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Ok, hell!
Topic Started: Mar 29 2009, 10:35 PM (3,366 Views)
Frank_W
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Resident Misanthrope
Ditto.

Dewey, thank you! A fascinating account... Even though Martin Luther claimed that mysticism was a blind alley, he was still involved with it. Still pondering and contemplating the scriptures until insight came to him. This is important. VERY important.
Anatomy Prof: "The human body has about 20 sq. meters of skin."
Me: "Man, that's a lot of lampshades!"
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Renauda
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HOLY CARP!!!
Dewey
Apr 2 2009, 08:23 PM
Luther had an overpowering sense of his own sinfulness, and the more he sought to overcome it the more he became aware of sin's sway over him. It is mistaken to suppose that he was not a good monk, or that his life was licentious or immoral. On the contrary, he sought to obey his monastic vows to the fullest. He would repeatedly punish his body, as recommended by the great teachers of monasticism. And he went to confession as often as possible. But such practices did not allay his fear of damnation. If for sins to be forgiven they had to be confessed, there was always the horrifying possibility that he might forget some sin, and thus lose the reward after which he was so diligently striving. He therefore spent hours listing and examining all his thoughts and actions, and the more he studied them the more sin he found in them. There were times when, at the very moment of leaving the confessional, he realized that there was some sin that he had not confessed. He would then grow anxious and even desperate, for sin was clearly more than conscious actions or thoughts. it was a condition, a way of being, something that went far beyond the individual sins one could confess to a priest. Thus, the very sacrament of penance, which was supposed to bring relief to his sense of sinfulness, actually exacerbated it, leaving him in a state of despair.

In short, a fanatic with some serious pathology.
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Frank_W
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I prefer the fanatic to the phlegmatic and the pathological to the merely dispassionate.
Anatomy Prof: "The human body has about 20 sq. meters of skin."
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John D'Oh
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Frank_W
Apr 3 2009, 09:39 AM
I prefer the fanatic to the phlegmatic and the pathological to the merely dispassionate.
There's never been a phlegmatic, dispassionate suicide bomber.
What do you mean "we", have you got a mouse in your pocket?
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Frank_W
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Nor has there been a phlegmatic, dispassionate master painter, musician, sculptor, artist, or vocalist. :shrug:
Anatomy Prof: "The human body has about 20 sq. meters of skin."
Me: "Man, that's a lot of lampshades!"
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John D'Oh
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Frank_W
Apr 3 2009, 09:58 AM
Nor has there been a phlegmatic, dispassionate master painter, musician, sculptor, artist, or vocalist. :shrug:
No, but those guys can calms themselves down with various chemical solutions. Traditionally, the wild-eyed religious loon doesn't have this option open to him. Insanity loves company.
What do you mean "we", have you got a mouse in your pocket?
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Dewey
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Frank_W
Apr 3 2009, 05:19 AM
Ditto.

Dewey, thank you! A fascinating account... Even though Martin Luther claimed that mysticism was a blind alley, he was still involved with it. Still pondering and contemplating the scriptures until insight came to him. This is important. VERY important.
And for the record, ML was not the only one who did so. There has almost from the very beginning of the faith been a mystical strand of the Christian faith. While it isn't my dominant path, whatever that might mean, I've received instruction in spiritual formation/the spiritual disciplines from two people who are firmly part of the mystical tradition, and my personal prayer and meditation has benefitted greatly from it. Like Luther and others, though, it isn't sufficient in and of itself for me. It was my observation, and personal experience, that it could easily devolve into simply meditation for meditation's sake, and to provide relaxation and even a euphoric/transcendent state - which is fine (wonderful, actually, based on my own experience), but it doesn't always necessarily reveal much about God.

I had read excerpts of Luther's writing, in which his words were almost the exact same words you'd written. I couldn't find the exact quotes, but I thought that passage out of one of my old texts captured his situation well.
"By nature, i prefer brevity." - John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, p. 685.

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Frank_W
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Thank you, Dewey. I agree with you (and Martin Luther), that mysticism for its own sake turns the mystic into a rather slovenly, introverted hedonist, and one becomes like a dead lake into which water flows, but no water flows out of. A living organism that could only inhale, certainly wouldn't remain alive for very long.

