Vorlon
The former, dear. My choice was to do something important or argue with you. But now I have time to relax and toy with you a bit.
You might be right, so let me be sure I understand. “How can you evaluate the highest possible standard?” is a rhetorical question, but “Do you know what a rhetorical question is?” is not. Let’s see, then. A rhetorical question is one that you put to someone else but are incapable of answering yourself, right?
That’s at least better. Instead of biting the ankle, you’ve gone for the shoe. Now if you really want to graduate to Great Debates, back up what you say with, oh, reasons and cites or something.
The definition of God that I gave was “G”. But when you “broke it down”, it became “the source of all things, a consciousness/intelligence beyond all comprehension, that which lies beyond this universe, the essence of Love, the essence of Goodness”. Apparently, you think that the expression, “2y” could be simplified by writing it as “SQRT(4)xy / (((12/4)*3)-8)x”.
I have witnessed precious few miracles, but were you actually to identify an error, as opposed to just spitting out your tongue and shouting, “Neener neener!”, I would use it as strong evidence in my arguments against atheists that miracles happen.
That may be, but that isn’t what you said you would do. You said you would break “<>G” down into “more basic elements”. “The source of all things, a consciousness/intelligence beyond all comprehension, that which lies beyond this universe, the essence of Love, the essence of Goodness” — was your response to — “Please demonstrate what you mean by breaking these down into “more basic elements”: G -> G and <>G”. Did you misquote yourself?
The Supreme Being is G (Supreme -> Necessary, Being -> Existence). Goodness is the aesthetic that He values most. Love is the facilitation of goodness. Therefore, it follows that God is Love.
Let me teach you about disjunction. Take the definitions of mercy that you finally bothered to look up, the one you bolded: "compassion OR forbearance shown especially to an offender OR to one subject to one’s power; also : lenient OR compassionate treatment ".
I’ve changed the emphasis so that you wouldn’t miss the little words this time. You are interpreting mercy as having the forbearance and lenience components only, but according to your latest definition mercy can be compassionate as well as lenient. In other words, all that is required to be mericful is to be aware of the suffering of another and desire to relieve it. This is in accordance with God being Love — His desire to relieve suffering through the facilitation of goodness.
Your answers keep going in circles, but that’s because you refuse to accept even the definition that you yourself quoted and placed in bold tags. That’s why you’re left with the rather weird contradiction that exercising the highest principle and discarding it are one and the same.
Despite all that you say, you really do not think that I am stupid.
In fact, your post at 8:58 last night belies the giddy excitement that rushed over you as you spent all day anticipating a possible victory in debate over me. So anxious were you to claim such a victory, that you were unable to resist actually asking me whether my pausing to do my day-job meant that you had won. Even were you to win a minor point, you would swoon with orgasmic joy, wouldn’t you? But to achieve your dream, you’re going to have to do much more than rhetorical razzing and making up definitions. You’re going to have to identify flaws if they exist, not merely say that they do. You’re going to have to learn to minimize accusations of incompetence and stupidity and maximize attention to the argument at hand. Until then, you’re going to have to settle for being the cute little amusement and distraction that you are, invoking my name in completely unrelated threads, due to your obsession with me and your inability to take your mind off me.
Right. No kidding. Statements like this, “If God wasn’t bound by rules, He could be bound by rules and still be God,” — where A is not B but could be B nonetheless — are Neanderthal and jejune in their conception. In order to understand them, a man would have to think in contradictions and circles, which is precisely why you think they make sense.
Yes, in fact, I do. That’s why I explained it to you. I wrote, “It is not God Himself who is bounded by logic or its rules; rather, it is our perception of Him that is bounded by these. It isn’t that He cannot make a square circle; it is merely that we wouldn’t know how to perceive one.”
If you ever take the time to study, you will learn that there are myriad frames of logic and manifold theories of truth. You have a vague and passing familiarity with primitive first-order logic, possibly supplemented by a couple of Geocities links, that you use to apply to everything from deontological discussions to doxastic assertions. But there is so much that you lack. Something might hold as an Identity Truth in S5 logic, but be unprovable in S4. Something else might hold as a Correspondence Truth in K, but be false in M. What you can tell by my statements is precisely nothing because discernment requires understanding.
I don’t blame you for claiming to be ignorant over claiming to be dishonest, but the fact remains that you refuse to accept both my and your own cited definitions of mercy for no reason other than the fact that even you could not twist them into supporting your premise. You therefore ignore disjunctions, accuse me of intellectual density, and anticipate excitedly a victory that will never come. You know that positing the highest standard as mercy destroys your argument, and you refuse to accept it for no other reason save that alone.
Well, then you’ve dug yourself yet another hole — if you cannot discern what is deserving and what is not, then by your strange standard you cannot discern whether in fact something is merciful or not since you can’t even know what the child deserves. That means that your statement, “it’s duty and not mercy,” is unprovable within your frame. Of course, your frame is arbitrary and incorrect, but you prefer to operate within it because to do otherwise would be to admit an error, and of all the things on heaven and earth, that is the one that you guard against with the greatest determination and fear. That’s why you lost the greatest debating partner a man could ever ask for. He lost interest in you because of your weak and dishonest arguments. And I am soon to follow his lead.
According to the unidentified cite you gave, mercy need not be forebearance.
Just for the sake of those to whom truth is meaningful, here is the record:
You began this hijack by offering, “Justice and mercy are often incompatible.”
“Often”, you said at first. But after much rebuttal and argument, you have now morphed into the position that justice and mercy are categorically incompatible. Not often. Always. You’ve flailed and bellowed and hurled insults until you’ve finally found yourself stuck in a corner with paint on the floor all around you. Now, you hope to bail out by transporting yourself to another dimension where you will flail and bellow some more.
No, thank you. I believe that I will do something more meaningful with my time, like watch a lava lamp.
” On the other hand, there are some folks who have had little enough to enjoy, not that that’s any excuse for missing out on sunsets. I suspect, too, there’s a sense of, “In order for me to be right, someone must be wrong” and a tendency to perceive that which is different as wrong. That’s pure guesswork, though.