Originally posted by Evensong:
(p.s. What does this have to do with hell?
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) quote:which, fwiw, my $5 would say is most consistent w/ Scripture (and the creeds)
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
You're missing the bodily resurrection and the new heavens/new earth thing. Heaven is not the end.
quote:Just this. Nothing else.
Originally posted by blackbeard:
a. Scriptural inerrancy must be abandoned;
quote:To be replaced by what?
Originally posted by Gareth
quote:Just this. Nothing else.
Originally posted by blackbeard:
a. Scriptural inerrancy must be abandoned;
quote:There is more than one text that is claimed to be divinely inspired.
Originally posted by Schroedinger's cat:
But faith and reason needs a starting point.
Accepting the Bible as a divinely inspired work is still valid.
the other choice is that heaven and hell are something we find on earth, not after. And accept that the bible does not actually tell us a great deal about what happens after we die.
Which would mean that we cannot know what happens. We can trust that God is good and reasonable and will deal with us in an acceptable way. But that it may be as much based on whether we spread heaven or hell while we are here on earth.
quote:No. Heaven on earth is the end. But the judgement issue is the same:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
You're missing the bodily resurrection and the new heavens/new earth thing. Heaven is not the end.
quote:I like that theory (I gather from here the Orthodox tend to it), and that and some form of purgatorial-universalism are I think the only ways I can tie the two threads that go throughout the bible (and also a individual wish that things here matter, and the obvious fact of eternity being eternal).
Originally posted by W Hyatt:
How about heaven is open to everyone, but people who find they can't stand it leave and find a place as remote from God and heaven as possible. There they make each other miserable because everyone is surrounded by selfish bastards. The name used for the places where they gather themselves together is Hell.
quote:Well yes.
Originally posted by Gareth:
quote:Just this. Nothing else.
Originally posted by blackbeard:
a. Scriptural inerrancy must be abandoned;
quote:Both very wise comments. I've noticed alot of your posts are full of wisdom these days catty. Have you always been thus or have I only noticed since you stopped haranguing me in Hell.
Originally posted by Schroedinger's cat:
But faith and reason needs a starting point.
Accepting the Bible as a divinely inspired work is still valid.
<snip>
Which would mean that we cannot know what happens. We can trust that God is good and reasonable and will deal with us in an acceptable way. But that it may be as much based on whether we spread heaven or hell while we are here on earth.
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quote:I don't find annihilationism any nicer or comforting than conscious torment. The idea of people simply disappearing as if they never existed strikes me as upsetting, as if God made a mistake in creating them and decided to erase them from history.
Overall I think the Scriptural evidence is heavily on the side of the wages of sin being death, and humans being mortal creatures doomed to die without the gift of eternal life. The idea that God would grant the gift of eternal life just for the purpose of torturing someone forever seems to me to create a god that it is not possible to worship. [/QB]
quote:Upsetting, yes. Horrendous torment? No.
Originally posted by Anglican_Brat:
I don't find annihilationism any nicer or comforting than conscious torment. The idea of people simply disappearing as if they never existed strikes me as upsetting, as if God made a mistake in creating them and decided to erase them from history.
quote:The idea that something happens is itself pretty strange to me.
Originally posted by Schroedinger's cat:
the other choice is that heaven and hell are something we find on earth, not after. And accept that the bible does not actually tell us a great deal about what happens after we die.
quote:I never said otherwise. Although, TBH, many sacred books are claimed to be dictated or written by God, not inspired.
Originally posted by agingjb:
quote:There is more than one text that is claimed to be divinely inspired.
Originally posted by Schroedinger's cat:
But faith and reason needs a starting point.
Accepting the Bible as a divinely inspired work is still valid.
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quote:c. this is a topic on which Scripture is mostly silent (perhaps a variant of b)
Originally posted by blackbeard:
Can I make the rather obvious point that, if using Scripture results in a number of different and mutually incompatible results, then either:
a. Scriptural inerrancy must be abandoned; or
b. there is something here which we don't understand. Maybe God's plans are beyond our current understanding?
quote:But what if God never withdraws from them the opportunity to repent? That means that He would need to keep them in existence and conscious in order to enable them to exercise choice. After all, a non-existent or unconscious person cannot exercise choice.
Originally posted by Boogie
If they still say 'no' then annihilation would be the best of the alternatives imo.
quote:I don't find my annihilation a matter for deep concern. Obviously I worry about those left behind and I would prefer the end not to be too unpleasant.
Originally posted by Anglican_Brat:
I don't find annihilationism any nicer or comforting than conscious torment.
quote:What is a non-existent person?
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
But what if God never withdraws from them the opportunity to repent? That means that He would need to keep them in existence and conscious in order to enable them to exercise choice. After all, a non-existent or unconscious person cannot exercise choice.
quote:Interestingly, I think the exact opposite. The idea that a person who physically dies is completely snuffed out and ceases to exist, is bizarre.
Originally posted by hatless
The idea that something happens is itself pretty strange to me.
quote:Consciousness may be made of a different stuff from physical objects but that says nothing about it longevity. It may, for example, be in some way dependent on the physical body and so die with it. It may be able to exist on its own but have no means of communication with other consciousnesses, it may be absorbed into some sort of universal consciousness. Is there something it would be like to be mere consciousness? And what would it be conscious of? At the moment consciousness seems to me just a word with no obviously coherent meaning (even after reading your post).
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Unless it can be proven that consciousness is produced by the physical processes of the natural organism, then we cannot be sure that physical death implies the total non-existence of the person.
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
quote:To be replaced by what?
Originally posted by Gareth
quote:Just this. Nothing else.
Originally posted by blackbeard:
a. Scriptural inerrancy must be abandoned;
quote:That's a good Tony-Blair-Esque conceptual statement. Like the old joke: "Mr Blair would like breakfast to be nutritious and ethical, and be a fitting start to a productive day of doing good things." It doesn't say what he wants to eat.
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
By faith and reason.
quote:
Originally posted by no prophet:
...... If you can combine your heaven/hell belief with decent, loving behaviour, I'm willing to tolerate a bit of that self centred focus on your own soul, just not very much, and it had better not be your main focus.
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quote:c. What Scripture is saying is blindingly obvious but we just don't like to face up to the implications of it
Originally posted by blackbeard:
Can I make the rather obvious point that, if using Scripture results in a number of different and mutually incompatible results, then either:
a. Scriptural inerrancy must be abandoned; or
b. there is something here which we don't understand. Maybe God's plans are beyond our current understanding?
quote:Sorry, Truman, I just don't see the logic of your post. Yes, of course, it's simple if we are good little boys and girls and just look at the Bible verses we are supposed to look at. It's when you look at some of the other verses that things start not to add up. This seems pretty obvious to me; have you seen something I haven't seen? and if so, what? or have I misunderstood your post completely? if you could state just what proposition you are defending, it might make things clearer.
Originally posted by Truman White:
quote:c. What Scripture is saying is blindingly obvious but we just don't like to face up to the implications of it
Originally posted by blackbeard:
Can I make the rather obvious point that, if using Scripture results in a number of different and mutually incompatible results, then either:
a. Scriptural inerrancy must be abandoned; or
b. there is something here which we don't understand. Maybe God's plans are beyond our current understanding?
quote:There's always the allegory of the long spoons.
Originally posted by W Hyatt:
How about heaven is open to everyone, but people who find they can't stand it leave and find a place as remote from God and heaven as possible. There they make each other miserable because everyone is surrounded by selfish bastards. The name used for the places where they gather themselves together is Hell.
quote:I used to collect Bibles - by which I mean different translations and interpretations. This is because you can choose your translations to affirm or refute the belief of your choice, and I have always found that fascinating. The ability of some people to choose a source that suits their prejudices and then claim authority has entertained me.
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Gareth, we're COMPLETELY in agreement. Reason necessitates the abandonment of inerrancy. Which is why faith is necessary.
How metaphor can be inerrant I don't understand.
The apostle Paul proclaimed errancy. Jesus and Peter for two took license with scripture. Jesus most breathtakingly of all bar none of course.
How a sentence with a highly specific context can be carved eternally and universally in stone I don't understand. Especially when the same narrative makes it obvious that's not how it was understood (Dee-Eye-Vee-Oh-Ar-Cee-Ee anyone?)
quote:Yes, exactly. The rules and the environment are the same for everyone, it's a matter of what we make of them, starting here and now.
Originally posted by saysay:
quote:There's always the allegory of the long spoons.
Originally posted by W Hyatt:
How about heaven is open to everyone, but people who find they can't stand it leave and find a place as remote from God and heaven as possible....
quote:Dear Mudfrog,
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
.....Seems to me to be illogical to believe in the one and not believe in the other when both beliefs come from the same source documents.
quote:Yup.
Originally posted by no prophet:
I tend to think that heaven and hell are over-rated... and the focus on all the wrong things. With much of the behaviour of Christians in violation of the ideas and message of the religion's founder.
quote:The Bible is not a single book. It is a library of multiple sources spanning different times of history.
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
The Bible tells us that there is a heaven.
We like that so we believe the Bible and believe in heaven.
The very same Bible tells us that there is a hell.
We don't like that so we don't believe the Bible and don't believe in hell.
Seems to me to be illogical to believe in the one and not believe in the other when both beliefs come from the same source documents.
quote:If we take Scripture as a whole, Old and New Testaments, I would agree with this. Although Matthew 25, for example, speaks of eternal damnation, there's a dispute among langauge experts as to whether the Greek word for eternal means age-enduring, which would make hell more purgatorial. St Paul writes of God reconciling all things in Christ, so Scripture isn't consistent here, probably because we know so little about what happens when we die. But I can't relate to the idea of a God who creates people, resurrects them or leaves them alive, for the purposes of eternally torturing them, unless....
Originally posted by Trudy Scrumptious:
Overall I think the Scriptural evidence is heavily on the side of the wages of sin being death, and humans being mortal creatures doomed to die without the gift of eternal life. The idea that God would grant the gift of eternal life just for the purpose of torturing someone forever seems to me to create a god that it is not possible to worship .
quote:If God really treats us like His lost sheep, and keeps searching until He finds us, that would be a reason to keep people in conscious existence, but as EE points out, again it would be more purgatory than eternal hell.
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvengelical:
Annihilationism, therefore, is inconsistent with a God of everlasting love - a love that never gives up on anyone. Of course, this implies that hell is actually purgatory.
quote:All descriptions of the afterlife are, at best, metaphorical, and at worst, totally confused. There is no consistency in Scripture, or in the way theologians have interpreted it throughout two millennia. I think the humility to acknowledge that we don't have anything but a faint insight into God's plans is useful. But I don't feel bound to believe that anyone is in eternal conscious torment.
Originally posted by blackbeard:
Maybe God's plans are beyond our current understanding?
quote:This is an aspect in which Christianity is inferior to Judaism, in which the idea of seeking a place in the afterlife would be meaningless. It's doing God's will in the present moment which that we should be focussing on, trusting that He will do what is best for us. And Christ's will is that we love one another ashe loves us.
Originally posted by no prophet:
I tend to think that heaven and hell are over-rated and one of those areas within Christianity that makes outsiders shake their heads, wonder about credulity and idiocy, and the focus on all the wrong things....Much of the focus on heaven and hell seems to be ensuring one's immortal soul gets a nice eternal home versus a nasty one. It is self centred. And I think it stinks. Better in my view is to let those mysteries take care of themselves and live as if the present mattered, that other people matters, that things outside of ourselves mattered, and that being kind and behaving lovingly is more important than any ticket to heaven or hell.
quote:Even if you ignore the entire OT and the parable of Dives and Lazarus, there is enough in the words of Jesus in just any one of the Gospels, to show that there is a heaven and a hell. You cannot accept Jesus' assurances of a place in the Father's house but then dismiss his warnings about hell. If you believe what he said about one, you must logically believe what he says about the other.
Originally posted by Anglican_Brat:
quote:The Bible is not a single book. It is a library of multiple sources spanning different times of history.
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
The Bible tells us that there is a heaven.
We like that so we believe the Bible and believe in heaven.
The very same Bible tells us that there is a hell.
We don't like that so we don't believe the Bible and don't believe in hell.
Seems to me to be illogical to believe in the one and not believe in the other when both beliefs come from the same source documents.
There is no evidence that the ancient Hebrews before the Babylonian exile believed in separate realms for the righteous and the unrighteous. All we have is the concept of "Sheol" which corresponds to other ancient peoples' version of the Underworld, a gloomy misty realm for everyone.
The only story that does indicate a heaven and a hell is the story of Lazarus and Dives. But the purpose of the story is about charity/justice to the poor in the present life. I do not think Jesus' intent in that parable was to explain literally the afterlife.
quote:And why do people often have such strong opinions on the subject without being able to answer that?
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
What is hell? What is heaven?
quote:You are mistaking the book being divinely inspired and the necessity of the people in it being always divinely inspired.
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Schroedinger's cat - I completely accept the Bible as divinely inspired but that doesn't help. Samuel was inspired to command genocide. Divinely? I.e. directly, by the same voice that called him so touchingly and awesomely as a little boy?
quote:Not if they contradict each other. A loving God that seeks the losts' salvation cannot be reconciled with an eternal torturer.
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
Even if you ignore the entire OT and the parable of Dives and Lazarus, there is enough in the words of Jesus in just any one of the Gospels, to show that there is a heaven and a hell. You cannot accept Jesus' assurances of a place in the Father's house but then dismiss his warnings about hell. If you believe what he said about one, you must logically believe what he says about the other.
quote:This is a failure of logic again. You do not have to see the whole bible as meaningless if there are some inherent contradictions. You just have to find the Spirit of the law as opposed to the letter of the law.
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
And if he was 'wrong' about hell then maybe he was wrong about heaven too - you certainly have no grounds for assurance of heaven from the Gospels if you doubt other teaching which you imply is equally uncertain.
quote:No, I am not commenting on the nature of heaven or hell - I believe the language used is symbolic, even though I believe the place/state of heaven and hell are actual; but that, AFAIAC, is another conversation.
Originally posted by Evensong:
quote:Not if they contradict each other. A loving God that seeks the losts' salvation cannot be reconciled with an eternal torturer.
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
Even if you ignore the entire OT and the parable of Dives and Lazarus, there is enough in the words of Jesus in just any one of the Gospels, to show that there is a heaven and a hell. You cannot accept Jesus' assurances of a place in the Father's house but then dismiss his warnings about hell. If you believe what he said about one, you must logically believe what he says about the other.
You logically have to find a different answer.
quote:This is a failure of logic again. You do not have to see the whole bible as meaningless if there are some inherent contradictions. You just have to find the Spirit of the law as opposed to the letter of the law.
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
And if he was 'wrong' about hell then maybe he was wrong about heaven too - you certainly have no grounds for assurance of heaven from the Gospels if you doubt other teaching which you imply is equally uncertain.
quote:Jesus' references to Hell refers to Gehenna, a place outside the walls in Jerusalem where the garbage of the city were burned up and where Tradition states, the Israelites sacrificed their children to idols.
Even if you ignore the entire OT and the parable of Dives and Lazarus, there is enough in the words of Jesus in just any one of the Gospels, to show that there is a heaven and a hell. You cannot accept Jesus' assurances of a place in the Father's house but then dismiss his warnings about hell. If you believe what he said about one, you must logically believe what he says about the other.
And if he was 'wrong' about hell then maybe he was wrong about heaven too - you certainly have no grounds for assurance of heaven from the Gospels if you doubt other teaching which you imply is equally uncertain.
quote:It's not about Jesus being wrong. It's about interpretation and understanding.
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
You like heaven so you you accept what Jesus sauys about it - many mansions, life eternal, paradise, etc.
But you don't like hell so your reject the words of the same man who also told you about the nice stuff. That's the problem. If the horrid stuff is a bad belief what makes you think the nice belief about heaven is also true? If Jesus is wrong about outer darkness and torment, then maybe, just maybe, he's also wrong about many mansions and paradise.
quote:Yes I have read what you have written and I don't accept what you say.
Originally posted by Evensong:
Did you miss my posts Mudfrog or just choose to ignore them because they were too difficult?
quote:That's nice
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
goperryrevs I agree with every word you've said.
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I'm sure we've done this enough before to know that our ultimate views are very different, but it's good that we're starting with similar foundations and priorities.quote:Consistency is very important. I'd question whether 'place' is the best word to describe either Heaven or Hell. For example, for me, the Kingdom of Heaven is a concept, not a place, and has little to do with the afterlife, and Hell can be a subversive rhetoric device or a hyperbolic warning, and so on.
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
I was clear about my wish not to comment on the nature of these places, merely the logic of accepting one and rejecting the other when the only info we have (that is valid) is Biblical. The same hermeneutics must be used when studying passages about heaven as they are when studying the passages that deal with hell - sometimes in the same paragraph! remain in condemnation after this life is over.
quote:You're very keen on upholding Scripture, yet you cheerfully throw out this list of things on which, on the face of it, Scripture is clear (apart from the obesity, or otherwise, of the cherubs). It seems to me that you're doing what we're all at risk of doing: saying that as far as Scripture agrees with your preconceptions, you'll take it literally; but that where it disagrees with your preconceptions, we're to read it "symbolically". It seems like you're drawing your lines of adherence with Scripture in some very arbitrary places.
Heaven is not a reward - there will be no clouds, no harps, no tinkling fountains or fat cherubs darting about. No whites robes, no golden crowns, no glassy sea or sapphire throne.
quote:I think it is simpler than that. Either Samson (and Joshua, Jephthah. Lot and a host of other people) we complete murderous assholes or God is a complete a murderous asshole.
