It seems to me that whenever someone makes a statement about what God is or God isn’t, or about what God does or God doesn’t do, that statement is an opinion. And, there are many opinions about the nature of God.
Must God be “supremely loving”? If yes, then how did you arrive at that conclusion?
If “God is love”, how do you know what follows from that statement?
Why does “God is love” lead to “God cares how loving you are and how you treat yourself and the other beings who God also loves”?
How do you know what love is for God? How do you even go about getting an answer to that question? Does every Christian agree with your answer and with your method of getting the answer?
You could say “The details don’t matter”, but Christianity has a lot of details.
You could say “I know what matters to me.” Fine. So, we are back to opinions.
I realize that Christianity has had almost 2,000 years to formulate and fine-tune the many variations of Christian theology, and that many intelligent people consider Christianity to be rational. Seems to me, though, that when it comes to religious beliefs, rationality is in the eye of the beholder. I wonder, then, whether there is any value for “true believing Christians” (in this thread’s title) to discuss their beliefs with those who don’t accept the existence of the Christian god (or of any other gods) and who consider Christianity to be irrational.
Scripture can indeed be interpreted in different ways. But what is the God you experience like? Which interpretation is most consistent with the God you know?
[/quote]
Good = that which supports and enhances health, joy, love, peace, happiness, laughter.
Bad= that which supports and enhances pain, suffering, disease, violence, cruelty, hate and other types of harm.
I believe in both good and bad, and can’t imagine why you’d conclude otherwise (apart from discussions of a possible spiritual existence. Within the context of life on earth, I absolutely recognize that good and evil exist!)
[/quote]
On what basis do you claim that any of the things you describe as being the object of “good” are in fact desirable? Or for that matter, why do you reject those things which cause or create pain, suffering, etc?
Where did I ever say selfishness was bad? You should always pay attention to what I do not say as well as what I do say.
I’m sorry, smiling, but I find you very difficult to parse to begin with, and to the extent that I am able, I find you are venturing off somewhere far away from this thread or the topics I’m interested in discussing.
Yet another possibility that I have seen discussed: that we all experience the god or other spiritual truth that we believe in. If one is a confirmed atheist, then death will be final and complete. If one is a Christian, of whatever stripe, then death will be followed by whatever they expect. Same for everyone else - believe in reincarnation? See you again soon!
I think of good and evil not as two sides to a coin, or a ying and yang, but more like light and darkness. Light comes from a source; and darkness is what you are left with when there is no light. I think that God is Love and the source of everything that is good; but where there is a lack of love or goodness, we are left with evil.
Anyway, I think your matching up with the Nicene Creed is good; the main quibble I have is referring to Jesus as ‘created’ by God when the Creed states that he is ‘eternally begotten’ and ‘through him all things were made.’ There was never a time when the Son of God did not exist.
You don’t sign on. I do not have inside information on exactly how God wants you to live your life. I have faith that He loves you. I haven’t searched His baggage. Dogma is earth based opinions of people. I suppose you will decide your own opinions, and that will be your dogma. If you don’t like your dogma, run over it with your Karma. I have no idea in the world what would be a radically different kind of love. I am not a member of a particular sect, so cannot speak for them.
I believe that the one true way is to love every soul you encounter, as best you can. Do no harm to others, and if you can, do what good you can. But that’s just works, not grace. Besides, you are likely to fall short of that standard. That is the actual meaning of the word sin. It means fall short. It comes from archery. We are not perfect, and so, by a perfect standard, we sin. God will love you no matter what you do. He will not force you to love Him. As RTFirefly pointed out, He is immortal, and infinitely patient. However, you are neither immortal, nor infinitely patient. Whether you can survive death without His love is not something I can judge. I do sort of doubt it. (Not you personally, just humans in general.)
I consider it relevant because, as I see it, the problem is that you don’t really know, or haven’t clearly though, about what you actually think. You want to question our beliefs, when you don’t quite have anything clearly. I’m trying to define some terms, so I can understand what you mean by things. Thus far, I’m not really sure where we can even find some common ground to begin.
As I said, I find your communication very difficult to penetrate to begin with, and these topics are themselves somewhat impenetrable, so we will probably have to say farewell to pursuing it further.
It’s not a matter of existence; these terms are descriptors for behavior regarded as beneficial or abhorrent. Helping eradicate Guinea worm disease is good; getting your jollies by abducting and torturing people is evil.
It would seem that the implication of such a belief would be that there is no point in doing things that we would regard as good, because more bad stuff would have to happen to balance it out.
Such a belief seems to be the moral equivalent of a denial of agency: sure, we still have moral agency and freedom to act, but the effects of our actions, good or bad, will all be canceled out.
I obviously can’t prove such a belief true or false, but I’d hate to feel that the universe indeed worked like that, and would deeply resent a God that created the world to operate in such a way, and would not want to have anything to do with such a cosmic fuckhead.
What’s weird to me is hearing this from someone who doesn’t believe in a Creator. There is no mechanism by which the Universe would operate according to such principles absent a divine being pulling the strings to make it so.
I think you’ve done a whole lot of presumin’ and concludin’, there RT!
Within the context of living flesh, yes, but we’re talking about what happens to our souls after we die. The idea is that what we do here is “good” or “evil” only to the same extent that actors playing a part are good or evil…only during the play, not in their hearts.
I disagree that balance means that there is no point to an individual’s decision to do anything at all. In the same way you don’t think it’s your job to question God’s thinking or purpose, in a world of balance I don’t think it’s our job nor are we even capable of determining what must occur for balance to be acheived. Rather than say “screw it- why do something nice if something bad will only follow to cancel it out?” maybe we need to be doubling up on our goodness because the bad is already ahead?
You’re having trouble separating the idea that good and bad are real from the idea that good and bad are merely balance.
And you’re doing it again here. Which I understand. In the same way that really being able to imagine infinity is kinda of impossible because our existence and everything in our world is finite, it’s hard to imagine evil not being genuinely evil.
Which only goes to show the power of perspective, because to me the reverse is true. Balance seems like something very natural to me, requiring no outside creative force to monitor or maintain it.