SolitaryWalker
Tenured roisterer
- Joined
- Apr 23, 2007
- Messages
- 3,504
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- 5w6
- Instinctual Variant
- so/sx
Well, I was hoping you'd take my criticisms on the first appearance of this post and parse it down / tailor it so as to be an actual personalized response to a posting, rather than just ripping another page out of your philosophical journal and slapping it online.
God is infinite and therefore is outside of human understanding. We can not understand what is infinite as we break things down into fragments of time, space, matter, heat, color.. etc. The real world (noumenal, don't know if you've heard this term before) doesnt have any of those qualities. Everything that we see in the world is filtered through our perceptions and because of this there are things like time, space, matter,color and heat. Hence the real God is out there where we cant experience him, therefore we filter His presence if he exists through our perceptions. Therefore if there is such a thing as Cosmic Purpose, we will never be able to experience it for its raw essence. This renders the design argument untenable. Even more so can be said for the 'divinely inspired ethics'. It is not possible for us to have direct knowledge of God's morality because we can not directly understand anything about him, let alone something so complex as morality. So we can not use religious testimony to discover how we should live our lives, we are still on our own, we are left with nothing but reason. In the light of this the Bible has gone down from sacred truth to a merely set of recommendations on what we should do. Yet if we examine human nature and build a sound ethical framework, we will see that our ethical framework will be along the same lines of what the Bible says. So it gives us good advice and does have something to do with God, but it is not God's word directly, but God's word through the perceptions of man. There are no absolute rules. The end here is erradicating evil and good people dont kill, steal or commit adultery, yet if you think you are good only because you dont do those things, you're obviously wrong. Surrendering yourself to God is what will make you good, not forcing yourself to not do those things for the reason that you dont understand like the Pharisees did. The Feminists cant say that God is a male chauvinist because all of those pesky rules are man made. God's idea is general and outside of human understanding, and because God is outside of human understanding, there is no reason for us to regard God as a He. There is only one law of God that we can be confident about. That is love your God, surrender to him and everything else will than be fine. Love thy neighbor is superfluous because if you love your God, God will put you into the position where you start to love your neighbor. We must have only one commandment--love thy God. Any more will open the door for Phariseenism.