Hi/Bye

[Nihilist Virus]

aside for my poor english I would say that it does not mean that I am speaking gibberish. but to answer the part of your question that was not a clear enough expression I will say that ofc i would be shocked to hear that raping a woman is how I could find me a wife. that does not seem like a good idea to me but I am against most laws that people make up anyways. I think I justified and explained everything I needed to now.

but I did think it useful to express that in religious experience that it is common for God to appear to be opposed to you or to be your enemy. that is one reason why i called the bible the "tree of knowledge of good and evil" and also why i will say that the serpent pretends to be God but the image of the lamb in the book of revelation speaks like a dragon... because of sin distorting the person and thus their understanding of God.

If I understand you correctly, you don't disavow the NIV but you don't accept everything in it. Can you explain to me your procedure by which you discern what information is of divine origin and which information is not?

 

[Nihilist Virus]

I don't approve of infanticide. This is a song of lamenting and wishful revenge. I'm not saying it is right and I don't believe that this passage of scripture is saying that it is a foundational stance for Christians to take as part of the belief and worship of God. It is simply a person writing a Psalm of their intentions. This was, by the way, a common practice in those days. Again, not that it was right, but it was the way.

OK so you asked me to show something in Christianity that resembles hate, and I give you a Bible verse which describes the vengeful fantasy of violently murdering the enemy's young. How much more explicit hatred do you need? If I said I wanted to smash your children against rocks, would you think it's because I don't like your children or would you think it's because I hate you?

If God had the infant son of David die due to the sins of David, then this is God's right. He already said that He would give punishment for sins of the parents to the children of the third and fourth generations. We have no right to judge God.

If you forfeit your right to judge YHWH, why do you think you have the right to judge Allah? Because YHWH exists and Allah does not? I can only assume you base this on some combination of 1.) blind faith, 2.) persuasive apologetics, or 3.) a personal experience.

One infant is not infanticide.

Yes it is.

in·fan·ti·cide
inˈfan(t)əˌsīd/
noun

1. 1.
   the crime of killing a child within a year of birth.
2. 2.
   a person who kills an infant, especially their own child.

You have a faulty understanding of the suffix "-cide". You seem to think that "genocide" means the killing of many, so, naturally, "infanticide" means the killing of many infants. This is not correct. We have a term for the killing of many: mass murder.

If "genocide" does not necessarily mean killing lots of people, then what does it mean? It just means wiping out a race. White Americans attempted many genocides on the Native Americans. One such attempt was nonviolent: they attempted to sterilize all of them. If they had succeeded then they would've committed genocide without even killing a single person.

Similarly, the "-cide" suffix, when used in "homicide", just means murder. In your phrasing, is one homo sapiens homicide?

Lastly, God did, on two separate occasions, kill infants in mass amounts. So even in the way that you meant it, you were still wrong.

Now I will repeat the question:

Infanticide, therefore, can be righteous depending on the circumstances. Correct?

There are laws made by men for men. We punish a person for murder, stealing, rape, kidnapping, whatever. That is their earthly punishment. Their eternal punishment will only be for one thing, accepting Christ or not. Accepting Christ brings eternal life. Denying Him brings eternal death. It has nothing to do with murder, stealing, raping, kidnapping or anything right down to telling you parent a lie.

A murderer will enter heaven whether they were saved before or after the earthly crime. Your eternal destination is based on one thing and one thing only...........were you a child of God.

So then just to be clear, you are saying that Christianity in no way offers a method by which to improve society. Right? Since good works are completely voluntary, at best you can say that Christianity proposes that we do good voluntarily. I believe that pretty much any moral system selected at random can do the same.

You still haven't destroyed this again for me.

All I have to do is just let you present your arguments and you destroy yourself. You said that God is the law. So God is a list of 600 or so Do-and-Don't laws proposed by a wandering group of men who regularly engaged in racism, sexism, genocide, rape, slave trading, and other despicable war crimes that slip my mind at the moment. I think that sums it up quite nicely.

 

[Chriliman]

<Staff Edit>

I'm sure you understand the drive in people to defend what they believe is true. Admitting when we're wrong is a difficult part of life, but often when we admit error and seek to reconcile, we realize a deeper meaning in life that we didn't know was there before and would not have known had we not admitted error and sought reconciliation.

For me, my faith in Jesus has helped me rise above my wrongs and move toward hope and life and put my wrongs behind me, in the past where they belong.

 

[Cappadocious]

It is possible that I am a brain in a vat and that you don't exist, but that is not a proposition I will ever take seriously. Likewise it is possible that oars bend in water, but that is not something that I will seriously entertain.

Ok, do you take other possibilities more seriously (ex. oars only look bent in water due to a fact about perception, etc.?)

The position I adhere to is rational skepticism along with my nihilism.

So far I'm not seeing the difference between rational skepticism and other forms of skepticism, and your nihilism, on the other hand.

theorems that are derived are conditional upon the assumptions being made.

Okay, I see. I thought you were saying that all logical laws are conditional/hypothetical in the sense that they only hold conditionally. And I understand you now to be saying that this is not your position.

 

[Nihilist Virus]

Ok, do you take other possibilities more seriously (ex. oars only look bent in water due to a fact about perception, etc.?)

Of course I do. I cannot help but feel like you might be insulting me...

So far I'm not seeing the difference between rational skepticism and other forms of skepticism, and your nihilism, on the other hand.

You just articulated the difference. Irrational skepticism would hold that the oar might actually be bending; rational skepticism accepts the evidence and concludes that the oar is not bending.

Okay, I see. I thought you were saying that all logical laws are conditional/hypothetical in the sense that they only hold conditionally.

Upon what would they conditionally hold?

And I understand you now to be saying that this is not your position.

Why are you separating conditional and hypothetical with a slash? Are you suggesting those notions are similar? They aren't. The laws of logic are hypothetical and not conditional. The conclusions that follow are conditional and not hypothetical.

