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Source: (consider it) Thread: A problem with the first commandment
mousethief

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quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
But in a quite practical way, God only appears as a potential threat to you if you already have decided to believe that He is even around.

The message, present in Christianity from the very beginning, of "turn or burn," belies this absurd claim.
Uhh, no? If one doesn't believe in the existence of the Christian God, then obviously "turn or burn" is a meaningless threat. As I've said in the preceding sentence which you did not choose to quote - once one does believe in God, one indeed starts with a fear of God (and certain evangelism strategies may well emphasize that). However, as the post went on, this fear is often skin deep and ... Well, I tell you what, why don't you just read my previous post if you are interested?
Tell you what. I did. And one doesn't need to quote the whole of someone's post to respond to it. That's stupid. And I explained how the people who use this threat mean it to be meaningful. Which you didn't address. So thanks for playing. Sorry, thanks for NOT playing because you didn't engage with me at all.

[ 23. August 2013, 20:20: Message edited by: mousethief ]

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EtymologicalEvangelical
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quote:
Originally posted by Zach82
You know, I am not sure that love demands a free choice. I don't think I ever freely chose to love my mother, and I can't say that I am freely choosing to continue loving her. I love her because she's my mom, and she's nice and makes S.O.S. I love her because of things completely out of my control. It's the same with my wife. I didn't make her beautiful or gentle, or able to withstand my sarcasm or constant feelings of dread, but those things compel me to love her.

On the other hand, I doesn't seem to me that one cannot have free choice just because the wrong choice comes with threat of punishment. In fact, I would say refusing to grant people the consequences of the choices they make is to deprive them of agency.

I think that, in a weak sense, we are coerced to accept and receive the love of God. I say in a 'weak' sense, because it is possible wilfully to reject that love and thereby be damned (however we may understand damnation, which is clearly not a pleasant fate). 'Strong' coercion would be for God to make us love him such that we could not possibly reject that love (the programming of automatons).

A good way of illustrating this is to consider food. We all need to eat, and if we don't eat the consequences will become increasingly serious. Therefore we are compelled to eat according to 'weak' coercion. We certainly have the option of going on hunger strike, thereby submitting to self-torture, but this is generally not an attractive option. But if we recoil from the idea of such long-term fasting, and therefore feel compelled to eat, we still happily choose to eat, and usually with a positive appetite. We can also choose what kind of foods to eat.

Now if this is a fair analogy of the love of God (and it seems to me that it is, in the context of this discussion), then we need to reject any notion of the love of God as something objectively presented as an option, which we can 'choose' in the same way we would choose a pair of shoes, a new car (if we had the money) or a holiday destination. It might be inconvenient to go barefoot, or to use public transport or to never get away on holiday, but the refusal to buy shoes, cars and holidays do not - by necessity - result in horrific torture. But the refusal to receive the love of God does have extreme and terrible consequences. Therefore, its rejection can be likened to the rejection of one of the necessities of life, such as food. A necessity of life is imposed on us by means of weak coercion.

When I "became a Christian" - or as some evangelicals would put it: "got saved" (ugh, I hate that phrase!) - I responded to the deep conviction of the love of God. At the time, there was no sense at all of "what would happen if I rejected this?" God had brought me to the point where it was a "done deal". I was going to accept His love, and there was really no choice involved at all. I could say that I was taken captive by His love. I am very happy with that idea. To refuse it would have been unthinkable at the time. The presentation of the love of God to me by the Holy Spirit was the end of a process of drawing and ongoing conviction. It was, as it were, the finishing touches to a process that had been going on a long time during my extremely difficult, confused and depressed adolescence. The love of God was most definitely not a package just 'sold' to me by a slick evangelist: "take it or leave it" and "if you leave it, you'll burn in hell for all eternity". This is a pseudo-gospel. God's love is not an external object to be traded in a spiritual "free market", but is God Himself working out His purposes in His way in different people's lives.

This is why I do warm to a certain kind of very moderate Calvinism. I deplore the double predestination idea, and thoroughly reject that, but it is undoubtedly true that salvation is the result of a long term work of the sovereign God in people's lives, which is personal and often deeply hidden. It is not a product that we can just airily choose on a whim (the cheap "turn or burn" approach).

Like the utility of food, or the love of one's parents, God's love is a necessity of life, which comes to all of us in different ways, and, in a sense, it is 'forced' on us. Because to reject such a necessity (in fact, the greatest necessity of all) is to be damned.

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You can argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome': but you neither can nor need argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome, but I'm not saying this is true'. CS Lewis

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mousethief

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quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Now if this is a fair analogy of the love of God (and it seems to me that it is, in the context of this discussion),

I don't think it is. Nourishment is not called "love" with all that attaches to that word.

quote:
But the refusal to receive the love of God does have extreme and terrible consequences. Therefore, its rejection can be likened to the rejection of one of the necessities of life, such as food. A necessity of life is imposed on us by means of weak coercion.
But the aftermath of not loving God is presented not as a natural consequence but as a punishment, which seems to me to move it out of the "weak" category pretty decisively.

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EtymologicalEvangelical
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quote:
Originally posted by mousethief
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Now if this is a fair analogy of the love of God (and it seems to me that it is, in the context of this discussion),

I don't think it is. Nourishment is not called "love" with all that attaches to that word.
I was just using the analogy of food to illustrate the idea of something as a necessity, the refusal of which has dire consequences.

quote:
But the aftermath of not loving God is presented not as a natural consequence but as a punishment, which seems to me to move it out of the "weak" category pretty decisively.
Well, we can argue about the difference between consequence and punishment, but I was using the term 'weak coercion' to mean something that we have the ability to reject, but the rejection of which results in horrific consequences / punishment. 'Strong coercion' was used to denote the programming of an automaton, in other words, the total denial of free will.

[ 24. August 2013, 12:51: Message edited by: EtymologicalEvangelical ]

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You can argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome': but you neither can nor need argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome, but I'm not saying this is true'. CS Lewis

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mousethief

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quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Well, we can argue about the difference between consequence and punishment, but I was using the term 'weak coercion' to mean something that we have the ability to reject, but the rejection of which results in horrific consequences / punishment. 'Strong coercion' was used to denote the programming of an automaton, in other words, the total denial of free will.

Then your distinction is not the only, and possibly not the more important, distinction that should be made.

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Dafyd
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quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
But the aftermath of not loving God is presented not as a natural consequence but as a punishment, which seems to me to move it out of the "weak" category pretty decisively.

I don't believe that's the sole consistent line of all Christian theologians, even all traditional Christian theologians. C.S.Lewis' Great Divorce, for instance, doesn't depict Hell as a punishment inflicted by God. While there is always use of language of punishment, there's quite a lot of theology that makes use of natural consequence language as well. My impression is that Eastern Orthodox theology uses both; as does Dante. Aquinas tends towards natural consequence language too.

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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams

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mousethief

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Fair enough, there's often a both/and rather than an either/or. But the existence of the punishment thread at all makes it very, very different from dying from not eating.

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Polly

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The OP states at love is. "Heartfelt commitment" and I fundamentally disagree with this.

Love is primarily a choice and not primarily an emotional desire to be exercised.

I choose to love God (at least try my hest) with all I have and I don't rely on my heartfelt emotions because they can be deceptive amongst other things.

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IngoB

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quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
A good way of illustrating this is to consider food. We all need to eat, and if we don't eat the consequences will become increasingly serious. Therefore we are compelled to eat according to 'weak' coercion. We certainly have the option of going on hunger strike, thereby submitting to self-torture, but this is generally not an attractive option. But if we recoil from the idea of such long-term fasting, and therefore feel compelled to eat, we still happily choose to eat, and usually with a positive appetite. We can also choose what kind of foods to eat. Now if this is a fair analogy of the love of God (and it seems to me that it is, in the context of this discussion), then we need to reject any notion of the love of God as something objectively presented as an option, which we can 'choose' in the same way we would choose a pair of shoes, a new car (if we had the money) or a holiday destination.

But the analogy does not hold, and for the reason I've pointed out above. God is hidden in this world, and the the coercion that you perceive (no matter how weak or strong) is already a function of your faith in God. Food, and your need for food, is not hidden at all in this world. If you are in any doubt about it, stop eating, and it will become undeniably present to you within a day or two. The same cannot be said about God. People can go through their entire lives without engaging at all with God. We can talk about how there seems to be a "spiritual longing" that tends to make most people seek some kind of "beyond the ordinary" satisfaction. Yet that is in the end just that. People can and do fulfil this longing in all sorts of ways, from simply ignoring it to putting a crystal pyramid next to their pillow to becoming a Buddhist. And again, even you who believe in God and may feel coerced to do this and that, are just one step away from not being coerced at all. Stop believing in God, or at least in the God who coerces you, and this coercion just pops out of existence like a soap bubble. All this is as solid as you would make it, it has no intrinsic strength at all. God is hidden, and any coercion accrues from you trying to find him. Of course, in times past there was strong social coercion to follow particular religious expressions. But that is largely gone now, and even when it was present it could do no more than producing the social following of norms. Anything beyond that was also then up to the individual, at least in principle. (In practice people are creatures of habit.)

So again I ask you, where is the coercion? If I decide tomorrow that the Christian God is bunk and never again pay the slightest heed to anything Christian, who will coerce me how? If you say that God may throw me into hell for that, then you are invoking something that I have decided to be bunk. How can that bind me? And yes, if this is then reality it will catch up with me. But after my death. In this world, the reality of God requires realisation. And since I am the one doing the realising, there can never be any coercion here but self-coercion. Again, there can be religiously motivated social coercion, but that's really a different matter. Because the people that would coerce me so, be it my neighbours or the Holy Inquisition, are very much not hidden. God however is hidden and a hidden entity cannot coerce you other than through your choice to seek it out.

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Martin60
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IngoB. I've decided to play a zero sum game with reading you. So ... again (yes I see the irony), first class, thank you.

I therefore extend the same to you EE. Even though I have nothing to show for it.

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EtymologicalEvangelical
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quote:
Originally posted by IngoB
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
A good way of illustrating this is to consider food. We all need to eat, and if we don't eat the consequences will become increasingly serious. Therefore we are compelled to eat according to 'weak' coercion. ...