Mysticism -- Meditation/contemplation with an aim towards a fuller realization of God's love, and coupled with outer service and a love and compassion for all of life: It is my opinion that these are the (to continue the analogy of breathing) inhaling/exhaling parts of the cycle.

There are do-gooders who run all over the place doing things for other people, constantly. If they remain busy enough and do enough good deeds, everyone will stroke their ego and say, "Oh my... What a wonderfully spiritual person s/he must be! Look at all the things s/he does for others!"

Most often, this is exactly the reason these people do soooo much, allll the time. Certainly, their service to others is laudable, but often, such people remain too busy for inner reflection and for confronting their own baggage and issues. Such people are like saints in the church or group, until their delicate ego is jostled, and then the claws and teeth come out. Usually, this results in fights, factions, discord, and division within the congregation.

What I've found, is that everything seeks balance, and the spiritual man must also seek balance. For instance, there is the warm, personal love that he gives his family and close friends, and then there is the more detached love, goodwill, and compassion that he gives to his fellows and the world at large.

Likewise, one is careful not to become overly attached to one's own opinions and/or outcomes of any given situation. So often, people treat God as some kind of Cosmic Santa: "Dear Lord, please heal me from this, please heal her from that, please let my football team win," etc. etc.

Or even more troublesome and problematic: People pray to God to change other people. Trying to influence another's state of consciousness without that person's knowledge or consent, seems something akin to black magic... Little more than witchcraft, in a sense.

How many people follow Jesus' example and pray, "Not my will, but thine..."?

Man... It's been a long time since I've pondered this stuff. Over two decades, in fact.
Anatomy Prof: "The human body has about 20 sq. meters of skin."
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Wacki Iraqi
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Moonbat
Mar 31 2009, 06:09 AM
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You're mistakenly equating having designed humans with the *ability* to reject God, with God's intention that this ability should be made use of to reject God. Having the ability to reject is not a design flaw, but a design necessity.


Suppose we consider the point before God creates the universe (yes yes starting this way is itself wrong because time and space and matter are not separable - there is no before the beginning of the universe because the beginning of the universe is the beginning of space and the beginning of time, hence it doesn't even make sense to talk about a "creator" but we will pretend this is not the fatal blow that it really is). So he's sitting there in all his omniscience and he can see all possible permutations of possible realities. All hypothetical histories of the universe are laid out in front of him. By a history I simply mean a complete account of everything that happens. (Two different histories, which I'll call two different universes, could be identical upto a point where in one a particle radioactively decays a fempto second later than in the other.) He sees the spectrum of possibility in infinite detail.

Put another way what is available to God then is a book where every page tells you everything there is tell (everything that happens) about a hypothetical universe all the way through from from the beginning to either the end if there is an end to that universe or stretching off too infinity if there is not.

And then armed with this impossibly deep knowledge he actually creates a universe, this universe. He picks a page from this ultimate book, turning what was before but one possibility amongst an infinite number into reality. So immediately you see how hollow your answer is for he knew as he created reality all that would occur, he knew people would choose to kill and maim each other yet he still picked that universe, this universe, rather than one of the one's where people don't choose to kill and maim each other.

He couldn't help but specify the universe because he had infinite knowledge. The "choice" thing doesn't help you - yes we (well some of us) choose to kill and maim but he chose the universe where we choose to kill and maim and he did so deliberately because he had infinite knowledge beforehand. To top it all off he then sends the people who he chose to choose to kill and maim to suffer in hell! Great.

From the perspective of infinite knowledge, genuinely infinite knowledge of all possible permutations it doesn't mean anything to talk about coercion or automation or anything like that.

Suppose I can send you 5 different messages and I know in infinite detail what your response to each of these hypothetical messages will be. Then I pick one to send you knowing exactly how you will respond. What I have done is specified your reaction, I've deliberately specified your reaction. Whether you call that "coercion" is neither here nor there, but that is exactly what you are claiming God did when he created the universe given that you attribute him omniscience.
This is nail on the head stuff Moonbat, my absolute take on the omniscience subject. Great!
You're an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.........I just go one God further.
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Larry
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This is nail on the head stuff Moonbat, my absolute take on the omniscience subject. Great!


