Thread: In what ways does God give us freedom? Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.
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Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on
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A lot of weight is given to the idea that God gives us total freedom. Freedom to evolve, freedom to choose right from wrong, freedom to love Him or not.
We had this short conversation on another thread -
quote:
Originally posted by Alisdair:
quote:
If we depend on God for everything, why should he 'set us free'? - Boogie
Well, I gues that depends on your understanding of 'freedom' in the context of Love. I have done my best to set my children 'free': I have given them what I know of life, God, love, but I am trying to let them go to make their own choices about these things, rather than be compelled/manipulated into being merely a projection of myself.
Yes, me too - very much so.
But, unlike my kids, my dog could not be brought to independence in that way, yet she is still truly loved. This is also the case for my brother's 35 year old daughter who has never been able to move, speak or communicate in any way. She has Retts syndrome.
And we can never be un-dependent on God (as it's God we rely on for absolutely everything) so I still have the question 'Why set us free?' We are not free. We have something of an illusion of freedom, but that's all it is. If God loves us he does not have to set us free, he just needs to be as kind as it's possible to be to us (not indulgent, kind).
What do you think?
What is this freedom?
Is it real?
Is it necessary?
Posted by Jack o' the Green (# 11091) on
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I think first of all, that we have to make a distinction between freedom of will, and ontological freedom i.e. freedom of being. If God sustains us in existence, then we can never be free to exist without God's sustaining power. So freedom in that sense is nonexistence (interesting side topic regarding freedom from God and hell).
Regarding freedom of will, it is precisely because God sustains our existence and nature that we have the freedom to choose.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
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Superb all so far. I'll try and spoil it (and I don't have to try hard to dump on a thread ...) Freedom, what freedom? CHOICE? What choice?
We are incredibly, pathetically constrained in our autonomy in God whom we cannot experience except in our stories. As Jack said, we exist by God's choice and the rest is up to Him in us in Him. And that is a species long process. The only thing we didn't make up is Jesus. And He had to make it all up.
I want to be kind. To encourage.
I fail miserably, without even trying (see above) to be nasty. I'm helpless in privilege that I didn't choose.
I failed a guy on the street this morning coming back from my flu shot. I know him well. He just needed to talk inconsequentialities. We passed my door and I didn't invite him in, as I do have man flu (and yeah, flu shots make it EVEN worse!) was my excuse and the missus needed breakfast. He just needed some unconditional love. Some attention. I could abandon a puppy in a box on his doorstep I suppose. Or just hug the bugger. He wouldn't like it.
I used to say something here a lot and I forgot, became distracted and it comes back thanks to this thread. There is no meaningful freedom or choice. There is suffering. How is the best way to live until it's over? Eudaimonism for others? The thing I used to say was that if you're in the creation business, it's going to hurt EVERYONE concerned. No choice.
A group of us are trying to help another guy who cannot be helped and it's not his fault AT ALL. We just can't. I just hope he ends up in a mental care unit rather than a ditch. Where he is already but not dead yet.
I've no idea why God had to do it this way. The alternative is angels. That didn't work out too well. So far. They didn't have choice either. Now they know and there's no way back. So far.
Choice eh? Freedom. Is that something God has?
One thing I KNOW, Kindness NEVER gives up. Ever.
Posted by shamwari (# 15556) on
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Interesting.
There is a dimension of Christian belief which says we can only be free if we are first captives. As in the hymn "Make me a captive Lord and then I shall be free".
We are free only to choose the chains that will bind us.
Posted by rolyn (# 16840) on
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Freedom is living on a desert Island with all the food and water you need.
Freedom from war, oppression, neighbour disputes, criminality, having to go to work, general hassle etc. etc.....
Oh my God I'm lonely, I'm trapped, I am not free.
Thus proving that "Freedom" is a relatively silly word.
Posted by Tortuf (# 3784) on
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God, for me, is the Great Allower. God allows us to do what we will, even as God may well weep over what we do with our wills.
That means bad things happen. Bad things happen all the time. And sometimes things that we at first think are bad turn out to be opportunities for change and growth; if we give those events that power.
My experience is that God is not the Great Micro Manager. God does not hear a prayer and then change the course of the physical universe to accommodate that prayer. God is not some cosmic vending machine.
On the other hand, God is always there, offering hope and guidance if we are willing to take it and only if we are willing to take it.
God allowed me to make a right mess of my life, and that was when I finally allowed the events of my life to give me the power to surrender my ego and my will to reality - to the NOW - to God. When I am actually surrendering my ego I find myself bathed in a serenity and freedom from want (from Dukkha, if you will).
I think much of my suffering was self imposed. As in I could not be happy unless . . . I knew the way things should be so "X" must change for me to be happy.
Well, all that was bullshit. The world is going to be the way it is. We are captives of reality whether we like it or not. What God can do is provide a cessation of the need for the world to be a different way and a concomitant freedom from unhappiness.
Is that freedom? For me it is. It is freedom from the captivity into which I placed myself. It is not freedom from God. That is fine. I do not want freedom from God. I want to see and recognize God in my life because that is where my true serenity lies.
Sorry to go on so.
Posted by Belle Ringer (# 13379) on
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I don't know what people mean when they say God gives us freedom to choose or reject love. That isn't a good description of reality. Many mothers and fathers love their newborn and their growing child not because they choose love, it's just a common (not universal) automatic part of the whole process of pregnancy and birth.
Adult people fall in love with another without choosing to.
So for love to be the central issue it would have to be an unemotional love, but from the wordings of the prophets, God compares his love for us with a husband longing for his wife, not as unemotional duty.
We have some, but limited, freedom to choose what we do, but we are born with differing talents, different physical and mental limits, born into different circumstances, that severely restrict our range of choice.
I read once the one specific freedom we have is how we choose respond to circumstances. Even that doesn't seem to work universally, can a person with severe Alzheimer's or in a coma choose their responses to anything?
I feel like I'm missing some basic understanding when I read comments like "the reason bad stuff happens is because God gives us freedom, so we can choose love."
Posted by Alisdair (# 15837) on
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'Freedom' seems to me to be a choice. The image of the prisoner who decides to remain in the 'security' of their cell, although the door is open and they have been told they are free to go, comes to mind.
'Love' seems also to be a choice, it certainly isn't inflicted nor guaranteed, but it is a choice that, like 'freedom' is made real by action.
We can decide we have no genuine autonomy, that it's all programmed through our genes, or by 'God's will'---but such thinking makes a mockery of 'Love'.
Personally, I'm working on the basis that John's assertion that, 'God is Love' is fundamentally true, and trying to work from that foundation.
But then we seem to be 'free' to choose other foundations, and to see where they take us.
Posted by balaam (# 4543) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Jack o' the Green:
If God sustains us in existence, then we can never be free to exist without God's sustaining power.
Interesting use of if. quote:
So freedom in that sense is nonexistence (interesting side topic regarding freedom from God and hell).
Regarding freedom of will, it is precisely because God sustains our existence and nature that we have the freedom to choose.
Only if the if you mentioned earlier is true. I am not so sure that it is something we can take for granted.
Paul used the term, "In whom we live and move and have our being," but it being incorporated into formal prayers notwithstanding, he was not quoting scripture but Greek poets in order to debate with the philosophers of the Areopogus in Athens.
As this idea does not exist in the rest of Paul's preaching in Acts, or in his letters that we have in the Bible, I don't think we can actually say that if we were free from God then we would not exist. The closest the Old Testament goes is Job 12:10, "In his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind." Which does not go as far as living, moving and having being, and in any case is also part of a debate.
But that is me talking like an Evangelical: If it isn't explicit in the Bible then it isn't true. Which is on philosophical thin ice. But I think we need to explore this idea that if we were free from God we would cease to exist. I don't think the idea is that sound.
But staying with a Pauline theme, the idea is that we are set free to love - something that a set of laws like the Jewish law, or any other set of laws, does not allow us to do. Being freed from the 'do this and don't do that' of law frees us to love. (It's in Galatians 5 around vv 12-15, but you need to read more for context.
So freedom, according to the apostle Paul is not only freedom from stuff, but we are set free in order to do other stuff.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
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If there's a God and She doesn't think us autonomous, She isn't God.
[ 03. October 2015, 15:19: Message edited by: Martin60 ]
Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on
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quote:
balaam: The closest the Old Testament goes is Job 12:10, "In his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind."
I thought there was something more or less like this in a Psalm too.
Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on
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This is one of the questions which finally took me away from Christianity. I could never see how God could allow so much freedom, for example, to the Oregon killer, that it produced evil. I mean, stopping his free will is worse that people being killed. Is that right? So this is the best world possible.
Well, it's a ball-breaker for me.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
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Have you seen so little of evil up till then?
Posted by Jack o' the Green (# 11091) on
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quote:
Originally posted by balaam:
quote:
Originally posted by Jack o' the Green:
If God sustains us in existence, then we can never be free to exist without God's sustaining power.
Interesting use of if. quote:
So freedom in that sense is nonexistence (interesting side topic regarding freedom from God and hell).
Regarding freedom of will, it is precisely because God sustains our existence and nature that we have the freedom to choose.
Only if the if you mentioned earlier is true. I am not so sure that it is something we can take for granted.
Paul used the term, "In whom we live and move and have our being," but it being incorporated into formal prayers notwithstanding, he was not quoting scripture but Greek poets in order to debate with the philosophers of the Areopogus in Athens.
As this idea does not exist in the rest of Paul's preaching in Acts, or in his letters that we have in the Bible, I don't think we can actually say that if we were free from God then we would not exist. The closest the Old Testament goes is Job 12:10, "In his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind." Which does not go as far as living, moving and having being, and in any case is also part of a debate.
But that is me talking like an Evangelical: If it isn't explicit in the Bible then it isn't true. Which is on philosophical thin ice. But I think we need to explore this idea that if we were free from God we would cease to exist. I don't think the idea is that sound.
That would more or less mean that once created, we are self existing in some albeit limited way. The idea of our dependence on God for our existence has been argued by scholastic philosophers when looking at the distinction between necessary and contingent existence as well as preached by Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart.
I don't think the rarity of Paul's reference to God sustaining us has much force unless it can be shown that it was especially relevant to topics in his Epistles but didn't get mentioned.
Posted by Adeodatus (# 4992) on
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I believe that all "freedom" is limited and constrained. I don't think I've ever seen a human being in a state of perfect freedom. Surely the discovery of the subconscious tells us this? - we're all influenced by how we've interacted with the world since the day we were born, or even before. And not only our subconscious, but our genes constrain us, in ways we neither realise nor understand.
We are tied to a thousand and one things by invisible elastic bands which, however long they are, will soon begin to tug at us when we try to assert ourselves against them. That, I believe, is one of the essential features of human life.
The best we can ever hope for in life, I think, is to recognise these limits, and perhaps sever or stretch a few.
Posted by anteater (# 11435) on
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Belle Ringer:
quote:
I don't know what people mean when they say God gives us freedom to choose or reject love.
I agree with everything you say, and I would go further and say quote:
I don't know what people mean when they say God ( . . insert platitude here . . ).
if we make God so fundamental that he is everything to us, then he sort of becomes nothing to us. We surely can't end up believing that Hitler could only kill 6 million Jews with the help and support of God, and couldn't have done a thing without him. But some seem to be heading there.
We do have limited freedom. What does it add to say that God gives it?
Incidentally, one of my heroes (Richard Holloway) more or less believed that it was pointless to remain a christian once he lost the ability to say anything meaningful about God. I don't. It seems fairly natural. The proponents of the via negativa have been doing it for years.
Posted by Komensky (# 8675) on
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Excellent OP. I have encountered (especially in my dark years spent in Evangelical circles) many people who are theological determinists. These same people use the kind of language that Boogie is querying:' freedom in Christ Jesus', etc. Of course many of them don't say that they are determinists, but in the next breath say things like 'God has always known about you and had a (good?) plan for you'. In which case, there is no freedom whatsoever. You are merely a witness to the unfolding of God's plan which not only has he planned, but already knows its conclusion. It's a nonsensical approach, but it is common. Whatever it is, it isn't any kind of 'freedom'.
K.
Posted by Jack o' the Green (# 11091) on
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quote:
Originally posted by anteater:
if we make God so fundamental that he is everything to us, then he sort of becomes nothing to us. We surely can't end up believing that Hitler could only kill 6 million Jews with the help and support of God, and couldn't have done a thing without him. But some seem to be heading there.
It depends on what you mean by 'help and support of God'. If you mean God wanted it to happen, or it was God’s moral will, then absolutely not. However, if you mean that everything which exists only does so because of God’s sustaining power, then yes. Hitler required God's ontological support as a contingent reality.
There are a number of passages in the Hebrew Bible which would support the idea that God is in some sense responsible for evil.
Whether the universe requires God’s sustaining power or not, if he created it ex nihilo or shaped pre-existing matter, he made Hitler possible. I don’t think you could argue moral responsibility or implications for God with one model but not the others.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
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Aye, He's FULLY responsible all right. And will therefore make it ALL right.
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on
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I think we're more like people than like dogs. Sorry, Boogie.
God allows us to make choices that go against Her will. This is what "freedom" in the context of this thread means. It is quite clear we have it. The example of Hitler should make that clear (not the only example of course but doubtless the most common example of "God allows evil" in these kinds of discussions, as already seen).
Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on
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mousethief, I was using dogs as an example of total dependence. Over millennia we have made what was a wild animal complexity dependant on us, to our mutual benefit.
If we can't live or breathe or have our being without God, how are we free?
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
mousethief, I was using dogs as an example of total dependence. Over millennia we have made what was a wild animal complexity dependant on us, to our mutual benefit.
If we can't live or breathe or have our being without God, how are we free?
Free enough to kill 6 million Jews.
Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on
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Free enough to do all sorts of stuff. But, as many kids say at some stage "I didn't choose to be born".
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
Free enough to do all sorts of stuff. But, as many kids say at some stage "I didn't choose to be born".
Totally irrelevant -- we are free in some ways and not in others. The question is "in what ways does God give us freedom?" I have answered that. Freedom to make decisions for good or for evil. That we are not free to choose not to be born does not negate that. It's an area where we are not free. That doesn't mean there are no areas where we are.
Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on
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quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
-- we are free in some ways and not in others. The question is "in what ways does God give us freedom?" I have answered that. Freedom to make decisions for good or for evil. That we are not free to choose not to be born does not negate that. It's an area where we are not free. That doesn't mean there are no areas where we are.
How free are we even then? Some people are brought up in a happy homes with good parents - it's so much easier for them to chose good pathways. What of those abused and thrown into evil company at a young age, they may have choice - but it's a totally unfair playing field for them.
Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on
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Isn't this what Heidegger talked about, the difference between Geworfenheit and Entwerfen of our Dasein?
(I'm totally out of my league here ![[Smile]](smile.gif)
Sorry Hosts, I know I need to translate these words and I would if I could. I think Geworfenheit means something like "thrownness", Entwerfen something like "design" and Dasein something like "being there". I think this refers to the fact that some things in life just come over us, and in some things we can choose. But undoubtedly a philosopher will come along shortly to say that I'm completely and utterly wrong.)
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
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What choice, what freedom did Hitler have?
