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The Bellman said:Many of us have done precisely that. However, despite your claims of "4000" verifiably fulfilled predictions, Christianity invariably fails.
I don't know if this has been answered in any detail before (and if someone could point me to a thread/article where it's discussed, I'd really appreciate it.) But in my view, the idea of free will/choice requires a deity who is not onmiscient. Were he all-knowing, he'd know what decision we were going to make between faith or non-faith long before we'd ever made it. So in effect, god created us fully aware of what choice we were going to make; where's the free will there?True_Blue said:You make a good point, Physics_guy. Here's why I believe God requires belief. God created us so that we could love Him. In order to love God, we have to be given the freedom to choose to love Him. Otherwise, it would be forced love, and that's not love at all. So God gave us minds and the capacity to reason and time to make a choice. He requires faith because if He revealed Himself to us fully and completely, He would be depriving us of our ability to choose. We're all debating Creation/Evolution because God has frozen over Mr. Ararat, something that really irritates me. But anyway, that's the logical underpinning of God's requirement of faith. He's given you and I the ability to choose to love Him.
Why is this relevant to this forum? It's not even relevant to thoughtful Christianity. Unless the God you believe in values faith via fear or pure self-interest.True_Blue said:My point is that a lifetime of believing in atheism has no hope of doing anything for you after you die. If God doesn't exist, you were right all along, but you're still dead... If he exists, He's gonna want to know why you didn't give Him credit for creating you. I'm a Christian and love God, but sometimes He really scares me. I don't want to be put to the question by God.
Because it doesn't have 4000 verifiably fulfilled predictions. Its record on prediction is about the same as any other source of 'prophecy' - Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce, etc. Great AFTER the event, when actual happenings can be shoe-horned into vague sounding prophecies, but not so good beforehand.True_Blue said:Why?
Aeothen said:I don't know if this has been answered in any detail before (and if someone could point me to a thread/article where it's discussed, I'd really appreciate it.) But in my view, the idea of free will/choice requires a deity who is not onmiscient. Were he all-knowing, he'd know what decision we were going to make between faith or non-faith long before we'd ever made it. So in effect, god created us fully aware of what choice we were going to make; where's the free will there?
Philosoft said:Why is this relevant to this forum? It's not even relevant to thoughtful Christianity. Unless the God you believe in values faith via fear or pure self-interest.
You make a good point, Physics_guy. Here's why I believe God requires belief. God created us so that we could love Him. In order to love God, we have to be given the freedom to choose to love Him. Otherwise, it would be forced love, and that's not love at all. So God gave us minds and the capacity to reason and time to make a choice. He requires faith because if He revealed Himself to us fully and completely, He would be depriving us of our ability to choose. We're all debating Creation/Evolution because God has frozen over Mr. Ararat, something that really irritates me. But anyway, that's the logical underpinning of God's requirement of faith. He's given you and I the ability to choose to love Him.
Why have I chosen only two belief systems to compare against? Because I'm a financial analyst and I don't like building incredibily complex models. When I run portfolio optimization models, I usually only compare two stocks against each other, not the entire stock market. And I usually pick my two favorite stocks to run the comparison, not junk stocks.
It's like polls measuring the race for president. I only care about how President Bush and Senator Kerry are doing against each other. I don't care about how the libertarian candidate is doing. I may look at Ralph Nader on occasion, just like I'll consider Islam on occasion, but in the end, it's the Kerry-Bush comparison that really matters.
I've never quite understood the rationale behind this apologetic via analogy. What is it supposed to tell us? That God can do whatever He likes? That some things humans like God also likes?True_Blue said:Here is a cheesy example--I'm not all-knowing, but when it comes to my wife, I come pretty close. Yesterday, I asked my wife if she wanted to go to a restaurant at the top of the Prudential Center in downtown Boston. I knew she'd say YES!!! before I even asked. But I wanted to give her the choice because her choosing to say yes would be an expression of love and an expression of her desire to spend time with me. If I forced her to say yes, I would be losing the enjoyment that her choice of saying yes would give me. It works the same way with us and God. Even though God is all-knowing, He really likes it when we choose Him.
And yet another apologetic analogy that renders omnipotence impotent.True_Blue said:The Bible says that "God is Love." God values love above everything else. If fear of God eventually induces you to love and obey Him, then so be it. Parents use fear of spanking to convince infants not to stick forks in electrical outlets. They do that because they are willing to use fear to advance and nurture a loving parent/child relationship. It works the same way with us and God.
The problem I see with this is that when you ask your wife something, there's the possibility she might say no, instead. Maybe she isn't feeling well, or has something else she wants to do... I don't know. The point is, you asking her is by no means an assured positive answer.True_Blue said:Here is a cheesy example--I'm not all-knowing, but when it comes to my wife, I come pretty close. Yesterday, I asked my wife if she wanted to go to a restaurant at the top of the Prudential Center in downtown Boston. I knew she'd say YES!!! before I even asked. But I wanted to give her the choice because her choosing to say yes would be an expression of love and an expression of her desire to spend time with me. If I forced her to say yes, I would be losing the enjoyment that her choice of saying yes would give me. It works the same way with us and God. Even though God is all-knowing, He really likes it when we choose Him.
The Bellman said:Because it doesn't have 4000 verifiably fulfilled predictions. Its record on prediction is about the same as any other source of 'prophecy' - Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce, etc. Great AFTER the event, when actual happenings can be shoe-horned into vague sounding prophecies, but not so good beforehand.
You have two problems here. First, you don't know whether we are in the end times. Christians have been predicting the end of times being coming already for 2000 years, but still nothing has happened. So your prophesy might still turn out to be wrong. We're not there yet.True_Blue said:In 1945, five million Jews had just been exterminated. Two years later, a Jewish state was reborn after they fought off attacks from six surrounding Middle Eastern countries. That's a freakin' miracle if I ever saw one. Almost every end times prophecy requires a Jewish state to have a prayer of being accurate. Well, now we've got one. I would agree with you that unfulfilled prophecies are very, very vague. But prophecies that have been fulfilled are crystal clear.
Tomk80 said:Second, this can be a self-fullfilling prophesy. Because the jews think Israel was given to them by God, they did everything to get a state there. So the prediction in itself might have no great truth in it, but might be the cause of the desire for the jews to have their own state. To be a real prediction (in my book), prediction and predicted should be independent from each other. Whether this is the case here is questionable.
I'll look at the text. Going to bed now (it's 2:42 AM here) and will try to give a reply tomorrow.True_Blue said:Some things are pretty hard to self-fulfill. In the case of the Jews, they somehow survived as a culture for 2000 years and somehow managed to stave off about 30-40 attempted genocides. You could make the argument that Israel's rebirth was self-fulfilled, but that doesn't make sense given the reality of Ezekiel 38:8: "After many days you will be called to arms. In future years you will invade a land that has recovered from war, whose people were gathered from the many nations to the mountains of Israel, which had long been desolate." Tomk80, I think you are a reasonable person with the ability to think critically. What is this verse telling you?
Arikay said:The point was, when is something a real prophecy fullfilment or just luck?
Does your prophecy have constraints? Does it say, "In the future" or does it say, "in the 20th century."?
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