The monstrous Christian / Islamic God

[Dr.Who]

02-26-2009, 12:55 PM #80
Dr.Who
Senior Member




Re "Mercifulness of God"
Originally Posted by dahermit

Originally Posted by Dr.Who

Re: "Thou shall not kill"


Dr.Who, you seem to have forgotten that the post was about how merciful God is. Now, you seem to be agreeing with me that he is not so much as merciful as he makes the rules and he kills.

I never contradicted you when you said that he makes the rules. But the rules are based on the nature of who he is and are not just arbitrary. He cannot change who He is - he is holy and holiness requires that he not be in the presence of sin. Sin is that which is contrary to his nature. he may make the rules to define the specifics but he cannot change his nature. And since He is the source of life those who are sinners must be out of his presence and must no longer benefit from his life-giving.

He is still merciful. The rules require that those who sin die. But he has provided a means by which all can avoid the just punishment.

For example,

Premise: God is the most perfect and good being in all the universe.
Premise: perfect and good beings should be loved
Conclusion: the rule is that you must love God or you are a sinner.

premise: I did not love God
Premise the rule is that one must love god or be a sinner
conclusion: I was a sinner

Premise : sinners cannot be in the life-giving presence of God
Premise : I was a sinner
conclusion: I must die

Premise: I must die
Premise: God arranged for me to not die
conclusion: God is merciful

 

[zakiyeh]

He cannot change who He is - he is holy and holiness requires that he not be in the presence of sin. Sin is that which is contrary to his nature. he may make the rules to define the specifics but he cannot change his nature. And since He is the source of life those who are sinners must be out of his presence and must no longer benefit from his life-giving.

"And Moses said: Though ye and all who are in the earth prove thankless, lo! Allah verily is Absolute, Owner of Praise."
(Quran, 14:8).

The word absolute stands for the word "غنی" (ghani) in arabic which is also translated as "self-sufficient", "independent", and "free of all needs".
So God can stand watching people sin. Even if all the people on earth turn away from him, and he won't be affected. So it's not for himself that he set punishments as an obvious result of sin. It's just that he's so much nice that he wants everyone to be good and to enjoy the results; that is the joy of living in heaven, close to God and having him satisfied of you, which might not be so easy for us to realise now how good it is.

He is still merciful. The rules require that those who sin die. But he has provided a means by which all can avoid the just punishment.

We can't judge that God is cruel because he kills. The actual punishment is after death; and more interestingly it is not as though if God gives the unbelievers more time to live, it's for his mercifulness; he just gives them more time to sin!; at least you can say in this case he's just merciful to their bodies:
"And let not those who disbelieve imagine that the rein We give them bodeth good unto their souls. We only give them rein that they may grow in sinfulness. And theirs will be a shameful doom."(Quran, 3:178)

It is only for believers and those who are hoped to become one, that this extra time is good; otherwise it will add to their punishment in hell.
And so if you see someone die young, you can't say he was a sinner. He might have been just too good that God wanted to take him to himself before he'd ruin his soul by sin.

 

[samsara15]

"And Moses said: Though ye and all who are in the earth prove thankless, lo! Allah verily is Absolute, Owner of Praise."
(Quran, 14:8).

The word absolute stands for the word "غنی" (ghani) in arabic which is also translated as "self-sufficient", "independent", and "free of all needs".
So God can stand watching people sin. Even if all the people on earth turn away from him, and he won't be affected. So it's not for himself that he set punishments as an obvious result of sin. It's just that he's so much nice that he wants everyone to be good and to enjoy the results; that is the joy of living in heaven, close to God and having him satisfied of you, which might not be so easy for us to realise now how good it is.



We can't judge that God is cruel because he kills. The actual punishment is after death; and more interestingly it is not as though if God gives the unbelievers more time to live, it's for his mercifulness; he just gives them more time to sin!; at least you can say in this case he's just merciful to their bodies:
"And let not those who disbelieve imagine that the rein We give them bodeth good unto their souls. We only give them rein that they may grow in sinfulness. And theirs will be a shameful doom."(Quran, 3:178)

It is only for believers and those who are hoped to become one, that this extra time is good; otherwise it will add to their punishment in hell.
And so if you see someone die young, you can't say he was a sinner. He might have been just too good that God wanted to take him to himself before he'd ruin his soul by sin.

