Is the Christian God the first cause of sin?
16 Aug 2019, 9:47 am
Given the cruel and harsh world that we live in I think it's safe to presume that God does in fact not exist.
If God existed then clearly he would have helped out people who are abused or bullied or who face some other kind of troubles.
But the fact is, as things stand, God never helps people who are abused, or bullied or who find themselves in some other kind of hardship or trouble in life.
So I think it is therefore rational to presume that God in fact does not exist at all, otherwise this world would have been a much better and happier place for many abused, neglected, impoverished or bullied people.
16 Aug 2019, 10:06 am
Absurd.
I have had those things you mention happen to me & would have shot myself long ago if not for the twofold help of Religion and Science.
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16 Aug 2019, 10:14 am
I have had those things you mention happen to me & would have shot myself long ago if not for the twofold help of Religion and Science.
What I'm saying is that religion is most likely BS because it has never really helped me through anything in my life. I'm still not better off than I was 10 years ago despite the existence of religion.
Science on the other is based on trying to find facts about how the universe really works and operates so it is something else entirely different from religion.
In my opinion religion is based on lies on top of lies while science is based on facts about how the world really works, including at the most fundamental level.
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16 Aug 2019, 10:48 am
The thing that annoys me about science is the way scientists are constantly changing their minds about what is and isn't fact, and nothing EVER exists until an expert with a PHD in whatever decided it exists. 
Also scientists have pretty much claimed that love, empathy, and compassion are all just a delusional state of mind. Your own child pretty much has no more value than that apple you ate for lunch.
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16 Aug 2019, 11:10 am
I have had those things you mention happen to me & would have shot myself long ago if not for the twofold help of Religion and Science.
What I'm saying is that religion is most likely BS because it has never really helped me through anything in my life. I'm still not better off than I was 10 years ago despite the existence of religion.
Science on the other is based on trying to find facts about how the universe really works and operates so it is something else entirely different from religion.
In my opinion religion is based on lies on top of lies while science is based on facts about how the world really works, including at the most fundamental level.
I feel like religion has helped me in my life. As far as whether religion is beneficial or not we could probably argue all day.
16 Aug 2019, 11:41 am
I really never wanted this to be a thread about where God exists or not, or whether scientific thinking has problems or not. The fact is, it is impossible to prove one way or another because there is no data.
My hope was to keep it focused on the initial topic, i.e. what are the necessary implications of some of the axioms presented in Christian thought? At least there are known premises we can discuss there.
16 Aug 2019, 11:43 am
If you disagree with the above, then one of the following must be true:
God is not all powerful, because he was unable to make a world that suited his purposes without the inclusion of sin.
God is not all-knowing, and he did not know that humans would sin when he created them.
Not true. You have jumped to conclusions, made assumptions and judged God.
Why do people play games, when they know they may lose? Because a game that you can lose is exciting.
God could have created human beings to have free will so as to make them more interesting and less predictable.
He may have intentionally created mankind so that he intentionally has no control over us, out of interest.
As surely that would be more interesting than creating dumb robots.
Imagine if you were to create two computer games. One that had creatures in it that were like simple robots that followed a programmed set of instructions, that were completely predictable and ran to a schedule.
In the second game, you also created robots that had artificial intelligence that included free will programming,
so that the programmers could not predict them. Place both sets of robots into their own game environment.
Which game would be the most interesting?
Some also have the theory that our world of sin, is the training ground that naughty human beings need to go through in order to rejoin God in Bliss in the garden of Eden.
We can not join God at the mo, as we are not made of the same stuff. We need to purify ourselves to make us compatible.
Through our lives, we may also make ourselves more interesting. As remember, God created Mankind originally to be his companions in the Garden of Eden. Genesis doesn't explain how many of us he will need. perhaps just two....
If you look at other creationist theories, you will find other interesting transcendental theory.
Worth reading up on. rather than trying to write something that makes you feel clever for a moment
but which is flawed with human logic. If humans are so clever, then why don't they just make their own perfect universe and go live in it with the creatures that they have made...
16 Aug 2019, 12:21 pm
If you disagree with the above, then one of the following must be true:
God is not all powerful, because he was unable to make a world that suited his purposes without the inclusion of sin.
