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Pariah wrote:

resedit wrote:

Pariah wrote:

The idea that God would create beings for which he could only feel disgust is one really big thing about Christianity I find appalling.

Um - that's your idea, not Gods.
He created us perfect - and not only said that it was good, he said it was very good. And when we rejected him - he sent his own son to die in our place to give us an opportunity to come back to him.

God didn't reject us, we rejected him and chose sin instead.
God then provided atonement for that rejection - but just like we had the freewill to reject him, only our freewill can choose to accept that generous gift.

You are aware that the Garden of Eden situation as described was a big honking trap, right? As if God would inadvertently allow his creation to go so completely sideways immediately after creation is absurd.

Some say that belief in God itself is absurd. But this is one of my favorite things to talk about and to think about. You say that its absurd for God to allow his creation to go awry after creation- is that really absurd, or is it possibly more absurd that God allows the current world we live in where a child can be born and neglected by its mother until it starves to death or born addicted to drugs or raised in a household where its beaten or sent to slave all day making shoes or sent to institutions where the child is raped or born where warfare and violence maim it or kill it etc etc etc. Make no doubt about it, whether God exists or not this world is a messed up place, to such a degree in fact I sympathize with anyone doubting the existence of a good God.

To anyone trying to reconcile a belief in a good God with the world as is, the Eden account is actually rational (it is at least, even if unbelievable, a kind of rationale). But there is a really neat metaphysic involved in the account too, concerning evil. The only evil existing is a possibility, namely that man would eat from a tree God said was not theirs to eat from. So what is the tree? The ability to name for oneself what was good and bad. That was God's tree- it was only his right, not man's prerogative. Man had the ability to name and classify all of nature, to form and shape it, it was all under his dominion but this one thing, naming for themselves what was or was not moral. And the only moral imperative they had was not to break God's law. What was this law? The law that said not to break God's law. Why no other laws? Why did God not have to tell Adam not to beat Eve or tell Eve not to kill Adam? Could it be because they were perfect, with perfect consciences? Could the law have been not so much an establishment of authority as much as a natural law of condition, much like gravity? Break this law and break perfection and destroy the moral law within that keeps you from self destruction…

And why does God allow the serpent to pose the question, and yet why does Jesus declare that the lie was made with intent to kill, as if that, not the temptation, but the lie, was what made Satan the original serpent a manslayer? I dont mean to go on and on, but I really love discussing Adam and Eve and Job and Satan and so forth. Perhaps I'll put my stake near the atheists- if the Adam and Eve account is unbelievable, it is at least as believable as anything else in the Bible.

Metacell wrote:

Obviously the ability to think of and act on harmful intentions is neccessary for free will.  That makes us completely superior to "perfect" pre-apple Adam and Eve and their blind loyalty.  What would there be to learn in life with no conflict?  What enrichment would it hold with no struggle?  How many moving stories have you read where nobody had to suffer?   Whether by God or nature, it is conceit to believe we are supposed to be anything other than what we are.

No, if it had been blind loyalty, they would not have been able to disobey. Thats like suggesting that anyone in a marriage has a lower quality of love since they lack the freedom single people have.

And the other thing is, just because they are supposed as perfect beings, it does not follow that creativity was lacking, or that they had no project or nothing to work at. They were told to subdue the earth and to have it in subjection. One of the first things Adam does is name animals. God made a paradise, but it was limited to one tiny locale. The world at large was still there for them.

Moving stories require suffering? Why? Is that all that is left for drama now is suffering? I think you have a point, but its based on a false dicotomy- you interpret Biblical perfection as being and not becoming, but in the Bible being is becoming, even God's name is a form of the verb meaning "to become." It says that man sharpens man like iron sharpens iron. Interaction and contrast and effort are not eliminated, and there is no basis I think to suppose that unless there is conflict and evil that there cannot be enjoyment. We were after all created with capacity to cry and to be angry and to feel pain, this is a part of our biology- it seems ridiculous to imagine that a perfect body would not have any of these sensations it is wired for. Who is to say that the employment of these sensations and reactions are meant as we experience them now though, and that in a perfect world they might serve in a different more beautiful capacity without the risk of hurting another person? I cry when I am sad, but on some occassions I cry when I am extremely happy. I feel a rush of adrenaline and a surge of power when I am in a rage, but I also feel something similar when dropping into the deep end of a pool on a skateboard.