Amusing really, watching people who think their little exercises in mental masturbation rises to a level of "logic" that can put God in a little box and then eliminate him.....
Of the Pokatwat Tribe

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ivorythumper
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Klaus
Apr 2 2009, 01:15 AM
Hey IT, you may want to take a look at Frege's Begriffsschrift for an update on your slightly outdated understanding of logic. Syllogisms have long been superceded by Frege's framework of predicate logic.
I didn't realize that syllogisms were subject to fashion. What again is outdated about Aristotelian logic for the purposes of understanding things through deduction?
The dogma lives loudly within me.
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ivorythumper
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Moonbat
Apr 2 2009, 04:02 AM
The defence you are trying to reach for is that this universe is the best logically possible universe. In the book where each page is a possible history of a universe and there is a page for every logically possible universe, the page that corresponds to our history is the one where the least bad things and the most good things happen to conscious observers. That's your defence, that it's logically impossible to even imagine anything better than this world, with no constraints to imagination, no requirements to adhere to our physical laws or indeed any physical laws at all. Well simple inspection reveals that isn't the case. In fact, even with our laws they are possible. But what's more you explicitly don't believe your own defence.
Well, no, Moonbat. That is not the defense I am looking for, since I don't accept the argument that in order for God to be good he has to have created the best possible universe. Again, I fully understand the argument -- you are just regurgitating an old argument that has been around for several hundred years. And while I certainly don't want to get in the way of your basking in the adulation of others who think that this stuff you are writing is some original product of the Moonbat biomachine, the topic of theodicy has been around for a long time and is not intellectually compelling as an argument against God. Your are inclined to accept it since you don't have faith. It fully buttresses your world view. OK, I'll agree that as an argument it's clever, if you'll agree that it hardly original thinking on your part.
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You explicitly believe that a vastly better world is not only possible but it actually exists - you think some people get sent there after they die. Or are you going to argue that there are paralysis victims in heaven?

I have no idea what you mean. I don't believe that heaven is a world as you use the term -- given your reflexive materialism. And if you are trying to stuff an argument such as paralysis victims in heaven, that is so completely incoherent to what heaven is said to be that I can only assume you are working off of some angels playing harps cartoon understanding of these things.
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I see why you have to try to dismiss it as massive overkill since it really gets to the heart of the question. If all that was wrong with the world was that people stubbed their toes, you would presumably still choose existence and the opportunity for love relationships over nonexistence. Even in a world with Alzheimer's and paralysis and tigers who eat people and HIV, you would still choose existence and the opportunity for love relationships over nonexistence. So really, all your hangwringing over what a terrible world this putatively perfect God made is shown to be hollow.

Whether I personally want to live has nothing whatsoever to do with the argument that a tri-omni God is implicitly incompatible with the observed universe. But uh there are people who don't want to live - about a million people kill themselves every year.

I fail to see how suicide rates of under .02% make much of a defense against the notion that your position of what a terrible world this putatively perfect God made is shown to be hollow.
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It's not overkill -- just the opposite. I am just clearing away all the noise that gets in the way of your real argument.


You haven't grasped that overkill comment. If the only bad thing that happened to conscious organisms was stubbed toes that would still refute the notion of a tri-omni god. The real world with much much worse stuff than stubbed toes is overkill, is vastly more than is needed to refute this notion of a tri-omni god.
I grasped it perfectly well, I am just looking at it from the other side. In your view even a stubbed toe would preclude the perfection of God. Even a head cold or a mosquito bite would preclude God as good, omniscient and omnipotent. You seems to be agreeing with me about that, but you seem averse to just come out and say "yes, IT, that is the basic argument".
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Moonbat
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Well, no, Moonbat. That is not the defense I am looking for, since I don't accept the argument that in order for God to be good he has to have created the best possible universe.


When you tried to defend suffering by arguing it was beneficial (that everything's connected and you can't have the good stuff without suffering) that's trying to invoke the 'you can't get any better than this universe' argument. Anyway your response now is to claim that a creator can be good if what he creates is not the best possible universe. Well he certainly can't be infinitely-good which is what many of the monotheists around today claim. So ok you want to solve the problem by downgrading god from all-good to just partially good.

