Free will vs Omniscience

God doesn't annoy me at all--that would be like saying Tinkerbell really ticked me off.But people who claim cosmic revelation for things that are the artifacts of birth place and time--i.e., their web of belief about God--and then seek to impose their beliefs on me and others in secular life, well, they annoy the crap outta me.Of somewhat less annoyance value are those folks who claim an inerrant Bible, claim to have read it, and then smugly describe how slaughtered innocents and prosperous evil are actually the punitive will and justice of God. That's just pathetic. There's a lot of that in this thread--'We generally cannot know the mind of God, but I got the internal memo.'But no organized religion can long thrive without blaming the victim, whether via original sin, karma or dynamically scored sin-and-pay accounts. "God doesn't bother with all that--he plays a long game" won't fill the collection plate when it passes by the sorrowing widow or parent.It's long past time to stop sucking on the childish, sugar-tit myth of divine justice and take this world in hand. Our progress in recent centuries inflames the Taliban and American Neo-Christians alike. They all need free will to keep up the blame game--their secular seat of power--and thus ignore the fact that 99% of their lives and their enemies' lives are wholly determined by the brute facts of the world. Yet their own mean, cruel judgments are clearly the will of God--even though their own scriptures tell them they cannot possibly know that.Free will, grace, God's will--the oldest peas in a very old game.

Always happy to amuse, MrHambre--but at least my "rant" stood on a scaffold of reasons, while your "snort of amusement" is merely snotty.Go collect fundie evidence for the "will of God" in one hand, and secular evidence for the "brute facts" of the world in the other.See which one fills up first.

Okay. Did you want a defense of my ahem? I thought you just wanted to troll your epistemological superiority with a bit of eye-rolling mockery. My bad.Other than that, let's see: you suggest I have no more evidence for my assertions about the brute facts of the world than fundies have for the will of God. I say, go collect/review the evidence for each side, and see for yourself.Alas, that was not to be: "I've long thought that "evidence" is the secular equivalent of "God's will," in that what we already believe defines what we accept as evidence."Shapes, informs, mediates: all good words. Claiming that our prior beliefs define what we accept as evidence is twaddle. But your experience may vary. If so, I regret that your established beliefs preclude the gathering and evaluation of evidence.Perhaps your exquisitely-tuned sensitivity to the presumptions of others comes at a price.

Are you a bot? That sounds like an early conversation engine.What do you call it when a human fails the Turing test?

That sounds reasonable until you start imagining how it works in the day-to-day practice of religion and in the personal histories of the religious.If we accept that faith in the divinity of Christ and his rising from the dead is the sine qua non of Christian identity, then what are we to do with the losses and lapses of faith reported by ordinary Christians as well as its saints and church fathers?Is your Christian identity thick as a brick on Sunday, in the bosom of your congregation, serene and unchallenged because you are young and unsorrowed--and then it thins and wavers because someone raped and murdered the kid next door, and belief in a personal, loving God seems impossible for a while? Poof, you're not a Christian?When someone experiences a crisis or series of crises of faith, does their Christian identity blink on-and-off like fireflies? I don't think so. Would you look at the bio of a famous Christian mystic, and say, "Look there, that patch where he had a dark night of the soul--definitely not a Christian then."? Clearly not.So, sure, being a Christian involves your beliefs about Christ and his precepts, but just as surely there can be no single doctrinal acid test. Perhaps the will or desire to believe could be described as necessary. The alienated mystic has that, and continues to pray and meditate, as do many Christians who lose their faith but continue as members of a congregation and as celebrants of its creed and worship.I think the question of who is a Christian has much to do with doctrinal zealotry and the desire to tidy up a messy human experience. If doubts about Christ's story disqualify one as a Christian, what shall we do with Christ? He had his own doubts. Edited by Omnivorous, : No reason given.

Tidy.

Phat, you'll recall that back in Message 339, I didn't make an atheistic argument against Christianity or the Christian experience.Rather, I proposed that people don't stop being Christians when they sin, or even when they deeply question their faith; the notion that born again Christians are perfected in their faith and cannot fall away, that sinning again after salvation, or even losing one's faith entirely, doesn't mean they are no longer Christians.My comments were in the context of the "no true Christian" fallacy, often invoked by Christians defending the conduct of other Christians in debates about the impact of Christianity on the world, for good or ill. Both the Bible and Luther, among others, disagree with you. If you have any trouble finding support for Luther saying one could fall from grace, let me know. I'll just treat with the Bible here.Peter, for example, denied Christ three times, and fled Caiaphas' courtyard while the guards beat and mocked Christ--yet it was Peter who entered the empty tomb and who preached on the Day of the Pentecost.Did he stop being a Christian anywhere in there?I don't want you to give up your faith. I just want you to stop using fallacious--and counter-biblical--defenses of it. They hurt my brain.