Was Adam a Slave?

[kramerfan86]

An imaginary person cant be a slave.

 

[El_Machinae]

You still have not expanded on Anselm. Are you being dismissive of the onotological "proof" of god?

Um, yes. It's an old argument. It's now well understood to be some interesting wordplay, but in the end not an actual proof of anything other than the fact that people can be tricked with wordplay. So, once you recognise the wordplay, you can spot when other people play the same game.

I'm not saying it's intellectually dishonest to do so, just that it's wicked easy to see how the wordplay is not all that convincing. In the end Anselm's argument meant less than he thought it did. It's like when someone creates a new puzzle, but one that can be solved using an old heuristic. The puzzle is new, but not in a 'meta' sense.

 

[warpus]

Some people accept both as historical figures and their experiences were well documented. I assume that in 3000 years, the formation of the US will be just as ambiguous.

I doubt it, we've been documenting human history extensively over the last couple decades, especially with the rise of the internet.

 

[Farm Boy]

History gets simplified, glossed over, re-written, and lied about. Some events will read better than they lived, and the other way around.

 

[El_Machinae]

Right, but then we have to figure out if Paul Bunyan was real if we end up being convinced George Washington was real.

 

[warpus]

History gets simplified, glossed over, re-written, and lied about. Some events will read better than they lived, and the other way around.

Of course, like how students are still taught the Columbus was out to prove that the Earth was round or whatever. Crap like that will always happen, but the point is that the real facts will be recorded and are accessible, meanwhile for events 2,000 years ago we don't have nearly such extensive documentation available.

 

[Farm Boy]

Doesn't matter much. Maybe people will think George was Paul.

 

[El_Machinae]

It will matter, if people think we should be allowed to chop down neighbor's cherry trees with one mighty blow, as long as we confess about it later.

 

[Harv]

I'm pretty sure that the whole Adam & Eve story is nothing more than a dirty joke that the ancient people told each other for giggles.

Naked Adam and naked Eve in the garden, and a snake tempting Eve to pick an apple from the tree of Wisdom and eat it?
Come on! This is clearly a metaphor for Adam seducing Eve to palm his apples, suck his snake and thus losing her innocence by by becoming wise in the ways of sex!

The people then must have been rolling on the floor laughing when they heard that the old coot from the ramshackle hut at the edge of their village incorporated that story in his "holy" text!

My translation says, "fruit." It does not say "apple." Why is it when we talk about a "friut" we think of "apple?" Why not ?

Genesis 3:1-7, HCSB

Spoiler :

1 Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the wild animals that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God really say, 'You can't eat from any tree in the garden'?" 2 The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat the fruit from the trees in the garden. 3 But about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, God said, 'You must not eat it or touch it, or you will die.' " 4 "No! You will not die," the serpent said to the woman. 5 "In fact, God knows that when you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." 6 Then the woman saw that the tree was good for food and delightful to look at, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate [it]; she also gave [some] to her husband, [who was] with her, and he ate [it]. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

 

[Narz]

You get into the real fun when you get into the possibility that subjective understandings, at odds with each other, may be simultaneously objectively correct.

Sounds like some quantum physics crazyness.

 

[Farm Boy]

It should! =D

 

[timtofly]

Actually, I don't think there's anything which is objective (for which read "fact"). I'm surprised the word is ever used.

I can't think of anything that can be said to exist outside our subjective knowledge of it.

There is either nothing objective, or there could be objective things that we have no knowledge of.

I doubt it, we've been documenting human history extensively over the last couple decades, especially with the rise of the internet.

Collecting data is only a small part and as with Borachio, there could be only data left and it still would not be objective enough for some humans.

 

[onejayhawk]

Um, yes. It's an old argument. It's now well understood to be some interesting wordplay, but in the end not an actual proof of anything other than the fact that people can be tricked with wordplay. So, once you recognise the wordplay, you can spot when other people play the same game.

I'm not saying it's intellectually dishonest to do so, just that it's wicked easy to see how the wordplay is not all that convincing. In the end Anselm's argument meant less than he thought it did. It's like when someone creates a new puzzle, but one that can be solved using an old heuristic. The puzzle is new, but not in a 'meta' sense.

I had to look up the name, but I was somewhat familiar. I never thought it worth inspection. It reduces God to human terms. It is like counting the trancendental numbers.

My intent was not to present an argument. I intended to define boundaries. The equivalent of saying dollars, not euros. It is obvious to me, but not to some that you and I are not competent to question the word of a diety. To do so is unacceptable anthropomorphism. Regardless of the religion, scripture must be approached in its own terms or not at all. You plainly stated that you chose the "not at all" option. I can respect that.

