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Well, ok.. so you're sort of saying why couldn't God have just put on a puppet show to help us understand the difference between good and evil? (or as I see it good = love, evil = non-love) instead of making us actually EXPERIENCE it? Like, why couldn't we have just watched a movie or something about it?
Well why not?? If the end results can be acheived (and why can't they in the case of an omnimax deity) without inflicting pain, suffering and misery...why wouldn't a loving deity do it that way? What I mean is, if you can teach your child that hitting the cat with a stick is painful for the cat, in some other way than hitting your child with a stick to demonstrate what it feels like to be hit with a stick....wouldn't you do that?
I really don't get this business about having to experience something to know what it's like. My parents didn't force my hand into the fire to make me learn the consequences of touching a hot coal.
Well, let's say you didn't have nerve endings and you couldn't feel pain. So you had no idea what the cat felt like when he was getting hit with a stick, and if you didn't have compassion.... how would you learn that it is wrong to hit the cat with a stick?
Unless you either had your nerve endings reactivated and felt the pain or you developed compassion/empathy?
I understand your point about learning things without having to experience them, BUT.... you have to have some sort of reference point in order to understand what it is that you're learning. I mean, explain to me how you wouldn't.
Rafius, I've been thinking about this a lot ever since you brought it up...
At first I understood what you were saying and thought "yes, that's true...knowledge without experience"...after all, a child knows their mother loves them even when the mother hasn't beaten them with a stick. Then again, the child knows the mother loves them because they have experienced Less than absolute love from another source and their mother does not cause them harm, pain or suffering.
As sparrow says, maybe a "puppet show" wouldn't reach us because we need to Feel; we need to experience something on a cellular level for us to actually understand it completely. A bit like a maths or physics question (here's hoping you aren't a maths/physics genius...) when you're sitting in front of a problem question thinking "what the flip do I do?!". People explain it to you, professors, the internet, Maths for dummies books...and you still don't understand...Then, suddenly, out of nowhere...BAM!...it makes sense...like a lightbulb has been switched on it your brain...
Have you ever been watching a news report where they're telling you the death toll after a natural disaster, or a terrorist attack on the other side of the world, and you know it's horrific and terrible and it shouldn't be happening, but you can't Quite empathise with them 100%? I think maybe that's what a puppet show would be like... We would KNOW that what we were seeing was not showing love, but it wouldn't MEAN the same.
Then again, surely God can "download" that universal knowledge of what a lack of love is without us having to experience it...that way we would be Feeeeeeeling and experiencing it without actually having harm done to us...
Then again...what would be the point in life?
Regarding heaven, as I understand it, we would have knowledge and understand "evil" because we have lived on earth, not because the universal knowledge of "evil" had been "downloaded" into us without experiencing it...
Does all that make sense?? I think I've confused myself... This is why I can never have philosophical debates alone...I contradict my initial point!
Well, let's say you didn't have nerve endings and you couldn't feel pain. So you had no idea what the cat felt like when he was getting hit with a stick, and if you didn't have compassion.... how would you learn that it is wrong to hit the cat with a stick?
If you didn't have nerve endings and you didn't have compassion, how would the current system work i.e. what would be the point of your god making you suffer in order for you to know what it's like not to suffer? You wouldn't know would you?
You see, your argument that we must suffer in order to learn things has no merit IMO. We don't make our own children suffer to teach them lessons do we? We acheive the end result by other means. If your son is the school bully you don't beat him up and physically abuse him just so he can learn what it's like to be beaten up and abused. You'd soon find yourself in trouble if you did that and I'll wager that you wouldn't think twice about reporting it to the authorities if you learned that your neighbour was doing it to his son. Yet, you appear to have no quams whatsoever about this loving god doing it to HIS children. In fact, you positively welcome it.
...after all, a child knows their mother loves them even when the mother hasn't beaten them with a stick. Then again, the child knows the mother loves them because they have experienced Less than absolute love from another source and their mother does not cause them harm, pain or suffering.
Yes, exactly my friend. You have it in a nutshell. So why does Yahweh consider it necessary to inflict pain, misery and suffering on us in order that we may know 'love' when the mother manages to achieve the same results without inflicting the same on her child?
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As sparrow says, maybe a "puppet show" wouldn't reach us because we need to Feel; we need to experience something on a cellular level for us to actually understand it completely.
But we are talking about an omnimax deity here. A deity that can allegedly do anything it desires by just a thought. Are you saying that he is incapable of making us understand something without submitting us to pain and suffering?
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Have you ever been watching a news report where they're telling you the death toll after a natural disaster, or a terrorist attack on the other side of the world, and you know it's horrific and terrible and it shouldn't be happening, but you can't Quite empathise with them 100%? I think maybe that's what a puppet show would be like... We would KNOW that what we were seeing was not showing love, but it wouldn't MEAN the same.
Yes, I understand what you're saying but the analogy is far from what we are discussing. The present system and the one that you subscribe to, requires that we need to beat our children to give them an idea of what 'non-love' is so that when we do love them, they will understand the difference. I don't buy it!
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Then again, surely God can "download" that universal knowledge of what a lack of love is without us having to experience it...that way we would be Feeeeeeeling and experiencing it without actually having harm done to us...
Yes, yes exactly.
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Then again...what would be the point in life?
Perhaps the "point" would then be that millions of our brothers and sisters would not be subjected to suffering and misery for every day of their miserable lives.
What would be the point in life if we knew everything. Religions state that the telos of life is God and life must be spent becoming like God. Philosophies and belief systems such as Buddhism and humanism say life is about developing qualities that enable us to live harmoniously in a peaceful society. All these are based on the idea that qualities such as respect, support, empathy, forgiveness and love are to be acquired and/or developed. If we knew everything spontaneously, what would be the point in life?
If we knew everything spontaneously, what would be the point in life?
Why does there have to be a "point" to life? We are here. We exist. That's it....job done. We are nought but an act of nature. A "point" is not required.
Why does there have to be a "point" to life? We are here. We exist. That's it....job done. We are nought but an act of nature. A "point" is not required.
Any Christian who mistakenly tries to justify the heinous acts attributed to Jehovah in the OT by ignorant primitive savages needs to come back to Jesus and realize that the veil of ignorance still clouds the writings in the OT till this very day. I hope sparrow will abandon any misguided defense of those indefensible descriptions and focus on Christ, period. Leave the absurd defense of the indefensible to the Bibleans and the Churchians.
I've been quite busy with work, so I haven't had time to comment on this all. But I had a comment here:
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Originally Posted by Rafius
You see, your argument that we must suffer in order to learn things has no merit IMO. We don't make our own children suffer to teach them lessons do we?
Actually, yes we do - we do make our children "suffer", in a sense, to teach them a lesson. Examples:
1. Sending a 3 year old kid to the corner when they do something they shouldn't. In the kid's mind, that kid is suffering (at least my daughter was when I had to send her to the corner).
2. A Dad catches his kid smoking a cigarette. So he makes him smoke 20 more cigarettes to teach him a lesson. The kid gets sick of cigarettes and never smokes again.
Any kind of corrective punishment can be viewed as suffering, but it is for a good purpose - to correct.
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