erislover wrote:
Haggar physicists develop “Quantum Slacks” that paradoxically behave like both formal and casual wear: http://www.theonion.com/onion3721/quantum_slacks.html
I don’t think God necessarily deals out hatred. It all depends on which Christian’s God we are talking about. I am perfectly willing to accept that God has received a bum rap and that he is more like Lib describes… Love. It is irrelevent. It is not that quality of God that I find revolting. There are some qualities, e.g. belief in his existence, that is pretty base to all Christians. It is these characteristics that are, in my ethic, negative.
Yes, absolutely. A good fighter understands the fights he can win and those he cannot. If God were to exist, it would mean one very important thing about my ethic … it would be wrong. Period. And in being wrong and in dealing with a supreme being that deals out hefty punishment there is only one logical thing to do, attempt to understand and accept the correct ethic.
It is about power, it is about the end result. If God were to exist and didn’t deal out such stiff punishments then I would continue to live my life in my way and then God can explain to me why I was wrong when I face him.
And this is where we differ. To me Jesus is not good. The ethic he proposes has some elements I would agree with but at another level it is, to me, completely wrong.
If God is evil, by lets say your definition, to the degree that you cannot accept his ethic. You cannot make a moral stand against God because you are wrong, and He is right. There is no right principle (except His) to stand on, there is no fight to make. You will lose, because He is God and He is right and He is so because He makes the rules and He says so. So, why then would you choose Hell to fight for a, by definition, flawed principle?
Glitch
Because we love goodness more than correctness.
Sure, He makes the rules. He’s created this big chess game that we all play. But chess holds no attraction because it’s chess. Chess is attractive because you can find in it beauty and wonder and purpose. It ain’t just the science; it’s the art! If I thought chess were a deceitful game with unfair rules, I would choose not to play it, just as I would choose not to play God’s game if I thought He were unfair. In that case, He could have his rules and His game. I would want no part of it.
Truth is not something that is right because it follows logically from something else. Truth is right because it’s the axiom from which all else is derived. The martial arts don’t teach you anything just because they’re the martial arts. They teach you what they do, not because they are based upon an argument, but because they are based upon truth itself. They aren’t merely correct, they are trustworthy.
You give a man a way to save face, not because it is the correct thing to do, but because it is the good thing to do. Fixate upon goodness, and what you do will always be correct. But fixate upon correctness, and you will miss many good things.
We do not see the battle as who can whip whose ass, and neither does God. It isn’t that God has given us a head start and will now hunt us down. Rather, God has given us freedom. We may return to Him or go our own way. We see the battle as a battle of decision. If a god were therefore evil, he could have my ass, but he could not have my love; he could kill my body, but he could not kill my resolve; he could beat me up, but he could not beat me down.
God isn’t right because He’s God. God is right because He’s good. If there is a passage in the Bible that says God is not good, then that passage is a lie. You cannot defer to a book or a pastor or a poster or even a single experience out of a lifetime of experiences not yet completed to lasso in God and present Him to you. He awaits your search. He comes to you on your terms. He refuses to trump your will with His own, just as you would refuse to fight a man who simply disagreed with you. I cannot imagine that you would walk up to him and slap him in the face and say, “Bastard! Here is what you need to believe!”
You need not look in a book or to another man or in a Straight Dope thread to find God. You need only look within Glitch.
And to me, all else but Love is irrelevant.
And for me, I will not fight, but neither will I surrender.
I live a different life, and have no power, nor desire it. It is not about the end, but the being itself.
Yet you would join in, if it allows you to be the “winner” despite your own heart. I would not.
Because it is the principle I have chosen as the core of my life. Winning or loosing are not matters of principle.
Tris
Triskadecamus wrote:
Love.
Exciting and new.
Come aboard, we’re expecting you.
Tris
Oops. That should be “It is not about power…”.
N.B.: I am going to use small g god in this post since we are not talking about any particular god, and in particular not the one commonly believed in by the Christians of this board. No offense is intended.
It is not about winning or losing. The simple fact is that if god exists and my ethics do not match his then mine are wrong. If god exists and your ethics do not match then yours are wrong, even if by your ethics god is evil. I am not the sort of person who gives in easily, given some different choices like lets say: heaven (by accepting god ethos) or non-existence upon death (by rejecting it) then I would reject the evil (by my definition) god. But hell, eternal pain and suffering, is a rather different bird! These are not stakes to be playing around with when confronted with these facts:
- The undeniable proof that there is a god
- He will throw you in hell if your ethics do not match his and/or you do not meet his requirements/conditions to avoid this fate
- Your ethics don’t match his and/or you do not match his requirements/conditions for redemption (sp)
Keeping in mind that if by your definition god is evil, then you’re wrong, god is not evil, because he can’t be by definition (god inherently transcends good and evil because he is the definitions of such).