God is not all-knowing, and he did not know that humans would sin when he created them.
Not true. You have jumped to conclusions, made assumptions and judged God.
Why do people play games, when they know they may lose? Because a game that you can lose is exciting.
God could have created human beings to have free will so as to make them more interesting and less predictable.
He may have intentionally created mankind so that he intentionally has no control over us, out of interest.
As surely that would be more interesting than creating dumb robots.
Imagine if you were to create two computer games. One that had creatures in it that were like simple robots that followed a programmed set of instructions, that were completely predictable and ran to a schedule.
In the second game, you also created robots that had artificial intelligence that included free will programming,
so that the programmers could not predict them. Place both sets of robots into their own game environment.
Which game would be the most interesting?
Some also have the theory that our world of sin, is the training ground that naughty human beings need to go through in order to rejoin God in Bliss in the garden of Eden.
We can not join God at the mo, as we are not made of the same stuff. We need to purify ourselves to make us compatible.
Through our lives, we may also make ourselves more interesting. As remember, God created Mankind originally to be his companions in the Garden of Eden. Genesis doesn't explain how many of us he will need. perhaps just two....
If you look at other creationist theories, you will find other interesting transcendental theory.
Worth reading up on. rather than trying to write something that makes you feel clever for a moment
but which is flawed with human logic. If humans are so clever, then why don't they just make their own perfect universe and go live in it with the creatures that they have made...
Which of my premises do you think is wrong?
16 Aug 2019, 4:48 pm
[quote="naturalpl
The English Lit nerd in me is gratified at this.[/quote]
You disagree that God was setting up Adam and Eve like a pair of bowling pins.
But then you quote a poem that agrees with me.
Yeah. That IS a paradox![/quote]
It was their decision. How is that a set-up?
Incidentally, in the early Church, Adam & Eve were/are considered to be saints. Interesting.[/quote]
That's why it was a set up.
God dangled the tempting fruit in front of them.
Why didn't god put the tree up on a remote mountain, instend of planting it right in front of them in their front yard, and why didn't he cloak the tree in nasty thorns, and why did he play on reverse psychology and make the forbidden fruit "a forbidden fruit" (if you know what I mean), and etc. God knew all along that they would succumb.[/quote]
The cops lure you into commiting a crime, and then arrest your for that crime. That's enough to be considered "entrapment". The cops don't have to put a gun to your head and force you against your will to commit a crime.
16 Aug 2019, 5:22 pm
It is hard to imagine a universe where 1+1 = 3, however it also seems like if God is truly ALL powerful, he should be able to reconstitute reality as such.
I think a lot of Christians (particularly the fundamentalists type) would have a hard time saying something like, "God is also bound by the laws of logic."
I think this is based on an erroneous and linguistic idea of what power and laws are. "Law" and "bound" imply subjection and coercion, generally speaking, and the vestiges of this meaning are present in any statement to the effect that God is "bound" to such and such "laws", but that's not the sense in which the words are being used in this particular instance. I think that it would be best to view this way of thinking as a defect of our limited human minds: it's true that the words "God could have chosen to constitute the laws of logic differently than he did" form a grammatically correct sentence, but so is, to use Chomsky's example, the sentence "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" - but what does it mean? In the words of Wittgenstein, "anything that can be said, can be said clearly".
Ultimately, we have to acknowledge that our limited minds, although they can come to know of the existence of God with certainty, according to the Catholic Church, cannot know of his nature except in a limited way.
Once we have demonstrated the existence of God with certainty, which I believe we can do, any other, nontrivial questions have to be settled by appeal to revelation, tradition and authority, and we can only have good prima facie rational reasons for accepting the answers, not proof.
Of course, the truth of revelation too - and therefore the Christian conception of God - suffers with this problem, so that Christian dogmas, aside from that of the existence of God, can only be held, at best, on the basis of probability. But the same is true of their negations.
In summary, I believe that the existence of God can be demonstrated with certainty, but that the truth of Christianity has to be demonstrated by historical evidence for things like the miracles of Jesus, usually the Resurrection, which for obvious reasons are much less certain. I think deism and Christianity are both reasonable; for me, what decides it is an appeal to practical reason, in Kant's terms - would I rather live in an as it were Christian world, or a deist one?