But the analogy does not hold, and for the reason I've pointed out above. God is hidden in this world, and the the coercion that you perceive (no matter how weak or strong) is already a function of your faith in God. Food, and your need for food, is not hidden at all in this world. If you are in any doubt about it, stop eating, and it will become undeniably present to you within a day or two. The same cannot be said about God. People can go through their entire lives without engaging at all with God. We can talk about how there seems to be a "spiritual longing" that tends to make most people seek some kind of "beyond the ordinary" satisfaction. Yet that is in the end just that. People can and do fulfil this longing in all sorts of ways, from simply ignoring it to putting a crystal pyramid next to their pillow to becoming a Buddhist. And again, even you who believe in God and may feel coerced to do this and that, are just one step away from not being coerced at all. Stop believing in God, or at least in the God who coerces you, and this coercion just pops out of existence like a soap bubble.
I can see your point, but I find it problematic. God is hidden from "the natural man", because the carnal mind (as the Apostle Paul refers to it) cannot grasp spiritual things. But then how could man in his natural state possibly find this hidden God? The only way would be for God to reveal Himself to him in some way and convict him, thus countering the effect of his natural mind. Any choice would be a response to God's initiative. This is how the grace of God works. God takes the lead and man ought to respond.

I dispute the claim that people go through their entire lives without engaging at all with God. It is, of course, true that many people have never heard the Christian gospel, and have little or no understanding even of monotheism. However, that is not to say that God, through the Holy Spirit, cannot minister something of His love and reality into people's lives, such that they are able to respond within the framework of their own understanding. That is how I understand Paul's words in Romans 2: 12-16. I don't accept that the love of God is optional for anyone. Nothing could exist without some element of the active and engaged love of God, and the tragedy is that this love is so sorely abused by the wicked. It's interesting that John 1:4 states "in Him was life and the life was the light of men". But the Good News Version renders this: "The Word was the source of life, and this life brought light to people", which gives the impression that the life of God (Christ) is an extra that some people can obtain, but is not necessarily that on which all human life depends. In fact, the original Greek doesn't even imply that life merely depends on this light, but rather that it is that light. Therefore the reality - the light - of the God of love is the ultimate necessity. And thus being a necessity, we cannot choose it from some other position of neutrality; we either accept it, or we can choose to resist it, a bit like someone choosing to go on hunger strike.

Now the question is: how exactly does God reveal Himself to the individual? Is it simply "turn or burn", which is presented as a choice, but is actually a form of psychological coercion? Even if the hearer does not believe in hell, their natural and understandable fear of death is being played with. They are told, on the one hand, that "you have to make the decision. God will not force you. He respects your free will", whereas, on the other, they are warned that if they do not make the correct 'free' choice, they will be tortured mercilessly for ever with pain akin to the pain of being consumed by fire.

It may superficially be true that someone who does not believe in God (for whatever reason), may not feel any coercion to make a decision for God, but that is to ignore the role of conscience. Of course, a person's conscience can become seared, but that is the result of the kind of choice that can be likened to someone who refuses to eat (to go back to my disputed analogy about food). Moral conscience is something universal, because morality is a necessity of life.

quote:
So again I ask you, where is the coercion? If I decide tomorrow that the Christian God is bunk and never again pay the slightest heed to anything Christian, who will coerce me how? If you say that God may throw me into hell for that, then you are invoking something that I have decided to be bunk. How can that bind me? And yes, if this is then reality it will catch up with me. But after my death. In this world, the reality of God requires realisation. And since I am the one doing the realising, there can never be any coercion here but self-coercion. Again, there can be religiously motivated social coercion, but that's really a different matter. Because the people that would coerce me so, be it my neighbours or the Holy Inquisition, are very much not hidden. God however is hidden and a hidden entity cannot coerce you other than through your choice to seek it out.
If the hidden God condemns someone who has, for whatever reason, failed to choose to seek Him and thus realise His reality, and who felt no spiritual conviction as to the reality of God, or at least, the error of his ways, then it could be argued that this God is deceitful. God would not be respecting that person's freedom, since that person had no freedom, not feeling the slightest necessity to seek God or believe in Him. Thus the fate of hell would be imposed unjustly. A punishment that is imposed about which the condemned knew nothing - and about which he could not reasonably be expected to know anything (and he could not have known that the errors he committed were even wrong) - is a punishment imposed unjustly. His moral responsibility is upheld when he is apprised of the law and its just consequences. And if the consequences are severe enough, then one could argue that he is being (weakly) coerced into obeying the law (after all, how many people obey the law of the land willingly, rather than grudgingly?). He may happily and joyfully obey the law, but one could hardly say that it is an obedience arising from a completely free choice, in the sense that one would choose one meal rather than another off a restaurant menu (in which the choice of any does not entail negative consequences, but is merely a matter of taste, unlike the choice between a wholesame meal and a plate of human waste).

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You can argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome': but you neither can nor need argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome, but I'm not saying this is true'. CS Lewis

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EtymologicalEvangelical
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For "wholesame" read "wholesome".

Missed the editing deadline!

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You can argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome': but you neither can nor need argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome, but I'm not saying this is true'. CS Lewis

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Erroneous Monk
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quote:
Originally posted by Zach82:
You know, I am not sure that love demands a free choice. I don't think I ever freely chose to love my mother, and I can't say that I am freely choosing to continue loving her. I love her because she's my mom, and she's nice and makes S.O.S.

I remember that as I began the descent into post-natal depression after the birth of my son 7 years ago, I asked my own mother *why* the baby loved me. [Frown]

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Lietuvos Sv. Kazimieras
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I'm having a hard time seeing where this discussion leaves room for the grace of the Triune God, apprehended by means of faith. Where does the realisation that the entire creation and our own consciousness are gifts of the divine grace fit into these arguments? Surely that realisation by itself is enough to command/motivate a response of thankfulness, which is essentially a response of love to the vast love of the Trinity revealed in the Creation, of which we and our conscious apprehension take part. From this loving thankfulness should in turn flow a generosity of spirit, giving rise to acts of generosity. The hitch, of course, is that this realisation - this faith that apprehends the divine grace - is difficult to maintain in an ongoing fashion. But grace is always there. And not so much our own working to discover God or to find "salvation", but rather the persistent reaching out of the Trinity to us: the God in whom we live and move and have our being.
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EtymologicalEvangelical
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quote:
Originally posted by Lietuvos Sv. Kazimieras
But grace is always there. And not so much our own working to discover God or to find "salvation", but rather the persistent reaching out of the Trinity to us: the God in whom we live and move and have our being.

Well, I believe that that is what I have been trying to say. God takes the initiative by His grace, and this grace is something in which "we live and move and have our being" - in other words, it's the prime necessity of life. We can, however, choose to resist this grace, but that choice is rather different from the idea that it's down to us to take the initiative to search out the 'hidden God' (or to respond, by means of fake freedom, to "turn or burn", as if God's grace can be objectified like a marketed product in this way).

[ 04. September 2013, 12:47: Message edited by: EtymologicalEvangelical ]

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You can argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome': but you neither can nor need argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome, but I'm not saying this is true'. CS Lewis

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lilBuddha
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quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:


Like the utility of food, or the love of one's parents, God's love is a necessity of life, which comes to all of us in different ways, and, in a sense, it is 'forced' on us. Because to reject such a necessity (in fact, the greatest necessity of all) is to be damned.

But it is still all bullshit then, yeah? In the context of the Christian God, to create said situation is coercion, is punishment. The most hideous example of Hobson's choice ever devised.

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EtymologicalEvangelical
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quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Like the utility of food, or the love of one's parents, God's love is a necessity of life, which comes to all of us in different ways, and, in a sense, it is 'forced' on us. Because to reject such a necessity (in fact, the greatest necessity of all) is to be damned.

But it is still all bullshit then, yeah? In the context of the Christian God, to create said situation is coercion, is punishment. The most hideous example of Hobson's choice ever devised.
No, it's not bullshit. The "turn or burn" message is bullshit, because that is based on the idea of "damnation by default". It assumes that everyone who is not a 'proper' professing Christian lives in a natural state of reprobation, and from this position needs to "freely and joyfully choose" the grace of God in Jesus Christ, failure to do so resulting in being slung into the pit of burning sulphur for all eternity. Now that clearly is coercion and a travesty of the idea of "free choice".

But what if everyone was "saved by default"? Then the love of God is not chosen (in the consumerist sense of selecting between external objects), but is simply a fact of life - indeed the ultimate necessity of life. This love can however be rejected, just like any 'given' or necessity in life can be rejected (and if so, then that very love which is rejected becomes a torment for the person who hates it). So therefore God doesn't expect anyone to actively 'choose' His love on pain of damnation, but simply to live in it. It's not for me to judge how God works in the lives of those who do not subscribe to Christian theology, and I certainly believe the truth of 1 John 4:7 - "...everyone who loves is born of God and knows God" and 1 John 4:16 - "...he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him."

So, in this case, someone needs to go on a long journey and "Hobson" simply gives him a horse to enable him to do this, which he can either accept or walk. Thus the horse is not chosen (i.e. "Hobson" takes the initiative, not the person to whom the horse is given), but gratefully accepted, and even if it's accepted without gratitude, it's still given. But "Hobson" doesn't say: "You must freely choose that horse, but if you don't want it, then I will break your legs." If the person to whom the horse is given, wilfully rejects it (despite "Hobson's" pleas), then that person may end up suffering by having to walk a great distance, but that is hardly "Hobson's" fault!

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You can argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome': but you neither can nor need argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome, but I'm not saying this is true'. CS Lewis

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lilBuddha
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It would be Hobson's fault if he created the situation.
You are standing on a crumbling precipice above a pit of molten lava and God kindly extends his hand to bring you in to his loving embrace if you but choose to take it.
This would be wonderful if God had not created the lava, precipice and placed you on its edge.*
In this scenario, the Christian God is as needy, cruel and sadistic as any god ever worshiped by the Romans.
Why would a "loving" god create a situation in which those he loves could end up suffering?

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Gramps49
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Going back to the original post. I think the mistake is that we think "love" is an emotional response.

Harkening back to what I remember from my Marriage Encounter days (20 years plus): love goes through three stages: Romantic love, the emotional, rose colored glasses stage; disillusionment--when the warts and all can be experienced; and then reaffirmation, when a new level of relationship is obtained.

Speaking from my own experience it is in the disillusionment stage that one has to make a conscious decision to love a person in spite of the difficulties.

I would argue that is the same situation with God. One can have mountain top experiences with God, when everything seems to be going well; but then there are those deep valleys when nothing seems to be going right and doubt is everywhere. It is in these times one makes a decision to continue loving God. But then spring time comes around and one can reaffirm their faith/love and trust.

Love is much more than an emotion. It is a conscious decision.

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Enoch
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Going back to the original question, Gramps 49, your answer is good enough for me.

