That's why God didn't make intelligence or reason the touchstones of faith. As it is written, "God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise". But without them faith is blind, which is why study is neccessary. The truth is that no manner of science can deliver you from sin of injustice. Any person who accepts science as a substitute for God has already decided on his own innocence, and will therefore face condemnation when he is found guilty. And it will go even worse for the person who destroyed the faith of someone, as Jesus said: "Woe to the world because of the things that cause people to sin! Such things must come, but woe to the man through whom they come!" (Matt. 18:7) If I manage to lead anyone to repentance or faith, it won't be because of my reasoning skills or someone's gullibility. I can only testify about what I know, but faith comes from God. It takes a miracle, and the only miracle I have at my disposal is the message that God loves you and has set a place for you at His table. Lack of faith can only be "justified" if you don't believe in God, in which case it won't count much in your favour. Hebrews 11:6 And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.
Guilty of what? Not believing in something that makes no sense? As with the technician and his intelligent robots, the creator has a responsibility to his creations, not the other way around. So you think its okay for God to punish me heavily for spreading my worldview, but you will be rewarded for spreading your worldview? That is hardly just. This sounds a lot like what I'm reading about Kierkegaard (I think you'd like it if you haven't read it already), and I've heard it before from others - that it takes an intervention from God to give you faith. What I don't understand is: If the miracle is about you gaining superhuman insight regarding something that we mere mortals cannot figure out ourselves, as this insight is only available in the form of a miracle from God, then if you do understand it, then part of that understanding would include why others can't understand it. The revelation should be a big forehead-slapping 'Oh, now I get it!' It should all make sense to you, in which case you could explain it to others. But you can't - ergo, you don't understand it. I bet others from other religions have similar 'miracles' occur to them; some Buddhists feel they have reached Enlightenment, and Whirling Dervishes feel they connect directly with God. If you all got together, each utterly convinced that their truth is the right one, how would you determine who was right? All you could do is ask that the others have 'faith' that you are right, and of course they are going to do the same. There's also the problem of why you bother to talk about all this at all - I agree that its going to take a miracle for me to become a Christian, so you could just sit back and wait until it happened. Unless you think that I must first 'open my heart' to God, in which case you will have to convince me that there is something up there to open up to, instead of opening up my heart to some other deity. So, no matter how you turn and twist it, you can't escape the need for rational explanations. Neither can God. Surely you don't expect me just to believe and expect that it all falls into place - again, belief is not voluntary. It just happens when the information sensibly combines to create a worldview. At least tell me this - do you understand why I am an atheist? Are you baffled at my lack of comprehension, or do you see my point and just pity me for lacking something vital that you happen to have?
You being deliberately dense now. Your worldview denies God's existence based on your unwillingness to believe in Him, and nothing else. God is perfectly just in condemning something that leads to destruction. I'm not spreading a "worldview" anymore than Noah was spreading one when he warned people to repent and be saved from impending disaster. He was asking people to look critically and seriously at their own worldview, in light of the revelation from God that it will be destroyed. In other words: I don't get the last word, you do. Besides, whenever you propagate a system of justice/morality in order to establish peace and ensure love - you are in essence already spreading the "Christian" worldview. You just don't know why or how - or what that says about who you are. The miracle of faith is not something that requires anything you don't already possess. God has provided the "superhuman insight", but you have to believe it (which requires that you believe in Him). Miracles aren't sufficient for belief, but you are. It's a typical fallacy that religion has to supply everything you don't know. That's why people end up thinking science has replaced it and religion is no longer necessary. While it's true that some religions do (and no doubt they were invented for exactly that reason), that's not what Christ did. He supplied nothing less than what we needed to know: that everyone falls short of God's glory, but that He values your life above everything and wishes to reconcile you with Him. Do you accept that? No, I don't understand it. I don't understand why God would have bothered at all, except if He loved me. And I understand love. Again, don't ask me how, but I have an intuitive knowledge of what love requires, and I suspect so do you. It means He accepts me, failures and all. But a child who had run away from home is still lost, even though he is loved. Recognizing God's love means going back to Him, confessing that I was wrong to run away, and living a new life. So you see - it's not a big forehead-slapping revelation. It's a simple truth. The miracle is that it's possible even though it seems impossible. Faith means believing that such a miracle is possible for God. Faith doesn't give you superhuman understanding, or makes you any better than you were before, but it admits that God can. That's just it: it takes faith to believe in something that is voluntary. The reason why I can't just sit back is because God has already provided the miracle, and I know that something is preventing you from believing it. Whether it's a love of sin, prejudice, misunderstanding, pride, stubbornness, conditioning... I don't know. But I know it's not because you're stupid or because you lack anything. You already have the knowledge of how God got you to the point where you can discuss the intricacies of His message with me. That didn't take a miracle, or did it? I'm trying to clarify the message but I can do it no better than the apostles. It's just that not many people will get to reading the Bible if they have already made up their mind about its contents (or they will just never get to it). The Bible isn't really a holy book, it's a book with a message: that of life and salvation. It doesn't require that you change who you are, just that you listen. It only becomes "holy" when you listen. The best I can do is make you prepared to listen. "Opening your heart" only requires that you abandon the belief that I'm trying to con you for some personal satisfaction or sinister agenda for long enough to forget about me and hear the truth: I'm not trying to convince you to become more like me, but to become more like Christ. Because as long as you deny that God can provide, you will lack the information necessary to make sense of it. In fact, you have to be able to positively deny that God can reach you right there where you are, in order for this message not to make sense. Rational explanation is limited to your reasoning ability - but think about this: is God?