Posted by Alisdair (# 15837) on
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Surely if we are essentially nothing more than 'automata' then 'love' has no useful meaning, so the whole 'Gospel' becomes pointless, as does any idea of 'God', regardless of whether God is or is not.
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
-- we are free in some ways and not in others. The question is "in what ways does God give us freedom?" I have answered that. Freedom to make decisions for good or for evil. That we are not free to choose not to be born does not negate that. It's an area where we are not free. That doesn't mean there are no areas where we are.
How free are we even then? Some people are brought up in a happy homes with good parents - it's so much easier for them to chose good pathways. What of those abused and thrown into evil company at a young age, they may have choice - but it's a totally unfair playing field for them.
Are you saying we're automatons, completely molded by our environments, so that at no point do we ever make a decision that is morally culpable, or indeed is not completely predetermined by every event leading up to it? If you are, then that's an understandable philosophical position, and we just disagree. If you are not, then you admit we do have some freedom, within the circumstances we find ourselves.
Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on
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Doesn't this discussion bring up the 3 omnis, or coulda, shoulda, woulda?
It seems that under the 3 omnis, the free will of the evil person is more important than almost anything, certainly more important than the victims.
A Christian acquaintance of mine keeps telling me how God often reminds him where his car is parked (as he forgets), so I asked him, couldn't he have also have warned the Orgeon victims?
Ah, that's different. That would impugn their free will also. There's something morally bizarre about this.
Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on
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quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
If you are not, then you admit we do have some freedom, within the circumstances we find ourselves.
Yes, we have some freedom to choose our reactions to our circumstances. But how is that related to love?
If God were kinder to us, would he not nudge things here or there to prevent atrocities and cause us to suffer less? We don't have much freedom, so a little less wouldn't hurt us and would alleviate so much pain.
Once again, I'm not talking about God indulging us - just being a little kinder. If God were kind he would have nudged things so that my Mum died two years before she did. There was nothing good which came out of her suffering. Much suffering is like this - pointless in the extreme.
As I said in the OP, we can never be un-dependent on God (as it's God we rely on for absolutely everything) so I still have the question 'Why set us free?' We are not free.
Posted by balaam (# 4543) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
mousethief, I was using dogs as an example of total dependence. Over millennia we have made what was a wild animal complexity dependant on us, to our mutual benefit.
{TANGENT}Dogs are totally dependant?
So no domesticated dogs ever go feral and survive?
You may think dogs are totally dependant, but the evidence is against you.[/TANGENT]
Posted by Tortuf (# 3784) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
We are not free.
What would you do differently if you were free?
Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Tortuf:
quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
We are not free.
What would you do differently if you were free?
I'm not asking to be free, I'm asking that we are less free and God intervenes more.
Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by balaam:
quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
mousethief, I was using dogs as an example of total dependence. Over millennia we have made what was a wild animal completely dependent on us, to our mutual benefit.
{TANGENT}Dogs are totally dependant?
So no domesticated dogs ever go feral and survive?
You may think dogs are totally dependant, but the evidence is against you.[/TANGENT]
Feral is not wild - they still depend on us being careless with our leftovers. In Russia feral dogs have learned to use public transport to come into the cities to scavenge and beg.
Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
quote:
Originally posted by Tortuf:
quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
We are not free.
What would you do differently if you were free?
I'm not asking to be free, I'm asking that we are less free and God intervenes more.
Yes, that's it. There is supposed to be a good reason why God does not intervene to stop evil. Free will is one possible reason.
But you end up with a strange moral state of affairs, whereby the Oregon killing (as an example), is for the best. God could stop it, but has a good reason not to.
Posted by Tortuf (# 3784) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
I'm not asking to be free, I'm asking that we are less free and God intervenes more.
What would that look like?
Posted by Alisdair (# 15837) on
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quote:
What would that look like?
Exactly, where should God draw the line? Me stubbing my toe on the uneven paving slab; the kid running out into the oncoming car; the flu?
From our point of view, at least, it seems to be an all or nothing situation, and if God does 'intervene' perhaps it's not generally in the way we tend to think. Our point of view is hardly objective by any stretch of the imagination.
Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Alisdair:
quote:
What would that look like?
Exactly, where should God draw the line? Me stubbing my toe on the uneven paving slab; the kid running out into the oncoming car; the flu?
From our point of view, at least, it seems to be an all or nothing situation, and if God does 'intervene' perhaps it's not generally in the way we tend to think. Our point of view is hardly objective by any stretch of the imagination.
That almost seems to be saying that because God could always intervene, he never does. It makes me wonder how an omni God operates then? By allowing evil so that a greater good flows? Hmm.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
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Apart from in the first circle around Jesus, there is no evidence that God intervenes at all, apart from in the big three: matter, life and mind. In decreasing order of probability.
If She could do better She would.
And where was Hitler's (internal) moral failure? Where is IS'?
Posted by Alisdair (# 15837) on
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The question is what do we think God should do about the choices we make? On the face of it it's a man nailed to a cross, i.e. 'I'm not going to stand back and turn my back, and I'm not going to stand back and wave a magic wand, especially not to suit your idea of who I am, but I will join you---all glory cast aside'.
What is it that we want from God? Isn't that issue exactly what Jesus faced: those who turned away from him because he didn't do what they wanted, wasn't what they expected; those who set out to destroy him because he so offended their view of 'God', 'justice', 'holiness', and 'forgiveness'?
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
How free are we even then? Some people are brought up in a happy homes with good parents - it's so much easier for them to chose good pathways.
No doubt. But if there is no freedom then there is no praiseworthiness in those brought up in crappy circumstances choosing good pathways. It's just a quirk in their genes or situation, is all.
quote:
What of those abused and thrown into evil company at a young age, they may have choice - but it's a totally unfair playing field for them.
Doubtless it is unfair. Horribly unfair. The question in this thread is freedom, however, not fairness. Although the latter is a good and important question, it's not the topic at hand. Lack of fairness does not prove lack of freedom.
quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
If you are not, then you admit we do have some freedom, within the circumstances we find ourselves.
Yes, we have some freedom to choose our reactions to our circumstances. But how is that related to love?
I am answering the question, "In what ways does God give us freedom?" The title of the thread, and all.
How that's related to love is another, much harder question. But it was not the one I was answering. I have given my answer to the question "In what ways does God give us freedom?" I did not claim that answer also answers the love question. I think we must just agree to disagree. I believe there is freedom amid admittedly (subjectively) crappy circumstances. You believe there is not.
It seems you want the thread to be about theodicy, not freedom.
[ 04. October 2015, 17:52: Message edited by: mousethief ]
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on
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And I would ask, if God steps in and prevents people from doing evil, in what way does that make us more free?
Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Alisdair:
quote:
What would that look like?
Exactly, where should God draw the line? Me stubbing my toe on the uneven paving slab; the kid running out into the oncoming car; the flu?
It would look kinder, more loving.
Pain is necessary. Stubbing your toe helps you to learn to be more careful, kids need to learn road safety from us. Microbes are necessary and there are as many which are 'friendly' to us as 'unfriendly'.
Death is necessary, I completely agree. But long drawn out, awful painful death which is like torture? No. A kinder God would make sure the dying died days or weeks sooner than they do.
Why allow psychopaths and sociopaths? Why not intervene in those horribly catastrophic neural pathways.
If s/he could then I can't see any reason on Earth why s/he wouldn't.
Martin60 - why do you think God can't intervene?
[ 04. October 2015, 18:01: Message edited by: Boogie ]
Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on
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quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
And I would ask, if God steps in and prevents people from doing evil, in what way does that make us more free?
It doesn't, it makes us more protected, more dependent. But as we are dependent anyway (for everything) why not?
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
And I would ask, if God steps in and prevents people from doing evil, in what way does that make us more free?
It doesn't, it makes us more protected, more dependent.
More coddled, less image-bearers of God, more dog-like, less human.
quote:
But as we are dependent anyway (for everything) why not?
Because we believe that God, for whatever reason, wants us to love him as humans, not as dogs.
Even you want your children to be less like dogs and more like independent humans. You seem to want for them a freedom you think God should not want for us.
Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on
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Alisdair wrote;
The question is what do we think God should do about the choices we make? On the face of it it's a man nailed to a cross, i.e. 'I'm not going to stand back and turn my back, and I'm not going to stand back and wave a magic wand, especially not to suit your idea of who I am, but I will join you---all glory cast aside'.
I like this. It offers me a God of weakness, and not of strength, and isn't this part of the magnificence of the Christian story, that it isn't magnificent, but a ruin?
But as to waving a magic wand, God would do that if it was good, no? Ditto casting aside glory, this must lead to a greater good.
But maybe only then can I exist. With a magic wand, and great glory, I would not.
Isn't this one of the solutions to divine hiddenness, that God not hidden, would disintegrate me?
Posted by Alisdair (# 15837) on
:
quote:
Death is necessary, I completely agree. But long drawn out, awful painful death which is like torture? No. A kinder God would make sure the dying died days or weeks sooner than they do. - Boogie
Doesn't that lead to a very dangerous and terrible situation where effectively we are oppressed by God's presence, and deprived of the essential freedom as to whether we even believe God is, let alone trust God?
It's the 'big brother' scenario, and still doesn't address your concern, and my question: @Where should God draw the line?' The line if it's drawn must always be arbitrary. If suffering/death is ended today, why not the day before, or the day after; if this injury/disease, why not that one, and so on, ad infinitum. it's a horrendous prospect, and we would always be blaming God, which we do anyway, but now we would have good grounds. And, of course we would take even less responsibility for our actions because, of course, God will step in and smooth out the bumps.
My father has just died a 'long drawn out death' (several months), it wasn't pleasant, although pain did not, I think, feature largely in the unpleasantness. Perhaps he wished it would have all been over quickly, and we may have wished the same, but was that all it was---unpleasant? I don't know, it was my father's death, and his alone. I see death regularly in my work, almost daily. I see some people making a real bitter angry meal out of apparently relatively little suffering, I see others demonstrating inspiring grace and even humour in the face of horrible symptoms, and I see everything in between. All I can say is that I think I am learning from others; I hope it will serve me well when my time comes. I will be very disappointed (I guess figuratively) if death turns out to have the final say, but I do think I have a choice, and that the freedom to choose is dependant on real and profound Love.
Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on
:
Great stuff, although I can hear my atheist friends saying, that if God is so careful not to intervene, so as not to oppress us, it's almost as if he didn't exist!
It also seems to offer an omni God who isn't really omni in practice. I can make this sacrifice, so that you can live (that's not me speaking).
[ 04. October 2015, 19:53: Message edited by: quetzalcoatl ]
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
Great stuff, although I can hear my atheist friends saying, that if God is so careful not to intervene, so as not to oppress us, it's almost as if he didn't exist!
It also seems to offer an omni God who isn't really omni in practice. I can make this sacrifice, so that you can live (that's not me speaking).
I think that's exactly right. God sacrificing her Omnipotence to allow us space to (a) exist, and (b) operate as (relatively) independent deciders. The divine condescension, which reached its apex (or nadir) with the Incarnation. There's a word for it that starts with a "K" but I"m not coming up with it.
Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on
:
quote:
quetzalcoatl: I like this. It offers me a God of weakness, and not of strength
This is where I'm at, too.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
:
Aye, the Greeks have a word for it.
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on
:
I k nows it.
Posted by mark_in_manchester (# 15978) on
:
Tortuf's post said something to me.
Seems that God offers us freedom from sin, those times we can grasp it. That's my hope - that in me, virtue can win, some days. Some days, it does, and when it does, it feels like freedom.
Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on
:
(I'm coming more and more to the conclusion that I find the phrasing "freedom from sin" unhelpful. Interestingly, I don't think it's biblical.)
Posted by Jengie jon (# 273) on
:
My parents argued when courting on the Freewill/Predestinarian lines. I am not going there. I was in my twenties when I realised each was arguing against a caricature of the other position. For Freewill to be true then we had to have complete freedom to do anything. For predestinarianism to be true then everything has to be micromanaged by God. These are both caricatures of complex theological positions.
The same is going on here. Complete freedom is an illusion created by looking too much into the future where we do not know the full circumstances in which we will make a choice. Complete control is an illusion created by looking too much into the past where the outcome that happened is the only one that appears possible. Only in the present moment to we come to the complex balance between the given and our own will.
Jengie
Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on
:
Sorry, I looked wrong.
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
I k nows it.
![[Overused]](graemlins/notworthy.gif)
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
Great stuff, although I can hear my atheist friends saying, that if God is so careful not to intervene, so as not to oppress us, it's almost as if he didn't exist!
It also seems to offer an omni God who isn't really omni in practice. I can make this sacrifice, so that you can live (that's not me speaking).
I think that's exactly right. God sacrificing her Omnipotence to allow us space to (a) exist, and (b) operate as (relatively) independent deciders. The divine condescension, which reached its apex (or nadir) with the Incarnation. There's a word for it that starts with a "K" but I"m not coming up with it.
Open Theists would add to this that God voluntarily self-limits the omnis in order to allow for human freedom precisely because love must be freely chosen. The degree to which you are free to choose evil is also the degree to which you are free to choose love. So, yes, there are limits on our freedom, but clearly not much, given what we see of human evil-- but also what we see of human love and sacrifice.
At the last mtg of the Open & Relational Theology subgroup of AAR we got into a vigorous debate about whether God
ever overrides human choice in the Bible-- none of us could think of an example.
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
At the last mtg of the Open & Relational Theology subgroup of AAR we got into a vigorous debate about whether God ever overrides human choice in the Bible-- none of us could think of an example.
God hardened Pharaoh's heart.
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
At the last mtg of the Open & Relational Theology subgroup of AAR we got into a vigorous debate about whether God ever overrides human choice in the Bible-- none of us could think of an example.
God hardened Pharaoh's heart.
Yes, we discussed that one. But even that doesn't seem a good example of overriding free will-- the text alternates between Pharaoh hardening his heart and God hardening it. It seems to suggest, intriguingly, some sort of interplay there.
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
God hardened Pharaoh's heart.
Yes, we discussed that one. But even that doesn't seem a good example of overriding free will-- the text alternates between Pharaoh hardening his heart and God hardening it. It seems to suggest, intriguingly, some sort of interplay there.
I don't buy it. It suggests to me that God was playing Pharaoh like a puppet. Overriding his free will. God wanted to slam the Egyptians x number of times, and when Pharaoh didn't oblige by hardening his own heart, God did it for him, stripping him of free will. I don't see what else "God hardened his heart" could possibly mean. With all due respect I wonder if your group's overarching belief about free will is coloring your (collective) reading of the text.
Posted by W Hyatt (# 14250) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
If God were kinder to us, would he not nudge things here or there to prevent atrocities and cause us to suffer less?
How do you know he hasn't already nudged things?
quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
Why allow psychopaths and sociopaths? Why not intervene in those horribly catastrophic neural pathways.
Just what kind of intervention do you propose? Should it be apparent that God is the cause of the intervention? Or should his involvement not be noticeable? If you want it to be apparent, then you're asking for miracles. If not, then he might already be intervening without you knowing it.
In either case, why do you limit yourself to proposing only that he be a little bit kinder? I think the question of where you propose that he should draw line is a serious one - I don't see how a little change would resolve the issue. Yet, as Alisdair points out, not drawing a line at all will lead to a pretty unrealistic scenario.