16 Aug 2019, 8:36 pm
Original Sin is the harshest thing humanity has had to deal with; a scourge like no other.
I'm autistic. I'm a rule follower. If I would have been in the Garden of Eden and presumably would have had eternal life in a place of which I'd want for nothing and God would have told me that I would live forever in literal paradise save for one very important rule....don't eat the fruit of one tree...I can say that, Devil-snake or not, I would not eat the fruit of that one tree. Sucks that we've all had to suffer because of it. I would wager a fortune that Eve and Adam were NT.
19 Aug 2019, 9:16 am
It is hard to imagine a universe where 1+1 = 3, however it also seems like if God is truly ALL powerful, he should be able to reconstitute reality as such.
I think a lot of Christians (particularly the fundamentalists type) would have a hard time saying something like, "God is also bound by the laws of logic."
I think this is based on an erroneous and linguistic idea of what power and laws are. "Law" and "bound" imply subjection and coercion, generally speaking, and the vestiges of this meaning are present in any statement to the effect that God is "bound" to such and such "laws", but that's not the sense in which the words are being used in this particular instance. I think that it would be best to view this way of thinking as a defect of our limited human minds: it's true that the words "God could have chosen to constitute the laws of logic differently than he did" form a grammatically correct sentence, but so is, to use Chomsky's example, the sentence "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" - but what does it mean? In the words of Wittgenstein, "anything that can be said, can be said clearly".
Ultimately, we have to acknowledge that our limited minds, although they can come to know of the existence of God with certainty, according to the Catholic Church, cannot know of his nature except in a limited way.
Once we have demonstrated the existence of God with certainty, which I believe we can do, any other, nontrivial questions have to be settled by appeal to revelation, tradition and authority, and we can only have good prima facie rational reasons for accepting the answers, not proof.
Of course, the truth of revelation too - and therefore the Christian conception of God - suffers with this problem, so that Christian dogmas, aside from that of the existence of God, can only be held, at best, on the basis of probability. But the same is true of their negations.
In summary, I believe that the existence of God can be demonstrated with certainty, but that the truth of Christianity has to be demonstrated by historical evidence for things like the miracles of Jesus, usually the Resurrection, which for obvious reasons are much less certain. I think deism and Christianity are both reasonable; for me, what decides it is an appeal to practical reason, in Kant's terms - would I rather live in an as it were Christian world, or a deist one?
I think it is fair to say that, of my original premises, you refute: 4. The Bible is literally true, and represents an accurate depiction of events as they actually happened (that is to say, it is not metaphorical).
That is a fair objection, and certainly resolves the logical conundrum which interested me initially.
Thank you for sharing your interesting perspective.
19 Aug 2019, 9:19 am
I'm autistic. I'm a rule follower. If I would have been in the Garden of Eden and presumably would have had eternal life in a place of which I'd want for nothing and God would have told me that I would live forever in literal paradise save for one very important rule....don't eat the fruit of one tree...I can say that, Devil-snake or not, I would not eat the fruit of that one tree. Sucks that we've all had to suffer because of it. I would wager a fortune that Eve and Adam were NT.
What is your take on God's foreknowledge that Adam/man would sin? Are there any implications given that he went ahead with that version creation anyways, even though he could have altered creation to both suit any and all of his purposes and avoid original sin(because he is all-powerful)?
19 Aug 2019, 11:09 am
Your assumption that God could have set things up differently so that Adam and Eve/humanity as a whole did not sin is rooted in a kind of biological determinism.
For one thing, contrary to popular belief, early or "traditional" Christianity does not insist that we look at the story of Genesis completely literally (I know that's hard for people on the spectrum but we have to try).
Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge, specifically gaining the ability to know good and evil. Thus, they went from being perfectly innocent and blameless of evil just like the animals in the Garden of Eden, to being capable of recognizing evil and still partaking in it-- this is essentially free will. Adam and Eve, through their own willfulness, chose to know good and evil, and therefore be held accountable for their actions. They went from simply obeying the natural law of God to knowing good and evil for themselves. They did so because God gives all of creation a type of freedom from His reign. You may ask how he does this, because you're set in the idea that everything that happens has a step-by-step cause; something that's highly intuitive, but not unchallenged by philosophers or scientists. Ultimately, we are highly advanced mammals. We are still learning that we don't quite understand cause and effect. As Christians, (unless we're Calvinists) we therefore believe in free will. God /can/ control everything, but He chooses not to. This is because of His desire for us to do good and have faith of our own free will. Why is this? This will incorporate beliefs from my own tradition (Orthodoxy) so I can't speak for other Christians.
