are the gracies religious?
- Thread starter snakeybizz
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The Jesus didn't promote violence. Yet the people who cemented and expanded his beliefs in Eurasia found a way to use his teachings to wage war and accumulate riches. So is the fault with the man, the organization or the teachings*?
*Including Old Testament. Man, God in that one is a bad mofo. Easily irritated with the homies.
I'd like to add that for the most part only the Ecclesiarchy knew latin until the Bible was widely translated (and the population educated enough to read it), so a priest could pretty much say anything to the majority of the population with a
And they'd actually think that was the way the Jesus wanted it. And even after the Bible is translated and everyone can make their own interpretation, you'll get the crazies promoting hatred like those antigay Westboro Baptists.
I'm sure the Jesus wouldn't have minded two men di**** each other as long as it was with love and permission :icon_lol:
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Jesus believed that the Old testament was the word of god, that it was divinely inspired, and totally right. Now, if you read the Old testament and focus on all the bad things that are written there, you
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Balto, could you expound on this point?
If my model includes only the Universe, and your model includes the Universe + God, then how can your model be simpler? It necessarily includes all of the complexity that is in my model (i.e., the Universe) and then adds another entity to the equation.
The response I've heard from theists is that my model is inadequate because it fails to explain: (1) creation ex nihilo; or (2) why the Universe's physical constants are fine-tuned for life. I don't find either of these arguments persuasive.
The first argument faults my model for having a first link in its causal chain. But that's not a valid criticism, because the theistic model suffers from the same shortcoming. It adds a cause that precedes the Universe, but there is still a first link in the chain. The only change is that now the first link has the name "God."
Of course, people have lots of rationales for why it's valid for God to be the first link. They say that he is eternal, that he has no cause, that he originated outside of time, that we simply can't understand his origin, and so on. But all of these theories can just as easily be applied to the Universe itself. (i.e., the Universe is eternal, the Universe has no cause, the Universe originated outside of time, we simply can't understand the Universe's origin) Thus, the model gains no additional explanatory power from the addition of God.
The second argument is dispatched by modal realism and/or the Everett Interpretation of quantum mechanics. If numerous (potentially infinite) Universes exist, then it makes perfect sense that life will only arise in those Universes where all the necessary preconditions have been satisfied. Our existence can be understood as the result of a completely random process, without any need for supernatural volition.
A theist might counter that my Multiverse model requires belief in entities that we cannot directly observe. Of course, the same is true of God, so the real question is which explanation to prefer. And there is at least indirect support for my model, based on evidence like the double-slit experiment.
From the perspective of information theory, the Multiverse explanation is infinitely less complex than God. God has all sorts of arbitrary attributes that would need to be specified, like his moral preferences and his plan for the world. In contrast, the entire Multiverse can be derived from an algorithm that says "all possible things exist."
In a sense, this provides an even better answer for the creation ex nihilo question. The two simplest algorithms for specifying existence are "nothing exists" and "everything exists." The former obviously is not operative, given the fact that somethings exist. So Occam's razor dictates that it's logical to choose the simplest remaining choice: Everything exists.
So in a sense, I do believe in God. I think that somewhere in the Multiverse, there are entities whose composition, powers, and motivations may resemble those of God (or at least, demigods). But I don't believe the design of the entire information structure can logically be traced back to a volitional entity. And I see no evidence of these pseudo-Gods at work in our corner of spacetime.
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"I have not come to bring peace on earth, but a sword"-Jesus
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ok, so this whole stuff is wrong.
1) nothing that can be added/subtracted to sequentially can be infinite
2) nothing with a physical body can be eternal. anything physical has to be created. you cannot create something from nothing
ok,
so God is immaterial and outside of time. God was not created/
Wuuuuut????
yeah, God was not created
we exist. this is an attribute
God IS existence. he is "to be"
he does not have to be brought into existence to have the property of existing
because He is existence. Existence is his essence.
like a triangle is 3 sided. but a red triangle would have red as an attribute.
so it is not like the universe at all is it? you have to go back until something can explain its own existence.
that is God. period.
try to find another explanation and i will shot it down
MULTIVERSE
- this suffers the same thing. Who created the FIRST universe?
as we already know there are not infinite universes since they can be added to.
you still need a universe creating mechanism.
you are using the multiverse wrong in trying to argue against God
the multiverse is used to argue the fined tuned universe
so you see there is not an infinite number of universes. everything does not exist.
I figured this one would pop up sooner or later.
Read the whole passage, and it's clearly a metaphor. He's talking about how his existence is going to be disruptive to the status quo and force people to make some hard choices.
Jesus never actually used a sword on anyone. The one time his disciple Peter did, Jesus rebuked him and promptly healed the man.
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Matthew 26:52 "Put your sword back in its place," Jesus said to him, "for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.
so you are just ignorant and post a line and do not know IT IS A FUCKING PARABLE
he is not saying this literally. he is saying to the disciples that his message will cause strife between those who accept Jesus and those who don't
again, it is not promoting violence
CONTEXT. look it up. read a passage and not a sentence
Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35For I have come to turn
“ ‘a man against his father,
a daughter against her mother,
a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—
36a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.’c
37“Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. 38Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 39Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.
