just wonder how an omniscient being could not and an omnipotent being did not. — TheMadFool

The conclusion should lead you to recognize that god is not defined properly as no one can access the supernatural realm he is said to exist in.

Men put many lies in the bible.

Regards
DL

the contempt they feel for those who believe — T Clark

There is but compassion for those who are stuck, those who have to misleadingly teach "maybe's" as truth, as well as anyone who is stuck, such as those ever running into life's wall and getting thrown back into prison or just in general always having to cause trouble. It's not their fault that their will became what it is, compounded by an inability to learn; one is never responsible for how one turned out. Some people are reachable and some aren't. Some teach their belief out of rote or out of fear, who knows. Lately, there is more opposition, such as many more books on the subject, which may impress the fence sitters, although perhaps not the severely indoctrinated.

The 30 Commandments From the 3 Tablets

1. Thou shalt have no strange gods or singing idols before Me, for I wilt be jealous of them. All of thous wert created and put on Earth solely to worship Me. I need it; I am insecure. I ever was what I am and so I just don’t get the scheme of it.

2. Thou shalt not ever take the surname of thy Lord God Dammit in vain—damn all you swearers.

3. Remember thou to keep holy the Sabbath Day, and thus not even lift up a finger or do wholly the laundry. Do not even press an elevator button.

4. Humor thy father and thy mother—never tell them where you’ve been!

5. Thou shalt not kill, like I do, except outlaws and in-laws.

6. Thou shalt not admit adultery. Me, I only had sex once. Do not think of people naked, as like the way I made them.

7. Thou shalt not steal, except for office supplies and sundries from restaurants.

8. Thou shalt not bare falsies.

9. Covet Heavenly bodies and make love to thy neighbor.

10. Ever covet thy own ass—tie it to a tree, like Moses did.

11. Do one to others before they can do one to you.

12. I work in mysterious (crazy and insane) ways.

13. Don’t try to walk on water except during a very cold winter.

14. Fun is sin’s evil twin outside of the Sin-a-God.

15. You can have free will, but only if it matches My will.

16. Do not lie in court; let your lawyer do it for you!

17. Thou shalt only one spouse—this is called monotony! More than one spouse is called spice.

18. You are ever at fault for the sins of your ancestors. Luckily, I have no ancestors, nor any earliest memory.

19. Tell Me how darn great I am—or be tortured and burned in Hell forever.

20. I think I goofed—I made you in My own image!

21. Heaven is a wild place—you can do whatever you want!

22. You may commit horrible sins if you repent them.

23. I fully expect children not to touch something when I tell them not to.

24. I shall murder all mankind again anytime that I choose, but, not by flood, for I’ve promised not to, but by Earthquake!

25. Preferential treatment is given to those who beg, grovel, and ask for favors to get ahead of others.

26. I use My higher level intelligence to throw tantrums and have emotional outbursts!

27. We have had the last supper—no more free meals.

28. I crap on the just and the unjust alike.

29. If someone kisses your ass, then turn the other cheek.

30. I am in your heart—in your mind—and in your end.

Bible Lessons Continue

(the previous was in another, similar thread.)

Were the Homo series of near-men and proto-humans merely a lucky result of the extinction of the dinosaurs and 95% of all species by asteroids or some such? Or did God send the asteroids? If He could send plagues of locusts then… why not! This is intelligent design at work.

For those who feel that evil sprits still tempt us into sin, we could say that the Devil’s method is to unbalance one’s brain chemicals. Not fair? Well, don’t expect ‘fair’ from a Devil. Religion can always adapt to new information, as it did with evolution and the asteroids above.

So, the infant species of Homo Sapiens continues forward, some ahead of their time and some way behind. It is not totally unexpected that many will arrive at evil, and that saying they shouldn’t won’t change this. Some will obsess on winning the Olympics or being great at something, doing little else along the way; some will go into depressions and do bad things; some will get so anxious that they will hit their children and spouses, and many will slip into the sit-com life of being selfish. This is human nature as it really is, fully intended, with no surprise. Casting out Angels, making Adam, sending Moses, restarting with Noah, and sending Jesus all did nothing because…?

