Armagednoutahere:

JimC

I can see from your posts you think you're bringing the truth to the unenlightened living here in this left-wing darkness, but the fact is I've heard everything you say many times from many people, as have probably most here....

The notion that there is an all-powerful, all-knowing God, who made us (and the rest of the universe) exactly the way he wanted and who knows every single thing there is to know about us (and everything else in the universe,) fails as soon as you introduce the concept of sin and punishment. Something doesn't add up. Either God isn't as all-powerfull and all-knowing as you folks like to believe, or God is like a giant mean-spirited 3 year old, who makes us a certain way and then punishes us (or rewards us) based on whether we perform. Which we do or not based on how he made us and which he knows ahead of time whether we're going to be able to do or not.

I was trying to stay away from the basic contradiction thingie. But all my attempts to reason with Jim by taking the Bible on its own terms came to naught for a very simple reason: he has turned his brain into mush in the process of rationalizing all the contradictory things he believes.

It's obviously much better to go right to the heart of things, as Armagednoutahere has done. An ominpotent God and human free will just don't go together. In fact, an omipotent God just doesn't go together with itself, as witness the age-old conundrum: "Can God make a stone so heavy he can't lift it?"

As humans, we are painfully aware of our relative powerlessness. For all that we can do, we are always aware of so much more that we cannot. It's comforting to imagine that there is some being greater than ourselves, who can do absolutely everything.

But even though we are quite limited, we can at least understand that this fantasy is an illusion. The universe is ruled by logic, and logic creates limits that preclude omnipotence. If there is a creator, then that creator is bound by logic, and cannot be omnipotent. Which brings us to the Deists' Creator--the God whom Jefferson, Paine and other prominent Founding Fathers believed in.

None of this was even the least bit new or original way back then. These sorts of basic logical problems were part of what fed into the creation of Gnosticism. The Gnostics believed that the world was created by an inferior being, that we are trapped in his inferior creation, and that the true spiritual struggle is to escape from his creation. Not that I believe that myself. But it does at least hint at a deeper awareness of the problems inherent in the standard Christian theology.

Of course, from another perspective, none of this matters at all. What matters in religion is not what people believe, but what they do. Not religious belief, but religious practice. As I wrote before, "By their fruits ye shall know them."

There is a great deal of wisdom in the Bible, as there is in all the scriptures. But you have to have a modicum of plain old common sense to recognize where that wisdom lies.

I took a class a few years back from a guy named Marcus Borg on the Historical Jesus. Man that guy knows the bible--every single verse--and the meanings of important words in all pertinent languages. I always wish I could have him there when these people start quoting. Like the Woody Allen movie where they're arguing in a waiting line about what Buckminster Fuller (I think) meant when he said something or other, and Bucky magically appears and tells the other guy he's full of shit and Woody's right. Wouldn't it be great if that could happen in real life is the point as I recall. Anyhoo, I always think of Borg when they get out the scriptures.

It was Marshall McLuhan. And why stop with Borg? Why Jesus himself?

Oh yeah. We already know what would happen. It's in the Bible: Jesus wept.