chaz wyman wrote:
adge wrote:
In a sense you're asking too many questions, but i'll see if i can address some of your ideas, and i'll start by saying i don't believe in god.
On your point about god not being able to have sex, if Christ was god incarnate then he has felt the human desires you speak of. The idea of Christ as God incarnate was a fourth century Christian idea, but nonetheless was essentially about god showing solidarity with man. You may reject this notion of God, as post facto reasoning, but given that nearly all Christians do, your argument is somewhere upstream of Gods incarnation or indeed Christianity per se.
If god is ineffable why is his working in mysterious ways incoherent? In a sense you sound like a 1950's positivist,
but if there's nothing we can say about him, has more to do with language than god, if he exists.
God, if he exists, is not a fact of the world like the existence of the atom
Two things.
1) Why is the fact of god's existence not on a par with all other questions of existence. And what give you the right to make a statement like that?
2) The idea that Jesus was a man, was the dominant theory until the 4thC. There was a far more reasonable idea of the reality of Jesus' existence until the Council of Nicaea outlawed common sense, demanded that Christ was God, and inserted extra stuff in the Gospels to back it up. The twisted versions of Christianity that now pertain are an amalgam of Roman mysticism and Greek cosmology; where the idea that people could be
deified was common place.
You're fetishising rights again chaz, no need-try really hard and bet you can use a sentence without the word.
OK, question 1
Gods existence isn't an existence in the sense of the keyboard you're hoping to type a repost to this post on.
Prove it! By what reason to you make that ridiculous statement?Ever heard of the word 'transcendence'? to equate god with some aspect of reality is to profoundly misunderstand the notion of transcendence, or a deity isn't another piece of the world.
Yes, but I know what it means. It's about your imagining the material world. That makes god a thing of the mind, not of reality. You are merely justifying a fantasy, BY DEFINITIONThat's not to say god exists or i believe that god exists, but rather if he did we'd be mistaken in thinking he was just some bigger part of the world.
No, but we would be right in saying his nothing more than a conception; just like Zeus, Gandalf or the tooth fairy.
Question 2
This is really easy, and ostensibly depends on whether you believe in Christ as divine or man.
The political reality of Nicaea is neither here nor there, if jesus was the son of god then the Nicaean creed conclusion was a kind of attractor to that ultimate reality, one fashioned by the almighty. The fact that the conclusion of Nicaea was rooted in historical and political circumstance is simply god acting through circumstance to proclaim his truth.
Naive in the extreme.
Was Homer's talking horse and the presence of Athena among the troops ALSO god acting through political circumstances?
And then for the generations that thought Jesus mortal - was that ALSO god acting through circumstances?
Of course 'The idea that Jesus was a man, was the dominant theory until the 4thC' he was after-all a man, it's not some profound revelation you observe, but the everyday reality of the time.
I'm not saying it's profound, b ut it is news to most Xians.
He can't be mortal and immortal. You have to choose.
One has to be wrong and the other right, if you think he lived at all in any sense described by the stories.
If i were a Christian i would simply counter by saying it took 4th century divine inspiration to illuminate the truth of Christ's entity.
I might say i'm not a Christian or believe in God, but i find many of the arguments on this thread as predictable as they are facile.
There is none more facile than you that gives a moment's credibility to such an asinine theory of Jesus' divinity.
That some people were willing to accept it at the time should be considered with no more credibility than that they also considered Alexander and Augustus divine - along with many other people.