Metacell wrote:

Obviously the ability to think of and act on harmful intentions is neccessary for free will.  That makes us completely superior to "perfect" pre-apple Adam and Eve and their blind loyalty.

Does it make us superior?
That's what the serpent in the Garden told Eve to deceive her.
I guess some deceptions are easy to believe.

resedit wrote:

Metacell wrote:

Obviously the ability to think of and act on harmful intentions is neccessary for free will.  That makes us completely superior to "perfect" pre-apple Adam and Eve and their blind loyalty.

Does it make us superior?
That's what the serpent in the Garden told Eve to deceive her.
I guess some deceptions are easy to believe.

You just go on believing that.

The serpent didn't say that it would make her superior, he said it would make her as God, knowing the difference between good and evil.  I don't for a second believe God is superior to anything in the Universe, nor do I believe God is concerned with such concepts as superiority.

Pariah wrote:

user wrote:

radarman wrote:

Also, I don't see that we have "outgrown" our need for God.

We have outgrown our need to use supernatural entities to explain the world around us....but not all of us have caught on to that yet.

Nah, still plenty of unknowable things. We have not even put a dent into the serious mysteries.

What?

Sure, there's stuff we don't know about. My point is that we no longer have to use superstitions to explain the stuff we don't know. Superstitions don't provide answers. We now know that eventually we'll figure things out on our own.

StaticAge wrote:

user wrote:

We now know that eventually we'll figure things out on our own.

I dont think you need superstition to explain things either, but to assume that you are equipped to be able to know everything you may question is a sort of extravagant claim. Do you suppose there are definitive objective answers to questions like "why is there something rather than nothing" and the like?

I'll concede that such general philosophical questions may be unanswerable. Likewise, plugging in god won't be an answer, either.

Ummm, but we do, though we use the political arena to do it.

StaticAge wrote:

Metacell wrote:

There is no such thing as a perfect human. The idea is preposterous to begin with. It implies a unique standard for something which is typified by variety.  Perfection is the absolute loss of freedom--any change from a state of perfection will result in an imperfection.  That was Light's dillemma when trying to make a perfect catalog of life on earth: by the time he'd finished, it had all changed.  The only perfect state is devoid of life and change.  And the reason suffering is required is so that joy can have meaning. If you've never had a bad day, how will you know what a good one feels like?  It's hard to feel satisfaction for something you didn't have to work for.

My concept of perfection is radically different from yours I guess. Like I said, yours is with perfection as a permanent equalized static form of being and mine is an open ended optimized dynamic way of becoming. I think your idea makes as much sense as saying "how can you enjoy food if you've never eaten feces to be able to tell how terrible it tastes in comparison," or, "how can you appreciate use of your eyes if you dont poke them out every so often?"

Reductio ad absurdum.  A better analogy is: would you enjoy your favorite food as much if it was all you had to eat, and would you still appreciate beauty if nothing was ugly?

StaticAge wrote:

Why did God not have to tell Adam not to beat Eve or tell Eve not to kill Adam? Could it be because they were perfect, with perfect consciences? Could the law have been not so much an establishment of authority as much as a natural law of condition, much like gravity? Break this law and break perfection and destroy the moral law within that keeps you from self destruction…

I haven't read it in a while, but I don't think the story of Adam and Eve has enough information to determine whether or not they had the capacity for anger or hatred.

If you interpret it entirely allegorical though to the nature of human greed and selfishness (and everything else that's wrong with us, and only some of what is right), you can infer what the author may have been trying to say. So, it is from this perspective that I will try and read your posts from.

