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The answers to your questions you seek are below. If you cannot understand them then ask the Holy Spirit for wisdom and understanding. I'm done with the spoon feeding and answering of your questions ad nauseum.Again, as expected.
This kind of post certainly isn't fooling me. And I'm pretty sure it isn't fooling anyone else either. As stated, this is the normal reaction after the argument made at post 850.The answers to your questions you seek are below. If you cannot understand them then ask the Holy Spirit for wisdom and understanding. I'm done with the spoon feeding and answering of your questions ad nauseum.
Any more questions directed to me by you regarding the H.U.will be answered with this link each and every time.
What About Progressive Sanctification?
What's your take on post 850? Certainly I've never seen an effective rebuttal of that argument - seems watertight to me. Thoughts?
This kind of post certainly isn't fooling me. And I'm pretty sure it isn't fooling anyone else either. As stated, this is the normal reaction after the argument made at post 850.
I guess I'll spill the beans right here. I'll summarize my metaphysics here. Links for further details:
God Is a Physical Being
Why God is Worthy of Our Praise
The Problem of Evil
- Post 850 showed my defense for acquired holiness. Please start there.
- In fact every act of free will is acquired knowledge of sorts. How so? As noted earlier, free will contradicts foreknowledge. Free choice involves a period of deliberation whose outcome isn't foreknown because the mind hasn't decided yet. Therefore God's knowledge must be acquired knowledge, if He has free choice.
Ok so when did this learning process begin, for God? Today would not have been reached yet, if the past were infinite. There must have been a first moment in time, therefore, as the inception of a finite past. I said that I reject all magical phenomena, including "spirit" (all reality is physical in my view) and including creation nihilo. I don't even believe in "time" - except as a convenient term for counting motions. All I believe in is matter in motion.
The Totality is my term for the sum total of matter, understood to be imperishable. What caused it's first motion? The only real force in existence is free will. For example if I punch you in the face, what propelled my hand? Muscular energy alone? If that were the primary impetus, you couldn't blame ME - you could only blame the laws of physics and physiology. Free will is thus the only self-propelling impetus in the Totality.
When one piece of the Totality launched that first motion - that first act of free will - that piece began to awaken to full sentience. And it awoke to become the being that we now know as Yahweh. During His early years, presumbly, He quickly realized that the Totality would eventaully become a place of eternal conflict and war if there was no Ruler to keep the peace. Thus He made the decision to become holy (i.e. exponentially advanced in knowledge, skill, love, and purity). He decided to become the quintessential Ruler and Judge, to insure the everlasting safety of us all (all matter in the Totality).
The PROBLEM is that this task of becoming holy was likely too daunting to undertake without some hope of eventual reward. Hence He had to promise Himself a bride as a reward for His work (a bride formed from leftover matter in the Totality). He literally felt He had no choice, as He was facing the prospect of perpetual solitary confinement. The Totality would be doomed to eternal conflict if loneliness caused Him to falter in His effort to become holy. And failure was NOT an option. Therefore He could not risk the loneliness. Note that, to date, this is the only valid solution proposed to the Problem of Evil. Unacceptably, traditional theodicy has God creating this world of (potential) suffering, not out of a perceived NEED for it, and therefore for the FUN of it. Which is evil behavior. After all, an infinitely self-sufficient God wouldn't need a world like this - such a being could not have any needs or unfulfilled wants, by definition - and therefore could not justify creating this kind of world.
What is the Trinity? All reality is physical. Physicality means multiplicity. After all, which brain cell in your head is the real you? ALL of it is you. You are multiple. (Earlier I already demonstrated multiplicity in my theory of Adam). In a similar way, the Trinity is a multiplicity, it is the three major subdivisions/Persons exhaustively constituting the Godhead:
(1) The Father is a human-shaped figure seated on a throne (see Dan 7:9-11). Literally we are fashioned in His shape/image.
(2) The Son is a human-shaped figure seated at His right hand.
