God’s communication and Ignorant Free Choice?
An Atheist-
Then I put it to you. If you had the plan for the salvation of mankind, but you had to explain it to Bronze Age people…what would you do? What methods would you use? I’m very interested to hear.
ATB-
I put the same challenge to you. Your example of the TV proves my point exactly. We’re talking first century, NOT TODAY. How would you deliver that message to them? TV?
It’s really quite clever to posit 20th century modes in as a useful means of communication in the 1st century. Clearly, such technology did not exist, and so the question boils down to: “Why did God just not save everyone and get it over with?” I submit that a revelation like that requires no faith at all and reduces human beings to robots. The way God used means that people are free to choose. [StealthPudge18]
All right, so let me get this straight.
Hypothetically, I am all-powerful – and I have a desire, specifically to deliver a message to the world of humans.
It’s almost a tougher question to ask – “How could an all-powerful being have a desire to make some situation come about, and yet for it not to come about?”
But for the purposes of this discussion I’ll tell you the thoughts my very finite mind can come up with in a very finite amount of time.
As I’ve already stated once,
1. Everyone could be born with the innate knowledge of what it would take to get to heaven. That’s an easiest and makes the most sense to me.
2. *I* (the all-powerful BUM) could come down and explain to each and every person what the conditions of salvation are – clear up a bunch of confusion.
3. Let’s say that Jesus had to come at the year 1 AD or whatever. I could help the development of mass communications along to the point where by the year 1 AD there was a TV in every house that could be seen the world over instantly. There’s nothing at all wrong with that – there’s no reason that TV’s couldn’t have been invented 2,000 years ago, logically speaking at least. TV’s work on very sound and stable physical properties with nothing *special* in the supernatural sense needed at all!
4. One interesting thing that I’ve been developing in a paper recently, is that when Jesus rose from the dead that he remained on earth in his 30 some-odd year old body – agelessly from then on. So that people the world over could continually verify that Jesus is alive, and that sure enough, it’s a miracle…
5. Why couldn’t Jesus have traveled the world over in a year teaching to every person on earth? The rules of the physical universe were supposedly convincingly bent around many of his public deeds, why not allow him to fly as fast as he wants to every person on earth?
6. God could have spoken from the clouds (like he did in one of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ baptism) to the whole earth at once – and you can’t say that God can’t/wouldn’t talk to a crowd of people from the clouds if you believe that Gospel account.
7. Why not have Jesus come TODAY instead of 1 BC? We do have mass communications…
8. Let’s see, getting a little bit more outside the box…I have a plan for salvation and need to explain it to Bronze Age people. Everyone is born with the same tattoo on their arm that continually plays like a video that describes in a universally understood manner the plan for salvation.
9. Maybe, after each person dies, they come up to heaven after their life where I explain to them THEN how to get into heaven – and then I send them to another planet to be reborn (keeping their memory of their previous life and my explanation of how to get to heaven from their new planet).
10. Perhaps increase the life-span of people from around 70 years to 200,000 years, so that the 1,500 year delay in getting the message from the Middle East to the Americas is not a problem at all – no one has died yet.
11. The message could be written in a language that everyone understands on the moon so that everyone could read the message for themselves whenever they wanted (so long as it was night, and a full moon) – oh yeah, no one is blind anymore, either.
All right, I think you get the point – if you actually want I have about 10 more in mind, but I think this should do for now.
One quick thing that I’ve argued with people before is the concept of “The way God used means that people are free to choose.”
Let’s say that I gave you a choice between Box A and Box B. Let’s also say that you have free will.
Behind one of the boxes is something unpleasant, behind the other, something pleasant.
If I don’t tell you which is which, you don’t have enough information to FREELY choose the pleasant box over the unpleasant box.
Let’s say that I tell you what is inside each box, but there’s a tricky way to open it – and let’s put a time limit such that if you don’t choose to open the box that’s pleasant within 5 minutes, you’re stuck with the unpleasant one.