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mousethief

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quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
It would be Hobson's fault if he created the situation.
You are standing on a crumbling precipice above a pit of molten lava and God kindly extends his hand to bring you in to his loving embrace if you but choose to take it.
This would be wonderful if God had not created the lava, precipice and placed you on its edge.*
In this scenario, the Christian God is as needy, cruel and sadistic as any god ever worshiped by the Romans.
Why would a "loving" god create a situation in which those he loves could end up suffering?

This is where double predestination is so handy! God doesn't love the ones who end up suffering; they were created to suffer and sucks to be them.

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IngoB

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quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
But then how could man in his natural state possibly find this hidden God? The only way would be for God to reveal Himself to him in some way and convict him, thus countering the effect of his natural mind. Any choice would be a response to God's initiative. This is how the grace of God works. God takes the lead and man ought to respond.

Sure, God reveals Himself through grace (though also actually through the natural moral law). But precisely not in a coercive manner. It's not like Richard Dawkins gets visited by Archangel Gabriel, who slaps him around the room a bit until Dawkins sees the errors of his ways. There will be sufficient grace, sufficient "revealing of God" if you wish, provided also to Dawkins. He could see the errors of his ways. But it is just a possibility, and in the end a matter of choice and faith. God is not in Dawkins' face, God remains hidden enough in the sense of regular human evidence even in any revealing grace given. It is really the case that Dawkins must want to be coerced by God, before he will be coerced by God. It's not like the floor of his bedroom falls out in a Divine vision, revealing the fires of hell underneath his feet. Indeed, powerful visions like that are just given to those who do not need them themselves. Somebody well advanced on the way to sainthood may see that sort of thing, and then tell Dawkins about it. That would be a revealing grace given to Dawkins (from God through that saint), but it is obviously something that Dawkins can easily choose to ignore. And this seems to me to be the general rule.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
I dispute the claim that people go through their entire lives without engaging at all with God.

I think that's a simple fact. Of course, if you count every single occasion of grace or the mildest spiritual experience as "engaging with God", then indeed probably every human being has some moments. Everybody has gazed at a sunset in awe, or something like that. But I'm talking about an actual conscious and intentional engagement, some effort to really "make contact" with something higher (not necessarily the Christian God). I have little doubt that plenty of people never do anything like that in their lives, including properly a fair number of people officially registered with some religion.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
I don't accept that the love of God is optional for anyone.

I never said that it is. But I think you are way overdoing the "push" of God in all this. From the very beginning, see Adam and Eve, man is given space with God being as "away" as God can be to make his own decisions. We really do have a choice, Pascal's wager is an intellectual game not a visceral reality.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
It may superficially be true that someone who does not believe in God (for whatever reason), may not feel any coercion to make a decision for God, but that is to ignore the role of conscience.

Bollocks. As someone who grew up in an agnostic / atheist household, I can honestly tell you that talk about hell was something I considered mildly ridiculous, and mostly an embarrassment to the person talking in that way (and probably telling us something nasty about their character). There was zero impact of that sort of thing, or if there was impact, then only the usual social evasion one performs when meeting unpleasant characters. Of course I had a conscience back then, but I did not see it in any way as connected to God, much less to some conception of heaven and hell. Morals were a simple self-justifying thing: one does good because it is good to be a good person. Yes, I can poke philosophical hole in that myself now. That's not the point. I'm telling you that this sort of hell stuff was sliding off like oil on teflon while I had no faith.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
If the hidden God condemns someone who has, for whatever reason, failed to choose to seek Him and thus realise His reality, and who felt no spiritual conviction as to the reality of God, or at least, the error of his ways, then it could be argued that this God is deceitful. God would not be respecting that person's freedom, since that person had no freedom, not feeling the slightest necessity to seek God or believe in Him. Thus the fate of hell would be imposed unjustly. A punishment that is imposed about which the condemned knew nothing - and about which he could not reasonably be expected to know anything (and he could not have known that the errors he committed were even wrong) - is a punishment imposed unjustly.

God is hidden, but not hidden in that way. God is not entirely absent. Richard Dawkins knows full well what people say about God. He just doesn't believe it. If God would write in fiery letters into the sky over Oxford "Dawkins, you fool, I'm right here." and the transported him into the air and held him there levitating until the message had sunk in, then God would not be hidden in the sense that I mean. God would rapidly become an undeniable fact. Everybody would know that God is there, and what He wants, because He would be in their faces. But it is not like that. Evidence for God is usually finely balanced. Most of the time there is plausible deniability. (I don't think that it is "plausible" in a rational sense, ultimately, but it is certainly plausible in terms of the typical state of mind of most people.) There's nothing in the world that normally screams 'God' at you. Sure, there may be people that scream 'God' at you. But we all know that people scream all sorts of things, why should this be any different?

On one hand, there is what you describe: an injustice by virtue of punishing what cannot reasonably be expected to have been known. On the other hand, there is Pascal's wager, an overpowering coercion by the threat of infinite punishment and the promise of infinite reward. God is hidden such that neither of them can take hold of most people. It is a fine balance, but God is neither an indisputable fact nor a complete unknown. He is a shadow, a hint, something in the air. You have to decide to get into that. It is in fact as free a choice as is possible. Amazingly free, really, given the circumstances.

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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear

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EtymologicalEvangelical
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quote:
Originally posted by IngoB
On one hand, there is what you describe: an injustice by virtue of punishing what cannot reasonably be expected to have been known. On the other hand, there is Pascal's wager, an overpowering coercion by the threat of infinite punishment and the promise of infinite reward. God is hidden such that neither of them can take hold of most people. It is a fine balance, but God is neither an indisputable fact nor a complete unknown. He is a shadow, a hint, something in the air. You have to decide to get into that. It is in fact as free a choice as is possible. Amazingly free, really, given the circumstances.

The alleged freedom is created by the withholding of information. In fact, according to this argument, some measure of doubt and unbelief is a necessary condition for the operation of freedom. I say this, because if everyone was acutely conscious that if they resisted God's demands, they would be burnt alive forever, then freedom would be abrogated. If a criminal puts a gun to my head and demands my money "or I'll shoot", am I really truly free to say "no"? Pedantically speaking, I am still free to refuse his demand, but what sort of 'freedom' is this?

But suppose there is some kind of vague threat communicated to me, about which I am not completely certain, which demands my money "or else...". Because of the uncertainty, I decide to exercise my freedom to resist that demand and to hope that no adverse consequences will ensue. But in reality the threat is real, and some time after my refusal I end up being shot dead. I may have had a greater sense of freedom to resist the demand, but this experience was entirely illusory. To suggest that this hidden and doubtful threat is the method by which God allows us freedom, is to impute deceit to Him.

Of course, handing money over to a mugger is an entirely negative scenario, whereas responding to - or 'choosing' - the love of God is something positive. However, the same argument holds, because the command to love God is backed up with a threat - in fact, the most severe threat of all. If everyone on the planet went through life acutely and entirely conscious that if they spurned God's advances, they would fall into a hideous pit of burning sulphur, and they could see this pit under their feet every moment - as if walking on a transparent surface - then who in their right mind would not comply? In reality, people would be 'mugged' into loving God. But then to argue that the choice is real and legitimate only because people don't know that this fate awaits them, is tantamount to saying that God's idea of true freedom is an illusory freedom, in which people are deliberately kept in a state of ignorance, unaware of the unspeakably serious peril they are in. What sort of sadistic trickster is this God?

How can true freedom only work within the framework of unbelief and ignorance? Jesus said: "You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free". Here it is truth - knowledge, wisdom and understanding - which produces freedom. So how can the hiddenness of God produce freedom?

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You can argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome': but you neither can nor need argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome, but I'm not saying this is true'. CS Lewis

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IngoB

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quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
But suppose there is some kind of vague threat communicated to me, about which I am not completely certain, which demands my money "or else...". Because of the uncertainty, I decide to exercise my freedom to resist that demand and to hope that no adverse consequences will ensue. But in reality the threat is real, and some time after my refusal I end up being shot dead. I may have had a greater sense of freedom to resist the demand, but this experience was entirely illusory. To suggest that this hidden and doubtful threat is the method by which God allows us freedom, is to impute deceit to Him.

You can call it whatever you please. It is an undeniable fact that God is not currently present to us in an overwhelmingly compelling fashion. Indeed, God is not even present to most of us in a particularly accessible manner. This fact is fully acknowledged in the traditional Christian teaching that without God's grace one cannot come to full faith in God. It is consequently not an undeniable fact that we are going to be faced with heaven or hell after death, since that is a teaching of faith. But of course this is the traditional Christian teaching, and for the sake of our discussion here we are assuming this to be true in order to find out how much freedom it affords. Finally, it is a in my opinion a well established fact that people can feel essentially free to choose or nor choose their beliefs in God (or other "higher things"). I certainly did not feel constrained in doing so, when I did. If people feel compelled to make choices in religion, then in my opinion arguably only by social pressure from other people, not (usually) by any direct pressure from God. God may in grace make present such a choice, and provide inspiration for the correct option, but it is simply not the case that the right way to jump is thereby becoming obvious to all but the most heartless of morons. Experientially, it is more the case that faith becomes an option at all by Divine intervention (in spite of a lack of compelling evidence). Hence I maintain that my analysis is little more than a stringing together of facts that are undeniable, assumed as true for the sake of discussion, or easily established. You can then rage against such realities, since they do not fulfil some ill-conceived ideals of yours. But that's no skin off my nose, and I suspect God is not particular interested in your complaints either.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
If everyone on the planet went through life acutely and entirely conscious that if they spurned God's advances, they would fall into a hideous pit of burning sulphur, and they could see this pit under their feet every moment - as if walking on a transparent surface - then who in their right mind would not comply? In reality, people would be 'mugged' into loving God. But then to argue that the choice is real and legitimate only because people don't know that this fate awaits them, is tantamount to saying that God's idea of true freedom is an illusory freedom, in which people are deliberately kept in a state of ignorance, unaware of the unspeakably serious peril they are in. What sort of sadistic trickster is this God?

You are now just making my argument for me. It is indeed near impossible for people to remain free in their choices if the eternal consequences of those choices are compelling present to them. And since love involves a choice, it is then near impossible to truly love God. One would have to love God in spite of being excessively forced to "love" God. However, you are simply speaking the untruth about the alternative, and knowingly so. For it is not at all the case that you just "do not know" about heaven and hell. You know lots and lots about heaven and hell, and about who claims what about it. You could probably write a little history and a sociological analysis about it off the top of your head. And it would be very easy for you indeed to close any remaining gaps in your understanding. Still, all this knowing does not come together into an undeniable case. It comes together into a meaningful choice. There's just enough there for you to reasonably worry about it, but not enough to decide the matter.

