RE: Four questions for Christians
July 11, 2013 at 2:51 pm
(This post was last modified: July 11, 2013 at 3:01 pm by Consilius.)
(July 10, 2013 at 5:14 pm)Ryantology Wrote:Evil is the absence of good. Where God isn't, there is evil. Evil is not an entity. And it is no more his fault that one fell to temptation than it is the government's fault I stole an unlocked car. Or a teacher's fault that I failed an exam. Because all temptation is is a test of character. If you failed it, it means you need to improve, something some students choose to do and others don't.(July 10, 2013 at 4:19 am)Consilius Wrote: If God is good, then good should go to God. Chrisitans perform good acts and claim that God helped them. God draws people closer to himself by prompting good from them. Evil is willful deviation from good, and from God. God does not prompt sin out of anybody, because that is contrary to him. Why would God make people do evil if he is good?
I really do not understand the justification for assuming that God is good. Just because the Bible says so? That is not good enough for me. Many of God's actions strike me as evil, as no amount of power, knowledge, or alleged 'righteousness' justifies killing people as he is said to have done.
Whether or not God is good, he still made it so that evil is possible. As evil can only happen by design, God is still responsible for it. One can also blame God for creating the conditions which most frequently inspire acts of evil, such as giving us a planet with limited resources.
Quote:The rules of logic are all that there is. The illogical is not a realm of limitless possibilities, because the illogical does not exist. What exists is all that there is. We can dream of the illogical, but the illogical cannot be done because it is not real.
To say that there are rules that cannot be circumvented would imply there is a higher authority than God, which is illogical in this case and therefore nonexistent. Omnipotence means that one can do anything, or all there is TO do. If there is something that cannot be done because it does not exist, then it does not constitute an uncrossable limit, because that would mean there would have to be something on the other side.
If God is subject to any limits or must follow any rules, it is illogical to to state that God is the ultimate authority. Why not worship the concept of logic if even God has to answer to it? Logic has no higher set of rules to answer to.
All that there IS is logic. IT is the ultimate authority. God is invisible, eternal, logic.
(July 11, 2013 at 2:21 am)Esquilax Wrote:Creation is when something that does not exist is brought into existence. It is the channel by which the nonexistent begins to exist. God has the authority to truly make logical things that don't exist real. The illogical can never be made to exist, but the logical can be made to exist.(July 10, 2013 at 4:19 am)Consilius Wrote: The rules of logic are all that there is. The illogical is not a realm of limitless possibilities, because the illogical does not exist. What exists is all that there is. We can dream of the illogical, but the illogical cannot be done because it is not real.
You know what else wasn't real, at one point? The universe, according to creation accounts. Saying that things that aren't real can't be done precludes any act of creation because there was a point in the beginning where none of it existed.
Quote:To say that there are rules that cannot be circumvented would imply there is a higher authority than God, which is illogical in this case and therefore nonexistent. Omnipotence means that one can do anything, or all there is TO do. If there is something that cannot be done because it does not exist, then it does not constitute an uncrossable limit, because that would mean there would have to be something on the other side.
So, when god creates a person out of dirt, and the dirt out of nothing, he wasn't creating things that don't exist?
Simply because something is not real does not mean that it cannot logically be made to be real. Both the illogical and the logical didn't exist at one point. The logical came to exist from being a CONCEPT, but the illogical never will exist except as a concept.