(August 3, 2014 at 1:27 am)Esquilax Wrote: Whoops, missed this. Kids don't belong to their parents, kids are raised by their parents. It's a very different relationship, and one that, notably, we put a stop to if the child is being mistreated. Even if your comparison of children and parents to god and man was apt, no court on the planet would allow god to remain in possession of any sentient entity if he announced his intentions to cause the amount of suffering he causes to humans daily. Neglect gets your parental rights removed.
Ok, so if a parent has no claim or rights of ownership to a child, and the are simply responsible for it's care, then by that failed observation, all I need do is be able to provide a better level of care then I could pick and choose who's kid I wanted to take. I would just need to Show the court that the level of care I could provide would far exceed the natural parents thus in compareson I could show neglect, and could take the rights to that child from the parents. 'Neglect' is a meaningless term based on what is available, or what someone believes to be available.
No. Or should I say, not where I live. Here parental rights are only ever in question if a parent is unfit, absent, dead, in prison or dangerous to the child's well-being. Even then it must be proved in a legal setting.
The same legal definition I provided can be said about pet ownership as well. This does not make your dog any less yours.
Quote:Might makes right isn't exactly a compelling moral stance to take, however.
You can't start the conversation off by saying that we owe god everything, and then end it with "well, you have to bow and scrape anyway, he's stronger than you." Somewhere along the line your moral argument has taken a complete one eighty.
might makes right, is how the whole world works. Even when the state legally comes in and takes a parent from his child, it is often times under the authority of 'might makes right.'
Might makes right, is also the fundamental force behind all social morality so long as the majority approves.
Example. It was at one time 'moral' to stone a homosexual, or give small pox infected blankets to the native Americans, or give expired food to the homeless. Now because society has changed, and the majority has deemed these acts as immoral, the whole "might" of the society we live in will be levied against those who act against what it deems to be "right." So don't give me that B/S that you do not believe might doesn't make right. Because in you're opening paragraph you are hiding behind it yourself.
Quote:If I was given this life then it's entrapment, and if I elected to live it then I'm sure I'd remember that, and I know that I, as I am now, would not accept that I have anything to prove to this kind of god of my own free will. There would have to be some element of coercion in there, for me to accept this kind of deal.
If you are not happy with the terms of the agreement, then why are you seeing them out to they expire, why not terminate the contract early?
Quote:Where I live emergent creations aren't automatically credited to the initial creator: parodies, remixes, refurbished items and so on aren't the possessions of the initial material builder, but the one who fashioned them into something new. Which is beside the point anyway, since I'm arguing that consciousness isn't something you can own. It's a special case.
your attempt to move the goal posts and broaden this discussion will not go unchecked. We are specifically speaking to the point of owning sentient beings that we have created, why would you then bring a remix into this discussion as if it had any bearing in what is being discussed?
me Wrote:you assume too much. I am not willing to blindly accept the idea that anything I create belongs no one.
Quote:You're equivocating between objects and life forms.
oh the irony, here maybe you should read what you wrote again:
you again Wrote:Where I live emergent creations aren't automatically credited to the initial creator: parodies, remixes, refurbished items and so on aren't the possessions of the initial material builder, but the one who fashioned them into something new. Which is beside the point anyway, since I'm arguing that consciousness isn't something you can own. It's a special case.
Do you see it, or do I need to point out children, dolphins, orangutans, and Ai's are all sentient, while "parodies and remixes" are not.
Quote:So you admit that within the context of "ownership" of life forms there are responsibilities that the "owner" has, and that if those responsibilities aren't met then their ownership is terminated for the sake of the owned party?
never once in question.
Quote:Because I'm pretty sure that if you own a dolphin and you starve it, and let it hurt itself, and plan to send it to hell, then that would all qualify as severe mistreatment and land you some jail time. There's a duty of care there... are you sure you don't want to rethink the comparisons you're making? They don't actually serve your case very well at all.
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If God were to starve us their would be nothing on the planet to eat, as it is just 10% of the people produce enough food to feed every man woman and child 10x's over. But rather than do that, we hang on to the majority of what we have, and even pay our farmers not to plant so as not to have too much so we can maintain a set commodity price.
I'm not sure what you mean by mistreatment unless your talking about the wars we start and have with ourselves. Which I do not then see how that is God's fault.
Quote:Communal groups are symbiotic relationships, not owner-and-chattel ones.
whether you like it or not the vast majority of the people believe they own their children, and yet they do not treat them like 17th century slaves. Maybe you should familiarize yourself with the term chattel before using it in such a singular fashion. It is a term to describe anything owned that is not land.
Because it is possible to treat chattel in a non slave like manner the word is not the same as cattle or slave.
Quote:Alright. And... why did that cost need to be paid? What's so difficult about forgiveness that it requires a blood sacrifice? And how does someone else sacrificing themselves make forgiveness of other people easier?
i do not understand why you can't seem to put the pieces together. Read the following carefully.
