:
: : And as such, you're in no position to say: "if you want to cast the stones at lies make sure not an embelishment, a justification, a rationalization, a manipulation never spills forth from your heart and onto your very own lips.": : Because you can never prove that your personal God is everybody's personal God; thus, you should not accuse others of lies simply because they don't agree with you.
: Gid, I don't think you really "heard" was I was "really" saying my Personal Jesus Post. Your defensive position has blocked you from perceiving what I was trying to convey.
K: Your absolutely right. It is only through faith that we can see or perceive anything spiritual. For instance, if you don't believe in God then this world appears to your fleshly eyes as a mere coincidence. A big bang that resulted in our existance.
- which reads as "If you don't believe in a Creator, the Universe is essentially a giant coincidence".
Fair enough. I don't see why that's so bad.
K: Through faith, you perceive and see the spiritual which results in the conclusion that we are more precious and valuable in the eyes of a creator. That there is a highter meaning to life than what we perceive while walking in the spiritually numb valleys of it. Without faith, I guess we'll all just have to resign to the fact that we're just a bunch of bones running around in skin suits. I guess love, joy, pain, deception, truth, etc. doesn't really exist either since we can't prove it.
- essentially, you are saying "I believe that we can derive our observed irrationalities and 'humanity' from an unprovable Deity - and that if an unprovable Deity doesn't exist, neither do the things that make us human."
Which doesn't follow at all; you are issuing a definitive statement on an unprovable foundation; you recognise this, but say that any number of observable phenomena rely on this unprovable foundation. If you are going to say this, then any and every unprovable axiom is an equally good solution to the question of whence 'humanity' derives.
According to your argument, Kristin, every God exists - from Coyote to Astarte to Jahweh to Mithras - or none of them do. You cannot point to anything human and use an unproveable foundation to prove any one God to the exclusion of others; the Deity becomes an eigenfunction; any one of a number of solutions came be used equally well.
K: Anyway, your right. To the human eye God is foolishness. But to the spiritual eye, "no God" equals foolishness.
- Which reads as "If you already believe in God, then not believing in God is strange to you". Fine; but it's the sort of circular argument a Jesuit would use; and not one that stands up to critical examination.
K: Maybe the question isn't whether there is proof or not the question is, if he is real, would we want to accept him into our reality and way of thinking. Afterall, if he is real then all the hidden agendas, motives and secrets in our hearts might be known to someone other than ourselves. Pretty scary thought to those who want to remain in hiding.
This is basically a veiled threat/taunt; "you don't believe in God because you're scared of having your thoughts seen".
I'm not. Heck, my girlfriend can do that, and I don't worship her. Well, not as a Deity.
K: It's like someone barging into your bedroom in the middle of the night and turning on the lights. It hurts and offends our sensitive eyes and we scream for them to turn it back off.
- "You're frightened" - see response above.
K: So all this witty, banter back and forth whether God is real or not does nothing but build walls of pride and ignorance.
- which reads as "you try to conceal the aching void in your lives by indulging in mind-wank".
Actually; it's something I do because I find it interesting; I'm a philosopher because I don't just believe in blind faith. Blind faith leads to sloppy argument and does no-one any favours. Certainly not those such as yourself trying to convince a sceptical audience.
K: The real question is, those who have given there lives over IN FAITH to God, is the fruit of there life reflective of the fruits of the Spirit proclaimed in the Word of God.
I don't know. You'll have to ask Torquemada. Or Pope John XXII. Or Pope Alexander (a Borgia). Or Guido da Montefeltro. Or Pope Boniface VIII. Or St. Dunstan. Or St. Cyril of Alexandria...
Merely giving one's life to the Church means nada if you've got good (or bad) spin doctors and historians.
K: Love, patience, kindness, forbearence, honesty, humility etc. If so and if these fruits are genuine and not based in pretense, people pleasing, manipulation, wanting to appear godly etc, then we can conclude that there is something of TRUTH there. And if the truth spoken in love has the power to change the hearts of men and love and truth being spiritual laws then we also can conclude that it is something to be seriously contemplated and looked at.
What you're trying to say here is that somehow being nice to people is good because it serves the Ultimate truth; this is utterly unprovable and vacuous; even if it's an admirable statement along the lines of "wouldn't it be nice if everyone was really nice to each other?"
K: No one can prove the reality of a vision but it is through the visions and hopes of our forefathers that we reap all the inventions and comforts of today. It was not because of evalution that made the Wright Brothers design an airplane. It was because deep down in their SPIRITS the truth told them it was possible. They never invented it, they only, through faith, hope and a vision discovered what was already there waiting for men of faith to bring into existance- "Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven."
- "Every idea comes from a spiritual part of us that is hotwired directly into God".
Two major problems with this;
Firstly it relies on your unsupportable assumption that our humanity comes solely from God. Which makes it as sound as the rest of that claim; and you could equally well say that any God is responsible for humanity.
Secondly, what kind of bastard would God be to give us the atom bomb? If you seriously maintain that all human inventions are divinely inspired, then God has given us chemical warfare, machine guns, nuclear weapons and the like.
If you take the usual route of saying that these were the product of a) the Devil or b) humanity's perverse nature, then God really isn't 'good' by any measureable means.
K: This Christian debate has become a joke. No one is interested in knowing the truth because we're all to busy worshipping our idol of wisdom.
-or because some of those here are so indoctrinated that they wouldn't be able to cope with the idea that there may very well be no Ultimate Truth; like a safety blanket, they cling to the idea of something they can never be sure even exists or not.
: As for this comment you've yanked out of November's post, Read IT IN CONTEXT. I was merely stating that if one wants to call another a liar they better be innocent of it themselves.
Uh-huh. So where does misconception fit in? I don't pretend I've got the ultimate handle on the Universe; I recognise that my knowledge is limited. But I can spot a vacuous argument a mile off. If someone is unwittingly a liar, are they somehow not a liar? - or does their ignorance not excuse them.
You are arguing an eternally unprovable point; you have no way of ever knowing whether you are lying or not; as such, you'd best be damn careful according to your own axioms.
: I was making the point that we all lie, and then defining what exactly a lie can be categorized as. It had nothing to do with religion or me calling someone a liar because they don't believe in God (I have no clue where you got that idea from.).
"if you want to cast the stones at lies make sure not an embelishment, a justification, a rationalization, a manipulation never spills forth from your heart and onto your very own lips."
- but this is what all human speech *is*; hummanity cannot speak in purely logical terms as it runs alien to the illogical mind. All human speech is manipulation; including yours. Your intimation was that humans lie to themselves because they cannot face the truth as you see it; something I disagree with utterly.
: I was merely stating that we shouldn't take out the speck in our brothers eye until we first remove the plank in our own. Man, we're from two different worlds and when you mirror back to me what you think I "mean" in these posts, I just think "Where did he get that from?"
I got it from a simple treatment of the English you used. If you care to express your ideas in binary, machine code, formal logic or hexadecimal, there might be less room for ambiguity - but I doubt you're familiar with those languages.
If you'd care to provide a propositional deconstruction of the English you used, it might help. But do try to be as precise as possible about your use of English; like all human languages, it's really rather ambiguous and imprecise.
Gideon.
