Confession of a former christian

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As an O.T. expert, Joe, could you give us an approximate figure for the average number of factual stats per. word achieved in the book?

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I did give examples - you never disproved any of them. i say, there is no document in existence with more vindicated, factual statements than the OT. If you want to know the travel time from Goshen to Pithom, or whether the universe is finite - then there is only one document. Correcting with a spellcheck does not impact here.

No document with with more vindicated, factual statements? Not one? Have you ever heard of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica? Or maybe the Merriam Webster Dictionary? I'd say those documents have far more vindicated, factual statements...in fact...all of them.

No sir. There are many dictionaries and encyclopedia, and they all define what is already known, as in an archive library. If you read therein the definition of FINITE applied to the universe - then also know where this was first recorded - in the opening preamble of Genesis over 3000 years ago. Thus you see it in dictionaries.One cannot pass two verses in the OT wherein a historical fact is not seen - for the first time too, and vindicated by new discoveries almost on a weekly basis. This is the only document which speaks in authentic and contemporary terms, with specificity of dates, places and names. The earliest 'names' are in the OT: we have no names dated more than 6000; no writings; no recallings; no history per se. Co-incidence?Edited by IamJoseph, : No reason given.

Joseph, I asked you this:

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As an O.T. expert, Joe, could you give us an approximate figure for the average number of factual stats per. word achieved in the book?

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I am not talking about examples, and I was not disputing anything you say. I was asking you to do some math. You talked about millions of facts in a book. I happen to know that there are not millions of words in that book. So, this means that multiple facts per. word are being expressed.So, explain the miracle. How, for example, do you express 100 different facts in a ten word sentence? Can you illustrate how it's done?Or was the "millions of facts" bit what might be generously described as wild exaggeration, and less generously described as "bullshitting"?

Umm, by definition, if something is written down, it is already known...the person writing it had to know it. You claimed there was nothing with more factual statements than the Bible. Just because you already know what is in an encyclopedia doesn't make it any less factual.On your next point, I would ask you to write down anything the Bible says that has been proven true that isn't something that had already been known. Your example of the distance between two cities is not a good example. We have atlases galore, and no one starts praising their copyright page.

God knows in your 1st year that you will turn left in your 20th year because he is right there beside you now as a 20 year old watching you decide to turn left. Knowing what a person is doing, through observation, and feeding that knowledge "back in time" doesn't alter you being the one to decide what to do.One way to see it, a way that doesn't involve mixing time and eternity units, is to view whole of history, from beginning-of-time to end-of-time, as a film which is already "in the can". The event in the film are made up of our free choices and God can view any point in this film to see what is happening. In fact he has two screens one showing you in your 1st year and another showing you in your 20th year. He can look at you in diapers and 'predict' that you will make that turn left in your 20th year - simply by looking at the other screen. You are the one making the decision. Hmm. Ask the fat, balding man driving the red sports ferrari whether he freewillingly chose that car. Or was it the overwhelming sense of fading youth that did it for him

But that's just it. A film "in the can" has a set progression, the characters have no choices, you can't watch a film one time and it ends happily, and then watch it again and the main character decides to kill everyone else. Feeding information back in time would absolutely take away choice. If I could build a time machine, go back in time to Gettysburg and watch without interfering...I would know exactly how the battle wold go. There is no option for it to go any other way. All the combatants and generals would be forced to do exactly the same things.If someone knows what you will do..."know" is in possession of a belief that is in fact true, then you have no option to do anything else. A prediction is something ele. I can predict, with varying degrees of accuracy whether it will rain later today. But I am not in possession of omniscience and extra-temporal existence. God, supposedly, is, which means every thing he says about the future is true and unchangeable. If its unchangeable, then the odds of you choosing to do other than God predicts is zero.To get back to your movie analogy, let's say you're watching your favorite film, one you've seen many times. You're watching it with someone who has never seen it. You turn to your friend and say, "He dies at the end." That is something you "know" to be true, and the character at which you pointed has no option but to die at the end, it has been scripted and already seen, it can't be otherwise. If it can't be otherwise, there is no choice, only the illusion of one.

iano responds to me:

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"Could choose it"? You mean skew the choice to the point where it becomes a choice no more?

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Huh? What are you talking about. I'm talking about the existence of choice. That means you could choose any of a myriad of options (rarely is there only two.)And "skew"? You mean having a strong sense of morality eliminates the ability to make a free choice?I guess that means god has no free will.

