GenMarshall
High Elven ISB Capt & Ghost Agent
I know that this seems strange, but is there any proof that God can forgive me and my past transgressions?
Thanks for your replies, Plot.
Re: omnipotence and why one should worship a being that is merely stronger and smarter than oneself, I suppose the Romans had the answer: do ut des. IOW, because it pays. Nobody seems to have a problem with this idea wrt pagan cults, so shouldn't it be accepted for non-omnipotent interpretations of the monotheistic god? I'd certainly think it more compatible with the OT than what the omni-everything god of conventional theology is.
Plotinus said:I'd say it's not meant to be a metaphor but it's clearly meant to symbolise God's displeasure with the Jews at their rejection of Jesus. The author of Mark would probably have expected his readers to believe that the story was literally true but also to understand the symbolism. Ancient authors, especially religious ones, didn't think in terms of "metaphor" quite as we do.
By the way, don't use the NIV. It's a terrible translation made by fundamentalists with the agenda of making the Bible seem to support their views.
Thanks for your replies, Plot.
Re: omnipotence and why one should worship a being that is merely stronger and smarter than oneself, I suppose the Romans had the answer: do ut des. IOW, because it pays. Nobody seems to have a problem with this idea wrt pagan cults, so shouldn't it be accepted for non-omnipotent interpretations of the monotheistic god? I'd certainly think it more compatible with the OT than what the omni-everything god of conventional theology is.
I know that this seems strange, but is there any proof that God can forgive me and my past transgressions?
Anselm seeks to prove - by reason, rather than from Scripture or tradition - that the Incarnation had to have happened. The ostensible plan is to prove the doctrine to Jews and Muslims, who would not accept arguments based on Scripture and tradition. The argument is presented in dialogue form, the two speakers being Anselm himself and a disciple with the unfortunate name of Boso.
Anselm begins with the problem which the Incarnation solves: the problem of sin. He defines sin as disobedience to God. Any failure to submit totally to God’s will places us immediately into a state of sin.
Unfortunately, once this has happened, there is nothing we can do to rectify the situation. As Anselm puts it:
Anyone who doesn’t give this honour to God steals from God what belongs to him, and dishonours God, and this is sin. What’s more, as long he doesn’t repay what he stole, he remains guilty. And it’s not enough simply to repay what he stole. Because he insulted God, he must give back something more than what he took. Why God Became Man I 11
Anselm’s ideas are drawn directly from medieval society. People in the feudal system of the Middle Ages owed allegiance to a lord, whom they had to obey. Failure to do this was a gross insult to the lord, and was regarded as a kind of theft since it robbed the lord of his honour. If the thief could not make reparation to the lord, together with extra payment in view of the insult he had caused, he would be punished.
In the case of sin, Anselm goes on to point out that we cannot make reparation to God. To do that we would have to give him something that we wouldn’t otherwise owe him. But we owe God everything as it is: we exist only because he created us, and even if we had never sinned we would owe him total allegiance and everything we owe. Anselm asks Boso the crucial question:
Anselm: So what will you pay God for your sin?
Boso: If I owe him myself and everything I can do even without sin, then after I have sinned, I have nothing left to repay him.
Anselm: So what will become of you? How can you be saved?
Boso: If I think about what you have said, I cannot see any way.
Why God Became Man I 20
There is worse to come. To disobey God is the very worst thing that could possibly happen. It is a crime of infinite wickedness. So to repay God his honour, we would have to offer him something that outweighs this infinite crime. And how could we possibly do that?
The problem is that, as the guilty party, humanity must make satisfaction to God. But humanity is incapable of this. In fact, only God himself could. The conclusion is clear:
Anselm: So no-one except God can make the satisfaction.
Boso: That follows.
Anselm: But no-one except humanity ought to do it - otherwise, humanity has not made satisfaction.
Boso: Nothing could be more just.
Anselm:... So if no-one except God can make it and no-one except man ought to make it, there must be a God-Man to make it.
Boso: Blessed be God!
Why God Became Man II 6
For the plan to work, the God-Man must be wholly God and wholly human. He needs to offer a gift of infinite value. Since he is God, his death has infinite value. Therefore, the God-Man allows himself to be killed, offering his death to God as reparation for the insult to God’s honour caused by humanity. This more than repays the theft, and sinful humanity can be forgiven.
Anselm’s doctrine is an “objective” account of salvation. It sees sin as a sort of cosmic overdraft, that God pays back to himself. Sinful humanity is something of a passive observer of this exchange. The doctrine does not speak of a changed relationship with God or the way sinful humanity may be changed to a better life. Of course, those things are important to Anselm, but they do not play a part in his theology of salvation, strictly speaking. For Anselm, human beings are like criminals who have escaped their sentence. Any subsequent change of heart and improved living comes as a reaction to being saved: it is not part of being saved itself. This contrasts very strongly with the later doctrine of Abelard, as well as with the earlier emphases of Augustine.
Anselm’s legalistic understanding of salvation would be immensely influential. It is at the root of the doctrines of the Atonement of Luther and Calvin, and through them became the received wisdom of Protestantism at large.
