DescentBB

Jeff250 wrote:

snoopy wrote:If you look at the close of the NT, you see the final closing of God's judgment, permanently - where those who don't accept Christ's punishment for their sins are finally punished and banished from heaven & earth for good... leaving a sinless, perfect world.

Wouldn't you have to banish all people to have a sinless world? It's hard for me to conceive of a sinless world with people in it.

The way I read it, it'll go something like:

Christians taken to heaven
Everyone else banished to hell
The earth completely destroyed by fire
A new heaven and earth created; this one without sin
God & all Christian dwell on perfected earth in perfected bodies forever

There's an idea that sin is tied to our imperfect bodies. The destruction of our current bodies will include the complete destruction of sin & our new perfected bodies won't have any sin attached. Likewise for the Earth - complete destruction/banishment for the imperfect; new, perfect earth created in replacement.

As for the idea that sin is needed to appreciate the good - I agree with Cuda that I don't see that idea in the Bible. Maybe in the context of times of plenty and times of want, but I think it's always on human emotion/perception levels. I'd argue pretty strongly with anyone that tried to tell me that the Bible said sin was a necessity.

For the discussion on the Trinity:

As opposed to you guys, I'm a very busy guy and don't have tons of time to be doing lots of research . Can we all agree that there is a single God; yet that He's separated into separate persons - among who there is clearly one characterized as Father, one Characterized as Son, and one Characterized as spirit?

My 2c: If you think you have it all figured out, you're probably wrong.

Tunnel:

I hear your frustration. I think it's a large reason for people leaving the church. One of the central themes of the whole Bible is everyone's individual guilt; yet it seems that the "Christian culture" of the US has lost track of their guilt, and somehow think themselves better than those around them. The Bible has strong words saying that those who do not forgive those around them will not be forgiven by God. The Lord's prayer says "forgive us our debts, and we also have forgiven others" - Yet humble forgiveness seems to be completely lost on right wing American culture...

On a theological note: My biggest qualm with Armenian-ism is that people tend to walk away from it giving themselves the credit for somehow being smart enough or humble enough (heh) or whatever enough in-and-of themselves to have accepted forgiveness. I strongly believe that nobody desires even the slightest speck for credit for their salvation - and that belief means that my only appropriate response to having been saved is to turn around and extend the exact same undeserved grace & forgiveness to everyone around me.

(for course, Calvinists get lazy about evangelizing because it's already destined for those whom will to believe & God doesn't need me to turn their hearts... after all I have no power to do so anyways...)

That is the whole purpose of deceptions--to rob people of salvation. To render the gospel inoperable. I don't claim to totally understand how praying to Jesus, The Holy Spirity, and the Father as separate people contributes to this end-goal , but I do know that it's unscriptural. That has been one irregularity that I have observed. I don't know if that can be said to be the fruit of a trinity doctrine or not. We are told to pray "our Father in heaven" by the Lord himself. I can't find any grounds for disagreement with what Flip is saying. I can tell he isn't stepping into either the deception that says Jesus is another God, nor the one which claims that Jesus is not God. It seems sound to me. I don't think you're detracting from the work of the Holy Spirit either, Flip, as that is where demonstrations of power come in. Is that right?

Yes, exactly. We are not to pray to Jesus, but by His blood and sacrifice we are given access to pray directly to the Father, and then the Father gives us the power that comes from His Spirit to free us from sin and operate in the power that comes from His own Spirit dwelling within us.
Jesus was the way to that, but the goal of all Christians is to have a direct relationship with God through His Spirit. All through the Bible, God is revealed by different names through Christ. Each name described a certain aspect of God, then Christ is given the name of Jesus and by His sacrifice and then leaving, God is revealed fully by all His attributes by His Holy Spirit, the fullness of God now within human flesh. The Christ had to leave so that the fullness of God could come, and by the Holy Spirit, the Father is fully revealed.

EDIT:Every name of God is summed up in His Spirit.

11 I am coming soon. Hold on to what you have, so that no one will take your crown. 12 The one who is victorious I will make a pillar in the temple of my God. Never again will they leave it. I will write on them the name of my God and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem, which is coming down out of heaven from my God; and I will also write on them my new name. 13 Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches.

