Relax, Lib - I already think you’re posessed by demons. 
So telling me your interpretations of either the OT or Paul wouldn’t affect how I regard you in the least. Besides, if I try to exorcise you, I’m sure cooler heads would prevail over me, and persuade me to stick with counterarguments. So go for it, if you’re so inclined!
The God that I worship is Jesus, RT.
And?
Okay, maybe you weren’t around when I’ve explained this in some detail elsewhere.
Some people believe in the Canon. I believe in Jesus. Whatever might contradict His teaching (which teaching is about God, not Rome) is not of God. I worship Who dwells in my heart. I do not worship ancient scribbles on paper.
If the scribbles say that God forced anyone to believe in Him against their will, then the scribbles are lying.
Lib - that’s nice and all, but it’s possible to believe in Jesus rather than the canon, but still give the canon great respect and authority. And I must point out that those ‘ancient scribbles of paper’ contain all the teachings of Jesus that we have.
There’s no point in discussing any of this with you further, I expect. If you believe a Scripture is consistent with who you believe Jesus to be, then it’s valid, AFAYC. If you don’t, it’s not.
And if they say that the Torah required landowners to limit how thoroughly they harvested their fields, and required them to let the indigent onto their property and take the leftovers, then the Torah was mistaken with respect to God’s will. Whatever.
Actually, the Torah “required” Jewish landowners to limit yadda yadda. Which is reasonable after all, since the Jews lived on God’s land.
And the rest of the earth isn’t? And how God’s chosen people did things wasn’t supposed to be an example for the Gentiles to emulate?
‘The rest of the earth isn’t God’s?’ But you knew that.
My friends say I should act my age, what’s my age again? - Blink 182
Lib, you don’t believe that Jesus would use his infinite power to ensure that the description of his life, works and beliefs is free of flaws and capable of leading anyone who would but read it down the one true path - to find the way, the truth and the light?
I have felt badly all day, thinking about my post in this forum. No one can unsay what has been said. I regret saying anything about the Lord, my God, and Savior that might imply his approval of my political opinions, or impute to him any political opinions whatsoever I do not speak for Him. I am not his political follower, only the least, and now least obedient of his servants.
My sorrow is muted only by the sure faith that I am forgiven by Him. The evil I have done is still rightly done, and irretrievable. To the members of this forum I offer my complete and unqualified apology for engaging in this hubris, and can only say I shall endeavor never to make such arrogant claims again.
<P ALIGN=“CENTER”> Tris </P>
Here’s where Lib and I fundementally disagree.
His God revolves around the Christian religion, mine doesn’t.
The God I know didn’t “have a bunch of humans write a book explaining his intentions for humanity” the God I know gives you free will (without a book of scriptures) to decide upon what is right and what is wrong.
You may take the wrong path, and that you will be punished for, but it’s not written in a book it’s a part of your heart. If you are a spiritual being, you know the love God has for you and God will remind you when the choices you make are wrong.
God is not Libertarian but a belief that one has more to life than being simply human, that possibly there is more to it than what meets the eye.
God is God whatever your religion is but not political, that’s what we humans do to create freedom or supress others within the confines of our skin and bones.
Yeah, when I think arrogance, I think of Tris. :rolleyes: I never thought you presumed to speak for God. I like humility well enough, but don’t you think you might be overdoing it a bit? I hardly think you can honestly say you are the least of His servants. You may not be better than anybody else, but you’re not any worse, either. On the other hand, maybe this approach works for you. ::bemused shrug:: Now, don’t you dare apologize to me again, or I’ll have to kick your ass!
“Humility does not consist in hiding our talents and virtues, in thinking ourselves worse and more ordinary than we are, but in possessing a clear knowledge of all that is lacking in us and in not exalting ourselves for that which we have.”
“The last shall be first… The least among you shall be the greatest.” — Jesus
I’ve been thinking about humility off and on for the past few months. It hasn’t made me into an exemplar of that virtue yet (big surprise, huh? :)) but I thought I’d toss in my tentative conclusions anyway.
For me, humility seems to be linked strongly to that oft-quoted verse, “All have sinned, and all have fallen short of the glory of God.” (Rom. 3:23.)
With respect to ourselves, I would submit that this means that, in any of our human dimensions, we’re riddled with imperfection; we’re routinely insufficient, both to ourselves and to those whose lives we’re entwined with. Whether it’s our physical, or intellectual, or our moral processes, we’re going to find ourselves coming up short, over and over again.
That isn’t something to abase ourselves over; that’s just our natural condition, to be acknowledged and worked within. That I frequently fail to be the person I should comes as no surprise to me; the only reasonable response is to ask God’s forgiveness and continue on, not holding my manifold failures against myself.
One of the dimensions in which we’re going to be less than perfect is that of our intellect. We’re all smart people here, so we’re used to being right most of the time. But we’re not going to be right all the time, and (especially on this board) some of our long-cherished ideas are going to have holes knocked in them. We all need to be ready to accept that when it happens. As Billy Joel said:
“Some things were perfectly clear, seen with the vision of youth
No doubts and nothing to fear, I claimed the corner on truth
These days it’s harder to say I know what I’m fighting for…
I hear the other man’s words, I’m not that sure anymore.”
