How God could fail to convey His message?

[Greta]

The problem lies directly in the title of the OP - "How God could fail to convey HIS message?". As soon as God is anthropomorphised, then you have an deity that bothers to send messages to HIS creations' inhabitants.

Once you ask "How God could fail to convey ITS message?" then the answer naturally occurs that if God exists, it is not like a big male spirit person. In that case it's easy to see how such a non-humanesque spirit might not be any more inclined to send cryptic messages to curious primates than would the Sun.

[Lacewing]

So don't judge by "sects": judge us all by the degree to which we obey what is clearly taught in Scripture.

Which scripture?

From outside, you would really have no way to judge.

Yet you judge non-theists all the time -- regardless of what they tell you to the contrary. And yet you do not want to be judged in such a way. How do you reconcile this?

[-1-]

So don't judge by "sects": judge us all by the degree to which we obey what is clearly taught in Scripture. It's nowhere near so hard to figure it out as you seem to be imagining. But you'd have to know what Christians really are in order to see that. From outside, you would really have no way to judge.

I am not judging you, or any other Christian. All I am saying is that God, in the Bible, has failed to deliver his message (or its message, to make Greta, feminists, and the femdoms happy. I'll stick to the "male" gender, which is childish, I know, but it's a historical convention, which I don't have the strength -- cultural or linguistic -- to break.)

I am not saying this christian is wrong and that christian is right. I don't want to, and really, I don't have to, either, because they say it themselves. That is what I meant by being an outsider. Seeing that they can all be wrong, and they can't all be right, and yet the consensus is missing, exactly because the scriptures have been worded in an impossible-to-understand way. That's a sad thing for a teacher to do.

[-1-]

The problem lies directly in the title of the OP - "How God could fail to convey HIS message?". As soon as God is anthropomorphised, then you have an deity that bothers to send messages to HIS creations' inhabitants.

Once you ask "How God could fail to convey ITS message?" then the answer naturally occurs that if God exists, it is not like a big male spirit person. In that case it's easy to see how such a non-humanesque spirit might not be any more inclined to send cryptic messages to curious primates than would the Sun.

"The god of a carpenter is a carpenter. The god of a businessman is a businessman. The god of a cannibal is a cannibal." Ralph Waldo Emerson. (My favourite wise guy, in the English-speaking cultures, alongside with Mark Twain.)

You can extrapolate from a big male god with a big male ego, Greta, but you are going to be walking on territories NOT meant to be walking on as instructed by the Scriptures. The christian scriptures.

[Greta]

The problem lies directly in the title of the OP - "How God could fail to convey HIS message?". As soon as God is anthropomorphised, then you have an deity that bothers to send messages to HIS creations' inhabitants.

Once you ask "How God could fail to convey ITS message?" then the answer naturally occurs that if God exists, it is not like a big male spirit person. In that case it's easy to see how such a non-humanesque spirit might not be any more inclined to send cryptic messages to curious primates than would the Sun.

"The god of a carpenter is a carpenter. The god of a businessman is a businessman. The god of a cannibal is a cannibal." Ralph Waldo Emerson. (My favourite wise guy, in the English-speaking cultures, alongside with Mark Twain.)

Good point, -1-. I note that the Christian practice of calling their god, "God", is akin to UK postage stamps not needing to indicate country of origin or Americans having the .com generic URL extension.

Still, the situation is messy. Many women worship male deities, Yahweh/God and Allah. Billions of westerners venerate a Middle Eastern family (Mary, Joseph, Jesus) and worship an ancient Middle Eastern war god (in competition with the Muslims' Allah and the various extinct European gods), while themselves generally being deeply racist towards Middle Eastern people.

People are often simply not rational, hence economists' frequent misreadings based on their assumption that people are rational agents. Advertisers understand people better - that the emotional animal that lies within every human lies only just beneath the surface. Like any animal, we can be manipulated by the right stimuli.

The Abrahamic gods were "fathers for fathers" in those deeply patriarchal societies where males took on almost all responsibility for the family's protection, housing and sustenance. Having one's own deity father figure who will ensure their own protection, housing and sustenance would have been comforting for young men thrust into such challenging circumstances. These days, such a notion is simply the mechanical ritualistic reiteration of that old spiritual comfort toy.

[-1-]

Good point, -1-. I note that the Christian practice of calling their god, "God", is akin to UK postage stamps not needing to indicate country of origin or Americans having the .com generic URL extension.

If American computer professionals had a sense of humour, they would have called their extension .cum and .com. And I really like your simile of no-name country and god, as a default of superiority or at least premierity.