Science, of course, continues inventing helpful things, schools continue new programs like Good For the Sake of Good (GSG), and putting drunk driver’s wrecked cars on the school lawn by the entrance, asking for compassion, and so forth, as in “Rachel’s challenge” and exposing bullying.

I suggest even more focus for the young and impressionable. There could be a class in which students daily log how their thinking out of consequences helped lessen their problems, or, when they merely reacted without thinking, how problems arose and bloomed out of control. Such thinking ahead might then become as routine as doing math calculations. Why not focus a lot on the actual living of life?

We have, perhaps, zillions of years to improve, which, at the current rate, may be necessary, for human nature is what it has become. It could very well go the other direction as well.

Overall to date, is the human race progressing? If not, why does the same evil stuff keep befalling it? Is the gene pool degrading? Why are the prisons full? Will drug-users, abusers, gamblers, sports nuts, gang members, workaholics, and all such (the list is too long) reproduce so much more of the same until goodness becomes a rarity?

Still, what an adventure it is to be alive at this time on this pale blue dot in the middle of nowhere between the eternities of forever was and will be…

You are on target by focusing on this issue :up: I hope you have every success to find how Christianity can be reconciled with the obvious truths, that you see are at odds with a doctrine that has become a common, widespread error.

For your consideration while you are going there, your third paragraph contains a clue: that the Jews have an advantage over the English speakers.

When I came to question what you are questioning, I found that the ones who have believed the view you are objecting to, are forced to misread scriptures in order to sustain their view (consider 2 Peter 3:16c).

Some translations have even gone so far as to take the liberty to completely change what the bible says, because the translators genuinely are unable to see that what they are reading can mean any other thing. Amusingly, by choosing to go so far as to change the words, they reveal a genuine contention that the original words are somewhat misleading, and that if they had written what is written in the bible, they would have chosen different words to say it. So of course, seeing they are at liberty to write their own words in the bible, that is exactly what they do, thinking that they are doing a service to God.

So that is what we are wrestling with. Two thousand years of it (and more, as Jesus also remarked: Mark 7:9).

Here are a few things you will find as you keep pressing into the matter:

• There is no scripture saying that we are born with "inherited sin", but to the contrary you will find scriptures saying in various ways, that it is the sin in the world that spreads upon all, and when that sin takes hold (James 1:14-15), then it is only through receiving the life-giving words from God that we can be restored. "Born again".
• God does not require blood in order to be able to forgive (Luke 7:48-50), and you will find to that effect, that a question must be asked in respect of Mark 10:45: because Jesus' life was given as a ransom, who is it that demanded the payment? (ie: God, man or the devil?). The false doctrine teaches that God demanded the life of Jesus as payment for sin, but the scriptures don't say that (Matthew 7:25).
• Romans 7:9 talks about a spiritual life in the same way that John 5:24 and 1 John 3:14 do, but Romans 7:9 is obviously teaching that he had spiritual life to begin with, even before he came to know the Torah (the knowledge of sin). What Romans 7:9 says, simply does not fit with the objectionable theme of the error, and typically you find that it is the one which they will most struggle to read accurately and to explain.

If you can get through it, this is a letter I wrote to someone who, owed to my having discussed differences over this very doctrine with his subordinate, and his having taken sides with that subordinate without hearing my own words, excluded my welcome and then declined my requests for his hearing. So I wrote this letter to him, hoping it might be useful. You'd probably gain a few things from it to go with what you are already bringing forth.

Whether or not God is good has no impact on whether or not he exists. — T Clark

I am not so sure that's true. There is something about an all-too-human God with character flaws that makes him far less believable. A being capable of creating this universe, obviously having intelligence and power beyond our comprehension, would surely not be so petty and fucked up!

I don't claim to have a great argument that would show some necessary connection between the goodness of God and the likelihood of his existence. But there is certainly something persuasive in an argument against a particular kind of God based on his character flaws. For one, seeing such flaws makes it apparent that this God is probably something created in the imaginations of flawed human beings who made God in their own image, mostly after their abusive fathers.

