Very good point. If those who've never heard of God and his Son can be judged by their heart, then everyone can. So there was no need for Jesus to live, die and rise at all.
I hope Jesus doesn't hear about this. He'll be very miffed.
Very good point. If those who've never heard of God and his Son can be judged by their heart, then everyone can. So there was no need for Jesus to live, die and rise at all.
I hope Jesus doesn't hear about this. He'll be very miffed.
Where were you when God hung the stars in the sky (as God might have said to Job)?Originally Posted by MarkBastable
The notion that only through the Grace of Jesus' sacrifice can people be saved from their sins is (I'll fully grant) bizarre. Why should God create a world like that? But, then, why should God create a world where people die int he first place?
In all fairy tales (and many myths), there are strange rules which have inexorable, unnatural and constant results. "Blow this horn, and the walls of a castle will fall." "Look back at your wife, and she will return to the land of the dead." Of course we puny humans don't understand WHY these rules exist. Where were we when God hung the stars in the sky?
Still, if being able to go to heaven only through Jesus' sacrifice seems strange, going to heaven for ANY reason is even stranger and more miraculous. Why strain at a gnat? If heaven exists at all, why should we understand the rules about getting there?
(Of course the Fundamentalists who think they know who is "saved" and who is not weren't there when God hung the stars from the sky, either. For who can know the Mind of God?)
..and that's exactly where believers end up when the logical going gets tough. "Who can know the mind of God?" "God's ineffableness is beyond human comprehension." "Hey - beats me, but I'm sure God knows what he's doing...."
Well, in order to take that position - which you're absolutely entitled to do - you have to have a preceding belief in the existence of God that enables you to lend him that kind of confidence.
Me, I find it impossible to believe in a Supreme Being who appears either not to have thought things through ("....oh, hang on - there was no need for the whole redeemed-by-the-blood-of-the-Lamb thing. I could've applied the 'law unto themselves' technique to everyone...") or who has created a system of justice that, although it applies to me, is impossible for me to understand, but I'm expected to just trust him that it's all fair and consistent.
Neither of those deities - the woolly thinker or the capricious obscurist - has any business trying to run a Universe. In fact it's pretty difficult to see how he could.
Well, no leader has ever been perfect and none is ever really fit to run a country, a world, or the masses.
If there is a God (which I highly doubt) he's just as fallible, vengeful, vain and irrational as the rest of us. After all, He invented us (or we invented him).
"All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours." -Aldous Huxley
"Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires." -William Blake
This seems like a very self-centered view of the universe. The idea is: I won’t “believe in” anything I can’t understand -- as if we are God and can't create anything we don't understand. I suppose we could apply this to Relativity, or Chaos Theory, or any number of scientific or philosophical ideas which are also difficult to understand. The question, though, is not whether you can “believe in” something, but whether the internal logic of the system is inconsistent. When Hades made the condition that if Orpheus looked back, Euridyce would return to the land of the dead was he capricious, or a wooly thinker? Perhaps he was – but that doesn’t ruin the story.
If, of course, the key question about a story is whether we can “believe in” it, then we might examine every plot detail in terms of whether it adds credence to the story. I’ll grant that many Christians DO frame the Christian myth in these terms. Nonetheless, it seems silly for non-believers to frame it in these terms. After all, many of us DON’T “believe in” the Christian myth any more than we “believe in” the Euridyce story. Indeed, some of us (me, for example) see the historical “truth” of both stories as irrelevant. In order to grasp the story, some suspension of disbelief is required – just as it is when we read Anna Karennina. If every aspect of the story is contaminated by “I find it impossible to believe…” we will never see any truths that ARE embedded in the story.
Oh, I understand the story. If that's all God requires of me, I'm safe.
i vehemently disagree.
my beliefs aside, God must be infallible to be God, right? if God is NOT infallible, then He is merely powerful. Castro was powerful, but is he God? the very nature of some "God" existing, is that the "God being" is superior to us, as we are humans. Gods, regardless of religious belief are omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. if lacking is perfect, the god-like qualities fade and that being becomes of one us.
"The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n"
That's simply not true of - for instance - the Greek Gods, the Roman Gods, the Norse Gods, the Hindu Gods, the African pantheistic Gods, the Aboriginal Gods. In fact, pretty much every God except the Judaeo-Christian God has been other than omniscient (hence the intrigue and deceit), absolutely not omnipotent (because there are winners and losers in every encounter) and anything but omnipresent (because there's no story if everyone in it is everywhere all the time).
Last edited by MarkBastable; 07-21-2011 at 02:35 PM.
Obviously, the Norse Gods are doomed to lose their battle with the Giants at Ragnorok. So they are not omnipotent (far from it). It seems to me that the Jewish God was CALLED omnipotent to compare him with the (lesser) Gods of other cultures. I mean, Odin might be called "the all-knowing and all powerful Odin" at some point, even though it's clear from the story that this is hyperbole.
Christians, Muslims and Jews will be a lovely bunch in Heaven. God is welcome to them.
Well, in that case you're one up on me, (and probably) the Pope, Thomas Acquinas, and Bishop Tutu. Most of us don't think we understand the story (at least not completely). Many of those who have studied it for a lifetime -- brilliant, dilligent men and great scholars -- don't claim to understand.
Last edited by Ecurb; 07-21-2011 at 06:32 PM.
The Pope doesn't think that he is God's representative on earth or anything, does he? The Saint and Tutu also do a lot of talking for men without understanding, not to mention the lesser entities that infect Christendom with bombast and bluster. The story is that they get saved no matter what their atrocities against common humanity. It gives them a lot to talk about whereas otherwise they would be a complete blank.
Last edited by G L Wilson; 07-21-2011 at 06:49 PM.
No, the point was that if people who have actually studied the story don't understand what it means, how can MarkBastable. (Perhaps MarkBastable is a Treasure Seeker, and has worked as hard at understanding the Bible as the Bastable children did at restoring the fallen fortunes of the House of Bastable on Lewisham Road, in which case I apologize.)
What's hard to understand? Love doesn't get you into Heaven, righteousness does.
"There is none righteous, no, not one." -- Romans, 3:10.
(And, yes, the Bible is hard to understand. So is G L Wilson. So similar, and yet so distant.)
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