However, compare this to the Jewish G-d which can't even be called on its generic name according to the faithfuls. It's no longer a sign of superiority... it's a safeway of protecting their g-d and hiding it in the cellar or in the rafters in case the Nazis every stage a come back. "G-d? Our G-d? No, we haven't heard of such a thing. No, not here, not in our cellar. We swear there is no G-o-d down there. Go over to the Wiesensteins, mayb He is there."

[Greta]

Good point, -1-. I note that the Christian practice of calling their god, "God", is akin to UK postage stamps not needing to indicate country of origin or Americans having the .com generic URL extension.

If American computer professionals had a sense of humour, they would have called their extension .cum and .com. And I really like your simile of no-name country and god, as a default of superiority or at least premierity.

However, compare this to the Jewish G-d which can't even be called on its generic name according to the faithfuls. It's no longer a sign of superiority... it's a safeway of protecting their g-d and hiding it in the cellar or in the rafters in case the Nazis every stage a come back. "G-d? Our G-d? No, we haven't heard of such a thing. No, not here, not in our cellar. We swear there is no G-o-d down there. Go over to the Wiesensteins, mayb He is there."

Yes, it's premierity - "we were first", a bit like planting a flag on a "discovered" land. Or other species excreting to mark their territory.

My understanding is that G-d came about because "He" is so sacred that even to mention "God" is thought to be disrespectful. You would think it more disrespectful still to drive bulldozers over "His" other creations. That is why religions are such an unreliable guide to morality; they get caught up with traditional fancies and lose sight of big picture considerations.

[-1-]

My understanding is that G-d came about because "He" is so sacred that even to mention "God" is thought to be disrespectful. You would think it more disrespectful still to drive bulldozers over "His" other creations. That is why religions are such an unreliable guide to morality; they get caught up with traditional fancies and lose sight of big picture considerations.

Changing times, changing signs. At one point (or stretch, it wasn't just a point) "having as many children as possible" was a good thing; it lead to overpopulation and mismanagement of precious resources.

Getting rid of non-christian heathen, in other words untamed wild men, was a good thing, too. To kill them was a mercy of G-d.

The horrible act of raping actually helped some isolated groups to DNA diversification, when in times of war travelling armies inseminated their young women.

The entire practice of witch hunts helped easy and smooth reallocation of assets. Basically you were a witch if you were getting on with age, had no strong relatives to support you politically in the community, and you had assets. According to customs, the person reporting the witch and the judge presiding in finding them witchy, shared the witches' wealth equally after burning the witch alive at the stakes. Witches were both male and female.

Huge forest fires in many natural rain forests served as a rejuvenating force of nature.

Mass suicide by lemmings kept on preventing sets of second degree differential equations with three unknowns and having five or more degrees of freedom, from running amok. This is actually still debated in the calculus communities.

[Greta]

My understanding is that G-d came about because "He" is so sacred that even to mention "God" is thought to be disrespectful. You would think it more disrespectful still to drive bulldozers over "His" other creations. That is why religions are such an unreliable guide to morality; they get caught up with traditional fancies and lose sight of big picture considerations.

Changing times, changing signs. At one point (or stretch, it wasn't just a point) "having as many children as possible" was a good thing; it lead to overpopulation and mismanagement of precious resources.

Getting rid of non-christian heathen, in other words untamed wild men, was a good thing, too. To kill them was a mercy of G-d.

The horrible act of raping actually helped some isolated groups to DNA diversification, when in times of war travelling armies inseminated their young women.

The entire practice of witch hunts helped easy and smooth reallocation of assets. Basically you were a witch if you were getting on with age, had no strong relatives to support you politically in the community, and you had assets. According to customs, the person reporting the witch and the judge presiding in finding them witchy, shared the witches' wealth equally after burning the witch alive at the stakes. Witches were both male and female.

Huge forest fires in many natural rain forests served as a rejuvenating force of nature.

Mass suicide by lemmings kept on preventing sets of second degree differential equations with three unknowns and having five or more degrees of freedom, from running amok. This is actually still debated in the calculus communities.

I understand that alleged witched were hanged in Salem rather than burnt and I don't see great benefit in entertaining calculus communities (whom are presumably can always find fascination in something similarly tedious ), but otherwise you are making fair points basically about the complementary relationship between order and chaos. Religions do appear to have played a civilising role in humanity's development although, like our old teddy bears, there comes a time when we let go.

[-1-]

I've never had a Teddy bear.

Maybe that's why I've never been religious, not even teetering on the verge of it.