(3) The Holy Breath/Wind is the remainder of Yahweh (misnomered in orthodoxy as The Holy Ghost/Spirit), for example He exudes from the Son's nostrils and figure as rivers of Fire (Ps 18), billows of Smoke (Ps 18), and Light from His face (compare Rev 1:16 with Rev 21:23).
God's power? Again, same as ours. Free will. Nothing magical. Nothing supernatural.
What makes His holiness irreversible? A 2-pronged strategy, see post 116 on this thread:
The Problem of Evil
Incarnation? A cinch. If I wanted to reduce your knowledge to that of a vegetable, all I have to do is find a way to damage/scramble your brains. The Father surgically extracted a small subsection of the Son's figure, basically one cell, and did several things to it. For example, He:
(1) Yanked it out of the divine "neural network". Think of Yahweh as one huge Brain continually receiving and processing information. If you yank a cell out of that brain, it has already lost most of its knowledge by virtue of separation from the flow of information.
(2) He surgically "scrambled" that cell (scrambled its brains) until it had COMPLETELY lost all its former knowledge.
(3) He mated it to a human embryo in Mary's womb. God's strength/power is largely a product of His enormous size (He is spread throughout the Totality). But this tiny lone cell was as weak as we are.
Christ's soul was thus the uncreated Son of God - no human soul was added to the Trinity.
What I've expressed here is a simple manipulation of matter. That's what I meant when I said that my whole theory of the Incarnation falls under the scope of John 1:14:
"The (physical) Word became flesh".
It's not complicated.
Skillful manipulation of matter. Normally we think of bread as the product of multiple slow stages (mixing ingredients, letting the dough rise, baking it, and so on). But since God's hand is on every particle of matter, He can instantly shape any matter in our environment (including air) into a "baked" loaf of bread, or a "grilled" fish, or whatever He wants.
It's not complicated. What's cool is that He manipulates light so effectively - and so quickly - that no one ever sees His form, or His hands, when He is performing His feats, not even when He is undertaking surgery upon the sick. As a result, it looks like magic.
Not a clone of Him. The Jesus was a piece of the Son. Again, which cell in your brain is the real you? Each one is a piece of you. Same idea here.Jesus is a clone of Jesus? Pretty weird idea.
I praise God for His love, for His divine attributes. I praise God for His Creation. I praise God for what He IS.Newsflash: As for the Son of God, His entire life on earth was an exercise in mutability.
"And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man" (Luke 2:52).
Not my fault you don't believe the Scriptures. That was YOUR decision. As for immutability, let's put the final nail in the coffin, shall we? These two definitions of divine holiness stand diametrically opposed:
(1) Innate, immutable, intrinsic holiness. (The orthodox position)
(2) Acquired holiness - acquired by free will. (My position).
Now I will show why #1 contradicts the whole Bible. This is an argument I haven't unveiled as yet, although I hinted at it back at post 665.
Scripture doesn't merely COMMAND us to praise God. It goes further than that - it insists that He is WORTHY of our praise, that He DESERVES/MERITS our praise. The problem is, holiness as defined in #1 does not merit praise! Innate characteristics do not merit praise! For example, do not praise me for being human, or for my red blood, or my gorgeous features - all these things exist, but do not merit praise. The UNANIMOUS definition of merit - the definition that has grounded every sermon in the last 2000 years, is the following:
"Merit is a status achieved by freely choosing to labor/suffer for a righteous cause over an extended period of time".
The best example is the cross. Suppose the Father had anesthetized Christ's nerves, and tranquilized His mind, sufficiently to prevent any suffering for the whole ordeal of the cross. How much praise would the cross merit, in that case? Zero! Zilch! None! Nada!
How much labor? Bear in mind that even the angels have merit - they labored/suffered against the agony of temptation for at least a period of time, and overcame it. And even ordinary Christian men labor for more than 50 years.
But Scripture claims that God has ineffably more merit than men have. Recently I was debating with a YEC (young earth creationist). I told him it was impossible that God created the world in 7 24-hour periods, that it contradicts His holiness. (At first he thought I was crazy as he couldn't connect the dots).
