Death Thread II: The Second Death.

[Tigranes]

Even worse. No need to create a controversy where it is none. In every situation one can chose to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. If I call you "it" -- this will not advance our discussion. We either agree on basics or don't talk at all.

 

[El_Machinae]

I waffle. I think the Christian god is portrayed as male. This doesn't make much sense in a grander cosmology, but ehn, let 'em. Sure, it's a weakness in the Scriptures themselves if you think the Scriptures themselves are really important.

Now, I have a hard time talking about God, the Creator. This is a different entity from the Christian god, though they might disagree. This god clearly has no use for gender identifiers. They're mostly non-sensical. Like calling gravity 'she' or somesuch. Sure, Gaia can be a 'she' but ecosystems clearly aren't

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Even worse. No need to create a controversy where it is none. In every situation one can chose to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. If I call you "it" -- this will not advance our discussion. We either agree on basics or don't talk at all.

Suit yourself. It's not creating controversy, it's being accurate as far as I'm concerned.

And I asked you to stop representing the atheist point of view, which you didn't. Maybe if you had paid attention to my request I might have considered yours. I have done so before with regard to capitslisation when it became an issue years ago.

 

[Borachio]

I waffle. I think the Christian god is portrayed as male.

Surely it's a cunning ploy by the patriarchy. I can't think of any other reason to do so. Jesus is male, I think, and I'm fine with that. (Although how he managed that by parthenogenesis is another matter. But I digress. I expect once you can make yourself believe one unbelievable thing, a few more don't really require much effort.)

This doesn't make much sense in a grander cosmology, but ehn, let 'em. Sure, it's a weakness in the Scriptures themselves if you think the Scriptures themselves are really important.

Now, I have a hard time talking about God, the Creator. This is a different entity from the Christian god, though they might disagree. This god clearly has no use for gender identifiers. They're mostly non-sensical. Like calling gravity 'she' or somesuch. Sure, Gaia can be a 'she' but ecosystems clearly aren't

It doesn't make any sense, I agree. Maybe it's just a feature of the particular human language, and doesn't mean anything at all. If we were using French, for instance, the gender of God would depend overwhelmingly on the form of the actual word. Pretty much unrelated to the actual gender of God, who may have one or not. It seems reasonable to suppose God is ungendered. What purpose would it serve for him, her, or it to have one?

What difference does it make to you, Mr Tigranes, what gender God is?

 

[BenitoChavez]

Can a one-of-something even have a gender? Male and Female are usually defined as the opposite of each other. Since there is supposedly only 1 God, there is no other God that could be compared to. Thus I would think neither male nor female pronouns would be a good descriptor of God. 'It' is probably the proper term if you're forced to use a pronoun to describe God.

I agree with Mr. B and Mr. El_Mach that the use of "He" is a historical one that is more a reflection of our society than God.

 

[Borachio]

I think from a Hebrew monotheistic tradition it makes some sense to talk about God being male, and inter-penetrating (as it were) an allegedly female physical world. Nature often being thought of as being female.

It makes some sense. But I don't like it. And I think the motives for doing so are strongly suspect.

Yet since God is the putative creator of the physical world, this can hardly be called a coherent view.

 

[Tigranes]

What difference does it make to you, Mr Tigranes, what gender God is?

One has to pick his fights. It is "Our Father who art in heaven" not our mother. YHWH is the personal God, He is not Brahman. If you are talking about cars and call them horses real discussion becomes real nonsense. You are welcome to open a Feminist perspective thread if you think something like that is an interesting and important topic. Here is a starting point, if you need one. In this thread we simply have a different topic to discuss, we cannot cover everything in one thread. Because you did it so out of blue -- I insist that this is deliberate derailing of thread by someone who is just making fun of RD. Unfortunately I cannot do anything about it, except for focusing on those who focus on the topic.

 

[Borachio]

You've gone all sniffy again, Mr Tigranes.

What's there to discuss in the thread title? You state with some assurance that all unbelievers will suffer eternal torment. Who can argue with that?

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

How out of character of you to insist on the motivation of others

 

[Tigranes]

What's there to discuss in the thread title?

Then don't.

 

[Borachio]

Well, I wasn't. But then you went on to complain I wasn't.

This is the old double-bind trick. I remember my ex-wife was especially fond of it.

 

[timtofly]

You still don't answer the question how God allows suffering in the world in the first place, though, I notice. (Let me spell it out once more: either God intentionally allows suffering and isn't benevolent, or God cannot prevent suffering and isn't omnipotent.)