I'm not trying to be dense - the thing is, we understand the world in radically different ways. Its really interesting. Its not just facts we disagree about, its the very method of understanding and interpreting the world. You seem to have skipped ahead to some 'truth' about the world - you don't understand it exactly, but something has made you understand it as the truth. I could never be satisfied with that - I need to know the why and the how of the matter. You understand things about this world, then you understand that there is a God that loves you and that asks for your love, and that you and everyone else needs to rejoin with Him - but you can't bridge the gap between the two; in other words, you are acting as if you knew for sure that God exists. I cannot for the life of me understand why you aren't sceptical of your surety. If God spoke to me, the only thing I would accept is something that explains the logic of the Bible, of God, the meaning of it all, the different religions etc, in such a way as to make belief in Him the most sensible option. "You have some problems with Christianity. Let me explain them for you..." I don't care about love or duty or anything like that until those other things have been dealt with. Like I've said, the reason I deny the existence of God is lack of logic and evidence and moral grounding. On one hand you act like I can't see something that's staring me in the face; on the other hand you admit yourself that you don't understand why God would have bothered, etc. If its not obvious to you, its certainly not going to be obvious to me. Of course I deny that God exists - until He makes sense, I am never, ever, going to 'go to Him'. If Santa Claus exists and is depressed that I don't believe in him even after all the presents he gives, then its up to him to make himself known. I will eventually spend all the hours to read the Bible, and the Qur'an, and others if I have the time and patience. However, the point of this thread was to deal with an issue of the morality of the doctrines of religion. Irrespective of whether He exists or not, in order for Him to be moral and just He has to obey the same principles as ourselves, or we cannot know Him as moral and just (as we would not be able to define those words!) I thought of an answer to the situation - if God was warning people of the folly of turning away from Him, and given that people need to be treated justly by Him, what if God gave everybody the same treatment on Judgement Day? Then, it would not be about each individual trying to get to God, and oh dear how sad never mind for the others; instead, everyone would have a responsibility to his fellows to boost humanity up to God. The test would be of all humanity; obviously, if you're born retarded or die as an infant, you can't do anything, but those that have the ability should make the world as just as possible, treating all people as equals, and not just congratulating themselves on being the saved ones while everyone else is doomed. Now, because you can't just enforce Christianity, love, duty and such, you would have to create 'God's Kingdom' on earth, my making a just and fair society. That's what I would want - just without any reference to God. Then, He can congratulate us on Judgement Day for achieving peace, justice and liberty on earth, love for fellow man, progress etc. It would mean that God wasn't quite all powerful, but it would mean that He was just, that He really did intend the best for us all, and that He really did give us the free will and abilities necessary to pull it off. We all know that vices tend to undermine society, and that good deeds help it; we just need to work out the bugs from capitalism, and we're well on the way. Is that appealing? Because as far as I can see, God shouldn't be able to require that we also recognise Him as creator - its makes no difference. I believe in the primacy of the ethical, you believe in the primacy of the spiritual, but technically they should work towards the same goals. If they don't, only then is there trouble.
The why and the how is inseparable from love and duty. People live in a disfunctional relationship - with God and with each other. it's a family that needs urgent repair, because in such a relationship everybody loses. Misunderstandings, anger, hatred - all are symptoms of our condition. When things fall apart, you have to fix them first before you can appreciate the "logic" of a healthy relationship. God calls such separation "sin", and his concern about its destructive power is seen through Christ. We can only see God with any amount of clarity and understanding within a healthy relationship with Him, which is why Jesus' ministry was so necessary: he preached a gospel of action, but of action that requires faith - much in the same way that actions that can lead to world peace require faith in the principles that will lead to it - justice, love, tolerance... even though we don't understand any them completely, and we have no idea what "world peace" looks like, we have to trust them because those are the tools and bricks we need. We uncover more we weren't aware about from the beginning (because they weren't "logical" yet?): personal responsibility, education, health care, environmentalism. But all of these - despite our lack of understanding of their details - form the outlines of the picture we're colouring in. In the light of what I said, does this make sense? Philippians 3:12 Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. What frustrates me is that you are seeing what's staring you in the face. You're describing it to me so clearly that if you hadn't told me otherwise I would have thought you were a Christian (except for a few illogical conclusions reach, but I'll come to those). As I've explained above, it's not because I don't understand anything that I can't explain it clearly enough, but because I don't understand everything. I'm also just seeing a fuzzy reflection in the mirror. But my faith and understanding doesn't have to perfect to believe in perfection - and you think it does. You think we have to know all the variables, all the details, have every last piece of information before we can make up our minds about something. If that were true we would still be living in caves - too afraid to make fire because we don't understand it. Can you imagine a world where millions of very desperate scientists across the earth were making a final, concerted effort towards discovering and describing the sub-quantum mechanics of water before they could take the first sip? Then why are you so willing to wait until you die of spiritual thirst before you drink from the living water that gave you life in the first place? Even your ethics and morality are gulps of air because you know they're necessary to breathe, but you don't know why they represent "life". You're already taking breaths of faith, my friend. You're not phasing in and out of existence, it's called being alive. We are only able to define what those words mean within our lives. They only assume their meaning when they touch us - or we touch them - because although find their origin in God's nature, they describe human behaviour. Doctrine is just us trying to rephrase what we've got; Theology is the science of religion. We're trying to understand what we know - whether by instinct, revelation, or reason. We know God is moral and just, but we are limited by our understanding of morality and justice. It takes an immense leap of faith to judge him finally by something we are still trying to make sense of. Paul called the commandments a "schoolmaster" to teach us how to understand God's love, which was embodied by Jesus (not by the Israelites - they were still being taught). You can't say: "look this plant didn't have leaves then, how can it have leaves now - isn't that a contradiction?" I understand your reasoning that God should be true to the moral character, but the problem is that we are not. So it really is a case of the flawed (us) asking the perfect (God) to become flawed, before they could accept his morality. Now that rings a bell: Jesus (God) became flawed (man), and do we accept His morality, or do we judge over it? That should make you think. We are the discrepancy, not God - because we are unable to be legally and morally perfect. But Jesus showed that even though we are inadequate by ourselves, it doesn't mean we are inadequately equipped. While we strive for perfection, He makes us perfect. And Godly perfection means complete devotion and commitment - which is really just "obedience to the goal". So in a sense we're back in the garden of Eden, being asked to become obedient to God (committing ourselves to those laws and morals that will eventually be our peace). This is what I meant when I said you already seem to understand what you're seeing. Look around you - aren't we already living in such a world? Replace "on Judgment Day" in your first sentence with "through Nature". The problem is that you're building a house (or palace) on the king's property, with the king's tools, and the king's resources. Except you don't submit yourself to the king, and have therefore already decided your not going to live under his rule or in his kingdom. You get to the same point as I do using logic and common sense, but then we split up: if you are building this kingdom with your own resources, tools and authority, then isn't it also subject to the nature by which you built it? Sure, you apply spiritual tools like perseverance and honesty, and abstract concepts such as love, but really, you're building your house on sand (does this count as a pun?). On the other hand, if you build it on "God's green acre", as I have described above, doesn't it belong to Him? Don't you also want to be able to live in it eternally, once you're dead to this nature? What you call Judgment Day here, is really nothing other than God coming to claim what's his. Peace, justice and liberty on earth will die with those who enjoy it, and ultimately die with the earth itself, you know that. I don't know how you can blame God for choosing to ground His kingdom in heaven, with it's tallest spires barely touching earth - where some of us are already changing our lives, painting our rooms and choosing matching curtains...