Say the way to open the box that you wanted, was to flap like a chicken, run around in a circle, throw up on the floor and then press a specific blank space on the wall. If I didn’t tell you that that was the trick to opening the box, the likely hood of you or anyone else stumbling upon the correct answer in under 5 minutes is very rare.
If you complained about getting the unpleasant box at the end of 5 minutes, and my response was, “You could have freely chosen the other one – you were capable of completing all the tasks within the time limit” – I think that you could rightly say, “No, I didn’t have enough information to FREELY chosen the pleasant box, regardless of whether I could have physically done it.”
In light of these brief examples, how can you say that any ambiguity about the choice that God is making us choose between, gives a person MORE freedom to choose?
How can a person ever make a FREE CHOICE unless he is fully informed not only of the choice, but the consequences, and exact actions required to attain each of the consequence?
God did inform us of the choices and the consequences: “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden, but you must not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.” Sounds pretty clear to me.
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That quote was Genesis 2:16&17
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“God did inform us…”you must not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.” Sounds pretty clear to me. [Ambassador4Christ] 1. Sounds like God told Adam and Eve, not me. 2. KJV says “the day you eat it you will die” – which is wrong. 3. What about “death” implies hell? Or do you believe in that?
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But don’t you think that we should learn from others mistakes? God gave us the Ten Commandments..those are pretty clear too. Just to set the record straight, I don’t at all claim to know why God does the things that he does, I just know that he’s a loving, just, forgiving, gracious, merciful…a gentleman, it does upset and sadden him when we don’t obey him, just as any parent would be.
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The death that is being spoken of here is spiritual death. ‘Death’ implying hell….God/Christ is in heaven (he can’t be where sin is, and those that chose not to take the gift of his Son, Jesus, and be covered by his blood, are in God’s eyes unrighteous). If you kept rebelling against your parents they would eventually kick you out or you would probably leave…
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(cont’d)..but eventually you would realise how good you had it (assuming that your parents were ‘good’ paretns). Hell is a place where there is agony because the Father is not there. As children, we need boudaries and structure or well become…out-of-control brats. God provides those boundaries and rules, and best of all he provides a helper, because we have never been able to do it on our own.
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The tree of knowledge…like the tree of life in the Qabalah? You mean the tree that allows man to ascend to the level of godliness? Yeah, I can understand why there would be a punishment against that. But he never told them why eating from the tree of knowledge would be bad…they would die? I tell my daughter “don’t touch the stove because it will burn you. That will hurt.” These are
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concepts she can understand. She’s felt pain before. But to tell them about death when death doesn’t exist is silly. I mean if I told you that eating a certain bag of chips would “galamaertan” you, would you have a clue what it means? If they feared not for death, as eternal life would imply, then why would they know what death meant?
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you spend so much tiem, making up pointless arguments, that has nothign to do with what I said, I asked for how I contradicted myself and said nothing about ponies, thx
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no you misread me, i said that God wouldn’t send an innocent child to hell, and he wouldn’t, God is a loving and understanding God, i never said that people didn’t go to hell before Jesus
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your whole diary and beliefs are based off what if’s, you’re trying so hard to argue with people when you have nothing to argue for, if you spend all your time searching for more answers to what if questions you’ll never have the time to search for the answers that count, hope you find what you’re looking for
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Boy, you really were raised a catholic weren’t ya? So, your notion of free choice as per your example of the boxes, isn’t a moral choice but rather a choice of convienence and reward? All theists in your mind then are stupid, greedy and lazy. Don’t you know a theist that’s a bit altruistic, chartible, intelligent and energenic? Maybe you need some new digs.
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“your notion of free choice as per your example of the boxes, isn’t a moral choice but rather a choice of convienence and reward?” Not at all. “All theists in your mind then are stupid, greedy and lazy. Don’t you know a theist that’s a bit altruistic, chartible, intelligent and energenic? Maybe you need some new digs. [haredawg]” No. Why are you calling me stupid, greedy and lazy?
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“why not allow him to fly as fast as he wants to every person on earth?” Because Santa wouldn’t let him borrow the sleigh!