Sounds pretty monstrous to me. I can't think of anything more monstrous than such a God.

 

[zakiyeh]

Sounds pretty monstrous to me. I can't think of anything more monstrous than such a God.

God is merciful; but He's also "powerful". God's power is not a small thing;He is "the Great one" and all on earth belong to him. If we understand these and the place of God in our world, ie if we could understand the greatness of God, things would be different. If you believe in God's greatness and His power over you, you'll see that He can only threaten you to punishment for committing a sin(which is turning back from His will), when He sees you worth enough to be at his side, with all his greatness. He has seen you worth enough to be challenged for this by saying: either choose me or Hell! I talked about him being self-sufficient and free of any needs. He doesn't need anyone to praise him, so If he threatens you it's because of you yourself. If he didn't like you and your salvation wasn't important for him he would as well have just said you can live however you want. But he didnt. This means he wanted everybody to be with him.
Mercy is not just giving you a nice time in your limited life. The most merciful is the one who wants your eternal good. To be with him is the eternal good.

 

[samsara15]

God is merciful; but He's also "powerful". God's power is not a small thing;He is "the Great one" and all on earth belong to him. If we understand these and the place of God in our world, ie if we could understand the greatness of God, things would be different. If you believe in God's greatness and His power over you, you'll see that He can only threaten you to punishment for committing a sin(which is turning back from His will), when He sees you worth enough to be at his side, with all his greatness. He has seen you worth enough to be challenged for this by saying: either choose me or Hell! I talked about him being self-sufficient and free of any needs. He doesn't need anyone to praise him, so If he threatens you it's because of you yourself. If he didn't like you and your salvation wasn't important for him he would as well have just said you can live however you want. But he didnt. This means he wanted everybody to be with him.
Mercy is not just giving you a nice time in your limited life. The most merciful is the one who wants your eternal good. To be with him is the eternal good.

If he is so powerful anmd wise, then he knew which choice we would make. If he knew which choice we would would make, then he created us with full intent that we would go to Hell. Our salvation was never a possibility, since he knew which choices we would make. Once again, we are left with a monstrous God, who punishes people for actions that he knew they would take.

 

[Dr.Who]

If he is so powerful anmd wise, then he knew which choice we would make. If he knew which choice we would would make, then he created us with full intent that we would go to Hell. Our salvation was never a possibility, since he knew which choices we would make. Once again, we are left with a monstrous God, who punishes people for actions that he knew they would take.

I can't answer for Zakiyeh. I would answer:

Yes he very likely knew what choices you would make. He clearly says they were your choices and you had the ability to make the other choices. Hell is not guaranteed based on your choice to sin. You still can be sorry and repent and be forgiven. Is there a salvation after death? I do not think the bible guarantees that. So what punishment is guaranteed for those who make choices God knew they would make?

Taking this down to our level:

I have kids. I decided to have kids. I knew they would make bad choices. I had kids knowing they would make bad choices. I punish them when they make bad choices. I punish them for the choices I knew they would make. My punishment is meant to help them grow. My punishments are meant to help them understand and I always consider whether or not they are sorry and repent. So they can come out on the other side of it better off.

 

[samsara15]

You do not posit a punishment, Dr Who, as I understand from some of your other posts, merely a painful separation.

You still say, however, our choices are, and must, be pre-ordained. Known in advance. So what real choice, if any, did we have? None at all. If God is all powerful and all wise, he could have made us differently, but chose not to do so. So where lies our guilt in doing as we were programmed to do?

If you write a computer program, and it does what it was written to do, with the data it is given, do you blame the program for what it does? The program had choices, but based on its data, its decisions were already built into the program.

 

[Dr.Who]

You do not posit a punishment, Dr Who, as I understand from some of your other posts, merely a painful separation.

I do claim a painful separation.

You still say, however, our choices are, and must, be pre-ordained. Known in advance. So what real choice, if any, did we have? None at all. If God is all powerful and all wise, he could have made us differently, but chose not to do so. So where lies our guilt in doing as we were programmed to do?