Can't you see that its the other way around? You know someone, then you develop a healthy relationship with them. The terms exist only to the degree we understand them. We don't decide that environmentalism is a good thing, because its a nice long fancy word, or even because its something to do with nature and so we'll trust it's good, then go about understanding it - rather, we understand our symbiotic relationship with nature and the fact that when we damage nature we may be harming ourselves, then call the resulting attitude 'environmentalism', and begin to learn what actions conform to that attitude and how it fits with our other values. We don't start education reform etc until its rational to do so, until we we know why they are the tools and bricks we need. Likewise, we do know what world peace looks like - no wars! In order to realise that we discover that it will probably take equal rights, education etc. We don't have faith that those really are necessary, we have reasons to believe that they are. And they might be wrong. But until we have better alternatives, they are what we aim for. We do not follow them because Kofi Annan tells us to. Imagine if someone had faith in the idea that killing your supposed enemies was the key to world peace: no enemies = no wars. So he preaches the gospel of 'action', doesn't bother to understand the consequences, and starts a Rwanda-style genocide. In order to convince this person that he has it all wrong, you need arguments, reasons, logic. I don't think our understanding has to be perfect, just reasonable. Enough friction on wood, and hey presto, you get fire. It's there, in front of you. Learn how it works later. Its just that until they do, they take the risk and hope that the smoke won't poison them and that the light won't blind them, but that's their choice, and they accept the risk because of the benefits. However, believe in an entity whose existence seems improbable bordering on the impossible, rearrange your life to live according to precepts that you don't agree with, and... you die. You hope that you'll wind up in this 'Heaven' place, but there is no credible evidence that anyone has ever ended up there. I don't want to blow over your point though; I can understand that if you feel there is a good reason to behave according to those precepts (which you do agree with), you should. I can't know your individual experience or anyone else's, I can just assume that we're not too different. There are just two points I am trying to make about this: One is that you cannot transfer your experience to me without the sensible worldview. My understanding of the world has few holes - yours has got to trump it. That's not to say you have to hand the whole thing on a silver platter for me ready to consume; you can indeed explain how it works for you, giving me an incentive to investigate it myself, which I will continue to do. But right now the logical, rational and moral obstacles are still there - I can't just choose to pretend they aren't there and have faith. And I don't like the Christian God - He isn't someone I can look up to. I don't even have much respect for Jesus - He has no right to claim to be able to die for my or anyone else's sins, as my supposed sins all revolve around not worshipping God, which I shouldn't have to do even if He did exist. I have precisely no incentive whatsoever to even entertain the notion of Christianity. In fact, my ideas of what makes a society good and just involve values that contradict Christianity. To me, a just world is not a Christian world. I despise meekness, humility, faith, obedience, loyalty, paternalism, hierarchy and duty; I value honesty, understanding, ambition, ingenuity, curiosity, equality and individuality, as well as values that Christians and I share, like responsibility, compassion and love. The second is the responsibility to society to understand yourself and your actions. It doesn't do any good just to promise that your actions are in accordance with something that we cannot see and that its all going to fine in the end; this brings no comfort to the daughter of the 'witch'. Your actions must comply with an ethical code that works for all society, one that is comprehendable irrespective of religious persuasion. That's why if Jesus came down to begin the 1000 year kingdom, he would have no choice but to seek election democratically, because not even divinity would allow him to override our natural morality. If he sets up a dictatorship, he'll have to be gotten rid of, simply on principle. Even if he happened to have 100% support, but then he wouldn't need a dictatorship. If God's given us free will, he has to continue to respect that. If you conjured up an ideal, called it God, and showed why living according to that ideal was beneficial to me and society, responsible, and sensible, I'd be all ears. You are making headway in some respects; you've proved an excellent complement to that introduction to Kierkegaard, revealing a new dimension of spirituality where perhaps objective reasoning and evidence-collecting is missing the point of the individual's personal beliefs, values and actions. If God was simply our common humanity personified (since He created us in his image), and there was an objective morality that we could understand, then perhaps there might be good reason to trust in certain values and 'duties' because they feel so right, then I might be more inclined. Unfortunately, they're closing this net place I had to use today, so I'll finish on Monday.
I honestly hate to butt into the middle of a wonderful discussion, but I quickly wanted to state some observations regarding some statements made here. Sincere apologies in advance.. Could you kindly name me one person that god stopped from dying? At the end of the day everything dies, whether they believe in god, the marshmallow man, or nothing. I really think it's about time we draw up a list of god vs satan to figure out who has the higher tally of evil. I mean really, has satan ever done anything like drown every man, woman, child, animal and plant? Has he bombed cities with sulphur, closed womens wombs or commanded man to stone their sons to death? Show me where in the bible satan has ever done anything that can be seen as seriously evil in comparison to the acts of god. Demonstrate love for who? Certainly not for the child who was about to be sliced and diced. Ok, I admit god and I are from different sectors of the galaxy, but where I'm from we demonstrate love by hugging and kissing, not by stabbing to death. This quite clearly goes against religious belief. According to christians, jesus is god - and thus he wasn't saved by god - he saved himself. In fact, we could even state there's no way he was dead at any moment in time unless we are to acknowledge that for a brief time god was actually completely dead and non existant, but somehow managed to bring himself back into existence. It's a parlour game, a magic trick. He pretended to die, then stood up, laughed at the humans and buggered off back into space. Nobody saved him, he saved himself. Furthermore, faith is not an issue here - he wouldn't have need for faith, considering he is god and is going to save himself when he kills himself. Faith is not an option. He knows he's god and he knows that he wont die even if it looks to humans like he's dead - but he really isn't dead because he's god, and as he's god he can never really be dead. Now kindly don't give me some horsey-poo about three gods, I don't even believe one exists, let alone some pagan polytheistic hand down of sun gods, moon gods, water gods and ice cream gods. He either is god or he isnt god. If he isn't then why do christians exist, and if he is - then his act of dying was mere "stage acting" for the stupid humans, and he would never have need for faith or anything else - because he is in fact god, which would also show he was never really dead at all.