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To me a choice means balance - not forgone conclusion.

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Huh? I have the choice of throwing my computer out the window. I'm not going to do it. It isn't a foregone conclusion. I simply choose not to do so because it

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God extended the choice to what he extended it to be.

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That doesn't answer the question. The point is that god could have created a universe populated with beings that have free will and yet never commit evil.We do not live in such a universe. You admit that god deliberately did this, since god cannot act against his will, and thus god must have wanted evil in the world.How is that good?

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his way means that created beings get to (effectively) choose whether to have a relationship with God or no for all eternity.

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Huh? How does creating beings who can choose but choose good not an example of beings who "get to (effectively) choose whether to have a relationship with god or not for all eternity"?If god creates beings who will choose evil, then god must want evil.How is that good?

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You couldn't have beings freely choosing to have a relationship with you without giving them the option to freely choose not to have a relationship with you.

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Of course.But as we have both said, just because you can, that doesn't mean you do. There is no reason why the universe can't be populated with beings that have free will to choose and do not choose evil.Doesn't god have the choice? If he can do it, why can't we? Or are you saying god has no choice?

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Evil becomes a necessity in such a system.

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So you admit god wants evil. If it doesn't have to be (and it doesn't), if the choice god made resulted in a word that has evil as a necessity, then it is only because god wanted evil.How is that good?

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You might yourself agree it is good (in the relative sense) that God provide us this choice - that he doesn't force people to be with him forever.

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How many times must you be told before you remember? There is no forcing. There is only choice. But it just so happens that people never choose evil. The ability to choose evil does not require that evil ever get chosen. If god can do it, why can't we? Or are you saying god has no choice?

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Your presuming Adam and Eve weren't faced with a balanced choice.

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There's this "balance" thing again. What is this, Fox? You seem to have fallen for the error of the middle ground. That is, given a choice between two extremes, the "right answer" necessarily lies somewhere in the middle. That isn't true. Sometimes the answer is one of the extremes (evolution, f'rinstance).But, you're presuming Adam and Eve were capable of making a choice. They weren't. They were innocent. They hadn't eaten from the tree of knowledge yet and thus were absolutely incapable of choosing evil since they didn't know what evil was.

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Certainly Eve was aware of the prohibition in her consciousness "But God did say..." in a way you couldn't expect of a toddler and the Mhing vase.

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But Eve was not conscious of what the prohibition meant. She hadn't eaten from the tree yet. Yeah, god did say...so what? Why is the word of god given any weight? She doesn't know anything about good and evil because she's innocent: She hasn't eaten from the tree.So when the snake tells her the truth (and it was the truth for god was, indeed, lying to her), how is she supposed to make a choice? Choice requires being aware of things like consequences. Otherwise, you're simply flying blind. Eve, being innocent, having not eaten from the tree yet, is constitutionally incapable of making a choice. That's the entire point behind being "innocent."

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They're culpable, the toddler isn't

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They hadn't eaten from the tree, yet. How could they possibly be culpable? After all, they were sinning up a storm beforehand and nobody seemed to mind. We all understand this: People who don't know what they're doing aren't being evil. Oh, the results may be tragic, but tragedy isn't malfeasance.But, that's an old argument that has no place here. Back to the issue at hand.God didn't have to put the tree of knowledge in the garden. Thus, since he created beings who would choose evil, he must have wanted it.How can that be good?

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Skewed choice is not free choice.

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Why not? All choices are skewed. Every single one of them. There is never such a thing as "all things being equal." That's why people make the choices that they do: Something about the situation favors one option over all the others. That's the reason why people have such a hard time when there are too many choices: Nothing is clearly pointing the way to go.

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You might say I could freely scream down the motorway at 160mph on my Yamaha. But if my choice to do so is so heavily skewed by the various things which restrain me from doing so then we're not talking free choice anymore.

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Why? Why does weighing consequences mean the choice is no longer free? People do things they know they shouldn't do all the time. I'm up way past when I know I should have gone to bed replying to you. I could have chosen to do this tomorrow, but I've decided to damn the consequences.[...only to have the site go down on me as I'm trying to post...is that a hint?]

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Free choice is more like resting on the middle of a balanced see-saw.

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Such instances are rare in the extreme and when they do happen, people aren't making a choice.They're guessing. Guessing is not a choice.

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

iano responds to bluegenes:

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The question now is, would you walk free from his?