When you understand who the Christ is and how He inherited the name of Jesus is a powerful revelation, because I bet when He steps back down, He gets another name!! And that name will be written on us so that we inherit the same name!!!

3 See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. 2 Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears,[a] we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. 3 All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.

Heh, This says that right now we are named children of God but we will be something else when Christ appears! We will be like the Christ!

EDIT:So, whatever the Christ Jesus becomes, that is what we will become

I guess I'll weigh in on this issue.

To answer this question, we need to first develop our view of God. If God be some being floating in the heavens who commands right and wrong, then no, morality does not require God, for God would just hold a say on right and wrong. He wouldn't be the definition of right and wrong.

But if we take God as the first principle of reality, that by which all reality can be understood (that which allows intellection, that which allows things to be, the principle of non-contradiction), then God becomes a mandatory requirement for morality (as well as everything).

How do we determine morality?
If by how we feel, then morality is an illusion, propagated by the stimuli of our environment.
If by how we think, then we are employing a process of searching within ourselves, for thought is an interior process, looking within the logical constructs (what we create) and workings (how we think) of the mind. By searching out what is logical, we are searching for a standard, not a standard as some ideal form in the sky, but qualities that we already identify to be good, being the ultimate thing we are after. All humans desire happiness. Happiness of the full person (body, soul, and mind) is achieved by conducting oneself according to one's nature. Human nature is living (like plants), sensing (like animals), but it also involves reasoning and forming/maintaining communities (for we are social beings). If we perform these activities well, we are reaching our full potential.

What can pervert these activities?
Murder perverts communities. Laziness perverts reason. Drug use perverts sensation. Suicide or seeking harm to oneself (for its own sake) perverts one's own living. As humans, we recognize a hierarchy of our activities, but a hierarchy that does not deny the lower orders. Acting as a member of a community is our highest order, but we can't belong to a community if we can't reason speech and all the complexities speech deals with (Math, Science, English, insert study here). Reasoning is good, but it cannot be sparked without sensation. Nor can it continually relate with the world around us if we are cut off from sensing the world around us. How can I further reason about a subject if my senses are removed and I can no longer read or listen about the subject? Sensation is good, but one cannot sense if one is dead.

What allows for these activities to flourish?
Food, water, clothing, health, experience in the world, participation in intellectual dialogue, participation in communal affairs, all in a manner that ensures the continuation of these things, especially the greater, more fragile ones like community and reason.

Who determines the good?
The principle of Good, the first principle, the deepest level of interiority of reality, aka God. This is a principle that we don't find outside ourselves in the world of extension, but in ourselves, past the individuality that divides us, in the commonality of intellection which all humans share (although many do not realize this potential).

So yes, morality requires God.

Aggressor Prime wrote:But if we take God as the first principle of reality, that by which all reality can be understood (that which allows intellection, that which allows things to be, the principle of non-contradiction), then God becomes a mandatory requirement for morality (as well as everything).

God is the principle of non-contradiction? What does that mean?

Jeff250 wrote:

Aggressor Prime wrote:But if we take God as the first principle of reality, that by which all reality can be understood (that which allows intellection, that which allows things to be, the principle of non-contradiction), then God becomes a mandatory requirement for morality (as well as everything).

God is the principle of non-contradiction? What does that mean?

It means that God created the Law of non-contradiction. It's a logics thing. He was referencing God being the principle of intellect.

Prime, look at it this way. (in concert to what you just said). If all is as the evolutionist say (I'm using that in the broadest sense as I realize there are folks with varying views) then "right" and "wrong" simply don't exist. If, all things came into being via big bang and "random chance" evolution then there is no purpose. There is nothing but energy and the exchange there of. We as beings that are now soulless have imagined right and wrong to suit our own selfish desire for preservation and holds no value. Survival of the fittest and, really, morality stands in the way of that "natural" progression. There is only chaos with synergistic patterns running through it that creates the illusion of order.

It all becomes a huge "machine" with no purpose. It just simply is and we are all cosmic accidents.