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“The death that is being spoken of here is spiritual death.” What does that mean? The Hebrew implies a physical death. Why would mean anything else?
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Oh, your talking to me. Funny, I didn’t here the phone ring on my diary. Ok, how is your box example indicitive of a moral choice? How would it pertain to, for instance, a moral stand of pacifism (assuming one wanted to say pacifism was a stance of their particular theism). I think the heaven/hell stuff is reward/punish parable for moral choice. How would I know if you were lazy or greedy?
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“Ok, how is your box example indicitive of a moral choice?” It isn’t an example of a moral choice – and I have no idea why you think I think it is. The scope of my argument and example was explicitly the necessary conditions of a “free choice”.
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Because your response to my original query was, and I qoute from a few short notes above, “Not at all.” I assume, given the wording of my question, that not at all means you disagreed, disagreement being that it was, in fact, a moral choice. I’ll not assume and you explain what not at all meant.
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“your notion of free choice as per your example of the boxes, isn’t a moral choice but rather a choice of convienence and reward?” The consequences of the choice and the parameters for evaluating it are irrelevant – not “moral” or “a choice of convenience and reward” – my argument deals with whatever kind of choice a person is presented with (moral, convenient) and whether that choice is free.
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The reasons aren’t relevent to your argument, they are very much so to the christian argument. Your analogy is one of heaven and hell. The christian construct holds that it is the choice, the exercise of will, in moral matters particular to “sin” that determine the course of the individuals afterlife. Your box is much like your unicorn; it’s only clever out of context.
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I don’t agree with the basic christian concept, but I hardly find it necessary to dedicate an entire diary to cheap denigration of it. It’s very arrogant and grandiose to do so, and you pick on kids with marginal reasoning skills for the most part. There are a great many clergy men and women with doctorate degrees. Your assumption of intellectual superiority is ill considered.
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“The christian construct holds that it is the choice, the exercise of will, in moral matters particular to “sin” that determine the course of the individuals afterlife.” AND, most Christians argue that this choice is only meaningful if it is a choice we can freely make – which I’m arguing we cannot freely make this choice. If they want to bite the bullet, that’s another matter.
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RE Will, choice and higher power; AA is the most successful treatment modality for addiction ever. Two core tenents of AA are relinquishing one’s will to “God” and making amends. Whether you believe those to be valid beliefs or not you can hardly deny how effective they are in treatment. You also can’t deny that the reason for following such beliefs is in any way obscure or arbitrary.
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Now, atheists can effectively run an AA program, but without relinquishing their flawed will and making amends (asking forgiveness). It is a stubborn and ignorent fellow, regardless of religious or areligious beliefs, who believes he can solve any problem by force of “Free Will”. It is a poor course and a circular argument. Your box, however, doesn’t address ppractical application.
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Your box analogy basically says, Silly Christians, your god puts out your eyes and asks you to see.
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“It is a stubborn and ignorent fellow, regardless of religious or areligious beliefs, who believes he can solve any problem by force of “Free Will”.” Man, you REALLY want me to be wrong about SOMETHING in every entry that I write, huh? I never said anything about solving problems by force of Free Will. Where are you getting these criticisms?
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Oh. You’re talking to me here again. And here I was looking for your response on the 7-11 bulliten board. I was making a statement in general not a specific statement about you. In fact you specifically didn’t really come to mind in the statement. I sometimes make general statements to you as you seem to think theists don’t operate in normative parameters. Statements like “It is a jaundice
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d fellow that has liver function impedement” I’m not calling you jaundiced, it’d be the same as saying if you prick a christian does he not bleed. Will is an attribute ascribed to humans, I was making one statement on how it works, you respond with me making a personal slam and then making a sweeping generalizations about how christians think free will works. Sweeping generalizations are also
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often refered to as bigoted or prejudicial statements, which is something I generally find in your entries (I’m not deneying that I find something distasteful in many of your entrys, just that the statement you refered to was indicative of fault finding). I feel a little weird leaving notes here, you likely expect me to only leave them for you on my diary, no?
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