Dubious wrote: ↑Mon Aug 21, 2023 2:50 am
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Aug 19, 2023 3:55 amHere's another way of thinking about that. God, being the Supreme Being, must have every virtue in ultimate proportions. If He does not, then He is, by definition, not supreme in that respect at all. Something else is "better" than He is, at least in that respect.
So ask yourself: if we humans regard loving people and being sacrificial for their good as high-level virtues for human beings, then would we not expect the Supreme Being to be more -- not less -- loving and sacrificial in His nature than we are? So it can come as no surprise if the Supreme Being is, in fact, much more loving and sacrificial than you and I are. Were he not, that would be a diminishment of his goodness, a deficiency of a virtue of which we have more -- and one respect in which we would be better than God Himself.
Sorry for the delay! Frankly I wasn't sure if I should reply since my response, as usual, is not favorable to your argument...
and it's not that I'm simply trying to be recalcitrant. But it kept bothering me, so I decided to come forward.
My main objection to your argument is, though humans have always been the main perpetrators of atrocities of every kind, they have also been instrumental in condemning and stopping it.
Well, are you planning a vacation in Ukraine or North Korea this year?
I think it's pretty clear that the atrocities are continuing, and in fact, that the last century witnessed two bloody world wars and a succession of totalitarian regimes that neutral statistics-keeping demonstrates were orders of magnitude greater than at any time in history. Slavery is still increasing worldwide, both in raw numbers and in the wickedness of the kinds of slavery being practiced, we have faced only the first in what is likely to be a succession of global man-made pandemics, we massacre more infants than at any time in history, and we are told we are on the brink of a total global climate meltdown.
I guess I'd ask...what part of that tells you that human beings are "stopping it"?
Where was the Supreme Being in all of this?
What would you have expected him to do? I mean this as a sincere question, not a rhetorical one, and not a trick one: I'm genuinely asking what you envision God, if He existed, would do differently than He has done.
In all history nowhere to be found.
Now, that's a hard postulate to substantiate. Lots of people think God has been and is very much present, and has been involved in all the ways He plausibly "should have been." Leibniz, for example, would have said this was the case.
Where in all this is the "loving" part?
Well, are you prepared to accept any part of the Biblical record as historical? Or is your thought that anything in which God's love was shown has to be excluded from evidence for no other reason than that it contradicts the theory that God has been absent from history?
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Aug 19, 2023 3:55 amWhat you espouse here is more of a philosophic view relating to the necessary or presumed qualities of a Supreme Being which can theoretically be discussed by anyone...not just theists.
I wasn't "espousing" it. I was summarizing the "god" of the Deists. I'm not a Deist, so I don't "espouse" such a view.
What I always considered literally obscene - an excuse to give the Christian movement credibility when its official founder was crucified - is that Jesus died to save us. It demands an answer to the question, to save us from what? Original Sin,
No. From your own sin.
I'm quite certain he never thought of himself in that way while he was alive.
So you're "certain" that what the Bible says He claimed is false? For example, when Jesus said,
"And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to Myself.” And John adds,
"Now He was saying this to indicate what kind of death He was going to die." (John 12:31-33), or when Mark writes,
"And He began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise from the dead. And He was stating the matter plainly" (Mark 8:31-32), Mark just got that wrong? And those are just the first two of many references I could give you that show the same thing.
What we both can safely say is that the people recording Jesus' actual teaching certainly believed that He was telling them He knew about his own death long before it happened, and understood it in precisely that way. You may say, "He must never have said any such thing," or "They must have misinterpreted... (accidentally misinterpreting the exact same way, of course)" but what I would ask is "What source are you getting that from?"
