(November 30, 2013 at 1:21 pm)Drich Wrote: I am giving you the benfit of the doubt here, but just incase you do believe this, allow me to ask, does everyone in our soceity 'play' by the same rules as everyone else? Or are there people in authority that are not governed by the same laws as the rest of us?Sorry to jump in so late, and doubly-sorry if this was already covered. But it seems as if you are saying that god is above the standards he determines for us and is therefore not restricted by them in the same way that there are people who maintain a personal double-standard of behavior. This brings two thoughts to mind:
1- This implies that god has a double-standard. I am assuming that if I contend that this makes god a hypocrite, you would point out that god is not a lowly human and therefore is automatically above our standards. But...
2- ...the standards being discussed were his standards, not ours. Is god also not held to the standards that he himself prescribes for humans? I think this opens up a can of worms. Putting god on a level where behavior is irrelevant means that he cannot possibly serve as an example for us. When Jesus tells a crowd that they "must be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect," what does that mean?
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
