All the problems with Christianity

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Is that what your new thread was? It had the cryptic subject line "418" and the equally cryptic contents "For 8 T N" followed by more of your spam linking to your website. In view of the incomprehensibility of the thread I removed it.

Sorry you view it that way. I will no longer post links here.
Life is kind of cryptic. I'm not making any money off my blog.
I am just trying to communicate IT.

And sorry you didn't understand it; others fully understand IT.

I'm glad you brought this up, it's a very intelligent question to ask. I've considered it before myself, and here's my somewhat complex response.

First off, let's look at another question here: is free will a "sliding scale" or an "either-or"?

Other animals have verying degrees of intelligence, with a housecat obviously drastically smarter than a earthworm, yet does that make a housecat have a "degree of free will"? Since we ascribe moral blame to only being applicable to free will, then if a housecat did have some degree of free will, it would be sensible to say that a cat can commit a degree of moral good or evil. Most people would not say this though, nor would they ascribe any level of moral blame to any animals other than humans.

This points to the concept of free will actually being "either-or", meaning it's something that we either have or we don't, there are no "degrees" of free will inbetween. Now that's not to say things can interfere in humans' abilities that come from free will. We often consider the severely mentally ret*d or brain damaged to not have the same degree of blame to their actions, but this seems like more of a physical interference in their free will, which would have otherwise been the same as anyone else's if not for the physical limitations of their malformed or damaged brain. Therefore, I think we can still say more appropriately that humans, as a whole, have free will, while no other animals do.

To further this point, just think about what some inbetween degree of free will might look like. Try to think of it without including some physical limitation on an animal or person. Is there even any way to conceptulize the idea of "partial free will"? If there is, I haven't found it. You either can go against your instincts or you can't. You can either have the ability of mastery over them, or you're forever a slave to them without it.

Now if you're willing to accept my analysis of free will not having degrees, then here's where my response to your question comes in:
- God does everything with a purpose (he never just does random stuff).
- God chose to create us with free will.
- Since free will is an absolute (doesn't have degrees), God must value free will absolutely.
- Supressing free will is contractictory to creating it, since it would go against God's own value.
- God is not contradictory.
- Therefore, God will not supress free will.

If you're describing humankind's imperfection as being linked to our free will, then it certainly is a valid question to raise. But let's keep in mind that in order to raise it you basically have to be saying that you consider having free will to be worse than not having free will. And some people might certainly say that, but I think the majority of people value their own free will very much, and are glad they are human rather than some other animal that doesn't have free will.
And that's how God's act of creating us with free will can still be considered a good thing even while acknowledging that free will by logical definition can potentially allow for evil to be done.

I make no such assertion. Theists equate free will with the ability to do evil deeds. I'm attempting to reason with you based on Christian assumptions, not my own.



By logical definition, free will cannot exist in a universe in which there is an omniscient being. Predetermination is a fundamental requirement of a theist belief system that includes an omniscient and omnipotent god.

That's an interesting assertion... I'm interested to hear a further explanation of it.

Christians (who are not alone in this) believe their god to be omniscient, omnipotent and infallible. If such a being exists, he must therefore transcend time in order to have complete knowledge of all that was, that is and that will be. The existence of any such being with this sort of knowledge completely precludes free will, as our deeds and actions are already known.

Free will relies on a future that is pliant, not one which is set in stone. An omniscient being is therefore incompatible with the existence of free will.

This also means that an omniscient being who is also omnipotent is logically impossible. If the future is already set in stone, men nor gods have the power to change it.

aghogday, you have previously posted some of the most well researched and detailed posts on WrongPlanet, and you deserve full credit for that.

But recently, your posts have become increasingly difficult to comprehend... I advise that you sit back for awhile and try to be more concise, as your recent posts in PPR are - for now - less than worthy in the light of your previous accomplishments on WP.

Except that within Christian theology, the story of sin entering the world through the Original Sin, the transgression of Adam and Eve is often taken as fundamental. It's the reason why the world is as screwed up as it is, rather than being able to find Edenic peace.

I mean if you want to drop it, then you can go ahead and do so, but the problem is that other stories about how evil came into the world don't show the existence of evil as being at all necessary. It's a contingent result of certain historical forces where if a God chose, we could freely do without this choice.


You mean some Christians, and this is a matter of debate because of the issue of Satan's kingdom in scripture. One can't have a kingdom of negation otherwise how does one rule over it?