I guess that can work, you could also change all-powerful to just powerful or all-knowing to knows quite a bit and achieve consistency that way. The thing is though I'm not all-good but if i were in that position and had the power i would have picked the best possible universe, so exactly how "good" is a character who deliberately chooses a reality where really awful things happen?

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Again, I fully understand the argument -- you are just regurgitating an old argument that has been around for several hundred years. And while I certainly don't want to get in the way of your basking in the adulation of others who think that this stuff you are writing is some original product of the Moonbat biomachine, the topic of theodicy has been around for a long time and is not intellectually compelling as an argument against God. Your are inclined to accept it since you don't have faith. It fully buttresses your world view. OK, I'll agree that as an argument it's clever, if you'll agree that it hardly original thinking on your part.


Well I thought it up rather than reading it and spitting it out again but of course i'm well aware that many many people have already worked this stuff out before.

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I have no idea what you mean. I don't believe that heaven is a world as you use the term -- given your reflexive materialism. And if you are trying to stuff an argument such as paralysis victims in heaven, that is so completely incoherent to what heaven is said to be that I can only assume you are working off of some angels playing harps cartoon understanding of these things.


Materialism is a word you use - it doesn't mean anything to me. When i said "world" I meant it as synonymous with "universe' a i used it in the original argument, i.e. a specification of everything that happens. The point was just ramming home that this world is not as good (from the perspective of conscious observers) as it could be. Which you now seem to accept.

Quote:
 

I fail to see how suicide rates of under .02% make much of a defense against the notion that your position of what a terrible world this putatively perfect God made is shown to be hollow.


Whether I want to live has no bearing on whether or not it's consistent or inconsistent to posit a tri-omni god as creating the observable universe.

Quote:
 

I grasped it perfectly well, I am just looking at it from the other side. In your view even a stubbed toe would preclude the perfection of God. Even a head cold or a mosquito bite would preclude God as good, omniscient and omnipotent. You seems to be agreeing with me about that, but you seem averse to just come out and say "yes, IT, that is the basic argument".


I've spelled it out a fair few times now. Yes stuff that's bad but minor still precludes an all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing, designer. That's true by definition.

But in the real universe a hell of lot more than just stubbed toes or colds occur. Those wouldn't ruin lives, they would rule out your tradditional monotheist claims but it would be a relatively subtle point. But in the real world the point is not subtle. In the real world there are destroyed people, there are real horrors. Thus the point is overwhelmingly obvious.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem
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Klaus
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ivorythumper
Apr 3 2009, 11:30 PM
Klaus
Apr 2 2009, 01:15 AM
Hey IT, you may want to take a look at Frege's Begriffsschrift for an update on your slightly outdated understanding of logic. Syllogisms have long been superceded by Frege's framework of predicate logic.
I didn't realize that syllogisms were subject to fashion. What again is outdated about Aristotelian logic for the purposes of understanding things through deduction?
Aristotelian logic is imprecise and incomplete. For example, Aristotele does not say anything about universal and existential quantification.
Trifonov Fleisher Klaus Sokolov Zimmerman
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ivorythumper
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I am so adjective that I verb nouns!
Klaus
Apr 4 2009, 07:11 AM
ivorythumper
Apr 3 2009, 11:30 PM
Klaus
Apr 2 2009, 01:15 AM
Hey IT, you may want to take a look at Frege's Begriffsschrift for an update on your slightly outdated understanding of logic. Syllogisms have long been superceded by Frege's framework of predicate logic.
I didn't realize that syllogisms were subject to fashion. What again is outdated about Aristotelian logic for the purposes of understanding things through deduction?
Aristotelian logic is imprecise and incomplete. For example, Aristotele does not say anything about universal and existential quantification.
Yes, I understand that (I think) -- the problem Aristotle was looking at was how to know being. You can edit this, since my understanding of analytical philosophy is amateur, but as I understand it the problem that analyticals are looking at is how to develop sure forms of symbolic knowing. Formal languages do not even require meaningful content (that is, meaningfully cohering to something outside the grammar of the language). Perhaps you can explain to me how universal quantification differs from what Aristotle would have called an essential property, and existential quantification differs from accidental properties.
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Moonbat
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Presumably modern logic has little in common with the Aristotelian ideas of essential and accidental properties of actual objects - since the latter idea has been shown inadequate following the developments of the atomic theory of matter and the conceptual unification of the physical sciences that has taken place over the past 200 years.
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Wacki Iraqi
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Larry
Apr 3 2009, 10:21 PM
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This is nail on the head stuff Moonbat, my absolute take on the omniscience subject. Great!


