Belinda wrote: ↑Sat Jul 12, 2025 12:12 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Jul 11, 2025 6:21 pm
Belinda wrote: ↑Fri Jul 11, 2025 9:31 am
I do agree that world views are ephemeral. Can you not see that your own version of truth is historical?
That question doesn’t actually have any meaning. Every “truth” is “historical”; that’s not to say it’s untrue. You must be trying to say something more specific, but I can’t tell what it is.
Truth, Beauty, and Good don't necessarily win over evil.
Today they don’t. But a tomorrow is coming.
It's useless to look to any supernatural spirit to protect us from Trump, Putin, Hitler, Stalin, Netanyahu, and others who follow the dictum might is right.
“Might is right,” as Nietzsche pointed out, is all one CAN reasonably believe, once you remove God from your thinking. The very worldview you’re trying to defend is the one that inevitably yields that result.
But “might” and “right” are not the same. And tomorrow, we’ll find that out.
Love of truth is a way of living, not love of an actual being. Jesus said he was the way, the truth, and the life : a synthesis , not pure Truth.
What’s the incentive for “love of truth” in a world in which only power has a say? You think you can escape that, but you cannot. Having abandoned God, one is left with nothing but the ability of the strongest to tyrannize the weaker…a kind of “nature red in tooth and claw” taken over to human affairs. And “right” and “wrong” themselves no longer have meaning, because there’s nothing to MAKE anything “right” or “wrong.” There is only, “I have the power, and I will do as I will.” And that’s the end of it.
The claim of Jesus, “I am the way, the truth and the life” is not some sort of synthetic abstraction. It’s a clear declaration that without Him, you will never get to God. As He adds (and you forgot to quote) “No one comes to [God] the Father except through Me.” (NIV) Not only is He not saying He’s an abstraction or amalgam of ideas; He’s saying, unless you come to Me first, you’ll never come to God.
Take that to the bank, Belinda. He said it, He meant it, and some coming tomorrow, you’ll know the truth of it, one way or the other. My preference is that by that time, you’re on the right side of what Jesus Christ promised.
Having abandoned God there remains one guiding star which is human nature compounded as it is of good and bad.
The problem is that there is then no objectively-real “good” or “bad.” Our “human nature” is just whatever Nature made it to be; no more, no less, no other than that. One has no longer any objective basis to deplore or laud, to praise or blame, our actions.
Our history is terrible however I do trust in hope for better.
You can’t call our history objectively “terrible.” All you can say is “Belinda would not have preferred the way it was.” You’ve killed off the only basis for identifying history as good or bad. So your view of history would have to be, if you were frank with yourself, that it just was what it was, and will be what it will be. There is no “terrible,” and there is no “hope.” There is only, perhaps, your wish that you might like the future more than you liked the past — but your grounds for hoping it will be so are none at all, given what it has already been, and given what Nature can do for you in the future.
How can you be happy with that?
The Way, The Truth and The life as propounded and existentially lived by Jesus was aimed at fellow Jews a people suffering under brutal Roman occupation. Jesus truly is iconic goodness but Jesus is not the only true icon of goodness: there are also Socrates and Buddha.
You’re mistaking “nice” for “good.” Socrates was a “nice” man, perhaps; he was never good in the way you know Jesus Christ is. And Buddha might not have been genuinely good at all, depending on your view of fatalism.
But why do you say that Jesus is “iconic goodness”? He, Himself asked the same question when interrogated by the Rich Young Ruler: “Why do you call Me good; there is none good but God alone?” Jesus is, of course, not denying HIs own deity, but rather pointing out the implications of what the RYR was calling Him. So let me ask you: why do you call Jesus “good,” when you don’t regard HIm as God? Are you taking the glory of God, and attributing it to somebody you think was just a man, not the Son of God?
To be a practical proposition a religion has to speak to the people who are to be converted. Some people will respond to Socrates, or Buddha, far more so than to Jesus. Even modern paganism is better than no religion at all, or the philosophy that might is right.
Yes, some people will respond to Socrates or Buddha. But neither can save them. They were not God, nor even claimed to be. And paganism never saved anybody. And likewise, some people will respond to Satanism, or Nazism, or the Nietzschean nihilistic view that puts power at the head of all things. But so what? What does that prove? Only that men can be badly, badly lost. It does not imply that because they choose something, that thing is good…far less, capable of saving them from their natures.
Would you yourself care to provide a set of rules that enable us to differentiate between a harmful cult on the one hand a life -supporting religion on the other?
You already did supply it: Jesus said, “I am THE way, THE truth, and THE life; no man comes to the Father except through Me.”
There’s the test: if they have Christ as the source of Salvation, they can bring you to God; if they do not, they cannot. They are not the way, not the truth, and not the paths to life.
And the One who provided that test is, by both your admission and mine, the very embodiment of “good.” So trust Him, if you quote Him. For it is one thing to admire, but quite another to believe and be saved.