Is Jesus Christ behind the high divorce rate in the USA?

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Is Jesus Christ the reason behind the high divorce rate in the USA since Jesus Christ said for husbands to hate their wives? Source: If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. (Luke: 14:26 - KJV) Should Jesus Christ be viewed as a hate monger? Does Jesus's exhortation for husbands to hate their wives and children prove that Jesus did not have the oars in the water and that Jesus Christ cannot possibly be the Messiah/God because Jesus was clearly a lunatic?

No.

Knock knock.

Who's there?

pgd

pgd who?

Please, God, don't let this be another of his elephant jokes.

Is it impossible to tell when Jesus Christ is telling the truth vs fibbing? (moved to stand as a separate question)

Taking you seriously, like it or not, that is precisely why after kindergarten [see the latest Rohr quote] the scriptures are recommended supplemental reading, not a textbook.

No good teacher [my definitions, after all I am the one talking so I get to define my own mode as "good"] teaches the textbook.

If you know what lies behind, the barriers of time and culture and translations of highly variable validity slide down and the person clicks into place.

Troll-igion topic

At least Mr. Pgd dows not ask for money.

Yes.

Not for the same reason though. Technically if Jesus/God exist, God is the 100% set of everything, cannot make something happen and not know its full outcome. Therefore there would be nothing in existence happening - ever - that's in any way deviant from his will.

Foreknowledge does not necessarily mean control. If we take God be working within the limits of logic and that he intends for us to have free will. Then God could only elect to create a wold into existence, in which free will and divine foreknowledge were not mutually exclusive.

Foreknowledge simply means that he can't create something like that and know the exact outcome all the way down to who would eat what for lunch on July 30th 468 BC or January 12th 3176 AD. Its not so much a free will thing so much as we have the right to be exactly who our genetics, externalities, and input knowledge and ideas allow us to be which is something extremely linear, for our lives or any part of nature not to be 100% linear as such would need a dynamic Z - typically the best answer for Z is the non-omniscience of God or a notion that God exists but isn't in control of all dynamics. Even THEN life is still 100% linear but perhaps 85% is known to God, 15% is from outside factors (ie. laws of the universe that he can't control) that he may be able to predict reasonably by this point but still has to task in order to keep things going as he wants them to. This would also attack any notion that he exists outside of time, to say that would be indicating that he created our entire existence before it was set in motion whereas for him to be constantly tampering with our environment would necessarily put him firmly within time.

The passage is rather complex to simplify with citing one verse out of context. Its not saying to unnecessarily hate your own family, which i view as a strong. word. I'm not sure what the original context of the aramaic word is. After all, Jesus also says to love others as you love yourself and to love your enemies. My guess is the context of "hate" is similar to a passage in Corinthians that talks about dealing with an adulturer in the church by giving him to Satan, letting him go from the church, to save his soul. The idea was that the church needed to have strong people in it to be able to save sinners and such down the road or else it would fall apart and nobody would be saved.

Luke 14 is mainly talking about lukewarm, flavorless passivity and how he doesn't want people part of his church that get caught up in daily life and material possessions so much to actually change their souls and to save the world. It also notes how thee poor don't have the worldly attachments and set backs that their bourgeois counterparts have because they have nothing to loose in it.

He's not saying to specifically hate them but be prepared to hate them, to estimate the costs, if people and possessions get in the way of tearing away their own egos seeing the big picture and ultimately finding justice. honor, and dignity for the future of the human species. That's how I interpret it anyway.

@ techstepgenr8tion

I think you may have mistaken my position for or seem to be advocating something like open-theism. Open theism is not really a viable view of Gods divine foreknowledge because it does not deal with the divine omnipotent capacity for do to deal in counterfactuals (an omnipotent God could run any scenario to know the outcome and would have full foreknowledge as a logical consequence, there is no reason to think that God would need to run such a scenario in order to know these things, hence, omniscience is attached to omnipotence).

You also seem to be making divine foreknowledge into some sort of theodicy, rather my own view (Molinism) is itself a defense (considering the context I put it forward within). It therefor does not have anything to do with probability, since to the theist who believes in a omnipotent and omniscient being (grounded in logic), something like Molinism, due to its status as a defense, can be claimed to be true (due to the epistemologically sound belief in free will). In order to disprove the Molinist view, one would therefor need to mount a defeater rather than a probability.

Secondly even if a supporter of divine foreknowledge and free will put forward Molinism as a theodicy rather than a defense, then one simply cannot throw away one aspect of the divine makeup (such as omniscience) in order to argue away the Molinist position. Your example of the dynamic Z is therefor invalid since you are claiming the dynamic Z is the primary part of the argument creates a kind of false argument. Since Molinism seeks to demonstrate that in a world where God is both omnipotent and omniscient, something like Molinism is most likely to be true. Postulating a world where God is not omniscient does nothing to undermine a Molinist theodicy, which is predicated on an omniscient God. This is also due, in part, to the relationship between God's omnipotent and omniscient makeup, discussed above).

As to the typically best answer, this presupposes that God should, most likely, be non or semi-omniscient. There is really no way one could actually judge this to be true. Since if a God is both omnipotent and omniscient then something like Molinism would be true and we would have no way of knowing the likelihood of having either a God who is omnipotent and omniscient or a makeup of other values (I am not sure how one would really begin to argue likelihood in these matters in any publishable way).

As to the nature of God being within time or out, this is really a totally separate subject, suffice to say, in my view, God could be either (depending on which theory of time one uses).