Any time discussion of a goal is divorced from a discussion about the means of achieving it, the discussion becomes completely hypothetical and goes nowhere. Everyone would agree that eliminating illness is a good goal, but no one would seriously consider anihilating the human species as a way to achieve it. Even you seem to recognize that eliminating microbes would also not be a good way to eliminate illnesses - the overall costs of such a solution would be too great in the bigger scheme of things. It doesn't make sense to seriously discuss the elimination of illness without discussing how it might be done.
On the one hand, it's difficult to argue against the idea that God is omnipotent and should be able to achieve any good goal we propose without getting into any details about how God is supposed to do it. On the other hand, it's illogical to think, at the same time, that we know enough to correctly conclude that since God has not been achieving our goal, he must either not want to or lack sufficient power to do so. That would mean that we know enough to judge him for not doing something, even though we do not know enough to say how he should have been doing it.
It seems to me that there is only one thing necessary to explain why God might have enough power and desire to fix things but still not actually fix them, namely that some good things are more important than other good things. If achieving one good thing by preventing something bad must necessarily come at the cost of a more important good thing, then refraining from preventing that bad thing is a good and moral approach for God to take. And if you want to make an argument that this doesn't hold water, then you either need to get into the details about relative degrees of goodness, or make a case that the "necessarily" part doesn't hold. But either way, avoiding specifics takes all the substance out of your argument.
So it seems to me that unless all goodness has the same value, there is no simple and clear case that God should be doing a better job of it.
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
God hardened Pharaoh's heart.
Yes, we discussed that one. But even that doesn't seem a good example of overriding free will-- the text alternates between Pharaoh hardening his heart and God hardening it. It seems to suggest, intriguingly, some sort of interplay there.
I don't buy it. It suggests to me that God was playing Pharaoh like a puppet. Overriding his free will. God wanted to slam the Egyptians x number of times, and when Pharaoh didn't oblige by hardening his own heart, God did it for him, stripping him of free will. I don't see what else "God hardened his heart" could possibly mean. With all due respect I wonder if your group's overarching belief about free will is coloring your (collective) reading of the text.
Well, it is a pretty diverse group, including one heck of a lot of non-Christians (mostly on the process side of relational theology) who wouldn't be particularly intent on maintaining any particular stance in a book they don't view as authoritative. There were a lot of different takes on that particular text, most not as literal as you're reading it. For those who did hold the Bible as authoritative (most of the open theology folks and some of the process people) it was more that the Ex. text is just as troubling from either perspective, so taking it literally at face value is a problem no matter which paradigm you're working from. So then you have to broaden your pov to look at the entire Bible as a whole-- it's not a pattern you see anywhere else.
But then, as I said, it was a vigorous debate-- and this text one of those in particular hotly contested.
[ 05. October 2015, 03:46: Message edited by: cliffdweller ]
Posted by Alisdair (# 15837) on
:
You do have to wonder how many of these 'stories' involve a strong component of interpretation after the fact, i.e. looking back and reading preferred understandings about how things work into the events. So, 'God hardened Pharoah's heart' is a way of acknowledging God's involvement, but in practice doesn't actually tell us much about what actually happened, except that Pharoah wouldn't let the people go.
Having said that I look at my own life and generally feel that when it comes to decision making it's pretty much up to me because there have been a small number of times when, from my point of view, I have felt strongly that God has made God's view very clear, but even then I could have chosen another path. Usually however it's more like: 'Why are you asking me, it's your life, you've got a mind, get on with it. I'll be with you wherever you go'.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
:
In Christ we see God as He IS. We don't get it do we? Divested. Poured out. Helpless. Spent. This is obviously how God is in all creation, not just in the creation of Jesus. That's how He is in US alongside everything we feel and think, we the agents of our thoughts and feelings.
We have the freedom to take responsibility.
Now.
Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
I k nows it.
I'm convinced that hatless made a brilliant joke here, and I realise that explaining a joke runs a big risk of ruining it. But I'm really curious what the Greek word is ![[Help]](graemlins/help.gif)
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
:
Kenosis.
Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on
:
Thank you (and yes, it was a good joke).
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on
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![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on
:
The idea of a weak God is attractive, although I can hear atheists saying, why, it's almost as if there were none.
But presumably, for many 'weakists', God is not totally weak. There is a glimmer or a whisper, or call it what you will.
It reminds me of Simone Weil, who talks of God's withdrawal, although she adds to that, that my own withdrawal, or self-annihilation, reveals God again.
That sounds like a mixture of ancient Jewish ideas and Eastern ideas, but no doubt, it has Christian ancestry, e.g. 'the nameless formless nothing', (Tauler).
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
The idea of a weak God is attractive, although I can hear atheists saying, why, it's almost as if there were none.
But presumably, for many 'weakists', God is not totally weak. There is a glimmer or a whisper, or call it what you will.
It reminds me of Simone Weil, who talks of God's withdrawal, although she adds to that, that my own withdrawal, or self-annihilation, reveals God again.
That sounds like a mixture of ancient Jewish ideas and Eastern ideas, but no doubt, it has Christian ancestry, e.g. 'the nameless formless nothing', (Tauler).
Really, what I think the doctrine of kenosis, drawn from Phil. 2:5-11, points us to is an entirely different understanding of what power is-- on that is completely counter-intuitive and counter-cultural. The notion that power is based on being "the biggest bad-a** dog on the block" is deeply, deeply embedded in our culture, in our hearts, and shows itself in a 1000 different ways. We only feel safe when we are stronger, more heavily armed, bigger than everyone else (or maybe that's just Americans...).
Phil. 2 points us to an entirely different way of looking at things, by describing a God who is all those omnis, but is able to give up the omnis, and still be God in every sense. Which suggests that "Godness", whatever that might be, is not about the omnis, but about something else altogether. Something deeper, more powerful, more incredible, than everything we have been led to believe "power" is all about. (Maybe the "deep magic" that Aslan speaks of?)
Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on
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cliffdweller - yes, that makes sense to me. It reminds me of training as a psychotherapist, when one learns (painfully) that being right is not really where it's at, rather being with.
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
Phil. 2 points us to an entirely different way of looking at things, by describing a God who is all those omnis, but is able to give up the omnis, and still be God in every sense. Which suggests that "Godness", whatever that might be, is not about the omnis, but about something else altogether. Something deeper, more powerful, more incredible, than everything we have been led to believe "power" is all about. (Maybe the "deep magic" that Aslan speaks of?)
This is great stuff, CD. I've never put those thoughts together before. "Godness is not about the omnis" is a fabulous insight. Perhaps the God of the omnis is the god of the philosophers, but not the god of Isaac, Jacob, and the other guy.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
:
Exactly!
Posted by Pomona (# 17175) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
quote:
Originally posted by Alisdair:
quote:
What would that look like?
Exactly, where should God draw the line? Me stubbing my toe on the uneven paving slab; the kid running out into the oncoming car; the flu?
It would look kinder, more loving.
Pain is necessary. Stubbing your toe helps you to learn to be more careful, kids need to learn road safety from us. Microbes are necessary and there are as many which are 'friendly' to us as 'unfriendly'.
Death is necessary, I completely agree. But long drawn out, awful painful death which is like torture? No. A kinder God would make sure the dying died days or weeks sooner than they do.
Why allow psychopaths and sociopaths? Why not intervene in those horribly catastrophic neural pathways.
If s/he could then I can't see any reason on Earth why s/he wouldn't.
Martin60 - why do you think God can't intervene?
What about people deciding on assisted suicide and things? Is that not God intervening via the Holy Spirit? God intervening frequently comes in the form of moving people to do particular things rather than things that look more obviously supernatural.
Also many people wouldn't want God to end their life before the drawn-out suffering started. What then? Should God totally override their wishes? To them that would be evil.
Obviously you can't see why God wouldn't intervene. You're not God. That's axiomatic, surely?
Posted by Brenda Clough (# 18061) on
:
Dorothy Sayers has said this better, in The Mind of the Maker. But I am going to give it a whirl. Since God made His creation, we can see how He interacts with it by looking at how we interact with what we create.
When I write a book, in me it lives and moves and has its being, and nothing in it exists without me. The author completely permeates the work and has complete control of everything that happens in it down to the quark level and up to the heat death of that universe. My hero does nothing but that I do not will it: his digestion, his love life, his haircut. It would be quite accurate for you to say that he is a puppet, entirely a creature of my volition.
But! Having said that, the creatures have free will. My hero is his own man. I can sling the arrows of outrageous fortune onto him from on high, but he reacts to them in his own characteristic way. And the creator wants him to do that. Tolkien wants Frodo to react like Frodo, for the Riders of Rohan to respond in their culturally correct way. The book is much, much more cool when all the characters are alive and seize the bit between their teeth.
Yes, I am all-powerful. I can force an action. Marry Harriet Vane, Wimsey! And immediately the work dies. The hero is sawdust, the plot collapses, and the novel lies there with its tiny legs in the air, dead. If it is to live, I have to let it be free. It is entirely accurate (equally accurate!) to say that the creations have free will. I can prove it, any time I like, by killing this book and then dialing it back and raising it from the dead again.
So I envision God sitting at the keyboard, tearing his beard and muttering, "Those damned Westboro Baptists. I'll get 'em, some day. Got a lightning bolt, right here. But today, drat them, they're going to go picket another funeral."
Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on
:
![[Killing me]](graemlins/killingme.gif)
That's about it, all right.
I don't want God to take away my free will. I don't want to be more dog-like. Otherwise why not make more dogs from the start?*
But at the same time, if I want it for me, in fairness I have to allow that to other people, including the asshole who [redacted]. Even though that impacts me and those I love.
So I pray and ask God to change X. And on occasion he does--there seems to be enough "give" in the cosmos that God can interfere in certain ways, at certain times, without making the whole construction come crashing down--but most of the time he doesn't. Which makes me mad at him. But he can live with that, apparently.
And still, I don't want to have my free will removed.
The two choices seem to be a) have no free will (=be a considerably lower level creature) and be happy (if that's even possible given the complexities of the universe), and b) have free will and be angry.
Sucks to be us. Sucks to be God.
*(though seriously, my dog has more free will than this thread is giving her credit for)
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
:
Lamb Chopped
It would suck for me if God EVER intervened. Ever. Thank God He will not, that He NEVER will, CAN NOT. And Boogie, sorry, you asked before why He CANNOT. Because He would be hypocritical, disgustingly morally weak, inconsistent, arbitrary, double minded, pathetic, untrue, untrustworthy. He did not spare His own Son, could not. He HAS to take the pain of doing NOTHING. Of feeling everything. Every sick thing. As they, we hung (our) children at Auschwitz He HAD to do nothing. But hang. How many obscene, meaningless horrors have to occur before He intervenes? What's the ratio? He has to suffer the GUILT of ALL our meaningless suffering. Or be a coward. Is that shocking enough for you?
When the next gamma-ray burster detonates within ten thousand light years and we ALL get religion, what will He do? If we're not already extinct?
He NEVER intervenes. The 'give' in the cosmos is His provision. NOT His failure of nerve. He provides space for increased complexity to happen. That is ALL. Apart from the ONE 'event'. Jesus. THE Sign. THE Hope. Beyond death. The heat death of the universe. Which makes the big-bang a moment ago.
We are free to invoke Love winning despite there being no meaningful trace of it beyond necessarily, in every sense, painful evolutionary progress but for Jesus.
Who says there are no works involved in universal salvation? It's bloody hard, bloody work for everyone involved.
It's obviously the only possible way. And no, God will NEVER be able to explain that.
WE have to do ALL of the work. And He spent a short, hard life of it with us, yes. We've been doing it for hundreds of thousands of years. We're half way. To accumulating enough experience, enough complexity, enough of a story to share all together on Judgement Day.
Where we will work it out, explain it, know it, feel it, embrace it and go on together in conversation with Him.
Posted by Brenda Clough (# 18061) on
:
I will lay it on you another way. God needs the story to be interesting. It is not a good story, if Hamlet simply graduates from Wittenberg U with an advanced degree in heuristics and then comes home to Denmark to peacably take over from Uncle Claudius who has been keeping the throne warm while Hamlet does his postdoc, and now obligingly dies of a heart attack in his sleep. The play is tons better if you have everybody lying dead in pools of blood on the stage at the end of act 5. Hamlet, and Claudius, and even Queen Gertrude, and the most themselves when the story is stressful.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
:
That just makes a sick bastard. An emo-vampire. But you're right, there is no love story without conflict. That's just the way it is.
Posted by W Hyatt (# 14250) on
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"There is no love story without conflict" does not equate to "conflict is necessary." Most of us would be very happy with having no story to tell if we could eliminate all conflict.
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by W Hyatt:
"There is no love story without conflict" does not equate to "conflict is necessary." Most of us would be very happy with having no story to tell if we could eliminate all conflict.
Agreed.
I believe God intervenes-- that's really the message of the incarnation-- but not in ways contrary to our will. The reason God doesn't intervene is not because he wants a good story. The reason God doesn't intervene is because he wants us to be free to choose love, and love cannot be forced, it must be freely chosen. The degree to which we are free to choose evil is proportionally the degree to which we are free to choose love.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
:
It's up to us to stop the conflict. And once more Cliffdweller, I'm glad you agree. The ONLY intervention we have is the Incarnation. As for God waiting for us to love, the us is our species, the wait is two hundred thousand years and counting. Choice has nothing to do with it. It's realisation. Head space.
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
It's up to us to stop the conflict. And once more Cliffdweller, I'm glad you agree. The ONLY intervention we have is the Incarnation. As for God waiting for us to love, the us is our species, the wait is two hundred thousand years and counting. Choice has nothing to do with it. It's realisation. Head space.
I wouldn't agree that the incarnation is the only intervention-- although obviously it's the most dramatic, impactful, and significant intervention. But I would agree that God won't intervene to violate our free will. Once you create a world that operates within certain constraints, you must operate within those constraints. For God to create a universe where some sentient beings have freedom, but then to say, "I'm going to override that freedom when I don't like your choices"-- then freedom is meaningless. (Reminds me of Henry Ford saying you can get a model T in any color you want as long as it's black).
So God won't intervene by overriding our free choices. But he does, for example, send his Spirit, to speak to us, guide us, chastise us. Whether we choose to listen or not is up to us.
Posted by Tortuf (# 3784) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
So God won't intervene by overriding our free choices. But he does, for example, send his Spirit, to speak to us, guide us, chastise us. Whether we choose to listen or not is up to us.
My belief is similar to that. God's Holy Spirit is inherently in all of us members of God's Creation. We can access the guidance of God's Holy Spirit any time we are willing to let our egos go enough to listen to what the Holy Spirit is telling us directly through our hearts, or through others, or even through events.
We are also free to ignore God's Holy Spirit and quite often do just that; ignore God. I know I did anyway.
I got messages that I ignored. I had family and friends try to help; which I ignored. I had events "happen to me"; which I ignored until I could no longer ignore all the messages. It is at that point that I gave God the chance to give me the courage to take events the events I thought had happened TO me as a powerful driver of change. Now, I understand that events happened FOR me because of God and my willingness to pay attention to God.
As I have bored the crap out of people here before, God is not a cosmic vending machine that anoints us with some magic wand to make things all nice and comfy for ourselves. God is "there" to care and love us and give us guidance. God is not there to change events, but to give us the power to live and grow through events.