40“Anyone who welcomes you welcomes me, and anyone who welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. 41Whoever welcomes a prophet as a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward, and whoever welcomes a righteous person as a righteous person will receive a righteous person’s reward. 42And if anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones who is my disciple, truly I tell you, that person will certainly not lose their reward.”
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this is a rather nominalistic perception of what a term like 'god' would entail.
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Here we go again...
The Universe IS existence. it is "to be"
it does not have to be brought into existence to have the property of existing
because It is existence. Existence is its essence.
you still need a god creating mechanism
The Universe IS existence. it is "to be"
it does not have to be brought into existence to have the property of existing
because It is existence. Existence is its essence.
you still need a god creating mechanism
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Yes, I have read the full passage before. It does not get better with context in my opinion. I don't see how abandoning your family and and "having an effect of" people turning on each other is promoting peace. What it does promote, IMO, is the cult mentality and "specialness" of the in-group (AKA persecution complex)
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TsukinoKage
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No one has addressed this point yet so I ask again. If God's teachings are supposed to be universal why is it so weirdly specific to their place and time period. We're supposed to accept that these rules written thousands of years ago by a select few is supposed to guide all of humanity?
The standard answer is to take the existent verses metaphorically and apply their principles, but the modern world is one that is infinitely more difficult and complex than could have been envisioned back then.
If God was omniscient, why no mention of electricity or internet or stem cell research?
The standard answer is to take the existent verses metaphorically and apply their principles, but the modern world is one that is infinitely more difficult and complex than could have been envisioned back then.
If God was omniscient, why no mention of electricity or internet or stem cell research?
I'll expound a little. I read your explanation, and I know a lot of people who believe this way too. I understand where you are coming from. I'll tell you why I feel differently:
Basically as you keep going back further and further to the beginning of the universe, you keep going down an infinite rabbit hole of one thing creating another thing until you stop somewhere. Infinity is a mathematical concept, but it does not exist in the physical world in any way we can observe. Physics equations trend to infinity sometimes, but in real world observation they have finite values when we measure them. So things should have to stop somewhere in the real world.
One stop is with the concept of God. That would be a being, existing independent of the universe, that was powerful enough to create the whole thing. Because God exists outside of the universe, the rules of our universe don't apply to him, so he doesn't need a creator himself. He can just be eternal and all existing.
The other concepts I think are more complicated than that. I was good friends in college with a guy (now theoretical astrophysicist PhD from Harvard) who did not believe in God. So we would talk about this sometimes. Obviously he knew a ton about physics (we were in physics classes together) so I liked to get his take on things.
Really he did not seem overly concerned with the question in the first place. But when pressed, he suggested that a lot of the mathematics surrounding these things tend to infinity, so he felt it was possible that the universe could have just existed infinitely throughout time. Obviously something truly infinite has no beginning and no end, so there wasn't any need to have a creator for the universe. The universe just was.
To this I would say well you've never measured anything to be infinite, so how do you know that exists? You base everything else on things you can measure, but a question as big as this you chalk up to the one thing you've never measured? He would say well you've never measured God either. So that's kind of an impasse.
Basically all the non God explanations I've heard for the universe involve the universe doing something itself that we have never been able to observe in the universe ever. So the universe is either breaking its own rules, or it is following a very special rule that we can only conjecture theoretically because it's so rare that we never see it.
To me, I think it is simpler to believe that something could exist outside of our universe. I don't see any logical reason for us to believe that our universe is the only thing that can possibly exist. And since something like that, with completely different rules than our universe because it is not part of our universe, would have created our universe, that is God.
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So the set of all natural numbers isn't infinite, in your view?
this is an exceedingly common misapprehension that has resulted in a great deal of intellectual abuses over the years. infinity is not a quantity, were in a different metaphysical category all together. the word youre looking for is, as cantor himself elucidated, is 'transfinite', an infinite number is a contradiction in terms.
Of course the writings are specific to their time. They are written by people. Just because Christians believe that God inspired them to write these things does not mean that suddenly they are not written by people. None of the authors of the Bible are believed to be anything but people. Jesus himself wrote absolutely zero portions of the Bible.
It hasn't really been that long since the New Testament was written. 2000 years or so? The idea is that Jesus is going to come back again. It's not like things are supposed to stand as they are forever and ever millions of years into the future.
I don't see why you are obsessed with people predicting electricity and the internet. The Bible does nothing like that and never claims to. Personally if it were going to predict the future like that, I'd like it to give me stock tips. But obviously that's not the idea behind it.
So the set of all natural numbers isn't infinite, in your view?
The thing is that these mathematical concepts are inherently abstractions. They are very useful abstractions for a lot of things, and these abstractions help us understand the real world, but they do not all exist in the real world.
I believe that the square root of negative 1 exists mathematically, and it's very useful to use that number to solve certain equations. And you can get real world results from solving those equations that way.
But you can't actually demonstrate the square root of negative 1 in the real world. If it doesn't cancel out at the end, it is usually discarded when applying to the real world.
It is the same with infinity. You can have a real world physical equation that trends to infinity (like the kinetic energy of an object with mass approaching the speed of light), but in the real world it never reaches infinity. Anything actually going the speed of light is light itself, which by definition has no mass.
So the concept of infinity can be real in the sense that it can be proven to exist mathematically, but it's not real in the sense that anything in the world can actually achieve it.