And let's not forget that I'm saying that this is a start, not the end. I think "fear of God is the beginning of wisdom", without equivocating about fear as awe and the like, puts it just right. The choice to take the threat serious is not supposed to be the fulfilment of your relationship of God. Indeed, those to whom the threat would be most clearly present, the saints, are usually the least worried by it. Because as you begin to engage with God, that relationship slowly becomes the most important thing as such, whereas worries about your eternal status fade. (And looked at from the outside, reasonably so. The saints often see themselves as big sinners, but from the outside they are pretty saintly...) All big things need small beginnings, and fear about one's eternal fate is such a small beginning.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
How can true freedom only work within the framework of unbelief and ignorance? Jesus said: "You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free". Here it is truth - knowledge, wisdom and understanding - which produces freedom. So how can the hiddenness of God produce freedom?

Except Jesus didn't say just that. Here's the actual John 8:31-32: Jesus then said to the Jews who had believed in him, "If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free." Note the condition, which determines what comes next. Just hearing the truth about heaven and hell does not make you free. You have to continue in that word you have heard, you have to make it your own, and then you will actually know the truth and become free because of it. The power of truth arises from making the active choice to pursue it. On its own, truth is largely impotent to change your life. Plenty of atheists know the bible, and some know it well. But that is not enough.

What I've talked about is that in order to be free to get on this "enacted truth" - the way and the truth and the life, not just the truth - we cannot be faced with the truth in an unfiltered fashion. That would warp the way and the life as human frailty crumbles before the starkness of Divinity. In order to for us to actually walk the way to a life in truth, God must be hidden and discovered through our own (inspired) agency. Perhaps a swimming analogy is helpful. God does not throw us in the deep end as rank beginners, because most of us would just drown, and even those that survive would just do a dog paddle and not a beautiful swimming stroke. The threat of drowning if you cannot swim is there from the beginning, and it may very well be a big motivation - in particular with those persistent rumours of a coming flood. But still, you start in the shallow end, until you get some confidence in your strokes. And then you start swimming out in the deep, because you discover that swimming is not just a survival skill. It is a joyful activity.

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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear

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EtymologicalEvangelical
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quote:
Originally posted by IngoB
It is an undeniable fact that God is not currently present to us in an overwhelmingly compelling fashion.

That is true only if you define 'God' as "the conscious knowledge of God in the human mind". That, of course, is not a definition of God by any stretch of the imagination. God is certainly very present to us - otherwise nothing would exist or function at all - and it is also the case that this presence influences the way people live their lives, even those who may not have the benefit of a theological explanation for their experiences.

quote:
Indeed, God is not even present to most of us in a particularly accessible manner.
You can, of course, only speak for yourself.

quote:
This fact is fully acknowledged in the traditional Christian teaching that without God's grace one cannot come to full faith in God.
Depends what we mean by 'faith', and I certainly would not like to limit the operation of God's grace to that which is carefully prescribed by a religious institution (with its control agenda - i.e. its need to know who are those who are consciously "with us").

quote:
Finally, it is a in my opinion a well established fact that people can feel essentially free to choose or nor choose their beliefs in God (or other "higher things").
Of course, people can 'feel' free. It's whether they actually are free which matters.

quote:
You can then rage against such realities, since they do not fulfil some ill-conceived ideals of yours. But that's no skin off my nose, and I suspect God is not particular interested in your complaints either.
I didn't realise I was 'raging'! As for God not being interested in my complaints, well, I rather think that is down to God - and not you - to make that known to me. You can assume the right to speak on behalf of God if you like, but I generally don't have much respect for those who resort to that rather tired device (also known as the religious cop-out).

quote:
It is indeed near impossible for people to remain free in their choices if the eternal consequences of those choices are compelling present to them. And since love involves a choice, it is then near impossible to truly love God. One would have to love God in spite of being excessively forced to "love" God.
Well, that seems to confirm my point that 'freedom' to love God is dependent on ignorance and illusion, because those who think they are making a free choice to decline this love do not realise that actually a terrifying fate awaits them, and if they had known about it, they would probably have not made that choice.

Actually your premise that "love involves a choice" is false anyway. Zach82 made that point well. The idea that the love of God is not the absolute fundamental necessity of human life, but rather a kind of luxury or optional extra, that we have to 'choose', is really quite absurd. This is playing in to the hands of the atheists, who see God as an add-on - obviously an unnecessary add-on. They claim that everything can be explained adequately without reference to God, who is relegated to the status of a being in the same epistemic category as the invisible pink unicorn. This is all lies.

Without the love of God - which is the nature of God - nothing would exist and nothing would function at all. We can no more 'choose' the love of God, than we can choose our own bodies or our own consciousness. The only 'choice' we have is to reject it, in the same way that someone may reject the necessity of food and go on hunger strike.

I know this view is probably anathema to the RCC, because it implies that it is possible to know the love of God outside the control mechanisms of that religious institution. But I am not interested in the agenda of religion (which frankly is one of the most tedious things on the planet), but I am very interested in what actually makes logical sense.

quote:
In order to for us to actually walk the way to a life in truth, God must be hidden and discovered through our own (inspired) agency.
I am not denying that we can seek to know more of God. It is obvious that God, to some extent, will always be hidden, because we cannot fully know God for obvious reasons. But this is not a soteriological issue. As a child I grew up getting to know more about my parents, but their love was there for me right from the beginning as a 'given'. And as a necessity! I never chose to love my parents at this fundamental level. Later in life I have been presented with the choice of continuing to love them - and especially at times when the relationship has been strained - but I have never been in the position where I started in a state of 'non-love' towards my parents and then I had to 'seek them out' on my own initiative to prove the point that my love for them was genuine and freely chosen.

I am not a Calvinist, because I reject double predestination, but the alternative (falsely called Arminianism) in which the onus is on man, makes little sense in the light of the nature of God. In fact, there's a rather strong whiff of human hubris about it.

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You can argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome': but you neither can nor need argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome, but I'm not saying this is true'. CS Lewis

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Zach82
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quote:
Actually your premise that "love involves a choice" is false anyway. Zach82 made that point well... The only 'choice' we have is to reject it, in the same way that someone may reject the necessity of food and go on hunger strike.
Oh, don't connect me to such heretical ideas. Humankind is lost to sin. We do not love God, for no one who loves God could ever be as hateful and wicked as we humans tend to be. We have to come to love of God.

quote:
I know this view is probably anathema to the RCC, because it implies that it is possible to know the love of God outside the control mechanisms of that religious institution. But I am not interested in the agenda of religion (which frankly is one of the most tedious things on the planet), but I am very interested in what actually makes logical sense.
It's anathema to the Christian faith. We live not because we love God, but because God loves us. Second, we have no way of knowing Him without the Holy Scriptures, which means obeying the "agenda of religion" which you find tedious.

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Don't give up yet, no, don't ever quit/ There's always a chance of a critical hit. Ghost Mice

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Lietuvos Sv. Kazimieras
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Oh really, Zach, are you honestly saying that only those who read and accept the Christian scriptures can know God? What a sad, fundamentalist position for you to take, if so.

And, of course, there are plenty who make a cult of the scriptures, whom we can easily see are followers of Jesus - our Lord and God - in name only.

Rather, it is only that Christians know the nature of God through the scriptural presentation of His Incarnation in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. It is not, however, the case that only those who follow the institutional Christian religion may experience and know God in God's true nature.

[ 06. September 2013, 01:35: Message edited by: Lietuvos Sv. Kazimieras ]

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Zach82
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Oh yes, I do. "How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher?" Romans 10:14

You can't come to the conclusion "Jesus Christ has risen from the dead" by meditating under the Bodhi tree for 40 years.

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Don't give up yet, no, don't ever quit/ There's always a chance of a critical hit. Ghost Mice

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Zach82
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quote:
Rather, it is only that Christians know the nature of God through the scriptural presentation of His Incarnation in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. It is not, however, the case that only those who follow the institutional Christian religion may experience and know God in God's true nature.
No, not even Christians can really know God in God's true nature. I would never mean that by "know God."

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Don't give up yet, no, don't ever quit/ There's always a chance of a critical hit. Ghost Mice

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Lietuvos Sv. Kazimieras
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Through the revelation of Jesus, Christians are able to have intellectual knowldge at least about what God is like and indeed that God's essential nature is love. Mystical experience and intuitive insight helps further-- apparently a great deal further, actually -- and it is this latter that is potentially available to all humans, in addition to the essential truths revealed in their own spiritual traditions.
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Lietuvos Sv. Kazimieras
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quote:
Originally posted by Zach82:
Oh yes, I do. "How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher?" Romans 10:14

You can't come to the conclusion "Jesus Christ has risen from the dead" by meditating under the Bodhi tree for 40 years.

What a narrow view of the salvific work of God in Christ this conveys.
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Zach82
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quote:
Through the revelation of Jesus, Christians are able to have intellectual knowldge at least about what God is like and indeed that God's essential nature is love. Mystical experience and intuitive insight helps further-- apparently a great deal further, actually -- and it is this latter that is potentially available to all humans, in addition to the essential truths revealed in their own spiritual traditions.
Oh, I am guilty of deifying some part of my experience too. I've "changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen." Romans 1:25 Shouldn't we both repent of idolatry rather than dress it up in theological language?

quote:
What a narrow view of the salvific work of God in Christ this conveys.
Narrower than you imagine- impossible for any human, actually. The eye of a needle and all that.

[ 06. September 2013, 02:16: Message edited by: Zach82 ]

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Don't give up yet, no, don't ever quit/ There's always a chance of a critical hit. Ghost Mice

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Lietuvos Sv. Kazimieras
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Surely you are no longer aiming for the priesthood of the Episcopal Church; I should think you'd feel quite uncomfortable there. Or is it just that you are playing here at being a Protestant IngoB, or perchance a daronmedway clone.
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Lietuvos Sv. Kazimieras
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And as I have already said, it's all up to the grace of God. Faith is only the mean for apprehending the presence of that grace.
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Zach82
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quote:
Surely you are no longer aiming for the priesthood of the Episcopal Church; I should think you'd feel quite uncomfortable there. Or is it just that you are playing here at being a Protestant IngoB, or perchance a daronmedway clone.
I can't even imagine what you are on about-- it shouldn't be that much of a threat to you to say that God is known in Jesus Christ alone, through the preaching of the prophets of Israel and the apostles.

Perhaps you've gotten the idea that I think only professed Christians can be saved. I haven't said that, and I don't think it either. God can save whomever he likes. He's promised to save his Church, and if he chooses to gather into his Church those who do not profess the Christian faith, he is of course free to do so.

quote:
And as I have already said, it's all up to the grace of God.
That's great, now if only you would accept the conclusion "And therefore it's not up to having some mystical experience available to all humankind."