Reality is simply that, reality. All our needs for reality to be different simply take away our ability to cope with reality, grow through reality and learn to love through reality.
Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
It's up to us to stop the conflict. And once more Cliffdweller, I'm glad you agree. The ONLY intervention we have is the Incarnation. As for God waiting for us to love, the us is our species, the wait is two hundred thousand years and counting. Choice has nothing to do with it. It's realisation. Head space.
The trouble is, that God might be rarely intervening, or he might be intervening all the time. When the apple falls off the tree, maybe God is pulling it down?
How would we know? As far as I can see, we can only guess, which is at least, time-honoured. My guess is that God intervenes on the third Thursday in the month, when generally more apples fall.
Posted by Brenda Clough (# 18061) on
:
No, remember that in God we live and move and have our being. He has total control over all that stuff, down to the molecular level.
Consider how you met your spouse. I happened to meet mine by the xerox machine, where I was copying some invitations to a college party. On impulse I handed him one. Ten minutes earlier or later and he would not have been there -- if the elevator had got stuck, if I had stopped in the bathroom, if it had been raining. By and large God does not need plagues of locusts or large lightning bolts -- too crude. He can be defter. He orchestrates the weather and the bathroom and the elevator, so when I turned around at the xerox machine there was this guy.
Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Tortuf:
Reality is simply that, reality. All our needs for reality to be different simply take away our ability to cope with reality, grow through reality and learn to love through reality.
That's a fine answer for me in my easy life. All my 'difficulties' do help me to learn to love.
But I'm not talking about myself, or others who are living easy lives. I'm talking about those in terrible, impossible, lifelong horrific lives. Why allow freedom for this? Why allow psychopaths?
Plenty have said 'where would God draw the line?' But God already draws the line, we are bound by the way the universe works - and God put all that together. Like I said earlier, we are already not free, so why not draw a kinder line?
[ 07. October 2015, 15:40: Message edited by: Boogie ]
Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
No, remember that in God we live and move and have our being. He has total control over all that stuff, down to the molecular level.
Consider how you met your spouse. I happened to meet mine by the xerox machine, where I was copying some invitations to a college party. On impulse I handed him one. Ten minutes earlier or later and he would not have been there -- if the elevator had got stuck, if I had stopped in the bathroom, if it had been raining. By and large God does not need plagues of locusts or large lightning bolts -- too crude. He can be defter. He orchestrates the weather and the bathroom and the elevator, so when I turned around at the xerox machine there was this guy.
I've come across this view in Islam, but not so much in Christianity. Does God orchestrate everything?
Posted by Tortuf (# 3784) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
Like I said earlier, we are already not free, so why not draw a kinder line?
I don't know. What I do know is that it is not in my wheelhouse because I am not God and never will be.
I think the need for things to be better is part of why we have Job. For me those passages where God is giving Job down the road are very much like my sponsor telling me to get a grip and deal with reality; wishing things were different simply gets in the way of dealing with things the way they are.
Yes, of course the world is not a perfect place. People do shitty things. People live in poverty. People persecute other people. Lions and crocodiles eat people. Little cute baby lambs and calves get eaten.
Think about what would happen in a world where God stepped in and changed the laws of physics for the benefit of a person or persons. We humans are fragile beings. We probably could not live through a timeline that shifted backwards and forwards instead of only moving in a forward direction. We might not be able to live in a world where normal biological processes were suspended so someone could recover from a disease that would otherwise take their life.
If we did not have free will, how would we feel any sense of empowerment from doing the next right thing? How would it be to live in a world where we already knew things would happen in a kind and gentle way where everyone got only "good things" from God. And, who is going to instruct God on what those good things should be?
YMMV. I find I spend my time more constructively no longer worrying whether or not God is living up to my standards.
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
No, remember that in God we live and move and have our being. He has total control over all that stuff, down to the molecular level.
Consider how you met your spouse. I happened to meet mine by the xerox machine, where I was copying some invitations to a college party. On impulse I handed him one. Ten minutes earlier or later and he would not have been there -- if the elevator had got stuck, if I had stopped in the bathroom, if it had been raining. By and large God does not need plagues of locusts or large lightning bolts -- too crude. He can be defter. He orchestrates the weather and the bathroom and the elevator, so when I turned around at the xerox machine there was this guy.
There's simply no way to sustain that belief without making God the author of evil. If God was in absolute, complete control orchestrating the events that lead to your meeting your sweetie, that means he was also in absolute, complete control orchestrating the events that lead to the shootings in Oregon last week. In Syria. In Auchwitz.
Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
As they, we hung (our) children at Auschwitz He HAD to do nothing.
quote:
Originally posted by Tortuf:
We might not be able to live in a world where normal biological processes were suspended so someone could recover from a disease that would otherwise take their life.
The interesting thing is the degree to which this is special pleading that is only ever argued in connection for God and would be considered morally monstrous in any other context.
For example, Martin60 seems to be arguing that putting an end to Auschwitz was far worse than anything done at Auschwitz. In effect, that the wrong people were put on trial at Nuremberg and the Allies were guilty of violating the Nazi High Command's free will.
Likewise we typically don't object when "normal biological processes [are] suspended" by using antibiotics to allow "someone [to] recover from a disease that would otherwise take their life" in the absence of such treatments, nor do we consider it immoral to suspend normal biological processes with vaccines that allow people to develop disease immunity without disease exposure. For some reason this sort of interference is only considered immoral when God does it.
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
quote:
Originally posted by Tortuf:
Reality is simply that, reality. All our needs for reality to be different simply take away our ability to cope with reality, grow through reality and learn to love through reality.
That's a fine answer for me in my easy life. All my 'difficulties' do help me to learn to love.
But I'm not talking about myself, or others who are living easy lives. I'm talking about those in terrible, impossible, lifelong horrific lives. Why allow freedom for this? Why allow psychopaths?
Plenty have said 'where would God draw the line?' But God already draws the line, we are bound by the way the universe works - and God put all that together. Like I said earlier, we are already not free, so why not draw a kinder line?
Again, I believe there is a proportionality at play. The degree to which we are free to choose evil determines the degree to which we are free to choose sacrificial incarnational love. I do believe there are limits to our freedom-- but God has drawn the lines as broadly as possible in order to allow the greatest possibility for incarnational love.
Another factor which I believe is at play is some degree of "corruption of creation"-- some ways in which Satan (as another sentient free creature) intervened in creation to "corrupt" it, distort it. I think that's what Scripture is pointing to when it talks about "all of creation groaning" and yearning for the coming restoration. I think that's what Gen. 3 is metaphorically referring to. It's the best explanation I've heard for natural evil (suffering which is not caused by human action) but it may also explain to some degree the overly-broad sweep of human freedom to choose evil. (This theory drives Martin mad as he'll no doubt jump in to express. That's not the purpose of the theory, just a little side benefit. ![[Devil]](graemlins/devil.gif)
)
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
As they, we hung (our) children at Auschwitz He HAD to do nothing.
quote:
Originally posted by Tortuf:
We might not be able to live in a world where normal biological processes were suspended so someone could recover from a disease that would otherwise take their life.
The interesting thing is the degree to which this is special pleading that is only ever argued in connection for God and would be considered morally monstrous in any other context.
For example, Martin60 seems to be arguing that putting an end to Auschwitz was far worse than anything done at Auschwitz. In effect, that the wrong people were put on trial at Nuremberg and the Allies were guilty of violating the Nazi High Command's free will.
Likewise we typically don't object when "normal biological processes [are] suspended" by using antibiotics to allow "someone [to] recover from a disease that would otherwise take their life" in the absence of such treatments, nor do we consider it immoral to suspend normal biological processes with vaccines that allow people to develop disease immunity without disease exposure. For some reason this sort of interference is only considered immoral when God does it.
I don't think that anyone is arguing that it would be immoral for God to intervene to prevent evil. Rather we (or at least I) am arguing that it is a logical impossibility. You cannot have a universe that is both free and not free (although, of course, you can and do have one that has degrees of freedom). If God overrides our free will when we choose differently than what he wants, then we do not have free will. It's like telling your child s/he can choose between broiled chicken or a cupcake and slapping their hand away when they reach for the cupcake because you know the chicken is a better choice for them. If you're going to override choice then there really is no choice.
Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Tortuf:
YMMV. I find I spend my time more constructively no longer worrying whether or not God is living up to my standards.
Quotesfile!
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
:
Brenda. Why would God override the freedom around Xeroxing? And not save a child from cancer or a paedophile? And what have His, according to Lamb Chopped, alleged rare miraculous interventions got to do with anyone's freedom? What has cancer got to do with freedom? Or are they rare interventions in stopping a person doing some foul evil? Whilst letting a million go by? We live and move and have our being in Her FREELY. In the limited, contingent, random, ignorant, weak sense of freedom.
As for what intervening part God the Holy Spirit plays, Cliffdweller, I haven't the faintest idea, apart from metaphorically, poetically and in my invoking Her thus. Invoking sanity, soundness, clarity, illumination, patience, tolerance, understanding, forgiveness, mercy, compassion, empathy, wisdom. As part of my whistling in the dark.
I am MOST grateful for God's provision. That in loss and fear and pain I came through. I thank Her for Her provision in my broken, mediocre, awesome mind.
As I watched a friend dying of cancer this year I was prompted from the abyss to genuinely thank God for Her kindness where none was evident in his ravaged, tortured body. He was still sweet. Sweeter than ever in fact. God provided for that in 13.7 Ga of evolution. What else?
q, like us the apple is completely free, like the near hurtingly beautiful sunset outside my window.
Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
The interesting thing is the degree to which this is special pleading that is only ever argued in connection for God and would be considered morally monstrous in any other context.
For example, Martin60 seems to be arguing that putting an end to Auschwitz was far worse than anything done at Auschwitz. In effect, that the wrong people were put on trial at Nuremberg and the Allies were guilty of violating the Nazi High Command's free will.
Likewise we typically don't object when "normal biological processes [are] suspended" by using antibiotics to allow "someone [to] recover from a disease that would otherwise take their life" in the absence of such treatments, nor do we consider it immoral to suspend normal biological processes with vaccines that allow people to develop disease immunity without disease exposure. For some reason this sort of interference is only considered immoral when God does it.
I don't think that anyone is arguing that it would be immoral for God to intervene to prevent evil. Rather we (or at least I) am arguing that it is a logical impossibility. You cannot have a universe that is both free and not free (although, of course, you can and do have one that has degrees of freedom). If God overrides our free will when we choose differently than what he wants, then we do not have free will. It's like telling your child s/he can choose between broiled chicken or a cupcake and slapping their hand away when they reach for the cupcake because you know the chicken is a better choice for them. If you're going to override choice then there really is no choice.
Sorry, not following you. Shutting down death camps or vaccinating against disease are like inconsistent parenting because if someone really wants to murder Jews or "decides" to contract smallpox we should respect their freedom to make that choice? That seems abhorrent.
Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Tortuf:
YMMV. I find I spend my time more constructively no longer worrying whether or not God is living up to my standards.
Not fair.
This is a low blow because I'm not worrying, I'm asking the question. I am in the fortunate position to have no fears. Throughout the Bible are the words 'fear not'. They must ring very very hollow for some people.
'I'm not God therefore it's not worth thinking about' is a cop-out imo
Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on
:
I agree with Boogie, Tortuf's remark is unfair. In my view, there are some interesting parts in the OT where people are "worrying whether God lives up to their standards".
Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
quote:
Originally posted by Tortuf:
YMMV. I find I spend my time more constructively no longer worrying whether or not God is living up to my standards.
Not fair.
This is a low blow because I'm not worrying, I'm asking the question. I am in the fortunate position to have no fears. Throughout the Bible are the words 'fear not'. They must ring very very hollow for some people.
'I'm not God therefore it's not worth thinking about' is a cop-out imo
What's the "unfair" about? I don't see Tortuf judging you or anybody for asking the question. Tortuf is simply saying this is how he handles it.
If you want someone with a shitload of fear right now, that'd be me. As in mother, stepfather, sister all hovering on the edge of terminal illness, husband's job in danger (as usual), self unemployed, and so forth.
But what does that have to do with the question of whether God is living up to my standards?
My default is to let God get on with being God, and I try to get on with being me. I’ve made a choice (which could be revoked at any time, me being the ordinary weak and screwed up person that I am) to assume that God knows what he is doing, even when it runs contrary to my personal perspective on events. And therefore I’m going to trust him when I don’t understand, and get on with my own work in the meantime. Which is what I think Tortuf is saying (correct me if I’m wrong). Nothing wrong with that.
I understand that other people are in a totally different place, and that’s fine. I could be there myself at some point. Which is what YMMV means.
ETA: "Fear not" actually is rather comforting to me personally right now. It's like the bracing, comforting words of an older brother holding you as you try to stay up on the bike: "It's okay, I've got you."
I'm not actually capable of obeying it (check my blood pressure!) but the fact that he's saying so is a comforting reminder that somebody is still in control.
[ 07. October 2015, 18:37: Message edited by: Lamb Chopped ]
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
Even though I don't believe (see posts upthread) in God as "totally in control over every thing that happens", I, too am comforted by the "fear not" command. Even though I think a lot of s***y stuff happens in this life that isn't exactly according to God's plan, I believe the future is his. He has a promised future. It's a long way off, but it's sure. So, while sometimes I might wish for more of the "controlling" sort of God who would keep all the bad s**t from happening, I'm still able to rest (sometimes-- I'm a lot like Lamb Chopped here, perhaps with even less justification) in knowing that promised future.
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
The interesting thing is the degree to which this is special pleading that is only ever argued in connection for God and would be considered morally monstrous in any other context.
For example, Martin60 seems to be arguing that putting an end to Auschwitz was far worse than anything done at Auschwitz. In effect, that the wrong people were put on trial at Nuremberg and the Allies were guilty of violating the Nazi High Command's free will.
Likewise we typically don't object when "normal biological processes [are] suspended" by using antibiotics to allow "someone [to] recover from a disease that would otherwise take their life" in the absence of such treatments, nor do we consider it immoral to suspend normal biological processes with vaccines that allow people to develop disease immunity without disease exposure. For some reason this sort of interference is only considered immoral when God does it.
I don't think that anyone is arguing that it would be immoral for God to intervene to prevent evil. Rather we (or at least I) am arguing that it is a logical impossibility. You cannot have a universe that is both free and not free (although, of course, you can and do have one that has degrees of freedom). If God overrides our free will when we choose differently than what he wants, then we do not have free will. It's like telling your child s/he can choose between broiled chicken or a cupcake and slapping their hand away when they reach for the cupcake because you know the chicken is a better choice for them. If you're going to override choice then there really is no choice.
Sorry, not following you. Shutting down death camps or vaccinating against disease are like inconsistent parenting because if someone really wants to murder Jews or "decides" to contract smallpox we should respect their freedom to make that choice? That seems abhorrent.
I'm having trouble following your not following
![[Confused]](confused.gif)
Are we talking past each other???
I would certain advocate for humans making full use of their free choice to do everything in our power to end human suffering-- vaccination and shutting down death camps be good example of that. Those are good, moral choices-- even if they mean intervening with someone's free choice. There are circumstances where limiting free choice is a good moral choice-- such as limiting someone's free choice to commit murder.