I do not claim that they are preordained merely likely to be preknown. It could very well be that you get to make your choice regardless of the fact that God may know it. There is an old argument that if God were both all knowing and all powerful that there would be no free will. But I do not claim that God is all knowing or all powerful.

God exist outside of time. If I flip a coin, video it, and then watch the video I will know the outcome. But the outcome was still random.

What I claim is that a very knowing God and a very powerful God lets you make choices. I claim that the only way we could have been made different is to not have free choice and that would be worse than having choice and making the wrong one. In fact, we were made the best way we could have been made. We have the choice, we choose wrong, and then at least (perhaps all) many of us choose to go back to God. That is good.

 

[zakiyeh]

If he is so powerful and wise, then he knew which choice we would make. If he knew which choice we would would make, then he created us with full intent that we would go to Hell. Our salvation was never a possibility, since he knew which choices we would make. Once again, we are left with a monstrous God, who punishes people for actions that he knew they would take.

I do not claim that they are preordained merely likely to be preknown. It could very well be that you get to make your choice regardless of the fact that God may know it. There is an old argument that if God were both all knowing and all powerful that there would be no free will. But I do not claim that God is all knowing or all powerful.

God exist outside of time. If I flip a coin, video it, and then watch the video I will know the outcome. But the outcome was still random.

This topic is one of the most complicated subjects between the religious scholars. It is neither way. We do have free choice and still we are not a moment separate from God's will.

I thought it was part of the biblical teachings too that God knows all things. God's knowing what we will choose is a function of His omnipresence since He is in all places all the time. If He were not, He would not know what choices we were freely going to make. To deny that God is all knowing, even of the choices we make, is to deny His omnipresence and reduce God's nature to something more like ourselves, which would be a mistake.
However knowing what a person will do does not force them or limit them to doing what is known and I can't see how there has to be such an obligation.
One important matter is that nothing is random in God's creation.But still our creation is different from a computer and we are not programmed point to point. Actually we are programmed to be able to choose between good and bad. God's will is to let us choose for ourselves, so we have free will, and still we are under God's will, because he has given us this opportunity to choose. God's will is not something that has happenned once and can't be changed. It has to be present all the time. So he can get back his will. Howerver he decides not to limit us completely, but to guide us through our choices by setting punishments and awards both before and after life for our bad and good deeds.

What I claim is that a very knowing God and a very powerful God lets you make choices. I claim that the only way we could have been made different is to not have free choice and that would be worse than having choice and making the wrong one. In fact, we were made the best way we could have been made. We have the choice, we choose wrong, and then at least (perhaps all) many of us choose to go back to God. That is good.

This is correct. If it were'nt so and we were planned only to do good we would be no better than angels. Only great souls can enjoy great joys. Angels can never enjoy the heaven as one who has been out of it, felt the bitter taste of being far from God and tried to reach back, and so during this quest his soul has grown to an extent to realise the joy of being with God.

 

[samsara15]

Dr Who:

I cannot find fault with your position that God, if there is one, is not both all powerful and all knowing. That is a well reasoned position that exonerates God from blame for the choices people make. However, the analogy of the coin flip video fails if God is presumed to be both all powerful and all knowing, since that amounts to being able to watch the video ahead of time and therby knowing what choices will be made.

Zakiyeh:

However, to say that nothing is random, as Zakiyeh does, and then to assert a few sentences later that we do have Free Will, is a step into logical nothingness which I cannot take. I wll not call it nonsense, because many other people seem to think that way, but to me it is illogical and incomprehensible, so it may merely be that I am mentally blind to the merits of that viewpoint.

Now if such people wish to assert that we live in a universe which may not be fully logical, or in which cause and effect does not apply, then perhaps there are other issues to discuss. If that be the case, however, how do we determine what limitations and criteria are mutually acceptable to all parties as evidence? In that case, we concede that we live in a where we have no common grounds for discussion.