Originally posted by Schroedinger's cat:
quote:You are mistaking the book being divinely inspired and the necessity of the people in it being always divinely inspired.
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Schroedinger's cat - I completely accept the Bible as divinely inspired but that doesn't help. Samuel was inspired to command genocide. Divinely? I.e. directly, by the same voice that called him so touchingly and awesomely as a little boy?
Without wanting to get into a detailed analysis, maybe the story is about how people hear God sometimes badly, sometimes well. It is a story about people engaging in an exploration of God. Or God reaching out to people. However you want to look at it.
quote:'Upholding Scripture' doesn't make me a literalist! Can i not believe in heaven without assuming i'll be wearing a crown for eternity? Does anyone seriously believe that things in the Bible that are evidently symbolic should be taken literally? Do you really think anyone believes we will walk through pearly gates and walk streets of gold? I doubt even the most fundamental fundamentalist believes that!
Originally posted by Adeodatus:
Mudfrog, I hesitate to weigh in when this question comes up because so often it seems to end up being everyone else versus you!
However, can you not see what you seem to be doing when you say things likequote:You're very keen on upholding Scripture, yet you cheerfully throw out this list of things on which, on the face of it, Scripture is clear (apart from the obesity, or otherwise, of the cherubs). It seems to me that you're doing what we're all at risk of doing: saying that as far as Scripture agrees with your preconceptions, you'll take it literally; but that where it disagrees with your preconceptions, we're to read it "symbolically". It seems like you're drawing your lines of adherence with Scripture in some very arbitrary places.
Heaven is not a reward - there will be no clouds, no harps, no tinkling fountains or fat cherubs darting about. No whites robes, no golden crowns, no glassy sea or sapphire throne.
quote:I like and agree with all of that
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
No, the timing of death isn't going to make a bit of difference to the believer who falls into sin (except perhaps embarrassment). All our sins were forgiven 2000 years ago, or alternately, before the foundation of the world, whichever you prefer.
The felt repentance that comes after we recognize we have sinned--well, that's a good thing, and a proper recognition of the kind of people we still are and how far we have to go. But it's not an ingredient in God's forgiveness of that sin. That comes wholly from God, for Christ's sake.
If it were not so, we'd be in deep crap, because we all sin daily in ways we don't even recognize. Have you never looked back over your life only to realize that something you did or said X years ago was actually a pretty rotten thing to do, only you didn't even "get it" at that point in time? The whole "they know not what they do" business. What a jerk I was back then! As Jeremiah says, "the heart is desperately wicked and deceitful; who can understand it?"
No, when it comes to believers, all our sins are forgiven in Christ, including the ones we don't even recognize, including the ones we may be in the process of committing at the very moment a heart attack or stroke takes us out. Our salvation doesn't rest on us. If we die at the moment of (say) falsifying our income tax return, or yelling unjustly at our kids, or lusting after so-and-so's body, well, we're going to be mightily embarrassed, I suppose, when we come face to face with Christ. But it'll be the embarrassment of a child who has been caught by a loving parent in wrongdoing.
Neither child nor parent is thinking, even for a moment, that the relationship is going to end--the child is secure in the parent's love regardless, there's no disinheritance on the table. But there may be some disappointment and some shame and apology, and then full reconciliation. Which is exactly as it would be if death had not intervened at just that moment. The only difference is that the repentance and forgiveness is happening face to face with Christ, rather than during prayer or confession on earth with his invisible presence.
For the believing Christian, death is not a crap shoot. Die at this moment or that moment, just before a sin or just after--it makes no difference to salvation. (It makes a difference to the people you live with, but that's another story.)
quote:The other story is the main story, the most important story. The better focus for all.
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
For the believing Christian, death is not a crap shoot. Die at this moment or that moment, just before a sin or just after--it makes no difference to salvation. (It makes a difference to the people you live with, but that's another story.)
quote:That may be, but I was replying to someone with a specific concern about personal salvation. What is the point of me popping in to say "Don't worry about that, worry about your neighbor"? That doesn't answer the issue and in fact only adds another layer of guilt and fear. The person who is convinced, gut certain, that God forgives and loves them, is the person who is set free from the worry of oh-my-gosh-was-that-a-sin-must-repent-did-I=repent-well-enough? that consumes so much worry and energy. If you are certain God loves and forgives you, you can finally be done with all that and get on with the much more useful and interesting task of loving your neighbor.
Originally posted by no prophet:
quote:The other story is the main story, the most important story. The better focus for all.
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
For the believing Christian, death is not a crap shoot. Die at this moment or that moment, just before a sin or just after--it makes no difference to salvation. (It makes a difference to the people you live with, but that's another story.)
quote:The proposition that consciousness is an emergent product of matter requires no magic. I do wish you’d stop characterising naturalism like this. It’s silly, nobody buys it, and the fact that you keep on doing it suggests you’ve got a bit of an axe to grind.
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
The idea that a person who physically dies is completely snuffed out and ceases to exist, is bizarre.
This belief implies that we are all just nothing more than physical machines, which produce a grand illusion that we call 'life'. According to this theory, this life is nothing more than the functioning of certain physical processes, which somehow, by magic it seems, throw up other properties, such as reason, affections, sense of purpose, free will, morals and and the most bizarre and illusory of all: consciousness.
quote:It's not a matter of being perfect or even all that good; it's a matter of God's love for us and our trust in him. Look at all us Christians on the Ship and all our spats over theological minutiae (Who has it all right, anyway? Don't answer that, IngoB
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8:38,39
), over proper liturgy, over political stands, a whole Dead Horse thread dedicated to "crappy choruses" (bad music!? ![[Eek!]](eek.gif)
), Hell calls basically saying: "He looked at me funny! ![[Mad]](angryfire.gif)
" Abba Father embraces a whole world of whiny, fretful, spiteful, yet somehow cute and loveable, allegedly grown-up rugrats. Lucky for us.
quote:Are you suggesting it's even a reasonably well understood phenomenon? I'd be interested in anything that indicates that consciousness is a by-product of physical processes.
Originally posted by Yorick:
quote:The proposition that consciousness is an emergent product of matter requires no magic.
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
The idea that a person who physically dies is completely snuffed out and ceases to exist, is bizarre.
This belief implies that we are all just nothing more than physical machines, which produce a grand illusion that we call 'life'. According to this theory, this life is nothing more than the functioning of certain physical processes, which somehow, by magic it seems, throw up other properties, such as reason, affections, sense of purpose, free will, morals and and the most bizarre and illusory of all: consciousness.
quote:That's a good example. I would tell her that here's her supper and that she's expected to hang around and pitch in just as soon as she's done eating.
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
Let's use an analogy. You have a a person who is living on the edge financially, and she is hungry. She shows up at your food pantry or soup kitchen. Do you a) tell her that it would be much more noble to volunteer to hand out the food to everybody else? or b) feed her on the spot, and THEN recruit her to feed everyone else? Which is going to be more effective?
quote:I think Yorick is saying there is nothing particularly controversial in the idea (although I'd hesitate to call it a by product). The whole field of modern Philosophy of Mind takes it pretty seriously. Theologians on the whole don't. Not much point in either side chucking shit over the fence, fun as it is.
Are you suggesting it's even a reasonably well understood phenomenon? I'd be interested in anything that indicates that consciousness is a by-product of physical processes.
quote:I can agree with all that, but I am genuinely interested in anything that provides even a suggestion of a solid alternative to magic. It makes sense for theists to assume one thing and atheists to assume the opposite, but I'm sure scientists are actively looking for explanations and it's a subject that I'm interested in, so I like to keep up with any progress.
Originally posted by Grokesx:
quote:I think Yorick is saying there is nothing particularly controversial in the idea (although I'd hesitate to call it a by product). The whole field of modern Philosophy of Mind takes it pretty seriously. Theologians on the whole don't. Not much point in either side chucking shit over the fence, fun as it is.
Are you suggesting it's even a reasonably well understood phenomenon? I'd be interested in anything that indicates that consciousness is a by-product of physical processes.
quote:Thank you for explaining your position Mudfrog. Why don't you accept this premise? It's what the bible says.
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
Evensong, let me explain.
You use the words 'torture and punish'; From that I infer you think the belief is that at death God decides who is to be condemned and then actively punishes them on the basis of his last judgment.
I do not accept this premise at all.
quote:So you too interpret things symbolically when you don't like the literal truth.
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
Torture? Fire? Haloes? Wings?
All symbolic
quote:I wonder what you mean by 'magic' here.
Originally posted by W Hyatt:
... it seems to me like the debate is between spiritualistic magic and naturalistic magic (i.e. it looks a lot like emergent complexity), which would make it a bit premature to say that the proposition in question requires no magic at all.
quote:Sure, but this is not the sense we're talking about here (unless of course you want to get into all kinds of philosophical shit about what existence actually is...), is it?
Originally posted by Bullfrog.:
Well, people continue to exist [after death] in a sense.
quote:Frankly, it's the idea of existing forever that appals me. Only the suggestion that a thousand years of our time can be a second in god's time makes me feel I could tolerate a future existence. But then the dimension of time as we know it is a human experience, and time might cease to flow in that afterlife.
Originally posted by que sais-je:
quote:I don't find my annihilation a matter for deep concern. Obviously I worry about those left behind and I would prefer the end not to be too unpleasant.
Originally posted by Anglican_Brat:
I don't find annihilationism any nicer or comforting than conscious torment.
A leaflet through the door said: "You could spend eternity with you family." I feel I've done that. But really being anything forever? Thanks but if it's an option I'd prefer not.
Wouldn't mind hanging around to see how homo sapiens turn out but even if that's a billion years, it's less than the splittest of split seconds of eternity.
quote:You miss my point. In order to understand it, let's not use the word 'literalist', but rather talk of 'critical' and 'uncritical' approaches to texts in Scripture.
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
quote:'Upholding Scripture' doesn't make me a literalist! Can i not believe in heaven without assuming i'll be wearing a crown for eternity? Does anyone seriously believe that things in the Bible that are evidently symbolic should be taken literally? Do you really think anyone believes we will walk through pearly gates and walk streets of gold? I doubt even the most fundamental fundamentalist believes that!
Originally posted by Adeodatus:
Mudfrog, I hesitate to weigh in when this question comes up because so often it seems to end up being everyone else versus you!
However, can you not see what you seem to be doing when you say things likequote:You're very keen on upholding Scripture, yet you cheerfully throw out this list of things on which, on the face of it, Scripture is clear (apart from the obesity, or otherwise, of the cherubs). It seems to me that you're doing what we're all at risk of doing: saying that as far as Scripture agrees with your preconceptions, you'll take it literally; but that where it disagrees with your preconceptions, we're to read it "symbolically". It seems like you're drawing your lines of adherence with Scripture in some very arbitrary places.
Heaven is not a reward - there will be no clouds, no harps, no tinkling fountains or fat cherubs darting about. No whites robes, no golden crowns, no glassy sea or sapphire throne.
quote:Thank you for feeding me.
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
quote:That may be, but I was replying to someone with a specific concern about personal salvation. What is the point of me popping in to say "Don't worry about that, worry about your neighbor"? That doesn't answer the issue and in fact only adds another layer of guilt and fear. The person who is convinced, gut certain, that God forgives and loves them, is the person who is set free from the worry of oh-my-gosh-was-that-a-sin-must-repent-did-I=repent-well-enough? that consumes so much worry and energy. If you are certain God loves and forgives you, you can finally be done with all that and get on with the much more useful and interesting task of loving your neighbor.
Originally posted by no prophet:
quote:The other story is the main story, the most important story. The better focus for all.
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
For the believing Christian, death is not a crap shoot. Die at this moment or that moment, just before a sin or just after--it makes no difference to salvation. (It makes a difference to the people you live with, but that's another story.)
Let's use an analogy. You have a a person who is living on the edge financially, and she is hungry. She shows up at your food pantry or soup kitchen. Do you a) tell her that it would be much more noble to volunteer to hand out the food to everybody else? or b) feed her on the spot, and THEN recruit her to feed everyone else? Which is going to be more effective?
quote:It's clear that consciousness is connected to physical processes because drugs can alter consciousness or make us unconscious, as can physical injury to the brain, illness, or for that matter, falling asleep. I agree the mechanism is very unclear. The situation is not helped by the people who stare at blobby fMRI images of brains and declare that our appreciation of irony is associated with activity in the inferior hanger lane gyrus.
Originally posted by W Hyatt:
I'd be interested in anything that indicates that consciousness is a by-product of physical processes.
)quote:Some people think that our conscious selves are independent of our brains.
Originally posted by Evensong:
(p.s. What does this have to do with hell?
quote:Well that anecdote overturns decades of neuroscience.
Originally posted by Evensong:
The reverse is true.
My husband came home one day from looking at an MRI where the patient's frontal lobe was almost completely gone.
Yet the patient was still functioning fairly normally.
(p.s. What does this have to do with hell?
quote:It all boils down to a false understanding of God (as God) as a kind of anthropomorphic moral agent. The core mistake is to first assume a humanoid god, just like the Greeks did except solo (or if you want to keep the Trinity, in some kind of threesome). And then to construct the wants and powers of this humanoid god in analogy to human wants and powers, by just blowing them out of proportion. Then this humanoid god becomes a player on the human stage, just like the Greek gods were. And so the humanoid god keeping the sinners in hell becomes a kind of infinitely terrible jailer.
Originally posted by Evensong:
If you don't see a contradiction in "God is light, in whom there is no darkness at all" with a God that punishes and tortures eternally then feel free to explain why.
quote:Is that what we're aiming for, in "loving" one another?
Originally posted by IngoB:
For example, God does not love things because they are good. He doesn't react. Rather God wills for different things different goods, and it is just this (willing good for someone else) that we analogically call His "love". To talk of God loving is actually talking about God creating with particular purposes in mind. To say that God is Love is basically the same as saying that God is Creator, just viewing that from the perspective of the ends He makes things for.
quote:
Originally posted by Erroneous Monk:
Thank you for feeding me.
Bon appetit!
quote:Are you God?
Originally posted by Erroneous Monk:
Is that what we're aiming for, in "loving" one another?
quote:As in "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," or as in a magic show where the mechanisms are hidden from the audience. One can assume consciousness derives from a physical mechanism, but until such a mechanism is discovered, it's indistinguishable from magic.
Originally posted by Yorick:
quote:I wonder what you mean by 'magic' here.
Originally posted by W Hyatt:
... it seems to me like the debate is between spiritualistic magic and naturalistic magic (i.e. it looks a lot like emergent complexity), which would make it a bit premature to say that the proposition in question requires no magic at all.
quote:This.
Originally posted by goperryrevs:
The first is this. You're starting with a philosophical picture of God, and fitting Jesus into that picture. For me, that's not Christianity. Christianity is starting with Jesus, and forming our definition of God around him. Jesus causes us to radically alter our preconceptions about God. He's the starting point out of which everything else flows. (I do love how you described the incarnation with the WTF factor, though.)
The second is that it seems to me that you're radically redefining Love until it no longer means what it actually means. If there's one message that resounds from the rooftops of the New Testament, it's that God is Love. To boil that down to "God is Creator" is to do the apostle John (for example), and Jesus a great disservice. Love is one of the central messages of Christianity, and ISTM that you're redefining it out of existence.
Again, we know what God is like when we look at Jesus. Jesus does get emotional, has compassion for people (and even, I'd suggest, got warm and fuzzy inside). That's as much to do with his Godness as his humanness. We have emotions because God has emotions, because we are made in his image. To make God so unchanging as to remove his emotion is to scrub out huge swathes of Scripture. The difference between us and God is that his emotions are just and right, based on objective and full knowledge. Ours are just reflections of our tiny experiences.
quote:This requirement to me is basically just pure sentimentality, unless you can cash it out into something concrete. Truth does not change whether I arrive at it from point A or from point B. Furthermore, classical theism has exactly done what you ask it to do there, namely radically altered the Jewish (and really, the ancient) preconceptions of God, using Christ as pivot. Because insofar as these old religious ideas were taken to be literal and physical truth, they were simply wrong. It was no accident of history that Jesus was born at the intersection of Jewish faith and Greek philosophy (and Roman organisation). The Jewish faith needed purifying, at a different level to all the harrowing purifications that went before. It was not just about a simple lack of faith this time, but about the very picture that the Jews had of God Himself.
Originally posted by goperryrevs:
The first is this. You're starting with a philosophical picture of God, and fitting Jesus into that picture. For me, that's not Christianity. Christianity is starting with Jesus, and forming our definition of God around him. Jesus causes us to radically alter our preconceptions about God. He's the starting point out of which everything else flows.
quote:I ask you as well, are you God? If not, then why do you insist that what one can say about His love must apply to you as well? What you are feeling there is precisely the strain of analogy. Good. Whenever you start talking about God as God and do not feel that strain, you know that you are in danger of oversimplification. But an analogy is not a statement about dissimilarity, but of similarity. The strain that you feel is not the point of the exercise, it is the price that you pay. You do love, don't you? You have human love. God loves. He has Divine love. It is not the same, but it is analogous. So if you now were to ask "What should I do, what must I be like, if I wish to become more like God, if I wish to become 'Divinised' in some sense?" then what would the answer be? Well, God is Love, all His activity is loving. Divine loving. So by analogy what must you do to be like God? Well, be love as much as you can, have all your activity become loving. Human loving.