Even further if we're going to talk about evil, what about natural evil and the degree to which natural disasters strike and harm human beings? There is no reason for divine absence in nature, but these bad things still occur.


And we lose this freedom in heaven? And infants who die in youth never have this freedom? And Christ's maintaining his sinlessness is still kept as morally meaningful?

Even further, you assert we have this "free will", but do you actually have evidence that this is even how the brain works? The reason I bring this up is because there are reasons to think that aspects of your experience of free will are delusions(so, most people have the experience of making choices daily or even by the second, but research finds small decisions are made unconsciously through a set of processes mysterious and unknown to our conscious brain. See the Libet experiment. )

Finally, what psychological researchers find is that in nearly ALL instances of evil, both parties believe that they are doing the right thing and that the other side is not honoring their legitimate claims. Some have that the story of "Good vs Evil" in some triumphant narrative is really the myth of evil, and that real transgressions aren't actually so black and white, but rather usually involve ongoing tensions where the "evil" side is simply the side that lost, or the one that simply stepped over the line, not a matter of saints vs sinners though. And so talking about how we're choosing between "good and evil" ends up utterly disconnecting with our own experienced life. If I go to drink Starbucks, am I choosing evil? If I pay taxes to the US government, am I choosing evil? If I join our armed forces out of patriotism and get sent overseas, did I choose evil? Somehow the only "evil" people that remain under this scrutiny are either people in the most unusual circumstances, circumstances which we are not fit to judge due to our lack of understanding of them, or people with real psychological struggles, either that or we're all evil as we drink our Starbucks coffee, greet our friends, and enjoy our weekends. Either way appears to be a violation of the narrative of choosing good vs evil.


In short you can't find a reason but you're dogmatically holding to your story in defiance of good reason? As a sign of some degree of self-lobotomization?

I mean, I'll be direct: we're not justified in believing things that stand contrary to the body of evidence, and/or things that simply do not make sense and seem to be continually intractable. This does not make sense, and it seems like it will always be intractable. We've had millennia to see these "crooked lines be redeemed", and yet for every rape there are more therapy bills than real answers, what remains is largely tears, and for every international brutality what remains is a world order that can still dispense more of these brutalities in the future.


The problem is that to make "the leap of faith" is to give up good judgment. Do we judge a man favorably for betting all of his money on the lotto in contradiction to sense? Do we judge somebody favorably for trusting prayer and witchdoctors over medical professionals? No, we do not. I'm not saying that a person has to go through life with every answer, but to explicitly give up on good judgment and discernment is as close to a moral failing as I think we could ever perceive. I'd hope you'd know better than to do this if it were your finances, I'd hope you'd know to do better if it were your health or that of a loved one, but on this matter you jump to a favored conclusion without considering the evidence, and probably without even recognizing that if we jumped that early, we'd all simply go to our favored beliefs rather than the truth.


I've tried it for much longer. It's one of my larger mistakes and I really do wish I had shown more discernment rather than drinking the koolaid.

1) How do we know he gave us free will?
2) By that definition does that entail that God lacks free will? Would that entail that Christ lacked free will and thus cannot be a moral exemplar for us because he never actually ever chose to do a good thing? Finally, does that mean that God when in heaven will strip us of all of our free will.
3) Following 2) why must the ability to choose involve much potential to choose evil things? I mean, do many people choose to leap off of cliffs like lemmings? No, and the few that would are usually diagnosed with a medical problem. Do most of us choose to cover our bodies with feces and walk all the time in such a state? No, and the idea wouldn't even occur to us. Do most of us solve 2+2 by saying it equals 5? No, and largely this would be impossible for us.

So, why couldn't this have been a matter where the failure state was implausible or even where rational coercion would keep us from it.


Why not say that human beings will actually use social coercion on other human beings and will not on tigers?

The same thing accounts for our data, and actually makes more sense in light of the fact that human evil actions usually aren't as stark as imagined, but rather involve real people on that other side who think they're doing the right thing in that context. I mean, if "free will" were actually the explanation then why don't we have more people who we say are evil who acknowledge that they made the choice to do evil? If they don't experience the "choice to do evil", then what makes us so certain that we really have the right explanation rather than dogmatically holding to some myth about how the world works?


So, if God *can* do evil, how do you know he HASN'T?

