? Maybe you should lose less time and energy praying, but I am starting to think your REAL loss of energy comes from your constant conclusion-jumping.
I, a lowly agnostic, have also given to several relief agencies to help in this disaster. Also, as part of one of my customers initiatives, I’m on a list of volunteer engineers to go to Haiti to help with telco and network infrastructure assistance, if it’s requested and if we get the funding. Similar to what we did when Katrina hit New Orleans. Not as glamorous as the rescue workers and people bringing in direct aid (food, water, medicine, medical assistance, etc), but we all do what we can.
