Why does Theology have to be so complicated?

Faith & Science Conversation
261

Thank you for confirming what I wrote: “All Creation Groans Under Sin” is not in the text. What’s in the text is “the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth” and “the creation was subjected to frustration”.

If you’re going to learn from the scriptures, you have to read carefully.

But it does, which you would know if you would read carefully.

So? A heretical phrase can be “a reference to” something in the scriptures, which tells us that just because a phrase is a reference to something in the scriptures doesn’t give it any value.

I made up nothing; I just pointed out that what you wrote is not what the text says.

In other words, you don’t do the historical-grammatical method because you ignore both history and grammar.
Besides which, your statement is a lie: you use an English translation, which is only possible because of “external sources” – so you’re just letting other people do your homework for you and pretend you don’t need it.

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262

Omg St Rpymond are you.really.going to maintain that view…you are weong, you have been clearly shown to be wrong, and yrt you insist thst your own interpretation, which is not supported by the evidence is right?

You are trying to force the claim that sin has not negatively impacted creation…you are 100% wrong there

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I didn’t give any interpretation, I pointed out what’s in the text, and the fact that your interpretation is not there.

No, that’s your imagination at work. You see everything in antagonistic terms instead of just reading what it written. Stop getting defensive and attacking people; instead read what is actually said.

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264

I get so sad reading how people think God is either incompetent or cruel.

Either

He did not foresee that sin would corrupt His perfect creation (incompetence)

or

He made the Universe in such a way that Humanity would need Him whether they wanted to or not. And if they didn’t want to they would be punished for eternity. (dominating cruelty)

Those are the only alternatives for the dogmatic view that sin has corrupted both humanity and the Universe.

The Garden story shows God to be incompetent. If he did not want Adam to eat from a specific tree, He either does not make that tree, or He makes it completely inaccessible. And when Adam does eat? God cannot see Him or find Him!

If, all along, God knew and planned for Adam to eat from the tree, one way or the other, why would He “test” Adam by claiming it was dangerous or just forbidden?
He must know that Adam would fail. He made him! He must also know the effect of sin. How could He not know the effect of something within His creation?. He created the possibility for sin. If he didn’t allow for it He is incompetent. If He needed to provide an antidote He is controlling, manipulative and cruel. Especially if that antidote comes with some sort of allegiance or coercion attached to it.

Like the Trinity, the doctrine of free will does not appear in Scripture. If anything it points towards the opposite. Many people have decided that according to Scripture there is no such thing as chance or freedom and that God is controlling everything. Some have even taken this as to mean that God decides in advance who will live and who will die. If there is no free will God is manipulative and cruel and life is meaningless.

On the other hand if life is some sort of trial or right of passage? God is still manipulative and cruel. Life may have a meaning but it is very narrow and difficult. (Ecclesiastes?)

Sin cannot do what people here are claiming. If only God can defeat it then either God is incompetent and produced a life that is unworkable. Or God is cruel and manipulative, forcing people to accept HIs “gift” or else!

However you look at it. For sin to be ruling or controlling or corrupting everything it looks bad on God.

Why would I worship such a God? Why would anyone?

Richard

265

False dichotomy – I can think of several other possibilities.

That’s a really disgusting view of God, portraying Him as having less understanding than anyone in a college or university education major! It treats God as not wanting creatures that could grow in maturity.

I can only suppose you’ve never dealt with children. A parent, finding something a child has done wrong, may call out, “Where are you?” even while knowing the answer. It’s an invitation to step up and come clean.

You portray God as evil. Is a parent who has a burn kit in a drawer just in case a child doesn’t obey the instruction to not touch the hot stove “controlling, manipulative and cruel”? No! It would be the parent who neglected to provide an “antidote” who is manipulative and cruel. A God who allowed for the possibility of sin would be evil to not have a remedy.

That’s like calling a coach manipulative and cruel for insisting that team members attend practice if they want to be on the team.

And that’s like saying that if the best designer in the world is the only one that an repair his invention then that designer is incompetent. What it actually indicates is that the designer is brilliant beyond all others.

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266

Then why didn’t you give them?

I agree. But that is the logical assessment of that story. I didn’t write it. And I do not accept it. All I am saying is that is the way God comes accross in that story.

That has nothing to do with it. We are talking about God not a human parent. God is supposed to see all, and know all. , but it would appear not. A parent has automatic authority, the child is not only expected to obey but not to question. Is that how you see God? Is that God’s automatic relationship with all of humanity? Or does He let us decide whether to accept Him or not?