If there is a true supreme intelligence behind everything, surely this temperamental and jealous monster depicted in the Bible is not that supreme intelligence!

Maybe one argument would be that the more supremely intelligent, good, and wise you are, the less likely you are to be concerned to punish apes you made for playing with their sexual organs, especially when you are responsible for their desires and their weakness and know precisely why they have these. Or you could simply show that such a being is not good, and if God is defined as being identical with Goodness itself, that this being cannot therefore be God as God is defined. This character clearly violates the definition of God in a number of ways.

I have a pretty strong intuition that if there is a God, He (as if such a being would be gendered!) would necessarily be supremely good and would necessarily not engage in the sort of behavior attributed to the God of scripture. But I am not sure how to justify that rationally. Something seems obvious about it. That doesn't mean God exists! But if God were to exist, God's goodness would surely be commensurate with His infinite intelligence and wisdom. I have a hard time taking seriously the idea of some kind of divine supervillain who created everything just to torture it!

There is something about an all-too-human God with character flaws that makes him far less believable. — petrichor

If only believable things are real, then Donald Trump wouldn't be President and fucking light would make up its mind.

Sorry. You deserve a better answer than that.

There is something about an all-too-human God with character flaws that makes him far less believable. — petrichor

It's kind of a raw deal for God. People who don't believe in him wouldn't believe in him no matter how good he is. He can't win. Damned if he does.... well, I guess not.

I don't claim to have a great argument that would show some necessary connection between the goodness of God and the likelihood of his existence. But there is certainly something persuasive in an argument against a particular kind of God based on his character flaws. — petrichor

A lot of Gods are pretty hard on the help. Zeus raping. Shiva destroying all things. Loki bringing on Ragnarok. Those Mayan gods and their virgin sacrifices. You know, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

But if God were to exist, God's goodness would surely be commensurate with His infinite intelligence and wisdom. — petrichor

Who's up for us here estimating the good probability of a quite normal Person-like system of mind as 'God' or the estimating that there is no 'God'? Can't really use any of the Biblical inspirations/contradictions for either stance unless they would still apply as a universal principle.

OK, here goes:

Probability for no ‘God’

0. Note: It is not a factor herein that the Biblical and thus necessarily fundamentalist ‘God’ has been demolished by evolutionary science and self-contradiction, for it still remains to size up what’s left.

1. All that we see goes from the simplest to the composite to the complex to the more complex, where we exist, which will continue into the future, where we can expect being higher than ourselves to become. The unlikely polar opposite of this is an ultra complex system of mind of a Designer being First as Fundamental, but systems have parts, this totally going against the fundamental arts.

2. (1) gets worse, given that there can be no input for any specific direction going into the Fundamental Eterne—the basis of all, this bedrock having to be causeless, having random effects, like those of quantum mechanics.

3. So, (2) indicates that there is no ultimate meaning, not that a built-in meaning would be great, for it would be restrictive, but at least, as ‘liberating’, there’s anything and everything possible that could become from the basic state of not anything in particular—our present Earthly life path being one that is being lived now after 13.57 billion years, much of which can be accounted for.

4. On top of the preceding unlikelihoods, and given that obviously that no Designer made everything instantly, it is unlikely that all eventualities could have been foreseen by a Deity in starting a universe suitable for life. It more seems like we were fine-tuned to the Earth.

5. It’s more OK if the ‘God’ Deity is like a scientist who throws a bunch of stuff together that is balanced and energetically reactive enough but not too much so that it races along too fast, etc., but, again, really, what is a fully formed person-like being doing sitting around beforehand, this also being all the more of a quandary that enlarges the question rather than answering it. If life has to come from a Larger Life, then a regress ensues, making this not to be a good template. As for a Deity trying to put workable stuff together, this is much like the idea of a multiverse.

6. Even worse, existence has no alternative, given that nonexistence has no being as a source and that there is indeed something, and so existence is mandatory, there not being any choice to it.