My post was in answer to the question of why God doesn't proactively intervene in the world to end human-caused suffering. I am suggesting that he doesn't do that, not because it would be immoral, but because it is a logical impossibility. That if you create creatures who exist in a universe with a certain amount of freedom, you cannot then uncreate that system. Either we are free to choose evil, or we are not. If God acts to stop that choice, then logically, we were never free-- just as in my example if you tell your child he can choose between chicken or cake but will stop him from choosing cake, he was never really freely choosing.
That's not about morality, it's about logical impossibility. The question of whether it is moral or not for God to create a world with the freedom to choose evil is yet another question. The question of whether or not God drew the boundaries tightly enough in terms of what he will/will not allow for the sake of our freedom to choose good is also yet another question. At this point I was simply clarifying that the argument is not about morality but about logical impossibility.
[ 07. October 2015, 19:09: Message edited by: cliffdweller ]
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
As they, we hung (our) children at Auschwitz He HAD to do nothing.
quote:
Originally posted by Tortuf:
We might not be able to live in a world where normal biological processes were suspended so someone could recover from a disease that would otherwise take their life.
The interesting thing is the degree to which this is special pleading that is only ever argued in connection for God and would be considered morally monstrous in any other context.
For example, Martin60 seems to be arguing that putting an end to Auschwitz was far worse than anything done at Auschwitz. In effect, that the wrong people were put on trial at Nuremberg and the Allies were guilty of violating the Nazi High Command's free will.
Likewise we typically don't object when "normal biological processes [are] suspended" by using antibiotics to allow "someone [to] recover from a disease that would otherwise take their life" in the absence of such treatments, nor do we consider it immoral to suspend normal biological processes with vaccines that allow people to develop disease immunity without disease exposure. For some reason this sort of interference is only considered immoral when God does it.
Excellent Croesos. You've exposed the elephantine void in the middle of my rhetoric.
My premises:
God is great and God is good. Perfect. The best case God in whom all will be well.
He OBVIOUSLY does not intervene. Ever. Except for the ONE stone thrown in the pond.
You believe the same I believe. You share those premises. No?
How do YOU square the circle WITHOUT special pleading?
Please?
Posted by Raptor Eye (# 16649) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
But, unlike my kids, my dog could not be brought to independence in that way, yet she is still truly loved. This is also the case for my brother's 35 year old daughter who has never been able to move, speak or communicate in any way. She has Retts syndrome.
And we can never be un-dependent on God (as it's God we rely on for absolutely everything) so I still have the question 'Why set us free?' We are not free. We have something of an illusion of freedom, but that's all it is. If God loves us he does not have to set us free, he just needs to be as kind as it's possible to be to us (not indulgent, kind).
What do you think?
What is this freedom?
Is it real?
Is it necessary?
My take on it is that the freedom is very real, that it's more like the freedom adult children have from their parents - the freedom which as they grow older allows them to turn and question their upbringing and challenge their parents, as we do at a certain stage of our spiritual growth to our Heavenly Father.
The freedom God gives us is the complete freedom to build or to destroy - each other and the world - as the collective human race. It is scary freedom, but it is necessary freedom as the only way we can be held accountable for our actions is if we had the freedom to do or say something else, or nothing at all.
We limit our own freedoms, through laws, societal and parental influences, and moral codes whether learned or imposed, but as individuals we remain free to break them.
Although I do see God as being the spiritual power that connects all of creation and without whom we would not exist, when it comes to our free will choices God doesn't impose himself on anyone. Mary could have said no to the angel.
I believe that God provides guidance to all of us at all times, but most of the time we are unaware of it. Perhaps occasionally we pick it up subliminally rather than consciously, so that extraordinary meetings or happenings take place and we meet future wives or husbands, or we don't catch the train that derails, etc. Some missed the Titanic. There are also evil influences that it is as well to be aware of, both within ourselves as tendencies and weaknesses, and from the deceptions around us.
Prayer and silence with God helps us to keep our attention focussed. If we follow the teaching and example of Jesus, we are not giving up our free will, but entering the freedom of God's kingdom where we have been released from the constraints of evil.
This then is the freedom we have in the world as it is: the freedom to nail Jesus to the cross and despise him, mock him, and spit on him, or to love him and others as ourselves.
The freedom we're promised at the end of the world is in the perfect kingdom we are all looking for, where there will be no more tears.
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
Yeah- that. What he (Raptor Eye) said.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
:
She intervenes in our heads and even external circumstances so we meet the loves our lives but not for the child and their killer?
And that's moral?
What utter, risible, pathetic, chick-flick twaddle.
At least I take the twaddle to the max as Croesos exposed. I justify God's UTTER non-intervention, utter amorality.
Posted by Komensky (# 8675) on
:
I don't get it. First, there is a considerable assumption being made about free will. What makes you think you have free will? If you do have it, who sort do you have? If you do think you have it, you can scrap all those Bible verses about God having plans for you. If he has plans for you, he presumably knows the future and exists outside of time. In which case you merely get to witness the unfolding of God's plan for you, rather than create your own present and future. The same goes for the verse about God knowing you before you were even conceived. If you are amongst the so-called 'Bible-believing' Christians, it seems to me that you have some difficult choices: God didn't really know you before you were born, nor does he have concrete plans for you. Or it might be that those verses contain real truth claims, in which case you don't have real free will, your earthly life is just marking time while God's plan for you unfolds. It might be getting hit by a bus, or motor-neurone disease or winning a Nobel Prize!
If you're going to talk about 'freedom' you need to sort out the matter of free will. Does God exist within time? Does he already know what will happen to you? Has he known you since before you were even conceived? If that is true, then not only do you not have any free will, but neither did your parents, nor their parents, an so on. I don't see how that is freedom at all.
K.
[ 08. October 2015, 09:08: Message edited by: Komensky ]
Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on
:
quote:
Komensky: If you do think you have [free will], you can scrap all those Bible verses about God having plans for you.
That's a false dichotomy.
Posted by Komensky (# 8675) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by LeRoc:
quote:
Komensky: If you do think you have [free will], you can scrap all those Bible verses about God having plans for you.
That's a false dichotomy.
I didn't present it as a binary choice, but merely a deduction from the first point. If God knows both 'you' (whatever that means) before you were even conceived and also knows what will happen to you in future such a claim would (to be generous) seriously undermine the understandings of free will under discussion here.
I should have been clearer about 'scrap'. It would have been better to write 'reconsider your literal interpretation, if you have one'. Such passages may, of course, have other value.
K.
[ 08. October 2015, 09:21: Message edited by: Komensky ]
Posted by Jammy Dodger (# 17872) on
:
I don't get it either - why does there have to be such a binary position - either total free-will and God is hands-off OR total control from God and we are mindless robots?
On the free-will side it seems to me that we have genuine free-will I can exercise real choice about how I treat people, what I say, how I live. However, let's not pretend I have total free-will. That free-will is constrained. To take an absurd example I am not free to jump off a building and fly - no matter how much my free-will thinks that would be a really cool thing to do. My free will is constrained by the laws of nature (amongst many other things).
On the side of God's sovereignty - I do not see how our free-will means that God cannot have plans and purposes that he intends to fulfil - it's just that those "plans" and how they are accomplished dynamically interact with all of our choices.
God has a plan to see his Kingdom come, to set all things right and he has dramatically intervened in the person of Jesus to kickstart this process. How that will ultimately come to fruition, how long it will take and what our role in it will be is a dynamic interaction between those purposes of God and our free will.
That is why prayer is important, and especially this part of the Lord's Prayer:
Your kingdom come
Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven
As this is us aligning our wills to God's and creating the conditions for us to fulfil his purposes and plans.
[ 08. October 2015, 09:23: Message edited by: Jammy Dodger ]
Posted by Komensky (# 8675) on
:
Ok, Jammy, what is the ratio, then, of your free will and when God takes control? 50/50? 60/40? 1/99? To get back to the point, how is that freedom? Are you suggesting that at least some of the time God is pulling the strings on your life? How does he do it? Do you notice when it happens? This is an interesting conversation, but still, what you are describing doesn't sound like freedom. I suppose you could argue that God mostly controls you, then sometimes (when? for how long?) he let's you drive—and you want to call those moments 'freedom'. Is that right?
K.
Posted by Jammy Dodger (# 17872) on
:
No I'm afraid I want to have my cake and eat it. I see is as 100% of both at the same time.
So I am exercising my free will and God is achieving his purposes and plans (not in a controlling way but maybe orchestrating? not sure what the best word would be) at the same time.
So God's intent is fulfilled ultimately - but how that happens and how long it takes may depend on whether, through my free will I am choosing to work with God or against him.
So if God's purpose is to bring about his kingdom here on earth then the more of us that are also working to that end now and behaving in that way will hasten the achievement of that purpose.
That's my twopenneth anyway
Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on
:
It reminds me of the jazz group at my son's school. There's an overlying musical framework, but within that framework, the players improvise all over the place, and it sounds different every time, as the mood strikes them. Saxophone solos, drum, etc. and each one different from the way it might have been done last Thursday.
Posted by Raptor Eye (# 16649) on
:
Martin, there is a big difference between imposed intervention and an invitation to accept guidance. We all suffer the consequences of each other's free will choices, sadly. If everyone allowed themselves to be guided by God's will, it would be heaven on earth.
quote:
Originally posted by Komensky:
I don't get it. First, there is a considerable assumption being made about free will. What makes you think you have free will? If you do have it, who sort do you have? If you do think you have it, you can scrap all those Bible verses about God having plans for you. If he has plans for you, he presumably knows the future and exists outside of time. In which case you merely get to witness the unfolding of God's plan for you, rather than create your own present and future. The same goes for the verse about God knowing you before you were even conceived. If you are amongst the so-called 'Bible-believing' Christians, it seems to me that you have some difficult choices: God didn't really know you before you were born, nor does he have concrete plans for you. Or it might be that those verses contain real truth claims, in which case you don't have real free will, your earthly life is just marking time while God's plan for you unfolds. It might be getting hit by a bus, or motor-neurone disease or winning a Nobel Prize!
If you're going to talk about 'freedom' you need to sort out the matter of free will. Does God exist within time? Does he already know what will happen to you? Has he known you since before you were even conceived? If that is true, then not only do you not have any free will, but neither did your parents, nor their parents, an so on. I don't see how that is freedom at all.
K.
There is a difference between knowing somebody and loving them, and forcing ourselves upon them so that they must do what we want. God invites, God does not impose.
We have the free will choice to do our own thing or to do God's thing, albeit that we are influenced subliminally all of the time by the media, the opinions of others, and the more subtle deceptions as well as the positive invitations to do what is good and right.
An analogy for God's plans might be a computer programme, which takes into account all eventualities but which knows and aims for its goal. If we refuse, someone else accepts. We are always given the choice. As God is outside of time, God may already know that we accepted, but that does not mean that we had no choice.
Posted by Komensky (# 8675) on
:
So if God knows everything about your future and is all-powerful, and has known it from before you were even conceived, then it sounds precisely that he is forcing it upon you. If it is already decided, I don't see much room for free will. It sounds to me like you want to say that although the outcome has already been decided, you get to decide some of the stuff in the middle, like what to wear or which kind of toothpaste to use; is that right? Your 'freedom' sounds like the same kind of freedom that prisoners get when they get to walk around the prison yard. 'Hey, these guys decide whether to walk in circles or back and forth, or lie down on their faces—that's a kind of freedom!'.
What kind of 'invitation' is that? 'Dear Komensky, I invite you to do exactly as I have already decided—and you can pretend that you made some of decisions, even though I have already decided it all for you.' Gosh.
K.
Posted by Raptor Eye (# 16649) on
:
That was not what I said at all, Komensky. The invitation is there for us to live the way God wants us to. We can freely accept or reject it. If we accept, we freely and lovingly do things Gods way. We can turn around at any time and go our own way. People do - which is why we have to suffer the consequences of other people's evil actions and words.
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Komensky:
I don't get it. First, there is a considerable assumption being made about free will. What makes you think you have free will? If you do have it, who sort do you have? If you do think you have it, you can scrap all those Bible verses about God having plans for you. If he has plans for you, he presumably knows the future and exists outside of time. In which case you merely get to witness the unfolding of God's plan for you, rather than create your own present and future. The same goes for the verse about God knowing you before you were even conceived. If you are amongst the so-called 'Bible-believing' Christians, it seems to me that you have some difficult choices: God didn't really know you before you were born, nor does he have concrete plans for you. Or it might be that those verses contain real truth claims, in which case you don't have real free will, your earthly life is just marking time while God's plan for you unfolds. It might be getting hit by a bus, or motor-neurone disease or winning a Nobel Prize!
As an Open Theist, I believe God exists within time. I recognize that's not the majority view.
But irregardless of your view on time, your view on free will vs. determinism is too binary. You are correct that those who view God as having absolute control over every detail of one's life (e.g. orchestrating complex events to cause you to meet your love) are going to logically have to exclude any pretense of freedom. As I argued above, this inevitably means that God would be the author of evil.
But to argue (as Open Theists do) that the future is undetermined ("open") does not mean the verses re God having a plan are meaningless. God has made specific promises, just as people w/ far less control over their own circumstances do all the time. God has the will and the power to fulfill his promises, even while keeping much of the universe still open.
I believe the future is "open"-- our choices are free. But all of our choices are known-- not in terms of what we will ultimately choose (if this were true we would not truly be free) but in terms of what all the options are, and what the implications/ consequences are for each choice. And, like a master chess player, God is able to anticipate every potential future choice and has a plan to accomplish his purposes in every scenario.
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Komensky:
Ok, Jammy, what is the ratio, then, of your free will and when God takes control? 50/50? 60/40? 1/99? To get back to the point, how is that freedom? Are you suggesting that at least some of the time God is pulling the strings on your life? How does he do it? Do you notice when it happens? This is an interesting conversation, but still, what you are describing doesn't sound like freedom. I suppose you could argue that God mostly controls you, then sometimes (when? for how long?) he let's you drive—and you want to call those moments 'freedom'. Is that right?
K.
As argued above, I don't believe God controls anyone. I don't believe God will override anyone's free will. He could-- but he chose to create a world with free creatures.
But there are many ways that one can accomplish one's purposes without manipulating/forcing other people to do your bidding. Our own freedom and power is obviously significantly more limited than God's, yet we make and keep promises all the time-- despite the fact that we can't control other people. So God can certainly have a plan (or multiple plans in all the multi-billions of scenarios dependent upon human free choices) to accomplish his promised future w/o having to control every choice.
Posted by chris stiles (# 12641) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Komensky:
So if God knows everything about your future and is all-powerful, and has known it from before you were even conceived, then it sounds precisely that he is forcing it upon you. If it is already decided, I don't see much room for free will.
I think it might actually be useful to remove God from the argument temporarily - as it reduces the possibility of arguing based on what God 'should' or 'shouldn't' do.
You are really arguing about whether or not determinism (whatever its causes) can exist alongside free will. Here opinions are divided, even if one takes the view of free will as libertarian that you do.
Posted by SusanDoris (# 12618) on
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Hear, hear! toKomensky's posts.
My body and brain work automatically and autonomously, obeying the instincts which have taken millions of years to evolve. Because it does this, I can choose my everyday actions. The fact that I firmly believe there is no God makes no difference - except perhaps that I never waste time considering what said god might be thinking or wanting.