Again not. That is the way God is portrayed if yo insist on taking it at face value.

Again, not .

We are not talking of a coach, or any human comparison. we are talking about God.
A coach is bending you to their will like a Sergeant Major without the military discipline. Once you submit to them they are your master. Is that how you see God?

NO.

Why can you not understand what you believe?

It is not my beliefs. It is the way the story is told. It is what the story says. You can read and understand?

This is God. The Almighty. The creator, not a watchmaker, or a football coach, or a human designer. Stop trying to justify your childish acceptance of the Garden story.

The story portrays God as I said. That is what you believe, if you take it as real

If you claim not to believe it than don’t keep quoting it as true history!

.Richard

267

Is God a coach or trainer?

If you go to a coach or trainer, who is setting the goals. You or the trainer?

The coach or personal trainer works for you so that you can achieve your goals.

A football coach is working for the team, to achieve their goals He may have his own agenda or wishes. He may even want the glory of training a winning team, but ultimately he can only do what the team or players allow him to.

If God is your coach He is trying to achieve your goals not His. Go does not set the standard or the bar.beyond basic decency and harmony… There is a difference between demanding that yo play fair, and honestly and dictating exactly where you will be at any ne time. The football coach cannot predict how the game will play. If you are told to stay on the right all the time and the ball never goes that way, what good will you do? Player have to still use their intelligence and skill during the game. They have to use the skill given and trained into them to achieve the win. The coach cannot play the game for them.

The God of the Garden treats Adam and Eve as Pets to be controlled by Him. They have the freedom of a pet. But it is a known fact that once an animal has been domesticated they are unable to live in the wild.

Obviously God is not in control of this world in the manner of the Garden. but is that because He allows it or we took it? Do you thik that if God wanted to He could take over the worrld? That is the second coming, not the world we have now. As it is God has given us the freedom to choose out own path rather than blindly follwo the “best one” (His))

The standards of Christianity are man made. Paul beat his body into submission but that was his choice. It would appear that God prefers us to decide how much or how little we want to beat out own bodies. If that is your wish , fine, but do not blame it on God or demand it for anyone else.

I have no wish to be like Paul. Paul hated his own life. He felt compelled to behave in a certain manner and got annoyed with himself when his own body would not submit. And he blamed God for his shortcomings!

The puritan movement was short lived. Monks and Nuns are looked on as exceptional (whether that is complimentary or not is debtable) What I see here is people trying to rule the worl. Maybe they think it is on behalf of God?? But God does not seem to be enforcing what they wish to enforce. And instead of judging and condemning God sent His only son.

OK that last bit is a mater of faith.

But, some Christans seem too be claiming a sandard of life that it would appear God does not require. And they claim that they must be right because?

Scripture says so.

Oh dear, no tea for me tonight then.

Richard

268

Usually? The coach, because the team member doesn’t know enough to pick any goals beyond being on the team and aiming to win.

Only in your limited imagination and small idea of God.
Oh – and your disrespect for the inspired scriptures.

No, you think you’re better than an inspired Apostle.

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269

That is your understanding of that statement. it is not mine.

And that is the crux of this conversation.

Richatd

Edit.

If you wish to emulate Paul’s goals anf standards, well, good luck with that.

I set my standards at a place I think I can achieve.

It would appear that God is happy enough Otherwise He would not forgive me when I fail

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Neither. God is a parent.

For good parenting it depends greatly on the child. Some need goals given to them and others need your support for the goals they decide on themselves.

This reminds me of the film “Arrival” where they find out the Chinese have established communication with the aliens based on the game of mahjong. The problem of communicating within the structure of a game like that is that everything is understood in terms of conflict. “If all you have is a hammer, then everything is a nail.” summarizes the general.

He can do whatever he wants. But to be the most effective (both for a goal and for the players), he has to understand the players, their life circumstances, and how they think.

The God of the Garden treats Adam and Eve as children. We give our children commandments like “don’t play in the street or you will die,” in order to transition them to being responsible for their own lives.

LOL LOL LOL

Domestication is not some vague abstraction. It is actually measurable. And one of the things we learn from this is that the animal we domesticated first is ourselves (talking like this is some kind of victimization is therefore absurd). It is a basic necessity for community and civilization. And yes, once we adapt to living as part of the community, we lose many of the adaptations of the lone survivor. But it is foolishness to think this is a bad thing. To be sure, if civilization collapses we will have to adapt again to those new circumstance and many will die. But it is not good to live for some possible future. That is too likely to become a self-fulfilled prophecy (and our failure to fully adapt to living in the community will likely be the biggest reason for the downfall of civilization).