J

 

[Hygro]

To do so is unacceptable anthropomorphism. Regardless of the religion, scripture must be approached in its own terms or not at all. You plainly stated that you chose the "not at all" option. I can respect that.

J

But the Hebrew scriptures give us an anthropomorphized God.

I have had arguments bog down in semantics before, but never to this extent. It seems a simple enough hypothetical, and it as merely a starting point for the discussion. I was going somewhere like what classical_hero. God's laws are objective, but how we understand and apply them is not. I could not get past the comma before being assaulted from multiple directions.

You still have not expanded on Anselm. Are you being dismissive of the onotological "proof" of god?

J

Semantics means meaning. They're important if we are to derive any further meaning from the words we choose (we do).

Let's try this a bit differently.

Did God have a say in the universe he created? Did he have any choice in what universe was created, or that it was created?

 

[Manfred Belheim]

God made the Adam (earthling) to work in His Garden, room and board, but Adam's purpose was to labor for God. Slave owners typically want their slaves smart enough to do as told but not so smart as to become a problem. Why does God get mad at Adam? He got too smart and became a problem. So God became angry and gave a speech about how Adam and Eve wont like having to work even harder because of their new found freedom.

How were Adam and Eve to be fruitful and fill the world if they're stuck in the Garden without kids? And how does the snake end up as Satan/Lucifer...the Devil...if confined to slithering the ground by God's curse?

I don't think we have to worry about it too much because none of it ever actually happened.

 

[Crezth]

An imaginary person cant be a slave.

Wrong.

 

[onejayhawk]

But the Hebrew scriptures give us an anthropomorphized God.
Why do you want to take the process significantly further? You seem to want to continue the process til god is human.

Semantics means meaning. They're important if we are to derive any further meaning from the words we choose (we do).

Let's try this a bit differently.

Did God have a say in the universe he created? Did he have any [/I]choice in what universe was created, or that it was created?

In this case it was in the definitions of objective and subjective.

I do not understand the thrust of your question. You seem to be presupposing an answer. If God does not have a say, how can you call him a creator or say he created the universe?

 

[El_Machinae]

Regardless of the religion, scripture must be approached in its own terms or not at all.

No, that's not true. Like the old scientific papers of Einstein, you can read the Scripture in order to glean insight into the nature of God, and discard the chaff as you find necessary. All of nature sings to the nature of God, to the point where the message is so clear that we have to discard parts of a book compiled centuries ago. A rabbi once mentioned in a lecture, "Scripture is part of our ongoing efforts to know God", it's merely a part of that effort.

For example, you said "God refers to Himself in the plural, we use the singular" as if it were actually important. You then quoted books that made egregious errors of fact when describing God. There's no reason to assume they had any insight regarding the proper use of terms.

Nowadays? Well, nowadays we know that any putative Creator has a long-term plan to destroy hydrogen and has forbidden humans from traveling in time to the past. This is just not something known previously. Certain eschatology believed that, if you squint hard enough, but they got a lot of the details wrong. Enough so that a 'broken clock is right twice a day' is just as reasonable of interpretation.

 

[warpus]

I do not understand the thrust of your question. You seem to be presupposing an answer. If God does not have a say, how can you call him a creator or say he created the universe?

That seems to be a strange stance to take.

Isn't a creator someone who creates, no matter how much say was involved or not?

 

[onejayhawk]

No, that's not true. Like the old scientific papers of Einstein, you can read the Scripture in order to glean insight into the nature of God, and discard the chaff as you find necessary. All of nature sings to the nature of God, to the point where the message is so clear that we have to discard parts of a book compiled centuries ago. A rabbi once mentioned in a lecture, "Scripture is part of our ongoing efforts to know God", it's merely a part of that effort.

For example, you said "God refers to Himself in the plural, we use the singular" as if it were actually important. You then quoted books that made egregious errors of fact when describing God. There's no reason to assume they had any insight regarding the proper use of terms.

Nowadays? Well, nowadays we know that any putative Creator has a long-term plan to destroy hydrogen and has forbidden humans from traveling in time to the past. This is just not something known previously. Certain eschatology believed that, if you squint hard enough, but they got a lot of the details wrong. Enough so that a 'broken clock is right twice a day' is just as reasonable of interpretation.

What books have I quoted? As a factual matter, I am interested.

Do we know the bolded? That seems a matter of belief.

You equate studying scripture with studying Einstein. If a god is not more profound than Einstein, he is not really a god. No wonder you are making no headway.

J