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BZZZZT!Pascal's Wager. I'm so sorry, iano. Johnny, tell him what parting gifts he has!Well, Bob, iano has won himself a lifetime of anguish in someone else's hell! Yes, that's right. After spending all of his life fighting against Satan and worshipping the Christian god, iano gets a reward of going straight to Hades for his hubris. He'll be sentenced to solve a series of puzzles for which the instructions can be read in many ways. Every attempt to glean more information will be met with "Since it would just be a waste of my time to tell you, I won't." Of course, every proposed solution will conflict with something in the contradictory instructions. This being for his continued insistence that those around him are unworthy of explanations.But, he won't get hungry because he'll have an afterlife-time supply of Rice-a-Roni®, the San Francisco Treat.You didn't really think that the god that truly exists was the Christian one, did you?

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

iano writes:

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Is God somehow obligated to suppress mens evil at every point in time?

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Why not? It's his creation. Is he not responsible for it? He throws thinking beings into the world after teaching them nothing and thinks there won't be any consequences?

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Gods willing to act (so as to suppress men's evil) and willing not to act ("create" evil) is good.

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Incorrect. If god is capable but unwilling, then god is malevolent.

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

Perdition writes:

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If someone knows what you will do..."know" is in possession of a belief that is in fact true, then you have no option to do anything else.

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Indeed.In magic, we call this "forcing." You certainly have the appearance of having a free choice of which card to pick out of the pack, but you really don't.If somebody knows what you are going to do, 100%, without any possibility for error, then how can you do any differently?

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

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Or was the "millions of facts" bit what might be generously described as wild exaggeration, and less generously described as "bullshitting"?

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No exaggeration, except from your own adaptation of my words.The OT is a most mysterious, inexplicable document, vaired from all others by kind than degree. It is made for all generations of mankind, talking to and of peoples in spacetimes 6000, 3000, 2000 years and today. In most forums today, the most robust debates concern the two premises of evolution [ToE or the genesis mode], and almost all debates on religions are pointedly aimed at the OT.What this means is, as each generation discusses this document, they find layers of meanings applicable to them. An OT verse is thus impacting manifold scenarious and subjects. If you consider the diets of the ancient egyptians are listed for the first time in the OT, this verse impacts on numerous sciences, botany, archeology, history and geographical premises, including the religious criteria of egypt, their agricultures, as well as which food products were used in ancient times. We know, because of the OT, the egyptians did not speak Hebrew, despite their close historical connection with canaan; this says canaanites did not speak hebrew, despite that canaan was also closely associated with the phoenecians.Do you see the far reaching power of a verse which is authentic and contemporary, where none else exists of that kind for a 1000 years later? Do you see the power of this for science and history? Each verse represents an encyclopedia, and it becomes expanded on every reading; and it appears its verses are contained with that goal, cntaining terms such as everlasting.It is the first alphabetical book, and believed by more humans than any other, and harkened by more scientists and historians than any other document. This despite that religious writings are at an all time low today.

I've already gone through this with him Bluegenes. You are not going to get anything even remotely approaching a sane answer from IaJ. You're just going to be forced deeper and deeper down the rabbit-hole.Just sayin'.

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Mutate and Survive

Sorry Iano,I generally don't post here for good reason.. it's futile.
so I'm not going to get back into this discussion, Just wanted to drop that one in again for the other to see.the points you make were addressed in the original thread.
infact you now seem to contradict yourself.but like I said.. I stopped enjoying taking part in the bullshit discourse here long ago.nothing personal

Firstly, realise that this thing is seen from two perspectives: you-in-time and God-in-eternity.Secondly, it might help if you suppose the film a reality tv show in-the-can instead. The characters are the ones who determined the course of the show. It has been recorded and no, it cannot be changed. But only because all the choices that will ever be made during that show have been already made. From God's perspective that is.From our perspective, part way through the tape, we see decisions made in the past, decisions being made now and decisions to be made in the future. I put "back in time" in "" to indicate 'in a manner of speaking'. There is no back in time in eternity. God is at all points in time now (it is argued). Past, present and future. If he knows the future by virtue of being there then he also knows the past by being there. More corectly; someone knows what you "will" do by virtue of knowing what you "are" doing. Perhaps it's clearer now? It is true the story is set in stone. But the choices made by the people involved in a characters death (during original shooting of the story) were the choices that set that story in stone. Viewing it again and again is a different matter to the original laying down of the story in stone.Edited by iano, : No reason given.