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Back at you. . .Yes.
Just for you, not for me.
I'll leave you to your conclusion (once again). Thanks for the respectful discussion.
See, I agree. But putting that to the side, for arguments sake. If I am tempted by a desire that is contrary to God's will, isn't that sin? If there is within me even the slightest desire (which is what temptation is), isn't that sinful?
believe that a temptation becomes a sin when, if I think to myself that:
"If I had an acceptable opportunity to fulfill my sinful temptation, then I would definitely follow through."
In this case, I have already committed the act in my heart, even though still a thought in my mind. That is the sin intention of my heart the Lord sees
That makes sense. We definitely have thoughts that we reject and might wonder, "Where did that come from?" In both the eastern and western contemplative traditions, it's assumed we are given thoughts we did not seek and are free to reject. I think the basic idea is that the impetus for some thoughts are outside forces, taken a number of ways.
Yes I’m trying to understand how to make sense out of a few things like you are, and like the ‘Did Jesus Lust?’ thread that @Pavel Mosko is referencing. So God is omniscient, therefore in order for a thing such as “Having a lust experience” to exist in reality then God necessarily must have knowledge of what that is like. But to have knowledge of a lust experience is to have had a lust experience. If you run into a person who has never had a lust experience before then that person wouldn’t have knowledge of what it is.That makes sense, but can you really be tempted unless you have some desire for the thing that tempts. Imagine Jesus being tempted, but not having to struggle against that temptation, as we do. Could we really say he was tempted as we are?
The notion that God cannot know something without experiencing it, is bogus. After all, he MADE us.Yes I’m trying to understand how to make sense out of a few things like you are, and like the ‘Did Jesus Lust?’ thread that @Pavel Mosko is referencing. So God is omniscient, therefore in order for a thing such as “Having a lust experience” to exist in reality then God necessarily must have knowledge of what that is like. But to have knowledge of a lust experience is to have had a lust experience. If you run into a person who has never had a lust experience before then that person wouldn’t have knowledge of what it is.
We say that God surely knows love, forgiveness, compassion, decision making, etc, because we know those things, and if we know them then God being much greater than us in every way also knows them. But I have been getting a little tripped up when looking at this idea from the view of mental properties that are not said to be good ones, like lust. Or even something morally neutral like being hungry, how does a spirit God know a hunger experience without being able to say that He has had/felt the experience before? To have it is to know it.
This part I agree with.Also, the fact that God knows something does not imply that Jesus did why here on earth, in his earthly body. He set all that aside, to live as we do.
It doesn’t even have to be God, the whole idea of knowing an experience without the experience confuses me. We even have the saying “It’s an experience” when an explanation can’t do something justice.The notion that God cannot know something without experiencing it, is bogus. After all, he MADE us.
It doesn’t even have to be God, the whole idea of knowing an experience without the experience confuses me. We even have the saying “It’s an experience” when an explanation can’t do something justice.
It sounds to me like you place more substance to this life than it merits. God is First Cause, and omniscient. Therefore, he knows what he made. It is illogical to think there is some detail that happened all by itself, by chance, just somehow, apart from him.I get it that to love is considered ‘Good’ so that it’s not totally fair to compare the knowledge of loving someone with the knowledge of lusting since God could love all day long and it’s fine because love is good. But still, God’s knowledge of love and God having had a love experience (even just once) seem dependent on each other.
I get it that to love is considered ‘Good’ so that it’s not totally fair to compare the knowledge of loving someone with the knowledge of lusting since God could love all day long and it’s fine because love is good. But still, God’s knowledge of love and God having had a love experience (even just once) seem dependent on each other.
Yes I think that is logical, but the part that seems to follow from it is that God knows all experiences just as intimately as we do (and probably even more so). Maybe the answer is that God can know a lust experience however God’s wisdom cuts it off at the root immediately? Maybe God only experienced impure thoughts one time ever in eternity past (so He does know them) but they only lasted a nanosecond before God shut the thoughts down, before His eternal wisdom cut them off? It’s so difficult to think about because there is an eternal source of both all things good and all things bad.It sounds to me like you place more substance to this life than it merits. God is First Cause, and omniscient. Therefore, he knows what he made. It is illogical to think there is some detail that happened all by itself, by chance, just somehow, apart from him.
