jryan

A child can't agree to terms they don't understand. It's the founding principle for age of consent laws. Hell, it's the founding principle for the entire legal system. It is why legalese is so meticulous and exacting... because for someone to consent they need to understand the full extent to what they are agreeing to. Job demonstrated that he fully understood the life he had been dealt and he chose to continue living it. In fact he demonstrated that he understood the will of God better than anyone else in the story.

Equating that person with a bug may absolve you of personal guilt but would not absolve you of the killing. Might does not equal right beyond inconsequential selfish ideals. Throughout human history the mass culling of human beings has been preceeded by a dehumanizing of the group to be exterminated.

The fact that children are easily manipulated is precisely why a child can not consent to anything.

Well sure, and if you harnessed the power of a larger universe to exactly simulate another universe you would be omnipotent to the beings in that smaller universe... and practically omnipotent to any beings in the larger universe.

Actually it does mean you can't judge the actions as immoral, based on the qualifications of this question and the tenets of the faith in question. Death in a reality with an after life is different than death in a reality without an afterlife. And the example of the pedophile is not realy appropriate because we establish such things as immoral due to the inability of the child to consent. Job was not under the same limitation and he consented to his lot in life by refusing to curse God.

I'll skip most of your post for now as I think I mostly agree with it, and I may agree with you above but for one simple distinction: an embryo, if you choose to classify their personhood in the same fashion as a brain dead individual, you have to accept the special circumstance that that "brain dead" individual has, based on miscarriage rates, a 75% chance of "full recovery" from their "brain death". In short, the embryo's "brain death" is short term in the majority of situations and therefor can not be readily equated with actual brain death that is irreversible through modern science (if ever). I would guess that a person pronounced brain dead yet who had a 75% chance of full recovery would pose a serious challenge to the legal system if someone wanted to terminate that life during it's temporary ailment. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Then we agree, a merged egg and sperm are a life and do carry a complete set of human DNA.

By your own argument they do not meet the criteria as alone they do not meet the criteria for life. When they merge they meet that criteria, which is my argument. By your argument a lump of carbon is life because one day it may merge with a enough hydrogen, oxygen and other elements to create a life form. The rulesdon't work that way, the entity must stand on it's own or not at all. Furthermore, a skin cell would test as human, but it is tissue, not a life. You can't seperate the two with a fertilized egg, however.

A universe simulator would alsways be based on assumptions and simplifications. The only perfect unviverse simulator is the universe itself.

Actually sperm and eggs are not living things by themselves as they do not meet the 7 criteria for life (homeostasis, organization, growth, adaptation, response and reproduction). Unfertilized eggs and sperm are classified as tissue. A fertilized egg does meet the 7 criteria for life, however, and therefor is a life... not "living matter". DNA testing on a fertilized egg would also confirm that the egg was human. So a fertilized egg is a living human.

It's an interesting question, and I think you are on the right track in describing God as seen by most religions. I don't think that omnipotence was ever meant to include irrational power... though in pratical terms a rationally omnipotent being would possess powers which to finite beings such as ourselves would seem irrational. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged That is along my thoughts on the subject. We already accept the fact that there are the posibilities of extra dimensions in the universe into which we have yet to be able to peer. Any being moving freely into and out of our ability to perceive would appear to be breaking the laws of thermodynamics. Indeed we conceive of parallel universes that don't necessarilly follow our physical laws so again, a being which straddles such universes, or moves freely between them, would appear to break the laws of thermodynamics.

Also, pardon the many grammatical and typing errors in my last post. It was late on a very busy day and my dyslexia was in full raging bloom.

And an Omnipotent God can erase all memory of suffering and bring the dead back to life... or give them life everlasting in his glory. So again, with your claim of Omnipotence you are invalidating your own limited interpretation of the occurances in surrounding the story of Job. God explains to Job that no man can understand God well enough to even question him properly (Job 38). Which of course is true if you presume omnipotence. Isn't it illogical to assume the omnipotence of God for sake of your argument then ignore the cousel of said omnipotent being in the very same text you want to disect? You can't claim that He's omniptent yet acted in clearly definable finite and non-omnipotent terms. Yes he was, but that wasn't what you were proposing. Weren't you also proposing that Job must has suffered even after the visit by God? I am saying that there is nothing to show that Job suffered following the affirmation and blessings by God so your claim of prolonged suffering is an invention on your part. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged If you believe in a God that created the unviverse and set it in motion you can believe in a practical omnipotence in all things rational and only sacrifice the illogical and irrational in the process. A being only capable of creating the Earth is still beyond our ability to fully comprehend as we can't fully comprehend His creation.