SnakeLord, feel free to butt in, but your post wasn't relevant to this discussion, and you seem to miss the point anyway. Heck, even I could probably answer your questions: 1) Death as in eternal oblivion instead of rejoining God; not bodily death. 2) Satan represents actions that turn you away from God, vainly seeking personal satisfaction through indulgement and self-love, refusing to acknowledge God's world if it inconveniences you. You're applying current and subjective moral standards to situations you know little about. 3) Refusal to obey would be tantamount to putting conditions on your faith in God, meaning you have no faith. If you believe that God's morality is the highest, that it's God's world and you are all of God, you are not murdering anyone, but rather performing God's will. Loving Isaac should be the same as loving God - your feelings for the worldly shouldn't override your faith in and love for God. Abe couldn't be the father of the chosen people of God if He wouldn't even give his son over to Him. 4) Jesus was God giving Himself to humanity, both communicating to them directly and allowing them to react as they pleased to God's word, violently on His own body if they pleased; He was not God dressed up as a mortal, He was of God, God made human, with imperfections, less than all powerful and less than all knowing, with the ability to suffer emotionally and physically; by putting Himself on the same level as humans, He could demonstrate His understanding and empathy with the human condition and give all humanity a chance to know Him. The suffering wasn't being killed, it was being beaten, ridiculed and killed by your own creations (and your own 'chosen people') for explaining your Word to them. He was demonstrating that He wasn't one to violate their free will. I have plenty of my own objections to what I've written, and there's tons I don't understand and don't agree with (and the above is probably not very accurate), but there is a great deal of insight and sophistication in the way many Christians see the world. It really is radically different from us atheists in many ways, and we can learn a lot even if it's not true. So, can the sarcasm. This discussion is about the moral dimensions of faith, responsibilites to your fellow humans vs. to God, etc. Anyway, back to the rest of your last post, Jenyar: We are imperfectly moral precisely because we don't understand morality perfectly! And because we don't, we can't justify submitting ourselves to the teachings of anyone, even one who claimed to be God and whose morals might have made a lot of sense. You are saying that because we are imperfectly moral, we need to submit ourselves to something that we can call perfect; I say that it acts as an incentive to become more aware of what morality entails. We don't need to be perfect right here and now; what we need is the chance to teach ourselves morality, try different attitudes and systems out and see what works. There are many Sons of God running around trying to save humanity - we judge the real from the insane by applying our understanding of morality on them. Otherwise we might as well accept anyone who claimed to be of God. We have every right to judge God, because until we know that He really exists and that He really means well for us, we have a responsibility to our fellow humans not to rush to judgement and start acting without due understanding. If God really exists in the way you claim, then you might have a point. Until we know, we have a responsibility not to assume things that have radical implications for the way in which we treat each other. In order to determine whether or not God's morality is True, we must understand it. Until then, we have to behave according to morals that we can justify to ourselves and others. I think this sums up what I'm trying to say. Again, how can I know? I build my house with the resources that have been made available to me, and the foundation looks a lot more stable than yours. Its like I build my house according to the lessons learned by past house-builders, and by those trying to understand the nature of the world in which I am building that house; yet here you are, having built a house on very different assumptions, using old understandings, and claiming that your house will last while mine will not. That's pretty bold. You justify it by faith, while I have the empirical evidence and reasoning. If you are right, good for you, but I am not going to bulldoze my house and build where you are until I understand why I should. You are doing nothing but explaining the consequences I will suffer if I am wrong, rather than explaining why you are right. It looks like I am building on rock, it feels like I'm building on rock, so I'm going to go with that. And God needs to be able to understand that.
It was relevant to the comments I quoted - which, funnily enough, is why I bothered to quote them. Go figure... No, it seems you missed that I was talking with relevance to the quotes I quoted, which is why I quoted them. Well heck, I asked a total of four questions, and you did very little in answering any of them. What's your point? Here's my question again in case you missed it: Can you name me one person that god has stopped from dying? - be it the first death or the second.. So basically what you're saying is that we die, (physically), but our soul or "other life" that doesn't die along with the rest of us, can then die itself, or be "rescued" by god? But then, word on the street has it that our "secondary being" doesn't die, but is sent to a pit of fire where it burns for eternity - so tell me, who is god stopping from dying? Our physical is dead, our spirit is burning. Question still stands.. I'm not applying anything, and I certainly know no less on the subject than anyone else - unless you're going to claim someone has personally met him and seen what he's all about, then been bought back to life and documented it all for the rest of us? The first instance of satan, (according to many), comes in the garden of eden where he's kind enough to give mankind knowledge of good and evil. Without knowing that, mankind has no reason or call to worship god - because they have no basis with which to view him as good, and have no reason not to worship the devil - because they have no basis with which to view him as evil. Anyway - the actual part of importance was: Show me one place in the bible where satan has committed an evil that is comparable to the acts of god. Kindly use the bible, using a personal thought over how he's evil does not answer the question - nor is it worth the kilobytes of space it is using. Wonderful.. but I asked who it shows love for - and then followed with "surely not the child who's about to be sliced and diced". Basically- the answer that should have been given was "love for himself". Yeah i've seen several of these crackpots around before. There's another thread around here somewhere about that woman in Texas. Murder is murder - you can't make it "better" by stating the guy in the sky told you to do it, regardless to whether this was 2000 years ago or 2 minutes ago. No it shouldn't. It is a sentence like that quote that shows exactly why humans are so fucked up. Oh really? What, and it wasn't in gods power to just like read the guys thoughts and find out whether he was worthy or not? Not being funny but I would have thought god would be aware of whether he'd chosen the right dude without the need for tests. So god was no longer in the sky, or was jesus a mini-god? So.. he wasn't god? or for a time, the one and only god wasn't all knowing or all powerful? So they in fact crucified god himself? but then god himself bought himself back to life? Or can we now state christianity as being polytheistic? All humanity? That's a bit unfair.. You mean all people in the area... I'm sure no Brazilian Tree Tribe people were lucky enough to see any of it. Buty i'm sure god with all his infinite wisdom would know that a few thousand years later some white collared dude would go over and inform them that all their beliefs were false, whereas his was right yada yada. However, being god, im sure he could demonstrate his empathy and understanding without performing magic tricks in the middle east. "killed" means nothing when you come back to life a few days later. Damn I'd let you kill me right now if I knew I would be up and alive by breakfast. But tell me.. how many other people were beaten, ridiculed and killed for explaining their words? Hell, some still are.