The shedding of blood is the physical manifestation of the spiritual cost of forgiveness. It represents what God has gone through to just forgive.
Put the idea out of your mind that you or anyone else can just forgive out of thin air. Especially on the level of all the sins past and present, of every man woman and child. Their is always a cost or sacrifice made of some kind. Or some part of that sin will remain and will fester in your soul, not completely forgiven.
Example; lets say, If a man/close relative like your father or son, kills your wife (accident/drunk driver) and you 'forgive him' you can't tell me their wouldn't be some lingering small bit of resentment, of some kind, for some time... That is Unless you killed that part of yourself off. The part that demands justice, the part that screams to see the guilty punished. Now multiply that a trillion times over for everyone who ever lived or will live and then multiple to the tenth power because of the hundreds of sins we all commit everyday.
Now take that level of forgiveness and try and communicate that to a savage people who fancy themselves advanced monkeys. Now ask yourself if you were God how could you simplify it that even the most primitive of said monkey people (or those too smart to see the connection) can understand it if someone where to take the time and walk them through it?
If you had to spiritually kill or rather, cut of apart of yourself off, that would hurt the one you love, who was too 'monkey like' to completely understand the complexity of what you have done. yet you need them to acknowledge it and change their behavior to at the very least show their understand of your sacrifice, how would you do that?
Quote:Ah, see, there's the problem. Logic is still a thing that happens, and when the book contradicts logic then it doesn't matter whether it's the only source of information or not, it can still be wrong. There's a third option here, and that's that the book has it wrong and so nobody has the answer.
if you still think the book is wrong then you can not admit to yourself how society has changed the question.
Quote:That's a weird stance to take. So god credits you with accepting wrong information, because that's all he saw fit to provide you with?
not weird, biblical christianity 101. This concept is found in the parable of the talents.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?se...ersion=ESV
A talent was a large sum of money. This money represents the gifts of understanding or talents we have been given. It clearly states not all of us has been given over to the same gifts/level of understanding. Therefore the same total is not expected from everyone. Just that we were faithful to what we have been given.
Quote:If that's the case, wouldn't the most sensible course of action be to completely eliminate any hint of christianity from the world so that future generations would have even less information to work with, and thus higher overall chances of getting into heaven? It's too late to improve the chances for ourselves that way, but we could certainly be charitable to the future, under these conditions.
heaven for the biblically based Christian is not the goal. It is a working interactive relationship with all mighty God. Heaven is just the venue. No bible, no relationship, no relationship, no point of Heaven.
Quote:And some other christian could point to another passage and use it to say that faith alone is sufficient. The bible is kind of a hodgepodge, in that respect. How can we tell?
we must take everything the bible says about a topic and place it in the proper context. What was the original intent of the passage verse how it is being used in a given church doctrine.
Quote:That's the problem you face when you open your holy book up to interpretation, especially to the extent that the bible is. Ain't my fault that spinning the words to mean something other than what they literally mean is a common pastime for christians.
that is why I closed the interpretation by showing you what Christ Himself said on the subject. Their is no room for interpretation there. Christ was speaking to this very subject, and as far as a bible believing Christian is concerned their is no greater authority.
Quote:Only if you have an extremely different definition of death than what it means to human beings. Most of us don't hop up three days later and become gods.
actually that is not true if we die in Christ. In fact we all will 'hop up.' Some to ever lasting life and those who still have a debt to pay, they will find a second death.
Quote:I'd be dead for three days for my sins too, if it meant I got to go god tier and rule the universe afterward. That's the problem I'm having: you keep mentioning this cost, but then we both know that the actual consequences of paying that cost were not only negated, but fully reversed days later, within the parameters of the story.
again what we saw on the cross was only repsenitive of the spiritual cost. And a brutal representation at that. Who can fathom what really happened? The death on the cross was simply the worst death we could phathom at the time. Which points us in the direction of the pain endured by God to forgive the sins of the world.
i Wrote:what makes you believe that death was not apart of the garden life?
Their were two special trees in the garden. The tree of knowledge of good and evil (which brought death) and the tree of life which according to genesis brought eternal life. Adam and Eve were allowed to eat from all trees in the garden (including the tree of life) they could not eat from the tree of knowledge. Eating from the tree of life is what made them Immortal. For everything in the garden to be untouched by death, the garden as a whole would also have to eat of this tree. Otherwise the garden and everything in it would be as it is now, and be subject to death.
you Wrote:Point taken.
Quote:I did provide other examples too, and there's more: like, seriously, why create the tree in the first place?
again, choice. With a sentient being their is an inherent will to be who we want to be. Which means eventually their will be sin. The tree represents the knowledge of sin. We were given this knowledge so that we may seek and find redemption when offered. The tree was the first step towards God spending eternity with a sentient being who elected to be there with Him, not just one created to be with Him. In order for their to have been choice their must first be an option/choice/sin. Their their must be redemption planed for said sin, and then their must be those who elect to be redeemed.
