Help me not fear heaven/hell

[Belacqua]

Wrong. Words do not have meanings, they have usages. There is a difference.

Ha! You'll fight about anything, won't you?

meaning (plural) meanings



[*](semantics) The object or concept that a word or phrase denotes, or that which a sentence says.

[Abaddon_ire]

God can’t violate his nature.

If so, god is not omnipotent. He/she/it/housecat has limitations. What other limitations do you imagine your god has?

Spoken to Moses in the 5 epic words in which He described himself: Moses asked who should I say has sent me?  God answered, “Moses: I AM WHO I AM”.

Your god provided a meaningless answer which theists have used to shoehorn in their prefered answer.

In other words, God is defined by his nature. God can’t do sin, accept sin, overlook sin.

Like you just did right there. You took the gibberish phrase and simply claimed to magically know what was meant on the basis of fuck all squared. Not to mention that your interpretation flies in the face of the canonically accepted interpretation. Not to mention that your god claims to be the source of evil in the very book you cite.

The sin nature is universal in humanity.  All of us have a sinful nature affects every part of us. This is the doctrine of total depravity, and it is biblical.

We do? Got any evidence for that claim? Of course not.

The remedy is to partake in the divine nature offered to everyone.

How come I can do perfectly well without it? How come I am not going out and raping and stealing and murdering willy nilly?

This new nature coexists with the old nature until physical death when the old nature becomes totally non-existent for those who accept the remedy*, those who don't will continue to have their one and only sinful nature eternally which is the referred to as the second death. 

Sorry, silly claims from your magic book do not cut the evidential mustard.

By partaking in the divine nature, one can have free will without the possibility of sin; the new creation will be sin-free.

Baloney. When you are dead, you are dead. There is not and has never been any evidence for any form of afterlife

*Everyone or anyone who calls upon the name of the Lord by embracing the life, death, and resurrection of Christ Jesus with confident trust and firm persuasion will receive salvation (new nature, partake in the divine nature).

Sure, divine blackmail and extortion, why not. Bribery even. Do you really think these are admirable traits in a deity?

[tackattack]

Wrong. Words do not have meanings, they have usages. There is a difference.

I guess you will argue over anything. Words to have meaning and they have usages. Those 2 things are very different and one "usually" depends on the other. To spell it out for you, the usage you had was with an incorrectly defined word. But I digress, so on to your points above.

-You don't need God to have morality. You can be subjectively or socially moral without any God. Your definition of perfectly well is what matters here.
-You call salvation blackmail, bribery and extortion. Your definition of salvation is relevant here.
-If you don't have any evidence for something existing the default position would be that it's unlikely, not impossible. You and I don't know what's on the other side. Evidence is the definition in question there.
- God is omnipotent. He/she/it/housecat has logical limitations. Thiessen defines omnipotent as: “God is all-powerful and able to do whatever he wills. Since his will is limited by his nature, God can do everything that is in harmony with his perfections.” See definitions matter.

[The Grand Nudger]

You don't need god to have -any- kind of morality.  You've told us that god is, in fact, capable of doing things against his own will and opposite to his nature. Bribery and extortion often do take the form of an offer of salvation. That;s probably the best way to get to a person. Scoop them up and out of a jam. The worse the jam, the less likely they are to make a rational decision and the less likely they are to balk at the horrid specifics of the deal. Bonus points if you manufacture the jam yourself.

[tackattack]

Please cite the post and line where I indicated God is capable of doing things against His own will. I'd like to correct any inconsistencies in my position or miscommunications.

[The Grand Nudger]

The nature of god is good and everything else is evil.  Sin is acting against gods will.  God can sin.

---

-and while you're trying to figure out how to stuff that square peg back down the godhole...let's take some time to address the history of this notion of gods "logical limitations".

It's a rehabilitation.  It's not at all what the people who came up with the story believed.  One of my favorite bits in either magic book goes like so.

“Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook

---

    or tie down its tongue with a rope?
2 Can you put a cord through its nose
    or pierce its jaw with a hook?
3 Will it keep begging you for mercy?
    Will it speak to you with gentle words?
4 Will it make an agreement with you
    for you to take it as your slave for life?
5 Can you make a pet of it like a bird
    or put it on a leash for the young women in your house?
6 Will traders barter for it?
    Will they divide it up among the merchants?
7 Can you fill its hide with harpoons
    or its head with fishing spears?
8 If you lay a hand on it,
    you will remember the struggle and never do it again!
9 Any hope of subduing it is false;
    the mere sight of it is overpowering.
10 No one is fierce enough to rouse it.
    Who then is able to stand against me?
11 Who has a claim against me that I must pay?
    Everything under heaven belongs to me.