Alaric, I must say it's a pleasure to have a discussion with someone who shows both insight and humanity. Your answers to Snakelord show you have some understanding at least of the Christian premises you're debating, and I think hearing your objections about them should be interesting. Snakelord, I'd like to address your questions as well, but I think we've covered this ground before. Besides, I'm in a discussion with Alaric at the moment, so if you don't mind... add something productive. PS. The Bible doesn't differentiate between the physical and spiritual body - it's the same thing from two perspectives: one from ours, one from God's. There's something I should make clear: you are operating within a cage. Sometimes it's a logical cage, sometimes it's a moral one, but the problem is that you don't differentiate between what God knows and what we know. You can see the outside but you can't get there. Even if we align ourselves to a moral guideline without being able to see either end of it (without faith), that doesn't mean neither can God. You've placed artificial boundaries on God, and they're not necessary for your argument. To God, perfection means folowing that line - the very one that everybody on earth holds to, the one you say we can measure God by. Otherwise we're not debating the direction of the compass needle anymore, but where it points to. My faith says it points North and nowhere else, following it leads to God, because that's where He came from when He came to fetch us. My faith is that Jesus shows where God is coming from. It doesn't say that I can make it on my own, or even that I know exactly how I know what I know. But there is a compass - you know it and I know it. The difference is that you're following it in the opposite direction, away from Christ, away from God. Because when you judge God, you're making a mockery of his judgment by using his law (however imperfect our understanding of it) to judge His perfect understanding of it. As it's written in James: "When you judge the law, you are not keeping it, but sitting in judgment on it." (4:11) If our understanding of morality is only human, then we can't judge God by it, because that's just an indication of his judgment - and if that understanding is divine, able to judge God from an independent position, then you must admit that we hold that independent condition in higher regard than God himself. Think about that for a moment... you are putting the law above God, exactly as Jesus' persecutors did, in effect making the law our ultimate judge. Do you follow what I'm saying? That isn't an enlightened view, it's tunnel-vision on the goal God set before us. The same tunnel-vision that Jesus condemned in the Sadducees and Pharisees. They also saw the law (remember, it was their "morality") as the be-all and end-all of God, the universe and everything else. It was a box that tried to include God, instead of realizing it was the box they are in, one which ended up excluding God. The law of Moses was their cage, even though it was supposed to set them free. But that law - that ultimate, perfect law - is exactly what condemns us to hell. It makes even anger and jealousy deadly sins, comparable to murder and adultery, because it's blind. It condemns as indiscriminately as a force of nature - with one sweep we're all condemned to death. Why else do you think it was so necessary for Jesus to show God's power over death? Hebrews 10 28Anyone who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. 29How much more severely do you think a man deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God under foot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified him, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace?Jesus did indeed bring the sword of division: He is the pivot of the moral compass - where you decide if you're on the judging side, or on the receiving side, where you can accept God's grace instead of rejecting it. Listen, I know this has a certain threatening quality to it. Please realize that it's not God who's threatening you with "the fires of hell", but the kind of perfection that leaves out faith. Justice is merciless, God is not. Christ made that distinction possible.
PS. Alaric, I think you will find these sites interesting in regard to our discussion: Evidential justification and deontologism One prominent view of justification is the evidentialist view. A justified belief is one for which a person has adequate evidence of some sort. A second related notion is that one is justified in holding some belief only if one is intellectually entitled to hold the belief, i.e., within one's intellectual rights or not in violation of certain epistemic duties. The views are often combined in what we might call deontological evidentialism: one has an intellectual obligation to hold a belief only if one adequate evidence for the belief. Alternatively, a person ought not to hold a belief in the absence of sufficient evidence. also Epistemic Objections to Religious Belief Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Both are from this philosophy course presented by Prof Michael Sudduth at St. Michael's College.
Born in christian home, raised with christian values..... I have become an athiest until otherwise. While i have my reasons, i still respect others beliefs and if they try to persuade me back in, i persuade them to come out. Religions/ beliefs or what ever are all human made. Therefore whether god will judge me, is not relavent since it does not exist .
That's the box I was talking about: If what we can understand of God is limited by our abilities, everything we understand will be within human reach and will necessarily seem man-made. But if there are things we don't understand, and yet have reason to believe in - it means we can't be sure enough of ourselves to justify not believing. Our understanding, reasoning and logic must be man-made; who else is there to do the "understanding"? But if the little understanding that we do have points to a world outside the box, you dismiss it at your own risk.
SnakeLord, I sort of agree with many of your objections, but they're irrelevant here. In this discussion, forget about floods and stonings and focus on the idea of a Creator in the Christian tradition and His relationship with His Creations - how do we understand morality, and can God judge us for the choices we make and the morality we hold to? Jenyar, those articles look perfect! I don't have time to read them today, but will this Easter. Yes, I follow you, but the thing is that we can't see out of the cage. You are arguing this as though we were a couple of infant siblings who were debating intelligently about the merits of obeying our parents. Then it would make sense - we have limited knowledge and experience, and our morality is consequently flawed, so sure, lets just trust and obey and have faith that we'll be alright. We would be applying our limited understanding of morality on the much wiser morality of our parents, who have shown that they love us, so let's not second-guess them since it could lead us to be distanced from them. (Wow, this is actually a great metaphor!) BUT! This is not the situation we currently find ourselves in. We do not know that there is a God up there. We do not know He is good, and we do not know whether we should care what He wants. We aren't sitting in cots looking at our parents, we are living in a world with many others who all have different ideas of what up there, and we are going to have to organize ourselves in a way that allows us to co-exist. This is what morality entails. You keep talking as though it was obvious to all that there was a God; if it's obvious to you, then you can justify (to yourself only) a 'teleological suspension of the ethical' (Kierkegaard) and follow God's will, like Abraham did. But both you and God need to realise that following God's orders as they are described in Christianity just because you were told to is immoral. It almost sounds like Jesus was agreeing with me! I remember that Jesus condemned someone for condemning Him for allowing His disciples to gather corn on the Sabbath, because they put the law ahead of the people (or something like that). That is something that makes sense to me. However, you don't need to involve God in this - He should just be saying that you don't follow the Sabbath rules strictly just because, you follow them out of respect for God; they aren't there to inconvenience you. So let's follow that idea and forget God and Christianity, set ourselves free and be moral according to our own understanding! Surely that would show the greatest respect?! We aren't judging God's morality with our own - we are judging our perception of God. If I'm turning away from God, I'm only turning away from the conception of Him that I currently have. Think about it - what is the most honest way of finding the 'truth' (call it God if you wish) - honest rejection of the implausible for the plausible, honest searching for the complete ethical which enhances my own understanding of my relationships with others, honest self-understanding - or suspension of all that and faith in something I can't love or understand? Your own views on God would be heretical to other Christians in other times. You have made your own quest for understanding, and have arrived where you are now, and you are happy with that, yet those other Christians might have forced you to have an understanding of God that violated those views you have now, and you probably would find it hard to love God. You haven't found God - you've found a version of Christianity that appeals to you. That should make you think!! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! And as you should know by now, I'm going further and saying that you have a moral responsibility to apply rational morality to your life, regardless of whether God is there or not, since you can't know you are right. Even though you are sure that you are right, you can never violate my freedoms for your beliefs (religious suicide bombers etc). We shouldn't submit to a belief because our morality is imperfect; we should avoid submitting to a belief precisely because our morality is imperfect.