Then I explained to him. Since both angels and men have labored more than 7 days, we would merit more praise than God has merited for creation. Therefore you must conclude that God TOOK TIME to learn how to create (and manage) this complex planet. Start thinking in terms of millions of years, nay, BILLIONS even. Perhaps even tens of billions of gradual learning and skill. As I said, we already know that God's knowledge is NOT innate, it is ACQUIRED/LEARNED - we know this from the Incarnation:
"And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man" (Luke 2:52).
Of course it is learned. Otherwise His knowledge wouldn't merit any praise!
And more than that - only a jerk would want us to praise him for His innate characteristics! How would you feel about me, if I expected you to praise me for my red blood, my beating heart, and (of course) my gorgeous face? You'd consider me a jerk!
To summarize, for 2,000 years the church has been willing to praise the Ancient of Days for 3 days of passion for the cross, but has DENIED HIM ALL THE GLORY for His holiness (acquired over probably 13 billion years of labor minimum, if science is correct about the age of the universe). This is TOTAL DISREPECT for His age, it despises His title as Ancient of Days, it deprives Him of 99.9999999% of the glory, and it is probably worse than spitting on the cross.
Gnostic?
The irony is amazing. You want to be taken seriously and yet your claim is:
(1) The Son emptied Himself of all transcendent attributes.
(2) This did not involve any change in the Son. He retained all the attributes supposedly emptied!
That's your claim - it's the orthodox claim - and I have NEVER been able to take it seriously. Nor should you.
No refutation of the argument. Ignored.I`m not surprised to learn that Christians choose to stop talking to you after reading it.
Simple question - would the cross have the same merit sans suffering?It`s a bunch of weird secular ideas tacked onto themes loosely based on a few scriptures.
Sure. I praise my girlfriend for her pretty face. But that's not the question being asked here. The questions are these:Progressive Sanctification
I praise God for His love, for His divine attributes. I praise God for His Creation. I praise God for what He IS.
I do not praise God because he has worked so hard to learn to create and love.?
You're extrapolating to an infinite past. Utter nonsense. If an infinite past has to transpire before today, then today would never have been reached. Only a finite past, therefore, is logically conceivable.An imperfect, evolving god in an imperfect, evolving creation implies another God beyond god who created these imperfect god (s).
Gnostic?
Simple question - would the cross have the same merit sans suffering?
Of course not.
My conclusion follows directly from the cross.
Very "secular" concept. Yeah right. Whatever.
Whatever.I haven`t a clue what that means.
Whatever.
First of all, please address Post 850 before proceeding further. That is my challenge to anyone monitoring this thread.I don't believe Christ emptied Himself. I adhere to the KJB as being the pure Word of God for our day, and it says in Philippians that he made himself of no reputation instead. I believe Christ suppressed His divine attribute of Omniscience sort of like how a person may suppress a bad memory, or how like when a person may suppress their eyesight by putting on a blindfold. A person still has a bad memory in their brain, but they buried it from their conscious mind. A person with normal eyesight who wears a blindfold still has their eyesight but the blindfold merely suppresses their vision. This is what I believe the Son of God did based on looking at the whole counsel of God's Word.
From my perspective, this is the most inevitable logical conclusion so as to reconcile all of the Scriptures together in harmony. But if you have a better explanation, then by all means (explain it simply for me).
First of all, please address Post 850 before proceeding further. That is my challenge to anyone monitoring this thread.
As for "suppressing omniscience" - call it whatever you like. If today I know Hebrew, and then tomorrow, I no longer know it, and then the next day I begin learning it again, that's change. That's not immutability.
If you insist on calling it immutability, then at some point it becomes evident that you are using words such as "changeable" and "immutable" as synonyms - in essence a distinction without a difference.
My words affirmed that the merit of the cross is understood to stem from the (freely willed) suffering involved (the self-sacrificial effort).I`m serious, that looks like gibberish, can you make sense of it?
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