Considering world events, any god that existed could be either omnipotent or good but not both. If one tries to say that there are certain things even a god can’t change, then suddenly all miracles are exposed as fabrications. Arguing theodicy is not so much a slippery slope as a slippery pinnacle surrounded with razor wire. No matter which way you turn, God quickly and decisively turns out to be a fraud.
Then you fundamentally misunderstand the nature of both rituals and symbols.
I’ll take that bet.
Seeing how the Stoning Of The Devil is merely a ritual reenactment of a famous event during the prophet Abraham’s own pilgrimage, done in symbolical imitation of him, I’d be willing to bet that some 99.9% of the stone-throwing pilgrims do not believe that they are “throwing a rock at an actual entity.”
That would have been Verbal Kint.
Yeah, it had legs before it got punished. I know Christians believe that the snake was Satan in disguise, but that is not the Jewish take - and we wrote it.
The way I learned it, it is kind of a Just-So story explaining why men have to work, why we die, the pain of childbirth, and the obnoxiousness of snakes.
Yeah I don’t have a Hebrew keyboard, sorry. The vulgate is usually the closest we get to the ancient Hebrew while still using an anglicized alphabet.
God could possibly be just good, but not omnibenevolent and omipotent, that is not maximally good.
But we don’t need complex logic to figure that out. A glance at the natural world is good enough.
Well, no. That would be transliterated Hebrew, like so.
The Vulgate, being in Latin, is no closer to the original Hebrew than any other translation in a Indo-European language.
I don’t understand this even a little bit.
Imagine a god who can bring a dead man back to life after one year, or fifty; but not after fifty-one years, that’s out. Imagine a god who can turn water into wine, which seems like a textbook example of a miracle; and let’s add that the god can’t turn iron into wine. Imagine yet other miracles; why would they all, in bold like you’d said, be exposed as fabrications just because something else can’t be done?
Because either this god can break the natural laws, or not. If physics or chemistry or biology were no obstacle on one occasion, there’s no reason for them to suddenly become insurmountable on the next.
Maybe a human’s conception of perfection and a deity are different? Or, perhaps, free will results in unpredictability?
I don’t see where you get this weird confidence from.
If I say a guy can zip around faster than a speeding bullet — but that he often doesn’t need to bother, since bullets tend to bounce off him — the jarring part isn’t that I then say “unless there’s kryptonite in the area”. If I say a woman can turn men into frogs and birds and back again — and I add that she’s done it to me, and that she’d gladly do it to you — I don’t figure that “but she can’t do horses” would be the odd part. If I say that a werewolf shrugged off strikes from steel weapons and bronze ones, I don’t get why you’d draw the line at “but a silver blade worked like a charm.”
Why must the ability to do one such amazing thing imply an ability to do them all?
For me the story of the apple is just a metaphor for humans gaining sentience, which happened so far back that the Hebrews had no more knowledge of those times than we do.
And the lamenting is common to Humans. We’ve seen it on this board, where at least one person questioned whether sentience was even worth it.
And there’s been plenty of “Gosh, everything was so perfect before we knew things and blah blah blah” romanticizing over the millenia, most of it dead wrong.
Did you have trouble understanding my post?
Your post was confusing. If you were transliterating the Hebrew word for “Lucifer” using the Roman alphabet, it would be something like Heylel. You wouldn’t type “Lucifer”, which is the Latin translation of the Hebrew word, not a transliteration of it.
Not things that God can’t change, but things where He chooses to allow us to go flat on our collective noses through our individual actions.
The idea that God has no choice but to control everything is the one that involves Him not having the power of choice.
In the case of the Christian deity, the canonical attribute is of being omnipotent - *all-*powered, *all-*capable. The mainstream doctrine allows for no restriction by physical laws.
In that case, your god is evil.
Hey, the guy I was replying to said: “If one tries to say that there are certain things even a god can’t change, then suddenly all miracles are exposed as fabrications.”
He didn’t, as far as I could tell, limit it to an ***omni-***potent one — and, if anything, his follow-up remark seemed to cement that, no, he simply means it across the board; he seems to be saying, of any god, that: “either this god can break the natural laws, or not. If physics or chemistry or biology were no obstacle on one occasion, there’s no reason for them to suddenly become insurmountable on the next.”
That’s easy. To get money or power, ostensibly for Devil eradication?
You need an adversary to gather supporters. Didn’t George Orwell show that?
To many people, anything they don’t like is the Devil. Rock N Roll music, dancing, BBQ pork sandwiches…