It's not immoral for the same reason that parents loving their children and expecting them to imitate (respect/return/understand) their love is not immoral - it's where morality starts! Within a loving household, children learn that the benefits of love are justifies the self-control and tolerance it requires, not because they understand it, but because the experience it. We do know there's a God - you just don't believe it. There's a difference. You don't agree with the way we have arrived at that knowledge, because it doesn't fit into the current worldview. Have you considered there might be something wrong with the current worldview? Maybe what God said was wrong with it? Namely that sin obscures our senses. Sometimes it's in the name of "logic" or "reason" or just plain self-righteousness, but it's always the same: believing in God places an obligation on you that you're not willing to accept (at least not honestly, since your moral preferences show you already accept it at least in principle). You've got it the wrong way around: you are agreeing with Jesus. But Jesus went further than that: his parable about the talents could have been aimed directly at you. As your Creator, God gave you certain allowances, gifts - a certain potential and an inherent value. Digging a hole in the ground and "keeping them safe" sounds like the respectable thing to do, as it did even in Jesus' time, but He made it clear that they were meant to bear fruit. If you live a moral life, and it bears fruit, shouldn't you wonder who it belongs to? The faculties of reason and morality aren't your own, you know, you didn't acquire them because you liked them - they were gifts, given along with life itself. As I said before, living a moral life, even if only "according to your own understanding", shows that you hold yourself to principles that are foreign to your nature. If they were natural to you, you would not ever have need to exercise self-control, or reason, for instance. You would have been able to simply trust your instinct without thinking about anything you did. Finding the truth sometimes requires more than rejection of the improbable. To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes: "When you have eliminated the impossible, what is left, however improbable, must be the truth." Since you haven't been able to eliminate God as impossible, your rejection of Him can't be "honest". I completely agree that the picture one has of God has a lot to do with it. Some people see Him simply as a policeman, jumping out behind a bush everytime you do something wrong, but ignoring you the rest of the time. They can't be more wrong, but there's a lot of these presumptions going around. Yet people seem content with rejecting their straw-gods, waiving their relationship with "Him" as impossible due to their own ignorance. From my perspective it looks like someone fiercely keeping their eyes shutwhile saying, "I already know what I'm going to see - I know I won't like it, and nobody can blame me for being wrong if I've never seen it!" Don't you think I've been there? I'm still there! I have a book by my bedside, "The Kingdom of the Cults", that explores all the main Christian-related cults, how they interpret Scripture, their own "revelations", logical mistakes, and in what ways their thinking can be misinterpreted or faulted. I recognized my own thinking in many of them, and I'm constantly trying to refine it. These forums have also contributed their part, and I'm only getting started - even though I've theoretically been a "Christian" since birth. But there's one thing I've come to rely upon - that God rewards those who seek Him with knowledge... pure, tangible knowledge about Him. And still they're just feathers I pick up along the way. I have no reason to doubt that by the time I get to the top of this mountain of seeking, doubt, reasoning, failure and successes, I'll have gathered enough feathers of truth to fly above it. Another thing you should know. My "version" of Christianity is probably as unique as any other, but the times a have come across the true "church" - people who go: "no way! You've found that too? And it was in the Bible all along!" has become just too frequent to ignore. There are people who are on the same quest as me, and I don't doubt they're on the same path as me, even though the path is always as unique as the individual who walks it. I can describe to you how unlikely that is: it's like I've been running, jumping, doing cartwheels and backflips all my life, and then I suddenly realized I've been on a tightrope all along. That's what fear of God is like. It takes faith to go on walking after that, but it's a faith based on experience. Trust me, blindness is the last thing you want. Where is that moral responsibility attached to? Responsible to whom - myself or others - who's the authority? If I follow the thread that connect all moral people, where will it take me? In other words, it's a tightrope that doesn't seem to be attached at either end - a moral box. Is everybody in the same box, or is everyone in their own box? Still you don't know what keeps any of you there. We can never "know" we're safe, so we have to concentrate on doing the little things we are "quite certain" are right, while negotiating other people and their "certainties", all the while hoping it gets us to the other end, wherever that is. Talk about a blind and precarious faith. I'm not mocking you, just comparing our versions of the world. No, we're not free from the trappings of the world. It's our box in more ways than one. It includes the authorities God had placed over us (like Pilate was placed over Jesus) just as surely as it includes the terrorists around us - often they're even the same thing. It includes our life and death in one uncompromising package. The question is where are they taking us, and are we slaves to them or do we belong to God? Don't submit to "Christianity" - it will be just another strawman. Take that advice from a Christian. But submit to God, and He will show you what Christianity really is, namely Christ. You've already found the entrance to his "narrow road". You're mulling about with abjections and questions, but you're not really looking. I just hope that the ones you're asking me are really honest, and you're not just looking for more reasons to reject God. Because I'm telling you He exists, and I'm able to do that with a force that blows through me like a wind - I'm not the authority that this knowledge comes from, and neither is my church.
If they experience good results from doing something, does that always make it good? We do know there's no God - you just don't believe it. There's a difference. You don't agree with the way we have arrived at that knowledge, because it doesn't fit into the current worldview. Have you considered there might be something wrong with the current worldview? Maybe what I have said was wrong with it? Namely that faith obscures our senses. Sometimes it's in the name of "love" or "duty" or just plain self-righteousness, but it's always the same: acknowledging your ignorance and accepting its consequences places an obligation on you that you're not willing to accept (at least not honestly, since your moral preferences show you already accept it at least in principle). Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! They aren't foreign at all - you talk as though I find myself doing good deeds and don't know why, when I keep saying that I do know why, because I understand why they are good. We are social animals who have evolved the ability to empathize with others of our kind (and even animals), because it helps us survive. There is nothing strange in it at all. There is conflict in our instincts because we also succeed by screwing others over sometimes - if all the people who tried to get ahead at the expense of others were killed off as soon as they did it, humans would not have evolved the ability to be selfish. Conflict is good, though - we wouldn't be self-aware if there wasn't any, we would be just mindless automatons. This is why I think that morals are at least partly objective - intelligent social being must simply live a certain way to prosper. Well, I still think I have, but here you are saying that if we can't disprove it, it must be the truth - while there are many different worldviews that are not disproven but that mutually contradict each other. Mine, for example! My eyes are wide open - it's you that has already made up his mind that God is real, and your entire quest is not about the truth, it's about justifying your beliefs to yourself. You need to do a Descartes and rid yourself of all preconceived ideas and then rebuild your worldview based on what makes sense. To be honestly searching for the truth, you need to declare to yourself that you will admit that God does not exist if the evidence is there. The thing about the path I'm on is that I can clearly see all the other paths, while yours is leading deeper and deeper underground until you reach a point (of total submission to the idea of God, when you declare that you will be able to fly above the mountain of doubt etc) when all other views are completely blinded from you. Aren't you worried of losing your humanity? You're growing backwards, towards the fetal stage of total trust and acceptance of your parent, straight to the womb, while I'm developing the other way, away from notions of dependence and obedience towards total self-understanding and self-reliance. I'm already airborne, and what a view you're missing! Humanity looks so much more appealing as products of evolution with no in-built purpose - look at the societies we've built and progress we've made all by ourselves! And no nuclear armageddon yet. Fantastic. The reason you have to struggle so much is simply because you're intelligent, so it takes a hell of a lot of searching to come up with reasons to justify and understand what you want to believe. My worldview is perfectly sensible - the only thing I don't understand is why there is something and not nothing. To quote Coolio: I'll "c u when you get there"! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! The rope is tied to evolution and social necessity, like I said above. Humans have developed the morality we currently have because we need them, and we use negotiation and debate because we must acknowledge our individual imperfections and come together to build something we can all use. Do you really regret that we have to live in democracies instead of under one all-knowing king who can just tell us what to do? Your conviction is not rational, it's emotional, so I don't believe it. When I'm mulling around the entrance, I look down the road and see the end of my trust in myself and my fellow humans, the betrayal of my inner convictions to a concept of 'God' that I don't agree with. I would only end up on that road if I closed my eyes and took a blind step of faith in that direction. Then you could help me justify my beliefs while distracting me from my initial problems with it. Which includes my responsibilities to my fellow man. This is what you want me to turn my back on (as well as my reason). If I understand my beliefs, allow them to develop and evolve, throw them out when I have reason to, discuss and debate with others etc, while you dedicate yourself to God without accepting your responsibility to the rest of us to understand what you're getting yourself into, who's in the box? Instead of running to God, try poking Him with a stick a few times first! Remember also that when you wonder whether I am honestly looking to understand or just trying to come up with reasons to reject God, that I am often wondering the same about you - am I right if I guess that you have it like me after each post - 'okay, he can't possibly fail to agree with me this time!' Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! But that's what makes it interesting.
