ken wrote: ↑Mon May 22, 2017 2:56 pm
A few things here;
1. I would much prefer you talk about what
you think and what
you would do instead of trying to guess and assume what I might think or what I might do. If you continue to do the latter, then you will inevitably sometimes end up being completely and totally completely wrong.
Wow. That's a lot of agitation. I seem to have hit on some nerve of which I was unaware. I suspect the cause is my use of the editorial pronoun "you," rather than "one," which always has the danger of seeming to single out a particular person for accusation.
That was not my thought. But if I've offended you on that count, I apologize. The fault was mine. I did not intend to convey any accusation. I simply thought the principle rather obvious; that parents who let their children run riot are demonstrating a lack of "proper direction and care," to use your terms. And it seems to me that that is pretty much definitional in the terms "proper" and "care."
But if you suppose otherwise, it's not a point important enough to warrant further consternation. I yield the wording to you.
Children are not born to do wrong and bad things. Children learn to do wrong things by following adults, especially their parents.
Now, this point I would think worth debating.
I think that thinking that children are born innocent is the luxury of those who spend little time on the playground. A schoolyard is a place of raw power, in which the boys with size and strength dominate the smaller and weaker, and the girls gifted with the power of beauty tyrannize the less gifted. Unless they all have truly horrid parents who train them in vicious and self-serving behaviour, I think they have their own innate resources on which to draw for much of that.
I don't recall when my parents taught my young brothers and I to hit one another. They did no such thing to any of us, nor to each other, nor to anyone else. But we became skilled at it very quickly.
I simply ask, 'Does that God, which you believe in, interfere with human beings or does It let human beings do as they please. Only you can answer that question, It is after all your God, so you must already know the appropriate answer.
Then I answer, "interfere"? No. For "interfere" is a pejorative term, and already slants the question in the wrong direction.
I do not see any ambiguity in the question so I can not see any difficulty in interpreting it.
Then I suppose my answer is also unambiguous. No.
Yet you think you are the one who can judge other and if they are "horrible or bad parents" or not.
No, I do not presume to judge by remote. But some things are definitional. A person isn't a "parent" if they have no children, for example. For by definition, a "parent" is a
relational term pertaining to children, just as are "father," "mother," "brother" and "sister." And this much I will venture: that an indifferent parent (that is, one who neither "cares" nor provides "guidance," to borrow your terms) is a
bad parent. That may not be quite definitional, but it's as close as one can come with a value judgment, perhaps.
If 'we', human beings, are God's children, as some might say, then would that not make God 'our' parent/s?
Or do you say 'we' are not God's children?
Analogies are not one-to-one correspondence, as I said before. To call a person a "fox" does not mean he has a tail and red fur. Yet it still communicates an aspect of his character in a telling way.
In judging of analogies, one always has to say what
aspect of the analogy is being emphasized. It's never the whole thing, or it's not an analogy at all; it's the thing-in-itself.
Did you forget it was I who was asking you the question.
Well, I didn't "forget:" one can't "forget" a person one has never met. So no slight was intended there.
I have been waiting for to answer the question. If your answer is "both", then great. We are finally moving ahead.
Then I have answered, as you say.
But anyhow we are back at How do propose God intervenes?
You said "interferes" above. That would change my answer. With which term did you wish to continue?
What do you mean by divine action? Is that opposed, superimposed, and/or supernatural to natural actions?
A Supreme Being would most certainly be capable of intervening to interrupt the natural laws that He had set in place. Now, since He has set them in place as regularities, He would not do so all the time, it seems to me: for why bother with laws, if that's the case? But if He should so wish, there would be no reason why the One who had the power to create those laws should not have power to interrupt them too.
The Deists would agree God has the power to interrupt physical regularities he's established, but would say that God
does not do that. Some suppose that any miraculous intervention would imply bad workmanship on the part of the "Divine Watchmaker." I don't think that.
When do the alleged periodic episodes of direct divine action happen? How did they happen? And, what was the actual actions that took place?
As I say above, I do believe miraculous intervention is possible. And I would argue we have specific instances of the same, as recorded in the Bible, for example: preeminent among these would surely be the resurrection of the dead, and Christ in particular.
By the way if anyone had been following any thing I have written about free will AND determinism, then they would have noticed that, to Me, they both exist equally. I also question people why do they pick one side or the other, and why do think that it has to be either one or the other?
I can see the problem from a Determinist perspective. That is, allow ANY free will, and you have something less than strict Determinism in place. Moreover, it then argues that physical laws and regularities are not the total story of the universe, and that seems to threaten causal attribution, and to some, even science itself.
Again, I don't agree with their position. Periodic intervention does not threaten causality or science. It just implies that there will be events
very occasionally for which material causality and human science will not be the adequate and total explanation. Under normal conditions, the material and causal regularities will still hold. When they definitely
do not, and when we
perceive that they do not, only then need we speak of the "miraculous."