God does not seek control the way many of the religious seek to use their religion.

Obviously so and thus obviously this is not what God wants.

Or that is what the those control obsessed religious want us to believe.

Christianity is a creation of God and man. Thus it behooves us to discern what comes from God and what comes from man.

I see no evidence of this. Paul went to war against God and was defeated to become God’s captured slave. He embraced this because he understood his old life was death and only in the new one would he find real life.

Woah!!! While I see elements of religion design for the purpose of power and control and thus likely having an origin in man. I most certainly do not see all members of groups like the Puritans, monks, and nuns trying to take over the world. Some of them certainly went overboard and effectively do exactly that… like… Oliver Cromwell, and perhaps those from the Dominican order who became inquisitors. It is much more to do with fallen human nature than the motivation for these movements.

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271

If you are going to jump in, it would help if you looked st what I was answering. I did not claim god was a trainer or coach , in fact i was arging against that notion.

On the other hand, to compare God to a human parent can cause equal problems.

For a start you are still claiming some sort of reality to the Garden story.

And second, there are dynamics within a family that do not compare to Go’s relationship with humanity.

A parent is considered responsible for their children, at least up to adulthood. A parent guides and instructs within their own morality and code. There is a huge diversity of parenting styles including the use or not of physical punishment and / or privileges…

Even if God did treat the first humans as direct children, He does not now.

Comparing Adam to a rebellious child is interesting theology, but it makes little sense for God to “disown” humanity at the first transgression… The parable of the prodigal son would seem to deny it. The prodigal soon left on his own volition he was not thrown out by his father.

All theology would point towards God drawing in, not pushing away.

Richard

272

It’s a simple rule of thumb that whenever the phrase “it is a known fact that” appears in such posts you can be sure that whatever follows is going to be 100% false.

This is no exception.

Examples of once domesticated animals that are thriving in the wild include:

Horses. Domesticated horses introduced to the US from Spain that are now feral.

Chickens. This is just one of the dozens of examples of escaped chickens that have gone feral in the Americas. Like the horses above, these were transported to the Americas as domesticated animals.

Dogs. Pets abandoned in the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear incident evacuation have bred for nearly 40 years.

More dogs. Also originally abandoned pet dogs (this time because of population housing policies), feral dogs have sufficient numbers in Romania to be classed as pests.

Rabbits. Domesticated rabbits originally introduced to Australia by European setters in 1788 now number in the millions. Feral rabbits are also a problem in New Zealand, as are…

Ferrets. Crossbred domestic ferrets/polecats introduced to NZ to combat the growing feral rabbit infestation have become a problem in their own right.

Camels. Also in Australia, domesticated camels released as a result of the growth of the motor industry are thriving.

Cats. Feral domestic cats in New Zealand have increased in population to more than a million, and have driven several native species to extinction.

Pigs. Escaped/released domestic pigs, originally introduced to the Americas by European settlers, have become feral across Canada and the northern USA, again with populations in the millions.

Cows. Populations of domestic cattle have been left to go wild on many remote islands, including the Aleutians in Alaska.

The actual fact is that almost every domesticated animal species, including those that were domesticated the earliest, is able to live in the wild. The most notable exception appears to be sheep, and even they have (semi-)feral flocks on islands near Scotland and New Zealand.

So @RichardG is wrong. The only possible point of interest (apart from learning about the species, size and location of feral animal populations) is which domesticated animals he might have been thinking about when he said “they are unable to live in the wild”. Hamsters? Canaries? Pekingese and Chihuahua dogs? Pampered Persian pusses? Goldfish? SIlkworms?

Answers on a postcard please.

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273

that appears to be you one aim in life.

Sad really

Richard

274

Yeah, because there’s a lot more going on in the story than that model covers – and with the entire story, it does make sense.

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I see no legitimate reason not to. To be sure, I see no reason to accept interpretations of the text contrary to the scientific evidence. But once that sort of understanding is dispense with, there is nothing contrary to evidence in the existence of two people long ago whom God had a relationship with. Therefore, the only reason I can see why people would harp on such a thing because they don’t want to take the story seriously – and thus refuse to accept what the story is teaching.

The story explains why this might be true to the small degree it may be the case. And not only are we certainly not “direct” children now, but we were never children in a biological sense. Adam and Eve were children of God via an inheritance of the mind they had from God, but they added another inheritance in the misuse of those gifts to go along with it.