 

[numinus]

You still say, however, our choices are, and must, be pre-ordained. Known in advance. So what real choice, if any, did we have? None at all. If God is all powerful and all wise, he could have made us differently, but chose not to do so. So where lies our guilt in doing as we were programmed to do?

A free choice is simply a choice that is not influenced or coersed by someone other than the one making the choice. One's foreknowledge of your choice does not render the free exercise of that choice defective.

If you write a computer program, and it does what it was written to do, with the data it is given, do you blame the program for what it does? The program had choices, but based on its data, its decisions were already built into the program.

Almost all computer programs have built-in logical operators. It is through these operators wherein a person intervenes within the program -- usually through some form of human interface. And quite frankly, a computer program may be made sufficiently complex such that it's logic mimics the behavior of free will.

However, the fundamental difference remains -- a computer program cannot 'choose' anything other than what it was designed to do. Human free will, however, can. And just because human beings choose from within a finite set of choices like a computer program, does not make the choices less free.

 

[samsara15]

I would still say that it is posible to imagine more than one program at a time running on a computer, to produce unpredictable results, given unpredicatable input, nunminus.

After all, how many choices does (or can) a cell have? What happens within a cell is all chemistry. When you consider a living organism, with enough choices to make moral judgements, it is a large conglomeration of cells, with some basdic idea of itself as an individual organism, those cells working in some sort of coordination with each other.

Is a lving organism a republic?

 

[laymen]

I think I may be a Deist (did I spell that right?) creation seems obvious to me. Christianity seems small mided and full of contridictions. I guess the story about Jobe is what realy highlites the obsurdity of the Bible for me. What little I have learned about Budism (from the book, The Power of Myth) really opened my eyes to a far more expansive understanding of how great our creater must be. Vishnu's dream is the universe and within that universe are millions of worlds ruled by Entras/ gods, and each time brama blinks one world dies and another is created. I hope I got that right. Joseph Campbell did a better job in his description. I'm currently reading a book by His Holiness The Dalai Lama entiteled, How To See Your Self As You Realy Are. My wife said I should see myself as others see me. She should talk!

 

[MichaelB]

Human beings are finite creatures. In any moral system, we do some good and some evil. None of us can do infinite evil, in any moral system, in our brief lives. We simply don't have enough time to do so.

So how can it be justified to conceive of a Hell in which human beings suffer eternal damnation for their finite sins? What can these poor, finite creatures do, in their short lives, to justify such an infintely cruel punishment?

Since I cannot see any justification for such horrendous punishment, isn't it very likely that the believers in these religions have written their own need for revenge and 'divine justice' against their ideological enemies into the religious texts of both religions, if one is making the unlikely assumption that one of these religions might actually be 'true'?

That being the case, and continuing with the assumption that one of these religions might be 'true', then isn't it more likely that the punishment for 'sin' in the afterlife is not eternal, and is more like a Purgatory?

Men, after all, wrote both the Bible and the Koran. Human beings serve theri own ideological purposes when they write religious texts.

A God who would punish mankind so severely for such finite offenses would be a monster, in every sense of the word. Doesn't it make more sense to assume that such an interpretation of God is false, that God is much kinder than that?

In a sense everyone is right. GOD does exist. Religion was created by MAN not GOD. If GOD had created religion there would only be one not thousands. GOD inspired MAN to write the bible so that MAN would know the truth and be set free by his son Jesus who died for us. Jesus taught us that religion is a mind set not a sect. We are to worship no man but to only worship GOD our creator. A lot of religions worship not GOD (YAHWEH) but men or false gods who they themselves created for themselves. Most people out there don't get it because they are always turning to man for their answers instead of turning to GOD. GOD is love and will not turn his back on anyone who calls out to him and believes that he is there to listen. As far as punishment. That is something between GOD and the one who needs punishing. No one is perfect and all of us are promised the reward of heaven if we are to accept and believe in GOD and his son Christ. Let no man judge another man. Only GOD can judge us and he will be just. No matter what your sins may be you can be forgiven but only by HIM. Man needs to worry about himself and not be concerned about others and how they are going to be or not going to be punished.

 

[laymen]

I dont believe it was my choice to live. But here I am, and for this life I am greatfull for with out it I am nothing.