God 3%. Satan 97%. Does God needs a new marketing man?

[Brainteaserfan]

If they did not know right from wrong, then it was wrong of God to punish them.

 

A just God would punish to change attitudes and actions.

 

To punish without these in mind is just purposeless torture and not any kind of justice at all.

 

Do you punish your children if no benefit is to be gained?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As to earning punishment. Punishment with a purpose perhaps but not if it serves no purpose.

 

Punishment is usually given to change ideas, attitudes and actions of a sinner.

 

If punishment is given for any other reason, then it is being given without an altruistic purpose and would be given out of a sense of cruelty.

 

Does hell serve the purpose above?

 

If so, to continue to torture a repented soul is not just.

 

If not then it is cruelty that is motivating the eternal torture.

 

Better to shovel coal in hell than to spend eternity watching friends, neighbors and our children in torture and flame forever.

Only a sick mind would conceive of such a situation or wish it upon anyone. That is why God would not do such because then, heaven would be hell.

 

If those in heaven did not go insane then they could not have once been human or good.

 

 

You should think of hell just a bit and recognize that God would not create such an immoral construct.

 

Regards

 

DL

They didn't know right from wrong, but they did know, because God told them, that they couldn't eat from either of the two trees.

 

We evidently have a completely different definition of the word "punishment".

[Greatest I am]

They didn't know right from wrong, but they did know, because God told them, that they couldn't eat from either of the two trees.

 

We evidently have a completely different definition of the word "punishment".

 

Yes. Yours does not include purpose while mine does.

The fact that you did not speak to my points show that you cannot justify yours.

 

Better to shovel coal in hell than to spend eternity watching friends, neighbors and our children in torture and flame forever.

 

Without purpose.

Regards

DL

[Brainteaserfan]

Yes. Yours does not include purpose while mine does.

The fact that you did not speak to my points show that you cannot justify yours.

 

Better to shovel coal in hell than to spend eternity watching friends, neighbors and our children in torture and flame forever.

 

Without purpose.

Regards

DL

Because all your "points" were simply reworded previous points that I had already responded to, with sources, either in this thread or another.

Edited June 10, 2011 by Brainteaserfan

[Edtharan]

They didn't know right from wrong, but they did know, because God told them, that they couldn't eat from either of the two trees.

 

We evidently have a completely different definition of the word "punishment".

But, if they didn't know right form wrong, then how could they understand that it was wrong to eat from the trees?

 

Without the knowledge of good and evil, it would be impossible to comprehend that you could be punished for doing something, because you could not know that it is wrong (and would not even know the meaning of punishment either).

[Brainteaserfan]

But, if they didn't know right form wrong, then how could they understand that it was wrong to eat from the trees?

 

Without the knowledge of good and evil, it would be impossible to comprehend that you could be punished for doing something, because you could not know that it is wrong (and would not even know the meaning of punishment either).

I should have added, except what God had told them (that they couldn't eat from either of the two trees.)

[Marat]

I'm not suggesting that Peter or Doubting Thomas directly denied the divinity of Christ, but rather, that if they had really believed in the divinity of Christ, they would have had no conceivable motivation either to abjure him (as Peter did) or doubt that he could perform any and every miracle (as Thomas implicitly did by his sceptical attitude to the reports of Christ's resurrection). If anyone had actually encountered God honestly incarnated as a human, the effect would have been so overpowering that any response in the witnesses other than perpetual and absolute adoration, belief, and loyalty would have been inconceivable. It is as though Biff, Scooter, Sally, Spanky, and God all submitted displays to a high school science fair, and the judges were not absolutely convinced that God's submission was the best.

[J.C.MacSwell]

It's not.

 

Greatest I Am: I can answer your entire post: Free Will.

 

So, you will only give us the answer if we let Will go?

 

Give us your answer first, and if we like your answer we will let Will go.

 

After all, with Satan at 97% and God only 3, chances are you are just trying to trick us.

[Marat]

Religion could provide us with an intermediate case in which the proof for the existence of God was imperfect but still sufficiently good that reasonable, rational people would accept it as adequate and believe as long as they were not so hard-hearted by their sinful pride that they would not assent even to a fairly good proof on the balance of probabilities. This would actually be theologically perfect, since it would avoid the current problem, which is that reasonable people may be damned for a good-hearted refusal to believe which grows out of simple scientific rigor and epistemological caution, while people who refuse to believe out of stubborn pride are equally damned, with no distinction being made between the two ethically distinct groups.