Originally posted by goperryrevs:
The second is that it seems to me that you're radically redefining Love until it no longer means what it actually means. If there's one message that resounds from the rooftops of the New Testament, it's that God is Love. To boil that down to "God is Creator" is to do the apostle John (for example), and Jesus a great disservice. Love is one of the central messages of Christianity, and ISTM that you're redefining it out of existence.
quote:Precisely. We know what God as God is like when we look at Jesus. "Like" is just the term that does the work in analogies. What we do not know when we look at Jesus is how God as God is (other than how He is Incarnate, obviously). Your easy equating of the Father, of the Godhead, with what you see in Jesus as a human is just nonsensical. It really, really is. It is exactly at the same level as reading about God's "strong arm" in the bible and imaging a giant arm reaching out of a cloud. Merely moving the discussion form a physical picture to a psychological one does not change the underlying problem with that. And yes, of course due to the Incarnation there is now something like "how God acts as a human being", and obviously it is highly instructive to look at that for anybody who wishes to do God's will. What could be better than following the example that God sets by actually embodying His will as a human being? But there just is no way that you can project what you observe there directly back into the Godhead. God as God does not sit down with friends, breaking bread. He just doesn't. You can go ahead and try to abstract from this to maybe the communal life of the Trinity, or whatever. But what you are doing there is to draw analogies, again. You cannot see God directly in this life, at least not by natural means. Sorry.
Originally posted by goperryrevs:
Again, we know what God is like when we look at Jesus. Jesus does get emotional, has compassion for people (and even, I'd suggest, got warm and fuzzy inside). That's as much to do with his Godness as his humanness. We have emotions because God has emotions, because we are made in his image. To make God so unchanging as to remove his emotion is to scrub out huge swathes of Scripture. The difference between us and God is that his emotions are just and right, based on objective and full knowledge. Ours are just reflections of our tiny experiences.
quote:I entirely agree. I think the core sickness of modern Christianity is just this. Christianity operates well at the level of pure heart, which doesn't worry much about the "theological detail". It also operates well at the level of intellectual sophistication. Where it all comes crashing down is if one takes the "simple" Christianity, and then pretends that it just is the theological sophistication. But we are not a bunch of medieval peasants any longer, who will consistently act from the heart. Where would all this endless discussion about just how precisely Jesus' words about hell have to be interpreted be? You would hear it, you would fear it, and that would be the end of it. But no, we will argue the toss out of this. Well, fine. But then it makes no sense to appeal to "just the heart". We then have to think hard and come up with proper intellectual solutions. In my opinion, we will arrive at pretty much the same spot that the simple "heart" people are in. Just with a lot more sophistication in our heads what it all means...
Originally posted by goperryrevs:
Now, we've discussed this whole redefining language thing before (or at least, I have with Zach). But I think it deserves highlighting again, because, to me, it's a crucial issue, and one that can mean the difference between someone wanting to commune with God, and just brushing him off as a philosophical construct.
quote:I certainly hold a type of supersessionism. Not one that negates Judaism, I would say, but certainly I will have nothing to do with "dual covenant" type of teachings.
Originally posted by no prophet:
Your first paragraph seems to suppose supercessionism or a negation of Judiasm, which I doubt you meant.
quote:If that's all you got out of my post, then that's truly regrettable.
Originally posted by no prophet:
You post also seems to hinge on reason, even when discussing emotion. There are additional ways of knowing than the binary "heart" and "head".
quote:This seems like one of those statements that's supposed to be self-evident, but I'm not sure it is. Given that, again, our best picture of God is Jesus, having a somewhat anthropomorphized view of God is inevitable, because that's the way God has revealed him/herself to us. The only way to avoid anthropomorphizing would be to speculate to the exclusion of what has been revealed.
Originally posted by IngoB:
It all boils down to a false understanding of God (as God) as a kind of anthropomorphic moral agent. The core mistake is to first assume a humanoid god, just like the Greeks did
quote:I agree with that. I like the Open Theist (big surprise) interpretation of the incarnation, which instead of:
Originally posted by IngoB:
There's also nothing particularly amazing about the incarnation of some humanoid god as Jesus Christ. That's like Superman finding a telephone booth and dressing up as Clark Kent. Whereas the actual Incarnation of God as Jesus Christ is so amazing as to be almost unintelligible. It's a lot more like the law of gravity becoming a human, and then tripping and face planting. Unless you say "WTF?" when you hear about the Incarnation, you have not understood God. The God of classical Christian theism, that is.
quote:translate the little Greek preposition like this:
Phil. 2:5-8: Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though (or although or even though) he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross.
quote:Which really changes our whole understanding of what it means to be God-- what is the essential core nature, as opposed to mere subordinate qualities or attributes or abilities. It doesn't really make it less anthropomorphic, but it does make it IMHO more incredible (in the literal sense of the term).
Phil. 2:5-8: Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, precisely because he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross.
quote:Uhhh...I don't see how that constitutes an "interpretation."
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
I agree with that. I like the Open Theist (big surprise) interpretation of the incarnation, which instead of:
quote:translate the little Greek preposition like this:
Phil. 2:5-8: Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though (or although or even though) he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross.
quote:Which really changes our whole understanding of what it means to be God-- what is the essential core nature, as opposed to mere subordinate qualities or attributes or abilities. It doesn't really make it less anthropomorphic, but it does make it IMHO more incredible (in the literal sense of the term).
Phil. 2:5-8: Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, precisely because he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross.
quote:They (and me) are interpreting the incarnation not as an
Originally posted by Zach82:
quote:Uhhh...I don't see how that constitutes an "interpretation."
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
I agree with that. I like the Open Theist (big surprise) interpretation of the incarnation, which instead of:
quote:translate the little Greek preposition like this:
Phil. 2:5-8: Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though (or although or even though) he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross.
quote:Which really changes our whole understanding of what it means to be God-- what is the essential core nature, as opposed to mere subordinate qualities or attributes or abilities. It doesn't really make it less anthropomorphic, but it does make it IMHO more incredible (in the literal sense of the term).
Phil. 2:5-8: Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, precisely because he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross.
quote:Yes, it is the complete opposite of the way it is usually taken. But it is as valid a translation as the more common one, which is why English translations are about evenly split in how they word it. It's as much a reading as it is a translation-- an interpretation. Open Theists would say it is our assumptions about the divine nature (influenced by Platonic thought) that cause us to favor one translation/ reading over another.
Originally posted by Zach82:
I was more getting at the fact that you sustain this theology by translating Phil. 2:5-8 in basically the opposite way it usually is. That's not 'interpreting' the Sacred Scriptures.
quote:Being human is the most extreme fulfillment of God?
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
They (and me) are interpreting the incarnation not as an
exception to the divine nature but rather as the most extreme fulfillment/ expression of that nature.
quote:Iranaeus said Gloria Dei est vivens homo which means something like "A living human is the glory of God."
Originally posted by Evensong:
quote:Being human is the most extreme fulfillment of God?
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
They (and me) are interpreting the incarnation not as an
exception to the divine nature but rather as the most extreme fulfillment/ expression of that nature.
quote:I'm not sure that is the real golden calf. Of course, it is totally wrong to make God in man's image. And people (including many Christians) make that mistake very frequently. In the words of Brennan Manning, "We often make God in our own image, and he winds up to be as fussy, rude, narrow-minded, legalistic, judgemental, unforgiving, unloving as we are."
Originally posted by IngoB:
The "golden calf" of seeing God as man had to be taken down. The ultimate idol of all religion of man is of course not a stone, or a tree, or an animal, or a fantasy creature - but man himself.
quote:But that's what I believe I am doing. I don't think I'm projecting anthropomorphism onto God (i.e. making God in our image). I'm taking the premises that we are made in God's image, and that God has revealed godself in the form of a man, and working backwards to see what God is like.
Originally posted by IngoB:
God as God does not sit down with friends, breaking bread. He just doesn't. You can go ahead and try to abstract from this to maybe the communal life of the Trinity, or whatever.
quote:I agree. If anything, though, I'm one of those people (perhaps you are too) that is far too intellectual in my faith and doesn't give the heart nearly enough time.
Originally posted by IngoB:
But then it makes no sense to appeal to "just the heart". We then have to think hard and come up with proper intellectual solutions. In my opinion, we will arrive at pretty much the same spot that the simple "heart" people are in. Just with a lot more sophistication in our heads what it all means...
quote:Well, yeah. Man is created in God's image*, right?
Originally posted by Evensong:
quote:Being human is the most extreme fulfillment of God?
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
They (and me) are interpreting the incarnation not as an
exception to the divine nature but rather as the most extreme fulfillment/ expression of that nature.
quote:That is correct, intellectually, spiritually and emotionally ("sentimentally" doesn't come into it).
Originally posted by goperryrevs
Christianity is starting with Jesus, and forming our definition of God around him.
quote:But cliffdweller is saying its the other way around. And s/he is also mixing the two natures (see below).
Originally posted by hatless:
quote:Iranaeus said Gloria Dei est vivens homo which means something like "A living human is the glory of God."
Originally posted by Evensong:
quote:Being human is the most extreme fulfillment of God?
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
They (and me) are interpreting the incarnation not as an
exception to the divine nature but rather as the most extreme fulfillment/ expression of that nature.
quote:We might be made in God's image (what does that really mean anyways?) but we have a human nature. We do not have a divine nature. (We're talking ousia here for the Greek heads). We are not God nor are we supposed to be. That's God's nature, not ours.
Originally posted by Yorick:
quote:Well, yeah. Man is created in God's image*, right?
Originally posted by Evensong:
quote:Being human is the most extreme fulfillment of God?
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
They (and me) are interpreting the incarnation not as an
exception to the divine nature but rather as the most extreme fulfillment/ expression of that nature.
* Allegedly
quote:Fine. But you didn't answer the question.
Originally posted by IngoB:
quote:It all boils down to a false understanding of God (as God) as a kind of anthropomorphic moral agent.
Originally posted by Evensong:
If you don't see a contradiction in "God is light, in whom there is no darkness at all" with a God that punishes and tortures eternally then feel free to explain why.
quote:I added the "precisely" for emphasis just to show the distinction I was making. But yes, "though" and "because" are both valid translations of the preposition. Translation is never as cut-and-dried as we'd like to think, it's always dependent on context and other sorts of subjective clues.
Originally posted by Lyda*Rose:
So whatever Greek word(s) that most Bibles have interpreted as "though" might also mean "precisely"?
quote:The incarnation-- particularly the act of kenosis is. Phi. 2 is describing the act of giving up the "omnis"-- the powerful attributes-- of divinity in order to take on the role of a servant. The though/because debate hinges on whether you see that act as an "exception" to the nature of the divine or whether you see that act-- the self-giving, sacrificial love-- as the very definition of divinity (and then, my implication, the relinquished "omnis" are not definitive but rather merely secondary attributes).
Originally posted by Evensong:
quote:Being human is the most extreme fulfillment of God?
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
They (and me) are interpreting the incarnation not as an
exception to the divine nature but rather as the most extreme fulfillment/ expression of that nature.
quote:Why not?
Originally posted by Yorick
Well, yeah. Man is created in God's image*, right?
* Allegedly
quote:With only the teeniest bit of encouragement I could bore you into submission with enthusiastic book recommendations...
Originally posted by goperryrevs:
Thanks EE, that's exactly how I see it too. Wonderful.
And cliffdweller, I don't know much about Open Theism, but thanks for bringing it into the equation - from what I can tell so far, I'd subscribe to that view too.
quote:But that's not what I (or Open Theistis) are saying (see above). We're not saying that "becoming human" is the definition of divinity, we're saying that incarnation/kenosis-- the act of "entering in", of "coming down", the act of self-giving, sacrificial love-- that is the definition of divinity. That's really what's being described in Phil. 2.
Originally posted by Evensong:
quote:But cliffdweller is saying its the other way around. And s/he is also mixing the two natures (see below).
Originally posted by hatless:
quote:Iranaeus said Gloria Dei est vivens homo which means something like "A living human is the glory of God."
Originally posted by Evensong:
quote:Being human is the most extreme fulfillment of God?
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
They (and me) are interpreting the incarnation not as an
exception to the divine nature but rather as the most extreme fulfillment/ expression of that nature.
...If the human nature and the nature of God are the same thing, the Council of Chalcedon would not have worked so bloody hard to keep them separate in the creed.
I believe the confusion of the two natures is a the heresy of the monophysite.
quote:Do they have pictures, and if so, are they colourful?
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
With only the teeniest bit of encouragement I could bore you into submission with enthusiastic book recommendations...
quote:The early, defining book that really started the whole discussion is
Originally posted by goperryrevs:
quote:Do they have pictures, and if so, are they colourful?
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
With only the teeniest bit of encouragement I could bore you into submission with enthusiastic book recommendations...
Go on then...
quote:Ah. I think I understand. It's not the incarnation that expresses the divine nature so much as the kenosis. The incarnation just follows kenosis.
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
quote:The incarnation-- particularly the act of kenosis is. Phi. 2 is describing the act of giving up the "omnis"-- the powerful attributes-- of divinity in order to take on the role of a servant. The though/because debate hinges on whether you see that act as an "exception" to the nature of the divine or whether you see that act-- the self-giving, sacrificial love-- as the very definition of divinity (and then, my implication, the relinquished "omnis" are not definitive but rather merely secondary attributes).
Originally posted by Evensong:
quote:Being human is the most extreme fulfillment of God?
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
They (and me) are interpreting the incarnation not as an
exception to the divine nature but rather as the most extreme fulfillment/ expression of that nature.
quote:Consider your own words carefully. You talk about God actually loving us, and then you talk about God loving us in a "dangerous familial way". So you have already nailed down what real love must be like for God, and unsurprisingly, it is all human. However, God is an incorporeal, eternal Spirit, there is no such thing as an actual family life in Him, or any of the feelings that go with it in our experience. What is true though is that we can comprehend God in familial terms. So we talk for example of a Father - Son relationship in God. But that is simply an analogy. What the analogy draws on is that the Son has the same nature as the Father, but in some sense has an origin in the Father. One can make other analogies that are completely different, yet just as valid on this point. For example, the Second Person of the Trinity can be considered as the intellect of God, God comprehending Himself. That works too.
Originally posted by goperryrevs:
But I think for many, the golden calf is that we're very happy to think of God in intellectual, theological and philosophical terms (as the Greeks were), but don't dare to believe that God actual loves us in the dangerous familial way that we can comprehend emotionally. That God is our Father (as Jesus revealed).
quote:God can become man, in the sense of a personal union. But God cannot reveal Godself in man, or in anything else but God Himself. Take a picture of someone with a camera. Then you have their image and likeness, these days probably as a computer file. What that tells you about that person is however quite limited, isn't it? Certainly that computer file of yours is not living the life of a human person. And as the expression "judging a book by its cover" shows, trying to guess the state of a person by their appearance often fails. And so in spite of you being intimately familiar of what it is like to be a human being. But here you are trying to guess to an entirely different category of being. Incidentally, traditionally what is supposed to be the characteristic mark which earns us this distinction as image and likeness is that we are able to understand, i.e., it's our intellect (in a wide sense).
Originally posted by goperryrevs:
I don't think I'm projecting anthropomorphism onto God (i.e. making God in our image). I'm taking the premises that we are made in God's image, and that God has revealed godself in the form of a man, and working backwards to see what God is like.
quote:The one word that does all the work for you in this is "less". By what measure do you declare the analogical Fatherhood of God as less if He does not do this or that? Of course that measure you use is man. This is exactly the anthropomorphising move. It is a bit more subtle than describing Zeus as hunting human skirts, thus being a lesser husband to Hera than many men are to their wives. But only just. In reality, you just have no idea where your analogies about God break down. Maybe you can expect a certain behaviour from God by virtue of analogising Him as Father, maybe not. How can you know? Well, speculation is a fair game until you run into the evidence of scripture and tradition, which presents the only real information here.
Originally posted by goperryrevs:
Take, for example, my earlier statement of "God is Father". You could, of course, say: "Well, God didn't actually eject some sperm into an egg to make some babies, so he's not really a Father - he's like a Father, but that's just an analogy." What I think that subtly does is make God less than a human father. Humans are more Father than God, because God is only like a Father. And, taken further, that means that we don't even have to expect God to act in the very good ways that human fathers act, because he's only like them, which is where we get into the whole discussions we've had recently about ethnic cleansing in scripture and how we can redefine "God is good" to mean something other than it actually does mean.
quote:It is true that God can be said to have many "human" characteristics in a super-eminent way, which is what you are getting at here in a lot of words. That's just another way of saying that one can make analogies from human to God, really. But I would accuse you of precisely the fault that you attribute to me. For while you do not go on about God's sperm count, you do wish to impose human behavioural norms on God. A good father must not punish his children physically, therefore super-eminently God must not do so. Well, maybe the former is true (obviously there is some historical and geographical disagreement), but concerning the latter you are basically saying that your analogy holds, and that it holds in terms of a moral / behavioural evaluation. But this is far from obvious.
Originally posted by goperryrevs:
The way I see it is this: God is the source of all being, the creator. And as a result all creatures are much much more his children than my daughter is my child, because he did much much more than just eject some sperm into an egg, and raise the resulting child. He gave us our very being, nurtured us and sustained us with life itself. He invented the whole sperm/egg thing in the frist place. "God is Father" is the ultimate definition of Father. My fatherhood is but a mere shadow of that parenthood. He's the very source of fatherhood. His fatherhood envelopes my own human fatherhood, and is so much more than it. It's not "goperryrevs is a father, and God is like that", it's "God is Father, and my fatherhood gives me a glimpse into that".
quote:"Less than" or "more than" by what measure? I question your very judgement of that as the essential problem. You are still forming a humanoid god in your mind here, and critiquing him by the standards of human behaviour that you have learned (and/or that God has written on your heart - but he wrote that on your heart for your behaviour as human being).