But Anselm’s doctrine differs from these later ideas in important ways. He does not think of Christ dying “in our place”. Christ makes satisfaction to God on our behalf: he does not take our place, because God does not inflict on him the punishment due to sinful humanity. The notion of Christ being punished by God is alien to Anselm. He thinks of Christ's death as a gift that he offers to God to repay him what sinful humanity stole from him. It is not a punishment for humanity’s crime: it is a reparation made so that God doesn’t have to punish anyone.
The later doctrines changed because legal systems changed - the notion of making reparation to avert punishment would have made no sense to Calvin. By basing his doctrine on contemporary practices, Anselm made it relevant and understandable to others; but in so doing he made it liable to become outdated. The same is true of any theologian who seeks to retell the Christian faith in a contemporary way. Much of Anselm’s greatness lies in the fact that, even though his work is couched in outdated terms and ideas, it is still easily readable today.
Following up Heretic_Cata's question with your answer, why would the author of Mark (presumably John Mark) throw in the story of the Cleansing of the Temple in between the two fig tree stories? He had to have some reasoning behind this, so that is why I (and other Catholics) believe the fig tree is meant to be a metaphor on the Temple?
Why do you think that the story of the resurrection, starts off as a simple spiritual resurrection in the oldest books of the NT, then ends up as a physical resurrection later? Why is the story so all over the place too, time scale and event wise? With Mary receiving Christ after his crucifixion in one, then 3 disciples then 11 and so on? Also there are other parts that are contradictory, fro example it says Joseph and Mary had no trouble getting out of Bethlehem with Jesus in one, and then in another they are held up? Why do you think the Gospels are so riddled with inconsistencies?
Also, who do you think the real authors of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were? They clearly were written long after Jesus's death in some cases more than a century later, if this is so, what happened to there source texts, or was it only passed on in verbal tradition, if so do you think source or otherwise there could have been some error of interpretation?
It's bot about the teleological argument! It's about the scientific utility of a supreme creator. Evolution removed the last bit of it from serious scientific discussion and since then God and science have been pretty much completely removed. It's this dismantling of the last scientific reason for God that makes it such a potent thing.Right. The fact of evolution by natural selection certainly undermines the teleological argument, at least the biological part of it. In fact even the possibility of evolution by natural selection undermines that argument, irrespective of whether it really occurs or not. And of course the teleological argument was destroyed pretty effectively by Hume, for other reasons, before Darwin ever came along. But none of that is an argument against God's existence, just the removal of an argument for it.
It's bot about the teleological argument! It's about the scientific utility of a supreme creator. Evolution removed the last bit of it from serious scientific discussion and since then God and science have been pretty much completely removed. It's this dismantling of the last scientific reason for God that makes it such a potent thing.
Mathematical truths are only true by definition and convention, they in themselves have no physical meaning.Yes. It seems a very peculiar position to take. It seems extremely clear that there are things we know without using "the scientific method", whatever precisely that may be. Mathematical truths are the most obvious example. I can know that 2+2=4 without having to form a hypothesis and carry out experiments to see if it is true.
I am an atheist when it comes to all forms of interacting Gods, and an agnostic and eyeroller of pointless giant invisable Gods that don't do anything.Besides, if you really think that only the scientific method can yield knowledge, then even on the assumption that there are no scientifically-based arguments for God's existence, you are not entitled to "reject God", only to insist that we cannot know whether he exists or not. You can't be an atheist any more than you can be a theist; you would have to be a rather radical agnostic, of the kind who thinks that no-one could ever, in principle, know whether God exists or not.
Well every statement with some bearing on physical reality should. I don't care to deal with the deep philosophical crap because it just leads to agnositicism on everything and I lose utility. It comes down to, "In my experience science works, and other stuff don't."This position reminds me of logical positivism, a movement which was very much in vogue in the middle of the twentieth century. The logical positivists believed that if a statement is to have any meaning it must have empirically verifiable content. Thus, "There are craters on the other side of the moon" has meaning (whether it is true or false) since you could, in theory, go there and see. But "There is a God" and "There is no God" are equally meaningless because you can't go and see. Logical positivism is now pretty thoroughly discredited, because it seems there is no reason whatsoever to accept this definition of meaningfulness. In a particularly nice irony, the statement "A statement has meaning only if it can be empirically verified" itself cannot be empirically verified, so the theory fails by its own standards.
Well, science brings techbology and stuff and religion and crazy philosophy doesn't, so that works well enough for me.Similarly, you insist that only the scientific method yields knowledge. If you claim to know that, I wonder if you think it can itself be established through the scientific method? If so, how? And if not, doesn't that make your position inconsistent?
Mathematical truths are only true by definition and convention, they in themselves have no physical meaning.
I am an atheist when it comes to all forms of interacting Gods, and an agnostic and eyeroller of pointless giant invisable Gods that don't do anything.
Well every statement with some bearing on physical reality should. I don't care to deal with the deep philosophical crap because it just leads to agnositicism on everything and I lose utility.
It comes down to, "In my experience science works, and other stuff don't."
Perfection said:Well, science brings techbology and stuff and religion and crazy philosophy doesn't, so that works well enough for me.