True, God would just eternally know all things.The 'experience' is subjective. And God is not like us. He does not learn by experience.
But lust and love are two different things. I don’t think we could make love out of lust or make lust out of love…you can lust for someone you love but not be lusting for them during a time that you’re loving them. Love is the cheeseburger, lust is an addition topping, lust is the lettuce and ketchup lolJohn made statements such as "God is love" or "God is light". So is love to be considered "good", or is love to be considered God? I do not mean to make the human experience or conception or attempts at making love (even of fellow men) to be an idol, we do that very well. Procreation is also good, but lust actually tends to have very little to do with procreation, it just treats it as an unfortunate side effect, if it considers it at all. The progression (or regression) of love to lust (might) be considered abstractly as a move from God to an absence of God (or, from a lot of God to less God, if you will, from nearness to farness)
Kind of like what Mark said earlier, we not only see everything backwards we Have everything backwards. We start from Lust and then try to 'make love' out of it lol. Not really having any really good idea of what that might be.
Did Jesus have a lust experience? I doubt it; He knew better. He already had the real thing.
Was He tempted? Possibly... but in light of what He had, was it with anything worth considering? Did he ever think about staying here and having children? But... wasn't that the whole point?
"But as many as received him, he gave them power to be made the sons of God"
Done on behalf of the Father
They just went about it a little differently than we do
Love is the cheeseburger, lust is an addition topping, lust is the lettuce and ketchup lol
How about this…God innately and eternally knows the lust experience, but God also innately and eternally knows that to not lust is better/wiser than to lust, so God eternally knows to suppress lust instead of to entertain lust. Because practicing good and wise decisions are eternally better than practicing bad decisions.
Wow this is all so confusing though because God not only is not embodied as a human, but also not embodied as millions of species as well. So God eternally knows the experience a bat has using sonar to fly. Well actually that’s much easier to understand than thinking about God having morally impure knowledge.
Spoken like a true Human
You'll notice the whole thing gets eaten by the end.
Well I am, however not in a way that goes beyond fun deep metaphysical thoughts (not in a way where my belief system of philosophical theism is at risk). Ok fine I’ll use the rest of my reply to your post to explain what I mean.I think you might be over-thinking this.
Here’s why this is just a fun thought experiment for me, and why I won’t let it drive me crazy…because at the end of the day I believe that the transition from empirical data based explanations to explanations of what mental experiences ARE marks a major dividing line of human understanding. Humans are spectacular at grasping physical cause & effect style explanations, however mental experiences are of an altogether entirely different ontology, and we frankly suck at giving similar levels of explanatory explanations like we do for scientific/physical explanations. So for this reason I admit to be sort of philosophically playing around here with trying to grasp an understanding that I have elsewhere admitted to being “Beyond human comprehension” (that of grasping mental phenomena like we can grasp physical phenomena).God understands our experiences because He knows us. He knows and understands us better than we do, God understands our weakness, God understands our suffering, God understands everything about us.
God does not need to experience that to understand--He already understands.
I wanted to get my philosophical confession of humility out of the way first so that I don’t come off as arrogant when I reply here…I don’t think that your analogy works here because a potter and a painter’s work still falls under the umbrella of purely physical/empirical phenomena (that is if of course if we don’t include the mental aspect of it such as mentally appreciating the beauty of art).Who better understands the pottery than the potter? Or who better understands the painting better than the painter?
From that alone it can be said that God understands and knows us best;
Ahh yes, now we have shifted into an altogether distinct ontology of mental phenomena than that of a potter’s physical pottery or of a painter’s physical painting!! And I will humbly admit right here that human comprehension of “How the ‘experience’ of having an emotion exactly works” is coherently inaccessible to human understanding unlike that of an exhaustively physical description of how brain matter and bio-electric processes physically ‘cause’ the ‘effects’ of a person to raise their physical arm.but it's much more than that. The love with which God loves us is incomparable to the love the potter has for his pottery or the painter does her painting. It's the love God has for us, a love as unfathomably deep as it is incomprehensibly infinite.