Even further, aren't the problems of agency really brought to the forefront if we say that God can exhaustively control the set of possible actions a human can undertake? I mean, while we may generally deny culpability in cases where we deny control. It seems clear to me that if we give control solely to another agent, that we do give some responsibility for those actions to that other person. If I purchase the services of a hitman, for instance, then I am responsible to some extent for his killing. Well, the problem here is that by God's divine plan, he has prescribed the role for each and all of us. If he didn't prescribe these roles in a relatively exhaustive sense, he would not be able to have a divine plan. The problem we run into is that God has set up the world in a such a manner that certain bad things will definitely happen. It seems to me that this undermines the very moral separation people need for that kind of argument, as it's no longer so clear that we're independently moral agents, so much as simply blindly executing God's plan through his unfathomable manipulations, and so... how is God NOT like the man who ordered a hit on his wife?


Right, and Skynet's creators would not have acted unevilly if they knew creating skynet would lead to evil. The problem here is that God knows the consequences, and he has known from the beginning and foreseen everything out according to his divine plans for the world. As such, it seems less fit to focus on our moral freedom than to recognize that we are effectively pawns in his chess game. To say otherwise would seem to require us to deny divine omniscience.

Err... assuming that libertarian/acausal free will is even a reasonable view of how our moral agency works(something I don't even see strong reasons to take for granted).

Even further, granting acausal free will, it seems like the only free will that would exist would be bounded. There are definitely things people don't really tend to ever do. And probably a few that are nearly inconceivable save for the mentally ill among us.

That being said... I have no reason to even think this is a relevant or good notion. I mean, what good does it do mankind to say that our actions are the result of the flip of a metaphysical coin? If there are lines of causation, then the matter is deterministic. However, in the absence, what is actually making the determination? A vagueness. Something with the logical properties most similar to a coin flip. Let's just face it. If you have "free will" such that your actions are not determined by preceding facts, then if you were faced with the exact same situation again, you could make an utterly different choice, it wouldn't be rooted in your character, it wouldn't be rooted in the context, it would be no different than flipping a coin twice: one time it may hit heads and the other time it may have tails. If you'd like to dispute that, then could you please tell me what substantive procedural difference there is between your free will and that coinflip?


The third is not a result of logic. Free will being an absolute says nothing about how God must value it. Suppression isn't contradictory to creating something either, so I may have a goal state, and this goal state may be best actualized through some middle combination.

I'm going to say something slightly controversial but it might clear up misconceptions that are even more fundamental.

it seems like its inescapable that the bible itself is a very occult/esoteric book. Its not intended to be a documentary. If you've ever read the thing through and had the 7's, 12's, and 3's dancing enough circles around your head to make your eyes go googly or really had to scratch your head as to why Cherubim and the four beasts in Revelation match the four cardinal points of the zodiac - its a normal reaction. Seeing odd parallels between John's writings and neoplatonic/hermetic thought also isn't abnormal.

(can anyone tell me why I have to keep clearing web bot riddles to post something even as short as this? WP security is really starting to get out of control)

Hi everyone, sorry I've been getting behind on this thread. Anyway...
The question of the infallibility of the Bible has been brought up a few times so far and I'd like to answer it, but first let me make 1 more comment on the issue of evil:
It has been said that the world was created for our good and God's glory, and the problem of evil makes far more sense in light of this idea. If a country is in peacetime, it is difficult to see how powerful it is and how well it can stand up to adversity. It is only after it comes into conflict with another country that we can see the greater one in all its glory. It is the same way with good and evil. We can only see how good goodness is when we understand evil. We can only know how powerful the kingdom of God is after it stands up to Satan's massive rebellion. This means that we can't judge God too harshly on evil until we see whether He comes out victorious in the end. This is how evil things work for God's glory.
But they work for our good as well. You see, just as God's kingdom cannot be seen in all its glory without evil, God's people might not become strong without it either. An experienced soldier is not simply barely alive when he comes out of a long war; he is all the better for it. He is stronger, more tactical, and his instincts are superior to when he was less experienced. He grows in his love for his country and in the appreciation of what it stands for. The battle between good and evil is likewise: One day, the evil will be defeated, and we will come out the better for it.
Now on the question of the bible: One of the best arguments in its favor is fulfilled prophecy. The Old Testament is full of prophecies, and theGospels are full of the fulfillments of them. That means that if the Gospels are true, it gives tremendous credibility to the Old Testament. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that it is true. We know that the Gospels were written soon after the time of Jesus (i.e. soon afer the 30s). Also, the Gospels included details from prophecy that the Jewish people by that time had largely ignored, e.g. the details of Jesus's crucifixion. This means that what was written in the gospels was a historical account and not just something made up to make Jesus look real. Here are some sources:
http://100prophecies.org/
http://pleaseconvinceme.com/2012/the-ea ... -of-jesus/

Experienced soldier? So, that explains the PTSD? That explains the maiming? I mean, look your soldier example does not seem to be true to the workings of war on people. Soldiers who went through WW2, Vietnam or anything similar have scars. They lose people who they will never get back. They have difficulty adjusting to peace time in many cases. And... if you have this naive exalted view on war, I'm not sure I should trust your intuitions about suffering and religion.