Originally posted by goperryrevs:
We both agree that God is 'other', ultimately unknowable and above human comprehension. My concern is how we convey that, and that in your (laudable) aim to make sure that we don't see God as a human, your resulting language suggests that God is so in a way that is less than human. But God is more than human, and we are made in his image.
quote:But this is not a discussion about how you (or I) could improve our spiritual lives, become better Christians, or whatever. So I find it entirely irrelevant to consider this now.
Originally posted by goperryrevs:
If anything, though, I'm one of those people (perhaps you are too) that is far too intellectual in my faith and doesn't give the heart nearly enough time.
quote:I'm confused (again). If this is so, why do we pray?
Originally posted by IngoB:
God does not really watch over us like some guardian, sending us things as He discovers our needs. God creates all there is, past, present, and future as a whole from eternity. One can just as well use a different analogy, one that will not appeal to you emotionally, and say that God designed the system so that the parts one can identify as "human beings" get what they need so that they will function as they should. (In fact, they break down repeatedly, but like any good engineer God has designed several fail-safe mechanisms into the system.)
quote:Yes, exactly. I think your summary helps explain it better than my rambling.
Originally posted by Evensong:
]Ah. I think I understand. It's not the incarnation that expresses the divine nature so much as the kenosis. The incarnation just follows kenosis.
So you're saying the kenosis or self-giving or humility is the very definition of divinity: not an exceptional occurrence.
quote:Yes, I like that a lot. It reminds me of the Jewish idea of tzimtzum, which means that God withdraws, so that he 'contracts his infinite light', thus leaving a space where physical worlds can exist. Simone Weil has a similar idea, and of course, she was Jewish.
Evensong wrote:
Ah. I think I understand. It's not the incarnation that expresses the divine nature so much as the kenosis. The incarnation just follows kenosis.
So you're saying the kenosis or self-giving or humility is the very definition of divinity: not an exceptional occurrence.
quote:This is another example of one of those "just so" statements-- where you accept as self-evident something that is anything but. We don't know that God cannot experience the feelings of familial life-- in fact, the evidence of Scripture and tradition is that s/he does-- and in fact, that such feelings are defining elements of divinity.
Originally posted by IngoB:
Consider your own words carefully. You talk about God actually loving us, and then you talk about God loving us in a "dangerous familial way". So you have already nailed down what real love must be like for God, and unsurprisingly, it is all human. However, God is an incorporeal, eternal Spirit, there is no such thing as an actual family life in Him, or any of the feelings that go with it in our experience.
quote:Your analogy would be valid if we were trying to argue that humanity as the image of God tells us what God is like. But we're talking about the incarnation-- about God himself, in human flesh. That's not an image, it's the reality. In an image, there are aspects of the original that are absent (e.g. in a photo, you are missing the whole side of the person facing away from the camera). But we're not talking an image, we're talking God himself, so that nothing is left out.
Originally posted by IngoB:
...God can become man, in the sense of a personal union. But God cannot reveal Godself in man, or in anything else but God Himself. Take a picture of someone with a camera. Then you have their image and likeness, these days probably as a computer file. What that tells you about that person is however quite limited, isn't it?
quote:A true observation, but one indicts your position as much as any, since you are veering as far into extra-biblical speculation as anyone here.
Originally posted by IngoB:
... Well, speculation is a fair game until you run into the evidence of scripture and tradition, which presents the only real information here.
quote:I would suggest that s/he wrote that on our hearts precisely so that we can come to know Godself. The standards for human behavior are then a secondary derivative-- we alter our behavior to conform to our understanding of God's character.
Originally posted by IngoB:
...You are still forming a humanoid god in your mind here, and critiquing him by the standards of human behaviour that you have learned (and/or that God has written on your heart - but he wrote that on your heart for your behaviour as human being).
quote:Taken in any literal sense, this statement is clearly wrong. So right from the start we have to ask what non-literal sense this has. The following verses suggest that it is mostly the question of Christ's Divine authority that this is about.
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Jesus said: "He was has seen me has seen the Father". (John 14:9)
quote:And why would He say that? Any man, including Jesus Christ as man, gives grounds only for very poor analogies to God.
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Jesus did not say: "He who has seen me has seen a pretty good analogy of the Father."
quote:Insofar as Jesus was talking about His own love, one can say that it was the love of God. Because Jesus is God. So it is Divine love in the sense of what agent does the loving. But if we ask how Jesus loved, in his daily interactions, then it was of course usually by His human nature, not by His Divine one. As far as the characteristics are concerned, how He loved, this was then human love he showed, not Divine love.
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Therefore when Jesus spoke about 'love', it was actually the love of God, and not some reduced anthropomorphised compromise for 'love'.
quote:More precisely, we can relate to God in understanding because we were created in His image and likeness. I'm pretty sure that a dog can and does relate to God. But not in the privileged way that we have, which can recognise God as God.
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Man has been made in the image of God, and that is why we can relate to God.
quote:Man is a finite creature, and a creature cannot possibly contain or express the infinite God fully. Further, as Creator God must Himself be Uncreated, essentially so, which any creature including man can never be. Of course, traditional Christianity has never claimed such madness.
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Jesus was fully God and fully man, and this implies that God can be fully expressed through man, at least through a particular man: Jesus Christ. This is clearly what Jesus meant when He said "He who has seen me has seen the Father".
quote:Jesus is God Incarnate, not just some signpost. This does not mean that you can comprehend God as God by looking at Jesus. You will rather see God as man in Him. To comprehend God entirely is only possible for God (indeed, comprehending God fully is being God, this is just what the Second Person of the Trinity is about). And to comprehend God in His essence requires a supernatural grace, which regularly is only accessible to the saints in heaven. Here on earth we do see through a glass darkly, and this statement was made by an inspired saint after Christ had come and gone.
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
The idea that God is completely beyond our comprehension and we have to settle for a crude representation, and that Jesus was nothing more than a signpost pointed into the impenetrable mist of divinity, is consistent with the heresy of Gnosticism, which, of course, draws on the vain speculations of Greek philosophy.
quote:This is suspect as a "just so" argument right off the bat. Why should the one aspect of God's eternal functioning that you claim to comprehend fully be just the one where you really want this to be the case? Furthermore, God does not really have a moral character. God dictates to all creatures their ends, and where these creatures have free will, we call the resulting list of how they ought to behave "morals". But God is no creature, and He is an end onto Himself. There is no moral calculus that applies to God, since moral calculus is nothing more than bookkeeping of a certain aspect of God's will in creating entities. Of course, you can try to discern what God has willed that humans ought to do. But you shouldn't confuse that with "God's own morals".
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Of course there are aspects of the mechanics of God's 'functioning' as God which are incomprehensible to man: omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, timelessness etc. These are His eternal attributes, which should be distinguished from His moral character.
quote:Let us assume for a moment that crocodiles, who often eat their own offspring, and spiders, who often get eaten by their own offspring, were sapient creatures. Well, they could go on and say that they can genuinely relate and know God. And for some unspecified definition of "genuine" that may well be true. But of course, they might very well argue with you concerning what it means to be a child of God. The crocodiles might argue that we all are dying, and that many do so before they are old, and that this is just like a crocodile Father munching on his offspring. The spiders might argue that we play pretend eating of God during mass, and that when Christ comes again all His children will rise from the dead to eat Him up and thereby gain life. And you will stand up and say "But no, I'm a mammal, I'm a hairless ape. I know exactly what God being Father means, it means being like a male mammalian hairless ape to your offspring, just a bit more abstract." And the crocodiles and spiders will ROTFL.
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Therefore we, in our finiteness and humanity, can relate to God genuinely, and know God genuinely. And by "God", I mean "God as God".
quote:Correct. The one huge assumption that traditional Christianity can be accused of is that our intellect can discern reality. Where God is concerned, the grasp of the intellect is naturally rather limited. But the intellect does not simply fail, and where it does find purchase (for example, concerning God's existence) it can and ultimately does deliver truth.
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
After all, if "God as God" is such a mystery, then we have no right to say that "God as God" cannot do this and cannot do that. That would be not only illogical, but hugely presumptuous!
quote:I think you are pushing the "non-literalness" of this waaaaay too far.
Originally posted by IngoB:
quote:Taken in any literal sense, this statement is clearly wrong...
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Jesus said: "He was has seen me has seen the Father". (John 14:9)
quote:I cannot agree that they are "very very different." If Jesus is without sin, if he continually "does the will of the Father" then even his human nature is a very very good picture of the Divine-- a very good analogy to God.
Originally posted by IngoB:
...Jesus Christ, of course, also is God. But the union is in the Person, not in the natures. The human and the Divine nature stay entirely unmixed. And they are very, very different. So even from what Jesus did as man we can only draw poor analogies to God.
quote:I did. You can say that the damned in hell get tortured eternally, but you cannot say that therefore God is a torturer. The former is a statement about human experience, which you have access to, the latter is a statement about God interpreted as a human being, which is logically illicit. If you step off a cliff, and go splat on its bottom, the cliff does not become a murderer, even if you are innocent of any crimes against the cliff. The cliff is not a human being, murder is the killing of an innocent by a human being, therefore the latter cannot be attributed to the former. Obviously, that the cliff is not a murderer does not make you any less dead. You remain splattered across the bottom of the cliff.
Originally posted by Evensong:
Fine. But you didn't answer the question.
quote:I'm sorry, but I can think of multiple ways in which what I said could be confusing about prayer. Can you be more specific, please?
Originally posted by Erroneous Monk:
I'm confused (again). If this is so, why do we pray?
quote:By 'literal' do you mean 'empirical'? If so, you would have a point.
Originally posted by IngoB
quote:Taken in any literal sense, this statement is clearly wrong. So right from the start we have to ask what non-literal sense this has. The following verses suggest that it is mostly the question of Christ's Divine authority that this is about.
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Jesus said: "He who has seen me has seen the Father". (John 14:9)
quote:Clearly "knowing the Father" does not and cannot simply mean "acknowledging the divine authority of various sayings and commandments". That would do serious violence to the English language (and any other language in which these words are read).
Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.
“If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also; and from now on you know Him and have seen Him.”
Philip said to Him, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is sufficient for us.”
Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and yet you have not known Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; so how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?
quote:This is speculation. It is not consistent with the context of the saying. Jesus is clear that He does not speak or work merely on His own authority, but the Father works in and through Him. Therefore God is communicated spiritually to man through Jesus. You seem to be reducing the saying to mere intellectualism (i.e. trying to sort out the disciples' grasp of the Trinity or the incarnation, as if that is really what matters to Jesus). It's the spiritual reality of God conveyed to man that matters. And this is what results in transformed lives.
That Jesus is pushing hard here presumably is because the disciples have the laudable instinct that no man can claim to be God in any reasonable sense. And indeed, no human person ever can be God. That a Divine person can assume human nature is a really non-obvious "trick."
quote:Not necessarily. Man is made in the image of God, and therefore there is a connection between God and man. I am not going to get into the DH subject of the biological origin of man here (which you hint at later in your post), but I certainly believe there is a radical discontinuity between humanity and all other creatures. It is precisely because man has a spirit - breathed into him by God - and has a rational mind (though that is not the be-all and end-all), not to mention free will, that he has been equipped to relate to God. That is the way our Creator has willed it. Why can't the omnipotent God be allowed to create creatures who can truly relate to Him? It might seem presumptuous to some to say man can genuinely know God, but equally it could be argued that it is presumptuous to say that God can only fail to create creatures who have the capacity (within His grace) to know Him. I wouldn't want to limit God in the way that you seem to be doing.
quote:And why would He say that? Any man, including Jesus Christ as man, gives grounds only for very poor analogies to God.
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Jesus did not say: "He who has seen me has seen a pretty good analogy of the Father."
quote:This is speculation, and no man can possibly know the precise relationship between the human and the divine in Jesus Christ. Because man is made in the image of God, then we know that there is continuity between the divine and the human. Therefore the divine can be expressed through the human, and when I say 'expressed', I mean expressed fully in the sense of being expressed directly - Spirit to spirit. Hence Hebrews 1:1-4 -
Jesus Christ, of course, also is God. But the union is in the Person, not in the natures. The human and the Divine nature stay entirely unmixed. And they are very, very different. So even from what Jesus did as man we can only draw poor analogies to God.
quote:
God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds; who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become so much better than the angels, as He has by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they.
quote:This is obvious nonsense. You cannot create this dichotomy in Jesus, in which He can love by his human nature and not by His divine nature. Jesus made clear that, on the human level, He did not consider Himself even to be good: "Why do you call me good? No one is good but One, that is, God." (Mark 10:18). This implies that all Jesus' acts that had any kind of moral content (in other words, virtually everything He did with the exception of His daily ablutions and suchlike) was His divine nature in operation. In other words, because Jesus did not sin, He did not perform a single act with a possible moral content, merely by His human nature.
quote:Insofar as Jesus was talking about His own love, one can say that it was the love of God. Because Jesus is God. So it is Divine love in the sense of what agent does the loving. But if we ask how Jesus loved, in his daily interactions, then it was of course usually by His human nature, not by His Divine one. As far as the characteristics are concerned, how He loved, this was then human love he showed, not Divine love.
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Therefore when Jesus spoke about 'love', it was actually the love of God, and not some reduced anthropomorphised compromise for 'love'.
quote:Not only in understanding, but also by the Holy Spirit. In other words, spiritually.
quote:More precisely, we can relate to God in understanding because we were created in His image and likeness. I'm pretty sure that a dog can and does relate to God. But not in the privileged way that we have, which can recognise God as God.
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Man has been made in the image of God, and that is why we can relate to God.
quote:But we are not talking here about geometrical symmetry or mathematical equivalence. The essence of something can be known without quantitative considerations being fully comprehended or appreciated.
quote:Man is a finite creature, and a creature cannot possibly contain or express the infinite God fully. Further, as Creator God must Himself be Uncreated, essentially so, which any creature including man can never be. Of course, traditional Christianity has never claimed such madness.
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Jesus was fully God and fully man, and this implies that God can be fully expressed through man, at least through a particular man: Jesus Christ. This is clearly what Jesus meant when He said "He who has seen me has seen the Father".
quote:I think this is essentially the same dynamic as in my last post. I am not saying that real love is the same as, or just a bit like human familial love. I am saying that it encompasses it and transcends it. In the same way that God is Father, and our earthly concept of fatherhood is a shadow of that, the trinity IS the prototype realm-of-forms family, "from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name". It's not an analogy. It's bigger, more real than the thing that you describe as just an analogy.
Originally posted by IngoB:
You talk about God actually loving us, and then you talk about God loving us in a "dangerous familial way". So you have already nailed down what real love must be like for God, and unsurprisingly, it is all human. However, God is an incorporeal, eternal Spirit, there is no such thing as an actual family life in Him, or any of the feelings that go with it in our experience. What is true though is that we can comprehend God in familial terms. So we talk for example of a Father - Son relationship in God. But that is simply an analogy.
quote:Isn't this is exactly what Christians believe God did in the incarnation? In Christ the fullness of God dwelt, not an analogy of God, or an icon of God.
Originally posted by IngoB:
But God cannot reveal Godself in man, or in anything else but God Himself.
quote:I think your cliff example illustrates this. To fit your understanding, you have to reduce God to a passive inanimate, inactive object. And you have to remove emotion from God because God is unchanging. That's fine, but for me, that's not the dynamic, responsive, passionate God of Scripture. I can see where you're coming from with the "your measure is man" point, but I think it's just inadequate. The measures are the same ones I would always use for theology - scripture, tradition, experience and reason. God has set eternity in the heart of men. His transcendence above us is vast and infinite, but we are made in his image, which means we can know him (as EE described, a child knowing her mother or father does not have to understand all to fully know her parent, and recognizing and understanding good traits in that parent is part of that).
Originally posted by IngoB:
By what measure do you declare the analogical Fatherhood of God as less if He does not do this or that? Of course that measure you use is man. This is exactly the anthropomorphising move. <snip> "Less than" or "more than" by what measure?
quote:But this is where I feel what you're saying is so different to the God revealed in scripture. It's a philosophical construct of a God. It's not the God I have encountered in the Christian faith.
Originally posted by IngoB:
Well, speculation is a fair game until you run into the evidence of scripture and tradition, which presents the only real information here.
quote:I'd say it's more subtle than that. As I have said, Parenthood is defined by God the Parent, Family is defined within the Family of the Trinity. Love is defined within God. Creativity is defined by the insatiable creative force of God. And so on. They are the definitions, the real deal, and they're way beyond our comprehension. However, we have shadows of those things in this life: parents, families, different kinds of love, creativity. And because we are made in God's image, we can see glimpses of the divine in those human things. We have an inkling of what a good parent looks like (despite historical or geographical disagreement), and that gives us a glimpse into who the True Parent is. So it's not that God has to conform into my picture of a good human parent, as if God is a subset of that, but that I have a some understanding because it's the other way round.
Originally posted by IngoB:
A good father must not punish his children physically, therefore super-eminently God must not do so. Well, maybe the former is true (obviously there is some historical and geographical disagreement), but concerning the latter you are basically saying that your analogy holds, and that it holds in terms of a moral / behavioural evaluation.
quote:And theology is even funnier, as amply demonstrated on this thread. As Thomas Paine once called it, "The study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion"
Materialism is great fun. "A philosophy for boys" as St Clive d'Oxford once called it
quote:And what does materialism demonstrate?
