"the church" says:

1 4 the 4 1 1 · #1 2007-12-03, 21:14

Facts:
Okay, the church says that god crafts every person according to his design, he makes them how they are.

God says he wants to help everyone, and wants everyone to go to heaven.

God knows everything, including the future.

Assumptions:

God, being that he knows everything that is going to happen, knows that a person HE DESIGNED will choose to ignore him.

God, knowing that said person will ignore him, created a human, for the known purpose of going to hell.

Explanation?
God is an asshole, if at all "God".

Debate;

KikoSanchez · #2 2007-12-03, 22:04

This seems to boil down to the problem of the possibility of free will with an omniscient god. You will hear various unsatisfying responses. For instance, an orthodox priest came to my religion class and was asked this. He responded with 'god doesn't perceive time like we do, but rather experiences all of 'time' instantaneously and therefore we can't ascribe him such properties as 'seeing the future' etc. Then, of course, I want to know why it took him 6 freakin days to create the universe.

BrokeProphet · #3 2007-12-03, 22:16

Exactly, if God experiences it instantly and time does not apply to him he CANNOT be attributed with much. Our world exists and things happen in a timely fashion...Time does not apply to God, God cannot exist in our world.

KikoSanchez · #4 2007-12-03, 23:55

To me it seems a non-sequitur, whether or not god experiences the lifespan of the universe with time as we do, or all at once. What matters is that it created the universe, thus created our lives a priori so that god has condemned us to hell.

Prometheum · #5 2007-12-04, 01:39

God does not exist. Your scenario is flawed.

AngryFemme · #6 2007-12-04, 01:44

Quote:

Originally Posted by 1 4 the 4 1 1

God is an asshole

Except when Morgan Freeman plays him. Then he's pleasant, and chill, and just a pleasure to hang with.

kurdt318 · #7 2007-12-04, 02:34

I suppose one could make the argument that perhaps our "free will" is unknown to God. Perhaps His greatest gift to us is His ignorance, the ignorance of whether we'll end up a believer in Him or not. To have created us, given us life, He sacrificed Himself, not physically mind you, but humankind's unquestionable loyalty in Him.

truckfixr · #8 2007-12-04, 02:46

Quote:

Originally Posted by AngryFemme

Except when Morgan Freeman plays him. Then he's pleasant, and chill, and just a pleasure to hang with.

I kind of preferred George Burns as God. The thought of God being a little old dude with a stogie in his hand just cracks me up.

Hare_Geist · #9 2007-12-04, 03:29

Quote:

Originally Posted by KikoSanchez

This seems to boil down to the problem of the possibility of free will with an omniscient god. You will hear various unsatisfying responses. For instance, an orthodox priest came to my religion class and was asked this. He responded with 'god doesn't perceive time like we do, but rather experiences all of 'time' instantaneously and therefore we can't ascribe him such properties as 'seeing the future' etc. Then, of course, I want to know why it took him 6 freakin days to create the universe.

This pastor isn’t very good at theology. If I was trying to be an apologist, I would have explained his argument by saying that time and space are mere properties of how the human mind, or spirit, perceives things. With this being the case, everything as it is in itself is an indivisible, timeless point. Therefore God is ‘everywhere’ and omniscient only because he perceives what you’re doing freely in the ‘present’ as if it were simultaneously being done freely in the ‘past’ and freely in the ‘future’ because he’s in an ‘eternal present’. God’s knowledge is entirely dependent on your actions, and this makes him omniscient strictly in the sense of knowing everything that is the case ontologically. But there’s a few problems with this. The first is the seven days thing. But because the pastor sounded like an Augustinian, he’d probably say Genesis isn’t literal but must be interpreted hermeneutically. The other problem is that it’s very hard to think of an ‘eternal moment’ without time, since ‘eternal’ is a property of time. In a sense, without time, it’d be a state of complete nothingness. Some theologians would probably say this is the case and all of this is a moment so fast it transcends time and obliterates into nothingness before it even kicks off. This is just completely strange though, and still dependent on notions of time.

ArmsMerchant · #10 2007-12-04, 21:45

Everyone here seems to be using the Piscean Age paradigm of God as an entity, and a rather limited one at that.

In my view, and the view of many sages, mystics, saints and assorted weird holy men and women through the ages, God is not a being per se, but the creative, loving, and sentient spirit which pervades everything and everyone.

We are All One in God, and God is one in all of us. Ascribing human characteristics to God is simply unevolved and rather simple-minded.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.