[ 06. September 2013, 02:43: Message edited by: Zach82 ]

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IngoB

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quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
That is true only if you define 'God' as "the conscious knowledge of God in the human mind". That, of course, is not a definition of God by any stretch of the imagination.

But since I was neither defining God nor discussing how God gives us being, I see little point in your reply. Human freedom is usually being considered in terms of the conscious workings of the human mind.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
Indeed, God is not even present to most of us in a particularly accessible manner.

You can, of course, only speak for yourself.
No, I'm indeed claiming to speak for most people here. The number of people who say that God's presence in their life is a clear and loud voice in their heads telling them what is right and wrong is rather small. As is the number of people who have apparitions of the Divine, or are otherwise filled with constant visions of Divine truth. Are you perhaps one of these people? Well, most of us are more pedestrian in their approach to God and find that our communication with God through the means of prayer, worship, scripture reading etc. is more like looking through a rather dark mirror. The direct experience of God in mystical union is a rare event, whereas the experience of spiritual dryness is all too common. You should take serious the ubiquitous complaint that "God is not talking back", which you will have read on SoF many times in many different ways. That is an experience most of us can relate to.

And even if we were all like you, constantly guided Divine visions and filled to the brim with God's voice explaining every detail, the problem would still be that these graces are all happening in your head. God is not dictating the truth to you in a manner that I can witness easily. It's not like He's standing there in front of both of us, talking to both of us, allowing us to share this inspiration directly. No, in order to access this direct line that you have to God, I first need to believe that you are a modern day prophet. And I find that hard to believe. So while the angels may consult you as a font of Divine wisdom, I still struggle listening to God's wisdom even as it is dripping from your mouth.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
This fact is fully acknowledged in the traditional Christian teaching that without God's grace one cannot come to full faith in God.

Depends what we mean by 'faith', and I certainly would not like to limit the operation of God's grace to that which is carefully prescribed by a religious institution (with its control agenda - i.e. its need to know who are those who are consciously "with us").
Interesting. Let's hear that clearly, please. You do believe that one come to some kind of faith in God without the help of God's grace? Please do explain what you mean by "faith" there. And I certainly do not believe that the operation of God's grace is limited to say the RCC either. But I do believe that orthodox teaching about the impossibility of faith without grace, as maintained among others by the RCC, is correct.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Of course, people can 'feel' free. It's whether they actually are free which matters.

It seems to me that a human of sound and clear mind who feels free to make a decision is free to make a decision. We assume that there is a real human capacity there and we cannot ultimately dismiss the opinion of the one exercising it. If someone puts a gun to my head, to use your earlier example, then I do not feel free to make my decision. Perhaps we can also make a case that if I am addicted to heroin, then my choice to shoot some more is not truly free even if my corrupted mind thinks so. But in general if I say that I felt free in deciding this or that, then this has to stand as true, for neither you nor indeed I can probe the subconscious depths of my mind to calculate some kind of objective "freedom score" for my decision.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
I didn't realise I was 'raging'!

I was giving you the benefit of doubt. If you meant to call God deceitful, a sadistic trickster, etc. in cold blood, then that is quite worrisome spiritually. And if you have been using this merely to gain the upper hand in a debate by emotional appeal, then that was piss-poor rhetoric. Whatever may be the case there, this is best avoided.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Well, that seems to confirm my point that 'freedom' to love God is dependent on ignorance and illusion, because those who think they are making a free choice to decline this love do not realise that actually a terrifying fate awaits them, and if they had known about it, they would probably have not made that choice.

First, you continue to misrepresent the situation, it is not the case that people simply "do not know". But you just do not get the the key difficulty, do you? Neither complete ignorance nor complete knowledge would allow humans to operate in freedom here. If God wants to be freely chosen, freely loved, then He can neither be utterly absent from the conscious mind nor be the only conceivable choice. Of the following three, which one is a choice?
  1. " "
  2. "A or B?"
  3. "A."
God needs to find the middle path there, or there is no freedom of choice. It is not faith in God if I feel the heat of hell fire on my face and run the other way. It is however a beginning of faith in God if in the absence of any change to room temperature I believe that I may burn in hell for my sins and should turn away from them.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
The idea that the love of God is not the absolute fundamental necessity of human life, but rather a kind of luxury or optional extra, that we have to 'choose', is really quite absurd.

Our loving of God may be the fundamental moral imperative, but it sure as hell is not a fundamental necessity of human life. Richard Dawkins conspicuously fails to drop dead due to his atheism. Indeed, there would be little for us to discuss here if religion was as uncontroversial as breathing, drinking, or eating.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
This is playing in to the hands of the atheists, who see God as an add-on - obviously an unnecessary add-on. They claim that everything can be explained adequately without reference to God, who is relegated to the status of a being in the same epistemic category as the invisible pink unicorn. This is all lies.

No, it is precisely not "all lies". Lies do not survive for long, half-truths do. Atheists are not simply insane, they do not ignore undeniable realities that are easily accessible to all. Their stance is quite defensible, given the way the world is. I think one can demonstrate that atheism is unreasonable, but some serious intellectual work is required for that. Give people, including atheists, agnostics, apathetics and indeed heretics, some credit. This is not "2+2=4" or "water is wet" territory.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Without the love of God - which is the nature of God - nothing would exist and nothing would function at all.

"Love of God" can mean the love we have for God, which is Christ's First Great Commandment, and which is what we have been discussing. Or it can be the love that God has (for us). We have not been discussing the latter, and these two are not identical in meaning. Obviously God's love is necessary for all existence, including ours. But not all that God loves into existence loves Him back. And that's what we have been discussing here.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
We can no more 'choose' the love of God, than we can choose our own bodies or our own consciousness. The only 'choice' we have is to reject it, in the same way that someone may reject the necessity of food and go on hunger strike.

Nobody has claimed here that we have a choice about the love that God has for us. God's love is indeed just what it is. What we have been discussing is the part where some of us reject this love, i.e., do not love God back. In terms of your analogy, God does give us the freedom to go on a hunger strike. He does not force-feed us, we are not getting food rammed down our throats. This has the terrifying consequence that we can starve.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Later in life I have been presented with the choice of continuing to love them - and especially at times when the relationship has been strained - but I have never been in the position where I started in a state of 'non-love' towards my parents

And therefore it follows that the analogy does not hold. Or at least it does not hold necessarily. There may be some who gain their love of God smoothly in their upbringing, and who never were in a state of conscious 'non-love' of God. Maybe in the heydays of Christendom there were many like that. But that is not always the case now, and it clearly was not the case in the beginning of Christianity. Many people, probably now most people in the West, start in a position of 'non-love' towards God. I certainly did not love God in the first thirty years of my life. He barely registered, He had about the status that Morris dancing has for me now: a cultural curiosity that I had vaguely heard about, which apparently some people were into.

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IngoB

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quote:
Originally posted by Lietuvos Sv. Kazimieras:
Or is it just that you are playing here at being a Protestant IngoB, or perchance a daronmedway clone.

As it happens, I'm way more positive about mystical experience and indeed sitting under a Bodhi tree than Zach82 appears to be. But do carry on, I wouldn't want to disturb your small-minded prejudices about me any further...

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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear

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Zach82
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He's connecting me to you because of the exclusive claims I make for the Christian Church, not my devaluation of mystical experience back to the merely human realm.

[ 06. September 2013, 03:57: Message edited by: Zach82 ]

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EtymologicalEvangelical
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quote:
Originally posted by Zach82
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical
Actually your premise that "love involves a choice" is false anyway. Zach82 made that point well... The only 'choice' we have is to reject it, in the same way that someone may reject the necessity of food and go on hunger strike.

Oh, don't connect me to such heretical ideas. Humankind is lost to sin. We do not love God, for no one who loves God could ever be as hateful and wicked as we humans tend to be. We have to come to love of God.
My mistake was to just put the link to your post rather than quote the relevant part from that post. I apologise for that. However you did write the following:

quote:
You know, I am not sure that love demands a free choice. I don't think I ever freely chose to love my mother, and I can't say that I am freely choosing to continue loving her. I love her because she's my mom, and she's nice and makes S.O.S. I love her because of things completely out of my control. It's the same with my wife. I didn't make her beautiful or gentle, or able to withstand my sarcasm or constant feelings of dread, but those things compel me to love her.
I agree that you then went on to say...

quote:
On the other hand, I doesn't seem to me that one cannot have free choice just because the wrong choice comes with threat of punishment. In fact, I would say refusing to grant people the consequences of the choices they make is to deprive them of agency.
I have actually always affirmed that we have some kind of rudimentary choice to reject the love of God, with the terrifying consequences that that entails, hence my reference to "weak coercion". What I dispute is the idea that we have to seek out and positively choose the love of the hidden God. This is manifestly wrong, because it is God who takes the initiative by His grace; it is He who draws us to Himself; it is He who elects us. I cannot imagine that this constitutes heresy, and I could fire all the relevant verses at you, but I suspect you know them all anyway.

We don't have a 'relationship' with God in the sense that we have when we enter into a romance with another human being. Romantic love may be deeply wonderful and horribly hurtful when it fails, but it is still nevertheless optional in the greater scheme of things. God's love can never be 'optional'. It's the most compulsory thing imaginable, because God is the basis for the whole of reality, and He does not have love, but actually is love.

It may be true that, in some way, mankind is 'lost' in sin, but the whole point of God's love and grace is that He meets us in our lostness. Where we probably part company is the method by which God manifests His love to people. You think it's dependent on certain biblical head knowledge; whereas I would not like to limit the eternal God to what I regard as a form of gnosticism (which, as I am sure you know, was one of the major heresies afflicting the Early Church).

In the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the working and manifestation of the Samaritan's love was not dependent on the profession - or even consciousness! - of the man who had been beaten up by bandits. Given that this parable is Jesus' answer to a question about "loving one's neighbour", and given that all love comes from God, and love for one's neighbour is a manifestation of the love of God, then it is not stretching the parable to reason that the actions of the Samaritan reveal something of the working of the love of God. This love was not at all dependent on anything the wounded man did or thought about. The Samaritan took the initiative, and I suppose later on, the wounded man could decide to be completely ungrateful for the love shown to him and despise the one who helped him.

quote:
Second, we have no way of knowing Him without the Holy Scriptures, which means obeying the "agenda of religion" which you find tedious.
No, the ways of God are not at all tedious - quite the opposite. But religion - which seeks to control those ways through the imposition of human conditions, and which seems to take a perverse delight in excluding people who fail to tick all the right boxes - is certainly utterly tedious.