Originally posted by Grokesx
And theology is even funnier, as amply demonstrated on this thread. As Thomas Paine once called it, "The study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion"
quote:Accepting the qualities of God found in the Christian Scriptures is entirely what I am on about.
Originally posted by Lietuvos Sv. Kazimieras:
But Zach, is it not at least as plausible that humans who so reject the nature/qualities of God will be forever alienated from Him and from His kingdom?
quote:Well, yes - though I'm sure Ingo would say that you're anthropomorphising God by declaring that he should be filled with wrath, a human emotion.
Originally posted by Zach82:
I reconcile myself to the possibility of hell when I consider the sort of wickedness humanity tends to occupy itself with.
The god that isn't filled with wrath at that is no god at all.
quote:Fair enough. Then let me rephrase according to your understanding of God:
Originally posted by IngoB:
His intentionality is expressed in how things are, not in what He does. The reason why nobody blames the cliff when you walk off it and go splat is precisely that the cliff doesn't do anything to make that happen, in the sense of changing its activity. It just is the way a cliff is, and if you ignore that walking off it is dangerous, then it is your own fault if you go splat. But likewise, heaven and hell are not something that God does to us. The world just is made in a particular way, and if you go one way, you live, if you go the other way, you go splat. "But should there be cliffs? Why is not everything just flat?" That is a good question IMHO. But it is a question that should not stand in the way of recognising a cliff, and that one is walking towards its edge, I reckon.
quote:Fair enough.
Originally posted by Evensong:
So the very fact that God created such a cliff in the first place is no consonant with what we understand to be just.
quote:In fact, what I was on about here is that one shouldn't be terribly surprised if facile moral evaluations by human standards of justice do not capture what God may be doing. You can of course ignore all that and repeat what has been argued to death. Fine. My answer is that there in fact is a human standard of justice, and one that wasn't simply developed for this case, according to which this is perfectly just. And this standard of justice is distinguished from our more egalitarian one simply by taking into account the status of the victim. The higher the status of the victim by some socio-cultural measure, the greater the crime. We have remnants of that in various lèse-majesté laws still, and this sort of thinking was hardly rare. I think we can safely say that it has dominated human history. Well then, by any measure that you can possibly think of, God's status is infinite. And that makes any offence against Him infinitely bad. Whereupon it follows that an eternity in hell is entirely justified as retributive punishment.
Originally posted by Evensong:
There is no sense or reason for eternal torture/punishment in Hell. There is no justice in it. It is the opposite of justice, it is vindictive and evil because while someone may commit atrocious crimes and therefore be deserving of hell, an eternal recompense is out of proportion to the crime because the crime committed will not have eternal consequences (tho I suppose you could argue the repercussions could be eternal but lets suppose they are not for the sake of argument).
quote:Rather, it is not consonant with what you understand to be just. And that has about as much influence on reality as a fart in a hurricane. Open your damn eyes! This world is created by God. It has cliffs. You can fall off them if you do not watch your step. What are you going to scream on your way down, "but it's not fair?!" A fat lot of good that will do you. Where do you see any evidence at all for your mollycoddling god? In nature? Hardly. In the OT? Hardly. In the NT? Well, apparently, though I remain entirely mystified how. For every nice word, there are two harsh ones there. In the life of faith as seen in history? Yeah, a faith founded on the blood of martyrs, ... let's all do the happy dance now.
Originally posted by Evensong:
So the very fact that God created such a cliff in the first place is no consonant with what we understand to be just.
quote:You mean the Jesus that goes on and on about the dangers of going to hell? Perhaps you didn't realise this, but hell pretty much is a Christian preoccupation (thought it was one of several Jewish options in Christ's time). Do you really think that the apostles sat down and said to themselves "We can't really control all those pesky new converts, let's invent some gruesome horror story, attribute it to Christ, and then scare them all into submission?" Is that what happened?
Originally posted by Evensong:
And while our concept of justice will ultimately be only analogous to God's sense there has to be some correlation otherwise why bother saying Jesus is a window into God at all. All theology becomes meaningless.
quote:No. The cliff analogy is a poor one.
Originally posted by Freddy:
I think you are right, Ingo.
The point about the cliffs is an especially good one. They are clearly unfair! Their very existence can be taken as proof that God is unfair, or that He doesn't exist - if your mind works like that.
quote:I'm assuming from this you dismiss the idea of eternal torture - take it as hyperbole.
Originally posted by Freddy:
[QBThis seems to me to be a fair system, and one that is consistent with a loving and fair God. It is also consistent with Scripture - as long as we understand the way that Scripture uses hyperbole for effect [/QB]
quote:I see.
Originally posted by Evensong:
The cliff analogy is a poor one.
If you fall of a cliff, you die. It's quick.
Eternal torture in hell is another game altogether. It's pure cruelty.
quote:Hyperbole isn't the same as dismissal. Hyperbole exaggerates to make a point.
Originally posted by Evensong:
I'm assuming from this you dismiss the idea of eternal torture - take it as hyperbole.
quote:My, my. That's a very anthropomorphic understanding of God. I thought you arguing against such a notion.
Originally posted by IngoB:
In fact, what I was on about here is that one shouldn't be terribly surprised if facile moral evaluations by human standards of justice do not capture what God may be doing. You can of course ignore all that and repeat what has been argued to death. Fine. My answer is that there in fact is a human standard of justice, and one that wasn't simply developed for this case, according to which this is perfectly just. And this standard of justice is distinguished from our more egalitarian one simply by taking into account the status of the victim. The higher the status of the victim by some socio-cultural measure, the greater the crime. We have remnants of that in various lèse-majesté laws still, and this sort of thinking was hardly rare. I think we can safely say that it has dominated human history. Well then, by any measure that you can possibly think of, God's status is infinite. And that makes any offence against Him infinitely bad. Whereupon it follows that an eternity in hell is entirely justified as retributive punishment.
QB]
quote:No I'm not. You're confusing me with a universalist.
Originally posted by IngoB:
[QB No, you are saying that it is outright impossible to have hell and a just God.
quote:Ah. The old - "it's a mystery".
Originally posted by IngoB:
Thus these two things must be incompatible by any reasonable moral calculus. My argument here has been that 1) I don't think that you can really apply moral calculus here, 2) and if you do, then it is rather daring to assume that your human sensibilities are the proper measure, to which I add now
quote:It is not a reasonable human moral calculus. It is one that favours the lofty for no particular reason. Very Dark Ages.
Originally posted by IngoB:
but as it happens, there is a reasonable human moral calculus available, which was (and probably still is in many places) highly popular, according to which this is in fact just.
quote:Because my understanding of justice comes from the scriptures.
Originally posted by IngoB:
quote:Rather, it is not consonant with what you understand to be just.
Originally posted by Evensong:
So the very fact that God created such a cliff in the first place is no consonant with what we understand to be just.
quote:You open your damn eyes. This world is as fallen as we are and is not a perfect predicate for discerning God's nature. Natural theology can be interesting, but it is very limited.
Originally posted by IngoB:
Open your damn eyes! This world is created by God.
quote:Wow. That's quite the rant. I didn't realise you knew me so well and so intimately. I also didn't realise you were a psychologist.
Originally posted by IngoB:
It's just not real. And sorry, I deal in realities. Your sweet and nice god can send me an essay on why I have to deal with this crap earthly life if I am anyway going to heaven. He should add a few sections on why I have to "improve" myself, if He can just create me perfect and fit for heaven. Is this supposed to be a practical joke, or something? Your theology just does not add up. It's the sort of dream that people dream on their way to work. But work doesn't go away, nor do the bills. Life is no fun ride, and whoever created this place was not designing it to the standards of equity, fairness and appropriate behaviour as discussed at the latest meeting of the union of kindergarden teachers. So why would you think that ultimate salvation is for the funsies? Get a bloody grip.
quote:You mean the Jesus that goes on and on about the dangers of going to hell? Perhaps you didn't realise this, but hell pretty much is a Christian preoccupation (thought it was one of several Jewish options in Christ's time). Do you really think that the apostles sat down and said to themselves "We can't really control all those pesky new converts, let's invent some gruesome horror story, attribute it to Christ, and then scare them all into submission?" Is that what happened?
Originally posted by Evensong:
And while our concept of justice will ultimately be only analogous to God's sense there has to be some correlation otherwise why bother saying Jesus is a window into God at all. All theology becomes meaningless.
What's happening here is a neat bit of repression. There's a serious danger lurking very close to you, and you can't find the nerve to face it. So you deny it. Poof, it's gone. Well, in your mind it is. It's still there, of course, and since you have chosen to ignore it your chances of running into it have much increased. But you will use all mental capacity to somehow find a way to deny what's right there in your face.
quote:I can't think of a less fine distinction. One is quick, one is eternal. There is an absolute world of difference.
Originally posted by Freddy:
Isn't that making a somewhat fine distinction between violent death and long-lasting pain - where one is OK for a loving God but the other unacceptable?
quote:I quite agree.
Originally posted by Freddy:
Rather, I think that a self-centered life is bleak by comparison to a life of love to God and the neighbor. That bleakness is enormously unhappy and lifeless. But you could never convince someone of that who was completely caught up in that way of living.
quote:You said that God doesn't watch over us, sending us things as He discerns our needs. Rather, He creates everything so that "parts" like me can function as he intended.
Originally posted by IngoB:
quote:I'm sorry, but I can think of multiple ways in which what I said could be confusing about prayer. Can you be more specific, please?
Originally posted by Erroneous Monk:
I'm confused (again). If this is so, why do we pray?
quote:I believe the purpose of this life is for us to learn the only way we can-- thru experience & observation-- that God's way of life is the only one that brings us happiness. So that in the next life we will be able to look back at our choices over our past lifetime and the fruits of those choices, and will freely choose to live in God's Kingdom, the place where God reigns-- where we freely choose to follow.
Originally posted by Freddy:
quote:Fair enough.
Originally posted by Evensong:
So the very fact that God created such a cliff in the first place is no consonant with what we understand to be just.
So why not hypothesize a different scenario in which God is not unjust, and yet which does not contradict the Scriptures?
The premise should be that God is loving and fair, and that He allows us to do as we wish.
To my mind this leads to an idea of eternity in which people think, will, and behave as they wish.
Isn't it inevitable that this set-up will result in varying degrees of happiness for the participants?
It seems to me that it is inevitable, because while happiness is subjective and different for every person, it is also axiomatic that happiness increases in proportion with a person's close connection with God. This, of course, defines God as the source of all love and therefore of all happiness.
This seems to me to be a fair system, and one that is consistent with a loving and fair God. It is also consistent with Scripture - as long as we understand the way that Scripture uses hyperbole for effect.
The only question is whether the acceptance of the idea that happiness can vary can also mean that it can vary even to the point of unhappiness - and still be fair.
Can it?
And given that happiness is subjective, how hard is it to imagine that one person's idea of happiness might not really be happy at all in a more objective sense?
quote:Christianity understands that God knows all prayers before they are asked. He does not really sit up there considering human petitions, and deciding in favor of some and not others.
Originally posted by Erroneous Monk:
If God really is that engineer, then I'm a dipstick (in the colloquial sense) for putting my empty hands out and begging, when He isn't going to hear me or "care" in any way that I can understand, aren't I?
quote:Sure. Why not?
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
I imagine at that point everyone-- no matter how broken or lost in this life-- will freely make that choice. So that hell-- the place we created through our own tortured choices-- is quite real, but also, ultimately, quite empty.
![[Angel]](graemlins/angel.gif)
quote:When I was in elementary theory we were regularly warned that if we didn't do the work well enough we would flunk that grade. Which seemed an obviously terrible thing. No one flunked. Even the significantly retarded man in my class learned a little each year, within his own limits, and was moved ahead.
Originally posted by Freddy:
quote:Sure. Why not?
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
I imagine at that point everyone-- no matter how broken or lost in this life-- will freely make that choice. So that hell-- the place we created through our own tortured choices-- is quite real, but also, ultimately, quite empty.
Full or empty, though, the theory remains the same.
The way these things work, best and worst-case scenarios are seldom the reality.
quote:Some people are reared that way "we are intellectuals, we don't do those messy emotions."
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
And risk yourself being in the first circle of hell now and not even knowing it. Frozen. Emotionally dead. Uncompassionate. Unfeeling. NOW. That is a fate worse than death.
quote:Just to be clear: that is the understanding that SOME Christians hold re: prayer. It is not the only, nor probably even the most common, Christian understanding of prayer.
Originally posted by Freddy:
quote:Christianity understands that God knows all prayers before they are asked. He does not really sit up there considering human petitions, and deciding in favor of some and not others.
Originally posted by Erroneous Monk:
If God really is that engineer, then I'm a dipstick (in the colloquial sense) for putting my empty hands out and begging, when He isn't going to hear me or "care" in any way that I can understand, aren't I?
Rather, God is near at all times with the answer to every conceivable prayer. The point of prayer is that it changes the disposition of the asker. When we are looking for, and asking for, what God has to offer the answer is instantly present.
quote:Yes-- spot on. Tony Campolo says something similar, "saved from a fruitless way of life". This is what I was getting at in an earlier post re: the purpose of this life is to learn experientially that life God's way really is the best possible life, so that we will come ultimately to freely chose it.
Originally posted by Belle Ringer:
quote:Some people are reared that way "we are intellectuals, we don't do those messy emotions."
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
And risk yourself being in the first circle of hell now and not even knowing it. Frozen. Emotionally dead. Uncompassionate. Unfeeling. NOW. That is a fate worse than death.
I keep thinking the answer to "saved from what?" is "from ourselves." Or better, apparently the word saved is equally translated healed. Healed from the distorted things we were taught about ourselves and about life.
quote:I'm sure that you are right. Many, maybe even most, Christians do think that prayers change God's mind.
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
Just to be clear: that is the understanding that SOME Christians hold re: prayer. It is not the only, nor probably even the most common, Christian understanding of prayer.
quote:
Matthew 6:8 "Your Father knows the things you have need of before you ask Him."
quote:Which is not the same thing as the view of prayer you proposed. Knowing what we need is not the same as knowing what we're going to pray, or the suggestion that prayer is not efficacious. Which is why many, perhaps even most, churches teach that prayer changes things.
Originally posted by Freddy:
quote:I'm sure that you are right. Many, maybe even most, Christians do think that prayers change God's mind.
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
Just to be clear: that is the understanding that SOME Christians hold re: prayer. It is not the only, nor probably even the most common, Christian understanding of prayer.
I was thinking of what churches actually teach. Most of them are aware of Christ's words from the Sermon on the Mount:
quote:
Matthew 6:8 "Your Father knows the things you have need of before you ask Him."
quote:Prayer is definitely efficacious.
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
Which is not the same thing as the view of prayer you proposed. Knowing what we need is not the same as knowing what we're going to pray, or the suggestion that prayer is not efficacious. Which is why many, perhaps even most, churches teach that prayer changes things.
quote:Prayer is very important. It changes the one praying. It doesn't change God or tell Him anything that He didn't already know. When we are ready for God's answers He gives them instantly, granting every sincere prayer.
Christianity understands that God knows all prayers before they are asked. He does not really sit up there considering human petitions, and deciding in favor of some and not others.
Rather, God is near at all times with the answer to every conceivable prayer. The point of prayer is that it changes the disposition of the asker. When we are looking for, and asking for, what God has to offer the answer is instantly present.
quote:Well, when the the tenets of materialism/physicalism/naturalism are built into a method of inquiry, you can actually demonstrate quite a lot. It can't demonstrate anything outside of the parameters of the scientific method, of course, but, and here's the thing, can anything else do any better? This thread is a rather entertaining demonstration that theology certainly can't. In fact, your highlighting of epistemic difficulties of non supernatural philosophising, here of all places, is hilarious. What we've got is a bit like a bunch of biologists arguing about whether trees are animals, plants, fungi or bacteria and unable to come to a conclusion.
And what does materialism demonstrate? Errm... nothing.
quote:That's an unsupported assertion that can be safely ignored until elaborated on. Although I've got a sneaking suspicion that will involve some wibbling on about "objective validity"
Because its basic premise is not only unprovable, but impossible.
quote:Some philosophers have argued that, others have differed. Meh. Although your St Clive, when he argued that naturalism is self refuting got his arse handed to him on a plate by a Catholic theologian. He altered the book the argument was in and never wrote apologetics again. How much the two events were connected has been the subject of (not much) debate. Since, I think, the whole thing hinged on the definition of "because", normal people have not taken much interest. Another example is Alvin Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument against naturalism, which treads similar ground with a fair smattering of abuse of evolutionary theory, maths and the philosophy of mind.
Oh, and self-refuting, of course...
quote:Which, again, is a perfect valid, perfectly mainstream, Christian understanding. It's just not the only Christian understanding of prayer, or the only one "taught by churches."
Originally posted by Freddy:
Yes, what things?
Prayer certainly changes things. The only question is what it changes? God? No, it changes us.
quote:Prayer is definitely efficacious.
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
Which is not the same thing as the view of prayer you proposed. Knowing what we need is not the same as knowing what we're going to pray, or the suggestion that prayer is not efficacious. Which is why many, perhaps even most, churches teach that prayer changes things.
God's knowledge of what we need is the same thing as His knowledge of what we're going to pray. god knows everything.
I said:
quote:Prayer is very important. It changes the one praying. It doesn't change God or tell Him anything that He didn't already know. When we are ready for God's answers He gives them instantly, granting every sincere prayer.
Christianity understands that God knows all prayers before they are asked. He does not really sit up there considering human petitions, and deciding in favor of some and not others.
