How God works (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, January 21, 2013, 19:40 (4325 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

DHW: Tony, I fear this may lead to more frustration for you. I don't want you to spend your time on such matters unless you feel they are of interest to you too.
TONY: There is nothing to fear. If I wasn't interested, I wouldn't spend my time on it. In fact, I quite enjoy it, honestly. Frustration is not a bad thing any more than pain is. -Thank you. I am reassured.-DHW: I am suggesting to you, through my subjective view of the earth's history, that the mixed nature of humans may mirror the mixed nature of the God who you think created us.
TONY: And I have agreed, repeatedly, that God is a mix of our nature. The prime difference, aside from physical differences and scale, is motivation. We have both agreed that motive is the primary component for something to be construed as evil/wicked.-You wrote earlier: "I do not shrink back when I think of the devastation that he has certainly caused in the past because I know, all things being equal, had there been any decency or goodness left in even one of the people destroyed, he would have found a means to spare them, as he has proven to do time and again." 
This is where faith becomes the decisive factor. You apparently "know" that such slaughter is all for the best. I do not.-DHW: But the sources of their information, and their credentials for announcing to us the nature of God, his motives for past actions, and his future intentions are unknown and uncheckable.
TONY: That is why the prophecies and histories are so important. The historical accuracy gives confidence in their credentials. They have never been proven inaccurate.-Whose credentials? Even if I were to give credence to some of these ancient texts, does an accurate prophecy in Daniel mean I must believe the prophecies of St John the Divine? The bible is a collection of books by different, fallible, human authors (and sometimes we don't even know who they were), put together by a group of men with an agenda of their own, who somehow or the other have succeeded in promoting the idea that their selection is "the Word of God".
 
DHW: If he exists, I have to agree as far as the scale is concerned. Love and mercy are encouraging, anger and power are scary, and justice makes them even scarier since we do not know whether his idea of justice coincides with our own.
TONY: Whose justice should coincide with whose?-God has the last word. And supposing ... purely for argument's sake, of course ... he decides that murderers, fornicators and agnostics are equally deserving of eternal death, I can't argue. That's why it's scary.-TONY: If you can not get to the point where you are at least WILLING to (dis)believe, then no one, not I nor anyone else on this earth, could make you (dis)believe anything at all. -It was a badly chosen quote. You obviously didn't intend to insult David or me ("This is part of my frustration with David as well") but the above explanation still requires clarification. For the record, I see my rejection of the so-called "evidence" in the case for and against God as being based not on an unwillingness to believe, but on what I regard as the dubious subjectivity of the arguments. To put it another way, what both you and Richard Dawkins are "willing" to believe seems to me to fall apart on analysis. And that is why I neither believe nor disbelieve.
 
DHW: I do not (dis)believe God is a "tyrannical asshole". I do not (dis)believe God is all good. I do not even (dis)believe in God. According to whatever subject is under discussion, I can only explain why I do not believe whatever my interlocutor does believe. 
TONY: You contradict yourself here... I do not (dis)believe, I do not (dis)believe, I do not (dis)believe .... I can only explain why I do not believe. What is disbelief but the absence of belief?-As I have tried to make clear many times, I distinguish between belief, non-belief and disbelief. Belief in God = I think God exists; disbelief = I think God does not exist; non-belief = I neither believe nor disbelieve in God. Absence of belief is non-belief, not disbelief. In talking to a theist, I explain why I do not believe in God. In talking to an atheist, I explain why I do not disbelieve in God. This distinction is very important for the understanding of what I mean by agnosticism.
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