ARCHIVE: God's mass-murder in the flood

[smothers]

Knight:
I would be happy to answer any questions posed to me. Please enumerate them and I will answer them one at a time. From my limited perspective I have not seen any direct questions.

Mark

 

[Nathon Detroit]

Originally posted by smothers
Most here seem rather intellegent,

:chuckle:

Emphasis mine. Apparently smothers wasn't counting himself among the "most here"

 

[taoist]

deardelmar;
Oh come now Iv'e been playing nice.

taoist;
I knew you'd love that one. It was a kind of peace offering. No hard feelings about Crow's Origin's thread?

 

[Nathon Detroit]

Originally posted by smothers
Knight:
I would be happy to answer any questions posed to me. Please enumerate them and I will answer them one at a time. From my limited perspective I have not seen any direct questions.

Mark

I asked you back on post #127.... Does something that is all powerful (omnipotent) have the power to give away some of its power to another entity?

 

[smothers]

Quote:

Emphasis mine. Apparently smothers wasn't counting himself among the "most here"

--------

Knight: It is a mark of insecurity to consistantly attack and call other people names in a debate.

 

[Nathon Detroit]

Originally posted by smothers
Knight: It is a mark of insecurity to consistantly attack and call other people names in a debate.

Actually it was you who was making a backhanded insult regarding certain peoples intelligence. I was merely poking fun at you for the manner in which you spelled the word.

P.S. I normally don't make fun of peoples spelling errors but in this case it was appropriate.

 

[smothers]

Knight:
The possive form of "people" is "people's" not "peoples".
Mark

P.S. I normally don't make fun of peoples spelling errors but in this case it was appropriate.

 

[Nathon Detroit]

Originally posted by smothers
Knight:
The possive form of "people" is "people's" not "peoples".
Mark

P.S. I normally don't make fun of peoples spelling errors but in this case it was appropriate.

:up:

 

[One Eyed Jack]

Originally posted by smothers
Knight:
The possive form of "people" is "people's" not "peoples".
Mark

P.S. I normally don't make fun of peoples spelling errors but in this case it was appropriate.

LOL!!!

 

[smothers]

I think my position is rather clear, so I will cease from posting any new material. I will be happy to answer any questions from anyone regarding my positions.

 

[Nathon Detroit]

Originally posted by smothers
I think my position is rather clear, so I will cease from posting any new material. I will be happy to answer any questions from anyone regarding my positions.

So you are ignoring my question yet again????

Posts... #127 and #164.

 

[taoist]

Knight

I think were going off topic (not that I really care as you are at least making sensible posts).

Spoken like a true redneck, troll-thread fellow-hijacker. Crow would be so proud.

I think evil has several acceptable definitions.

Absolutely, relative to the individual, of course.

Evil can be relative i.e., harm, calamity. Naturally this explains how it would seem that God could cause evil to come upon His enemies in the form of wrath or vengeance. The enemies see this wrath as evil because it is their calamity.

I can accept this, even under my wildly variant conception of a limited, universal (using a definition of the universe as limited), impersonal, amoral god. Your statement is probably more catholic (small "c," not the proper noun) than you realized.

But ultimately evil is absolute. Evil is what is apart from the will of a righteous God. Evil is like cold is to hot or dark is to light, the further something is away from God's righteousness the more evil it becomes.

I can accept this also, believe it or not, but only in the abstract. I have a fundamental problem with its application though. While I can be content with a working definition of evil as all that is not-god, the idea of "further away" from god requires a metric, a way of determining "how far" away from god a particular action being judged must be.

There is no evil source yet there is the absence of godliness which is evil. Lucifer has no special evil powers yet uses His God given powers (the same powers that other angelic beings have) to do evil instead of good. Satan uses his freewill to do what is not part of God's will therefore he (Satan) is evil.

Sometime we're gonna have to go into a debate on the moral applicability of mathematics' "axiom of choice." But if I were to apply it to this, I would say it's also acceptable.

My fundamental problem with this model is that it is only one of four that would each explain our observations, and all of them seem to be just as applicable. The choice seems arbitrary.

You've given me — I know, you don't believe you're the originator, but work with me here — a model that calls for an unsourced evil opposed to an absolute good. Fine.

I don't see how any metric applied to this model would not apply just as well, allow us to just as easily judge our actions, under the other three models: absolute evil opposed to absolute good, absolute evil opposed to unsourced good and unsourced evil opposed to unsourced good.

(Taoism, by the way, uses the viewpoint of that last model. "Nameless indeed is the source of creation." Though your conception of good and evil isn't really translatable into Taoism. Words aren't the essence.)

 

[taoist]

Knight;
Does something that is all powerful (omnipotent) have the power to give away some of its power to another entity?

taoist;
As an atheist, I'm justified in calling myself an objective source on this. Assuming your omnipotent something has infinite power, Cantor's laws of cardinal arithmetic imply it can actually give away an infinite amount of its power without diminishng itself.

 

[smothers]

Post 127:

Does something that is all powerful (omnipotent) have the power to give away some of its power to another entity?

Yes. I will approach this question from a mathematical standpoint. God has all (or Infinite) power(s). As any graduate student in mathematics knows, Infinity - any number is still infinity. Therefore God can still give away some of its power to another entity and still be omnipotent.

 

[taoist]

Cardinal arithmetic

 

[smothers]

Are there any other questions you would like me to answer?

 

[taoist]

Smothers;
As any graduate student in mathematics knows, Infinity - any number is still infinity.

taoist;
As any professor of mathematics knows, graduate students in mathematics who try to apply the operation of subtraction to infinity don't pass the class.

 

[Nathon Detroit]

Originally posted by taoist
My fundamental problem with this model is that it is only one of four that would each explain our observations, and all of them seem to be just as applicable. The choice seems arbitrary.

I don't think so. I think it is pretty cut and dry.

Evil is what is apart from the will of a righteous God. The more "apart" from that righteous will the more evil the act (and or person) is.

"Evil" that is done by a righteous God or righteous person would actually only be a figure of speech for harm or calamity. I.e., "God brought evil upon the wicked people." Would only be a figure of speech for... "God brought justice, wrath and vengeance upon the wicked people".

Would you agree with the following statement?

If no righteous God exists there is no such thing as true evil?

 

[One Eyed Jack]

Originally posted by taoist
Smothers;
As any graduate student in mathematics knows, Infinity - any number is still infinity.

taoist;
As any professor of mathematics knows, graduate students in mathematics who try to apply the operation of subtraction to infinity don't pass the class.

That was priceless.

 

[taoist]

But Knight, I've already said I agree your model is valid. My objection is exactly that is not unique when it comes to applying any derived metric. Now, about your question, as you've defined evil as everything separate from god, I'd have to say true evil cannot exist without it, by definition. You're nothing if not consistent.

But my issue is the metric. Or more appropriately, your metric. I'm looking not just for disagreement here, but for agreement as well. How do you judge "how far" something "further removed" from god really is. Given two actions, which one is closer to god? In other words, how do you make relative decisions? Is it really true that I can't use your metric without resort to using your god?