(Moved the quote from the quote box so it didn’t vanish in the response.)
I agree that this is a possibility, but it is a human-centric one. How do we know that we’ve fully comprehended God’s love in this scenario? Different people will certainly get different answers, and we don’t have (in this life, at least) someone scoring our paper to see how we did.
One way of telling a correct answer is to plug it in. Say you’ve been giving a long division problem, and you can’t figure out how to do it. If your friend does, by means you don’t understand, and gives you an answer, you can check it without being able to duplicate his work. If someone came up with an answer to this question, wouldn’t many or all of us say “now I get why people die!”? A typical theist response is that atheists would if we stopped being willfully blind - see The Last Battle for a blatant example. I don’t buy it, though.
However, I will add possibility 3.5.
God loves us, in a way possibly understandable by some, but the answer is not objectively verifiable.
Notice I agree that the process of finding the answer may not involve logic, but be purely spiritual.
But the dying person goes through suffering on the way to the afterlife. Causing unnecessary suffering, even if it will eventually be over, is not a sign of love. Plus, this scenario is the God can kill us since we’ve all got an afterlife one. That works for you a lot better than it does for your standard Christian, since many of the drowning victims were not saved, so their afterlife won’t be so pleasant.
"That may be an interesting notion but it’s not my notion. I think the journey is about what we value and whether we embrace a certain concept of God or not is irrelevant."
By the way, that’s interesting: so if god made himself known (not just ‘believed’) would you say that knowledge (not just belief) of god would harm or help our journey to discover what we value? Or neither?
“But the dying person goes through suffering on the way to the afterlife. Causing unnecessary suffering, even if it will eventually be over, is not a sign of love.”
Pretty much. Now, you’ll get an argument on the meaning of the word love.
I’m not disputing that there might be benefits in believing false things,whether it be lower blood pressure, place to meet women, or the slightest chance of being elected president. However, if there is a god, it would be nice if the belief would be directed to the god, and not all over the place the way it is today.
I’m on your side, but I’m not sure I know what you mean: my understanding of believing (in religion) is that you don’t, by definition, “know” (in the secular meaning) whether or not it’s true but you believe it anyway.
cosmosdan has said that he doesn’t feel that embracing belief in god is relevant and that the journey is about finding out what you value, but for most traditional xians believing in god is primary; and believing he/it’s true without knowing secularly.
I wasn’t referring to anything that deep. It might well be the case that we evolved to have positive physiological responses to the act of believing. It has absolutely nothing to do with knowing. In this case believing in Odin, Zeus, Jesus, the gods of Shintoism, or in a cargo cult give absolutely equivalent benefits.
In other words, you get good exercise by walking, and it matters not if you’re headed to a production of Shakespeare to the mall, to a pusher to get your latest nickel bag, or to nowhere at all.
The reason I like cosmosdan is that he isn’t a traditional Christian, thus his rejection of laws to make us live the way the Bible tells us to.
Actually, we can, since the question is whether god loves “us” - the avatars. Conflating us with the players is like confusing yourself with a marionette that you’re controlling; yes, you’re pulling the strings; no, you are not the same as the puppet. Does your mother love and care about what happens to you? Yes. Does your mother love and care about what happens to the marionette? No.
Keeping in mind that in the RPG scenario, God is at best ignoring us utterly, and most likely is actually laughing at our pain, reveling in our sorrow, and placing bets on our wars, I think it’s quite clear that this is not love as we know it, if it’s love at all. So, of the original list of four options:
…it’s either case two or case three, depending on how depserate you are to label god’s non-protective, non-caring emotions toward us with the word “love”.
Again, in this analogy we are not the actor or actress, but instead we are the character that they are playing. To look at the love had for the Player or actor is an entirely different goalpost.
"I wasn’t referring to anything that deep. It might well be the case that we evolved to have positive physiological responses to the act of believing. It has absolutely nothing to do with knowing. In this case believing in Odin, Zeus, Jesus, the gods of Shintoism, or in a cargo cult give absolutely equivalent benefits."
Ah, okay; yes, agreed.
And some things can be known. I find theists often want to claim everything is faith and nothing is knowable, therefore their faith is just as valid and it’s all a wash.
Yep, but then, neither I nor cosmosdan seem to be christians. This is just an extension of the ‘disproof of love by cases’ argument, which cosmosdan was attempting to refute by presenting these are possible non-covered-case alternative. (Assuming I read his argument right.)
“Continue that consciousness”? I don’t understand the question.
In the RPG scenario, we humans are actually being role-played. Not just what we do and say, but what we emote and think are also artifices of the Player controlling us. Sort of like how a writer might write in a book " ‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ Alice thought to herself."
So, our consciousnesses are entirely transparent to -and controlled by- the Player at all times. Not that the player is bothered by the same things we are; when we run ourself ragged with worry about something, the avatar is calling his friends over to see what a good job he’s doing “playing emo”.
When we die, the Player continues on, and remembers everything that happened to us, but not as something that happened to them.
Ah, I see; so consciousness is itself an artifice (and free will for that matter).
I’d call cosmosdan a postmodern xian; regardless, he used to be a xian (as was I) so that’s what I mean about it being a hard concept to grasp at first for ex-xians is maybe how I should have less controversially stated it.
Well, we “inherit” our free will from our Players; they can’t be predicted, ergo, how we will act can’t be predicted. (This is enough for us to have genuine free will for my definition of the term; whether it works for your definition may, of course, vary.)
Similarly, our consciousnesses are based in a genuine consciousness, albeit one that is playing a what-if game with itself. “What if I was begbert2, responding to this post in these circumstances that the game is presenting to him/me? What would I think? What would I do?” So, if there’s some magic merit to having a consciuonsess over being a mere meat-robot, then we inherit that as well, under the RPG model.
Note that the presence of free willed beings guiding our individual actions is virtually the only major functional distinction between the RPG model and other similar “humans aren’t really real, ergo evil is no problem” models such as the book or movie model.
I think we can make reasonable and logical conclusions about what is or isn’t love the more we agree on those parameters. I’d say the evidence offered by** Czarcasm ** qualifies. My point was only that for some things no objective** proof ** exists and we must go forward based on our personal interpretation of behavior as evidence.
the classic
There’s something I realized about this a couple of months ago. If we take down the line between religious beliefs systems and secular judging them both equally I notice a bunch of similarities. We all operate on some faith, or trust. It qualifies under this verse. The other thing I noticed is that this verse doesn’t have to mean that our beliefs never change. The process is, we go forward believing certain things and acting on those beliefs as if they were exactly true. We *act *as if we are certain and sure even when we know that our beliefs are subject to change and reinterpretation with each new experience and with each bit of gained information and insight. .
That makes sense to me. Faith can mean a certain doctrine or denomination and too many people think questioning the details of their particular denomination is a lack of faith. IMO that’s an emotional attachment to a certain belief that only hinders growth. That’s why I like the idea of a faith that adjusts itself with experience.
Right.
Sorry. You’ll have to read the threads to see examples. It varies from person to person.
But it doesn’t follow that not knowing of your existence – when it’s a metaphysical question of the basis of all reality and the cosmos, unlike the real-world parent example where they still know that there are such things as ‘parents’ – is a loving act. Unless you posit that coming to know you exist is the point of the love.
Which, of course, is quite a leap.
I haven’t suggested either of those."**
Okay, then it’s no proof or indicator of love that god doesn’t make himself known.
Cool.
So I guess you don’t assert that god loves us (assuming gods existence).