Of course not necessarily, but it does make it reasonable. My example assumes of course that the parents are genuine and sincere loving parents, teaching the principles of such love - if they teach their children to steal, even with "good results", it just makes them children themselves. But I'll concentrate on the base of your argument: An evolved morality is no morality at all. It just makes us slaves to our nature, and makes nature a condition we can't resist or escape. If we "evolve" into brutal kinslayers (sorry, I'm reading Robert Jordan at the moment) who are we to say it's "wrong" or indeed "right". The thing is, we are able to separate morality from nature. We can make moral decisions over and above our nature. You used the example of selfishness - to rephrase: "we have evolved the ability to serve ourselves". But who or what decides how we serve ourselves? What is the ultimate selfishness? Could it be "to believe in God, serve humnanity, and gain eternal life for yourself?" or is it more immediate, to serve yourself, sometimes at the expense of humanity, and lose eternal life with God? You see, what we have evolved cannot - must not - decide our actions. That's morality, because it's expressed in self-control, not "self-release". We can use our evolved/created traits for good or for evil - the destinction is important. That ability to distinguish between right and wrong overrides our natural inclinations. Now my question is: if that ability is itself just a product of nature and evolution, how did it gain its authority? So, how did it feel to positively deny God's existence? No, really, alaric. The way you arrived at that knowledge doesn't make sense given your worldview. If we evolved towards that knowledge, why did we start out with it? At what stage did evolution "slip" to make us believe in God, and what makes you think rationally correcting that "slip" is a step towards evolution if you are still able to wonder about it? Are you saying that reason has also gained authority over nature? If so, I ask again: how did it gain that authority? Because if it was simply the result of "evolution", then surely it would never have let God exist in the first place? "Nature" will have provided all the understanding and knowledge we needed, and there would have been no need to reinterpret its premises. What went wrong?
I meant we evolved the concept and need of morality, not the individual moral rules themselves (although some are pretty necessary). Humans would never have gotten intelligent if we roamed the wilderness alone like cats - much of our brain is devoted to social interactions. But in this paragraph you are essentially using my argument - we make moral decisions over and above our nature, but also over and above the laws, doctrines and traditions of our society, and over and above religious doctrines. Why shouldn't we be slaves to our instincts? Precisely because then we wouldn't understand them. Someone who acts in harmony with his fellow humans because it just 'feels' right is not nearly as worthy of respect, or indeed as trustworthy, as someone who acts because they've thought long and hard about the most beneficial ways of acting, and the religious person is much closer to the 'instinctive' moral person than the rational moral person, unless the religious person, as is more often the case these days, simply chooses the religion that best reflects their own moral values. But even then, by committing themselves to a religion they are getting lazy and leaving the thinking up to the priests. It has no authority other than reason, mutual agreement and usefulness! There are no absolutes - even for virtually universally agreed moral laws like 'don't torture' there are people who disagree. There is no God on earth to ask, just a plethora of morally ambiguous teachings from different religions. The only way we can ever give a moral rule authority is through debate and agreement. Take... abortion, for example. Perhaps you say that no one should be allowed to abort their foetus on purpose. Perhaps I say that there is certain timeframe in which you can, or certain situations where you can, or perhaps I say that anyone should be able to do what they like. How do we resolve this? Do you whip out you Bible to solve it? No, that wouldn't be very effective. You use reasons. If you declare that life is sacred, you must say why. If you say that the foetus is a person, you must explain your rationale for saying that. I can answer perfectly rationally for my moral views; how about you? If you can too, then you are admitting to the supremacy of the ethical over the teleological; that reason comes before faith. But if you just expect faith, then you are saying that it's okay for anyone to use their own religions to blindly justify their beliefs without any need for worldly explanations. How can you accept that? The teachings of Jesus simply aren't precise and unambiguous enough to rely on alone, neither is any other religion; but my point is precisely that even if they were, I want reasons, not statements that we simply have to swallow whole. God isn't necessary good, after all. This is a well-worn atheist-theist discussion. It goes something like this. Somewhere in our evolutionary history we evolved the ability of abstract thought. We could put ourselves in others' shoes; we developed the idea of 'self' as opposed to others and could imagine ourselves doing things that we weren't doing now, or even physically able to do; and we could take certain known concepts and piece them together to make things that weren't real. For example, we could conjure up in our minds a rhino, then stick wings on it. A flying rhino. No one has ever seen such a beast, and it would be physically impossible for the beast to fly, but that doesn't stop us imagining it in the air. All this is tremendously useful, because it allows us to plan ahead, to track animals, and to anticipate other tribe members' reactions to things you might do. God probably started when the early humans applied their abstract thought to the world around them. They imagined some conscious being up there causing the storm, or being pleased or displeased at certain actions. They were, in other words, trying to take control over their surroundings. God then became more of an anthropomorphisation of certain virtues instead of just forces - the gods personified the values of the tribe, helped the members to aspire to greatness, and identify them from other tribes. Then you have the monotheistic God, who isn't just your own god, but everyone's God, which is pretty bold. This belief gives a kind of divine purpose to humanity and makes the social rules absolute and perfect instead of just mortal. Very practical. It also allows the ruling priest class to have direct power over their subjects, acting as they do as intermediaries between individual, society, and God. God itself is not really understood. He just represents certain ideas all mashed together, like the winged rhino. There is no part of God that is not found elsewhere, and more importantly, the core defining feature of God, namely perfection, is not understood at all. We only know perfection as the lack of flaws; we understand flaws, so we simply name that which has no flaws as God, without being able to associate the word with any image in our minds. And that's where faith comes in - just believe it, don't bother understanding it 'cause you can't. And then they've got you. You should come and join the discussion and www.religiousforums.com, I'm trying to deal with these moral issues around God there too, but people aren't really taking the bait. Not too many people either, so it makes good room for discussion.