You can love your children and not grieve their passing.. at least not in the manor that you describe. Imagine, I guess, losing a loved one who dies in a heroic act saving many other people... that would sting somewhat less than losing a loved one to a heroin addiction. If you do not believe in God as Job did then you can not hope to surmise Job's emotional state upon the loss of his children. We however have Job's response in the very same book to judge Job's response by... so why not just go with that since you are already creating a laundry list of givens including an omniscient being in this exercise of evaluating God based on the book of Job?

1) Because nobody learning from the test of Job would be omniscient in their own lives. 2) If you assume an omniscient being then is there even an end or means for them? It is hard to discuss such things when the qualities of the subject are unknown and unknowable. Once you have assumed omniscience, omnipresent omnibenevolent and so on you cease to be able to describe action based on your understanding in a non-omniscient non-omnipresent paradigm. It's like proposing a 4 dimensional object then insisting that it behave in ways only describable with 3 dimensional math. Similarly you judge Job's reactions to his tests, and his life there after, as a non-believer, and you try to force Job's reaction to God's test by your own understanding. If you take the book of Job in total you see that Job did not grieve his lost children as you propose, and his reason is the same as his reason for not cursing God when at his lowest: he trusted God. You can't assume Job's life based on your own experience unless you share the unquestioning faith in God that Job was described as having. So the question becomes, for me, what would God's reasons be for testing Job.. and the reason is simple: it was as a lesson other non-omniscient people. I mean, you can make an argument about God's immorality if you ignore the premise of the whole exercise, and you can argue that Job suffered after his test if you insert thoughts and behaviors into Job's head that are not mentioned in the book of Job... indeed, after his first children were killed he offered everything he had to God "I came into this world naked, and naked I shall leave it".

You are looking at the story as a non-omniscient being and then trying to impose your limits on the omniscient being. As I said, the story did not end with Job's suffering and you have to evaluate God based on all that happened, not just what happened up to a given point that you choose to make a cut off.

Well yes, but suffering would certainly be viewed differently by the omniscient being that you postulated in your initial question, would it not? If God is Omniscient then God knows that Job passed the test and that he would be rewarded with a long, happy and prosperous life after the test. According the the story of Job he lived 120 years after the test, became rich and had a large a loving family in the process. Comparing that to a regualr parent, we all know that the teen years are painful process for most kids, but many of lifes most valuable lessons are learned in the process. A parent that steps in and saves their child from the rigors of growing up does that child no favors. In the story of Job, God as teh parent knew that Job's test would be affirmation for Job and a lesson for his other children, and that is how it is depicted in the story.

Would you consider a parent that allows their child the leeway to experiment with and experience their own lives immoral?

Your chosen blogger (shown grinning with President Obama, no less!) and The Atlantic article (I must assume as the link is broken) made a rather obvious straw man argument... which I can assume is somehow connected to the "Here's me with Obama" photo. The error is that Daggatt and The Atlantic make the false claim that for the assertion of a Reagan economic warfare win to be true then Russian defense spending would have to decline after the fall of the Soviet Union... but that couldn't be further from the truth. As a matter of fact, his own evidence of the Reagan spending is evidence against his own assertion. It was the fact that Reagan COULD spend as much as he did and the Soviets could NOT meet that spending that lead to the knock-out blow to the Soviet belief in the superiority of their economic system. Reagan made quite clear to the Soviet command the error in their assumption of economic superiority. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the era of glasnost the Soviet markets were opened to new customers and in the mid 80s their GDP began to grow, nearly doubling immediately following the end of the cold war and the start of glasnost. So why didn't Soviet spending drop? Quite simply because after the collapse of the hard-line Soviet leadership and the opening of their economy they could now afford it.

Says I'm a boarder line conservative/centrist... which they say makes me centrist. The "Maybe" answers are funny though... the only way to hit dead center is to answer "maybe" to everything. That isn't centrist, that's agnostic!

No,but you tell me where the cold war turned in the US favor. Was it the fall of Saigon, or the Killing fields? The fall of Cuba? The Bay of Pigs? I'm having a hard time finding a win in the cold war for the U.S. before Reagan called the Russian bluff and went all in on the arms race.

Ah, well by those qualifications then we are all Libertarians! I guess I'm a neo-classical-minarchistic-libertarian. Welcome to the club! This discussion is doubleplusgood!

We didn't technically win it, either. Our failure to win that war haunts us today, almost 60 years later.

Or that winning wars costs money.

It's all a matter of perspective:

Now explain how big government, high taxes, and heavy regulation translate into "freedom" or "liberty". The 1966 definition is pertaining to arts, not politics, and is still more "Libertarian" in it's definition. You'll have to extract what meaning you intended from the 1945 definition. The 1776-1788 definition is probably what you were going for, but even then that is 12 years out of ... 635 year? And listening to a modern "liberal" talk about Southerners or Governors from Alaska you would be hard pressed to describe them as free from prejudice.