Defying the Deity
POSTED BY: AnthonyT
UPDATED: Tuesday, December 27, 2011 18:15
VIEWED: 9122
PAGE 4 of 11
Quote:It the only 'way' I know of that has both a sense of humour, AND the requirement to question its own system.
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
I've been meaning to check out Buddhism at some point.
I like that.
The laughing Chrisisall
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Someone sent me this which I feel the need to share.
That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.
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Quote:These passages depict God as all seeing. He can see everything happening in the present. He knows me well enough to be able to predict what I might say in the future. (So does my husband.) I think he knows enough that he can calculate a probability chart of likely choices.
Originally posted by m52nickerson:
That being said, God in the bible is described as all knowing...
Psalm 139:2-6
2You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from afar.
3You search out my path and my lying down
and are acquainted with all my ways.
4Even before a word is on my tongue,
behold, O LORD, you know it altogether.
5You hem me in, behind and before,
and lay your hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
it is high; I cannot attain it.
Isaiah 40:13-14
13 Who can fathom the Spirit of the LORD,
or instruct the LORD as his counselor?
14 Whom did the LORD consult to enlighten him,
and who taught him the right way?
Who was it that taught him knowledge,
or showed him the path of understanding?
But if he knows what we will choose, that means the choice was already made. Doesn't sound free to me.
But then, I've never really believed in predestination or God's plan or anything like that.
ETA: Besides, Psalms is poetry. There is a limit to just how literally one can read it.
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"Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want - and their kids pay for it." - Richard Lamm
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I believe that God knows what I'm going to do, but He doesn't choose what I'm going to do. If He was choosing then I would not end up in the same scrapes I do end up in in real life, its called being human. Its more like a video you've seen before, you know what will happen even though you didn't choose for things to go that way. Not a perfect analogy but best I can come up with now.
"A completely coherant River means writers don't deliver" KatTaya
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Quote:The key question here is, can you change this video that God has seen before?
Originally posted by RionaEire:
Its more like a video you've seen before, you know what will happen even though you didn't choose for things to go that way.
Can you make a different choice he has already seen to arrive at an alternate ending?
If you can't, then it feels like predestination and absence of free will to me. We would just be puppets whose strings are pulled by an already written script.
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"Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want - and their kids pay for it." - Richard Lamm
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DT, that is funny re Morgan Freeman.
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"Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want - and their kids pay for it." - Richard Lamm
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"If you can't, then it feels like predestination and absence of free will to me. We would just be puppets whose strings are pulled by an already written script."
Hello,
I'm not sure why you feel this way. When you remember an event from your childhood, does remembering it suddenly strip your young self of free will?
--Anthony
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"In every war, the state enacts a tax of freedom upon the citizenry. The unspoken promise is that the tax shall be revoked at war's end. Endless war holds no such promise. Hence, Eternal War is Eternal Slavery." --Admiral Robert J. Henner
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Quote:It does not, only because I assume this: at the time, I could have chosen something else. And then I'd be remembering something different today.
Originally posted by AnthonyT:
I'm not sure why you feel this way. When you remember an event from your childhood, does remembering it suddenly strip your young self of free will?
Are you saying we are simply living out God's memories? All this has already happened, and that is why God knows what we'll do next? Cause we've already made our choices? And all the influences we consider in our choices are simply so we can stick to the old choices we've already made?
I guess I am confused. The past has already been written by us, so that is how we know what happened. The future is not yet written by us, so nobody knows what will happen. I don't understand how someone can know the future with any certainty unless it has already happened. A probable future, yes. A certain future, no.
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"Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want - and their kids pay for it." - Richard Lamm
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Hello,
I imagine our perception of time like this:
We are writing the story of our lives. We know each word that we are writing as we write it. We can remember the words we have already written. We can plan to write some words in the future, but we can't know for sure that we will write those words until we have written them. We are unable to change the words we have already written, but when we wrote them, we could have chosen any words we wished to choose. At the end of our lives, the story will be as we have written it.
I imagine God to be like my wife. He can impatiently skip ahead to the last page of the story to see how it ends. Doing this doesn't change any of the author's choices, which were made by the author. But it lets him know how the story goes.
The 'magic power of God', as I see it, is that he can skip ahead to the end of the story even though we are still writing it. Again, he isn't changing the story. We still choose all the words. But he isn't confined to the page we are working on. He can skip ahead to any part he likes.
Sometimes I think of some Eastern religions, which posit that we are all God, we are all the Universe, and the Universe is trying to understand itself.
And then I think of God reading my story. And I think- if we weren't here to write this story, God wouldn't have anything to read.
I like to believe that God is an optimistic reader, and is rooting for all the characters to have a happy ending. I also like to think that when we finish writing our story, he will give us an advance so that we can begin working on a sequel.
--Anthony
_______________________________________________
"In every war, the state enacts a tax of freedom upon the citizenry. The unspoken promise is that the tax shall be revoked at war's end. Endless war holds no such promise. Hence, Eternal War is Eternal Slavery." --Admiral Robert J. Henner
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Quote:
The future is not yet written by us, so nobody knows what will happen. I don't understand how someone can know the future with any certainty unless it has already happened. A probable future, yes. A certain future, no.
Theoretically, that would be an aspect of omniscience.
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