With respect to our relationships with others, what Rom. 3:23 says to me is that we are all in the same boat, morally speaking: As long as the ‘all’ or ‘all have sinned’ includes me, I don’t have the moral standing to say that I know, better than you do, what’s best for you. It says that we’re all at the same level, in an essential way: none of us are up on any pedestals, looking down on the others. If we are, we deceive ourselves. But on the flip side, none of us are in any ditches, looking up at the others, either; self-abasement is as much a deception as self-aggrandizement.
Since Tris’ posts, and Gaudere’s response, got me onto this tangent, I’d like to say, Tris, that nothing in your original post seemed to me to step over any lines. You didn’t give the impression of saying you knew what God’s views were; you elaborated minimally on the implications of things Jesus said and did, but without getting definite: there’s a big difference between saying “Graduated income taxation would seem to be entirely in accordance with His teachings”, and saying, “God is for graduated taxation”. You said it the right way; you didn’t try to identify God with a particular position - you just said that that position would be within the range of positions compatible with what we know of God.
So I’ll second Gaudere in my own words: stop groveling, or I’ll have to kick you while you’re down!
Gaud - great sig line! Who said it?
I don’t know where the quote’s from, actually. My other option was “And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin/Is pride that apes humility” from Coleridge, but I thought it was a little harsh on Tris to impute that he was humble out of pride. Sometimes I do think that excessive humilty is simply the flip side of pride, though; instead of saying “I’m so wonderful” you say “I’m so horrible” but neither attitude is realistic. It seems to be prideful to think that you are the worst person ever, as if your sins are so terrible the Almighty will take special notice. And you can be secretly proud of your abasement.
I wonder if there are two different sorts of personality here. The classic Christian “we’re all horrible evil scum, but God loves us anyway” attitude would not make me inclined to become a better person. If I’m raising a child or training an employee, do I say “you’re wicked, the least of my children/workers” and expect them to improve? Or do I say “You’re wonderful and talented and good, but there’s this one little thing to work on…”? I would certainly expect the latter to work better, but a lot of Christains seem to prefer the former.
[tip o’ the hat…]
The beautiful essence of noncoercion expressed beautifully.
I think the evil-scum assessment generally means relative to perfection. Perfection draws a stark dichotomy between itself and all else. The most beautiful quality I see in Tris is his reverence for God’s holiness.
Have you read his haikus in MPSIMS?
Maybe that’s part of the problem to which Gaudere alludes. Maybe that’s also why Paul says, “Each man should…measure his achievement by comparing himself with himself and not with anyone else. For everyone has his own proper burden to bear.” (Galatians 5:4-5, NEB).
We can’t deal with being compared with perfection; it would break us. He who is perfect has never, in thirty years, compared me to his perfection; he just loves me perfectly.
Personally, the ‘evil scum’ thing does nothing for me, but I guess I’ve already made that clear enough.
In my experience - and that of enough others that I’ve talked with about this to convince me that it isn’t just me - it seems that the sole requirement for stepping into God’s presence is a willingness to accept, to confess, the full truth about oneself in all its complexity. Our good, our bad, our strengths, our weaknesses, the times we reached out in love, and the times we failed, or lashed out in anger. When I step into God’s presence, the person who steps in there has to be me, not aggrandized, not abased, just me as I truly am.
It would be like stepping into the HHG’s Total Perspective Vortex, except that the One I meet there loves me totally and completely, without reservation. My faults, which we are both aware of, in no way subtract from the totality of his love.
When I leave my time of prayer, I may know there are things I need to deal with, but I never feel like evil scum, and I never feel like an employee whose boss has given him one last chance, or else I’ll get the pink slip. Instead, I leave with the love of God in my heart, giving me the strength and courage to do the things I may be scared to deal with on my own. (Kinda like Powdermilk Biscuits, only a lot better.)
Not exactly. Well, maybe, not at all. This notion is orthogonal to the libertarian notion of noncoercion, I’d say.
The virtue of humility, as I’ve expressed it, has equal value when one is making decisions for oneself alone, whether one is a king in the year 1500, or whether one is a participant of any sort in a democracy. It’s all the same. Whether or not your decisions apply to others besides yourself in some way has nothing to do with the need for humility in making one’s decisions.
And, on the flip side, my belief that having less than total sureness in one’s thought processes is a good thing, has nothing to do with the rightness or wrongness of the democratic belief that frequently, even mediocre-to-poor decisions made by a group are better than no group coordination at all.
Maybe those beliefs are right, maybe they’re wrong, but the quote of mine you cited neither supports nor undermines the libertarian notion of noncoercion. It’s operating on an entirely different axis.
Beautiful, thank you, RT. And I didn’t realize you were so young.
And yet it’s simply a rewording of the NP.
If I have no moral standing to say that I know better than you do what’s best for you, then I will allow you to make decisions for yourself, won’t I? I’ll let you pursue your own happiness in your own way. And I won’t try to force your will to bend to my own, right?
Nevertheless, by your beautifully stated principle, I am not prohibited to decide what’s best for myself and use force against you if you are coercing me.
Well, maybe it ain’t the NP verbatim, but I’ll gladly take it. 