As for fulfilled prophecy, the problem is that the Bible is usually the work that says that the prophecy was fulfilled, and because authors and later readers have their own drive to fulfill these prophecies, it creates a very bad/untrustworthy system of fulfillment. I'm not going to try to go through all 100 prophecies, but from what I can see a lot of them really are cases where the authors of the Gospels could have written in order to fulfill what they perceived as a prophecy. This really makes it difficult to give a lot of credibility.

Also, being written decades after the fact isn't really a strong sign of how credible something is. We have internet urban legends that barely took any time to ever develop. We have a website called "snopes" dedicated to disproving piles of BS, many of which really only came out in the last decade or so.

I mean, none of these "proofs" are written for people who are already skeptical of the credibility of the matter as they deeply rely on assuming it's credible with insufficient argument. They're written for Christians to reaffirm themselves by saving the "doubtful" parts of their web of belief by reaffirming other parts connected to it. For somebody missing a lot of those premises, it's meaningless. Joseph Smith's tablets wouldn't be more proved by the same kinds of arguments.(And he had his own eyewitnesses too)

OMG! Same experience!

Thank you for the kind compliment. This latest research project I undertake is the most detailed and exhausting research of my life. I approach the topic of God from an empirical and spiritual basis.

I did not have the spiritual connection as it was lost along with my health in 2008 after not being able to sleep but 35 hours in a span of 40 days along with a type of atypical nerve pain behind my right eye that was like someone stabbing me in the right eye 24/7 for 60 months.

I started out on 4 MG of Ativan to finally sleep on 4/27/2008, and finally weaned myself off it last night. That was probably the part that was impossible to understand as I meant @Evan for Ativan. I do not even want to see that word; as it saved my life to sleep but destroyed my spirit and emotions.

My attempt has been to provide empirical evidence that there is no time, distance or space in the nature of true reality. In doing this; it requires interaction from others to study and document the phenomenon.

My latest post was one of celebration of connecting my spiritual love, human love, and affect of contact of full joy and sadness.

I am still as or more rational than I have ever been in my life.

However, I can tell my wife I love her and mean it now. If I appear as a fool on a website, that is little consequence to me as compared to the love of my wife.

However, I am dead serious about what I am doing. It is no joke at all. If one is curious all they have to do is ask.

I have spent the last 64 months typing and researching from waking to sleeping each day; with only one day where I took respite from this. It was the only thing that allowed me to survive removing some attention of pain with that Ice Pick in my eye that no drug could touch for pain.

I am very disappointed in this website as I do know what I have contributed and promoted all across my travels to hundreds of others sites in the Autism Community and beyond on how great this website is. This Wrong Planet website is only a small part of well over 5 million words typed on almost every subject of research one could likely imagine; in many other venues.

I did not break any rules on this website intentionally and have always complied when I did something that I was not aware of that was a problem.

I am not a mind reader though; at least not yet. :)

I finished my spiritual journey today with that 418; it means more than you know. This website serves the purpose it is suited for, in my journey. In fact you are participating in that journey as we speak. I did not want that link published where it was.

I am finished with the links; there are no more to link. I will likely continue to participate here if allowed as a rational mind winning the rational arguments through hard work of research and presentation of facts, when possible.

Again, I do appreciate that comment. :) It is very rare that anyone speaks to me about anything regardless of how rational I appear.

In fact, there are more people speaking to me ever than before, in other venues because they likely think I am little 'crazy' and are little curious. That is part of the effect of what I am doing for it to appear that way. It is a necessary part of the research.

I didn't think my little posts would be of significance whether they existed here or not, in the view of those who could just overlook them. They are only a few teaser words with a link as Cornflake suggested to me as advice earlier this year.

It bothered me a little today, probably because I am still weaning myself off the last remnants of the Ativan in my system. Otherwise it would have been of no consequence and not worth my attention. ;)