As for knowledge: I would not like to dictate to God as to how he should reveal Himself to those whom He loves, especially considering that billions of precious people live outside of the Christian faith through no fault of their own. If anyone thinks that that is just 'tough', then fine. Don't expect any respect from me, and I don't believe such a person would garner any respect from the God of absolute and everlasting love (who, by the way, prayed in deep agony on the cross: "Forgive them Father, for they do not know what they are doing".

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You can argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome': but you neither can nor need argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome, but I'm not saying this is true'. CS Lewis

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Custard
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quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
The problem I have with this is that you cannot command 'love' and genuine heartfelt commitment. You can command fear and obedience, but absolute committed love?

You have two options.

1) You are wrong and what is being commanded is love in the sense of covenant loyalty rather than in the sense of feeling.
2) You are right and the purpose of the command is not to be obeyed but rather (for example) to demonstrate our inability to obey and therefore our need of transformation.

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IngoB

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quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
What I dispute is the idea that we have to seek out and positively choose the love of the hidden God. This is manifestly wrong, because it is God who takes the initiative by His grace; it is He who draws us to Himself; it is He who elects us. I cannot imagine that this constitutes heresy, and I could fire all the relevant verses at you, but I suspect you know them all anyway.

What you say is orthodox enough, but you fail to understand the relevant levels of description here. While it is sound doctrine to claim that all good we do arises from God, and all bad we do is found in the rejection of God, this does not abolish the usual descriptions of human choice in religious matters. It is simply not the case that we are mere puppets who get to flip a binary "yes-no" switch on behavioural programming streamed Matrix-like into our brains by God. That's not how that works, as you should know from your own inner experience. Rather, it is your innate human capability of discernment plus inspiration by God to consider the truths of (Christian) faith that are the good of God's grace, and it is your potential failure to make the right choice which is the rejection of this good. You are an instrument of God's grace, but it is precisely part of the good that is human to be a self-directed, a free instrument of this grace. The grace of God is realised or rejected in human freedom, it is not imposed over and against human freedom. We are not "grace robots". Again, please refer back to Adam and Eve in Genesis. It is in its own way a very precise account of how human freedom and God's grace hang together.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
We don't have a 'relationship' with God in the sense that we have when we enter into a romance with another human being. Romantic love may be deeply wonderful and horribly hurtful when it fails, but it is still nevertheless optional in the greater scheme of things. God's love can never be 'optional'. It's the most compulsory thing imaginable, because God is the basis for the whole of reality, and He does not have love, but actually is love.

Again you are equivocating painfully hard on "God's love". There is a difference between God loving us into being, and us loving God back. The former is fundamental to our existence, a sine qua non for anything we do at all. The latter is something we can do or fail to do, as is rather obviously demonstrated by Jewish scripture and Christ Himself by making it the fundamental Commandment for us. There is no need whatsoever to command what is the case anyway. This is commanded most stringently precisely because we are very good at not doing it. It is simply and strictly false to claim that humans necessarily love God. The evidence that they often do not is everywhere, and that is the reason for making it a moral imperative. And while I would agree that our relationship with God is not "romantic", even if it indeed is loving, there are clear parallels to romantic love in this relationship that justify the - eminently scriptural - analogy. That is so because of us humans, not because of God. Nevertheless, the Song of Songs for example is not included in the bible because some ancient marketing department decided that scripture needed to be sexed up to sell. The pursuit of romantic love does reflect much of the human interaction with God, on a poetic not literal level.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Given that this parable is Jesus' answer to a question about "loving one's neighbour", and given that all love comes from God, and love for one's neighbour is a manifestation of the love of God, then it is not stretching the parable to reason that the actions of the Samaritan reveal something of the working of the love of God. This love was not at all dependent on anything the wounded man did or thought about. The Samaritan took the initiative, and I suppose later on, the wounded man could decide to be completely ungrateful for the love shown to him and despise the one who helped him.

It is however too simplistic to only identify with the wounded man there. After all, Christ is telling this parable to motivate His listeners to imitate the Samaritan. As far as the actual "loving one's neighbour" goes, this parable contrasts the concerns with ritual purity with the concerns for basic needs of human beings, and is a lesson in how to imitate Christ (the Samaritan) properly. This parable is both a promise that Christ will come to tend to us in our need as we lie incapacitated in our sins, and a call to action for us to tend to others in their real needs as Christ-ians, Christ imitators. You cannot shorten it to only the former, and derive a stance of passivity from it.

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quote:
Originally posted by Jade Constable:
'With' is the important word, I think. It's telling us HOW to love God, rather than telling us to love God.

I like this; it's how I read it.
I'm sorry that no one has picked up on this comment directly.

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EtymologicalEvangelical
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quote:
Originally posted by IngoB
No, I'm indeed claiming to speak for most people here. The number of people who say that God's presence in their life is a clear and loud voice in their heads telling them what is right and wrong is rather small. As is the number of people who have apparitions of the Divine, or are otherwise filled with constant visions of Divine truth. Are you perhaps one of these people? Well, most of us are more pedestrian in their approach to God and find that our communication with God through the means of prayer, worship, scripture reading etc. is more like looking through a rather dark mirror. The direct experience of God in mystical union is a rare event, whereas the experience of spiritual dryness is all too common. You should take serious the ubiquitous complaint that "God is not talking back", which you will have read on SoF many times in many different ways. That is an experience most of us can relate to.

And even if we were all like you, constantly guided Divine visions and filled to the brim with God's voice explaining every detail, the problem would still be that these graces are all happening in your head. God is not dictating the truth to you in a manner that I can witness easily. It's not like He's standing there in front of both of us, talking to both of us, allowing us to share this inspiration directly. No, in order to access this direct line that you have to God, I first need to believe that you are a modern day prophet. And I find that hard to believe. So while the angels may consult you as a font of Divine wisdom, I still struggle listening to God's wisdom even as it is dripping from your mouth.

How fascinating. Leaving aside the language of caricature and sarcasm (of which I, admittedly, am also frequently guilty), it's interesting how you define the presence of God. Who ever said that God's presence must be "a clear and loud voice in their heads telling them what is right and wrong"? Or that it must involve "apparitions of the Divine" or "constant visions of Divine truth"? Or "constantly guided Divine visions" and being "filled to the brim with God's voice explaining every detail" or "God dictating the truth"?

There seem to be certain assumptions here about the way God manifests Himself, and the emphasis seems to be on the cerebral, which aids personal guidance obviating the need for the believer to think for himself, and also mystical visions. Neither of these define the presence of God or the work of the Holy Spirit in the believer's life. In fact, it rather smacks of spiritualism, rather than authentic Christian spirituality. The Holy Spirit renews the mind of the believer; He gives him peace, joy, confidence and an awareness of His presence of love and holiness. Nothing about "explaining every detail" or voices in the head, and nothing about special ecstatic and mystical visions.

quote:
If you meant to call God deceitful, a sadistic trickster, etc. in cold blood, then that is quite worrisome spiritually. And if you have been using this merely to gain the upper hand in a debate by emotional appeal, then that was piss-poor rhetoric.
My comment about 'God' being deceitful and a sadistic trickster is neither an emotional appeal or the manifestation of spiritual degeneracy. I say this, because I was describing a certain mistaken view of God - a false God, masquerading as the true God. Of course, if I truly believe that God is deceitful and a trickster, then that would indeed be a serious act of rebellion. But it is precisely because I know that God is not like this, that I reject a view of God, whose implications drive me to that conclusion!

It is because God is just and utterly righteous and upright in all His ways, that He does not play tricks on people, by hiding the terrifying consequences of a supposedly free choice. If people are to make a genuinely free choice, then they need to understand the consequences of their decision. If they are given the impression that it is OK to experiment with different world views and religious practices, when in reality it is not OK, then their 'free' choice is based on a delusion. If God facilitates the freedom of the choice by remaining hidden, and by keeping the execution of His judgment hidden, then He is granting the feeling of freedom on the basis of a wilful illusion. That doesn't look to me like the actions of a God of truth, integrity and righteousness.

quote:
First, you continue to misrepresent the situation, it is not the case that people simply "do not know". But you just do not get the the key difficulty, do you? Neither complete ignorance nor complete knowledge would allow humans to operate in freedom here. If God wants to be freely chosen, freely loved, then He can neither be utterly absent from the conscious mind nor be the only conceivable choice. Of the following three, which one is a choice?

" "

"A or B?"

"A."

God needs to find the middle path there, or there is no freedom of choice. It is not faith in God if I feel the heat of hell fire on my face and run the other way. It is however a beginning of faith in God if in the absence of any change to room temperature I believe that I may burn in hell for my sins and should turn away from them.

Well, you have just affirmed that some measure of ignorance is a necessary condition for the operation of freedom. Does that mean that the more knowledgeable we become, the less free we become? This seems nonsensical to me. If a particular option necessarily leads to a horrific consequence, then that is an objective reality, and playing around with the subjective side of it (namely, our levels of knowledge of it) does not change the facts of the case. If an authority figure wants me to obey him, he can persuade me to do so by explaining clearly that if I do not obey him, I will suffer appalling consequences. I still have a kind of rudimentary freedom to disobey him, but I am nevertheless subject to some measure of coercion (what I term "weak coercion"). If this authority desires that I choose to obey him freely - in other words, I really really want to, as opposed to having to - then he must remove that element of coercion. But the only way he can do that is either to remove the destructive consequences of not obeying him, or to seem to remove them. Either they are removed objectively and subjectively or subjectively only. If the former, then the authority figure has rejected his own moral position, and if the latter, then he is creating an illusion by allowing a feeling of freedom to be fabricated through the deliberate withholding of vital information. But this feeling of freedom is a delusion, because it gives the impression that I am not being coerced into obeying him, which implies that there are no serious consequences to that course of action, whereas in fact, there are very serious consequences to rebellion. Neither of these are worthy of the God of all righteousness.

So how do we resolve this problem? The answer is really very simple. God is not expecting to be loved and obeyed as a result of a completely free choice. The contradiction has been created by the false premise. God, as the absolute authority requires that we love and obey Him, whether we feel we want to or not. If this is not the case, then why did Jesus warn people about hell? Isn't this warning a form of coercion?

The way I see it is this: God has no illusions about man. He knows that no one can ever be committed enough and "sold out" enough to please Him and convince Him of the genuineness of their love and spirituality. Enough of all this "Super Saint" nonsense! There are no "Super Saints". There never has been a single human being who can claim to genuinely love God out of their own naked free will. No wonder Jesus said "Why do you call me good? There is no one good but God." It is sheer hubris on the part of man to imagine that anyone can claim to be "sold out for God" and utterly and genuinely committed to Him on the basis of their own free choice. Everything we have is due to the grace of God. Even the desire to love Him comes from Him.