Duper wrote:It means that God created the Law of non-contradiction. It's a logics thing. He was referencing God being the principle of intellect.

Saying that God *is* the principle of intellect sounds just as noncognitive to me as saying God *is* the principle of non-contradiction.

Regarding that God *created* the principle of non-contradiction, I don't think that this is a common claim by theists, since logical reasoning is commonly considered to be valid in "all possible worlds." But in any case, if your argument is that God was required for morality because God historically created something required for morality, then that's fine, but you won't convince anyone who doesn't already believe that history.

Compare this to the argument that you next give that God is required for morality in order to explain our intuitions about morality.

Ultimately Jeff, God created everything. Intellect and rationale. Nothing existed before creation. Not principles, not physical laws, not the premiss for physical laws. There was literally nothing or perhaps better refereed to as Non. there was only God.

One thing people fail to consider about an ever-present, always existing deity is the concept of time and how it actually makes life on Earth and Heaven completely meaningless. Heaven is the most depressing thing I can imagine and is no different than Hell.

I don't think that the new Earth is fleshed out enough in the Bible to really say.

Duper wrote:Ultimately Jeff, God created everything. Intellect and rationale. Nothing existed before creation. Not principles, not physical laws, not the premiss for physical laws. There was literally nothing or perhaps better refereed to as Non. there was only God.

God was not bound by the principle of non-contradiction before creation? God could have created a four-sided triangle? Even if God created every*thing*, I would contend that logic is not a "thing" (something that can exist or not exist).

Duper wrote:Ultimately Jeff, God created everything. Intellect and rationale. Nothing existed before creation. Not principles, not physical laws, not the premiss for physical laws. There was literally nothing or perhaps better refereed to as Non. there was only God.

I have difficulty with that. The Bible's timeline of creation does not jibe with what science has found to be the actual age of the earth. And if he created intellect and rationale, why did he create hate, evil, greed, lust and so on? Why create an intelligent human, then give it all those bad, undesirable traits? It seems self-defeating and pointless. Is God a Sadist and does He like cruelty?

vision wrote:One thing people fail to consider about an ever-present, always existing deity is the concept of time and how it actually makes life on Earth and Heaven completely meaningless. Heaven is the most depressing thing I can imagine and is no different than Hell.

If you're referring to living in eternity, it depends. If it's like living on earth, it'd pretty much suck eggs. If your soul can travel the universe and see anything it wants, it'd be cool...for awhile at least. Then there's that existing forever business to deal with again. Downer.

Regarding Genesis, Lothar (and others) have given a pretty good case for why it's not intended to be interpreted literally:
viewtopic.php?p=251454#p251454

Oh, thanks Jeff. I was thinking of that post. Oh and regards to your post earlier. I see those things as being tied to a 3 dimensional universe. As God created all dimensions (however many there truly are) he is beyond them, "above" them. When he relates to us he does so within the confines (normally) that he has constructed.

TC, I don't have a good answer for you there. All I can say is that Christ was provided so that we have a way out of that living. It's a choice for the individual. I will say that God never describes himself in the bible as approving for those attributes. Quite the contrary.

Not that God created the principle, but is the principle itself, or rather the power of the principle. The principle, as can be grasped by the intellect, holds no power in itself, for it is just a saying; but it points to the power responsible for intellection. I do not think God is a being, or bound to any form as beings are, but prior to intellection/being.

Principle of non-contradiction (which is the most basic principle of logic): Something cannot both be and not be in the same way.

As for the non-existence of right and wrong, answer me this:
Is 1+1=2 right?
Is the existence of gravity right?
Is evolution right?
Is math and science ever right?
If they are, then there is right and wrong (in the truthful sense of the terms).

It is wrong to deny science. It is wrong to deny mathematics. In the same manner, it hurts human communities to mass murder its members, especially for no reason. These are not simple unverifiable thoughts. Go out into the world and test these theories. If I steal from you, you aren't going to say, "It was nature." You are going to say that I wronged you. Why? Because before perception, before science, before even math, is the logic that binds all intellection. That logic only is known if we understand the reality of truth and falsity.

