I'm feeling pretty... Blackpilled, at the moment. Maybe even worse than that. Things are bad. Things keep getting worse. Not just politically, but... As a human being. All the failed relationships, all the lost friendships, all the... Shit, that has happened in my life, is sort of getting to me pretty bad.
But more than that, it feels like we're losing. Like things... Are spiralling out of control (in Aus, but also outside it). I literally can't look at ANY popular media, or any sort of news, without being utterly bombarded by it.
So... If you've got a good "whitepill", or just... Something that counteracts all this... Existential angst, and feelings of sheer... Doom, I would appreciate hearing it, I guess. Thanks. While it lasts, and while I last.
If I may interject:
BigCheese: You're kind of talking past Weyoun's argument and dismissing it outright by denigrating his character rather than directly addressing the Problem of Evil, which has confounded many a great theological mind in the admittedly accomplished and storied history of your faith (minds much greater than mine, I might add).
To put it bluntly, if God is the ultimate arbiter of all existence, whence cometh evil? If evil exists outside of His control, then He is not the ultimate cause of all extant phenomena, and He ceases to be "ultimate." If, on the other hand, evil exists under His will, why did He will for it to exist, in obvious contraposition to His (presumptive) flawless nature? Whence cometh the "worthy" and the "unworthy" when He lined up everything that was ever going to happen in the entire universe, down to the tiniest quantum interaction.
Our understanding of this conundrum today is far more nuanced than this presentation, but I wanted to sort of float it over the plate for you to have a crack at it. You seem to be taking a rather antiquated hard-line Calvinist view of the problem, whereby God just does whatever and we mortals are utterly bereft of any mental, moral or spiritual faculty to ask any questions about it apart from what's written in a compendium of scripture that wasn't decided on for seven centuries after The Crucifixion and wasn't translated into this language for another seven centuries after that.
Of course, this can all be summarily dismissed if you suspect me of being "prideful."
Weyoun: You played right into Cheese's hand when you came out of the gate expressing resentment at a being whose existence you don't credit. He latched right onto that and projected that resentment onto your relationship with your parent(s).
Next time, I recommend a more detached mindset. What both sides seem to forget so often is that there's a whole lot of room between "Every word of the King James Bible is Revealed Truth" and "The entire universe is a total accident and nothing means anything."
No, I'm not a Calvinist at all, I said several times that we have free will, there is no predestination. Another pharisee corruption (Calvin's real name was Cauuin, aka Cohen) There is no God lining it all up. He just can see what is going to happen, all permutations of all humans in history combined. We have been given a glimpse of the future, 2000 years ago, with specific signs, and now, it's all coming to pass.
God bless
I'd be more than happy to blame the Jews in other contexts, but I think it's sort of in bad taste here.
My problem with "free will" is such that it's difficult to fit in between these two axioms:
God initiated the universe
God knew exactly how the universe would play out from the moment he set it in motion (omniscience)
(Let's leave aside that "moment" is meaningless before God initiates time)
If you can do without either of those, then maybe I can understand. What I can't understand is the difference between God knowing everything in advance and God determining everything in advance. If "free will" means anything at all, to me it necessarily negates omniscience.
Not to be overly facetious, but on some level the "free will" argument strikes me somewhat like a child throwing his toy down the stairs, then berating it for breaking along the way.
Truth is always in bad taste, that's the nature of it. Pharisees have been leading us astray since the beginning, and they still do. All corruption leads to their involvement. Hollywood, wars, porn, gambling, the allopathic poisoning of mankind, and all major lie-agendas.
I'll assume that your use of "predestined" is ironic, given that you denied being a Calvinist in your previous post.
Beyond that, I'm afraid that we've reached an impasse, good sir. The fact that you are seemingly happy to use the microelectronic device with which you are making these posts doesn't exactly comport with your skepticism of the "pseudoscience" that painstakingly produced it over the last several hundreds of years.
Nevertheless I am fascinated to have encountered a pre-Galilean in the wild. You are an even rarer breed than the typical flat-earther much bemoaned on the front page of Jannit, and I wish you Godspeed and all the best.
The "problem of evil" requires so many false assumptions to be a problem. It's incredibly simple: God created man with free will. God loves man with free will more than man without it. There, problem solved.
He wants us to choose to worship because it's the correct thing to do. Could He eliminate evil with a snap of His fingers? Sure. But it would defeat the purpose of creation.
Now, if you want to move into the advanced class, we can start discussing how much of the world's problems are due to man's poor decisions and how much is due to the poor decisions of other created beings.
So which are you conceding, omniscience or omnipotence?
Edit: I breezed past this on my first read - what other "created beings" besides humans are you ascribing the ability to "make decisions" to? Is this a veiled reference to The Devil?
There is no conflict between free will and omniscience. There's even a story in the Bible where David asks if he should stay in camp and God tells him he will surely be slain by his enemies. So David leaves and what God told him didn't come to pass.
There's also no conflict between evil and omnipotence. Simply because God can do something doesn't mean He is obligated to. He's choosing to play the game with us, seeing how we'll handle things. He'd rather guide us to a win than simply flip the board, even though He could.
The devil isn't omniscient nor omnipresent. Do you think all supernatural evil is carried out by old scratch all on his own?
So did God know at the beginning of the world what choice David would eventually make? If He did, where exactly is the "choice" or "free will" afforded to David? If He didn't, He's not omniscient.