[-1-]

The Salem witches were hanged, but there had been countless European witches in the middle- and in the dark ages which were burnt, or otherwise done away with with great care. For instance, a test of witch was to tie a huge stone in a bag with an alleged witch, and throw them into deep water. If they sank, they were not witches; if they floated, they were witches, and burnt accordingly.

[attofishpi]

This is why I decry your faith, or the strength of the bible: Christians can't agree on their most sacred thing, on their faith, and they blame other followers for it, who otherwise have the same right to claim their own sect to be the only true one.

To make things worse, the believers truly believe that other sects' followers are horribly wrong. It takes an outsider to see that you are all different, and yet you each claim the one book to be the source of your faith. To an outsider Christian Faith X is equivalent to Christian Faith Y, inasmuch as both are based on the life of Christ. To each Christian, whether he belong to version A, B, C... or X or Y their own version is the only unassailable faith.

However, there is a tenet in logic, "Nothing can both be true and not true at the same time and in the same respect." This is the law of the excluded middle. Christianity proves itself wrong, without any outside pressure, by being the same and different as itself and from itself at the same time and in the same respect.

This is why I say that the word of god as spelled out in the Gospels is a proof that God failed to convey his message.

This is where I see your logic flawed, unless you can prove the following are inaccurate statements with regards to Christianity:-

All Christian faiths believe in the teachings of Christ, and the commandments received by Moses. The message of Christianity as received from the life of Christ and these commandments, make the message of God extremely clear.

[Immanuel Can]

You Christians discount each other's strength and trueness of belief.

So do you, of course. And with very good reason. You know, just as we all do, that there is a world of difference between saying you're something and being it. It may sound, perhaps to those soaked in the doctrines of liberal omni-relativism, that to question somebody's beliefs is unpardonably rude; but if you think about it, you quickly realize that it's the most normal thing in the world.

If I were to tell you I have ten PhD's to my name, you'd question it. And you should. You'd be crazy not to be skeptical, and you know very well that it takes more than saying something to make it a reality.

Ask yourself this: is a Mormon a "Christian"? Is a Jehovah's Witness? Is a Catholic? Is a Protestant? Is a Unitarian? Is a United Church member? What's the difference? Is a member of the Sacred Mushroom Church? How do you know what a "Christian" is?

If you do know, you must be using a criterion to eliminate some, because all use "Christian" language and symbols in their beliefs. But Aristotle's Law of Non-Contradiction is all you need to know to know that they cannot all be telling you the truth if their beliefs are in direct contradiction to each other. But, on the other hand, if you cannot answer the question, then obviously you lack a criterion; and what you've really learned is that you yourself have no idea what a "Christian" really is. Sorry to say it, but if you can't answer the question, it's got to be true. And that's just basic logic.

This is not good, man, this is not good.

Well, really, nothing can be "not good" under Atheism. Atheism (the belief) has no criteria for the moral to allow you to make value judgments one way or the other. So Atheistically speaking, it's as "good" as any other deed. So why are you condemning me? (or for that matter, generally condemning "Christians" as you are here)

No two atheists have ever disagreed on the tenets of their beliefs.

You would think it would be far, far easier, because Atheism, by definition, has only one "tenet."

But even so, they do disagree all the time on who is a "real" one. If you look around this forum, you'll see that repeatedly.

Some people say that Atheism is the claim that there IS no God. Others say that they are Atheists if they've just never thought about it. Some people say, "No, it's just that I lack belief in God, not that I say there's none." Some other say, "It's that I don't care." Others include the whole range of agnostics as some kind of Atheist subcategory...

Richard Dawkins is called a "leading Atheist," yet he himself (wisely) refuses that title altogether -- and then, rather inconsistently, embraces it at other times. Even he can't keep it straight, it's such a mess.

But it doesn't much matter, simply because nothing's at stake for them (well, except for their own well-being, if they knew it). In point of fact, the only thing they really seem to care about passionately is being able to console themselves with the illusion that "Nobody knows," so they don't have to deal with God at all.

Of course, that's a very dangerous game of peek-a-boo: "You can't see me, 'cuz I can't see you!"

Bah! Your argument can only be proven and it can only prove the trueness of the scriptures, if a positive reinforcement by logic can be found. But it can't be found. The Faith of A Catholic Christian is the same as the faith of an Evangelist Christian: both are based on the bible, yet they are different.

You see? You have no idea. Neither the Catholic nor the Evangelist (you mean "Evangelical," actually) Christians agree with you. I'm afraid it just makes abundantly clear that not only do you not know how they differ, you're not even aware that anything's at stake. But it would be worth your while to find out.