 

[Ron Coates]

Genesis 6:1-4 is now said to talk about the godly sons of Seth and the ungodly daughters of Cain. It's taught in seminaries. The older view and the one I believe to be true talks about Watcher angels coming to earth and having sex with human women. This produced offspring that are called the nephilim. These were evil and sometimes giant angelic/human hybrids. They ate people. They also had sex with animals. They so corrupted the world that God sent the flood to wipe them out. When God talked about Noah, He said he was perfect in his generations. He is talking about Noah's genetics, his D.N.A. It was through genetic manipulation that the Watchers were able to corrupt people and animals. When nephilim die, their spirits are called demons. These nephilim were present in the promised land. I believe that whenever God shows no mercy in the bible, He's dealing with nephilim. I'm telling you these things because I know that the church is a mess. But God is awesome and I wouldn't want to see someone walk away from Him over a misunderstanding. I know it sounds weird. These nephilim are behind the U.F.O. phenomenon. They actually abduct people from their bed in the middle of the night. I know this is so because one night they came to take me. I woke up to find I was paralysed with fear. At the foot of my bed was a 4 foot tall flame. I sensed there was a being inside it. I couldn't think until I thought the name Jesus. Instantly the flame, fear and paralysis were gone. It's never happened again. If you want to learn more, I highly recommend Try Smith. He's on YouTube. If you read the first chapter of the book of Enoch, you'll learn more. Peace. P.S. When I read the bible, I read it through a lens of love, since God is love. If my understanding of scripture isn't love, then I don't understand properly.

 

[Cappadocious]

Of course I do. I cannot help but feel like you might be insulting me...

The kind of skeptic you are trying to differentiate yourself from is a sort of skeptic I have a lot of respect for, so no, I'm not insulting you.

You just articulated the difference. Irrational skepticism would hold that the oar might actually be bending; rational skepticism accepts the evidence and concludes that the oar is not bending.

You say that you make no assumptions, and logical laws are assumptions. Then you say that you would prefer one conclusion about the oar to another based on some evidence.

So here's where I'm running into trouble: Sounds like you're employing an inference rule. Are inference rules assumptions? Do any logical laws explain inference rules? If inference rules are assumptions, then it looks like you do employ assumptions (or is employing an assumption different from making an assumption? If so, how)? If inference rules are not assumptions, why are logical laws? And would you be open to the idea that logical laws are more fundamental than inference rules?

Why are you separating conditional and hypothetical with a slash? Are you suggesting those notions are similar? They aren't. The laws of logic are hypothetical and not conditional. The conclusions that follow are conditional and not hypothetical.

We are using different senses of hypothetical, then, probably due to our differing areas of study.

Do you agree with the following:

A proposition x is conditional = there is some proposition y such that if y then x

Or

A proposition x is conditional = it is of the form: if y then z

?

 

[Nihilist Virus]

Genesis 6:1-4 is now said to talk about the godly sons of Seth and the ungodly daughters of Cain. It's taught in seminaries. The older view and the one I believe to be true talks about Watcher angels coming to earth and having sex with human women. This produced offspring that are called the nephilim. These were evil and sometimes giant angelic/human hybrids. They ate people. They also had sex with animals. They so corrupted the world that God sent the flood to wipe them out. When God talked about Noah, He said he was perfect in his generations. He is talking about Noah's genetics, his D.N.A. It was through genetic manipulation that the Watchers were able to corrupt people and animals. When nephilim die, their spirits are called demons. These nephilim were present in the promised land. I believe that whenever God shows no mercy in the bible, He's dealing with nephilim. I'm telling you these things because I know that the church is a mess. But God is awesome and I wouldn't want to see someone walk away from Him over a misunderstanding. I know it sounds weird. These nephilim are behind the U.F.O. phenomenon. They actually abduct people from their bed in the middle of the night. I know this is so because one night they came to take me. I woke up to find I was paralysed with fear. At the foot of my bed was a 4 foot tall flame. I sensed there was a being inside it. I couldn't think until I thought the name Jesus. Instantly the flame, fear and paralysis were gone. It's never happened again. If you want to learn more, I highly recommend Try Smith. He's on YouTube. If you read the first chapter of the book of Enoch, you'll learn more. Peace. P.S. When I read the bible, I read it through a lens of love, since God is love. If my understanding of scripture isn't love, then I don't understand properly.

 

[Vicomte13]

These nephilim are behind the U.F.O. phenomenon. They actually abduct people from their bed in the middle of the night. I know this is so because one night they came to take me. I woke up to find I was paralysed with fear. At the foot of my bed was a 4 foot tall flame. I sensed there was a being inside it. I couldn't think until I thought the name Jesus. Instantly the flame, fear and paralysis were gone. It's never happened again.

Unless there was supernatural knowledge being imparted during or after the incident, what you really know is that there was a being, in evanescent flame (not physical - it did not scorch your floor or your coverlet), at the end of your bed, and that this being was dispelled by the name "Jesus", which you said either internally or aloud.

That's what you really know.

You like the Enoch story and the thought of nephilim, and UFOs, so you have equated the being at the foot of your bed with aliens, aliens with nephilim, and thus brought them into the range of the Book of Enoch.

(If you think that Enoch is Scripture, then you should convert to Ethiopian Orthodoxy, as they have Enoch in their canon.)

Did you communicate with the being in the flame or with Jesus before, during or after the event?

What was communicated?

Specifically, was the demon at the foot of your bed holding you in a mind lock and pressing images into your mind, that you were unable to resist, until you called upon Jesus for help? Was the nature of those images quite lurid - such that you would blush to tell them and would tell of them only in euphemism? Were those images very much within the realm of things that you know are evil but desire anyway.

Was there anyone else in the room with you? Was that person sleeping? Had that person been awake, do you believe that s/he would have seen the flame and the being, or do you believe that you were seeing with spiritual eyes and not physical ones?

At the moment you invoked Jesus (by what name, specifically?), did you experience something as the demon's lock on you was broken?

I know of what you speak. I have seen it.

 

[Vicomte13]

Genesis 6:1-4 is now said to talk about the godly sons of Seth and the ungodly daughters of Cain. It's taught in seminaries. The older view and the one I believe to be true talks about Watcher angels coming to earth and having sex with human women.

If they're teaching that in seminaries, it's poppycock. The same sources that include Enoch tell us that Naamah was Noah's wife. Naamah was Lamech's daughter by Zillah. Na'amah is the only of the female offspring of the antediluvians mentioned by name in the regular canon of Scripture. Her name was preserved because, as wife of Noah, she is the common ancestor of all mankind.

We are all, all of us, descended from Adam and Eve, and from Noah and Na'amah.

Na'amah was Lamech's daughter. Lamech was son of Enoch, who was son of Cain.

So, we are all, all of us, lineal descendants of Adam and Eve, Cain and Zillah, and Noah and Na'amah.