The goal in Orthodoxy is mystical communion with God. Dostoyevsky said that the faith does not come through the miracle, but the miracle through the faith. The point of faith is that when we freely choose to trust in God and do His works, we become transformed a deified, and take on His image. We become God not in essence, (we don't become one with the Trinity), but through His energies and works in the world.
This is all possible because of our free choice to have faith and do God's works. This wouldn't have been possible without the fall from Eden and the presence of evil. Another aspect of Orthodoxy is mystery. I can't tell you that God's plan from the beginning was to introduce evil to the world so we may become deified. But He did give us free will, not rooted in biological determinism, to give us the ability to choose to follow Him.
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19 Aug 2019, 10:48 pm
If two or more claim to be God's divinely appointed representatives vested by God with the authority to interpret his texts, it is one man's word against another.
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20 Aug 2019, 8:42 am
For one thing, contrary to popular belief, early or "traditional" Christianity does not insist that we look at the story of Genesis completely literally (I know that's hard for people on the spectrum but we have to try).
Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge, specifically gaining the ability to know good and evil. Thus, they went from being perfectly innocent and blameless of evil just like the animals in the Garden of Eden, to being capable of recognizing evil and still partaking in it-- this is essentially free will. Adam and Eve, through their own willfulness, chose to know good and evil, and therefore be held accountable for their actions. They went from simply obeying the natural law of God to knowing good and evil for themselves. They did so because God gives all of creation a type of freedom from His reign. You may ask how he does this, because you're set in the idea that everything that happens has a step-by-step cause; something that's highly intuitive, but not unchallenged by philosophers or scientists. Ultimately, we are highly advanced mammals. We are still learning that we don't quite understand cause and effect. As Christians, (unless we're Calvinists) we therefore believe in free will. God /can/ control everything, but He chooses not to. This is because of His desire for us to do good and have faith of our own free will. Why is this? This will incorporate beliefs from my own tradition (Orthodoxy) so I can't speak for other Christians.
The goal in Orthodoxy is mystical communion with God. Dostoyevsky said that the faith does not come through the miracle, but the miracle through the faith. The point of faith is that when we freely choose to trust in God and do His works, we become transformed a deified, and take on His image. We become God not in essence, (we don't become one with the Trinity), but through His energies and works in the world.
This is all possible because of our free choice to have faith and do God's works. This wouldn't have been possible without the fall from Eden and the presence of evil. Another aspect of Orthodoxy is mystery. I can't tell you that God's plan from the beginning was to introduce evil to the world so we may become deified. But He did give us free will, not rooted in biological determinism, to give us the ability to choose to follow Him.
There is certainly a free will vs determinism argument to be had within Christianity (hence Calvinists vs Arminianism in the protestant tradition), though I do not think it is applicable to this particular question.
Whether it was to be Adam's free choice or whether there is some deterministic mechanism at play, it doesn't really matter. Regardless, God knew that Adam would sin before he created anything in the universe, and did so anyways. Thus, before any being with any kind of free will was around to take any blame for anything, God went ahead with a plan that he knew beyond any doubt would end up with the presence of sin in the world.
Say I have magical powers and can see into the future. Say I also want to have a child of my own. If I know for a fact that my future child will set off a series of events that will cast the entire world into every imaginable horror, what does it say about me if I go ahead with having said child?
And to the critics who think I am 'Judging God', I do no such thing. My criticism isn't of God, but rather is a criticism of what some humans (in this case, Christians) claim to be true about God. I'm not saying, "God did something wrong." I'm saying, this belief system necessitates that we come to the conclusion that God did something wrong. It is a philosophical worry for the belief system, not a criticism of God.
You can also argue that we shouldn't take the bible literally. That is certainly a logically consistent view. But if we do so, then why not view the bible as a book of fiction with a good moral message? There are great moral lessons in The Lord of the Rings, for example.
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