Hey everyone and welcome to the Scoles Forum. This Blog is an attempt to continue the vibrant discourse between my facebook friends. The rules, I think, will be very simple: Respect each other as members of this community. That's it. The penalty for breaking this one maxim will be severe...I will personally humiliate any violators in an extreme intellectual fashion....seriously! All joking aside, I really do want to explore some of the issues that tend to get a little divisive and while I totally encourage passionate debate I hope that we can remain civil. One last thing...come to play with your A-Game; fallacies will be highlighted and torn to shreds.
OK...so I am going to try to post regularly and I think that we should just go in a stream of conscious kind of way in the comments section. If things run too far off course I will create a new post for that issue and of course any major news may also spur on the occasional bonus post.
Let's have fun out here, gang.
You said bring your A-game, but you also mis-spelled four words, which are in sequential order: maxim instead of maxin; little instead of littel; fallacies instead of fallcies; conscience instead of concious.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your time.
Dustin
I'm truly looking forward to this. Thanks in advance to all who participate.
ReplyDeleteLet me start with this opening question: is God (in whatever form you my believe) a provider of gifts? For instance, can one say, "God gave me the job I asked for?".
ReplyDeleteGreat question. I personally believe (and this is off my dome w/no research) that God does not promise us gifts or an abundance of anything. All we are promised is that our needs will be supplied. Which our needs would be surprisingly basic. But this is subject is much deeper than I originally anticipated when I first read it. When speaking of jobs and what not. But to answer this, one would have to answer if our accomplishments in life are destin, or are they by our own works (Pretty much the whole basis of the movie Forrest Gump)
ReplyDeleteDusty,
ReplyDeleteYou were right, I did not bring my A game...rest assured all typos have been corrected.
So I have been thinking about this all day and this is such a multi dimensional question. On one hand, my head tells me "no, god is not a divine Santa Claus." But at the same time I am moved to ask "why not?" Whay can't a believer attribute some positive change in thier life, be it health, a new job, general good fortune, etc. to a divine source? In my personal life I tend to give credit for the less tangible gifts like friends and family to God. Yet, part of me still resists the idea that God is distributing gifts (and probably conversly punishments) as if the world were little more than a giant, celestial, Skinner Box. Does the free will issue come into play here?
ReplyDeleteI look forward to this. Matt and I have had many philosophical discussions in our 28 years.
ReplyDeleteI too am in favor of Gay marriage. Who am I to judge what is in the hearts of others. If you believe in the God of the Bible, then you know that it His judgment to make. People who believe in Him spend many hours doing His thinking for Him. I doubt that they would be very happy with His judgment of them because of it.
As an Atheist, I find no non-theistic arguments against gay marriage. Much stranger happenings have caused species to become extinct.
And so it seems to come down to this: is God (or god) a persona or not? I.E. Does God bestow wishes and desires as a parent bestows what is good for a child to the child at the best time for the child's well being and growth. Or is god a life giving force (or maybe even life) in the universe that experiences that universe through the experiences of all life forces. Monolithic God or zen-like god - - - that is the question.
ReplyDeleteI would have to go with something a little closer to the latter...In the Summa Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas presents the Knowable qualities of the Christian God as well as the necessary conditions for such a God to exist. One of his basic suppositions is that for an all-powerful and all knowing God to be all knowing and all powerful that diety must be a first mover. In the words of Brennan Manning, this means that "God only acts, he never reacts." God is turning and never re-turning. This of course would argue for the latter perception of God. Although an idea I have come to recently is the idea that our human flaw (going back to origianl sin) is that we believe that we are the arbiter of what is "good" and what is "evil." The truth is that aas far as God is concerned we have no idea. Thus what we percieve as gifts may not be at all and what we see as curses may be for good. Its tough to place our trust so fully in God that we can see cancer as a gift...it hard to trust God enough to beleive that mosquitos and poison ivy were created as good. Many people question how God can allow evil. "how can God justify the millions that die from sickness and war?" to me it seems that the answer is that God doesn't justify it...God REDEEMS it.
ReplyDeleteFrom where I sit, both Matt and Lou have made tremendous leaps of faith. God either exists or he does not. No one can or will ever be able to answer that question and they choose to former where I choose the latter. I demand evidence. Many say that all I need do is "look around and see you will see Gods work", but they too make that great leap.
ReplyDeleteI believe that our minds are so meager that we cannot comprehend what is in front of our nose, let alone what the meaning of life (and so on) is.
John (is it cool to call you Dad on here?) I don't deny making a leap of faith and i certainly agree that our meager minds have difficulty in comprehension. But I don't have any qualm in making that leap, nor do i see it contradicting with my own demands for evidence. I am simply willing to wait for that evidence whenever it comes and (as i recently heard from a dear friend) i am willing to be totally screwed if that evidence that I wait for doesn't arrive. that being said, I don't think that a demand for evidence right here and right now is unreasonable. I know that is not necessarly true about some people of faith. All the while, even evidence demands a little faith. Einstein had to wait for decades for any evidence that the theory of relativity had validity.
ReplyDeleteWow! This is great! I'm a little sorry I started this in the "Welcome" section. Maybe we should move this to the "Politics and Religion" section. No matter - - - here's my thoughts for now.
ReplyDeleteJohn, I'll even go one step further with your main point of the existence of god. My journey into Buddhism gives me this teaching: "That if you have been pierced by a poisoned spear, shouldn't you be more concerned in getting the spear out of you then the color of the eyes or length of the hair of one that threw it?" I interpret that to mean that the way we react to the things life presents (the "good" and "bad") is more important than the "why" it happens. There is natural karma (cause and effect"), but a god that rewards or punishes. Ahh, not so much. I hope other bloggers roll in on this.