Which means every one of is a descendant of Cain. Therefore, the notion that the descendants of Cain were doomed and all drowned in the Flood is absurd. We're all descendants of Cain. So was Jesus.

 

[Vicomte13]

Yes it is quirky. I don't, in fact, ascribe to him the best of motives. I think he has purposely tossed the apple of discord into the Christian tent, and is enjoying watching people flail around unable to reply to him effectively. I think he expected this very result, having seen it before.

Other believers have asked these questions, and other sincere souls have had their faith shaken by the same doubts.

So, while we may dismiss him for what he is, we should nevertheless address all of the valid points that he raises, because they lay bare all of the fault lines in Christianity, and the weaknesses in the message, the places where Christians themselves struggle the most.

I'll use my reply to you to begin to do so, starting with his early posts.

(1) He says his faith was destroyed by reading the Bible.

This is completely understandable. I was a superstitious pantheist the first time I read the Bible, in English, during a long sea passage across the Pacific. From the very first page, from the first sentence "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth..." I was confronted with a Go/No Go decision point. What follows next after that, read literally in English seems to establish a short six day creation period, with the quick arrival of man on the sixth day. I knew this was not true. It conflicted with what I knew about biology, paleontology, geology - all of the sciences acquired in and in preparation for an engineering program.

So, from page 1, I knew that I was going to have to suspend disbelief to read this thing, this Bible, and get through the story. It seemed worth it. And so it was through Flood and Babel. Unbelievable stuff, but accepted for the purposes of the story.

Abraham seemed like a rather dishonest fellow but God liked him the same. Joseph is the greatest hero of all in Genesis. It's hard not to like and sympathize with him.

Then we move to Moses and the Exodus. The 10 Plagues story is certainly exciting, but it reads like a myth. Rivers running red, hail, darkness, locusts - very cool. But frogs? Frogs. Why frogs? Yes, yes, the stench and disgustingness when they die, of course, but still, being plagued by FROGS seems sort of...comedic. Out in the desert, God seems capricious in his laws.
Applying 20th Century knowledge of hygiene makes the food laws seem far ahead of their time, but then that's juxtaposed with death for gathering wood on Saturday, strange sexual rules (such as the "marry the deflowerer, or not and pay money, at the father's discretion"), but burn alive the unchaste daughter of a priest? It feels like ancient folk wisdom and ancient folk barbarism, all tied together in a knot. It feels like the sort of customs - some practical, some brutal - that we think all ancient cultures had. We just know about the Jews' because of the age of their book, and its preservation thanks to the Christians' later interest in Christ.

But even in the Pentateuch God is said to have not just said some disturbing things, but also done them. Some of the priestly lines assert that they are Moses' equal, so they're all burnt up? Aaron's own sons carelessly light some incense and God slays them on the spot, but expects the father to go on? This God has some "Temple of Doom" features to him.

Then we come to Joshua, easily the most heart-rending, horrific book of Scripture, in which God apparently commands the utter genocide of a whole people, including all of the children. When I read that the first time, I had no faith to be put to the test. My faith wasn't tested because I believed in the scientific theory of the origins of the universe, natural law as "God", and had already taken the whole story of Flood, Babel, Abraham and Joseph and Moses as being myths, perhaps legends with a kernel of truth reposing in some event, but not literal history. I had suspended disbelief and enjoyed the ride. Come to Joshua and I stopped enjoying the ride. YHWH was a monster, and the Hebrews were Nazis. If there were a God, if that God were the YHWH of Joshua, he was indistinguishable from the worst attributes of the Devil, as I understood the Devil to be - and at least the Devil wasn't hung up on sex.

What's worse about Joshua is that it ceases to seem completely legendary, and starts to look like fact. The idea that the seas parted for the Hebrews seemed like a delightful Santa Claus story, but the thought that a bunch of religious fanatics, fired up by their faith in the blood rites of a demon god, would go and do something hellish in that god's name like wipe out whole cities for their race...well, that seemed rather believable. And sort of made Auschwitz a monstrous repayment to that event.

I liked the idea of God before I read Joshua the first time, and I generally liked Jews and didn't understand all of the fuss about them, but as I read Joshua, I came to truly, to the depths of my moral soul, detest this bloody YHWH, and to find the Hebrews to be the worst sort of Nazis. And the fact that the land claim to Israel that has generated such bloodshed TODAY was rooted in a land claim dating back to THAT genocide caused me to oppose Israel as well. No land claim can still be respected from such a crime. And if there were a hell, this genocidal YHWH belonged in it for urging on a bunch of barbarians to go slaughter whole cities. Of course, I didn't really believe I was damning GOD, because God was the laws of nature. I was damning the BELIEF in God that could cause men to be genocidal barbarians, and damning anybody who would claim a MODERN land right stemming from an ancient crime.

And of course, damning any Christian or Jew who would dare DEFEND such a horrendous crime against humanity.

Joshua did not destroy my faith. It strengthed it greatly. THANK GOD - the real one - the Laws of Nature - that I did not believe this monstrous myth of the Christians and Jews.

I read on grimly after that, and found the endless repitition of the prophets immensely boring. Why was God so offended with the Northern Kingdom? Something about doing sacrifices on the wrong altars with the wrong priests. So therefore they were all slaughtered by the Assyrians. Seems just. Live by the sword, die by the sword, they say. The Northern Kingdom was created by a genocide, and it was destroyed for good in a conquest that was pretty rough, but merely a cultural genocide - many descendants of Hebrews still lived there, but without the YHWH worship.

The Southern Kingdom is then destroyed, once again for a series of weird theological reasons. Prominent Jews are deported to Persia, where they demonstrate in those ancient time the same slippery ability to gravitate towards power that Jews were disliked for in modern times.

Then they returned and rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem, and promptly adopted the most xenophobic and exclusive marriage and cultural practices. Such utterly DETESTABLE people, these Jews were to me, reading about them ignoring their own God (who was also, mind you, disgusting to me, but at least he had POWER - these Jews didn't even had that, and KNEW their nasty demon-god would hammer them, but they were so stubborn, arrogant and stupid that they kept on ignoring him and doing evil, as he defined it).

After Joshua, watching the Jews get smashed in the Old Testament, and contemplating the final UTTER destruction of the Temple, forever, by the Romans, was very satisfying. The Bible didn't make me an anti-Semite in the present, but it DID make me strongly anti-Israel, both in my reading of the Scriptures, and in modern politics.