That truth and falsity connect to morality by recognizing the good in fulfilling one's natural potential. For this reason, we can call death bad, paralysis bad, stupidity bad. We recognize that life is better than death because there is no unifying form in death.

[To be unified is recognized as good. I find nothing pleasant about music without metre. A painting is ugly if there is just blobs of paint with no order to the colors. A mathematical or scientific proof is ugly if the writing is everywhere and there is nothing that pulls everything together. A work of literature is ugly if there are no transitions, no sentence structure, and the words themselves are random sequences of letters. A face is ugly if it was shot off by a shotgun.]

In death, we are divided into all the many parts the worms take with them. We recognize that sensation is better than paralysis because sensation gives us the ability to connect with the world and unify our perceptions (of feeling, but also of sight, hearing, smell, and taste) with others so that we have a common medium (perceivable world). Intelligence is good because it shows us what is immortal. 1+1=2 will always be, even when I die and the universe is destroyed. These judgments are based on a standard that is prior to the perceivable world and any mechanisms that we have reduced the human form down to due to our observations of that world, for prior to any observation is the intellection that guides it and the principles of that intellection (by which we can say that we have reasoned well). Before there is world, there must first be mind. Before mind, the first principle.

If you deny your ability to know truth, then you have no reason to say that your belief is true and I shouldn't believe you.
If you deny morality, then I hold no obligation to either seeking the truth, respecting the truth, or even believing you should you even claim to know the truth.
In short, if you are for no truth, or even no morality, no one is going to take you seriously if they really think about what you would mean.

As for creation, I do not believe it occurred. The universe most likely has always existed, stretching out into infinity to past and to future. Like space, time can be infinitely divided and infinitely stretched. However, the universe is still dependent on the first principle, and is therefore "after" it (but in orders of dependence, not temporal causation). To relate the atemporal with the temporal in efficient causation performs a categorical mistake. Likewise, my body's movements depend on my life; or content of intellect depends on categorization and division of the whole. The problem we run into way too often is that we only recognize two causes (material and efficient). We have forgotten/rejected the formal and final causes which are necessary if we are to understand the human mind and how it has made the world in the first place as we understand it, based on higher, immovable standards.

As for what God could or could not "create" (not taken in temporal terms, but dependence), imagine it, and God created it, insofar as you can imagine it. See it, and God created it, insofar as you can see it. I can imagine a unicorn, but not see it, and God created that unicorn insofar as that unicorn is a part of my imagination. I can hallucinate and see that unicorn. Again, God created that. If we consider multiple universe theory, that part of string theory with colliding bubbles of universes, then God created an infinite number of universes with an infinite number of starting conditions with infinite realizations in each universe. So in short, God already created everything and was bound in no way. The principle of non-contradiction is not a bounding on the intellect, but is what allows it to think anything at all. Thinghood/being itself requires consistency/non-contradiction, that 1=1=1=1=1....ad infinitum. No one can think of a triangle (a three sided figure) as a square (a four sided figure) when one considers the form of these things. 3 is not equal to 4. Nor are 3 sets of 60 degrees equal to 4 sets of 90 degrees. This is not a limitation on God because to allow such things as contradictions is to bring about the inability to differentiate a square from a triangle, and therefore, the loss of intellect, a loss. God is not perverted by loss, which is a negative thing, a lack. God is unlimited, held by no limit, even the limit that He brings forth into being by making things one thing or another (for God is not a thing/being but that which allows for things/being; if God were a being, another God would need to be found to allow God to be a being and our first proposed God, the being-God, would not be a god at all, for He is dependent on the principle of non-contradiction/intellect/being--all the same thing since non-contradiction allows for intellect and intelligible reality is the really real; perception is just an image of the real, for which reason we call it perception).

But if you are really interested in this, I suggest you read a combination of Plato, Aristotle, and the Platonists, especially Plotinus. All I've given was a summary crunched down into forum appropriate length.

Aggressor Prime wrote:To be unified is recognized as good.

Among other things.