Last edited by 91 on 27 Jan 2011, 4:13 am, edited 1 time in total.

91, I guess the trouble with this last post is that I'm not quite as read on interchurch arguments, and because of that I really didn't grasp much of what was there aside from that Molinism is for those who believe in both free will and complete divine foreknowledge? Having just looked it up now I see it's a belief that God surveys all possible worlds and chooses one? That in and of itself is problematic and here's why:

What I was really getting at with my earlier post - there's no such thing as a probability. A probability only exists as a best guess for those who don't have the mental capacity to map all variables, thus we run statistics which is the next best thing. For the truly omniscient probabilities are 100% for one outcome and 0% for everything else. That's why the concept of free-will is confusing, as in it makes intuitive/emotional sense from our own perspective and interrelations with each other, even if that sense is erroneous, but when you hold it up to proper inspection it becomes an utterly vacuous notion. We're 23 chromosomes from each parent, pumped full of beliefs from an environment, and if that's not bad enough there's absolutely no sign that if I walked into a casino tomorrow and through lucky 7's, that if that time between walking in the door and the dice falling were played over ad infinitum, that there would be anything more than a carbon copy - it would be tantamount to watching a reel of security camera footage over and over again but perhaps without the tape wearing out. If space, time, and matter are really nailed down this tight - there's really no wiggle room and no room for someone to have split off on two different courses of reality based on things that worked out differently. Pretty much, if my observation is the case, what happens is exactly what happens, thus the future is as fixed as history - it simply has yet to be acted out. Overall though - whether God has full custody of space and time, majority custody, or even minority custody, it still doesn't change how many paths there are going forward or backward in time.

This is where God's creation of literally one path for every object comes down to making every event before it happens via his foreknowledge. Much like its easy to ask which causes what - does prayer cause God to bring things into reality for us or does God's desire to give us things cause him to, in some people's cases, have us writing in influences that cause us to pray? If the whole story of everything past, present, and future, was built like a Heron of Alexandria play or like one of Anthony Hopkins' marble tracks in Fracture - it seems that effect can just as easily come before cause, all dependent on how the designer thought things through.

^^^^

Let me explain Molinism a bit. The point of Molinism is to indicate that foreknowledge and free will are not incompatible. Under Molinism God has at his choosing a large number of words that he can create. From which he choses what to actualize. Since, under the Christian view, God gave us free will and his nature is both omnipotent and omniscience then he could logically only elect a word where this was the case. If he elected a world where everything was decided, then there would be no free will. However, under the Molinst view, God has elected a world where his plan for salvation can and will be obtained, he knows this and that within this world all of our choices (are known yes) but they are still our own. The argument against Molinism is that, since God necessarily (as a property) knows our choices (free will as a property also), that all of these choices are predetermined and therefor not really choices.

The best way to understand Molinism and free will is to look at the concept of 'necessity'. There is no such thing as a married bachelor, but is it necessarily true that all bachelors are unmarried? Lets look; Sam is a bachelor, does that mean that Sam is a necessarily a bachelor, does that mean that he could not be anything except a bachelor? No of course not. The same is true of foreknowledge, God looks at you and knows that you will stand up, does that mean that it is impossible for you to decide to stand up? No. There could be a possible world where you were already standing, you are not making this decision necessarily due to the foreknowledge. Hence under Molinism God's foreknowledge and your choice are not contradictory, you clearly could have chosen something else (it is not necessarily true that what God sees is what you must have chosen, you could have chosen else, in some other possible world), God just knows the outcome.

I would have to disagree with the Molinists then. Between determinism and Molinism the topic is one of how to split hairs, determinists would indicate that there is a clear line in the sand for material causation of either one action or another - no matter how minute, while a Molinist would try to claim that there's irreducible blur in certain situations.

Examining razor's edge decisions though, perhaps even with more fuzzy when no moral dilemma exists - I wake up, I'm hungry, and I look out in the kitchen and see a yogurt and a bagel available. If they're both equally appealing but I only want one, if its really a dead heat, I might hem and haw over the decision for a while but then I'll perhaps start thinking on which way I'd go for lunch, whether I'll want the one tomorrow over the other based on plans I know about, etc. etc.. Ultimately, whichever one I chose - all the environmental factors and my state from waking up to thinking about which to go with played directly in my decision making. For me to have chosen otherwise, other things would have needed to happen.

I don't really see where there's any such blur or probability aside from our own limited perspectives, lack of self awareness, etc.. If God didn't have access to the details and was stuck guessing, the Molinistic outlook could be a subjective truth for God in his own lack of knowledge but - that's not what they argue for from what your saying, they're arguing for omniscience and free will at the same time, probabilities are something that can only exist as something 'real' to those who don't know all the variables or lack the cognitive gearing to know all of the variables on what's happening. For a weather forecaster, for example, to say 60% chance of rain, its his admition that his science is far from perfect and that the math is far too complex and surpasses the data recording means that they have available, if this wasn't so there would be no 30%, 40%, 70%, the weather man would be telling us 'Tuesday, at 8:30, this is what will happen' and we could take his word to the bank without any caveats or percentages. God, similarly with omniscience, has full minutial clarity on the details so probability can't exist from his side.

One factor I feel determinists always seem to ignore is consciousness. They say its only a secondary phenomenon, but I think its actually at the forefront. If everything was purely mechanistic, there would be pretty much no need for an observer at all. There is one, though, and I think its a good chance that this observer is proof of free will and proof of something that has the power to create and shape reality in a limited capacity.

Elaborate. It'd be cool if someone could show me that free will can't but logically exist.