Then came the Maccabean Revolt where, once again, the Jews revolt against what? Greek civilization. Barbarians versus civilization. I could not bring myself to root for Antiochus Epiphanes IV, because he was a murderous jerk also. Still, in general I thought that it would have been better for the whole world, including the Jews themselves, if the Greeks had managed to wipe out their barbaric little tribal cult once and for all.

Then comes Jesus and the Apostles. How can one not love Jesus? So good. So pure. So noble. And so VERY doomed, of course, because where was he living? With the Jews, and with that Temple up there with those fanatic priests of their bloody old cult. Of course they had him killed. The Roman destruction of the Temple finally brought justice and permanent extermination to that cult. What came next, the Pharisaic rabbinnical Judaism, is not the religion that YHWH established. It's a religious-social club based around the writings and the memories, but the priests are gone, the rites are gone. Good.

That's where I came out of the Bible. It would be swell, I thought, if Jesus were true, mainly because Jesus cancelled out the barbarism of YHWH's blood cult. Yes, yes, Jesus said he wasn't changing a letter of the law, but he obviously DID change everything, from food and the sabbath and the law of killing adulteresses and divorce. And then the apostles went further and struck down the whole archaic mess of the old Jewish law. I saw progress in that. Then a completely unjust trial and death. More outrage. And then back into suspended disbelief: resurrection, ascension, a new faith, this time a good one, spreading around the world. That last part was real enough.

That's where I left the Bible the first time through. It is fair to say, based on what he wrote, that Nihilist Virus is probably less offended by the Old Testament Scriptures than I was. I made a special point of blaspheming the God of the Old Testament a great deal, because my read of the Bible revealed him to be morally lower, in my eyes, than any Christian description of Satan.

So, when NV writes about horrors throughout Scriptures, he's right.
When he writes about contradictions, he is apparently right (when you read the Scriptures in English).
When he writes that the laws of the Old Testament offend the moral sensitivities, he is right.

Reading the Bible, and probably particularly Joshua, shattered his faith.
I believed in Natural Law as God, I was a scientific pantheist, when I read it, so I had no faith to be shattered. Its effect on me was to turn my view of the Old Testament God into one of hatred - so very evil, and my view of Jews into one of antipathy.

I still liked the Catholic Church, because of the charity work and the art, and because Jesus was likable. At heart I knew that it wasn't really TRUE, but it was MY heritage, part of it anyway, and it did a lot of good in the world today. From a religious perspective, the theology didn't matter because it was ALL myth - Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Hindu, whatever.

And that's where I left things for 7 years.

There were Muslims at my wedding, and they gave us a nice Qu'ran. I read it, and discovered that IT picked up where the Old Testament left off. Allah talks, sounds and rules very much like YHWH. The Muslim law is derived from the Mosaic law. Allah is the same monad. The only difference is that the command to worldwide jihad, by Allah, now turns the whole future into the book of Joshua for everybody but Muslims.

Interestingly, the Qu'ran extols Jesus beyond measure. He is greater than Muhammad, the greatest, purest prophet, born of a virgin, who will be the judge of men at the end. But he is not divine.

Unlike the New Testament versus the Old, the Qu'ran is quite consistent internally. It speaks with the apparent voice of one author. Where there is a variance in prescribed treatment, it is explainable by the surrounding text pretty regularly.

Islam is the simplest, most consistent of the three religions. Christianity is the most complicated and difficult to believe. Indeed, the god of Islam, if he were given a set of properties, could ALMOST be the face of a pantheistic nature.

Islam is an attractive religion (for men particularly) as written, because of the consistency, and because of the continuity with the past, to a point, but also for its strong assertion that the Jews and Christians distorted "The Book" by adding things not there and twisting it, so that the Qu'ran claims to "set the record straight".

If the Muslims behaved like Catholics, with all those worldwide charities and schools and hospitals, it would have been an easy sell for me to pick Islam as the most rational of them all, and as the "face" - if mythical - of Pantheism.

But I'd already been to war in the Middle East twice. I already saw the actual practice of Islam. And I have always instinctively thought that "you shall know them by their fruits" was a really wise truth. Jesus might not be real, but Allah isn't really real, as presented either...and even if he is, the way that Muslims BEHAVE was (and is) so disgusting to me that if that's really the will of God, then I'd do without that God. (Of course, I didn't really believe that this Allah of the Qu'ran IS God, just that he was more plausible than the other two choices. Hinduism feels like the Greek and Roman mythos - completely unbelievable.)

And that's where I left it until July 2001. Up until that point, Nihilist Virus and I could have walked the same path, but he would have found me far more virulently blasphemous towards YHWH than he would ever dare to be in his atheism. After all, reading the Bible shattered the faith he already had, and left him wounded with a hole. Natural Law was already my God when I read the Bible, and I was simply looking to like, to find good things from the ancient wisdom of man. I found things I liked - in Jesus - finally - but that was after having read 1500 pages of the most utterly detestable, boring and repetitive tripe I had ever read. I only persisted to be able to say I'd done it. The gentle suspension of disbelief for the Torah turned into a virulent hatred of this "God" in the Book of Joshua.

I understand Nihilist Virus.

Which is why I know that the only thing that is going to change his view is a miracle.

The encrustation of disbelief and moral horror at what is in Joshua has built a thick encrustation around the foot of the ladder in NV's spirit. He will never try to climb that ladder unless God reaches down and smashes away that encrustation.

He might. He did it for me. Unless and until he does it, though, it isn't possible to really reason with him. Looking through the eyes through which he looks, without the actual knowledge that the supernatural is real and that the natural does not encompass reality, he cannot believe. And he will not suspend disbelief either. He's read the lurid details of genocide, and heard the cries of the raped captive girls and the priest's daughters consigned to the flames. He correctly sees the utter barbarism in it, and is not willing to suspend disbelief again to find a way to justify a God who would command such evil things.

And he's right.

WE cannot "save" NV. We cannot impart faith in him. God alone can do that. And to do it, after the trauma, will require God to deign to perform a miracle. He did for me. I rather hope he will for NV too.

Only once one realizes that there really is God, like it or not, can one then come to grips with what God wants. And to find that, one should not start with Bible or Koran or Church, but a couple of miraculous artifacts.

That discussion, though, is for another day.