 

But isn't it suspicious that after the West had parted company from Eastern thinking -- which became preoccupied with questions of deontology and axiology -- and instead became obsessed with epistemology and ontology, the West's predominant religion also came to focus on a parallel epistemological criterion of salvation, and theology became a Cosmic Quiz Show in which you win eternal salvation if you guess which curtain has the new car behind it, or which of the many mundane candidates for the God, Son of God, or God's Messenger title is the right one? It operates suspiciously much like those puzzles which began to fascinate the Ancient Greeks a few centuries earlier, trying to guess without adequate information whether the essence of reality was moisture (Thales), change (Heraclitus), subjective perspective (Parmenides), or atoms (Democritus)? What could be more natural than that the god of the newly epistemologically-obsessed world should pose a guessing game to sort out the sheep from the goats? What could around more suspicion that this god is not the one true god, but just a local invention, dependent in his own rules and concerns ("Do you believe in me or not" rather than "Are you living a good life?") on those of the culture that made him up in its own image?

 

Free will is of course an unscientific concept, since the basic operating assumption of science (electrons excepted? -- some people are still trying to make room for free will out of Quantum Mechanics) is that every change, motion, or action requires a cause, so for humans to be the great exception to this, and to be the sole uncaused cause in the world, material objects freely determining out of themselves their own actions (the great fallacy of physics: hylozoism), seems oddly non-scientific, especially since so many new sciences have come to demonstrate how human behavior is conditioned by hormones, brain chemistry, social conditioning, early childhood education, cultural expectations, etc., all of which deprives us of responsibility for what we do and simply makes us the locus at which external influences operating on us are manifested. So if we deny that free will is real, rather than just a posit our culture superimposes on peoples' actions because we want to have what appear to be good reasons to praise or blame them for things they do, then we can allow God's manifestation of himself to us to constrain us completely to acknowledge his existence.

 

It seems that once God deigns to present himself to humans, he is caught in a conundrum, since he must either present himself honestly -- which would mean manifesting himself in his full divinity which would have to overawe and win the instant assent of every rational observer, so no one could get any credit for believing in him, or he must present himself dishonestly, which would cause the rationality he also builds into the human intellect to induce people to deny that God exists, for which he would then punish them. The high IQs all go to Hell for being sensible enough not to see the face of the Blessed Virgin outlined in the burn left on a side of bread left by a defective toaster, while the more gullible low IQs are all saved for their incapacity for critical judgment?

Edited June 19, 2011 by Marat

[Brainteaserfan]

Religion could provide us with an intermediate case in which the proof for the existence of God was imperfect but still sufficiently good that reasonable, rational people would accept it as adequate and believe as long as they were not so hard-hearted by their sinful pride that they would not assent even to a fairly good proof on the balance of probabilities. This would actually be theologically perfect, since it would avoid the current problem, which is that reasonable people may be damned for a good-hearted refusal to believe which grows out of simple scientific rigor and epistemological caution, while people who refuse to believe out of stubborn pride are equally damned, with no distinction being made between the two ethically distinct groups.

 

But isn't it suspicious that after the West had parted company from Eastern thinking -- which became preoccupied with questions of deontology and axiology -- and instead became obsessed with epistemology and ontology, the West's predominant religion also came to focus on a parallel epistemological criterion of salvation, and theology became a Cosmic Quiz Show in which you win eternal salvation if you guess which curtain has the new car behind it, or which of the many mundane candidates for the God, Son of God, or God's Messenger title is the right one? It operates suspiciously much like those puzzles which began to fascinate the Ancient Greeks a few centuries earlier, trying to guess without adequate information whether the essence of reality was moisture (Thales), change (Heraclitus), subjective perspective (Parmenides), or atoms (Democritus)? What could be more natural than that the god of the newly epistemologically-obsessed world should pose a guessing game to sort out the sheep from the goats? What could around more suspicion that this god is not the one true god, but just a local invention, dependent in his own rules and concerns ("Do you believe in me or not" rather than "Are you living a good life?") on those of the culture that made him up in its own image?

 

Free will is of course an unscientific concept, since the basic operating assumption of science (electrons excepted? -- some people are still trying to make room for free will out of Quantum Mechanics) is that every change, motion, or action requires a cause, so for humans to be the great exception to this, and to be the sole uncaused cause in the world, material objects freely determining out of themselves their own actions (the great fallacy of physics: hylozoism), seems oddly non-scientific, especially since so many new sciences have come to demonstrate how human behavior is conditioned by hormones, brain chemistry, social conditioning, early childhood education, cultural expectations, etc., all of which deprives us of responsibility for what we do and simply makes us the locus at which external influences operating on us are manifested. So if we deny that free will is real, rather than just a posit our culture superimposes on peoples' actions because we want to have what appear to be good reasons to praise or blame them for things they do, then we can allow God's manifestation of himself to us to constrain us completely to acknowledge his existence.