To say that God didn't create suffering but suffers himself doesn't answer it at all, does it? (And yup. I've heard this one before: Christianity is the only one with this or that characteristic. Usually said by people who are self-declared Christians of an evangelical nature with a very limited knowledge of other religions, I find. Strange, isn't it? It reminds me very much of people who say "Only human beings do this. And this distinguishes us from the animals. Inevitably, it turns out down the road that some animal or other displays precisely the same behaviour in proto form.)

Why does "intentional" have to go along with "allows"? Is not allowing evil enough? No one can know if it is intentional or not without knowing God's mind. Perhaps following the events may show that he allowed it, as it is certainly observable that he did not stop it. Even in not stopping it, does not rule out that he could not stop it. We already know that God is not all loving. He said that he loves certain people and others he hates. Even this does not mean that he will treat them badly. Punishment does not come out of anger, or hatred. Punishment happens from love and justice. Even a Good God will not allow evil to destroy humanity, while at the same time allow humans to destroy each other. Then we change the subject from allow to create. What proof do we have that God created it. The whole issue was satan's theory that God was wrong in not allowing humans the freedom to choose between good and evil. God allowed the choice, but what would be the point of a choice if there were no consequences that went along with the defined choices?

That is why satan put his effort into getting Adam to make the choice, so every other human could also be able to make choices between Good and Evil. It was a choice that brought on the current human condition, but why put all the blame on God? Even today humans are free to choose a life free from evil, even if it seems easier not too. Even when people suffer from no fault of their own, they still have the capability to focus on the best in life instead of being miserable. I may get flack from those suffering from depression, but even they have laughed in their life. Now if there are any here without humor and depressed, I may have to concede my point.

I think from a Hebrew monotheistic tradition it makes some sense to talk about God being male, and inter-penetrating (as it were) an allegedly female physical world. Nature often being thought of as being female.

It makes some sense. But I don't like it. And I think the motives for doing so are strongly suspect.

Yet since God is the putative creator of the physical world, this can hardly be called a coherent view.

This does not make sense at all seeing as how the Hebrews had a firm acceptance that God created the world and did not impregnate it. Patriarchy if anything was the fact that Abraham was the patriarch of the family. Fathers were the leaders of their families. This was not because of monotheism. It was the "church" that did push patriarchy into the embodiment of the Trinity. After Constantine, patriarchy was infused in the religion, and it became the ideology behind the formation of western thought processes.

 

[Borachio]

I want to talk about the wages of sin being death.

How does this work?

Didn't the Ancients view disease as being the result of sin/immorality? And therefore if you were sick you'd plainly done something to offend God. Not an unreasonable point of view in the absence of any knowledge of infectious diseases and genetic defects and the rest. (Hence Jesus saying things like "Take up thy bed and walk, thy sins are forgiven thee.")

But it hardly seems tenable in the C21st any more. Imagine telling someone with childhood leukemia that they've been immoral. That wouldn't go down well, at all, I think.

You do occasionally hear this view voiced. But it pretty quickly sinks beneath the waves again. (And yet, and yet, there are still quite a number of psychosomatic diseases about.)

Anyway, as far as I can make it out, this idea of a "second death" is just a confabulation of the Ancient view of disease.

What do you reckon?

 

[warpus]

That seems to be a loose definition of experience then. We have done a lot of re-writing history in our imagination, so how would one even know any more what really happened and what did not?

Well, I would just refer to the experts. If a claim that something happened seems reasonable (i.e. nothing crazy like flying dogs or pigs or the moon being made of cheese), and the experts all agree that person A married person B, then why would you doubt this?

The experts in this case are historians. I defer to them, since they are experts in the field of "What the hell happened in the past?"

Now, in certain cases they can't agree whether X happened or not. In those cases, I put X in the "who knows" pile, unless it's got a flying pig, in which case it likely goes in the "probably not" pile.

It's all about the extraordinarity of the claim. If it's reasonable, I require less backing from experts to believe that it happened. Marriages and wars happen all the time. Flying dogs do not. I hope you get what I'm driving at here.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

I may be biased but not everything in the Bible reads like a feel good story. I suppose that it could just be an imagined miserable experience without any great outcome. Perhaps even fairy tales used to have terrible endings and they have also been rewritten?

Many fairy tales are rather grim (no pun) but they were downright horrible before they were rewritten.

For instance when Cinderella's stepsisters couldn't fit into the glass slipper, they cut off a toe to try to make it fit. At the end they did not live happily ever after but had to dance to their death on red-hot irons.