Well, I work with algebraic systems where 2+2 is not 4 (well, generally not 2+2 but larger numbers), namely ones where a number can only have a certain number of digits (lots of programming languages). What makes these algebras any less true? As I see it, the only reason 2+2=4 is considered truer then any other internally consistant algebra that it is seen more often in reality. Are all internally consistant algebras true? What makes one internally consistant? It's tese kinds of things that make me suspect of math's truthfullness.This is a very peculiar statement. You think that it is true only by convention that 2+2=4? Of course it is purely a matter of convention that we call these numbers "two" and "four" and the function "addition". But the proposition which is expressed by "Two plus two equals four" and "Deux et deux font quatre" and the same thing in any other arbitrary language is clearly not arbitrarily true. If you take two things and another two things you will always have four things, no matter what you call these numbers. And that can be known intuitively, or a priori, not simply empirically. Note that mathematical truths can be learned empirically (for example, actually taking two objects and another two objects and then counting them; or by using a calculator and reading the result from the screen) but paradigmatically they are known a priori, simply by working them out in your head.
Well, I work with algebraic systems where 2+2 is not 4 (well, generally not 2+2 but larger numbers), namely ones where a number can only have a certain number of digits (lots of programming languages). What makes these algebras any less true? As I see it, the only reason 2+2=4 is considered truer then any other internally consistant algebra that it is seen more often in reality. Are all internally consistant algebras true? What makes one internally consistant? It's tese kinds of things that make me suspect of math's truthfullness.
Yes. It seems a very peculiar position to take. It seems extremely clear that there are things we know without using "the scientific method", whatever precisely that may be. Mathematical truths are the most obvious example. I can know that 2+2=4 without having to form a hypothesis and carry out experiments to see if it is true.
Plotinus said:I don't really see how an algebraic system that denied 2+2=4 would be consistent at all. The denial of a necessary truth is inconsistent even with itself, and 2+2=4 is not simply true but necessarily true. Nevertheless, perhaps we could imagine a mathematics where it was axiomatic tht 2+2 didn't equal 4, and that it contained no other statement that conflicted with that, and so we might say that that had a sort of internal consistency. But even then, it wouldn't be a true mathematics because it wouldn't correspond to the real world, where adding two things to two things always does give you four things.
Yes, but other "gods" never existed at all- except as mute idols. Only Jehovah is a true god.That doesn't say that other religions will pass away, only that other gods will.
People mistakenly worshipped them even when such 'gods' were in vogue! Jehovah says in His word, that some future day, knowledge of Him will fill the Earth. That would tend to dispell any competing religions, no?People could still mistakenly worship them even after they've ceased to exist.
Most computer number systems only have a limited amount of memory in an address to store a number as such when addition occurs involving numbers near that limit the results are different from normal addition.I'm no programmer so I don't know what algebraic systems you're referring to.
Are you saying that mathematics is empirical?But even then, it wouldn't be a true mathematics because it wouldn't correspond to the real world, where adding two things to two things always does give you four things.
It seems as though there is some truth to what you say.. however, I can't really think of a good example. "The sky is blue" seems to be an obvious truth, but you do sort of use a version of the scientific method when determining that. You observe (look at the sky), you describe and make a prediction (the sky is blue), falsifiability (you ask other people if they also see a blue sky), and casual explanation (the sky is blue due to the way light refracts).
edit: I see that this has already been addressed. "when you take two things and put them beside other two things, you will always get four things" seems obvious too. Well, it is.. due to logic. It's as obvious as "When you have one thing, and you throw it away, you will not have it anymore". It isn't really a truth. It's just simple logic and reality.
Vector spaces where multiplication (and thus addition) works differently are not that uncommon. I can't really think of any useful examples right now, but I took way too much math in University, and this is something I will never forget.
Yes, but other "gods" never existed at all- except as mute idols. Only Jehovah is a true god.
1st Chronicles 16:26
For all the gods of the nations are idols, but the LORD made the heavens.
Isaiah 44:8
Do not tremble, do not be afraid. Did I not proclaim this and foretell it long ago? You are my witnesses. Is there any God besides me? No, there is no other Rock; I know not one."
1st Corinthians 8:4-6
So then, about eating food sacrificed to idols: We know that an idol is nothing at all in the world and that there is no God but one. For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as indeed there are many "gods" and many "lords"), yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.
People mistakenly worshipped them even when such 'gods' were in vogue! Jehovah says in His word, that some future day, knowledge of Him will fill the Earth. That would tend to dispell any competing religions, no?
Habakkuk 2:14
For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.
Isaiah 11:9
They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.
I said tend to, because some, knowing the truth, will still refuse to worship the one true God. When He returns, they will mourn their decision.
Revelation 1:7
Look, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him; and all the peoples of the earth will mourn because of him. So shall it be! Amen.
At that time, He will set up His Kingdom on Earth, and will allow no competing religions. Not because He cannot handle competition, but because He will rule the world in truth.
Revelation 12:5
She gave birth to a son, a male child, who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter. And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne.
I stick by my statement: other religions will pass away someday!