STaff Edited

 

[Lulav]

Ladies and Gentlemen
May I have your attention please?
This Thread is now reopened
after a very long time
of cleaning out the
Off Topic, debating
goading, and flaming posts.

Can we all please stick to the subject at hand?
And remember that this forum
is NOT for Debating, and the
site wide rules against Goading
and Flaming are also
to be adhered to
in this forum as well.
If your post is missing it was in violation
of one or more of those above.
And let's keep in mind
Matthew 5:44 ​

 

[Noxot]

If I understand you correctly, you don't disavow the NIV but you don't accept everything in it. Can you explain to me your procedure by which you discern what information is of divine origin and which information is not?

the niv is a lame translation to me. it is good enough but I don't prefer it. it is not a black or white kind of thing to me. I even used to read the jehovahs witness version of the bible and even though they left out some verses and they at times seem like they have a semi-cultish vibe to them I was still not bothered reading the new world translation.


well one useful quote that helps to explain how I understand God is below. the context of this quote is in contemplation of the flood and what effects it can bring as our nature matures or becomes a bit more refined (which happens forever if we are forever ascending), but this little quote explains well one aspect of spiritual understanding:

ofc all colors in the rainbow are from the same light but it makes so many different colors and all are beautiful.

another thing I do is try not to think or understand anything at all but just wait for God to send an angel to tell me something that I might be able to understand. in general i try to avoid things that don't seem to pull me closer to God. so I try to find God everywhere and this can lead me to some strange places. at other times the Lord hides and he even puts evil spirits around to stir my own evils up. this ofc leads to a different perspective than the part of me that loves God but it also leads to questions and ideas and feelings that some people fear to ask and it also shows me that i have the liberty to oppose God. attacking him is good. the more I try to make war with him the more I am assured he will destroy me.

another part of how I understand what is divine is that i know Gods nature is infinite. so i try to use my full capacity to grasp a hold of God. so my self trys to reach as high as he can to know the simple nature of God, who is said to be love and who is said to have made me out of his love. I have a lot of different experiments going on with myself. i will adopt any technique if it gets me closer to God. I am even considering eating psychedelic mushrooms. I see nothing wrong with them if I desire to know God with them.

so to shortly sum it up i think one of the best ways to explain how I understand is that it is like being both darkness and light who are the same thing to me. it is like having a soul who is one side white and one side black. like the video 'killpop', which is full of understanding. it is like i watch it in heaven and know its eternal form. if you could understand that this video is filled with parts of what has been happening, that it is not just a song but is even in the context of what I have been posting about and having conversations about. it most certainly speaks of the same types as the flood, and the Swedenborg quote and of our conversation concerning the rape, if people can't see that then it is because they are blind to it, because I see it just fine.

so sometimes when i have a spiritual experience it is like reality is created anew and everything was designed to be at such and such point in time.

 

[JacksBratt]

OK so you asked me to show something in Christianity that resembles hate, and I give you a Bible verse which describes the vengeful fantasy of violently murdering the enemy's young. How much more explicit hatred do you need? If I said I wanted to smash your children against rocks, would you think it's because I don't like your children or would you think it's because I hate you?

Very good. Now, show me how this is the theology of the Christian religion. Or, better still, the teachings of Christ, which is God Himself teaching us what He expects of us.

You can show me many things of hateful actions, however, this is not an example of God teaching or telling us that worshiping or following Him is allowing any hate toward any other human as part of the rightful following of His will.

If you forfeit your right to judge YHWH, why do you think you have the right to judge Allah? Because YHWH exists and Allah does not? I can only assume you base this on some combination of 1.) blind faith, 2.) persuasive apologetics, or 3.) a personal experience.

What is your fascination with the comparison of the object of the worship of Christianity, God (YHWH) and the object of the worship of Islam, Allah? Or you fascination of trying to draw parallels between Christianity and Islam?

The two can be compared. In essence, they are the same Deity, from what I understand. However, I do not hold the ramblings of Mohammad in any way shape or form similar to the God breathed, Holy Spirit inspired word of God we call the Bible.

So, to answer your question, the Allah which is mentioned in the Koran is not a real or properly representation of the creator of the universe. He, Therefore is not worthy to judge any human and can be judged as a figment of Mohammad's imagination.

Yes it is.

in·fan·ti·cide
inˈfan(t)əˌsīd/
noun

1. 1.
   the crime of killing a child within a year of birth.
2. 2.
   a person who kills an infant, especially their own child.

You have a faulty understanding of the suffix "-cide". You seem to think that "genocide" means the killing of many, so, naturally, "infanticide" means the killing of many infants. This is not correct. We have a term for the killing of many: mass murder.

If "genocide" does not necessarily mean killing lots of people, then what does it mean? It just means wiping out a race. White Americans attempted many genocides on the Native Americans. One such attempt was nonviolent: they attempted to sterilize all of them. If they had succeeded then they would've committed genocide without even killing a single person.

Similarly, the "-cide" suffix, when used in "homicide", just means murder. In your phrasing, is one homo sapiens homicide?

You are correct. I assumed it meant on mass. I stand corrected.

Lastly, God did, on two separate occasions, kill infants in mass amounts. So even in the way that you meant it, you were still wrong.

Well, lets look at each of these occasioins where God did this. Present the ones you are talking about and I will address each one.

Now I will repeat the question:

Infanticide, therefore, can be righteous depending on the circumstances. Correct?

Only in cases where it is Gods will. He is righteous and if He has reason to do such a thing then it will be a righteous action.

Again, state the examples that you are referring to and we can discuss them.

So then just to be clear, you are saying that Christianity in no way offers a method by which to improve society. Right? Since good works are completely voluntary, at best you can say that Christianity proposes that we do good voluntarily. I believe that pretty much any moral system selected at random can do the same.

You are confusing the implementation of discipline in an earthly judgement and a heavenly judgement to what actions are expected of you.

Your assumption or statement that Christianity doesn't improve society is obviously in jest.

Good works will not get you to heaven..........ever.

No action will send you "to hell in a hand basket" either. We are all on the road to hell.... even the nicest little old lady who baked you cookies and gave you milk, after school, to the Harley riding thug with a 9 mm in his belt who just killed a man for fun..... all going to hell.

However, if this Harley riding murderer pulled over, had a glimmer of wisdom, recognized all the sin in his life and that he was, indeed going to hell.. gets off his bike. Gets on his knees and gives it all up, repents, accepts Christ in a sincere true change of heart.... he now is a child of God and when he dies, will spend eternity in paradise.