Yep, I’ll pause here again to let you know that I accept how human intellectual comprehension drastically falls off a cliff when going from physical phenomena into mental phenomena (and I also think that this is where people really get jammed up…a lot of people get so seduced by how excellent we are at grasping & giving explanations of physical phenomena that we get confused and start demanding empirical (physical) explanations to describe non-physical phenomena. Which is a little bit like me saying that I won’t believe that the color blue really exists unless someone can first explain to me what the color of blue tastes like (do you see the incomprehensible nature of trying to demand a physics explanation for a mental phenomenon such as experience of taste? But in reverse order many people for some reason seem to think that this request is logical…to claim that physical explanations are somehow coherent explanations of experiential phenomena…ie Physicalism). Sure, God understands how all of this works, however humans are simply out of their league, we pretend that it’s a given that we can magically grasp the mental & experiential fabrics of reality JUST because we happen to be excellent at grasping the physical fabric of reality. It’s an unjustified leap of intellectual hubris and I have no idea why so many people don’t notice the humongous distinction!He knows us. From the inside and to the outside.
He does not need to experience lust in order for Him to understand it, and to then to lovingly surrender Himself to us sinners to redeem, renew, heal, and restore us to Himself in Christ and by the Spirit.
I do always find it very interesting when Christians talk about how humans are in this interesting ontological middle ground where we have one foot in the physical realm and one foot in the spiritual realm. Personally, my experience with Philosophy of Mind has placed a very solid foundation underneath my feet that there is in fact both a physical and non-physical fabric to reality (I reached this observation on purely non-religious and rational grounds)…but such a foundation lends a lot of support to me as I read about “These religion stories” about spiritual realms. Thanks to where Philosophy of Mind has pushed my thought process I don’t have to constantly think that I might be a crazy to believe in a non-physical realm, because I was able to reach that conclusion from purely philosophical grounds. So it’s pretty relaxing to not have to sit there and second guess all the time that I might be delusional to buy into a non-physical realm that religions always talk about. I believe it for reasoning outside of religion. Anyway, I find it very interesting that a branch of philosophy landed me into a situation where I can (without feeling crazy) appreciate this picture that you are painting here, a picture about God incarnate joining together a unity of the Divine (non-physical spiritual) nature with the physically human nature. Pretty cool!The Incarnation, therefore, is not God passively experiencing humanity. It's God actively participating in humanity. God became man, not in order to understand man but rescue, heal, and restore man. The Hypostatic Union, the union of Deity and humanity within the one Person of Jesus means God has become, been made part of, us. And by our being united to Christ, we--in Jesus--are sharers and partakers of God. Which is why St. Peter writes that we have become "partakers of the Divine nature", not as a matter of our being made divine, but by our being made all the more human in Jesus.
-CryptoLutheran
'Lust' doesn't always refer to the same thing. Sometimes it's just strong desire. Sometimes it's a step further than that: considering or entertaining the desire.How about this…God innately and eternally knows the lust experience, but God also innately and eternally knows that to not lust is better/wiser than to lust, so God eternally knows to suppress lust instead of to entertain lust. Because practicing good and wise decisions are eternally better than practicing bad decisions.
Wow this is all so confusing though because God not only is not embodied as a human, but also not embodied as millions of species as well. So God eternally knows the experience a bat has using sonar to fly. Well actually that’s much easier to understand than thinking about God having morally impure knowledge.
Hunger may be a good example of something we can feel but God can't. (he might feel hunger, not sure)Or even something morally neutral like being hungry, how does a spirit God know a hunger experience without being able to say that He has had/felt the experience before? To have it is to know it.
The notion that God cannot know something without experiencing it, is bogus. After all, he MADE us.
Also, the fact that God knows something does not imply that Jesus did why here on earth, in his earthly body. He set all that aside, to live as we do.
We see everything backwards.
Yes I’m trying to understand how to make sense out of a few things like you are, and like the ‘Did Jesus Lust?’ thread that @Pavel Mosko is referencing. So God is omniscient, therefore in order for a thing such as “Having a lust experience” to exist in reality then God necessarily must have knowledge of what that is like. But to have knowledge of a lust experience is to have had a lust experience. If you run into a person who has never had a lust experience before then that person wouldn’t have knowledge of what it is.
We say that God surely knows love, forgiveness, compassion, decision making, etc, because we know those things, and if we know them then God being much greater than us in every way also knows them. But I have been getting a little tripped up when looking at this idea from the view of mental properties that are not said to be good ones, like lust. Or even something morally neutral like being hungry, how does a spirit God know a hunger experience without being able to say that He has had/felt the experience before? To have it is to know it.
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