It has never interested me. That looks to me like a concoction of those using religion for the purpose of power over other people. I see NOTHING rebellious in that story at all. Not one tiny shred of rebellion in any of it. What I see the beginning of the very bad habit of blaming everyone and everything but oneself for ones own errors and thus refusing to learn from them. It is a habit which is characteristic of the people in prison and is quite central to what is wrong with the world.

There is only one thing which can break a parent-child relationship and that is if the relationship becomes something which does more harm than good. And that is exactly what happened when Adam and Eve transformed God from their greatest help and teacher into the perfect scapegoat on which to blame everything wrong in their life – something which people have been doing ever since.

That is the most blindly black and white nonsense I have ever heard. It is like saying two people who love each other never say anything hurtful or spend any time apart. It is the product of the most naïve unrealistic fantasy. How can one be so unrealistic unless one doesn’t believe God is a real existing being at all, but frankly just an ideological prop.

No.

In a real relationship between real people, the reality is far more complicated. Things can go wrong even when you don’t do anything wrong. Misunderstandings happen because that is part of what a real relationship is by nature. Love requires a struggle against such misunderstandings just as life requires a struggle against death and learning requires a struggle against mistakes and failure.

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I have tried three times to formulate a response and failed. I guess this just proves my OP.

There is a fundamental difference of view between us that I cannot get past or argue.

Richard

PS I am not condemning it or dismissing it. I see no harm in it, but do not agree with the perspective.

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All I see in your OP is a bunch of questions… which I addressed in previous posts. What exactly do you think has been proved?

That seems a pretty reasonable likelihood to me. We have a lot of conclusions in common, but the reasons we come to the same conclusions can be very different and those different reasons can be leading us in very different directions.

It seemed like you were condemning any idea that the Eden story could be taken as real events. I suspect the reasons for this are common conclusions people come to from this story which I wouldn’t agree with anyway. That points to more agreements between us and while you can perhaps now see that it is possible to take the story as real events without these conclusions to which you are opposed, there remains the very different directions in which we are going in life/thought and that can be a difficult thing to change. We are hardly likely to agree with things which are contrary to the reasons for why we are Christian in the first place, for example.

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I guess that I could not conceive a valid usage.taking it as real.

The point here is that I am not dogmatic about details of faith. I am not here to convert or indoctrinate. I can see both your logic and your faith, that is enough.
I am happy to discuss without the need for total agreement…
I will admit that I find some of your assertions uncomfortable but ces la vie.

Richard

279

Richard, this is an unfortunate claim…obviously i disagree with it as you would expect.

I could go into some elongated theological statement of faith, however, at the end of the day, i can see that for someone like yourself, none of that is important…so i will just add this response…

(its one I’ve recently posted so its a bit of a rehash but i feel its important)

What about “kaput”?

Whether or not you agree, it is undeniable that in the very near future, for you, for me, for St Roymond…its “kaput”…we die and rot in the ground…whatever.

If someone offers you a well supported, and i mean historically well supported, option that if true promises a life after death and that all that is required is a genuine belief in that salvation…surely you would accept this rather than throw in the towel and just accept “kaput”?

Now whether or not one wishes to be a word game player and grumble about that notion…the reality for me is that its the only logical and historically consistent option that we really have.

Sure Pascals Wager has its naysayers, however, given death comes to us all what has one to lose?

Pascals Wager - Google AI

The argument is based on the idea that people can either choose to believe in God or not, and that God either exists or doesn’t. The outcomes of the wager are as follows:

  • God exists and you believe: You gain infinite happiness.
  • God exists and you don’t believe: You risk infinite suffering, or at least eternal separation from God.
  • God doesn’t exist and you believe: You lose nothing.
  • God doesn’t exist and you don’t believe: You gain nothing.

Ive heard the arguments about hinduism and various other alternatives, however, none of these offer the kind of historicity and logical consistency that the Bible does. In addition to that, most of them play magical games with this notion of self enlightenment. To me notions such as that are ridiculous given the demonstrated selfish habits of society as a whole…its pretty clear that’s a pipe dream (funny that the bible also considers it a pipe dream).

Im Christian because its a better alternative to “Kaput” and there is no delusion that one must actively choose Christian faith…its not automatic.

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Faith at its core is allegiance. It’s hard to conceive of Pacal’s Wager as actually resulting in allegiance to Christ.

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