As simple as possible to summarize the best way you can, first, please. Feel free to expand after, or just say whatever you want lol. Honest question.
As simple as possible to summarize the best way you can, first, please. Feel free to expand after, or just say whatever you want lol. Honest question.
Re:Orthodoxy - fair enough.
Original Sin
Ok, that’s an interesting take. If man is not guilty of the sin of Adam then why does he bear the consequences of the act? Why punish someone for something you don’t believe they did?
Yeah but then he followed them around? Adam praises god on the birth of his sons, they give offerings to god and even talk to him, etc. And if Adam’s sin is transmitted to all mankind then Cain and Abel were sinful too, so it kinda seems like god didn’t have a problem being in the presence of sin?
This doesn’t fly with me, because god created Adam and Eve as they were and they (assuming omniscience) couldn’t choose to do otherwise. So not only is god punishing them for a sin of his own making, he’s punishing everyone else despite, in the Orthodox version, them not being guilty of that sin. And then to call pain and suffering a mercy because it gives us the ‘opportunity’ to ‘earn’ back what you took? Nah, I’ll take a hard pass on that one. Sin but not guilt is kind of worse actually. It’s like telling your kid, ‘I know your brother was the one who took the cookie, but I’m going to spank you for it too.’ See also: pettiness and tyranny.
If it was static, how did it change from ‘angelic’ to ‘damned’ or whatever after his act of rebellion? Was it the act itself that somehow changed the unchangeable, or did god decide to rewrite reality just this once? If that’s the case, rewriting someone’s soul just so you can eternally punish them for one mistake is kind of a dick move.
Free Will
I don’t think so, though I concede that there might be definitions of free will that render it thus, I’m using the pretty common definition of having the ability to make choices.
I whole-heartedly disagree, foreknowledge precisely equals predestination. He doesn’t have to orchestrate things; merely knowing ahead of time that I will turn left instead of right at the next intersection means that it is definitionally impossible for me to turn right. If I was able to turn right anyway that would definitionally preclude foreknowledge: you can’t know that I turned left if I turned right.
Even if I grant this for the sake of argument, humans do not operate outside of time so foreknowledge of human futures, again definitionally, must necessarily be knowledge about the future of the time that humans operate in. But even if that wasn’t true, if god exists outside of time then he also definitionally exists outside of causality and cannot influence or be influenced by human choices within time, which precludes foreknowledge of human futures.
Ok, I’ll take your word for it, but according to the most widely-accepted definitions if man is free to choose then god cannot have forenkowledge of those choices.
If he’s not outside of causality (as implied by the participatory element here) then he’s not outside of time, because those two things mean effectively the same thing. You say he allows it out of love, I say he allows it out of lack of foreknowledge, because that’s the only thing that is logically consistent.
Logic doesn’t presuppose god, it merely presupposes consistency. Objective truth can arise from the structure of reality itself without requiring a divine source. We have mountains of evidence that logic is internally self-consistent; that’s not the case for pretty much any holy book I’ve read.
Vengeful/loving God
That doesn’t render it invalid. Also: primarily, but not uniquely as you point out; I was personally puzzling over this stuff back in the 80s before anyone but the editors of a few science journals had ever heard of Richard Dawkins.
I don’t dispute that he is also loving, I dispute that he is exclusively loving as of the New Testament. He just goes on and on about how vengeful and angry he is in the OT, and there’s some of that in the NT too, though I think it’s all said by others since (IIRC, it’s been a while) god doesn’t really have a speaking part in much of the NT. Also I don’t think you get to send your PR team out to call you a ‘loving god’ after slaughtering innocents and children (and advocating the same) over and over again.
I wouldn’t count that as wrath, and I also wouldn’t attribute it to god. We know he’s capable of turning those tables over himself if he wanted to, but he didn’t. :P
That’s fair, it’s definitely more of a vibe-check thing, I’m not sure there’s much space to discuss there.
(cont, TIL lemmy doesn’t have that high of a maximum post length.)
Two Paths
Which is kind of my point. A logical progression of revelation implies change over time in god’s plan, actions, or relationship with humanity. But a truly perfect, eternal, unchanging truth wouldn’t require progression or revision. If the Divine Truth was perfect and eternal and true, why did it need changing? Evangelicals talk about the ‘new covenant’ all the time, but humanity isn’t any different now than it was then, why did we need a new one? Seems like either god changed or the truth wasn’t eternal.
Corrupted might not be the right word, but we have examples of, say, King James commissioning his own bible to support the divine right of kings. But aside from that, human fallibility plays a part in the transmission of this truth, and anyone who has played a game of telephone in grade school can tell you how that tends to go: you line up the whole class, whisper something into the first kid’s ear, they whisper into the next, and what started out as ‘Billy can’t come to school today because he’s sick’ comes out the other end as ‘little Billy died’ or whatever. Even if you assume each person in the chain intends to transmit it faithfully people make mistakes, there are disputes over word choice and changes to meaning over time in translation, there are newly-discovered ancient texts that cast new light on the ones we had, etc. I don’t know about fundamentally corrupted, but if the perfect eternal truth is all of those things then something else has to account for the paradoxes, and if we’re assuming the literal existence of god then that leaves only human fallibility.
Me too man, I’m just here to have an engaging conversation and learn a little something. All we can do is do our best to own mistakes and not be shy about admitting fault.
That doesn’t surprise me. What little I know of the early history of Orthodoxy is that there was an early, pretty severe schism over some fundamental stuff that sent the two churches in very different directions. I am curious to know more, though, so I hope you stay and keep the discussion going. I admit that (probably because the way I fell out of Christianity and then into a long but fortunately-ended period of atheism) that Orthodoxy was never really on my radar in my religious studies. But I am a more curious person than I once was with considerably more free time, so I’ll do some poking about and see what I can find. ;)
That’s entirely fair. I don’t think I was intentionally doing it but there may have been some subconscious stuff going on there. My intent, and perhaps I should’ve chosen a better tool, was to use the terminology of modern ethics to convey the weight of my distaste for the idea of punishing one person for another’s crime in any context.
I don’t think everything is relative, nor do I think god is the only source of morality. Even without modern utilitarian concepts like least-harm, it’s pretty clear that ancient human cultures had a concept of justice that depended on the simple and self-evident truth that causing intentional harm to others is bad. It may have been applied unevenly and inconsistently, but. And hell, even a toddler with barely a grasp on language, much less culture or philosophy, can tell the difference between getting bitten by the kid you bit and getting bitten by some kid because she thought you bit her. They’re unhappy at being bitten in either case, but - and I’ve seen this in my nieces and nephews - they get downright angry when they feel that sting of injustice, even if they can’t describe it.