The nice, little old lady, if she has not accepted Christ and states as you do that God is a liar, murderer of children, institutes unrighteous genocide, Jesus was just a man... Yep, she, as nice as she is, is going to an eternity in hell.

Once you are a child of God, your heart will change, you will desire to please God and spread His good news. You will strive to love God with all your heart soul and mind and treat your neighbor as yourself...

This simple, new Commandment, given by Christ, is the bullet that destroys your statement "Christianity in no way offers a method by which to improve society."

All I have to do is just let you present your arguments and you destroy yourself. You said that God is the law. So God is a list of 600 or so Do-and-Don't laws proposed by a wandering group of men who regularly engaged in racism, sexism, genocide, rape, slave trading, and other despicable war crimes that slip my mind at the moment. I think that sums it up quite nicely.

Ah yes, your final card, the laws of Leviticus.... I usually see this come up when people have no where else to go...

God’s desire has always been to have fellowship with mankind, but our sin prevented that. He gave the Law to set a standard of holiness—and, at the same time, to show that we could never meet that standard on our own. That’s why Jesus Christ had to come—to fulfill all the righteous requirements of the Law on our behalf, and then to take the punishment of violating that Law, also on our behalf. Paul wrote in Galatians 2:16 that we are not justified “by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ.”

 

[Noxot]

I hope people can notice that too many laws result in the oppression of good conversation and life. if you don't then don't expect to ever understand the bible because Jesus fought tooth and nail against people who were "following the rules" and "doing their job"

you can't force people to be good and it is hard to judge what is good and what is evil which is why those who blindly follow "rules" will have a hard time understanding what the freedom of the spirit is. there is a time and place for rules and I can assure those in charge of this place that they would have a lot less work to do if they would stop trying so hard to enforce rules.

it is a human thing to have faults and to mess up or to not be appropriate at times. if we can not, by a social interaction, be corrected but have to constantly be babied by mods who hush things up then no one is going to be able to be called out for being a jerk or to have the pressures of other humans put to shame those who sometimes deserve it. boohoo sometimes people disagree. that is how the real world works. let us be human, please. -_-

or you know, just keep making this place lamer and lamer. because after all, you want to sell us a religion right? like the tax collectors ( spiritually speaking) selling junk by the temple did! Jesus did not approve. we don't have to be fake and try to swallow people up in indoctrination as the past evil doers did. cursed be all who do not live in the spirit of freedom for there is no spiritual life without inner freedom. that is why Jesus called the hypocrites white washed tombs of the dead.

~cough~ excuse me. do whatever you want idc.

 

[ToBeLoved]

If they're teaching that in seminaries, it's poppycock. The same sources that include Enoch tell us that Naamah was Noah's wife. Naamah was Lamech's daughter by Zillah. Na'amah is the only of the female offspring of the antediluvians mentioned by name in the regular canon of Scripture. Her name was preserved because, as wife of Noah, she is the common ancestor of all mankind.

We are all, all of us, descended from Adam and Eve, and from Noah and Na'amah.

This is not even Biblical. What commentaries or texts are you pulling this from? Enoch is not a Book of scripture. You need to take this to the Controversial Beliefs area.

 

[Nihilist Virus]

Yes it is quirky. I don't, in fact, ascribe to him the best of motives. I think he has purposely tossed the apple of discord into the Christian tent, and is enjoying watching people flail around unable to reply to him effectively. I think he expected this very result, having seen it before.

Other believers have asked these questions, and other sincere souls have had their faith shaken by the same doubts.

So, while we may dismiss him for what he is, we should nevertheless address all of the valid points that he raises, because they lay bare all of the fault lines in Christianity, and the weaknesses in the message, the places where Christians themselves struggle the most.

I'll use my reply to you to begin to do so, starting with his early posts.

(1) He says his faith was destroyed by reading the Bible.

This is completely understandable. I was a superstitious pantheist the first time I read the Bible, in English, during a long sea passage across the Pacific. From the very first page, from the first sentence "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth..." I was confronted with a Go/No Go decision point. What follows next after that, read literally in English seems to establish a short six day creation period, with the quick arrival of man on the sixth day. I knew this was not true. It conflicted with what I knew about biology, paleontology, geology - all of the sciences acquired in and in preparation for an engineering program.

So, from page 1, I knew that I was going to have to suspend disbelief to read this thing, this Bible, and get through the story. It seemed worth it. And so it was through Flood and Babel. Unbelievable stuff, but accepted for the purposes of the story.

Abraham seemed like a rather dishonest fellow but God liked him the same. Joseph is the greatest hero of all in Genesis. It's hard not to like and sympathize with him.

Then we move to Moses and the Exodus. The 10 Plagues story is certainly exciting, but it reads like a myth. Rivers running red, hail, darkness, locusts - very cool. But frogs? Frogs. Why frogs? Yes, yes, the stench and disgustingness when they die, of course, but still, being plagued by FROGS seems sort of...comedic. Out in the desert, God seems capricious in his laws.
Applying 20th Century knowledge of hygiene makes the food laws seem far ahead of their time, but then that's juxtaposed with death for gathering wood on Saturday, strange sexual rules (such as the "marry the deflowerer, or not and pay money, at the father's discretion"), but burn alive the unchaste daughter of a priest? It feels like ancient folk wisdom and ancient folk barbarism, all tied together in a knot. It feels like the sort of customs - some practical, some brutal - that we think all ancient cultures had. We just know about the Jews' because of the age of their book, and its preservation thanks to the Christians' later interest in Christ.

But even in the Pentateuch God is said to have not just said some disturbing things, but also done them. Some of the priestly lines assert that they are Moses' equal, so they're all burnt up? Aaron's own sons carelessly light some incense and God slays them on the spot, but expects the father to go on? This God has some "Temple of Doom" features to him.

Then we come to Joshua, easily the most heart-rending, horrific book of Scripture, in which God apparently commands the utter genocide of a whole people, including all of the children. When I read that the first time, I had no faith to be put to the test. My faith wasn't tested because I believed in the scientific theory of the origins of the universe, natural law as "God", and had already taken the whole story of Flood, Babel, Abraham and Joseph and Moses as being myths, perhaps legends with a kernel of truth reposing in some event, but not literal history. I had suspended disbelief and enjoyed the ride. Come to Joshua and I stopped enjoying the ride. YHWH was a monster, and the Hebrews were Nazis. If there were a God, if that God were the YHWH of Joshua, he was indistinguishable from the worst attributes of the Devil, as I understood the Devil to be - and at least the Devil wasn't hung up on sex.