Rather, God is near at all times with the answer to every conceivable prayer. The point of prayer is that it changes the disposition of the asker. When we are looking for, and asking for, what God has to offer the answer is instantly present.
quote:I see what you are saying. Yes, you are right. Thank you for clarifying.
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
Which, again, is a perfect valid, perfectly mainstream, Christian understanding. It's just not the only Christian understanding of prayer, or the only one "taught by churches."
quote:Indeed. Scripture contains between 66 and 81 such texts, depending on whom you ask.
Originally posted by agingjb:
quote:There is more than one text that is claimed to be divinely inspired.
Originally posted by Schroedinger's cat:
But faith and reason needs a starting point.
Accepting the Bible as a divinely inspired work is still valid.
the other choice is that heaven and hell are something we find on earth, not after. And accept that the bible does not actually tell us a great deal about what happens after we die.
Which would mean that we cannot know what happens. We can trust that God is good and reasonable and will deal with us in an acceptable way. But that it may be as much based on whether we spread heaven or hell while we are here on earth.
quote:Light of a sufficiently high intensity will burn the hell out of you.
Originally posted by Evensong:
If you don't see a contradiction in "God is light, in whom there is no darkness at all" with a God that punishes and tortures eternally then feel free to explain why.
quote:I think most Christians do realise this. Though you correctly point out that some strands of the Jewish plethora of His day, such as the Enoch tradition, paint a stark picture of the damned, eternal hell is entirely a Christian preoccuption. Very few of the world's spiritual philosophies are as ugly. So what should we make of this? IngoB believes that the hardest possible interpretation of these mysteries is the correct one. Others, myself included, would agree much more with Evensong's assertion that eternal damnation is unjust and serves no purpose.
Originally posted by IngoB:
Perhaps you didn't realise this, but hell pretty much is a Christian preoccupation (thought it was one of several Jewish options in Christ's time).
quote:Whether or not it makes me a bad Catholic, a bad Christian or an apostate, I belive that Christ's teachings on hell were hyperbolic. There's much else in Scripture that gives more hope. And there's much more in the outside world, away from the Christian preoccuption with hell, that can lead a person in the direction of obeying Christ's command to love unconditionally. That's where salvation is to be found.
Light of a sufficiently high intensity will burn the hell out of you.
quote:Many individual Christians throughout the ages have come to the same conclusion as the rabbis, that eternal damnation is incompatible with a God of justice and compassion. Also, an element which I first considered 45 years ago, is that it's at least in part, God's fault that we are as we are, because He created us here, with a proclivity to sin. That we are meant to rise above that, I can see, but the flesh is weak even when the spirit is willing. So I can entirely agree with this explanation about punishment being age enduring. suggestions of a year in Gehinnom are obviously metaphorical, but the idea that it can't last forever is quite logical given what Jesus has shown of the nature of God's love.
It is not until the later books fo the Hebrew canon that we start to hear the idea that there are different destinations in the afterlife. Now if you search non-canonical Jewish sources (apocalyptic literature, for example), the theme of the wicked being fated to eternal suffering in fire and ice appears repeatedly. Indeed, it is from this thread of Jewish thinking from around 100BCE - 100CE that Christianity, and later Islam, derive their doctrines of eternal damnation. But Judaism ultimately rejects this idea as incongruent with a God who both just (infinite punishment for a finite life of sin?) and compassionate. There is also an element of God being conscious of sharing responsiblity for our moral shortcoming. God designed us with this potential to sin built in, so how can the Creator totally fault the creation for acting within specs? (see RaSHI's commentary on Hagigah 15b,* for example, or the famous parable on Cain and Able in Genesis Rabbah 22:9). So what you find in rabbinic texts is the notion of Gehinnom (Gehenna in Yiddish/English), a kind of purgatory in which the soul confronts its sins and is purified before it returns to God.
quote:This alternative view accords with the Christian belief in the harrowing of hell, which was very much emphasised, especially in the early centuries of Eastern Christianity. Not all theologians agreed about who exactly is saved by Christ's descent, but at least some thought it applied to all those in captivity. We believe that the Messiah has already been resurrected and passed through hell, so I am happy to believe it's empty.
The wicked stay in Gehinnom till the resurrection, and then the Messiah, passing through it redeems them. (Emek Hammelech, f. 138, 4
quote:If there really is a hell, does anyone believe that it is actually a place? Isn't it more of a state of mind?
Originally posted by PaulTH*:
Not all theologians agreed about who exactly is saved by Christ's descent, but at least some thought it applied to all those in captivity. We believe that the Messiah has already been resurrected and passed through hell, so I am happy to believe it's empty.
quote:I'm not sure what this confusion actually is. In my opinion the only thing that separates science from philosophy is the testing part of science. Otherwise they are concerned with the same thing - exploring the world rationally. Philosophy's brief is wider - encompassing all logical possibilities (and also the nature of logic itself) leading to nooks and crannies of sheer bloody uselessness. At best, in one of those crannies is a path to theology.
But this is the old confusion between method and philosophy, isn't it?
quote:That's not the whole story, though. The success of science implies that 'there is only nature in nature'. Or at the very least there is only nature in the lab or on those occasions where we work really hard to eliminate biases and to make the work repeatable and as free from error as we possibly can. Thus, the modern scientist ignores the supernatural not only because the supernatural is not required for science to be successful, but taking it seriously would cripple science beyond imagining.
Science uses a naturalistic method, but that does not lead to a naturalistic philosophy. In other words, if scientists study nature, they are not implying 'there is only nature'.
They are ignoring anything else, partly because, as Grokesx said, there is no method for describing the supernatural; in other words, it is all guesswork
quote:Good post. If I can paraphrase Francis Bacon, FFS, stop wittering on about Aristotle, and use the senses!
Originally posted by Grokesx:
quote:I'm not sure what this confusion actually is. In my opinion the only thing that separates science from philosophy is the testing part of science. Otherwise they are concerned with the same thing - exploring the world rationally. Philosophy's brief is wider - encompassing all logical possibilities (and also the nature of logic itself) leading to nooks and crannies of sheer bloody uselessness. At best, in one of those crannies is a path to theology.
But this is the old confusion between method and philosophy, isn't it?
quote:That's not the whole story, though. The success of science implies that 'there is only nature in nature'. Or at the very least there is only nature in the lab or on those occasions where we work really hard to eliminate biases and to make the work repeatable and as free from error as we possibly can. Thus, the modern scientist ignores the supernatural not only because the supernatural is not required for science to be successful, but taking it seriously would cripple science beyond imagining.
Science uses a naturalistic method, but that does not lead to a naturalistic philosophy. In other words, if scientists study nature, they are not implying 'there is only nature'.
They are ignoring anything else, partly because, as Grokesx said, there is no method for describing the supernatural; in other words, it is all guesswork
This is not to deny that nothing supernatural exists at all, or that our natural world is not the work of some supernatural entity. The possibility of forces working outside the realm of what we can empirically detect cannot be discounted. But the success of methodological naturalistic science severely constrains what the supernaturalist can claim about the world, which is why, I suppose, modern theology relies on empty verbiage - culminating in the apophatic variety of discourse - or endless wibbling about the guesswork, as we see on show here. Or else barfing out "Scientism!" or similar every verse end.
quote:Theology and philosophy always went hand in hand until around the reformation: peaches and cream.
Originally posted by Grokesx:
quote:I'm not sure what this confusion actually is. In my opinion the only thing that separates science from philosophy is the testing part of science. Otherwise they are concerned with the same thing - exploring the world rationally. Philosophy's brief is wider - encompassing all logical possibilities (and also the nature of logic itself) leading to nooks and crannies of sheer bloody uselessness. At best, in one of those crannies is a path to theology.
But this is the old confusion between method and philosophy, isn't it?
quote:Hm, there are people whose concern it is, though. Every engineering project there has ever been has relied on some science being a pretty good fit with reality. Not to mention medicine.
I would say that strictly speaking, the scientist makes observations about appearances - the status of those appearances vis a vis reality is not his/her concern usually.
quote:
When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others.
quote:Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. The Anscombe Myth rears its head again. I actually have both editions of 'Miracles' - the naughty one with the 'objectionable' chapter, and a later edition with the rewrite. Lewis' argument is substantially the same! And furthermore, Elizabeth Anscombe accepted the revised version. This is what she wrote about the debate and its effect on Lewis:
Originally posted by Grokesx
Although your St Clive, when he argued that naturalism is self refuting got his arse handed to him on a plate by a Catholic theologian. He altered the book the argument was in and never wrote apologetics again. How much the two events were connected has been the subject of (not much) debate. Since, I think, the whole thing hinged on the definition of "because", normal people have not taken much interest.
quote:(from the introduction to her Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind, 1981 - emphasis mine.)
The fact that Lewis rewrote that chapter, and rewrote it so that it now has those qualities [to meet Anscombe's objections], shows his honesty and seriousness. The meeting of the Socratic Club at which I read my paper has been described by several of his friends as a horrible and shocking experience which upset him very much. Neither Dr. Havard (who had Lewis and me to dinner a few weeks later) nor Professor Jack Bennet remembered any such feelings on Lewis's part [...]. My own recollection is that it was an occasion of sober discussion of certain quite definite criticisms, which Lewis's rethinking and rewriting showed he thought was accurate. I am inclined to construe the odd accounts of the matter by some of his friends — who seem not to have been interested in the actual arguments or the subject-matter — as an interesting example of the phenomenon called projection.
quote:Someone should have told Lewis that, then - in the very letter you cite we find:
It's only naive intellectual onlookers, who have some axe to grind, who see such debates as personal affairs of "winning and losing"
quote:15 years on he's still bothered.
Lewis told me in 1963 that he thought he won the debate with Anscombe at the Socratic Club in 1948.
quote:Well, if I could list all the attributes of a normal person, the one that says s/he needs to take account of the ground-consequent and cause-effect senses of "because" in deciding whether there is a god or not would be unlikely to make the cut.
By the way... it really is remarkable that it seems your definition of "normal people" is: "people who cannot understand the difference between causation and justification", hence your nonsensical comment.
quote:I don't think the subject is a load of woo. The way you treat it, though, is a different matter altogether.
It's pretty basic epistemology (you know, the subject that you are referring to in all your posts when you seek to elucidate the scientific method. The subject you seem to think is a load of woo)
quote:I do not accept the idea that God 'tortures' people.
Originally posted by Evensong:
quote:Thank you for explaining your position Mudfrog. Why don't you accept this premise? It's what the bible says.
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
Evensong, let me explain.
You use the words 'torture and punish'; From that I infer you think the belief is that at death God decides who is to be condemned and then actively punishes them on the basis of his last judgment.
I do not accept this premise at all.
quote:So you too interpret things symbolically when you don't like the literal truth.
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
Torture? Fire? Haloes? Wings?
All symbolic
That's usually what you accuse others of doing. Like Adeodatus has said above.
quote:There is no The Doctrine of The Atonement. You should say your particular doctrine of the atonement believes....
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
The doctrine of the atonement says very clearly that all mankind is at enmity with God as the default position - Jesus said we are condemned already;
quote:
Originally posted by Evensong:
quote:There is no The Doctrine of The Atonement. You should say your particular doctrine of the atonement believes....
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
The doctrine of the atonement says very clearly that all mankind is at enmity with God as the default position - Jesus said we are condemned already;
.......and I don't recall Jesus saying we are condemned already. I think that's Pauline theology.
quote:As far as Noah, etc, are concerned - just read Hebrews 11. These people were all counted as righteous and were saved. The cross works backwards too and saved all those who were faithful to God's revelation in their day.
"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God's one and only Son.
"Whoever believes in the Son has life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God's wrath remains on him."
Jesus
quote:A lot of clarity of truth came through the coming of Jesus - what was the point of him being a teacher and the final revelation of God's word, if he didn't bring a fuller revelation of the truth?
Originally posted by Evensong:
p.s. Mudfrog.
As someone that believes he takes scripture seriously I'd be interested to hear your opinion on when you see the New Testament idea of Hell coming into existence. It did not exist in the Old Testament scriptures. Sheol paints quite a different picture.
I've mentioned on the other thread that I wonder if the reality of Hell (and yes - I do believe in its reality - just not the torture) came about through the advent of Christ.
What do you think? When and why did the New Testament notion of Hell emerge?
quote:Ah John has all condemned already. I wonder how that squares with Jesus saying he came not to call the righteous.
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
quote:
Originally posted by Evensong:
quote:There is no The Doctrine of The Atonement. You should say your particular doctrine of the atonement believes....
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
The doctrine of the atonement says very clearly that all mankind is at enmity with God as the default position - Jesus said we are condemned already;
.......and I don't recall Jesus saying we are condemned already. I think that's Pauline theology.quote:As far as Noah, etc, are concerned - just read Hebrews 11. These people were all counted as righteous and were saved. The cross works backwards too and saved all those who were faithful to God's revelation in their day.
"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God's one and only Son.
"Whoever believes in the Son has life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God's wrath remains on him."
Jesus
Believing that the Bible expresses truth through symbolism does not make an evangelical a liberal. I do not believe, for example, that Jesus is a real lamb. Neither do I believe God smells sacrifices or walks in gardens. Do you really believe that evangelicals take such things totally literally?
quote:Many people take torture in Hell quite literally, yes. And they would say you are in error in not doing so too.
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
Believing that the Bible expresses truth through symbolism does not make an evangelical a liberal. I do not believe, for example, that Jesus is a real lamb. Neither do I believe God smells sacrifices or walks in gardens. Do you really believe that evangelicals take such things totally literally?
quote:Why is it so hard to believe the Kingdom of God came near in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus?
Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
What about those who have been "told correctly" but much as they'd love to believe it's true, just find they don't?
quote:Do you mean "what should they do?" or "what happens to them in the end?"
Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
What about those who have been "told correctly" but much as they'd love to believe it's true, just find they don't?
quote:I agree with that entirely.
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
quote:Do you mean "what should they do?" or "what happens to them in the end?"
Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
What about those who have been "told correctly" but much as they'd love to believe it's true, just find they don't?
I'm suspecting the latter. In which case I would leave them to the mercy of God. There's a huge difference between "just can't" and "just won't." And I'm sure God can tell the difference.
quote:Well he doesn't say they are condemned with no chance of redemption - that's the whole point of being 'saved' - we who are all condemned can, through belief (faith and trust) in the Son, be taken out of condemnation. As Paul says 'there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.'
Originally posted by Evensong:
Ah John has all condemned already. I wonder how that squares with Jesus saying he came not to call the righteous.
quote:
As for Hebrews 11 that speaks of righteousness through faith. It speaks of a heavenly reward prepared by Jesus in the age to come. But it does not speak about righteousness through faith in Christ. It speaks of righteousness through faith. All those ancestor knew nothing of Christ's life, death and resurrection yet they were still righteous.
quote:You really believe in a fiery place of torture as described by Dante?
Many people take torture in Hell quite literally, yes. And they would say you are in error in not doing so too.
quote:I know many people who "just can't" - I often find myself on the edge of that category myself. I've never met anyone who "just won't".
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
quote:Do you mean "what should they do?" or "what happens to them in the end?"
Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
What about those who have been "told correctly" but much as they'd love to believe it's true, just find they don't?
I'm suspecting the latter. In which case I would leave them to the mercy of God. There's a huge difference between "just can't" and "just won't." And I'm sure God can tell the difference.
quote:Hmm, does this suggest a new (to me, anyway) twist on conditional universalism? Some people may well refuse to believe in and follow Jesus but that must be because they've not been presented with all the evidence properly, otherwise how could they refuse to believe in and follow him? And given that they've been presented the evidence in defective, substandard fashion, God will not condemn them...?
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
Yes, 'just won't' is an interesting idea. I suppose it means people who are confronted with all the evidence (!), and still refuse to believe in something. Do such people actually exist?
quote:YES!
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl
Yes, 'just won't' is an interesting idea. I suppose it means people who are confronted with all the evidence (!), and still refuse to believe in something. Do such people actually exist?
quote:No amount of evidence will persuade some people.
If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rise from the dead.
quote:The point is, there are/were righteous people before the coming of Christ so everyone cannot be "condemned" as a baseline starting point.
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
quote:Well he doesn't say they are condemned with no chance of redemption - that's the whole point of being 'saved' - we who are all condemned can, through belief (faith and trust) in the Son, be taken out of condemnation. As Paul says 'there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.'
Originally posted by Evensong:
Ah John has all condemned already. I wonder how that squares with Jesus saying he came not to call the righteous.
quote:
As for Hebrews 11 that speaks of righteousness through faith. It speaks of a heavenly reward prepared by Jesus in the age to come. But it does not speak about righteousness through faith in Christ. It speaks of righteousness through faith. All those ancestor knew nothing of Christ's life, death and resurrection yet they were still righteous.
Yes, you're quite right - but this was OT, not post-Christ. You'll read that their faith was reckoned to them as righteousness. It was said that to be commended, to please God, we must believe he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him. Their faith in God (who was, after all the God who was incarnate in Jesus) is what was commended. It seems to me from this list of saints that God is confirming the covenants made in the OT that are fuilfilled in Christ. When Jesus went to Sheol to announce the Gospel I believe he went there to bring out those who had died in the faith of YHWH and lead them out to their reward. I don't see that anyone who lived under God's covenants before Jesus came is excluded from salvation - they are God's elect after all.
quote:But why don't they? You didn't answer my questions above.
Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
So what do you make of the many people I know who would love to believe but just find they don't? These refusers may exist, but I've never actually met one.
quote:Why is it so hard to believe that there's a pink unicorn in my back garden?
Originally posted by Evensong:
quote:Why is it so hard to believe the Kingdom of God came near in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus?
Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
What about those who have been "told correctly" but much as they'd love to believe it's true, just find they don't?
quote:Do you reject the Way of the Pink Unicorn? If so, why?
Do you reject the Kingdom of God? If so, why?
quote:Without the supernaturalism, I can happily do the rest without bringing religion into it.
If its the supernaturalism that is a stumbling block, cut it out and throw it into the fire.
Those who do the will of God are Jesus' brothers and sisters.
quote:I have now.
Originally posted by Evensong:
quote:But why don't they? You didn't answer my questions above.
Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
So what do you make of the many people I know who would love to believe but just find they don't? These refusers may exist, but I've never actually met one.
quote:You can happily do God's will without bringing religion into it? How?
Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
quote:Without the supernaturalism, I can happily do the rest without bringing religion into it.
If its the supernaturalism that is a stumbling block, cut it out and throw it into the fire.
Those who do the will of God are Jesus' brothers and sisters.
quote:Tell me what you think they are.
Originally posted by Evensong:
quote:You can happily do God's will without bringing religion into it? How?
Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
quote:Without the supernaturalism, I can happily do the rest without bringing religion into it.
If its the supernaturalism that is a stumbling block, cut it out and throw it into the fire.
Those who do the will of God are Jesus' brothers and sisters.
Do you believe in the values of the Kingdom or not?
quote:Aye. It's thoughts like this that make me ask these questions. Most of my family have reasons they cannot believe God is there, or at least, if he is, gives a shit. To them, the demand appears to be "believe, despite the evidence."
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
I was thinking about my family - my father was uninterested in religion; my mother was vehemently opposed to it; my wife went to a Christian boarding school, and then gave it up; I sort of dabble with religions.
Would God really condemn such people? Then rather like the Groucho Marx joke, he's not worth believing in.
quote:I thought that faith was often defined as belief without evidence. It would be a bit strong to say, against the evidence, as that suggests that there is evidence that there is no God. Errm, no, I don't want to go there, as it gets into various arguments about atheism. Horror, horror, horror, not atheism, but arguments about it.
Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
quote:Aye. It's thoughts like this that make me ask these questions. Most of my family have reasons they cannot believe God is there, or at least, if he is, gives a shit. To them, the demand appears to be "believe, despite the evidence."
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
I was thinking about my family - my father was uninterested in religion; my mother was vehemently opposed to it; my wife went to a Christian boarding school, and then gave it up; I sort of dabble with religions.
Would God really condemn such people? Then rather like the Groucho Marx joke, he's not worth believing in.
quote:Slight rephrasing--these refusers are not people who "would love to believe but don't," that's self-contradictory. Rather these are people who refuse to believe for illegitimate reasons (remember, I'm not talking about the "can't believers" here, I'm talking about the "won't believers").
Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
So what do you make of the many people I know who would love to believe but just find they don't? These refusers may exist, but I've never actually met one.
quote:I'm not. Because I've never met any. I know shedloads of Can't Believers though, which is why I'm interested in them. People don't seem to want to talk about them. Why? Why the focus instead on this hypothetical group of people who think Christianity probably is true but don't want to believe it is?
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
quote:Slight rephrasing--these refusers are not people who "would love to believe but don't," that's self-contradictory. Rather these are people who refuse to believe for illegitimate reasons (remember, I'm not talking about the "can't believers" here, I'm talking about the "won't believers").
Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
So what do you make of the many people I know who would love to believe but just find they don't? These refusers may exist, but I've never actually met one.
quote:Why should I? Matters more what you think they are. What is this "the rest" that you speak of?
Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
quote:Tell me what you think they are.
Originally posted by Evensong:
quote:You can happily do God's will without bringing religion into it? How?
Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
quote:Without the supernaturalism, I can happily do the rest without bringing religion into it.
If its the supernaturalism that is a stumbling block, cut it out and throw it into the fire.
Those who do the will of God are Jesus' brothers and sisters.
Do you believe in the values of the Kingdom or not?
quote:So you think the life, death and resurrection of Jesus was completely made up by some enterprising disciples and everybody got seriously duped and has been duped for the last 2,000 years.
Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
quote:Why is it so hard to believe that there's a pink unicorn in my back garden?
Originally posted by Evensong:
quote:Why is it so hard to believe the Kingdom of God came near in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus?
Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
What about those who have been "told correctly" but much as they'd love to believe it's true, just find they don't?
quote:Do you reject the Way of the Pink Unicorn? If so, why?
Do you reject the Kingdom of God? If so, why?
quote:I didn't say I can't believe. I said I find it very difficult. I do not suppose the resurrection story was "made up by some enterprising disciples", but there're rather a lot of other possibilities between "made up out of whole cloth in 35AD" and "completely true", aren't there? Mistake? Hallucinations? Exaggeration? It's an extraordinary claim and does need rather better support than it has to gain uncritical acceptance.
Originally posted by Evensong:
quote:So you think the life, death and resurrection of Jesus was completely made up by some enterprising disciples and everybody got seriously duped and has been duped for the last 2,000 years.
Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
quote:Why is it so hard to believe that there's a pink unicorn in my back garden?
Originally posted by Evensong:
quote:Why is it so hard to believe the Kingdom of God came near in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus?
Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
What about those who have been "told correctly" but much as they'd love to believe it's true, just find they don't?
quote:Do you reject the Way of the Pink Unicorn? If so, why?
Do you reject the Kingdom of God? If so, why?
You believe that Jesus' values on how to love God and love each other have no truth or beauty or goodness in them.
You only try to put up with this farce because you're terrified you might go to hell if it does turn out to be true in the end.
Does that sound about right?
Is that why you can't believe?
quote:It was people insisting that God would do that that finally broke my faith.
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
I was thinking about my family - my father was uninterested in religion; my mother was vehemently opposed to it; my wife went to a Christian boarding school, and then gave it up; I sort of dabble with religions.
Would God really condemn such people? Then rather like the Groucho Marx joke, he's not worth believing in.
quote:The solution I've found is to take Christian symbols and rituals as helpful signs, which to some extent fit my own view of life. However, I realized a while ago, that symbols and rituals in other religions are also useful!
Originally posted by Ikkyu:
quote:It was people insisting that God would do that that finally broke my faith.
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
I was thinking about my family - my father was uninterested in religion; my mother was vehemently opposed to it; my wife went to a Christian boarding school, and then gave it up; I sort of dabble with religions.
Would God really condemn such people? Then rather like the Groucho Marx joke, he's not worth believing in.
That human impulse to condemn the "other" the "unbeliever" to hell or to be burned at the stake.
I would classify myself as one of those "would believe if I could" people. I would love to have good reasons to believe. I just don't see them. Being a non believer is not easier or less demanding, you have to come up with reasons to keep going and live a full life that hopefully helps your fellow beings. Thankfully other humans have also been faced with the same issues and you can learn from their example.
quote:Now that's a little different from Pink unicorns....
Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
I didn't say I can't believe. I said I find it very difficult. I do not suppose the resurrection story was "made up by some enterprising disciples", but there're rather a lot of other possibilities between "made up out of whole cloth in 35AD" and "completely true", aren't there? Mistake? Hallucinations? Exaggeration? It's an extraordinary claim and does need rather better support than it has to gain uncritical acceptance.
quote:I think I've responded to this post by speaking to Karl above. Shout if not.
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
Evensong
The trouble with your formulations is that they combine various kinds of ideas. Thus, I doubt that the life and death of Jesus were made up; it just seems unlikely to me. However, that is quite different from the resurrection.
Similarly, Jesus' values are interesting, however, to be a Christian requires more than that.
I don't think I will go to hell, for sure.
I'm not sure now if my reasons for the 'suspension of belief' are illegitimate or not! Whatever.
quote:It's not for me to make anything of these people, because only God is their judge. I believe that God judges people on the basis of their response to the light He has given them. I really don't think that that response can be measured in religious terms. Of course, there are those who will try to measure it, and there is a tome on my shelf which attempts this very thing. It's called 'Operation World' - an attempt not only to work out how many Christians there are in each country of the world, but also how many 'evangelicals' (you know... how many of those so called 'Christians' are the Real McCoy. *sigh*).
Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider
So what do you make of the many people I know who would love to believe but just find they don't? These refusers may exist, but I've never actually met one.
quote:I'm darned sure there's a parable about that...
Originally posted by no prophet:
This discussion makes me ask:
Do you have to believe to be a Christian, or can you just act like one? Behaving as if you believe? Isn't this good enough? What about those who profess to believe buy refrain from acting like they do?
quote:When I was a practising Christian, I suppose my position was basically, 'I don't know'. Well, I still don't know, but I realized there are lots of other things that I don't know! So you see, there is progress in life.
Originally posted by no prophet:
This discussion makes me ask:
Do you have to believe to be a Christian, or can you just act like one? Behaving as if you believe? Isn't this good enough? What about those who profess to believe buy refrain from acting like they do?
quote:My avatar tries to stick out its tongue back at your avatar, but mine lacks a face. So CYK* instead.
Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
quote:I'm darned sure there's a parable about that...
Originally posted by no prophet:
This discussion makes me ask:
Do you have to believe to be a Christian, or can you just act like one? Behaving as if you believe? Isn't this good enough? What about those who profess to believe buy refrain from acting like they do?
quote:I'm still not convinced of this army of "won't"s. IME, if something seems to be true, you believe it by definition. If it doesn't, you don't. The idea of refusing to believe something you "know" is true seems a bit non-sensical to me. But I know that not everyone parses "believe" as being equivalent to "think is true", as I do. To be fair, they can be represented with the same word in some languages - Credo (Latin), I believe/I think; Credu (Welsh) Believe, think; Croire (French) to believe, to think. Yes there's also Meddwl (Welsh) and Penser (French) which only mean "think", but there's a very close relationship between the concepts.
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
What is the difference between just can't and just won't? How can one tell if a person can't or won't?
quote:I think the definition of "believe" is pretty crucial here. I don't know any people who say (or imply) "I think the story of Jesus is probably true, but I refuse to accept that it is true" -- because that would be, as you say, kind of a nonsensical statement.
Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
quote:I'm still not convinced of this army of "won't"s. IME, if something seems to be true, you believe it by definition. If it doesn't, you don't. The idea of refusing to believe something you "know" is true seems a bit non-sensical to me. But I know that not everyone parses "believe" as being equivalent to "think is true", as I do. To be fair, they can be represented with the same word in some languages - Credo (Latin), I believe/I think; Credu (Welsh) Believe, think; Croire (French) to believe, to think. Yes there's also Meddwl (Welsh) and Penser (French) which only mean "think", but there's a very close relationship between the concepts.
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
What is the difference between just can't and just won't? How can one tell if a person can't or won't?
quote:Apples and oranges. I'm not hugely knowledgeable about the ministry and death of Muhammad but I don't recall him being killed very early on in his ministry when his disciples were but few and then appearing to many of them bodily after his death.
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
Evensong
OK. On your first point - survival of Christianity, does that mean that Islam survived because Mohammed really flew to heaven on a winged horse?
quote:Again, while mystical experiences are not unique to Christianity, this does not belie the fact that the risen Christ has appeared to many through the ages and provides continuing evidence to his living. That's what we're talking about here: evidence.
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
On mystical experiences, well, they go on around the world, in different religions and rituals. I'm not sure why Christian ones have special status, except of course, to Christians!
quote:You're welcome to reject the evidence. You do have free will after all.
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
I am fine with you believing in the resurrection, as long as I don't have to.
quote:The language point is a good one.
Originally posted by no prophet:
This discussion makes me ask:
Do you have to believe to be a Christian, or can you just act like one? Behaving as if you believe? Isn't this good enough?
quote:Faith to me is trust or faithfulness. Fits well with the most common word for faith in the NT too: pistis.
I am increasingly of the opinion that it is important to distinguish between faith as "trust" and faith as "belief", and that salvation by faith is essentially about having trust in Jesus Christ rather than belief in a set of theological propositions.
Those listed for their faith by Hebrews (Chapter 11) are commended essentially because they had trust in God, though many of their beliefs were questionable. IMO
quote:I know quite a few people who have had a direct experience of past lives. Is this evidence? Depends on how you define 'evidence' - I would say not. Confirmation bias, probably.
Evensong wrote:
Again, while mystical experiences are not unique to Christianity, this does not belie the fact that the risen Christ has appeared to many through the ages and provides continuing evidence to his living. That's what we're talking about here: evidence.
quote:I don't think it's possible to state that, as confirmation bias is probably largely unconscious. This stands to reason, since if it was conscious, and we were aware of it, we could lift the bias. But it isn't, and we can't. It's like lifting yourself by your bootstraps. It makes discussions difficult, since what seems perfectly sensible and obvious to oneself, can strike others as a bias or as wish fulfillment or even barking mad.
Originally posted by Evensong:
Well there was no confirmation bias in my experience. As I said, I grew up in Indonesia and knew nothing about Christianity.
quote:Well, I think we began by talking about evidence, as you seem to think that your own experiences are evidence. OK, my friends who have experienced past lives cite that as their evidence.
Originally posted by Evensong:
Confirmation bias may be "largely" unconscious in the way you describe (but you're redefining the term there do you realise?) but it still requires pre-conceived notions.
I didn't have any about Jesus. I didn't know anything about him: conscious or unconscious.
quote:Your confirmation bias speaking there?
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
I think we began by talking about evidence, as you seem to think that your own experiences are evidence. OK, my friends who have experienced past lives cite that as their evidence.
So for me, all these beliefs are similar, and I am equally skeptical about them
quote:I didn't say my particularly Christian mystical experience was extra special. I pointed out similar corollaries for evidence could be established in other traditions (as I mentioned above with Islam).
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
I suppose Christians like to say that their evidence is that little bit extra special because the capo de tutti capi has vouchsafed them! You have to admire the chutzpah anyway.
quote:It's a good thing that modern scholarship is doing so much to challenge the tired old evengelical interpretations of Scripture. Jesus spoke in Aramaic. By the time the New Testament came to its present form it was in Greek, which was subsequently translated into most of the world's languages. Something is always lost in translation. If you read N T Wrights books, "The Resurrection of the Son of God" and "Surprised by Hope" you will see that what John calls eternal life is synonymous with what Matthew calls the kingdom of heaven, and they have nothing to do with what happens when we die.
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
The doctrine of the atonement says very clearly that all mankind is at enmity with God as the default position - Jesus said we are condemned already ;
quote:I would say unequivocally that someone who acts as a Christian even where their belief is lacking (eg Mother Theresa at times) is a much better Christian than a "believer" who does nothing. In the Parable of the Two Sons (Matt 21:28-32) Jesus makes it clear that the son who refused to help, but repented and did the job did the will of his father, while the son who offered to do the job but didn't, had not.
Originally posted by no prophet:
Do you have to believe to be a Christian, or can you just act like one? Behaving as if you believe? Isn't this good enough? What about those who profess to believe buy refrain from acting like they do?
quote:Yes, I agree that there is so much more to the word 'eternal' than the concept of 'everlasting' as translated by those pesky evangelicals in the King James Bible of 1611 in John 3 v 16!!
Originally posted by PaulTH*:
quote:It's a good thing that modern scholarship is doing so much to challenge the tired old evengelical interpretations of Scripture. Jesus spoke in Aramaic. By the time the New Testament came to its present form it was in Greek, which was subsequently translated into most of the world's languages. Something is always lost in translation. If you read N T Wrights books, "The Resurrection of the Son of God" and "Surprised by Hope" you will see that what John calls eternal life is synonymous with what Matthew calls the kingdom of heaven, and they have nothing to do with what happens when we die.
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
The doctrine of the atonement says very clearly that all mankind is at enmity with God as the default position - Jesus said we are condemned already ;
John 17.3 reads, " And this is eternal life, that they know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.". So here, eternal life means to have an interactive relationship with the only true God and with Jesus Christ, his messenger. The same as being in the kingdom of heaven. An abundant life centred on a relationship with God. The use of the word eternal, or aionios in Greek means pertaining to the age, so eternal damnation could correctly be rendered as age-enduring correction. In Jesus' culture, there was the present age, and the age to come, so correction endures to the end of the present age.
A bg question also hangs over the use of the word belief, or pistis in Greek. It is much more closely related to faith or faithfulness, than it is to mental assent. So where Mudfrog would say that those who don't believe in Jesus go to eternal damnation, I take that to mean that those who don't faithfully obey His commandments go to a punishmnent whch shows them the error of their ways. True repentance with purposeful ammendent of life can, of course, remit the punishments due for sin. In Hebrews 5:8, we read;
"Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered; 9 and being made perfect he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him."
To obey him! No mention of compulsive belief! Himself, he said, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments."(John 14:14) and "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you." (John 15:12). So I simply don't agree that the overall message of Scripture is about believing in order to avoid eternal hell. It's about loving in order to do God's will, in the promise of the resurrection to a new cosmos freed from the decadence of corruption.
quote:I would say unequivocally that someone who acts as a Christian even where their belief is lacking (eg Mother Theresa at times) is a much better Christian than a "believer" who does nothing. In the Parable of the Two Sons (Matt 21:28-32) Jesus makes it clear that the son who refused to help, but repented and did the job did the will of his father, while the son who offered to do the job but didn't, had not.