The moral of the story is: if you're bad, you're going to end up bad. And that is also how it was when people wrote the Bible.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

So here: God did not create Hell, Satan did. Rejecting God places you in the place with no God, which is hell. Simple?

Yeah.

Why the lake of fire?

 

[Borachio]

Something to do with volcanoes, I think.

That's how a lot of myths work: take something in the real world and extrapolate.

Lava comes from beneath the Earth, and is associated with Hell. Heaven is... well... in the sky.

Don't a lot of volcanoes smell sulphurous, as well? And dead people get buried in the ground. What could be more natural than to associate hell with burning lakes of fire?

 

[Tigranes]

Yeah.

Why the lake of fire?

I don't know. I am not even sure how critical it is to know the exact shape and look of hell. Being without Jesus, Him saying -- I don't know you, is more serious to me than structural details about second death. Interestingly enough OP states that hell will end up in the lake of fire, so if we go to theological debate one has to distinguish between second death and hell.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

I don't know. I am not even sure how critical it is to know the exact shape and look of hell.

I imagine being cast into it can be quite painful.

 

[timtofly]

I want to talk about the wages of sin being death.

How does this work?

Wasn't the Ancient view of disease as it being the result of sin/immorality? And therefore if you were sick you'd plainly done something to offend God. Not an unreasonable point of view in the absence of any knowledge of infectious diseases and genetic defects and the rest.

But it hardly seems tenable in the C21st any more. Imagine telling someone with childhood leukemia that they've been immoral. That wouldn't go down well, at all, I think.

You do occasionally hear this view voiced. But it pretty quickly sinks beneath the waves again.

Anyway, as far as I can make it out, this idea of a "second death" is just a confabulation of the Ancient view of disease.

What do you reckon?

The wages of sin works the same way as the wages of righteousness. They are what one gets when they do their own thing. I keep hearing that the wages of not washing one's hands brings disease and death. I am not sure that one is related to the other though. One has to do with God. The other has to do with one's own existence.

Well, I would just refer to the experts. If a claim that something happened seems reasonable (i.e. nothing crazy like flying dogs or pigs or the moon being made of cheese), and the experts all agree that person A married person B, then why would you doubt this?

The experts in this case are historians. I defer to them, since they are experts in the field of "What the hell happened in the past?"

Now, in certain cases they can't agree whether X happened or not. In those cases, I put X in the "who knows" pile, unless it's got a flying pig, in which case it likely goes in the "probably not" pile.

It's all about the extraordinarity of the claim. If it's reasonable, I require less backing from experts to believe that it happened. Marriages and wars happen all the time. Flying dogs do not. I hope you get what I'm driving at here.

I do understand where you are driving to. You want objective experience that can be refuted by objective means.

There is no objective means when it comes to experience that happened 4000 years ago much less 10,000 years ago. We have alleged writings. We have today's experts. Now those in the past may have been lying. That is where one exercises their trust in what one accepts as the experience of today or 4000 years ago. Mine own experiences may have been just my mind deceiving me, but it is all that I can work with, and what I have accepted does make sense and not any more extraordinary than the universe itself.

Many fairy tales are rather grim (no pun) but they were downright horrible before they were rewritten.

For instance when Cinderella's stepsisters couldn't fit into the glass slipper, they cut off a toe to try to make it fit. At the end they did not live happily ever after but had to dance to their death on red-hot irons.

The moral of the story is: if you're bad, you're going to end up bad. And that is also how it was when people wrote the Bible.

I had my suspicions. So is the Bible in it's present form a fairytale, or does it need to be re-written into fairytale form to gain the same effect? I still do not see it written as just a "feel good story". It would seem to me that if it had been written as a scientific treatise or historical video recording, it would have been vetoed by satan as God not giving humans a choice in the matter.

I am pretty sure that even if you are good, you still may not have a chance, as the Bible clearly states that the end of all mankind is death. It is only God's choice in the end. Has nothing to do with any thing we do here on earth. We do not know who is a sheep or goat. We do not know who is a wheat or tare. We do not know whose name God is going to blot out of the book of life. Every one's name is there from the beginning and only those who God blots out will be blotted out and it does not seem to matter what the sheep, goats, wheat, or tares do to change God's mind. Does that mean we stop trying to figure out what life is about? NO. Does that mean we go out and do all manner of evil? NO. We are free moral agents who chisel out our own path, and even though some humans have attempted to assure us that we can know the end of all things, the only thing that we can know is our own heart and live life the best we can.

I realize that some people come across as being sure about themselves, but that comes from experience. Humans should not judge other humans, much less on their lack of certain experiences.