I remember a Pentecostal fellowship I was involved with for a number of years, and the leader often used to play mind games with us concerning the genuineness of our commitment to Christ. He seemed obsessed with trying to prove something to God, and often portrayed God as someone who demanded that we prove ourselves to Him. Needless to say, we always failed (the leader didn't , of course!). I have come to realise what a complete delusion this is. If we could prove anything to God, there would be no need for grace.

Of course, we respond to God's grace, and I affirm that we do have the capacity to reject it (therefore I do not subscribe to supralapsarian or infralapsarian predestination), but this response is rather different from the idea that we freely seek out and choose God. We may respond to God out of a certain fear (a fear that should eventually give way to delight, as we taste more of the goodness of God); we may grudgingly follow Christ; we may go through the motions. That's fine. God is not a petulant lover, but the ultimate authority, who understands how to rule and how, if necessary, to command obedience.

Our relationship with God is a parental one. I did not choose my human parents, and they expect me to love and respect them, as indeed I do - albeit imperfectly. They do not expect me to have a romantic relationship with them, in which I have to prove the genuineness of my love for them. It's the same with God. As I say, He has no illusions about the human heart. Therefore we do not need to prove ourselves to Him. We are not courting Him with a view to marriage, in which we need to demonstrate that we will be a good spouse, and that He really can trust us (this human model of marriage is not to be confused with the marital relationship between Christ and His bride, which is based firmly on grace). In our natural state God cannot trust us. He knows that, and if we have any spiritual insight at all, we should know that as well. Hence grace.

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You can argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome': but you neither can nor need argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome, but I'm not saying this is true'. CS Lewis

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mousethief

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quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
The Holy Spirit renews the mind of the believer; He gives him peace, joy, confidence and an awareness of His presence of love and holiness.

I've been a Christian for 33 years and have never had "an awareness of His presence," whatever exactly that means. I would submit that if you have such an awareness, you are projecting it onto all Christians without warrant.

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IngoB

Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700

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quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
There seem to be certain assumptions here about the way God manifests Himself, and the emphasis seems to be on the cerebral, which aids personal guidance obviating the need for the believer to think for himself, and also mystical visions.

Actually, I was simply being sarcastic about God being particularly accessible to you. Since that was what we were talking about...

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
It is because God is just and utterly righteous and upright in all His ways, that He does not play tricks on people, by hiding the terrifying consequences of a supposedly free choice.

I don't know how to have a conversation with you while you adamantly deny the most plain realities. The reality of heaven and hell is not present to the majority of people in a compelling and commanding manner. That's a simple and brute fact of life. Could God make this reality present to most, indeed all, people in a compelling and commanding manner? Certainly, but He doesn't. Thus either there is no heaven and hell, or God is in your estimation some horrible trickster. Either way, you are wrong.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
If people are to make a genuinely free choice, then they need to understand the consequences of their decision.

It appears that you think that freedom consists in having one option that is 100% positive, and another that is 100% negative, so that one will without fail choose the positive one. But the freedom in question here is not freedom from all possibility of error. One can be free and wrong.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
If God facilitates the freedom of the choice by remaining hidden, and by keeping the execution of His judgment hidden, then He is granting the feeling of freedom on the basis of a wilful illusion. That doesn't look to me like the actions of a God of truth, integrity and righteousness.

Well, then you will just have to adjust the way you look at things. Because it is simply undeniable that God remains fairly hidden, and that the execution of His judgement is near impenetrably hidden from us behind death. God does in fact require of you to make decisions in absence of perfect information, He forces you to have faith and operate on it, if you wish to be saved.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Well, you have just affirmed that some measure of ignorance is a necessary condition for the operation of freedom. Does that mean that the more knowledgeable we become, the less free we become? This seems nonsensical to me.

Rather, there is only so much truth you can handle in a particular mind state. As you become more God-like (or indeed anti-God-like), you can deal with less filter. Again, this is not rocket science. If God faced you right here and now with the full reality of heaven and hell, it would be obvious what you would choose. But that's just your fears and desires short-circuiting your decision making. That "choice" reveals next to nothing about whether you want to draw near to God or remove yourself from him. But heaven and hell is about that, not about your visceral instincts for survival. Now imagine that you have perfect love, or indeed perfect hate, of God. Then revealing the full reality of heaven and hell does nothing to your state of mind, because basically you already have arrived in heaven or hell, respectively. Human beings in this world are in some state between the extremes of purely survival instinct and purely clear decision. So a limited revelation allows them to make a decision for or against God with their head and heart, rather than gut.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
God is not expecting to be loved and obeyed as a result of a completely free choice. The contradiction has been created by the false premise. God, as the absolute authority requires that we love and obey Him, whether we feel we want to or not. If this is not the case, then why did Jesus warn people about hell? Isn't this warning a form of coercion?

Of course God requires loving obedience from us, nobody has doubted that. The question is however whether you are lovingly obeying God if you do His will merely to escape hell fire. And the answer is that no, you are not lovingly obeying God there much, it's more fearful obedience to hell fire then. God does not really want that sort of obedience, because it is not really about Him at all. And people cannot really develop the right kind of loving obedience if they are confronted from the start with the full reality of heaven and hell. Then fear and desire will just overrule all.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
It is sheer hubris on the part of man to imagine that anyone can claim to be "sold out for God" and utterly and genuinely committed to Him on the basis of their own free choice. Everything we have is due to the grace of God. Even the desire to love Him comes from Him.

I appreciate that you attempt to grab the orthodox high ground, too few people care about that these days. Still, the simple fact of the matter is that nothing in what I say contradicts the idea that all good is due to the grace of God. To repeat, we are not grace-bots. The grace of God operates in humans through their freedom, not against it.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
I remember a Pentecostal fellowship I was involved with for a number of years, and the leader often used to play mind games with us concerning the genuineness of our commitment to Christ.

This has nothing to do with what we have been discussing.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Of course, we respond to God's grace ... but this response is rather different from the idea that we freely seek out and choose God.

Rather, that is the perfect response to God's grace.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Our relationship with God is a parental one. I did not choose my human parents, and they expect me to love and respect them, as indeed I do - albeit imperfectly.

To love and respect one's parents out of a sense of duty is a beginning, it is not the end, much less perfection. Indeed, perfect love and respect for one's parents is free of all considerations of duty, just as perfect love and worship of God is free of all aspects of fear. This is the case in spite of the fact that the ties of blood and upbringing and the reality of heaven and hell, respectively, remain entirely untouched. Rather, perfect love fulfills all obligations to one's parents and avoids all sins, respectively. Perfect love is in fact the only way of ever obeying the law, any good law, in letter and spirit. Because it does spontaneously what is demanded.

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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear

Posts: 12010 | From: Gone fishing | Registered: Oct 2004  |  IP: Logged
EtymologicalEvangelical
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quote:
Originally posted by IngoB
I don't know how to have a conversation with you while you adamantly deny the most plain realities. The reality of heaven and hell is not present to the majority of people in a compelling and commanding manner. That's a simple and brute fact of life. Could God make this reality present to most, indeed all, people in a compelling and commanding manner? Certainly, but He doesn't. Thus either there is no heaven and hell, or God is in your estimation some horrible trickster. Either way, you are wrong.

I am only wrong if I accept your assumptions.

Let me give the example of an election. So we have a country in which the president is being elected, and we imagine two scenarios: 1) The ruling party declares that anyone who supports its opponents will be tortured to death, and given the track record of this party, the electorate believes that this threat will certainly be carried out. Clearly such an election could not be 'free' by any stretch of the imagination. 2) The ruling party certainly does torture its opponents in the most hideous way, but it decides to keep this fact well hidden from the electorate, in order to give the impression that the election is truly free and democratic, and because the president wants to convince himself that the people genuinely love him "from their hearts". So he dupes the electorate into thinking that he is a really nice guy, who will fully respect and honour the decisions of the people. In reality, of course, he will do no such thing, because he will never concede defeat and relinquish power to his opponent and he will certainly torture those who voted against him.

Now it is clear that there is no true objective freedom in either of these scenarios. The second scenario creates an illusion of freedom, and if this is really how God works, then he is a deceiver. This is simply a moral fact, not a petulant expression of personal rebellion.

The scenario which would truly honour the freedom of the electorate would be this: the ruling party ensures that the election is not rigged in any way, either by threats or corruption, and once it is over the verdict is totally respected by all sides. If the ruling party is reelected, it will not pursue any vindictive action against those who supported its opponents. Furthermore, this party would respect the decision of the electorate if the challenger won, and the incumbent would have to step down gracefully.

Now all this is nonsense when referring to God. God is an absolute ruler. He is the most benevolent, fair-minded, just and compassionate of 'dictators', but his rule is ultimately unchallengeable. His authority over man is not chosen, but simply has to be accepted. If it is not accepted, then dire consequences ensue for the rebel. Although technically man has the capacity to reject the authority of God, one could hardly call this a 'free' decision devoid of any element of coercion. The idea that this absolute ruler plays mind games with man (a bit like the pentecostal leader of the fellowship I mentioned in my previous post - hence the relevance of that comment, which you didn't seem to understand), by trying to get man to "love him freely and genuinely" while never being in a position to offer man objectively authentic freedom, is absurd and unworthy of a God of righteousness.

Now I have never denied that God keeps His distance from people, in order to give us space to function on the human level. I agree that God does give us freedom. But what I emphatically do not accept is that God does not respect human choices that are made in good faith. For example, someone finds himself in a situation in which he believes that, say, Islam is the truth about God and spiritual matters. In good faith he pursues this belief, and is convinced that he is rightly serving God. He is acting in freedom (although it may be true that his freedom is often undermined by the attitudes and actions of many of his co-religionists). He may have a certain respect for the one whom he calls the prophet Jesus. God observes this, and does not act to undermine the freedom of this man. But once this poor soul dies, that very same God, who so respected his freedom, casts him into the fires of everlasting hell, because he failed to believe in Jesus Christ in the doctrinally correct way. In other words, in the final analysis, God emphatically did not respect this man's freedom! And that man could legitimately complain that "if I had known that this was to be my fate, then I would not have made the choices that I did. I genuinely believed that your ways were the ways of Islam. Why did you encourage me in my delusion?" It would be really perverse for God (this false God, by the way) to reply: "But I didn't show you that, because I wanted to respect your freedom, and not coerce you into believing in me." I am sure that man would far rather have been coerced, quite frankly! In fact he could quite understandably retort: "If you didn't want to coerce me into believing in you, then why have you now coerced me into the fires of hell!"