Jeff250 wrote:Regarding Genesis, Lothar (and others) have given a pretty good case for why it's not intended to be interpreted literally:
viewtopic.php?p=251454#p251454

Definitely. It's magical thinking as far as I'm concerned, but if people want to believe in it, fine, whatever makes them happy. However, some people DO take it literally, and shouldn't be influencing national science policy. This bird brain actually serves on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. Sheesh! Watch the video in the link too.

http://www.policymic.com/articles/24986 ... it-of-hell

Duper wrote:TC, I don't have a good answer for you there. All I can say is that Christ was provided so that we have a way out of that living. It's a choice for the individual. I will say that God never describes himself in the bible as approving for those attributes. Quite the contrary.

Perhaps, but whatever the reason, man by his nature is cruel, greedy and violent. We have far more negative attributes than is needed just to survive in nature alone. If we are a loving God's creation, why create Jesus to "fix" us, or for that matter, why make us that way in the first place?

Jeff250 wrote:

Aggressor Prime wrote:To be unified is recognized as good.

Among other things.

Is it better if you lost your form as human and became a smudge on the side of a road? Is it better for my computer to lose its form, having smashed it against the sidewalk and see its parts broken apart? Is it better for society to abandon language, and each member return to indiscernible mumbling? In all these things, it is unity, a thing as one, which makes that thing a thing at all and therefore good. And yet we don't have to make the examples as extreme. If you lose your arm or your mind in a case of insanity, we call these events evil or ill, do we not, recognizing that possessing all our limbs and our sanity is a good? When my computer lacks its CPU, it lacks its ability to process data, or if one of its cores malfunctions, it processes data slower, an evil or an ill, is it not?

What precisely is your claim? That whenever two things unite, that their union is always better than the sum of their parts?

No. My point is that a quality of a form is its unity of its parts. Without that unity, the form disappears. Thus, that unity is the form's greatest good, allowing it to be a form at all.

Morality says that there are some things that we should or should not do, even if we don't want to.

If I have a bad heart with 24 hours to live, why shouldn't I take someone else's, especially if I want to live? How would the unity of things' parts morally compel me not to?

Jeff250 wrote:Morality says that there are some things that we should or should not do, even if we don't want to.

If I have a bad heart with 24 hours to live, why shouldn't I take someone else's, especially if I want to live? How would the unity of things' parts morally compel me not to?

The question is, are you "taking", or are you getting a "gift". If the organ donor specifically "gives" YOU their heart upon their death, it's a "gift". If you receive that heart ahead of everyone else waiting in line, you're "taking" it.

What I originally had in mind was the worst possible case of killing someone to take their heart!

Definitely bad, I agree. But that very nasty practice does go on in the world by the way. If there's a demand for a product, there will inevitably be a black market arising to fill it.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/11/ ... rgans.html

Jeff250 wrote:Morality says that there are some things that we should or should not do, even if we don't want to.

If I have a bad heart with 24 hours to live, why shouldn't I take someone else's, especially if I want to live? How would the unity of things' parts morally compel me not to?

Good question.

Such an act would be bad because you are not just a body. If you were just a body, then self-interested utilitarianism would work. But because your deeper interiority is a mind, a mind that can only function best, as a whole, via a community, acts against the integrity of the community should not be done for the benefit of just your body/perceptual existence. Your mind is more really yourself than your body. Your interior movements (reasoning) show through your exterior movements (perceptions), but as images (thus we call it perception), not as the real. Perception is like an image in a mirror while mind is like the person standing in front of the mirror. Greater interiority=more real. There are degrees of the real, for which reason I do not deny that the person in the mirror is me, but in a limited way, as me shown via sight. It is because of our interconnected interior nature that universal morality is made possible.

What makes this morality sacred, (not just good/bad, but holy/evil), is our even deeper interior nature of our connection to God. Without the first principle, not even mind can be, for the first principle is what allows for mind. The quality of this morality is its ability to transcend qualities. It is what allows us to unconditionally love someone and see that love as good, someone stripped of their qualities (e.g. a child in the womb, one's child never met before, the love between a husband and wife that can last through good and bad times, especially the really bad times).

atheists cling to their religion more than the people they QQ about

The moral code requires a standard