The driver of the car that knocked me down last year wasn't doing God's will or anything; she made a serious mistake. She didn't choose to do so with free will - it happened
The research that has been done which shows relevant parts of the brain lighting up a split second before someone moves a hand or something has already taken a step towards understanding how we make decisions, hasn't it? No doubt there will be much better experiments done over the next 50 years.
(P.S. I did hesitate before putting in a post!!)
[ 08. October 2015, 15:04: Message edited by: SusanDoris ]
Posted by Jammy Dodger (# 17872) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
God is able to anticipate every potential future choice and has a plan to accomplish his purposes in every scenario.
Yes, that. Put so much better than I could.
Posted by Komensky (# 8675) on
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Let me get this straight: God is the one who gives you free will, yet can (and according to some, does) over-ride that and use magic to make his already-established future transpire? I don't see how you are going to reconcile your argument that God exists outside of time and the issue of free will.
Cliffdweller seems to imply God has lots (how many?) of futures already made. This is really strange. If God has to create a bunch of contingent universes so that his plan is sure to happen in at least one of them, then his knowledge of his own creation (you and your life) is imperfect. If God achieves his plan/will (hey wait, what makes you think God himself has free will?) come what may, as you argue, you then presumably hold that children dying horrible deaths fleeing Syria are merely the fulfilment of God's great plan?
If you have free will, surely God's knowledge of you is imperfect; you could do something that God didn't already know you were going to do.
None of this sounds like freedom.
K.
Posted by Jammy Dodger (# 17872) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Komensky:
Let me get this straight: God is the one who gives you free will, yet can (and according to some, does) over-ride that and use magic to make his already-established future transpire?
I really don't see it has to be this either-or.
I don't believe God over-rides anything - the "magic" is us aligning ourselves to his will and inviting him to accomplish his purposes (once again: your will be done...). We then become agents of God's intervention. Its a dynamic interaction between both us and God. I also don't necessarily see that God's future has to be mapped out in perfect detail. I see it more as purpose or intent that he will accomplish.
Incidently, if God's control was absolute and our future fixed why would we need to pray "your kingdom come, your will be done" if it already is being?
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
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Raptor eye. It is God's will, Her invitation that we be kind and just and mericful and generous and forgiving and humble and eirenic and honest and temperate and ... what other "guidance" is there? And you freely accept that invitation. How's that working out for you? God's being outside of now does not mean that She is outside the next now: that doesn't exist, that hasn't happened yet. There are no times, no nows in God. Time is now. There is just now. The future no more exists in God than the past. God has no plan therefore. I don't understand any of your terms except as metaphor at best.
'Intervention', 'Invitation', 'Guidance', 'Will', 'Freedom'. We are 'the plan'. We tumbled out of free the freest possible creation. Despite the fact I cannot visualize it except in the metaphor of a picnic walk in paradise, free of violence, of entropy, there is a resurrection, a transcendence. If it's concurrent with now or after the heat death of the universe or some point in between, no one can ever know until they die. There's no trace of it. It doesn't impinge on us in any way. But as God is before us, around us, in us, ahead of us and doesn't either, it will be there.
Cliffdweller, Jammy Dodger. The future is open. That's true. NOTHING is known about it. By God. God does not bother with transfinite scenarios. She anticipates nothing. There is no need. She goes with our free flow of accumulating complexity. Forever. Beyond death. Judgement Day is eternity in Paradise. Ever learning, deconstructing, healing, relating, playing, creating.
It'll be nice. Forever and ever.
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Komensky:
Let me get this straight: God is the one who gives you free will, yet can (and according to some, does) over-ride that and use magic to make his already-established future transpire? I don't see how you are going to reconcile your argument that God exists outside of time and the issue of free will.
Most of us don't think God overrides free will.
I would agree that it's hard to make this (free will) work if God exists outside of time, which is why Open Theists posit that God in inside time as we are in time (OT vary in how they get to that place-- i.e. whether it is an inherent logical circumstance of time itself or whether it is something voluntarily did when he created a temporal universe.)
quote:
Originally posted by Komensky:
Cliffdweller seems to imply God has lots (how many?) of futures already made. This is really strange. If God has to create a bunch of contingent universes so that his plan is sure to happen in at least one of them, then his knowledge of his own creation (you and your life) is imperfect.
God doesn't have contingent universes, he has contingent plans. Which is not at all strange--we all do that, every day. "Tomorrow I will go to the park... if it doesn't rain." "Sunday I will pick you up at noon... if the preacher doesn't go long on his sermon..." Our future is contingent on a host of factors. If, as I suggest, God chose to create a universe where the future is "open" rather than fixed-- where what happens next is to some degree contingent upon free choices made by free creatures-- then God will make contingent plans in order to accomplish his purposes-- just as we would do. If my purpose is to spend time with my child tomorrow, I might say, "Tomorrow I will go to the park... if it doesn't rain.... If it rains we'll go to the movies... if nothing good is playing we'll go to the children's museum..." Three contingencies based on three future possibilities that are beyond my control, but all of which accomplish my desired purpose. Even though my freedom is limited by other factors beyond my control, I have a plan in place to accomplish my purpose.
Master chess players do this all the time. They don't know all the moves their opponent will make, but they know all of the possible moves, and therefore can think/plan many moves ahead in order to accomplish their purpose of winning the match.
How much more so for God, who, being omniscient, knows ALL the possible contingencies, not just some of them as I am-- and is able to comprehend and imagine an infinite number of possible solutions to each which will allow him to accomplish his purposes w/o having to override anyone's free will.
quote:
Originally posted by Komensky:
If God has to create a bunch of contingent universes so that his plan is sure to happen in at least one of them, then his knowledge of his own creation (you and your life) is imperfect. If God achieves his plan/will (hey wait, what makes you think God himself has free will?) come what may, as you argue, you then presumably hold that children dying horrible deaths fleeing Syria are merely the fulfilment of God's great plan?
One of the core beliefs of Christianity (indeed, of most world religions and philosophies) is that this is NOT a perfect world. This is quite obviously an imperfect world, which your mention of children dying fleeing Syria is just one of a myriad of examples we could use to prove that point. The question of WHY the world God created is presently not perfect is a complex one (Open Theism has a particular, if controversial answer-- so do other systematic theologies) but we all agree the world as it exists right now is NOT perfect. That is why we pray "thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven"-- precisely because that is NOT the case right now. It is our hope-- part of that promised future. It is why we need a Savior. It is very much not the current reality.
quote:
Originally posted by Komensky:
If God has to create a bunch of contingent universes so that his plan is sure to happen in at least one of them, then his knowledge of his own creation (you and your life) is imperfect...
If you have free will, surely God's knowledge of you is imperfect; you could do something that God didn't already know you were going to do.
God could have created a fixed universe where his knowledge of every future choice/action would be determined, and therefore know-able. But, for whatever reason (my theory is love) God chose to create a universe where the future is partially open-- unfixed-- and contingent upon free choices made by free creatures. God voluntarily gave up some control to make this happen.
God is omniscient, which means he knows everything that can be known. The past and the present are knowable-- God knows these perfectly. Future choices of free creatures are unknowable. But I believe God knows every future possibility. So no, we can't do something that will "surprise" God as in it never occurred to him that we might do that. But he cannot know with certainty (although one imagines he is a pretty good guesser) what we will choose until we choose it. As you suggest, if he knew our choices before we made them, then they could not be freely chosen.
But because he is able to know every contingent possibility, he again is able to anticipate and come up with a plan to accomplish his promised future in any contingency. Just as I (much more imperfectly) am able to come up with contingent plans to accomplish my purpose to spend time with my child, even though I cannot control everything that might happen to interfere with that.
Posted by Barnabas62 (# 9110) on
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I came upon this quote the other day by Justin Martyr.
quote:
Justin Martyr said that "every created being is so constituted as to be capable of vice and virtue. For he can do nothing praiseworthy, if he had not the power of turning either way"
Of course it preceded the Augustinian/Pelagian debate by a few centuries, but it is not untypical of quotes by early Church Fathers over the issue of choice. Here's anther one from Irenaus.
quote:
“But man, being endowed with reason, and in this respect similar to God, having been made free in his will, and with power over himself, is himself his own cause that sometimes he becomes wheat, and sometimes chaff.”
On a personal level, I think we wrestle with ourselves over moral issues and sometimes we submit to temptation. I'm not a Calvinist and I'm certainly not a determinist. I think the Catholic critique of Calvinism and the Orthodox critique of the pervasive impact of Augustinian thinking on the Western Church both have a lot to say to Protestants. We need to reflect on our roots.
I believe the most excellent way is unselfish love of God and others. And love has no value if it is a forced card. I would go further and say that if it is a forced card, it is not love.
The OT encourages us to "choose life, so that we and our descendants will live". The NT exhorts us to "follow the way of love". So I think God gives us freedom to choose to live a life of love and discover every day that we need the grace of God to help us follow through.
[ 09. October 2015, 06:53: Message edited by: Barnabas62 ]
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
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cliffdweller, why would God bother with ANY plan, let alone proliferate at least aleph-null of them?
THE issue is the one Croesos identifies. Why does She Zen in the face of the suffering of others when we must not, even though there is virtually nothing we can do EXCEPT on an immediate basis?
Is there a clue there?
Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
THE issue is the one Croesos identifies. Why does She Zen in the face of the suffering of others when we must not, even though there is virtually nothing we can do EXCEPT on an immediate basis?
The answer is always 'because we must be free to choose right from wrong'. God has already chosen. This universe, though faulty, is the only way freedom could have been achieved.
I accept this (I think) but I don't like it. I would rather a kinder but less free existence for those who suffer so terribly. I don't suffer (yet?) but would also accept a gentler, less free, way. We are already constrained in so very many ways a little less 'spiritual' choice would not go amiss imo.
Did you see BBC2 last night? A parasite which deliberately deforms frogs back legs so that they can hardly swim, they get eaten by birds in order that the parasite can spread far and wide in birds faeces. Foul nature. No wonder we who descended from them treat each other so badly.
Posted by Jammy Dodger (# 17872) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
That is why we pray "thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven"-- precisely because that is NOT the case right now. It is our hope-- part of that promised future. It is why we need a Savior. It is very much not the current reality.
Great post cliffdweller I liked your description of God's 'contingent plans'. This point is really important for me too as I would say prayer is why have have come to the position I have about the dynamic interaction between our will and God's. If God is totally in control and everything that happens is already his will. Why pray "your will be done". It's pointless. Also if God cannot intervene then why pray "give us..., lead us..., deliver us..." if God can do nothing about it. Also pointless. Yet Jesus prayed, he instructed us to pray these things and in my experience prayer does change things - even if that change is me so that I make different choices with my free will. I can't explain it any more than that!
Posted by Komensky (# 8675) on
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Thanks to Cliffdweller for thoughtful replies here. 'Open Theism' is a concept with which I am not familiar.
As for the question 'why do we pray the things we pray in the Lord's prayer?', surely the answer should be 'because we pray in hope', not in certainties of prayer being answered.
Again, I still don't see freedom in this—or very much of it.
K.
Posted by Komensky (# 8675) on
:
The issue of God ‘giving us freedom’ is also strange. If we are made in God’s image, and we have free will, then God too must have free will. When we exercise free will we make choices, for the most part, out of necessity or desire for the outcome. If God is perfect and lacks nothing, I don’t see how he could experience desire or necessity (assuming omnipotence). If, then, God lacks nothing and cannot experience desire or necessity, how can he possess free will? How then does God create mankind in his image and pass on this (allegedly essential) trait that he himself does not and cannot possess?
K.
Posted by Barnabas62 (# 9110) on
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God is Love. How is that expressed other than in relationship? The old systematic theologians talked about the impassibility of God but I never got that, never really related to it. Perhaps it doesn't mean what it seems to mean?
Posted by Komensky (# 8675) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Barnabas62:
God is Love. How is that expressed other than in relationship? The old systematic theologians talked about the impassibility of God but I never got that, never really related to it. Perhaps it doesn't mean what it seems to mean?
Maybe God is love, but how does that answer the question of the OP?
K.
Posted by Barnabas62 (# 9110) on
:
Well, if God is agape, and agape does not insist on its own way, then we have freedom. That isn't just freedom to louse things up. There are lots of good and kind choices we can make in life. There's as much variety in doing good as doing bad. Sometimes our choices get knife edged, it really is a case of either this or that. But mostly the range of real life options is a lot wider than what.
Posted by Komensky (# 8675) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Barnabas62:
Well, if God is agape, and agape does not insist on its own way, then we have freedom. That isn't just freedom to louse things up. There are lots of good and kind choices we can make in life. There's as much variety in doing good as doing bad. Sometimes our choices get knife edged, it really is a case of either this or that. But mostly the range of real life options is a lot wider than what.
So how then does God [= love] 'give' anything? You say that agape doesn't 'insist on its own way', what is this 'own way' that it doesn't insist upon? Are we any closer to it giving 'freedom'?
K.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
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Boogie. So that fact the we are weak and ignorant and faced with challenges in that, to 'choose' allegedly, whatever that could possibly mean (and yes I DO know what temptation is, but don't see how it applies to the vast majority of people in the vast majority of situations, including me) somehow justifies God, who is NOT weak and ignorant AS we are, doing absolutely NOTHING in the face of nature red in tooth and claw but incarnating with us.
I'm still stuck with God HAS to do nothing or there can be no creation AND we must do the right thing regardless. Job's comfort.
Posted by Barnabas62 (# 9110) on
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@ Komensky
Personally, I was happy with Jack o' the Green's answer at post 2. But I guess you aren't.
I think of life as a gift. And I think it is a privilege to live this day and the next. So yes, God is for me the author and sustainer of my life. Within that context, I find personal freedom to be an undeniable fact in my life. You can feel free in a cell, imprisoned in a wide open space. But in both situations you have many choices about what you think and what you do.
[ 09. October 2015, 11:55: Message edited by: Barnabas62 ]
Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Barnabas62:
God is Love. How is that expressed other than in relationship? The old systematic theologians talked about the impassibility of God but I never got that, never really related to it. Perhaps it doesn't mean what it seems to mean?
I've heard impassibility explained this way: that God's emotions are not subject to sudden storms of passion, the kind of thing that knocks human beings off our feet and leaves us momentarily out of control (e.g. "in the grip of passion," "overcome by rage," and so forth). Our emotions vary in intensity and can overcome us and cause us to do things we're sorry for later; his emotions are always at their height and work perfectly together with the rest of his personality.
All of which is to say, they are STRONGER than ours, not weaker. Ours have a way of sputtering out. We also have problems with apathy. God does not.
His are also perfectly directed--he never gets it wrong and desires something that should not be desired, or hates something that should be loved.
I think this means there is no mere "mild approval" with him either. When he says we are his children, he means that in a mama bear sort of way, not in some watery philosophical way.
The other thing this means (at least to me) is that where we stand with God is something we have the ability to affect. We can "walk" from one area of emotional response to another--they are fixed and predictable, not constantly moving and stormy. The analogy I use in my own mind is that of the sun and Mercury--you could theoretically walk from the burning hot side to the freezing cold side and back again at your own choice, because the planet is tidally locked and areas that are hot, are always hot; areas that are frozen, are always frozen. So you always know what to expect and where the boundaries are. And if you don't like the weather where you are, you can move elsewhere and find a predictable difference. In theological terms, you can repent--and if you do repent, you will certainly find mercy.