Quote:So when god said "die," what he really meant was "live." See, that's exactly the problem I was talking about.
not doggy, just written from His POV and not yours. Remember to always ask yourself who is telling/originally told the story?
Quote:from the past and ensure that doesn't happen with his next creation?
what makes you say that? The plan of salvation circumvents the wage of sin, it separates those who don't want to be with God from those who do, and it allows both a span of time to prove what they really want to themselves.
This is what it looks like what God wants to keep his cake and eat it too.
Quote:No, that's mystifying to me too. I don't really get why god makes such a big deal over single mistakes to begin with, it just seems like a huge overreaction.
do you not understand the term insurrection? Think 9/11 but instead of Osama/al quida think democrats, or republicans rising up and just turning on everyone else in an move to seize power. Imagine we had no choices till it got to the boil over point. Then those who did not know any better were just sent to Hell. What could be worse than spending an eternity in torment not truly knowing if you really belonged there?
Now imagine as it is. we have the opportunity to live free from the known glory of God so we can know who we really are, and know that we get to choose where we spend eternity. (Alive or dead)
Quote:But then, you'd think an all powerful, all knowing being would be able to create beings smart enough and rational enough not to rebel for the sake of their own self interest, and wouldn't be irrational enough himself to damn the entire species for a single honest mistake with no ill intent, covering humanity from both eventualities, there.
That's like you having the ability to clone your girlfriend and programming her to love you no matter what. Sure that may sound good for a few trillion years, but then what? Now take that in contrast to someone who freely wants to be with you no matter what and have proven themselves to that degree.
I don't know which you would prefer but God seems to prefer the latter and has gone through great effort to allows us to be the latter.
Quote:I'm really confused as to why you took my much simpler and straightforward metric for Eden, immediately overlaid the old, flawed rule system over it for no reason, and then decided that it's somehow my fault that god's rules cause perfectly nice scenarios to fail.
Because I believe Eden to be a jumping off point not an end game. It was intended to be the gateway for the rest of us and not God only plan. Because of that, I can not follow your metric as valid.
Quote:Seems like Eden could be pretty evil to begin with, then.
indeed, satan was allowed to roam there.
Quote:How are any of those things horrible enough to warrant hell?
I mean, you can exclude the bong and the beer right away, since I don't do drugs or drink. Take out anger, because I'm a pretty level guy even at my angriest. What is it about what's left that means I deserve the harshest punishment ever devised?
we are told even if we can keep the whole law and break the smallest part of it, it would be like we being guilty of breaking all of it.
Why? Because we are the ones who put a grading system on the law deciding for ourselves what is important and what is not. That is what we call morality. (It is the judgement or selection of the lessor of two evils/sins.) while righteousness is absolute sinless ness.
Imagine a world where the worst thing we could do to one on other was to stare harshly at each other.. No murder, no violence no rape. What would you think would happen? We would then escalate harsh stares to the top of the 'evil' rung on our morality ladder. Harsh stares would then become as heinous as rape and murder is now. Then d-bags from all over would cry out how can their be a God if harsh staring was allowed to continue... That is the ever sliding scale of man's morality. That is why "morality" is a crap standard. That is why you grading your own sin as not worthy for hell is also meaningless. You are comparing the evil you favor to someone else's evil and standing on the fact that you do not believe you are as bad as others can be.
That is like the richest man in a 3rd world village in all his 3rd world wealth may not be able to afford to eat at a mcdonalds.. Sure he may be rich to everyone in his country, but if he does not have valid currency, then it does not matter how he sees himself nor how anyone else's sees him from where he is from. Ronald does not accept goats, and chickens for mcflurries. If you or anyone wants to eat from mcdonalds they must provide the accepted currency at that location. The same is true with God. His currency is righteousness and not the goats and chickens of 'morality.'
Only Christ was truly righteous. Righteousness is the only way to Heaven/relationship with God. When we accept what Christ did for us we hand Him our 'morality' (which got nailed to the cross) and we get To Put On His Righteousness. Meaning we get to stand before God as Sinless as Christ is./we will be given exact change.
Christ in Mat 5 upped the reach of the law so far it makes it impossible to earn righteousness by following the law. Now we must seek redemption in order to find the righteousness needed for eternal life.
Does this mean we do not have to follow the law anymore? No absolutely not. Why? Because love is the key that binds us to Christ. Without love we do not know Christ and therefore can not claim His redemption. How can we love Christ if we are not willing to keep his commands?
That would be like finding the woman of your dreams and then cheat on her 10 times aday. How can you love someone[/quote] if you do things that they do not want you to do?