I realize all of this is based on the words of some human being and human beings like to think they know what God wants and What He says or does, but it doesn’t seem rational to me.
If my child says to me; I want to go to the movies and I do not wish(or will) that they go, then say okay you can go, but if you do I will kill you, is not free will. To say My way or the highway is not free will no matter how it is sugar coated. And I would not concieve a child I knew ahead of time I would have to punish
for all eternity.
It is a belief and each person is entitled to their own beliefs. Many translate the Bible in different ways. Each believe their way is right and maybe for that particular person it is, but there is too many contradictions and I doubt a Holy Spirit would inspire controversy.
The God of the Old Testament and the God of the new is the same being, so somewhere along the line he split His personality?
Perhaps I am. However, I can decide to do or not do something, thus possibly committing a sin of commission or omission. The second definition is not as much of an issue, because you can never really be free of prior causes. Something will have happened in the past to place me in a current situation and removed some of my choices previously available. The free will I was discussing follows the first definition, Predetermination follows the second definition, as I understand the definition.
I understand your point, and can accept it as an a priori argument about the basic nature of humans as created by God. However, that isn’t an issue in the human experience because of the a priori nature given by God. Within Creation, we can still exercise free will as long as we have more than one choice available. In this case, it is to sin or not to sin.
It isn’t that free will is given, it’s that it is allowed. That is, we are allowed to exercise free will within the boundaries of Creation. Ultimately that isn’t free will for us, but we are unable to step outside of Creation and exercise total free will. By definition, only God can do that.
I quoted that several posts above in response to kanicbird.
I stand corrected. I apparently heard that from someone who saw Brahman and Ishvara as the same.
Oh, absolutely. There were a lot of poems, stories and folklore in the region that, like most, started from some small grain of truth. The earliest Jews learned story-telling from the Assyrians, and the result is a compelling arc, as seen in J. The Jews tacitly accepted that there were other Gods, but the insisted on worshiping one god, and theirs was better than anyone else’s god. Thus they called themselves the chosen people of [their] god. This didn’t do much for international relations.
It isn’t that God is defined by humans, it’s that humans are trying to describe a being who is indescribable. All religions and scriptures are human attempts to describe God and the experiences they attribute to God, regardless of what the say to convince themselves that they speak the Truth. The apparent dual nature of God in the OT vs. the NT is not an indication that God is dualistic or split, it’s that the humans who were inspired to write the OT had a different view of God than the ones who were inspired to write the NT. The differences are due to human history, philosophy and perceptions of themselves. I wish I had taken a course on personality and beliefs when I was in college, because I believe that a person’s personality has a lot to do with what qualities they perceive in God.
Imagine, if you will, that you hold a piece of paper with a two dimensional person on it. This person only knows four directions: forward, backward, left and right. You, however, can see two more dimensions: up and down. You pierce the paper from above with a pen, and move it up and down. The two dimensional person sees a round area that suddenly appears and changes size as you push the pen through, and even becomes oblate as you tilt the pen. The two dimensional person then writes down their experience and interpretation of what happened, but does so imperfectly because they can only perceive two dimensions. They can’t perceive you or the pen because of their two-dimension limit. Their description and interpretation is limited to their two dimensional world, and is not an accurate description of your three dimensional experience, but it is the best that they can do.
Taking the analogy further, we live in a three dimensional world, and God is multidimensional. Our scriptures are an attempt to describe a multidimensional God as we experience God passing through our three-dimensional world. It isn’t perfect and it varies with our point of view and how we interact with our three-dimensional world. But our scriptures and interpretations are an honest attempt to describe something that is real but beyond our ability to fully understand.
I know that (our multi-dimensional existence in a 3D physical world), by Revelation by the Holy Spirit. Though you did not ask me.
[IMHO] Actually I believe our bodies are multidimensional but we can only perceive 3, which is our subjective reality, while others may perceive a different set, which makes up their subjective reality. Communication is possible (but confused) because each person is multidimensional, though they are only perceiving 3 they are still using all of them.
This explains apparent contradictions in the gospels and some other parts of scriptures, it is perception in different dimensions. This is also why people who witness a event can have different stories as to how it happened, did flight 800 get shot down by a missile or was it a center fuel tank explosion, my take on it is yes to both. In a 3-D dimension a missile destroyed it, people in that 3-Dimensional reality saw the missile, others in a different set did not.
Either that or you have to believe that the human mind is incapable of recording information for a very notable event, which does not make much sense to me. [/IMHO]
He did fulfill it, He kept it, found totally guiltless by the Father and put to death without cause by principalities and powers. This opened up the way of grace, a alternate route, and the only way back to God. When one accepts Jesus He and you become one person and also totally under grace.
The Law is still there, and if you follow any part of it you must follow it all, and any violation, even one small one or hundreds of violations, the penalty is the same - death. It was the reason Jesus had to die, to pay that. By Jesus being raised from the dead He is no longer subject to the principalities and powers, so they can not enforce death for violation of the law, as Jesus has been set above their authority.
That is your personal interpretation and you are entitled to it, but no God told you ,you were right. Neither did he tell me or anyone else for that matter. It is just a matter of what one believes and fits their agenda! Hence so many different religions all claiming to be the true religion!
Please explain why Jesus didn’t come back in his Father’s glory with his angels like he told the people who were standing there listening to Him were told. that some of them would not see death before that happened? Where are the 2,000 year old people linving today? If Jesus was mis-quoted why isn’t the rest a mis-quote?