Posted by Raptor Eye (# 16649) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
Raptor eye. It is God's will, Her invitation that we be kind and just and mericful and generous and forgiving and humble and eirenic and honest and temperate and ... what other "guidance" is there? And you freely accept that invitation. How's that working out for you? God's being outside of now does not mean that She is outside the next now: that doesn't exist, that hasn't happened yet. There are no times, no nows in God. Time is now. There is just now. The future no more exists in God than the past. God has no plan therefore. I don't understand any of your terms except as metaphor at best.
'Intervention', 'Invitation', 'Guidance', 'Will', 'Freedom'. We are 'the plan'. We tumbled out of free the freest possible creation. Despite the fact I cannot visualize it except in the metaphor of a picnic walk in paradise, free of violence, of entropy, there is a resurrection, a transcendence. If it's concurrent with now or after the heat death of the universe or some point in between, no one can ever know until they die. There's no trace of it. It doesn't impinge on us in any way. But as God is before us, around us, in us, ahead of us and doesn't either, it will be there.
It probably doesn't matter at all what we think Martin - whether or not God has a plan, or is outside of time. What we shouldn't do but we do constantly is to limit God to our own limitations, or to think that our ways are God's ways.
It only matters whether we believe that God intervenes or not if we try to insist that others believe as we do. We have the freedom to disagree.
Posted by Komensky (# 8675) on
:
Even from a theological perspective I don't see that the OP is answerable—or least satisfactorily answerable. Again, even from a theological perspective, surely it's OK that it isn't answerable, no?
K.
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Barnabas62:
God is Love. How is that expressed other than in relationship? The old systematic theologians talked about the impassibility of God but I never got that, never really related to it. Perhaps it doesn't mean what it seems to mean?
No, it means what you think it means and that's the problem. Impassibility is the one divine attribute Open Theists object to the most. It comes not from biblical or Jewish theology but from Greek philosophy. It just doesn't work in Judeo-Christian understandings of God. It flies in the face of everything that is written about God in Scripture, and inevitably means dismissing huge chunks of the Bible. We all have parts of Scripture that we struggle with and have to either "explain away" or set aside as "mystery", but those who hold to impassibility have to rewrite pretty much everything and have to constantly say "when it says this about God it doesn't really mean precisely what it says".
It just doesn't work in a Christian paradigm, however much some try to make it.
Posted by Barnabas62 (# 9110) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Komensky:
Even from a theological perspective I don't see that the OP is answerable—or least satisfactorily answerable. Again, even from a theological perspective, surely it's OK that it isn't answerable, no?
K.
I think I'm too stupid to answer it satisfactorily. But I have these inklings which point me in a certain direction. That'll have to do for now.
Amusingly, I'm leading a home group discussion on total depravity (!) this evening. I definitely prefer the concept of freedom of choice to the (to me) horrendous consequences of Limited Atonement. But maybe I'm just soft-hearted about that?
Posted by Tortuf (# 3784) on
:
I was accused of being unfair earlier in this thread. I probably was. In my meeting this morning we were discussion the third step, turning our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand God. It got me to pondering over this thread and my role in it.
My thought is that I ought to explain where I come from on this as a way of saying why it is not important to me whether or not God "allows" bad things to happen.
I used to think of God as some sort of cosmic vending machine who would pop out blessings if paid with the right set of sincerely and faithfully made prayers. That God never ponied up the way I knew that God should pony up. Things kept happening in my life, no matter how hard I prayed.
Now, my understanding of the care of God is a power that allows me to get through things the way they are - reality - with serenity and with the conviction that all I am asked to do is the best I can; the outcome is not up to me. This attitude towards life and God has given me more serenity than I can possibly express - when I work it. When I make it a theory, I manage to suffer and feel like a victim again.
Does that make God less powerful? Not to me. It merely allows me to deal with reality and what is going on NOW with strength and courage that emanates from God.
Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
I'm still stuck with God HAS to do nothing or there can be no creation AND we must do the right thing regardless. Job's comfort.
Yes - there can be no creation in the way it has evolved, because God had to allow creatures to kill and eat other creatures all the way down the food chain.
I am veering headlong into wishful thinking and science fiction, I know - but I would have thought an all powerful all knowing God could have designed it all to work less horrifically. Yes, I know much of nature is utterly wonderful. But the foul stuff isn't just awful to the faint hearted (and that ain't me, I'm a tough old bird), it's horrendous to all except the ones who have zero empathy.
Does God have zero empathy? OK, he was human in Jesus - but what does that amount to really? He lived a life and died a death, so do we.
Was Job comforted or simply resigned?
[ 09. October 2015, 15:27: Message edited by: Boogie ]
Posted by Barnabas62 (# 9110) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
Impassibility is the one divine attribute Open Theists object to the most. It comes not from biblical or Jewish theology but from Greek philosophy. It just doesn't work in Judeo-Christian understandings of God. It flies in the face of everything that is written about God in Scripture, and inevitably means dismissing huge chunks of the Bible.
Yes, that was pretty much the way the doctrine struck me in my salad days. I also slung out the perspicuity of scripture BTW. Used to say "It may be perspicuous to you but it sure ain't to me".
[ 09. October 2015, 16:25: Message edited by: Barnabas62 ]
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
:
Boogie, it CAN'T be designed any other way. The laws of physics and creation beyond that allow for increasing complexity. That's it. God CANNOT make physics kind. He CANNOT know if it's going to rain tomorrow, let alone anything else.
Yes, for now we have to be resigned to ignorance. To the mystery. And that in the Resurrection there will be no complaints. Eventually.
Posted by SusanDoris (# 12618) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Tortuf:
Does that make God less powerful? Not to me. It merely allows me to deal with reality and what is going on NOW with strength and courage that emanates from God.
For an atheist of course there is no God involved which means that all along it is and always has been humans themselves who have dealt with everything and therefore it is they who deserve all the credit for overcoming difficulties. I imagine you would still rather God was involved, but may I ask whether you have ever considered that taking that credit would give you greater confidence in your abilities?
Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
Boogie, it CAN'T be designed any other way. The laws of physics and creation beyond that allow for increasing complexity. That's it. God CANNOT make physics kind. He CANNOT know if it's going to rain tomorrow, let alone anything else.
Yes, for now we have to be resigned to ignorance. To the mystery. And that in the Resurrection there will be no complaints. Eventually.
I like that, 'cannot make physics kind'. Well, not if intelligibility is to be preserved, which presumably it should be, could be, would be.
'Eventually' - well, nice guess anyway.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
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It get the pathetic little finger twitching strength and likewise courage by being inspired by the story. Lucky me. I don't get it by magic.
Posted by Tortuf (# 3784) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by SusanDoris:
I imagine you would still rather God was involved, but may I ask whether you have ever considered that taking that credit would give you greater confidence in your abilities?
What I have found is that I have great confidence in my own strength and abilities when I pray and meditate.
I also have the significant probability of operating out of self centered fear, making an ass out of myself and fucking up things worse than they were if I let my ego take over and run things.
You might reply that taking the time to reflect and center myself is me operating and working out the best course of action without dependence on any supernatural being. Maybe you are right and I am wrong. It happens.
On the other hand, I am quite comfortable with where I am right now. Part of where I am right now is that I can share my experience and feelings, but that your path in life is your own and not any of my business. So, feel however you feel with my blessing, for what it is worth.
Posted by SusanDoris (# 12618) on
:
Tortuff
Thank you for your reply - much appreciated. It's an odd thing about memory - with old age come times when the brain recalls with sharp clarity various events, however brief they were, of acute embarrassment or stupidity! A consolation, however, is that you also find that others do not remember them - probably because they're too busy recalling their own! So now when my brain tries to do this, I give it a stern telling-off!
[ 10. October 2015, 05:35: Message edited by: SusanDoris ]
Posted by W Hyatt (# 14250) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
It just doesn't work in Judeo-Christian understandings of God. It flies in the face of everything that is written about God in Scripture, and inevitably means dismissing huge chunks of the Bible. We all have parts of Scripture that we struggle with and have to either "explain away" or set aside as "mystery", but those who hold to impassibility have to rewrite pretty much everything and have to constantly say "when it says this about God it doesn't really mean precisely what it says".
It just doesn't work in a Christian paradigm, however much some try to make it.
It works great for me, and yes, I'm entirely comfortable with saying Scripture doesn't really mean precisely what it says because I believe Scripture presents God as God appears to us in all our different states of mind. However, saying that it does really mean precisely what it says introduces a whole new set of problems, including statements that contradict each other and statements about God claiming to be the author of evil.
Impassability doesn't mean that God is unfeeling and unresponsive. It means that on the one hand, as he is in himself, his love and his response don't play out and change over time because time only exists in creation. But on the other hand, they do play out and change over time as he is present in his time-bound creation.
I can see why Open Theists would object, but I don't see why it would fail to work with other Judeo-Christian understandings.
Posted by Barnabas62 (# 9110) on
:
W Hyatt
The etymology suggests that if God is indeed impassible, He is not able to suffer or experience emotions. I've never been able to square that with scripture, nor with orthodox understandings of either the Trinity or the Person of Jesus. There is not a disunion between the human and Divine natures of Jesus; that's Nestorianism. And the church has always taught, contra the Gnostics, that Jesus really suffered, that he was indeed fully human and fully Divine.
But I recognise that both Catholicism and the early Reformers taught the doctrine. So the explanations that are traditionally given have always struck me as rationalisations! Which I suppose is not surprising given my nonconformist roots.
Why not be satisfied with the shared understanding that God is faithful? Surely that says all we can truly say?
[ 10. October 2015, 11:14: Message edited by: Barnabas62 ]
Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on
:
Impassible = not subject to passions, not necessarily emotion per se (though I know some people use the term so). Passions are by nature emotional storms or waves that come and go, and tend to incapacitate the reason of the one who suffers them. Our emotions are disordered, messed up, not fully functional, and subject to variation in object (who do you love this week? hate?) and intensity (yesterday I was gung ho, but today I'm rather meh about it).
God's emotion is not of that sort, but is a) steady and eternal and b) at the service of the rest of his nature.
Which is to say that God is MORE emotional than us, not less. He's doing it right.
Posted by Barnabas62 (# 9110) on
:
It is the issue of suffering with which I disagree. The word "passion" is now an intense word, even a wild one e.g. "I'm passionate about ...". But its original root was always connected with suffering. When we talk (or used to talk) about the Passion of our Lord, we refer to his suffering.
Here's a link to the evolution of meaning.
BTW, although this is a tangent, it's not that far removed from the OP. Our freedoms include the freedoms to experience sorrow and joy.
Posted by W Hyatt (# 14250) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Barnabas62:
The etymology suggests that if God is indeed impassible, He is not able to suffer or experience emotions. I've never been able to square that with scripture, nor with orthodox understandings of either the Trinity or the Person of Jesus. There is not a disunion between the human and Divine natures of Jesus; that's Nestorianism. And the church has always taught, contra the Gnostics, that Jesus really suffered, that he was indeed fully human and fully Divine.
I understand about the etymology, but that sounds like describing God as impassive rather than impassible. I believe Jesus is God as much as anyone, and that he truly experienced emotions and suffered as described in the Gospel accounts. I just don't see how that's inconsistent with impassibility, at least according to what I understand to be the meaning of impassibility.
[ETA: use of the right word, finally]
[ 10. October 2015, 20:44: Message edited by: W Hyatt ]
Posted by Barnabas62 (# 9110) on
:
How do you explain the cry of dereliction? Jesus the Son suffers an agony of physical pain and rejection. How is that not a sign of the Godhead knowing both the experience of suffering and the experience of deep emotional pain? Of course it is an experience in time but it must resonate in eternity. Indeed we are told that the wounds of the cross are 'still visible above'. They are a memorial to the suffering of the Godhead. I accept the huge mystery of kenosis but not the contradiction that the Godhead has both experienced suffering and is yet unable to suffer.
Happy for someone to explain where I am wrong.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
:
God cannot not suffer everything everything suffers. He's sustaining all, thinking [it] all, every indeterminate quantum perturbation in the cosmos and everything in between. And more. Infinitely more. But how does He FEEL about it? About what He feels. What is His metapathy? Creation may well be infinite from eternity in Him, but He is transfinite. So He can't not feel infinitely but it doesn't fill Him. At all. Do His feelings change? As a whole? They ... can't. He is, in that sense, impassible. Nothing can occur in creation that can change His overall feelings, mood or the analogies of those in His transfinite, multi-person, eternal, multi-dimensional, omni-omni, superpositioned, indeterminate, transcendent immanent being.
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
Ah, gotta disagree with our friend Martin there.
God is constant. His disposition towards us is always love. That is the sense in which he is "unchanging". But he is not impassive. Part of "being love" (as opposed to just "being loving" means that he is in relationship-- there is mutuality. God is moved. Think of Jesus weeping over Jerusalem or over Lazarus' tomb. He knows the end of the story-- he knows there will be resurrection-- and restoration. And yet, he weeps. He mourns. Precisely because he IS in time, he IS with us. He is not in some distant dimension, removed from the impact of the day-to-day realities that delight, horrify, bemuse, offend, and comfort us. He is moved.
Posted by Alisdair (# 15837) on
:
Would it be helpful to some to compare God's 'will' with the difference between a classical music score, and a jam session.
The score takes everyone through in a very prescribed format where everyone's role is clearly mapped out as to which notes they must play when, etc.; while the jam session may set out with a particular theme to get them going, and a fixed amount of time in which to play (several of the group members have a bus to catch), and off they go, seeing where they go, making it up as they go along, riffing off that theme, until somebody takes them all home.
Both approaches achieve their aim, but in quite different ways.
Perhaps God is into jazz and jamming.
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
I think Lamb or someone used that analogy already on this thread-- and yes, I think it's helpful. I'd draw the variables even wider than you do-- (the time frame may not be all that fixed-- someone might leave early thru their choice or another's)-- but yes, the overall metaphor works. God creates a framework in which we are free to improvise. There's some relief in that-- knowing that "doing right" doesn't mean having to perfectly decipher some illusive but super-specific "God's plan", but rather the freedom to explore within some fairly broad guidelines.
[ 11. October 2015, 14:16: Message edited by: cliffdweller ]
Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on
:
God may be moved, but doesn't actually do anything except quietly respond with no hint to us. We have the freedom to draw comfort from God. But no right to expect anything more than internally felt comfort.
There is no intervention to be expected. The freedom is complete for us, except for the freedom to not suffer and to not die. The Christian story is about, in part, intervention at death. We shall all have to see about that. In the meantime, we can live according to the ways we have been shown. Our freedom is to serve and love others or not. This, I think, is our imperative. I feel better when trying to do so. Positive reinforcement. The alternative is too bleak.
Posted by Alisdair (# 15837) on
:
@no prophet's flag is set so...
I don't buy that view at all.
That seems rather like the deus exmachina model---God winds up the universe then steps back and lets it run, i.e. effectively absenting God from any direct day-to-day involvement, which completely removes any possibility of a 'personal' God who we can 'know'. The 'Holy Spirit' drops out of view, and a large part of Jesus example becomes problematic too.
Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on
:
The experiences of life are sometimes a brutal teacher. I should have to betray my child to accept your view. The Holy Spirit is your comforter, not you miracle doer. God is your companion not your saviour from the perils of earthly life.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
:
Alisdair
npfiss... isn't saying this at all:
"God winds up the universe then steps back and lets it run, i.e. effectively absenting God from any direct day-to-day involvement, which completely removes any possibility of a 'personal' God who we can 'know'. The 'Holy Spirit' drops out of view, and a large part of Jesus example becomes problematic too,"
He isn't denying God's immanence in that which he said previously to your illogical response above.
Cliffdweller, we don't disagree at all. Nothing you say, with which I totally agree, disagrees with anything I said. Or believe. I.e. know. How much of transfinite omnipathic Love is taken up with feeling about every feeliing of creation?
We wrestle here with God's complete non-intervention beyong the Incarnation. The FACT of it. A fact as good as quantum mechanics (and NOTHING is better than that as a model of reality). The WHY of it.
Nothing about Jesus is compromised by that fact. And NOTHING about the Holy Spirit. Apart from our extremely limited understanding of Her based on the musings of our pre-modern Jewish spiritual ancestors INCLUDING the man Jesus.
Last Monday in our home group my wife shared how she was being driven to true despair, on the edge of acute depression by the straw on her camel's back of a single four year old child disrupting her entire school. She knows that God does NOT EVER intervene. Ever. That there is no point praying for wisdom, or a good night's sleep let alone any other magical change. But she wanted to share with the group who are ALL nice evangelicals, who ALL use the pre-modern modes of speech and therefore thought and prayer about God, to a despairing degree, bless them. Of COURSE we prayed about it. Raw and real with the unreal. Together. And one ordained sister present has been texting and praying and it's all been vastly encouraging. Not least because, of course, a miracle HAS happened. The situation has been transformed in a way that was not envisaged. Because of God's provision. Not because She performed some micromanagement of people's feelings and thoughts. The situation had potential in it that was realised BECAUSE goodwill, openness, positive perseverance, networking, vulnerability were being exercised. NO magic wand was waved. Someone from left-field, invisible, who was watching, just stepped unasked up to the plate and that has made ALL the difference. God made that possible. 13.74 Ga and 2 Ka ago. In our staggeringly subtle minds. And yes Her deep comingles perichoretically with our deep. Life=spirit goes way beyond Bismark's politics in being the art of the possible. And no claims have to be made at all. And no faith lost. Evil proliferates the same way. But the story just gets bigger and more complex.
I've mentioned here a guy I didn't love. A guy I felt no affection toward. Believe me, if you knew him, what his history is ... I felt awkward, uncomfortable ... resentful. His awkward, broken helplessness. On Friday night I just hugged him. I meant it. Thank you Father for that space. For that impulse. For the provision of that, of unconditional affection in my 13.74 Ga and 61 a of experience. For that FREEDOM.
I have another guy to go ... and another I've just had to let go. No, I've not abandoned him. He's completely unhelpable. God CANNOT lift a finger for these guys. Or anyone else. CANNOT. Not will not. That is SUCH a relief. THAT is freedom too. Free of that torture.
[ 11. October 2015, 21:02: Message edited by: Martin60 ]
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
((((Martin)))
See, Susan Doris: there must be a God. I just hugged Martin.
Martin: your post makes me both
and ![[Votive]](graemlins/votive.gif)
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
:
Steady on old girl. I'm British donchaknow.
Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on
:
I am too stupid to understand "immanence". Is mere presence sufficient? I am only objecting to the idea of intervention in the wiles and wherefores of the world and daily goings on. Which both reduces freewill of humans and all natural phenomena. And is inconsistent with experience. May I just proceed with companionship and hope for the ability to manage and cope? Free to botch it, free to return from wrecking it to a demonstrated path? ( If so, I will join in a group hug. And I really don't do hugs, but this would be, for me, pretty much central and thus worthy. )
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
:
(((((no prophet's flag is set so...))))) THAT'S immanence baby!
Posted by Alisdair (# 15837) on
:
@no prophet's flag is set so... and Martin60
On reflection I take back my last comment, because---on reflection---I find myself today far more in sympathy with the words you have both written than when I responded, too quickly, in the first instance.
But, still, perceptions of presence, immanence, and the meaning of words too, are personal, but I am glad they can be shared, smoothed like stones in the river, and then perceived again, but differently.
Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
We wrestle here with God's complete non-intervention beyond the Incarnation.
That's the very reason for the OP. I think that maybe the older we get the more wrestle. People have given me lots of answers for God's total non-intervention (thank you). I also hear some say God does intervene where s/he can without removing free will - but I don't see any evidence of that. I'm not asking for much intervention either - just to remove (or not allow to be created in the first place, whether natural or human) the worst of the worst evils, not everyday 'suffering'.
But, like a child, whatever answer I get doesn't satisfy and my question/answer remains 'humph, but why??
Posted by SusanDoris (# 12618) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
((((Martin)))
See, Susan Doris: there must be a God. I just hugged Martin.
Good idea!
Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on
:
Martin - a right corker that post, well done. I think that people who are not religious also go through processes like that, I mean, being in an apparently hopeless situation and emerging with a solution, happens all the time. However, your guesswork is aesthetically preferable.
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
However, your guesswork is aesthetically preferable.
In the end, that's all any of us-- me, Martin, Susan Doris-- has. We observe the universe and attempt to make sense of it. Out of the marketplace of interpretations, we choose the one that seems "beautiful" in the fuller sense of the term.
And that's important. Because how we view the world, how we interpret that data, determines how we will interact with the world, how we will "live and move and have our being" in the world that we share.
I hope that I too, am choosing light over darkness, beauty over chaos.
Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
However, your guesswork is aesthetically preferable.
In the end, that's all any of us-- me, Martin, Susan Doris-- has. We observe the universe and attempt to make sense of it. Out of the marketplace of interpretations, we choose the one that seems "beautiful" in the fuller sense of the term.
And that's important. Because how we view the world, how we interpret that data, determines how we will interact with the world, how we will "live and move and have our being" in the world that we share.
I hope that I too, am choosing light over darkness, beauty over chaos.
Yes. I'm not sure that we observe the universe really, or 'view the world'. Doesn't matter really.
Reminds me of Keats, truth is beauty, and beauty is truth. For me, that means that truth is not intellectual at all, but the right aesthetic moment, when life is fulfilled. I certainly don't choose that. It happens when I stop choosing.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
:
{{{{{{{Jack o' the Green, shamwari, Belle Ringer, Rolyn, LeRoc, balaam, Tortuf, Adeodatus, anteater, SusanDoris, W Hyatt, mousethief, Barnabas62, Komensky, Lamb Chopped, cliffdweller, Alisdair, mark_in_manchester, Raptor Eye, Jammy Dodger, Jengie jon, Pomona, Brenda Clough, Croesos, no prophet's flag is set so..., Susan Doris, quetzalcoatl}}}}}}} all in the same boat... Ship! with {{{{{{{Boogie}}}}}}}
Croesos has the answer the Boogie. But he ain't tellin'. A bit like God really.
Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on
:
hosting/
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
Croesos has the answer the Boogie. But he ain't tellin'.
Martin, I hate to interrupt all this hugging, but pre-empting the views of shipmates not involved in the discussion at this point is not a good plan. Please have a little sit down and a cup of cocoa or something, and rein in your posts a bit.
/hosting
[ 13. October 2015, 21:10: Message edited by: Eutychus ]
Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
However, your guesswork is aesthetically preferable.
... we choose the one that seems "beautiful" in the fuller sense of the term.
...
I hope that I too, am choosing light over darkness, beauty over chaos.
Aesthetics and beautiful. I have the neophyte's understanding of this. A strong draw. Light over darkness, beauty over chaos. Worth restating, it's where I try to live.
I hope it is like the waterfall on a canoe trip with my friend dying of cancer (dead these 6 years), where he obviously experienced something profound in the middle of no where; a 'thin place' he called it. It didn't change his cancer and didn't prolong his life, but it made him place his cancery troubled guts and soon death in the context of eternity, which the waterfall - running since the end of the last ice age - was a stand in. It gave a goodly measure of freedom from his worry and terror of dying and being dead.
I need lots of education about beauty and the truth it shows. Aesthetics. Is there a secret music of the spheres? Of the molecules in our cellular protein factories Can we know this stuff? Will knowledge truly set us free?
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
:
Eutychus. Sir. I would like to engage with what Croesos said way back regardless of his not engaging further, which I also completely respect.
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
Originally posted by Martin60:
As they, we hung (our) children at Auschwitz He HAD to do nothing.
quote:
... The interesting thing is the degree to which this is special pleading that is only ever argued in connection for God and would be considered morally monstrous in any other context.
For example, Martin60 seems to be arguing that putting an end to Auschwitz was far worse than anything done at Auschwitz. In effect, that the wrong people were put on trial at Nuremberg and the Allies were guilty of violating the Nazi High Command's free will.
I went on to acknowledge that I was guilty of special pleading on God's behalf. But Croesos' rhetoric is also flawed. If God had put a stop to Auschwitz by supernatural intervention, it would have been the Second Coming. I wish He had, that the Kingdom had come. But we ended it. After creating the conditions that led to it. The right people were put on trial. A tiny fraction of them. And we killed a few. Showing that we were part of the problem in microcosm. The evolutionary problem. AKA sin.
We must put God on trial. Test Her. Here. She is great and She is good, as Jews of Auschwitz knew well. She NEVER intervenes. In 13.74 Ga of this universe alone. Even in its creation possibly. Probably in fact. With a probability approaching certainty in the simplest model of God: creation is infinite and eternal in a transfinite God.
Except for incarnating. Infinitely, eternally or once.
I sit here with rolling news at 21:35 BST and am very moved by Pauline Cafferkey's dying, Lord have mercy. I wish She would. She won't. Is that because She can't? How can that be so? Is the only way out of concluding that God can but CHOOSES not to, restrains from doing so for at least six hundred million years of exponentially increasing suffering, requiring special pleading for Her not to do so, to conclude that She CANNOT intervene without destroying creation.
Because it can't be about morality. There is NO moral reason why God never intervenes. There must be an existential reason, a logical reason. Existential in the sense that we could not exist.
Surely?
Posted by Alisdair (# 15837) on
:
Sorry, not following you. Shutting down death camps or vaccinating against disease are like inconsistent parenting because if someone really wants to murder Jews or "decides" to contract smallpox we should respect their freedom to make that choice? That seems abhorrent.
So, where would you draw the line? It seems that 'Love' inherently requires 'Freedom', which inevitably opens up the potential for 'Suffering' and 'Evil' and 'Death', but how else can the potential for 'Love' and 'Life' be realised.
It's no different to my wife and I deciding not to have children because we don't want them to be exposed to the dangers of life. Fine, perfectly legitimate choice, but the end result is those children never were, and never will be---who knows what they might have been, and 'Love' is lost, instead there is nothing but a 'might have been'.
'God' doesn't seem to go for 'might have beens', but is very much interested in giving everyone/thing a chance to flourish and see what it can become.
Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
Because it can't be about morality. There is NO moral reason why God never intervenes. There must be an existential reason, a logical reason. Existential in the sense that we could not exist.
I agree. It must be this.
Because an all knowing, all powerful God would know exactly where to draw the line to allow us enough freedom to choose good over evil, but at the same time preventing the worst evils - especially natural evils.
Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on
:
Reminds me of the idea in Jewish mysticism that God withdraws in order to permit creation. This is not really a moral reason, nor I suppose a logical one, but an interesting one, even if it is another guess.
It suggests an incompatibility between my concrete existence and the direct presence of God, and I suppose many religions warn about this. Well, a friend of mine used to talk of a light brighter than a million suns, when he saw God in his friend, sounds scary. Other horror films are available.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
:
Hmmmm. Bin thinkin'. I talked the missus' hind legs off with this having trapped her in the car for a couple of hours yesterday and then walked AND talked them again on the way from Blakeney to Wells and back (sixteen bloody mile!) today.
I could see the weakness in my argument here as I reiterated it yesd'y and the walk drew it out. I abandoned special pleading for God being morally bound not to intervene for existential reasons BUT God DID intervene AS Jesus. In the face of every moral need as a man He responded.
So why can't He now?
Posted by Raptor Eye (# 16649) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
Hmmmm. Bin thinkin'. I talked the missus' hind legs off with this having trapped her in the car for a couple of hours yesterday and then walked AND talked them again on the way from Blakeney to Wells and back (sixteen bloody mile!) today.
I could see the weakness in my argument here as I reiterated it yesd'y and the walk drew it out. I abandoned special pleading for God being morally bound not to intervene for existential reasons BUT God DID intervene AS Jesus. In the face of every moral need as a man He responded.
So why can't He now?
God did and does intervene as Jesus, in the sense of guiding us, showing us the way - 'I am the way, and the truth, and the life'. Jesus points us toward God, and gives us the freedom to go our own way instead. Until the day when all tears will be wiped away, as the second coming of Christ means that God has intervened finally, once and for all.
Meanwhile, we're stuck with each other, and charged to love one another, even - especially - those who are the least loveable.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
:
You nicely avoid the question Raptor Eye. Very nicely.
Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
I abandoned special pleading for God being morally bound not to intervene for existential reasons BUT God DID intervene AS Jesus. In the face of every moral need as a man He responded.
Well, I don't think Jesus was God. I think he was full of God - more than anyone before or since. So he can show us the way. He responded with love, so should we.
But I don't think he intervened.
I still think the only reason God doesn't intervene is because s/he can't + allowing life to exist.
So s/he gives total, complete freedom. I am now working on being grateful for this.
Posted by shamwari (# 15556) on
:
God works from within the process of living, not upon it.
He nudges, suggests, prompts and influences us. He does not force, compel or coerce.
Love is in no way coercive. And God is Love.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
:
How can a man be full of God more than any other? Without God intervening?
Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
How can a man be full of God more than any other? Without God intervening?
By 'allowing' God in?
Posted by Komensky (# 8675) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by shamwari:
God works from within the process of living, not upon it.
He nudges, suggests, prompts and influences us. He does not force, compel or coerce.
Love is in no way coercive. And God is Love.
If you believe in the truth claims of the Bible, God most certainly does force, compel and coerce. I can't imagine what you mean by: 'Love is in no way coercive'.
K.
Posted by Komensky (# 8675) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
How can a man be full of God more than any other? Without God intervening?
By 'allowing' God in?
This assumes that you have free will. That you get to decide to let God 'in'. This is, at least, a better picture than the usual 'God has great plans for you' and that 'God has always known about you since before you were even conceived', which take God outside of time and deny your free will.
K.
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Komensky:
quote:
Originally posted by shamwari:
God works from within the process of living, not upon it.
He nudges, suggests, prompts and influences us. He does not force, compel or coerce.
Love is in no way coercive. And God is Love.
If you believe in the truth claims of the Bible, God most certainly does force, compel and coerce. I can't imagine what you mean by: 'Love is in no way coercive'.
K.
Other than the somewhat controversial and complicated passage discussed at length upthread (God hardening Pharoah's heart) I can't imagine what passages you are envisioning.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
:
Where is God in Christ coercive?
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