What's worse about Joshua is that it ceases to seem completely legendary, and starts to look like fact. The idea that the seas parted for the Hebrews seemed like a delightful Santa Claus story, but the thought that a bunch of religious fanatics, fired up by their faith in the blood rites of a demon god, would go and do something hellish in that god's name like wipe out whole cities for their race...well, that seemed rather believable. And sort of made Auschwitz a monstrous repayment to that event.

I liked the idea of God before I read Joshua the first time, and I generally liked Jews and didn't understand all of the fuss about them, but as I read Joshua, I came to truly, to the depths of my moral soul, detest this bloody YHWH, and to find the Hebrews to be the worst sort of Nazis. And the fact that the land claim to Israel that has generated such bloodshed TODAY was rooted in a land claim dating back to THAT genocide caused me to oppose Israel as well. No land claim can still be respected from such a crime. And if there were a hell, this genocidal YHWH belonged in it for urging on a bunch of barbarians to go slaughter whole cities. Of course, I didn't really believe I was damning GOD, because God was the laws of nature. I was damning the BELIEF in God that could cause men to be genocidal barbarians, and damning anybody who would claim a MODERN land right stemming from an ancient crime.

And of course, damning any Christian or Jew who would dare DEFEND such a horrendous crime against humanity.

Joshua did not destroy my faith. It strengthed it greatly. THANK GOD - the real one - the Laws of Nature - that I did not believe this monstrous myth of the Christians and Jews.

I read on grimly after that, and found the endless repitition of the prophets immensely boring. Why was God so offended with the Northern Kingdom? Something about doing sacrifices on the wrong altars with the wrong priests. So therefore they were all slaughtered by the Assyrians. Seems just. Live by the sword, die by the sword, they say. The Northern Kingdom was created by a genocide, and it was destroyed for good in a conquest that was pretty rough, but merely a cultural genocide - many descendants of Hebrews still lived there, but without the YHWH worship.

The Southern Kingdom is then destroyed, once again for a series of weird theological reasons. Prominent Jews are deported to Persia, where they demonstrate in those ancient time the same slippery ability to gravitate towards power that Jews were disliked for in modern times.

Then they returned and rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem, and promptly adopted the most xenophobic and exclusive marriage and cultural practices. Such utterly DETESTABLE people, these Jews were to me, reading about them ignoring their own God (who was also, mind you, disgusting to me, but at least he had POWER - these Jews didn't even had that, and KNEW their nasty demon-god would hammer them, but they were so stubborn, arrogant and stupid that they kept on ignoring him and doing evil, as he defined it).

After Joshua, watching the Jews get smashed in the Old Testament, and contemplating the final UTTER destruction of the Temple, forever, by the Romans, was very satisfying. The Bible didn't make me an anti-Semite in the present, but it DID make me strongly anti-Israel, both in my reading of the Scriptures, and in modern politics.

Then came the Maccabean Revolt where, once again, the Jews revolt against what? Greek civilization. Barbarians versus civilization. I could not bring myself to root for Antiochus Epiphanes IV, because he was a murderous jerk also. Still, in general I thought that it would have been better for the whole world, including the Jews themselves, if the Greeks had managed to wipe out their barbaric little tribal cult once and for all.

Then comes Jesus and the Apostles. How can one not love Jesus? So good. So pure. So noble. And so VERY doomed, of course, because where was he living? With the Jews, and with that Temple up there with those fanatic priests of their bloody old cult. Of course they had him killed. The Roman destruction of the Temple finally brought justice and permanent extermination to that cult. What came next, the Pharisaic rabbinnical Judaism, is not the religion that YHWH established. It's a religious-social club based around the writings and the memories, but the priests are gone, the rites are gone. Good.

That's where I came out of the Bible. It would be swell, I thought, if Jesus were true, mainly because Jesus cancelled out the barbarism of YHWH's blood cult. Yes, yes, Jesus said he wasn't changing a letter of the law, but he obviously DID change everything, from food and the sabbath and the law of killing adulteresses and divorce. And then the apostles went further and struck down the whole archaic mess of the old Jewish law. I saw progress in that. Then a completely unjust trial and death. More outrage. And then back into suspended disbelief: resurrection, ascension, a new faith, this time a good one, spreading around the world. That last part was real enough.

That's where I left the Bible the first time through. It is fair to say, based on what he wrote, that Nihilist Virus is probably less offended by the Old Testament Scriptures than I was. I made a special point of blaspheming the God of the Old Testament a great deal, because my read of the Bible revealed him to be morally lower, in my eyes, than any Christian description of Satan.

So, when NV writes about horrors throughout Scriptures, he's right.
When he writes about contradictions, he is apparently right (when you read the Scriptures in English).
When he writes that the laws of the Old Testament offend the moral sensitivities, he is right.

Reading the Bible, and probably particularly Joshua, shattered his faith.
I believed in Natural Law as God, I was a scientific pantheist, when I read it, so I had no faith to be shattered. Its effect on me was to turn my view of the Old Testament God into one of hatred - so very evil, and my view of Jews into one of antipathy.

I still liked the Catholic Church, because of the charity work and the art, and because Jesus was likable. At heart I knew that it wasn't really TRUE, but it was MY heritage, part of it anyway, and it did a lot of good in the world today. From a religious perspective, the theology didn't matter because it was ALL myth - Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Hindu, whatever.

And that's where I left things for 7 years.

There were Muslims at my wedding, and they gave us a nice Qu'ran. I read it, and discovered that IT picked up where the Old Testament left off. Allah talks, sounds and rules very much like YHWH. The Muslim law is derived from the Mosaic law. Allah is the same monad. The only difference is that the command to worldwide jihad, by Allah, now turns the whole future into the book of Joshua for everybody but Muslims.

Interestingly, the Qu'ran extols Jesus beyond measure. He is greater than Muhammad, the greatest, purest prophet, born of a virgin, who will be the judge of men at the end. But he is not divine.

Unlike the New Testament versus the Old, the Qu'ran is quite consistent internally. It speaks with the apparent voice of one author. Where there is a variance in prescribed treatment, it is explainable by the surrounding text pretty regularly.