12 “I will not fail to speak of Leviathan’s limbs,
    its strength and its graceful form.
13 Who can strip off its outer coat?
    Who can penetrate its double coat of armor[b]?
14 Who dares open the doors of its mouth,
    ringed about with fearsome teeth?
15 Its back has[c] rows of shields
    tightly sealed together;
16 each is so close to the next
    that no air can pass between.
17 They are joined fast to one another;
    they cling together and cannot be parted.
18 Its snorting throws out flashes of light;
    its eyes are like the rays of dawn.
19 Flames stream from its mouth;
    sparks of fire shoot out.
20 Smoke pours from its nostrils
    as from a boiling pot over burning reeds.
21 Its breath sets coals ablaze,
    and flames dart from its mouth.
22 Strength resides in its neck;
    dismay goes before it.
23 The folds of its flesh are tightly joined;
    they are firm and immovable.
24 Its chest is hard as rock,
    hard as a lower millstone.
25 When it rises up, the mighty are terrified;
    they retreat before its thrashing.
26 The sword that reaches it has no effect,
    nor does the spear or the dart or the javelin.
27 Iron it treats like straw
    and bronze like rotten wood.
28 Arrows do not make it flee;
    slingstones are like chaff to it.
29 A club seems to it but a piece of straw;
    it laughs at the rattling of the lance.
30 Its undersides are jagged potsherds,
    leaving a trail in the mud like a threshing sledge.
31 It makes the depths churn like a boiling caldron
    and stirs up the sea like a pot of ointment.
32 It leaves a glistening wake behind it;
    one would think the deep had white hair.
33 Nothing on earth is its equal—
    a creature without fear.
34 It looks down on all that are haughty;
    it is king over all that are proud.”

---

To them, god could do anything. There is no limit. God can do impossible things to the impossible creatures it made. How can we hope to overcome a god if we can't even fight back a dragon?

Call me crazy, but if an entity like that is going to throw someone into the pit there really isn't much that we lowly human worms can do about it. Stop worrying and learn to love the bomb.

[tackattack]

That doesn't follow Gae. if the nature of God = good and sin is acting against God's will; God can't act against His own (ie. commit a sin) will any more than you can. It takes will to do something. If you're referring to the other conversation about Jesus and the God Head. Jesus has the ability to go against God's will because of His human nature. I'm not stating anything that's not implicit in acting within our universe. God has the power to do whatever he wills.

[The Grand Nudger]

Don't tell me it doesn't follow, tack, it's your own business.  

You told me that god could sin, and implored any christian that would be surprised by this to take it up with the authors. Well, you're the author. If all god has to do is create a human avatar for all his sinning needs, then it's not actually beyond his abilities to do so. Patently incogent by your own definitions? Yeah, ofc, but them's the breaks. Intentionally confusing ideology cobbled together by committees of people and cultures with their own idioms and their own purposes. If this were the only illogical thing you believed that god could do it breaks this whole logical limit crap all by it's onesies...but it isn't. You, and abrahamics throughout all of time... have thought, as you put it, that god could do whatever he willed to do.

Logical impossibility is an afterthought. God defines those borders as he wills them, as well. God does what it wants, how it wants, when it wants. No deal or state of affairs could be enforced between man and this entity. The christian religion was founded by the notion that god had abandoned a pact and made some new one. Tomorrow, god could abandon yours. Nothing you can do about it, may as well try to beat back leviathan.

I get that you trust that the other will hold up it's end..it would only be shittier if you didn't considering the price paid. That's good, as far as it goes, that's all you can do. Hope that you don't end up like any of gods other abandoned hopefuls, or the people he flat out tells you he doesn't know regardless of all their testifying and miracle working in his name. Here's what I wonder, though. Does that deal hinge on believing contradictory things, or is that elective?

[tackattack]

You're intentionally misrepresenting me as I was fairly clear here and there. I told you Jesus could sin. I don't feel like playing semantic/semiotic games today Gae. God can't create what we would call a square circle because we would always define it by it's shape, not due to a lack of His creative power. God limits himself, for instance, He can't lie. Not because Lies don't exist, but because it's not in His nature.

[The Grand Nudger]

I like that I get to limit the omnipotent god with my definitions.  

No one's misrepresenting you, Tack, lol.  You told us that god couldn't do something, and told us how god could do it. You tell us that a god can't lie, but magic book says otherwise. You tell us that god can't do this or that because it isn't in his nature..invariably those things will crop up in magic book and you already have an explanation for how god can do things "not in his nature", anyway.

This is silly.