For them to have a perfect conscience, that implies to me that there would have to be an objective set of codes that one can live by an be like Adam and Eve. But to this day, i've never read or heard of a completely consistent moral code that works in the real world.

I think the perspective though that the fruit of the tree of knowledge not being the actual knowledge of good an evil, but giving them the trait of wanting to name what is good and evil is an interesting perspective (far more intriguing than reading it as a literal historical interpretation).

This is kind of off on a tangent... but it makes me wonder what humanity would be like if we were all born with the same set of moral codes. I believe we would still have free will (just like an AI with it's own set of codes could have free will ), but we would be drastically different. I would almost want to say it would necessarily have to be a highly communist or socialist society for that to work. We'd all have an innate understanding that we have to work together, to practice family planning, and the sense that we were doing the right thing would keep people from getting disgruntled and wanting to kill or steal from someone else.

jeremiah256 wrote:

We'd be...ant people.

Haha, that's surprisingly accurate, I think.

mo' ron wrote:

I haven't read it in a while, but I don't think the story of Adam and Eve has enough information to determine whether or not they had the capacity for anger or hatred.

If you interpret it entirely allegorical though to the nature of human greed and selfishness (and everything else that's wrong with us, and only some of what is right), you can infer what the author may have been trying to say. So, it is from this perspective that I will try and read your posts from.

For them to have a perfect conscience, that implies to me that there would have to be an objective set of codes that one can live by an be like Adam and Eve. But to this day, i've never read or heard of a completely consistent moral code that works in the real world.

I think the perspective though that the fruit of the tree of knowledge not being the actual knowledge of good an evil, but giving them the trait of wanting to name what is good and evil is an interesting perspective (far more intriguing than reading it as a literal historical interpretation).

This is kind of off on a tangent... but it makes me wonder what humanity would be like if we were all born with the same set of moral codes. I believe we would still have free will (just like an AI with it's own set of codes could have free will ), but we would be drastically different. I would almost want to say it would necessarily have to be a highly communist or socialist society for that to work. We'd all have an innate understanding that we have to work together, to practice family planning, and the sense that we were doing the right thing would keep people from getting disgruntled and wanting to kill or steal from someone else.

The implication I am drawing from comes from the Greek scriptures, where Jesus is called the last Adam and contrasted with him by Paul. Jesus was a perfect man also. Hatred in Hebrew is related to love, it isnt entirely opposite to it, it means to "love less." And Jesus had the capacity to display anger, because he cleaned out the temple etc. Of course, interpretations and valuations of scripture vary, but I find it hard to take the story of Adam and Eve as allegorical when the story of Jesus and his death is explained as a necessary consequence to save man because Adam sold his offspring into sin, so to speak. The codes would be an interesting feature, I totally agree with you, but at the expense of what seems to me to be the loss of meaning. First, they did disobey the only law that was given them, so if the coding was there, why didnt it work in that case? And the point is that the serpent causes them to doubt God's motives and to rebel against the only law given by creating their own laws in opposition to both God and their former nature. Its similar in a way to asking if you could fall in love with a machine- the law that allowed them to rebel ensured that their obedience was by choice and was trusting their God and respecting his right. With strict "coding" he could have had the obedience without worrying about intention as to what obedience meant. I have already talked about the part where Satan talks to God about Job after God brags about him- Satan apparently sees man as nothing more than machine-like mechanisms responding to input, but incapable of loving God. He sneers that God finds value in Job, that if conditions caused him pain he would respond in kind. And why not? After all, Job is an inferior imperfect model, and he already proved man was incapable of loving God in Eden.

jeremiah256 wrote:

mo' ron wrote:

jeremiah256 wrote:

We'd be...ant people.

Haha, that's surprisingly accurate, I think.

Actually, ants seem smarter than most people.

This is nothing compared to the Twig of '92!