 

It seems that once God deigns to present himself to humans, he is caught in a conundrum, since he must either present himself honestly -- which would mean manifesting himself in his full divinity which would have to overawe and win the instant assent of every rational observer, so no one could get any credit for believing in him, or he must present himself dishonestly, which would cause the rationality he also builds into the human intellect to induce people to deny that God exists, for which he would then punish them. The high IQs all go to Hell for being sensible enough not to see the face of the Blessed Virgin outlined in the burn left on a side of bread left by a defective toaster, while the more gullible low IQs are all saved for their incapacity for critical judgment?

Just a thought. Maybe we aren't, "rational"? Maybe a better word, "smart enough". Some of us have seen miracles. Maybe you could call it something else, chance, neurological disorders, etc. People have cancer, docs go in to operate after an anointing service, and the cancer is gone. Not a trace. There are dozens of others too. Seeing angels etc. I know I sound really odd.

[A Tripolation]

After all, with Satan at 97% and God only 3, chances are you are just trying to trick us.

 

Yes, but I never got that shipment of Slinkys in. It was obviously a clause-1506 error.

 

Really, what the HELL are you trying to say?

[Realitycheck]

I just wanted to point out that you've got it kind of backward. Belief in God in the U.S. is around 60-75%, depending on how you classify agnosticism, courtesy of Pew Forum. Throughout the world, however, it's about 97%, courtesy of CIA.

[Greatest I am]

od

I should have added, except what God had told them (that they couldn't eat from either of the two trees.)

 

 

God did not disallow the eating of the tree of life before A E ate of the tree of knowledge.

 

In effect, he directly caused them to die and is thus guilty of murder IMO.

 

Regards

 

DL

 

 

[Realitycheck]

Where are you getting this from, as if any of it even happened anyway, not even explicitly describing what species is being referred to. I thought the tree served another purpose, to make people think and raise themselves above the animalistic sexual free-for-all of the animal world. You might want to read The Power of Myth. But I can see how you are probably joking/being sarcastic.

 

Campbell asserts that all of the different experiential plants are included as the tree, though there was only one which made me analytical, not like I went around and tried a whole bunch of them.

Edited August 27, 2011 by Realitycheck

[deluxe]

God 3%. Satan 97%. Does God needs a new marketing man?

There was an estimated 1 milion people on the earth at the time of the flood, 8 people survived. What is the percentage of that?

It is not about being sold on something it's about want to serve God the way he wants. Not many really will do that.

 

 

 

 

Matthew 7:13-14

New International Version (NIV)

 

 

The Narrow and Wide Gates

¹³ “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. ¹⁴ But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

 

 

 

Some do not know the bible at all. If they did they would know this.

[Greatest I am]

There was an estimated 1 milion people on the earth at the time of the flood, 8 people survived. What is the percentage of that?

It is not about being sold on something it's about want to serve God the way he wants. Not many really will do that.

 

 

 

 

Matthew 7:13-14

New International Version (NIV)

 

 

The Narrow and Wide Gates

¹³ "Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. ¹⁴ But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

 

 

 

Some do not know the bible at all. If they did they would know this.

 

 

Yes. And reject a God who is such a loser.

 

You will note how God does better elsewhere.

 

You can make that book of myths say almost anything.

 

2 Peter 3:9 KJ

The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.

 

None are ever lost to God. A true God would have it no other way.

 

Regards

 

DL

 

 

[deluxe]

Yes. And reject a God who is such a loser.

 

You will note how God does better elsewhere.

 

You can make that book of myths say almost anything.

 

2 Peter 3:9 KJ

The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.

 

None are ever lost to God. A true God would have it no other way.

 

Regards

 

DL

 

 

Actually very few, do find it.

An example is the flood.

8 out of about 1 million. ( estimate)

But God does want everyone to repent , but most do not want it. But everyone is offered it.

 

 

 

Matthew 7:13-14

Amplified Bible (AMP)

 

¹³Enter through the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and spacious and broad is the way that leads away to destruction, and many are those who are entering through it.

 

¹⁴But the gate is narrow (contracted ^[a]by pressure) and the way is straitened and compressed that leads away to life, and few are those who find it.

 

This has been consistent throughout history.

There was Abraham, then Job, when Jesus came, he started with picking one by one.

Edited October 7, 2011 by deluxe