To an outsider Christian Faith X is equivalent to Christian Faith Y, inasmuch as both are based on the life of Christ. To each Christian, whether he belong to version A, B, C... or X or Y their own version is the only unassailable faith.

This is exactly what I said about the sports stadium. "To an outsider," you say. And I agree. You have no idea, because you're not aware of the "inside" issues in hand. And very clearly, you don't have anything very specific in mind when you say "based on the life of Christ." I wonder if you actually know what Christ said and did.

However, there is a tenet in logic, "Nothing can both be true and not true at the same time and in the same respect." This is the law of the excluded middle. Christianity proves itself wrong, without any outside pressure, by being the same and different as itself and from itself at the same time and in the same respect.

Sorry: this is both a misquotation and a misrepresentation of the relevant law, I'm afraid; and we should sort that out before we go on. You're trying to refer to the Law of Non-Contradiction, I think.

In contrast, Law of the Excluded Middle merely holds that something cannot "be" and "not be" at the same time and in the same sense of "be" (as, for illustration, in that you cannot "be" alive and "not be alive" at the same moment, if by "alive" we mean exactly the same thing in both statements). So it wouldn't support the claim you wish to make.

But I can help you make your case here. The Law of Non-Contradiction holds, essentially, that two equivalent-and-opposite statements cannot be simultaneously true. So if a belief system holds that, say, church membership is the only way to salvation, and another holds that faith in Christ alone is the only road to salvation, they are in mutual contradiction -- which simply means that they do not believe the same thing about salvation. And thus they are opposites, and not of-a-piece...even if both call themselves "Christian."

But now who is the one who is pointing out substantive differences among putative "Christians?" It's you! You just illustrated the fairness of my point.

[Immanuel Can]

So don't judge by "sects": judge us all by the degree to which we obey what is clearly taught in Scripture. It's nowhere near so hard to figure it out as you seem to be imagining. But you'd have to know what Christians really are in order to see that. From outside, you would really have no way to judge.

I am not judging you, or any other Christian.

Actually, you were. I'm not offended, of course, but I need to point out the factual untruth of that claim.

When you claim that anybody who says they are a Christian (or all "sects" as you put it) is a "Christian," you have judged from your outsider position that using the word "Christian" to self-describe is a sufficient reason for regarding someone as a Christian, and that making any differences among them is, to use your phrase, "...not good." But how would you decide that, if you are not "judging"?

I am not saying this christian is wrong and that christian is right. I don't want to, and really, I don't have to, either, because they say it themselves. That is what I meant by being an outsider.

I wasn't saying you were making such distinctions; I was rather pointing out that the inability to recognize such distinctions was a sure indicator of not knowing. That's all.

...because the scriptures have been worded in an impossible-to-understand way.

If this were so, in the unrestricted way you word it, then it would also be "impossible" for any of them to form "sects," as you call them. There would be no method by which any two of them could agree.

"Impossible"? Hardly. Not even seriously problematic, actually. You could read it and understand it yourself, with very little help. In fact, very little of the Bible remains under dispute as to what it says; in fact, if you do look as an "insider," you'll soon find that remaining differences have to do with other considerations, not with textual analysis problems.

[-1-]

All Christian faiths believe in the teachings of Christ, and the commandments received by Moses. The message of Christianity as received from the life of Christ and these commandments, make the message of God extremely clear.

So you do believe that Roman Catholicism and Protentantism are equivalent. Their tenets are exactly the same. According to you. Yet they went into war for a number of decades and centuries over who is right and who is wrong in what the bible says.

You, Attofishpi, can't get over the hurdle that yes, there are similarities between Christian faiths, and yet they are different, because there are differences between them.

As a simile to explain: a Tasmanian Devil and a human are both mammals. (Mammal- common factor, like some of the issues in the bible that all Christians follow.) Yet there are differences between a Tasmanian Devil and a human. Much like there are differences in believing what the bible says between Catholics and Protestants. Tasmanian Devils and Humans are different. Catholic Christians are different from Protestants (in their christianity). Yet you insist that they are the same. You equivalently insist that Tasmanian Devils and Humans are the same ("They are both mammals! Much like Catholics and Protestants are the same, they are both Christians! And all Christians are the same!" -- you may be crying.)

This is not even a question of faith... you are having conception problems in comprehending what constitutes sameness and differentness. Two things are the same and identical if they have no differences. If two things are same in some aspects, but are different in other aspects, then they are different. Two Christians are different if they live their lives differently because their Christian faiths tell them to live and believe differently, despite also having common beliefs between the two types.