I'm not for blind faith either. I think it's irresponsible and contrary to the premise of faith. What you're saying here simply means that we should guide our faith on a responsible course, which I agree with. But having no faith at all belies everything that morality (and religion) stands for. The ethical is dependent on this guidance, and so is the teleological. But I would add, so is the theological: in the Spirit of God. But that brings us full circle to what can be justified and what can't. Surely instinct can lead as into danger as easily as it can lead us out of it. Where do you draw the line? You presume to wipe out that line and rest on the powers of instinctive morality alone. But once you do that you take away any direction it might have had - it can only maintain the status quo and never achieve anything. Every new person must learn the same lessons over again, whether or not they were proved valid before. And that's my argument: the validity of a restored relationship with God has been proved over and over again. I don't mean to reject it for the sake of "clearing my prejudices", but I do mean to examine my prejudices to determine where they conflict with established truth and tested love. It does tend to the absolute. We are seeking God, after all. But it never reaches it. I've often said this: the finding is in the seeking. You can never sit down and say, "now I'm a moral person", it's a way of life - and as it goes with ways of life, whatever perfection you have reached can only be concluded at your death. My faith just places that conclusion in God's hands, because nobody knows all of who I am or ever was but Him. As a side note:the religion of Israel always propagated a reformed version of what was called "religion" at the time. The abolishion of idols and human sacrifice went against every major and minor ancient religion. So did the worship of a single God. The priests were everything but the ruling class. They served the community and the community served them accordingly. They had no power but what God gave them, and no possessions but what was given to God, and could make no legal requirements outside the presence of an appointed judge. Being a holy intermediary for God placed such high demands on them that they could never be in a position of power, unless they became corrupt - in which case the prophets had authority over them. Deuteronomy 18:1 The priests, who are Levites-indeed the whole tribe of Levi-are to have no allotment or inheritance with Israel. They shall live on the offerings made to the LORD by fire, for that is their inheritance. Morality was never allowed to become completely subjective. Yes, ever human being have the ability to make moral decisions, but you cannot deny that every human being also needs guidance to perfect it. Children need their parents, parents need their parents, and it all can be traced back to God. Because without judgment, moral decisions are only placeholders for justice - and insufficient ones at that. They will never attain the perfection they set out to achieve. I'm just trying to get you to admit that they are indeed trying to achieve something - something that lies outside our field of experience and ability, and yet something we have enough faith in to attribute a definitive authority to reason and morality as the undeniable, uncomprommising means to get there. Theoretically we only know perfection as a world without flaws - but that is a flawed perception. Like a myth made up out of so many truths that it's hard to tell apart myth and reality; does the myth lose its meaning if it's exposed as a conglomeration of facts, or can the facts actually become more meaningful in their new context? Every person has a particular idea of who God is, based on his own collection of conceptions and misconceptions - that much is evident especially in the Bible, but the truth beneath it all is never without its power. Sometimes it's more obscured than others, but that's what guidance is for, isn't it? You see faith as a dead glossing over over ignorance. I have no trouble of sympathising with that view, but at least understand my problem: I can't see it only as that anymore. I have found to much truth by it, and it has exposed too much of my own weaknesses to believe I can justify a life without it. Yes, it's "got me". But it's got me in the same sense that I felt my girlfriend, or my parents, or my best friend "got me" - and that's what life is all about: relationships. Being caught in trusting, loving and healthy relationships - caught so definitely that I know nothing in the world can separate me from their love. My relationship with God is no different, but it's different in one respect: I'm still seeking Him. They say faith is believing in advance what only makes sense in retrospect. I "remember" being with God as if it's today, but I'm at the same time aware that I'm on my way back to Him, a way that I can easily lose track of without his Guidance. To conclude, the moral guidelines Jesus proposed serve two puposes (the double-edged sword): they show us the way and condemn us at the same time. You could say the law was a slavedriver, and Jesus the liberator. But in returning from "exile" where dead laws were set in stone, we can only be considered "freed" by returning along the same road back to life in paradise, with God. Our morality was shaped by those laws, and we can trust them to guide us to Jesus (as far as his sermon on the mount). From there on we can follow Him, or shout a thank you over our shoulders while we make our way to a promised land of our own devise - and demise. Our obligation to Christ is the same as the obligation to someone you owe your life to, and our obligation to his Father is the same as to our own parents. This obligation is found in God's Spirit. Without it, you might continue to believe you owe God nothing, unaware that He has anything for you; you're still in exile, or still seeking.
Grrr - I specifically said in my last post that I do not want morality to rest on instinct alone. Reason is the means to realising your desires by developing morality and making it compatible with the desires of others. How you seek to understand yourself and get closer to God is your problem, and morality allows everyone to pursue this in their own way so that it doesn't impede on others' search. If God set down the rules, we could not be moral, and there would be no search. No, this is not true at all. Morality sets the rules for the game, allowing people the maximum amount of freedom and allowing progress to flourish. Yes. They have ultimate power - the ones who commune with God get to tell everyone else what to do. A king could never go to war if the priests said that God was against it. It's only by thinking independently without pressure from God or other people that we can get anywhere near perfection. Christian morality is far from perfect - mine is much better. Yours is stuck on God, and so isn't improving nearly as fast as mine is. Lets call it 'the ultimate morality' and not 'God'. It's a concept, an ideal, not an actual being. You seem to have fallen in love with an idea, and are looking for the reality of that idea, and in the meantime living as though that idea actually existed. Am I right? I can respect that view, but you just need to be aware of the consequences. You can live your life on the faith that something is true, but you must still be responsible for the consequences of that belief, whether it's true or not. Social morality dictates that you treat others with respect, etc etc, and it's these that are 'set in stone' so to speak, irrespective of your beliefs. God needs to realize this too. We don't have obligations to anyone or anything, not parents, God, or someone who saves your life. You will probably want to have a good relationship with them, show respect etc, but you don't have to. I would never expect that someone whose life I'd saved had to commit his life to me.