Islam is the simplest, most consistent of the three religions. Christianity is the most complicated and difficult to believe. Indeed, the god of Islam, if he were given a set of properties, could ALMOST be the face of a pantheistic nature.

Islam is an attractive religion (for men particularly) as written, because of the consistency, and because of the continuity with the past, to a point, but also for its strong assertion that the Jews and Christians distorted "The Book" by adding things not there and twisting it, so that the Qu'ran claims to "set the record straight".

If the Muslims behaved like Catholics, with all those worldwide charities and schools and hospitals, it would have been an easy sell for me to pick Islam as the most rational of them all, and as the "face" - if mythical - of Pantheism.

But I'd already been to war in the Middle East twice. I already saw the actual practice of Islam. And I have always instinctively thought that "you shall know them by their fruits" was a really wise truth. Jesus might not be real, but Allah isn't really real, as presented either...and even if he is, the way that Muslims BEHAVE was (and is) so disgusting to me that if that's really the will of God, then I'd do without that God. (Of course, I didn't really believe that this Allah of the Qu'ran IS God, just that he was more plausible than the other two choices. Hinduism feels like the Greek and Roman mythos - completely unbelievable.)

And that's where I left it until July 2001. Up until that point, Nihilist Virus and I could have walked the same path, but he would have found me far more virulently blasphemous towards YHWH than he would ever dare to be in his atheism. After all, reading the Bible shattered the faith he already had, and left him wounded with a hole. Natural Law was already my God when I read the Bible, and I was simply looking to like, to find good things from the ancient wisdom of man. I found things I liked - in Jesus - finally - but that was after having read 1500 pages of the most utterly detestable, boring and repetitive tripe I had ever read. I only persisted to be able to say I'd done it. The gentle suspension of disbelief for the Torah turned into a virulent hatred of this "God" in the Book of Joshua.

I understand Nihilist Virus.

Which is why I know that the only thing that is going to change his view is a miracle.

The encrustation of disbelief and moral horror at what is in Joshua has built a thick encrustation around the foot of the ladder in NV's spirit. He will never try to climb that ladder unless God reaches down and smashes away that encrustation.

He might. He did it for me. Unless and until he does it, though, it isn't possible to really reason with him. Looking through the eyes through which he looks, without the actual knowledge that the supernatural is real and that the natural does not encompass reality, he cannot believe. And he will not suspend disbelief either. He's read the lurid details of genocide, and heard the cries of the raped captive girls and the priest's daughters consigned to the flames. He correctly sees the utter barbarism in it, and is not willing to suspend disbelief again to find a way to justify a God who would command such evil things.

And he's right.

WE cannot "save" NV. We cannot impart faith in him. God alone can do that. And to do it, after the trauma, will require God to deign to perform a miracle. He did for me. I rather hope he will for NV too.

Only once one realizes that there really is God, like it or not, can one then come to grips with what God wants. And to find that, one should not start with Bible or Koran or Church, but a couple of miraculous artifacts.

That discussion, though, is for another day.

STaff Edited

In a post that was taken down I said that I found this to be brutally sincere and the most intellectually honest thing I'd ever read (although, thinking about it again, your casual remarks about metaphysical naturalism being polytheistic seem to be from left field; also I did read it before the staff edit and haven't re-read it afterward). When the mod message came up I clicked through the block filter to read what happened and I was so impressed by your honesty that I've taken you off that list.

But some questions remain.

I don't understand why you think the "casting pearls before swine" line works on any level. You readily admit that the bulk of the Bible - and certainly the parts to which I am referring - is "detestable," so why would it be a pearl in any analogy? Why do you refer to me, a person who, by your own admission, raises legitimate questions, as a swine? The only reasons I can possibly come up with are that the Bible is a pearl because it is true (even though you fully admit that this cannot be proven and must be understood via some miracle) and that I am a swine because you believe you've correctly identified my intentions, a conclusion that you presumably base on your own past self and the way you were. Essentially, you admit that I'm right - at least, as far as I can see from what's been presented to me - and then you ridicule me and say that no one should speak with me because I haven't had the bizarre personal experience that you had.

Do you not see a problem with this?

 

[ToBeLoved]

..

 

[civilwarbuff]

I believe the moderator stated we are to respond to the OP only, not each other......

 

[Nihilist Virus]

The kind of skeptic you are trying to differentiate yourself from is a sort of skeptic I have a lot of respect for, so no, I'm not insulting you.



You say that you make no assumptions, and logical laws are assumptions. Then you say that you would prefer one conclusion about the oar to another based on some evidence.

So here's where I'm running into trouble: Sounds like you're employing an inference rule. Are inference rules assumptions? Do any logical laws explain inference rules? If inference rules are assumptions, then it looks like you do employ assumptions (or is employing an assumption different from making an assumption? If so, how)? If inference rules are not assumptions, why are logical laws? And would you be open to the idea that logical laws are more fundamental than inference rules?

I apologize. I should have clarified earlier that I am a logical nihilist. I've said this many times, but I realize I haven't said this to you.

Although mathematics appears to be more elegant and precise than the sciences, I find the opposite to be true. In mathematics, we make assumptions which are often times based on nothing. Some assumptions are not even formalizations of regularly occurring natural phenomena. The axiom of infinity, for example, says that there exists some set X for which there is a function f such that f:X→X is injective but not surjective. Huh? It's essentially saying that there are occasions where the pigeonhole principle does not apply. I'd very much like to see that in reality.

Science, on the other hand, makes almost no assumptions at all. The "assumption" that physical laws are homogeneous throughout the universe is admittedly tentative and also has not yet been falsified. Every scientific principle has been put through the fire many times over.

So when I say that I accept that the oar does not bend, and that my conclusion is based on evidence, the assumptions that I'm making are that the laws of nature will remain constant for at least the rest of my lifetime. But again, that assumption is tentative and subject to change according to the whims of nature.

We are using different senses of hypothetical, then, probably due to our differing areas of study.

Do you agree with the following:

A proposition x is conditional = there is some proposition y such that if y then x

Or

A proposition x is conditional = it is of the form: if y then z

?

I agree with the former, and if you meant "x" instead of "z" in your "if y then z" then I agree with the latter as well.

But I'm still confused here because you seem to be trying to clarify your use of the word "hypothetical" and then you completely abandon the term and refer to your examples as being conditional.