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The Process of Belief

Lark

Active member
Joined
Jun 21, 2009
Messages
29,569
That sounds like quite a cop out to me.

If God is not to be humanized, how does he even have a son or feel human emotions like love in the first place? Seems like you want to humanize God when it's convenient but not when it isn't.

God can know man, his knowledge of the human experience is complete now that he's been here in person in the shape of his son Jesus.

To use what I think is a little bit of a cliched explanation we all have the spark but Jesus had more of it than most of us. Anyway, God has knowledge of us, we dont exactly have knowledge of him and we've got to deal with a legacy of people projecting their own ideas onto the infinite, so at one time God is a man, another a woman, another the planet and matter, one time a king, another time a father.

Its a difficult error to avoid for some.
 

Nyx

New member
Joined
Jul 31, 2009
Messages
444
That sounds like quite a cop out to me.

If God is not to be humanized, how does he even have a son or feel human emotions like love in the first place? Seems like you want to humanize God when it's convenient but not when it isn't.

You cannot humanize God, the Father. Jesus however was both human and divine. The God-man. God became man so man might become god as the Orthodox Christians say: Theosis - OrthodoxWiki

The statement by St. Athanasius of Alexandria, "The Son of God became man, that we might become god", [the second g is always lowercase since man can never become a God] indicates the concept beautifully. II Peter 1:4 says that we have become " . . . partakers of divine nature." Athanasius amplifies the meaning of this verse when he says theosis is "becoming by grace what God is by nature" (De Incarnatione, I). What would otherwise seem absurd, that fallen, sinful man may become holy as God is holy, has been made possible through Jesus Christ, who is God incarnate. Naturally, the crucial Christian assertion, that God is One, sets an absolute limit on the meaning of theosis - it is not possible for any created being to become, ontologically, God or even another god.

Through theoria, the knowledge of God in Jesus Christ, human beings come to know and experience what it means to be fully human (the created image of God); through their communion with Jesus Christ God shares Himself with the human race, in order to conform them to all that God is in knowledge, righteousness and holiness. Theosis also asserts the complete restoration of all people (and of the entire creation), in principle. This is built upon the understanding of the atonement put forward by Irenaeus of Lyons, called "recapitulation."

Christianity has the Trinity, but God the Father cannot be humanized, He said: I AM that I AM (KJV) or I am THE BEING (Septuagint)

So we know that he is the eternal AM or Being.
 

MagnifaSnail

New member
Joined
Jan 2, 2010
Messages
28
MBTI Type
INxP
Enneagram
5w4
"The Process of Belief is an elixir when you're weak. I must confess at times I indulge it on the sneak but generally my outlook's not so bleak!"
- "Materialist" by Bad Religion

The rest of the song has some food for thought too.
But anyway I haven't read the entire thread so feel free to call me an idiot or whatever if what I say has already been covered.

When the OP says:

This mentality of regarding all things with distributed divinity gives birth to materialism and pantheistic paganism - not Love.

Do you mean that a deity has assigned some level of divinity to all objects, on an individual basis or that the rational human being (I guess a humanist in this case?) has, by being rational and observing and assigning worth to objects, defied some tenets of humanism?

And when you say that this mentality gives rise to materialism etc. and not love are you implying that materialism/pantheistic paganism and love are mutually exclusive? I guess that all depends on what you mean by "love". And the way you're speaking it sounds like love must mean something pretty specific.
 
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