7. We see that the One of Totality continually transitions, never being able to remain as anything particular, which matches its nature supposed, due to no information being able to come into it in the first place that never was, for the One Fundamental Eterne has to be ungenerated and deathless.

8. Aside from the trivial definition of free will being that without coercion, that the will is free to operate, and the useless definition of the harmful random will equaling ‘freedom’, the deeper notion of ‘free’ as being original and free of the brain will is of a currency never being able to be stated and cashed in on, leaving ‘determined’ to continue to be the opposite of ‘undetermined’.

While eternalism can’t yet be told apart from presentism, the message from both is of a transient ‘now’, whether pre-determined or determined as it goes along. All hope is crushed, both for us and the Great Wheel having any potency. This is the great humility; hubris is gone.

It is enough, then, that we have the benefit of experiencing and living life well, sometimes, more so given this modern age, although still with sweat, tears, and aversive substrates of emotions that those of the future might consider to be barbaric.

Doesn’t seem like a smart God’s world, and so fundamentalist literalist Biblical ‘reasons’ cannot apply here, for those went away already. The pride of being special and deserving of reward and avoiding punishment is a nice wish, though, for us electro-chemical-bio organisms who appear be be as organic as anything else that grows in nature.

9. God’s operations, curiously restricted to be the same as nature’s has us not being able to tell them apart, but which is more likely, the natural or the supernatural? Earth is where it ought to be, in the Goldilocks zone, not out near Neptune. And why must there be a distinct transcendent, immaterial, intangible, super realm when it would still have to give and take energy in the physical material language?

10. Sit on a fence and go to church half the time or estimate the probability either way; there can be no blame for not knowing what can’t be shown for sure.

Comments?

It is beautiful poetry, deeply inspiring, and I love the grace of your spirit as you write, but you would be stronger if you were anchored rather than drifting. You drift, wondering, because you haven't quite grasped what God is saying through the bible. So that is a crucial piece missing in your faith that would empower Him as He speaks through you (for: God is love, whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him 1 John 4:16). When we read you, we read a corresponding uncertainty through your views, that doesn't serve well to inspire hope in others, especially so far as understanding how a final victory is to be won. And as 1 Corinthians 13:7 calls us to consider the qualities of love: "it hopes, trusts, bears and endures all things", the sum of your poetry gives a different sense of hope than what He says to me elsewhere (Matthew 10:27), owed to His greater knowledge of all things and creative ability.

No less now that I have said so, I enjoyed your thinking and the craft of your beautiful poetry! :)

.. and I would like add thoughts WRT this:

there can be no blame for not knowing what can’t be shown for sure — PoeticUniverse

.. sure, blame is pointless, whether it is available or not - but you are really promoting a catch-22 when you speak this way. Whoever trusting and believing, offering their prayer of love in faith, will get to see. "Ask for anything in my name, without doubting, and it shall be done for you". The doubt does not come from God, because Romans 8:32 "He who did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all, how shall He not also with Him freely give us all things?"

Whoever trusting and believing, offering their prayer of love in faith, will get to see. "Ask for anything in my name, without doubting, and it shall be done for you" — Serving Zion

The "no blame" conclusion is good for those who must honestly admit that 'God' is a maybe, however unlikely, those who didn't accord to the deal to accept 'God' or not have something, or worse, they most likely thinking that what is All Love wouldn't have any controlling conditions, but would true grant true freedom to the human natures designed as such as they are; however, if there is still a penalty foretold, either it is wrong since there can't be any or they wish to retain their freedom or at least integrity by not submitting to the accepting requirement of the conditional giving.

You'd probably gain a few things from it to go with what you are already bringing forth. — Serving Zion

I have spoken of most of the issues you put but thank you for the thought.

Regards
DL

I have a hard time taking seriously the idea of some kind of divine supervillain who created everything just to torture it! — petrichor

Oops.

Nice that you are not ready to become a Christian by allowing your morals and intellect to go into a dysfunctional Christian mode.

Regards
DL