Re: God
Posted: Mon Mar 30, 2026 3:06 pm
Not really. Islamists contest it, for sure...but it's really, really obvious from the relative texts. The problem is that most people know little about the Biblical God and zero about the Quranic "Allah," and so have no ability at all to know whether or not what the Islamists say is true or not.
But it's not. And you can certainly confirm that for yourself, if you want to know.
No, please don't. Disbelieve me, please...but confirm. And then you won't doubt it anymore....for the sake of continuing my thesis in this thread, I'll grant you your points here.
It depends what you mean by that phrase. It is the case that one's relationship with God is always personal; but it's not at all the case that it's "subjective" in the sense of "whatever I want to think it is." It has very specific conditions, which are defined by God Himself, not by any of us.I agree with that, and the premise that the Monotheistic (Abrahamic) God is Objective, not Subjective. Rather an individual's personal definition, relationship, and perspective of God, is Subjective.Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun Mar 29, 2026 1:57 pmI don't think, though, that our "assessments" matter very much, if they fail to reflect the reality of who God actually is.
Not at all, actually. There's no experience above that I'm referring to that would not be available to anyone who was present at the time, and would not be equally available to any modern person, had one such been present. But it is true that, for the person of today, the information about it comes from testimony and record, rather than from first-hand sight.Your arguments here rely heavily on what is epistemologically available to Humanity from Century to Century.Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun Mar 29, 2026 1:57 pmMoreover, if what Jesus Christ did and taught had something to do with "internet, smart phones, airplanes, nuclear bombs, etc." then you might have a case that nothing supernatural was claimed or done by Him, that He was merely using technology or science before its time. (Still, that would imply HE had supernatural access to those things; for how could He have predicted the technology, living as He did in the first century? So that's a weird theory.) But what you see, instead, is that the claims and actions of Jesus Christ are definitely presented as supernatural. There's really no avoiding that. And the supernatural is presented as His authentication, in fact.
And the people of Christ's day were not idiots, of course. Like us, they knew that lepers don't get cured, men born lame don't walk, the blind don't suddenly see, food doesn't materialize from nowhere, nobody walks on water, dead bodies don't rise, and nobody on earth has power to forgive sins. They got all that. It was well within normal human experience to know that, even in the first century. And that was why they recognized what Christ did as "miraculous." One doesn't call something a "miracle" if one knows any natural explanation for it. They definitely knew there was something going on that was so far different from normal experience that no accounting could be made of it.
So the narrative will not sustain the interpretation you're offering, I think you'll find. One can, of course, simply then decide to reject the whole narrative, and to say that no such Person ever existed. But when one admits the existence of Jesus Christ (which historically is quite well established anyway), then one has to make a plausible accounting of that narrative, too. I suggest that what you propose above simply won't do.
Actually, it seems to me that "artificial" or "artifice" has to be the very opposite of supernatural. Technology is wholly part of the natural world, and there's not a supernatural thing about it. "Artificial" is the opposite of "genuine," and "artifice" means "fakery," or "invention," so again, there's nothing whatsoever that's supernatural involved in such, by definition. You're now talking purely about man-invented things, which have no supernatural action, and for which there is always, ultimately, a wholly-natural explanation.My interpretation of Super-natural is Artificial or Artifice.
Well, since you ask, I'd have to say you're mixing terms. You're blending "not natural" with "supernatural" with "artificial," and then with "heavenly or divine," which you are then inisiting is not merely "outside human knowledge" at present," but ultimately altogether "unknowable." Those are radically different claims that do not entail one another. Things can be "artificial" and yet merely material, and not in any sense "divine" or "heavenly" at all. And things can be "outside human knowledge" but not ultimately "unknowable": just unknown at present, or theoretically knowable but not humanly knowable (like the actual dimensions of the universe, for example).Because the Abrahamic / Monotheistic God is "Not Natural" or at least Above Nature, then I assume 'He' is only Artificial... or Heavenly / Celestial / Divine / Outside all human knowledge altogether: Unknowable.
What say you to all this?
That's an easy mistake to make, but it's still a mistake. You're sliding from one term to the other, assuming they all require belief in the subsequent term; but they don't, and you'd need to substantiate each new claim as you change the adjectives.