Amusing really, watching people who think their little exercises in mental masturbation rises to a level of "logic" that can put God in a little box and then eliminate him.....
Masturbation with logic, sounds a bit clinical, but very unmessy! ;)
As far as i'm concerned Larry, God is eliminated in reality. It's the thinking that brings him alive for others that interests me greatly. It's a wonderful kind of dream really, I just don't have them.
You're an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.........I just go one God further.
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ivorythumper
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Look Moonbat, you keep trying to drag this on to your own familiar turf. That is fine as far as it goes unless your interlocutor keeps telling you that your ground of knowledge (terms, conditions, presuppositions, etc) is inadequate. IOW, the argument is not about the best possible universe. That is one possible line of inquiry for theodicy, but one I don't accept as binary as you seem to hold. Why not? Because the way you speak of different pages or different books or different paths or whatever analogy you use to posit the God choose one path that is not perfect (and therefore he either is not omniscient or not omnipotent or not good) makes no sense to how the divine mind is said to operate. It might make sense to the human mind, and indeed it does on level of logical pragmatism (your "true by definition", but that depends on how you define terms), but it does not address the model of divinity or the transcendentals such as goodness, unity, truth etc as posited by, say, Aquinas and his epigones who look at the question systematically.

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Materialism is a word you use - it doesn't mean anything to me.
Trying using a dictionary. The word has meaning to the rest of the English speaking world.
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When i said "world" I meant it as synonymous with "universe' a i used it in the original argument, i.e. a specification of everything that happens. The point was just ramming home that this world is not as good (from the perspective of conscious observers) as it could be. Which you now seem to accept.
But you can only deal certainly with the measurable and observable. You keep trying to place God (or you simply unknowingly assume God to be) in this universe or world or whatever term you use.

You say you keep ramming the point home, but again to a "conscious observer" even a world without evil or privation or disease or stubbed toes that was climatically as our own minus earthquakes and tornadoes and hurricanes and lightning induces forest fires and volcanoes could obviously be better if it all had a climate like La Jolla California year 'round. So again, your argument is that apart from perfection of creation, there can be no God who is all loving, all knowing, and all powerful. You could be living in paradise and if you got a thorn in your toe you would argue that there was no God, right?

You also fail to account for human free will as well as the possibility that God made us for perfection, but did not make us perfect, yet endowed us with the tools (intellect and free will, passions, appetites and emotions, and a sensate body) in order to cooperate with God in our own perfection. You might want to discard that as some sort of test and you don't like the idea of being a lab rat who gets a chunk of cheese after navigating the maze, which I could well understand. But I think that the order of love (if indeed God is love as Christianity holds) puts us in a relationship that lab rat analogies cannot address.
The dogma lives loudly within me.
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Klaus
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ivorythumper
Apr 4 2009, 10:46 AM
Perhaps you can explain to me how universal quantification differs from what Aristotle would have called an essential property, and existential quantification differs from accidental properties.
I don't think there is any relation between existential/universal quantification and Aristotle's essential/accidental distinction, which is no longer, present in modern logic, since the distinction between accidental and essential is subjective and has nothing to do with deductive reasoning.

Existential and universal quantification are the logic formalizations of properties that begin with "for all X" or "there exists an X".
Frege, and later improved by Gentzen, defined exactly how such properties can be proven, and how they fit into a calculus of deduction. So precise, in fact, that these proof rules can even be implemented by a computer - a substantial part of all important proofs in mathematics have already been mechanized and verified by computers.