So it seems to me that the only logical choice is to accept my wrongliness (new word) and try to convert even if with my current ethic I think god is wrong. I would have to accept that there must be more at play that the supreme being can understand that I cannot, and that he is right and I am not.
Lib
That was exactly my point. I wouldn’t because it would futile at best, and at the real heart of the matter incorrect. As above, god is right I am wrong. Period. Regardless of whether I think he is evil or not, he isn’t. However, without the punishment of hell facing me, I would see no reason to convert my ethic.
Glitch
Respectfully, I disagree. It isn’t necessarily futile. A man whose will is weak will fall to his knees when you slap him. He will believe what you tell him to, trembling with fear that you might punish him again.
Again, with respect, I disagree. What kind of student will be so gullible as to believe his evil teacher is good just because he declares, “I define goodness.”? God loves goodness so much that, as CS Lewis has said, were there a being more good than He, He would worship it.
Nonsense. You are not a man of weak will. Neither are you gullible.
Libertarian wrote:
Or at least, God says He loves goodness that much.
I gotta wonder, though, about this argument that God follows some kind of externally-verifyable definition of goodness. If, as Polycarp said in the OP, the Word of God is accurately revealed through Jesus’s words in the Gospels, there are at least some things in the Word of God that do not seem to fit any definition of “goodness” other than “It’s good because I’m God and I say it’s good!”
You could be right, Tracer. On the other hand, it could be all in how you look at it. I mention this because I can still recall the way I used to see things much differently than I do now — the exact same things. Which words of Jesus specifically do you think are evil?
Here’s a handly link if you don’t have it:
**Libertarian wrote:
Since we’re just supposin’, suppose it isn’t too late when you die…
Suppose Jesus said, upon hearing the plea of a Roman soldier, “I have not seen faith like this in all of Israel.”
Suppose time and space constraints are merely products of our perception…
Suppose Jesus said, upon hearing that His message is too terrible to bear, “Take my yoke upon you, for the burden I give you is light and easy to carry.”**
And just suppose those are your experiences with the J/C God, but not mine? Your own experiences with Deity seem to fly in the face of traditional Christian theology. Who’s are valid and who’s are not?
While your own experiences with the J/C/I Deity have been good and positive, mine haven’t. My own experiences with Him are closer to Tracer’s “It’s good because I’m God and I say it’s good!” which seems to echo what the Orthodox Jews here on SDMB also say about Him God said it, therefore that’s it! (sorry if I’m mis-interpreting).
Polycarp’s OP posited that traditional Christian theology is true and proven to be true. Your own experience with the J/C God have been very positive, mine have not; that’s why I asked the questions I did.
Fair enough, Freyr. You’re right. I cannot honestly maintain that my experience has been “traditional”.
Well, there’s always this ol’ reliable standby:
“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters–yes, even his own life–he cannot be my disciple.”
– Luke 14:26 (NIV translation)
I wondered if Jesus really did mean “hate” there, and didn’t merely mean “love less than me.” So, I hauled out my pocket interlinear New Testament and looked up the passage. The word translated in Luke 14:26 as “hate” is spelled mu-iota-sigma-epsilon-iota. My Greek-English lexicon translates the infinitive form, mu-iota-sigma-omicron-sigma, as “to hate.” There is only one figurative definition for this word or any of its forms that means anything other than “hate,” and that figurative definition is “would not suffer.”
There seems to be no question about it. Jesus is asking – no, insisting – that his disciples not only lay down their own lives for him, but also abandon their families. This was one of the reasons I called Jesus’s little band a “cult” earlier in this thread.
I know this is sort of what the OP asked us not to do, but some of these arguments I’m reading here are the ones that I had with myself years ago, with the result that I finally found the courage to abandon religion. There is a place for paradox in learning, but this isn’t paradox–it’s contradiction. The contradiction points to the metaphorical nature of the whole thing. Thinking about this is great, but it leads me to the conclusion that it couldn’t be literally true. Still, I know this misses the point of the OP.
Some Guy couldn’t be a Christian even if it were true; Abe would feel no compulsion to worship and adore even if God did exist. Tracer thinks God might be a “really big poopy head,” and I agree. Glitch doesn’t see the point in going to hell forever just to take a moral stand against the great big poopy head God, and I don’t either–but what am I going to do? If he says bend the knee and worship, and if he’s the God I remember from Sunday school, we damn well better do it. He never had much tolerance for dissenters. Plagues, torture, suffering, broken knee-caps and AIDS await those who refuse to follow. Then again, if he knows all things, he would know that my kowtowing would be an act, forced obedience just for the purpose of saving my soul from hell, and he would understand that I’m not capable of truly loving such a vindictive God, and that an act is all he could ever hope to get from me. Would he be satisfied with that?