I know you think you have a special “in” with a god but I can see why some people are led away by your diescription of how that god works and acts.He sure is a different God than Polycarp and some others worship!
You have the illusion of choice, but really, the attributes that your creator gave you will determine how you choose. If you have a great enough (God given, caused by a meme, or both) desire to avoid sin, you will pick avoiding sin over engaging in an act that may be sinful. If your desire to engage in the act that you believe to be sinful more than you desire to avoid sin you will engage in the act. It all comes down to the characteristics you have as a created being (whether you are created by God or Natural Law).
Being allowed to do something satisfies the first definition of free will (voluntary choice).
Being given the characteristics that cause us to make certain choices means that we do not make the choices without prior cause (in the case of being created by God, God being the ultimate cause of what we choose, as God gives us the attributes we have that determine how we will choose).
In other words, we are caused to act as we do by our creator (whether it is God or Nature). Being given the desire to engage in certain acts and the opportunity to do so is not the same thing as having free and independent will of the sort that some theologians propose.
If man’s will was free, instead of being molded by circumstance, then “counsels, exhortations, commands, prohibitions, rewards, and punishments would be in vain.” But we can see that man’s will is molded, at least in those men whose natural (or God given) attributes are molded by circumstance.
It’s not like all of the other “my God is the greatest” groups were masters of diplomacy either… although, admittedly, someone in that area came up with a utopian story of a God of Everything that granted eternal joy to good obedient servants and soldiers after they died.
Obviously the best selling God to not only the rich and powerful (who wanted placid servants and legions) but also to the servants whose masters were only willing (or able) to provide false riches (the afterlife) or the whip.
I was pondering something curiously similar to this line of thought Tuesday. Just thinking about what it would mean to be a consciousness that simply selected paths in a higher dimensional object, only perceiving the 3 dimensional consequences (well, 4 with time) of our decisions to follow various paths in the object.
I was wondering if the various decisions we make would lead us to very similar 3d parts of the object, in such a way that the world we live in is a meeting place of our various decisions. Interesting that I ended up in this thread and multidimensional God was brought up by Vlad the day after I thought about this, and your interesting addendum to his thoughts.
Pardon my ignorance, but before someone begins arguing about creation or evolution shouldn’t we ask the question of HOW life begun? If I am not mistaken I think science doesn’t have a clue. It’s mostly guess work (something including aminoacids (It’s been years since my last chemistry lesson!)) and using fancy words to describe it.
Seems to me if you start at the beginning you might discover that both religion and science start with their own hypothesis and work their way up!
For religion it seems ok as everything depends on faith and nobody said you can logically prove the existence of God. But isn’t science supposed to be more precise?
You might want to address this question to Vlad/Igor who brought up the idea in the first place, but my thoughts on the matter are:
I was describing a multidimensional object (as in physical object) that consciousness “travels” through.
The object does not change, but the consciousness moves to different parts of the object and is effected by the particular form of the object at the consciousness’s location in the object.
You can think of the multidimensional object as the theoretical multiverse of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (although the many minds interpretation may seem more appropriate at first glance, it’s not entirely harmonious with what I am attempting to describe).
The multidimensional object contains every possible path a consciousness could take, every decision leading the consciousness to some location in the object (such as a decision made prior to WWII leading the consciousness to a world in which Germany had won the war).
In this scenario, all possibilities exist in the multidimensional object, but a consciousness’s decisions limit the possibilities it can experience as it is constrained to experiencing only the selected portion of the object:
In other words, moving to one location in the object effectively limits the consciousness from experiencing another location in the object (such as being unable to experience the world in which Germany won the war), unless the consciousness gains the ability to move in greater than 3 dimensions. Even if the consciousness could move in greater than 3 dimensions, it still would not be able to experience both locations in the object at once (in the ?normal? 3 dimensional world format of human sensory experience).
This scenario does not rule out the possibility that a consciousness’s decisions are determined by the attributes the object imbued the consciousness with.
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He has many many times. The relationship with Jesus is personal, and so is the revelation of His coming back to rescue His people… You will not hear about this in the news, as that is of man, but by following God’s instruction, follow Him as best you can and allow Him to teach you inspite of what man had taught you He will reveal to you that Jesus coming happens all the time to ‘rapture’ His people.
What for? Abiogenesis is a completely different science than Evolution. Sure, there are several competing theories and no real consensus for how life first appeared on this planet, but that doesn’t mean it will be that way in the future. The entire history of scientific achievement, from Archimedes to the Large Hadron Collider, has shown that the Universe operates on underlying laws and principles which do NOT require the existence of God, and there is no reason to assume that will ever change.
If that’s the truth, then why is every Christian’s experience of Jesus different?
Current (earth based human public) scientific knowledge doesn’t include information about whether or not the patterns we observe in nature were set into motion by a deity.
In other words, it doesn’t include any information about whether or not natural law requires a deity to set it into motion.
Indeed, current knowledge says nothing about whether a deity created man, or set things in motion (if you want to put the goalposts that far to be outside the playingfield) mainly because there are no reasons to assume one did.
Our current knowledge says that the stories in the bible are not literal truth, Jupiter is just a planet and the moon is no godess, it’s not even made of cheese.
So why would be still spend time pondering such stuff.
Do you still wonder if the sun would really really rise again if some Indians in some jungle stopped performing their sun-dance?
Current scientific knowledge says nothing about if there really isn’t some giant wolf that is going to swallow the sun.
Science says nothing about it, religion does. So do we have a balance here?
Chances on the old Norse being right are equal?