The reality is that God judges people on the basis of where they are at, and in accordance with the light He has given them (which rather fits with John 3:19-21, which explains that God's condemnation is clearly based on the rejection of light having been given). This is what facilitates true freedom, not the absurd practice of spiritual "hide and seek" that you seem to be advocating.

But let's go back to my example of the Muslim. Now let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that, after he is cast into hell, his complaint is heard by God and accepted. Let's suppose that God agrees that there is something deeply inconsistent about not wishing to coercively influence his choices in life, while forcing him to go to hell. So God says to him: "OK, I will release you from the fires of hell, but salvation is according to the gospel of Jesus Christ, not according to the message of Islam. Take it or leave it." The Muslim would be required to accept that, and would not be permitted to try to fashion his own salvation according to his own belief system. I certainly believe that Jesus Christ is the only saviour ("Jesus Christ" understood objectively not subjectively, in the same way that the Samaritan in the parable saved someone objectively not subjectively). But again, while the Muslim may still have the choice to remain in the torture of hell, there is still an element of coercion, because the consequence of choosing Jesus is so positive and the alternative so negative.

Now I think it's all rather more complicated than many fundamentalist / evangelical (and yes, Catholic) Christians make out. Jesus Christ is the only saviour, but Jesus Christ is not equivalent to the Christian religion. Jesus is the Head of the Church, but the Church is not Jesus, but the Body of Christ called to be a witness to Him - in other words, called to serve, not to condemn. So it is possible that a Muslim, although in error doctrinally, may find that Jesus Christ is the fulfilment of all the longings that his religion induced in him. In this sense, he may find that heaven is not "anti-Islamic" but merely corrective of certain errors in Islam (and the fulfilling experience of the love, compassion and humility of God will so overwhelm the soul, that the doctrinal errors of this life will probably not even be mentioned or noticed. Serious moral issues will be dealt with, of course. I can't imagine, in the final analysis, that those who are found to be wrong about, say, the filioque clause or the perpetual virginity of Mary, will be given the mother of all bollockings! In fact, even apparently 'serious' points of Christology will be overlooked, because Jesus Himself overlooked them - see Matthew 16:13-20, in which Jesus wanted to keep His true identity secret from the very multitudes whom he healed, blessed and taught, even though they only believed Him to be a prophet!). Certainly (and I will stick my neck out on this one) heaven is not "Christian" in the cultural sense.

Therefore God does give people freedom, but it is a freedom what He will certainly truly and genuinely respect, and thus he will not punish integrity. There is no horrific shock waiting for the person who has acted in good faith. Those who are ultimately condemned are not the ignorant (for whom Jesus prayed on the cross), but those who wilfully reject and resist the convicting work of the Holy Spirit.

So while it is true that God is, in a sense, 'hidden', His self-concealment only facilitates the operation of human integrity, which He will then ultimately respect and honour. If this position makes me 'non-orthodox' or a 'non-exclusive' Christian, then so be it. I am not at all interested in orthodoxy (which through the ages has been spitefully enforced by rack, sword and fire - I wonder why!), but I am very interested in what is actually true. That is all that matters.

--------------------
You can argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome': but you neither can nor need argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome, but I'm not saying this is true'. CS Lewis

Posts: 3625 | From: South Coast of England | Registered: Sep 2009  |  IP: Logged
IngoB

Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700

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quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
I am only wrong if I accept your assumptions.

The only assumptions I've made there is that heaven and hell exist, and that God is omnipotent. If you wish to deny these, then you could avoid being wrong (logically speaking - since the assumptions are true, you are wrong, of course).

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Let me give the example of an election. So we have a country in which the president is being elected, and we imagine two scenarios: 1) The ruling party declares that anyone who supports its opponents will be tortured to death, and given the track record of this party, the electorate believes that this threat will certainly be carried out. Clearly such an election could not be 'free' by any stretch of the imagination. 2) The ruling party certainly does torture its opponents in the most hideous way, but it decides to keep this fact well hidden from the electorate, in order to give the impression that the election is truly free and democratic, and because the president wants to convince himself that the people genuinely love him "from their hearts". So he dupes the electorate into thinking that he is a really nice guy, who will fully respect and honour the decisions of the people. In reality, of course, he will do no such thing, because he will never concede defeat and relinquish power to his opponent and he will certainly torture those who voted against him.

The key problem here is that in your analogy heaven and hell become something outrageously unjust, namely the torture of political opponents. Whether heaven and hell are "just" has been endlessly debated on SoF, and I do not intend to get into that here. I simply take them as a given for the sake of argument here. But without the moral outrage borrowed from the mere existence of heaven and hell, your analogy starts to crumble. Now, the key problem is actually what heaven and hell are for. And they are precisely not just for some formal pledge of allegiance to God and the devil, respectively. Heaven is for those who love God, at least a little bit. Hell is for those who hate God, bitterly enough. You cannot make a "contract" for membership in either place, you cannot literally sign away your soul to the devil (as in some old stories). So now God has the ultimate millionaire's problem ("does she love me, or does she love my money?"). Well, since God can read your heart and mind perfectly, it is actually you who has the ultimate millionaire's problem. Do you truly love God? Or are you merely speculating on eternal gain? However, if you could really see hell, then how can you love God? I don't mean how can you love a God who allows a hell to exist. Remember, I'm setting aside that morality issues. I mean how can your mind have the space to come to a love of God, if it is flooded with the sensory threat of hell fire? Your survival instincts will kick in, you will react animal-like. But that is self-defeating. A decision for God that has the cognitive status of a rabbit running from a wildfire is not actually what heaven and hell are about. You need some room to work things out. Not in the absence of facts (even though you keep claiming this, it is simply not true that we are ignorant about heaven and hell), but with sufficient distance to allow you to choose as a real human being. This world is that room. Here you can work out whether you love God or not. Perhaps work it out in fear and trembling, but then so because you have drawn closer to the truth, not because it has been dumped on you to totally overwhelm you.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Although technically man has the capacity to reject the authority of God, one could hardly call this a 'free' decision devoid of any element of coercion. The idea that this absolute ruler plays mind games with man (a bit like the pentecostal leader of the fellowship I mentioned in my previous post - hence the relevance of that comment, which you didn't seem to understand), by trying to get man to "love him freely and genuinely" while never being in a position to offer man objectively authentic freedom, is absurd and unworthy of a God of righteousness.

You can evaluate the inescapable truth however you like, you can still not escape from it. It is just plain fact that neither God nor heaven and hell are obvious to man in this world. Matters Divine are hidden, removing direct constraints on man's decisions, including on those that will determine his eternal fate. All I do here is to provide good, and fairly obvious, reasons why God has arranged matters in this way for this world. You have not provided an alternative explanation, so there really is nothing to discuss here.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Now I have never denied that God keeps His distance from people, in order to give us space to function on the human level. I agree that God does give us freedom.

Oh. Good. I accept your full retraction of the various criticisms you have raised against this claim, which I have maintained from the outset.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
But what I emphatically do not accept is that God does not respect human choices that are made in good faith. For example, someone finds himself in a situation in which he believes that, say, Islam is the truth about God and spiritual matters. In good faith he pursues this belief, and is convinced that he is rightly serving God. He is acting in freedom (although it may be true that his freedom is often undermined by the attitudes and actions of many of his co-religionists). He may have a certain respect for the one whom he calls the prophet Jesus. God observes this, and does not act to undermine the freedom of this man. But once this poor soul dies, that very same God, who so respected his freedom, casts him into the fires of everlasting hell, because he failed to believe in Jesus Christ in the doctrinally correct way.

Since nobody has claimed this, certainly not me, this really has no further relevance for anything. The concrete criteria of judgement that God might use are simply an entirely different topic to why the reality of this judgement is obscured in this world. For what it's worth, I find it quite possible that people of Muslim faith make it into heaven, and so does my Church.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
This is what facilitates true freedom, not the absurd practice of spiritual "hide and seek" that you seem to be advocating.

Oh, so you haven't seen the error of your ways after all, in spite of already admitting my central thesis and not being able to offer any alternative explanation? What does it take then?

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
But let's go back to my example of the Muslim.

Let's not, because it is nothing more than a bit of smoke and mirrors for you to hide behind.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
If this position makes me 'non-orthodox' or a 'non-exclusive' Christian, then so be it. I am not at all interested in orthodoxy (which through the ages has been spitefully enforced by rack, sword and fire - I wonder why!), but I am very interested in what is actually true. That is all that matters.

You seem to have this deep-seated desire to be a "more Christian and right than the orthodox" heretic. Well, pick a different topic.

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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear

Posts: 12010 | From: Gone fishing | Registered: Oct 2004  |  IP: Logged
mousethief

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# 953

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quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
The Holy Spirit renews the mind of the believer; He gives him peace, joy, confidence and an awareness of His presence of love and holiness.

I've been a Christian for 33 years and have never had "an awareness of His presence," whatever exactly that means. I would submit that if you have such an awareness, you are projecting it onto all Christians without warrant.
<Crickets>

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This is the last sig I'll ever write for you...

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Zach82
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quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
The Holy Spirit renews the mind of the believer; He gives him peace, joy, confidence and an awareness of His presence of love and holiness.

I've been a Christian for 33 years and have never had "an awareness of His presence," whatever exactly that means. I would submit that if you have such an awareness, you are projecting it onto all Christians without warrant.
<Crickets>
I don't imagine you will be much gratified by such a thing from the likes of me, but I can echo your unfamiliarity with this "awareness of God's presence" business.

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Don't give up yet, no, don't ever quit/ There's always a chance of a critical hit. Ghost Mice

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IngoB

Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700

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quote:
Originally posted by Zach82:
I don't imagine you will be much gratified by such a thing from the likes of me, but I can echo your unfamiliarity with this "awareness of God's presence" business.

Well, it's not like there is no method to be had here, or rather, many methods. What have you concretely done in the hope to elicit such an experience?

(This reminds me of an old Jewish joke: Jacob is in serious financial trouble. So he goes into the synagogue and prays "God, please help me, my business is failing and the mortgage is pressing, please let me win the lottery." The lottery draw comes, and Jacob does not win. So he's back in the synagogue "God, I've lost my business, my house is next and my car ... please, please let me win the lottery!" But the next lottery draw again gives all the money to someone else. So Jacob is back in the synagogue "God, my business is gone. My house is gone. They will be coming for my car next, and I don't know how much longer I can put food on the table for my family. If there ever was a time for you to help me, now would be it. I don't often ask you for help, but please let me win the lottery." Then heaven opens and a blinding light overshadows Jacob as God's voice thunders "Jacob, meet me halfway on this one. Buy a damn lottery ticket already!" )

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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear

Posts: 12010 | From: Gone fishing | Registered: Oct 2004  |  IP: Logged



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