What would I do? Well, to avoid the suffering and cash in on the benefits, I would probably offer my servitude. But love would be hard to fake. Mostly I’m glad that it’s all hypothetical anyway.
Lib:
Hell does not equal a slap. As per my prior post, if the punishment promised by this hypothetical evil god as the price of failing to meet his terms for avoiding said punishment were something other than hell then I would reject him.
With regards to the futility, once again I must point that standing up to an evil man, by somebody’s ethics, is entirely different than making a stand against the supreme creator of the everything. It transcends just the punishment component of my reasoning. It seems to me that if a being has created everything and tells me “I am good”, then it is. Whether this being runs amok punishing people or not, whether I think it is good or not, all of this is irrelevent. It says it is good, therefore it is. There is no stand to take. And certainly in combination with a being that does doles out a rather extreme punishment for those it has a distaste for it makes even less sense to take a stand. You would already be wrong.
An evil (human) teacher does not equal an evil (godly) teacher. Is it gullibility to accept the word of god, the absolute supreme being? If so, then I guess Christians are pretty guillible. After all there is plenty of evidence that there may be some traditionally evil attributes to God, yet Christians accept His word that He is good. How many times have Christians posted on this board that any seemingly evil acts done by God were done with good reason and were, in fact, good, and that it is our own lack of understanding of God’s ethic that leads us to think that they are evil?
CS Lewis’ quote is irrelevent. It is not possible for there to be a being more good than god/God. He is the one who made the definition and by no surprise it happens to match him/Him.
I read your OP early in this thread’s life, and I thought “Great idea. Let me hammer out an answer.”
Then I realized that I don’t have an answer.
I have seen too many different (often radically different) interpretations of Jesus’ message and the “traditional” Christian doctrine. What my response would be is far too dependent upon which of those interpretations was realized in the “evidence” you gave me. This seems like avoiding the question, even to me, but I simply have not been able to come up with a “generic” scenario that seemed sufficiently accurate and interesting.
I mean, I can say: “I would act according to my conscience and the specific nature of my new understanding,” but that hardly seems good enough.
Lib
I think perhaps you are actually missing something rather interesting in Glitch’s position. In the past, you have put forth the idea that:
God is absolute good.
God is infinite and thus beyond specific human understanding.
Human morality cannot be absolutely grounded, since we lack the infinite reference frame.
Under those axioms, if God exists and is evil by my morality, it is entirely consistent to conclude that my morality is flawed, God is perfect Good, and I should abandon my limited and flawed moral understanding to embrace the perfect morality (or at least as much of it as is/can be directly communicated to me) of God.
Of course, glitch is also supplementing the logic behind that conlusion with the argument of infinite self-interest, which no longer falls prey to the standard refutations once God’s existence and nature have been “proven”.
Spiritus
Yep. That’s the one that Glitch and I danced around last year. At that time, he maintained that he is unwilling to amend his own principles to align with the principles of some other entity, even if those other principles are objectively right and his are objectively wrong.
Glitch
Perhaps for you it doesn’t. And I can understand why you might think it wouldn’t for another man. You might not have been bullied every day of your life as a child and viewed that bullying as a living Hell. Hell is different conceptually for each of us, but at its root it boils down to this: Hell is the consequence of our own decision to divorce ourselves from Love.
Tracer
Luke 14! I love Luke 14! I can see how a reasonable man, like yourself, might conclude that there is “no question about it.” But let’s examine the whole of Luke 14 for context, and see whether we’ve trapped a gnat and let a camel get by. Me, I find myself faced with quite a number of questions about it.
First, Jesus is in the home of a prominent Pharisee, surrounded by Teachers of the Law, and it is a Sabbath! [alarm bells all over the place!..] 
To rephrase, Jesus is surrounded by men who assume that their place in God’s Kingdom is guaranteed by virtue of their position and piety on a day — a day, mind you — that they hold sacred, even above the needs of their fellow man. This is truly a delicious mis-en-scene!
Now, Jesus has already raised more than a few eyebrows by healing a man right before their eyes, and therefore doing work on a Sabbath. They do not respond when He asks them questions about whether it is lawful to heal on the Sabbath and whether they themselves, faced with an ox having fallen into a well, wouldn’t immediately pull it out, even on a Sabbath. They remain quiet. We can pretty well draw a conclusion already that Jesus is not there to schmooze and win political favor.