I'll be happy to explain it in detail, but probably this is already more than what you wanted to know about it :lol2:

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Moonbat
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Look Moonbat, you keep trying to drag this on to your own familiar turf. That is fine as far as it goes unless your interlocutor keeps telling you that your ground of knowledge (terms, conditions, presuppositions, etc) is inadequate. IOW, the argument is not about the best possible universe. That is one possible line of inquiry for theodicy, but one I don't accept as binary as you seem to hold. Why not? Because the way you speak of different pages or different books or different paths or whatever analogy you use to posit the God choose one path that is not perfect (and therefore he either is not omniscient or not omnipotent or not good) makes no sense to how the divine mind is said to operate. It might make sense to the human mind, and indeed it does on level of logical pragmatism (your "true by definition", but that depends on how you define terms), but it does not address the model of divinity or the transcendentals such as goodness, unity, truth etc as posited by, say, Aquinas and his epigones who look at the question systematically.


I wasn't claiming anything about how god's mind operates, all I was doing is exploring the consequences of certain ideas that many people claim to go along with -that of a tri-omni designer- and showing that they are contradicted by observable reality.

Whatever is true about the universe we can rule that tri-omni idea out.

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But you can only deal certainly with the measurable and observable. You keep trying to place God (or you simply unknowingly assume God to be) in this universe or world or whatever term you use.


In general you can't deal with the observable with certainty at all, but i don't get your objection since in that initial argument it's quite clear that god is presented as independent of the universe he creates. (Though usually we use universe to mean "everything" and if it's used in that context then it's true that a putative god would be part of the universe)

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Trying using a dictionary. The word has meaning to the rest of the English speaking world


You can define the term "square circle" as "a circle that is square" but it's still meaningless. Everyone in the whole world could use the word that way, and it could be put in the dictionary and it would still be just playing with words.

I think materialism as you and Dewey appeal to it, is really just playing with words. I certainly don't think there are any apriori constraints on the nature of the universe (universe here meaning everything that exists) which is what you guys seem to be trying to get at with this 'materialism' thing.

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You say you keep ramming the point home


The point I was ramming home is the point you accept which is that the world is not as good as it could be with respect to conscious observers.

Quote:
 

but again to a "conscious observer" even a world without evil or privation or disease or stubbed toes that was climatically as our own minus earthquakes and tornadoes and hurricanes and lightning induces forest fires and volcanoes could obviously be better if it all had a climate like La Jolla California year 'round. So again, your argument is that apart from perfection of creation, there can be no God who is all loving, all knowing, and all powerful. You could be living in paradise and if you got a thorn in your toe you would argue that there was no God, right?


Quote:
 

I've spelled it out a fair few times now. Yes stuff that's bad but minor still precludes an all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing, designer. That's true by definition.

But in the real universe a hell of lot more than just stubbed toes or colds occur. Those wouldn't ruin lives, they would rule out your tradditional monotheist claims but it would be a relatively subtle point. But in the real world the point is not subtle. In the real world there are destroyed people, there are real horrors. Thus the point is overwhelmingly obvious.
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John D'Oh
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Presumably a simple 'yes' or 'no' is out of the question at this point?
What do you mean "we", have you got a mouse in your pocket?
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Moonbat
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Yes stuff that's bad but minor still precludes an all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing, designer.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem
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Dewey
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HOLY CARP!!!
About two years ago, I decided to opt for a simple "OK" to walk away from stupid, unending arguments. The key in being able to do that is to giving up on the assumption that people will automatically think you've lost the argument, and have no more ammunition (or similarly, give up caring that some people actually *will* think that, even if you know better). No one is going to answer the world's questions here. Life calls. Sometimes, the smartest answer is just "OK."

Try it. it will hurt the first three times you do it, but after that, you're home free, and you don't even have to wear a patch to gradually reduce the cravings.

OK.
"By nature, i prefer brevity." - John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, p. 685.

"Never waste your time trying to explain yourself to people who are committed to misunderstanding you." - Anonymous

"Oh sure, every once in a while a turd floated by, but other than that it was just fine." - Joe A., 2011

I'll answer your other comments later, but my primary priority for the rest of the evening is to get drunk." - Klaus, 12/31/14
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ivorythumper
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I am so adjective that I verb nouns!
Indeed, Dewey.
The dogma lives loudly within me.
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Jolly
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Geaux Tigers!
Ok.
The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States.- George Soros
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