Originally posted by no prophet:
Do you have to believe to be a Christian, or can you just act like one? Behaving as if you believe? Isn't this good enough? What about those who profess to believe buy refrain from acting like they do?
quote:
Originally posted by PaulTH*:
Jesus spoke in Aramaic. By the time the New Testament came to its present form it was in Greek, which was subsequently translated into most of the world's languages. Something is always lost in translation.
quote:
Originally posted by PaulTH*:
John 17.3 reads, " And this is eternal life, that they know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.". So here, eternal life means to have an interactive relationship with the only true God and with Jesus Christ, his messenger. The same as being in the kingdom of heaven. An abundant life centred on a relationship with God.
quote:
Originally posted by PaulTH*:
A big question also hangs over the use of the word belief, or pistis in Greek. It is much more closely related to faith or faithfulness, than it is to mental assent.
quote:
Originally posted by PaulTH*:
True repentance with purposeful amendment of life can, of course, remit the punishments due for sin.
quote:
Originally posted by PaulTH*:
In Hebrews 5:8, we read;
"Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered; 9 and being made perfect he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him."
To obey him! No mention of compulsive belief! Himself, he said, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments."(John 14:14) and "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you." (John 15:12).
quote:
Then they said to him, “What must we do, to be doing pthe works of God?” Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent." (John 6:28-29)
quote:
Originally posted by PaulTH*:
I would say unequivocally that someone who acts as a Christian even where their belief is lacking (eg Mother Theresa at times) is a much better Christian than a "believer" who does nothing.
quote:
“Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”
quote:One thing that puzzles me about hell is that without it, Christianity makes no sense, does it? If Christ is the bulwark against it, but it's not there, then why do we need a bulwark?
Originally posted by Evensong:
quote:Your confirmation bias speaking there?
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
I think we began by talking about evidence, as you seem to think that your own experiences are evidence. OK, my friends who have experienced past lives cite that as their evidence.
So for me, all these beliefs are similar, and I am equally skeptical about them
quote:I didn't say my particularly Christian mystical experience was extra special. I pointed out similar corollaries for evidence could be established in other traditions (as I mentioned above with Islam).
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
I suppose Christians like to say that their evidence is that little bit extra special because the capo de tutti capi has vouchsafed them! You have to admire the chutzpah anyway.
Oh look, more confirmation bias!
quote:There is a hell, but it is empty. And it is empty because of Jesus.
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
One thing that puzzles me about hell is that without it, Christianity makes no sense, does it? If Christ is the bulwark against it, but it's not there, then why do we need a bulwark?
quote:How do you know this?
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
quote:There is a hell, but it is empty. And it is empty because of Jesus.
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
One thing that puzzles me about hell is that without it, Christianity makes no sense, does it? If Christ is the bulwark against it, but it's not there, then why do we need a bulwark?
quote:Just my 2 cents-- my own unsubstantiated speculation cuz that's what we do here. But it is one way that Christianity can "make sense" w/o an inhabited hell. Whether it is the actual "way things work"-- well, we'll just have to wait and see, won't we?
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
quote:How do you know this?
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
quote:There is a hell, but it is empty. And it is empty because of Jesus.
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
One thing that puzzles me about hell is that without it, Christianity makes no sense, does it? If Christ is the bulwark against it, but it's not there, then why do we need a bulwark?
quote:That's fair enough, although it's a bit like inventing a problem for a solution, isn't it? Oh well, most of religion is like that, I guess. The Buddha says that he has found a solution for suffering, but that presupposes that suffering is a problem. So it goes.
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
quote:Just my 2 cents-- my own unsubstantiated speculation cuz that's what we do here. But it is one way that Christianity can "make sense" w/o an inhabited hell. Whether it is the actual "way things work"-- well, we'll just have to wait and see, won't we?
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
quote:How do you know this?
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
quote:There is a hell, but it is empty. And it is empty because of Jesus.
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
One thing that puzzles me about hell is that without it, Christianity makes no sense, does it? If Christ is the bulwark against it, but it's not there, then why do we need a bulwark?
quote:um.... you were the one who "invented the problem", right? I was simply answering your question with my humble opinion.
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
quote:That's fair enough, although it's a bit like inventing a problem for a solution, isn't it? Oh well, most of religion is like that, I guess. The Buddha says that he has found a solution for suffering, but that presupposes that suffering is a problem. So it goes.
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
quote:Just my 2 cents-- my own unsubstantiated speculation cuz that's what we do here. But it is one way that Christianity can "make sense" w/o an inhabited hell. Whether it is the actual "way things work"-- well, we'll just have to wait and see, won't we?
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
quote:How do you know this?
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
quote:There is a hell, but it is empty. And it is empty because of Jesus.
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
One thing that puzzles me about hell is that without it, Christianity makes no sense, does it? If Christ is the bulwark against it, but it's not there, then why do we need a bulwark?
quote:Great point!
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
One thing that puzzles me about hell is that without it, Christianity makes no sense, does it? If Christ is the bulwark against it, but it's not there, then why do we need a bulwark?
quote:Only if the "precautions" are something unpleasant or undesirable. When it comes to financial ruin then definitely there is a cost to the precautions you take-- the $$ socked away in your 401K is $$ you can't spend on a trip to Tahiti. But with Christianity, we believe the life in Christ is the best possible life you could have-- the life of the Kingdom, the abundant life as others have noted. So it's not at all about "taking precautions". It's about experiencing in the here and now a foretaste of the wonderful banquet to come.
Originally posted by Freddy:
quote:Great point!
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
One thing that puzzles me about hell is that without it, Christianity makes no sense, does it? If Christ is the bulwark against it, but it's not there, then why do we need a bulwark?
It would be like taking precautions against financial ruin if the risk was actually negligible or nonexistent.
quote:Absolutely. The 'taking precautions' analogy is only at all valid if Christianity is merely the promise of a ticket to heaven for when you die. My Bible talks about rather more than that...
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
But with Christianity, we believe the life in Christ is the best possible life you could have-- the life of the Kingdom, the abundant life as others have noted. So it's not at all about "taking precautions". It's about experiencing in the here and now a foretaste of the wonderful banquet to come.
quote:I'm not saying any of those things. Though Jesus, having taken on the limitations of a human brain, was culturally conditioned, I'm sure His awareness of His Father was enough to inform Him of the reality of the afterlife, and that the kingdom doesn't end with death. But in both this world and the next, the reality of the kingdom is living the moment in God's presence, which can also be described as eternal life. As for the Church's teaching on faith:
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
Are you saying that the Church Universal is all wrong for teaching, as she does, that faith in Christ is necessary for salvation? Are you suggesting that Jesus himself had no concept of the afterlife to which he was calling people? Are you saying that the Kingdom of God which has come near, is ended by death?
quote:It also makes my point beautifully. I don't say there's no overlap between faith and belief, but Christianity has taught for so long that believeing in Jesus is the key to salvation, and IMO, it misses the point. I am familiar enough with the writings of the Christian mystics to know that the dark night of the soul is part of growing in faith. Those are the times when belief is at its weakest.
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
Though your example makes my point beautifully. Based on her journals, Mother Theresa suffered from an absence of the sense of God for really long, long periods of time. Maybe I should call that "a sense of the absence of God." Either way, it's a terribly painful condition. But it is wholly consistent with the experience of the saints of all ages, and with that of Jesus himself. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
quote:I wasn't being snarky at all. I see a lot of Christian views as trying to work out what the problem is, for which Christ is the solution.
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
perhaps my mistake was in assuming your question was serious, and not snarky...
quote:Excellent point. It's a win-win.
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
But with Christianity, we believe the life in Christ is the best possible life you could have-- the life of the Kingdom, the abundant life as others have noted. So it's not at all about "taking precautions". It's about experiencing in the here and now a foretaste of the wonderful banquet to come.
quote:That is so right.
Originally posted by South Coast Kevin:
Absolutely. The 'taking precautions' analogy is only at all valid if Christianity is merely the promise of a ticket to heaven for when you die. My Bible talks about rather more than that...
quote:If you place the emphasis on "continue," then we may be saying the same thing. I call that kind of endurance, whether shown in action or in simple refusal to give up, faith; you appear to see it through the lens of works. And to be sure, faith always expresses itself in works, and cannot be without works, and as Luther put it,
Originally posted by PaulTH*:
The salvific faith is to do as Mother Theresa did during those spiritually dry periods, which was to get on with her work of helping the poor. Faith is to persist in the face of all adversity, which for many in history has involved persecution. For others it involves long spiritual nights of dry doubt. Maintaining Christian integrity in all those situations is what makes saints.
quote:But I am happy. Are you saying that I should be happier?
Originally posted by Freddy:
quote:That is so right.
Originally posted by South Coast Kevin:
Absolutely. The 'taking precautions' analogy is only at all valid if Christianity is merely the promise of a ticket to heaven for when you die. My Bible talks about rather more than that...
The point is not about facing the pain of hell in the future. The point is that following Jesus takes away the pain now - and also forever.
It's really about the pursuit of happiness. What is happiness? It is what happens if we obey Jesus.
quote:But again, YOU were the one who raised it as a problem. YOU were the one who said you were "puzzled" by the fact that "Christianity doesn't work without hell". I was merely answering a question YOU asked, naively taking you at your word. So yes, I would conclude that YOU invented a problem to set up your snarky little response.
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
quote:I wasn't being snarky at all. I see a lot of Christian views as trying to work out what the problem is, for which Christ is the solution.
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
perhaps my mistake was in assuming your question was serious, and not snarky...
This seems back to front to me. I can see that you have found a solution - but to what?
I suppose hell is a very obvious problem, but then if some Christians play down hell, or even don't believe in it, then what problem or problems are they left with? Well, there are an infinite number of things which we can see as problems of course.
But one solution is not to see them as a problem, isn't it?
quote:Which is precisely what I said. But that didn't allow room for your clever little quip about Christians having a "solution seeking a problem".
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
.
I suppose hell is a very obvious problem, but then if some Christians play down hell, or even don't believe in it, then what problem or problems are they left with? Well, there are an infinite number of things which we can see as problems of course.
But one solution is not to see them as a problem, isn't it?
quote:*shrug* Why do you ask? For what purpose?
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
quote:But I am happy. Are you saying that I should be happier?
Originally posted by Freddy:
quote:That is so right.
Originally posted by South Coast Kevin:
Absolutely. The 'taking precautions' analogy is only at all valid if Christianity is merely the promise of a ticket to heaven for when you die. My Bible talks about rather more than that...
The point is not about facing the pain of hell in the future. The point is that following Jesus takes away the pain now - and also forever.
It's really about the pursuit of happiness. What is happiness? It is what happens if we obey Jesus.
quote:THAT would be a fair-- and interesting-- question... if that's what you had done. But it isn't. Instead, you asked a different question (how does Christianity "work" with a hell) and then when I answered it, you pulled a bait & switch and asked "why do you have a solution seeking a problem", as if I had brought in a defensive answer out of the clear blue sky, rather than responding directly to your question. Which seems to be indicating that the original question was not a real question, but simply a set up for your snarky response. fwiw, I hate that.
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
cliffdweller
I don't really know why you call my questions 'baiting'. I think it's a fair question to ask of any religion - what is the problem, to which you proffer the solution?.
quote:Well, the original question about hell was directed at Evensong, as we had been having an interesting discussion about various things, such as confirmation bias. So I wondered what her views were about hell, and how a Christianity without hell works. It's fine that you answered it, but I can assure you I was not doing a bait and switch at all. Rather sad that you should feel that; anyway, it's probably better if I discuss this with others.
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
quote:THAT would be a fair-- and interesting-- question... if that's what you had done. But it isn't. Instead, you asked a different question (how does Christianity "work" with a hell) and then when I answered it, you pulled a bait & switch and asked "why do you have a solution seeking a problem", as if I had brought in a defensive answer out of the clear blue sky, rather than responding directly to your question. Which seems to be indicating that the original question was not a real question, but simply a set up for your snarky response. fwiw, I hate that.
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
cliffdweller
I don't really know why you call my questions 'baiting'. I think it's a fair question to ask of any religion - what is the problem, to which you proffer the solution?.
But I'm glad you liked at least part of my "answer seeking a problem" anyway. I'll leave it to that before we get hellish.
quote:I don't like the idea that heaven is a 'reward' - that might suggest to some that we get heaven as a reward for doing something, like we've earned it. In actual fact there is nothing we can do that would merit such a reward, given as it is entirely by grace.
Originally posted by Moo:
Here are two lines from a favorite hymn.
For thou art our salvation, Lord,
Our refuge, and our great reward.
Moo
quote:There is no "should" about it. Happiness is relative anyway. I'm thinking that everyone seeks happiness, or seeks to maintain the happiness they have.
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
But I am happy. Are you saying that I should be happier?
quote:I agree completely. My point is that Jesus is our salvation, our refuge, and our great reward in this life.
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
quote:I don't like the idea that heaven is a 'reward' - that might suggest to some that we get heaven as a reward for doing something, like we've earned it. In actual fact there is nothing we can do that would merit such a reward, given as it is entirely by grace.
Originally posted by Moo:
Here are two lines from a favorite hymn.
For thou art our salvation, Lord,
Our refuge, and our great reward.
Moo
quote:...in this life, which never ends.
Originally posted by Moo:
quote:I agree completely. My point is that Jesus is our salvation, our refuge, and our great reward in this life.
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
quote:I don't like the idea that heaven is a 'reward' - that might suggest to some that we get heaven as a reward for doing something, like we've earned it. In actual fact there is nothing we can do that would merit such a reward, given as it is entirely by grace.
Originally posted by Moo:
Here are two lines from a favorite hymn.
For thou art our salvation, Lord,
Our refuge, and our great reward.
Moo
Moo
quote:Yes. We are born again. A new creation. In the kingdom. We have life.
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Indeed. We have eternal life NOW.
![[Yipee]](graemlins/spin.gif)
quote:hmmmmm.... well, certainly sorry to have intruded on your conversation. The fact that you quoted my comment above your response was what made me think you were responding to my comment.
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
Well, the original question about hell was directed at Evensong, as we had been having an interesting discussion about various things, such as confirmation bias. So I wondered what her views were about hell, and how a Christianity without hell works. It's fine that you answered it, but I can assure you I was not doing a bait and switch at all. Rather sad that you should feel that; anyway, it's probably better if I discuss this with others.
quote:(raises hand, and speaks in a small quiet voice)
Originally posted by IngoB:
Life is no fun ride, and whoever created this place was not designing it to the standards of equity, fairness and appropriate behaviour as discussed at the latest meeting of the union of kindergarden teachers. So why would you think that ultimate salvation is for the funsies? Get a bloody grip.
quote:This of course is the elephant in the room, the emperor with no clothes and about the most egregious and terrible thing about many Christians. You're not supposed to mention such things. Leave the apple cart upright dear Martin! Let us attend church to fertilise the garden of our lives and our afterlives, stepping on and over homeless people on the way, whilst our governments spend more money on bombs and support industry's the destruction of the natural world. Let us warm the planet up, making it hell for ourselves, and all the creatures and plants living on it. This is our holy mission!
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
THE problem is us doing NOTHING about the hell in front of our eyes.
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Wherever you're condemned to by IngoB's God for that, can I come too?
![[Hot and Hormonal]](icon_redface.gif){kind=icon}
![[Axe murder]](graemlins/lovedrops.gif)
quote:I think Martin Luther would have to assume I'm doomed to the Divine Barbecue, going by the bit I've italicised. I think faith as described there is given to very few.
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
quote:If you place the emphasis on "continue," then we may be saying the same thing. I call that kind of endurance, whether shown in action or in simple refusal to give up, faith; you appear to see it through the lens of works. And to be sure, faith always expresses itself in works, and cannot be without works, and as Luther put it,
Originally posted by PaulTH*:
The salvific faith is to do as Mother Theresa did during those spiritually dry periods, which was to get on with her work of helping the poor. Faith is to persist in the face of all adversity, which for many in history has involved persecution. For others it involves long spiritual nights of dry doubt. Maintaining Christian integrity in all those situations is what makes saints.
“Faith is a divine work in us. It changes us and makes us to be born anew of God (John 1). It kills the old Adam and makes altogether different people, in heart and spirit and mind and powers, and it brings with it the Holy Spirit.
Oh, it is a living, busy, active, mighty thing, this faith. And so it is impossible for it not to do good works incessantly. It does not ask whether there are good works to do, but before the question rises, it has already done them, and is always at the doing of them.
He who does not these works is a faithless man. He gropes and looks about after faith and good works and knows neither what faith is nor what good works are, though he talks and talks, with many words about faith and good works.
Faith is a living, daring confidence in God’s grace, so sure and certain that a man would stake his life on it a thousand times. This confidence in God’s grace and knowledge of it makes men glad and bold and happy in dealing with God and all His creatures.
And this is the work of the Holy Spirit in faith. Hence a man is ready and glad, without compulsion, to do good to everyone, to serve everyone, to suffer everything, in love and praise to God, who has shown him this grace.
And thus it is impossible to separate works from faith, quite as impossible as to separate burning and shining from fire. ...
Therefore, pray to God to work faith in you. Else you will remain forever without faith, whatever you think or do.”
–Martin Luther, Commentary on Romans, Trans. J. Theodore Mueller (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1954), xvii.
quote:It might. I don't think it does. The subject of the sentence appears to be "confidence". Either way, I can see no life staking on it in my department.
Originally posted by ChastMastr:
Karl, mightn't he mean that God’s grace is "so sure and certain that a man would stake his life on it a thousand times"?
Take heart!
quote:Yes, I probably did it. He's written extensively on it.
Originally posted by Evensong:
I'm preaching on Hell in a few days. One of you (was it you Mere Nick?) provided me with a journal article from the Journal of Evangelical Theological Society titled "The Final End of the Wicked" by Edward Fudge which was quite helpful. Essentially argued for annihilation as the end of the wicked - not eternal torture of punishment.
PM me if anyone's interested and I can email it to you.