Then, as though that weren’t enough, He notices the seating arrangements at the table, and that guests have selected the highest places of honor available to them. (Remember Matthew 23?) He tells a parable about guests who are invited to a wedding feast, and how jostling for positions of honor might end up greatly humiliating them when they find out that the Host Himself has other seating arrangements in mind. Jesus concludes, “For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.” You’d think this would be a clue, but men who have already decided they are holy do not take hints easily that they are not.
So Jesus turns to the host of the day, and says, “When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous” This is a theme that He covers many times over in the Gospels and from many different vantage points: seek the rewards of God for your kindness of heart, and not the rewards of man for the return of favors. That is, love with your heart, don’t scheme with your politics.
Now remember, these are Teachers of the Law. One of them at the table says, “Blessed is the man who will eat at the feast in the kingdom of God.” Blessed are we, in other words, because we are invited. Just look at our fine robes!
But Jesus now tells another story. Just because you are at a dinner with other men in fine robes does not mean that you are at God’s feast. He seeks men who are righteous, not men who think they’re right.
You can quite imagine the dropped jaws all around the table. “You were invited,” Jesus is saying, “but you didn’t come. You come instead to feasts hosted by prominent Pharisees because you cannot be bothered to attend God’s own feast. It would mean turning away from the very things you treasure, like the adoration of other men, the material wealth you have accumulated, and the trivial things with which you busy yourself day in and day out. So in your place, God has now invited those who already have nothing and will appreciate His invitation. (Those who humble themselves will be exalted…)”
Yet again, as he does many times, Jesus slices the world in two with His Sword of Truth. You cannot serve two masters. You will always favor one over the other. You will suffer the one, and embrace the other. Or hate the one, and love the other. He Himself explains what He means by these love/hate dichotomies in Matthew 6:24.
This is the moment when Jesus turns away from the Teachers of the Law, who have already made up their minds. He turns instead to the crowd that had followed Him there, and speaks first in terms of the dichotomy that He has just drawn. What will you suffer to leave behind, and what will you embrace to follow? Will you make excuses about your commitments, or will you come to the feast?
But He doesn’t stop there. He continues to explain with a parable about a man building a tower who, failing to assess his costs, will be unable to finish it. He tells another parable about a king who goes to war and, failing to assess the futility of his effort, will lose.
“In the same way,” He summarizes, “any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.”
I don’t mind your calling Him and the twelve a cult. If He is to leave His work behind to a few other men, He better damn well be sure that He has left it to men whose hearts are committed to nothing else. He is assessing the cost of building His tower. He is assessing what army is required for God to defeat His enemies. He is announcing that He will not invite the Teachers of the Law because their hearts are committed to the law. Rather, He will invite those whose hearts are committed to Him.
In determining what Jesus might have meant by hating your father and mother, we might consider the dozens of other instances where “miseo” and its variants are used to draw the same sort of dichotomy. We might also consider whether, by His own example, He intended that we hate them in the sense of holding them as repulsive objects that merit our contempt. Was He contemptuous of His kin when He wept upon seeing their grief? Was He contemptuous of His mother when He placed her in the care of His disciple? Did His mother feel hated when she instructed the servants at Capernaum, “Do whatever he tells you.”? Did He show contempt for mothers and fathers when he said, “You know the commandments: ‘Do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not give false testimony, honor your father and mother.’” Would His mother and aunt have been at the foot of the cross if they felt He hated them in the narrow sense that you’re trying to squeeze from the term?
Can’t we change the intended meaning of a whole work by lifting from it a contextless sentence or two? Ayn Rand did this to Immanuel Kant. And countless politicians of one sort or another have done this with the Bible for two-thousand years. Clearly, Jesus, Whose own example is tesitmony, did not mean that his disciples must hate people as the world hates Him, but rather that they are to abandon what they treasure and treasure Something Else.
I can even understand why you might find this interpretation unsatisfying, since naturally you will interpret according to other interpretations that you hold. All I ask is that you allow that we who believe Jesus is our God may reasonably hold a different interpretation according to other interpretations that we hold. In other words, I would ask that you hold, not that there is “no question”, but that there might be questions after all.
Tracer
By the way, I forgot the ending wherein Jesus leaves a clue that what He is saying might be misinterpreted, and that not everyone will understand Him the way He intends. But that does’t matter. He is looking for those who do understand. Says He, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
And I still wouldn’t unless that particular entity is one that will literally make my eternal life a living hell.
Do you remember what thread that was in? I don’t remember, and would love to go re-read it. Sounds like it was a good one.