So you’d reject the immediate experience of libertarian freewill in favour of words in a book and your philosophical understanding of those words. Surely you can see how out of touch that is.
Describes the Word of God as "a book". It seems you reject the plenary verbal inspiration. It will be hard to find common ground for authority if you do reject it.
But, for whatever it may be worth, my philosophical understanding of the words of the
Bible has much to do with my experience, too. I concede that much. In fact, I demand it concerning all people, including yourself.
When you dismiss the experience of libertarian freewill as illusory you unwittingly degrade every other immediately experienced thing (e.g. Experience of Gods presence, transition of time, the belief in other minds besides your own.)
Those experiences likewise are, nevertheless, subjective, and are all to be governed by God's Word.
But I begin to notice here, a continual theme through all your comments, that exaggerates the inability I claim we all have concerning knowledge of God, to an absurd totality, which you use to denigrate my points as illogical. Really? —did I say anywhere we can know NOTHING about God? I think I shall call this, "Argument R", for, REALLY?
You’re worried about “provable facts” while I’m writing about the basis upon which we believe in things. You argued I’ve come to believe in ideas like counter casual freedom without basis, but the whole of the human experience is my basis.
You have argued from both sides of this coin (and I don't mean to say that I haven't). Your paradigm is a bit inconsistent here. Even your whole argument concerning your basis is an attempt to prove a point.
While your basis for belief in determinism is some dead guys philosophical musings on the Bible, this goes beyond bringing a knife to a gun fight.
The "double-edged sword" will slice through the flesh and bone of empirical 'experience', but bullets have no effect on Spirit.
Let’s go down this “provable facts” road. You can’t prove that the earth wasn’t created 5 minutes ago with the appearance of age, and with all of your memories being false implants, so do you now doubt that the earth is older than five minutes and that your memories are genuine? Of course you don’t doubt these things, because “provable facts” are only so good as the human tools with which we fact find.
This sounds like an over-the-top "Geronimo!" scream! Just saying...
But it is air you are beating. I'm not there. Your point is irrelevant, but for the sake of fun, (just to make you feel you struck something), if God says it is 6 thousand years old, it is, even if it is also a mere 5 min old. We don't know time like God does, so no, my memories would not be false implants, but actual memories, though no doubt considerably tainted, by my subjective view and interpretation of events.
Libertarian freewill is in the category of “properly basic belief,” like much of the above, while Calvinism is in the category incoherent systematic that men have to be taught.
Mere assertion, and near ad hom.
“the fact of Gods existence”? That’s gathered by the immediate experience of God and would be in the category of properly basic belief, alongside the experience of libertarian freewill. So no I’m not being hyperbolic, meanwhile you’re happy to admit that Calvinists are.
“A man with an experience beats a man with an argument.” Though you relegate experiences to the folder of illusion and elevate the philosophy of dead puritans to the secret workings of God.
Not at all "gathered by immediate experience of God". It is simple logic (in that nothing comes from nothing). The immediate experience is of personal existence. The default, then, is first cause —God.
The fact that dead Puritans agree with me is irrelevant, no? They are not my authority, nor even my source for material. Must you cast about hoping to land a blow?
Yes they do as is evident by these replies, however I’m absolutely right about there being “no accept or reject” in the Calvinist scheme of things, and as a result the gospel “offer” under Calvinism doesn’t rise to the definition of an offer. You’ll agree just so long as you understand my point, since you’ve been denying that the bare reality of the ability to do otherwise exists.
Not at all. You claim the level of knowledge where the choice is, to the chooser, between an actuality and an illusion, while in fact the chooser has no such knowledge of which is which. Therefore, the offer is real: If they choose one, the other will not happen.
I probably will not deal with this one again. As one my favorite posters here would say, "Already litigated. Will not be litigating it again."
“Would you like a can of beer or a bottle of water?” That’s an either/or proposition, it’s either beer or it’s water.
It's an either/or proposition within a false paradigm. You sound like a lawyer badgering a witness. Been there, done that.
Of course being from cloud coo coo land you don’t believe in the either/or choice being real, rather to you it’s an illusion of choice.
I do hope it wasn't you who objected to my ad hom, yesterday.
So the gospel “offer” under Calvinism is permeated by the illusion of libertarian free choice, meaning there’s no either you accept the gospel as an unbeliever or you don’t. There’s only the stark reality that you’ve been made either for eternal life or for death, and that the “choice” you make is only “real” insofar that you’re doing what you want to do. Typical philosophical compatiblism.
It occurs to me that it might be worth mentioning, that even the notion of "offer" is of humanly derived use of the Gospel, and not quite the way God does things. In one place, instead of asking us if we would like to repent, it says he demands, (or "commands"), repentance. So while we argue about "offer", I perhaps should admit to being drawn in to arguing assuming the false paradigm that the Gospel is an "offer".
And, again, the command does not imply the ability to obey.
The notion of the Gospel being an "offer" is not a typically Calvinist one, but a generally Protestant one, (particularly in modern times when people want to make God 'nice'), though most Calvinists of my acquaintance do deal with it in that fashion to some degree, as do I.
God has foreordained mans nature and as a consequence his choice to forever reject the things of God, meaning that the “offer” of the gospel is just as ill intentioned and as cynical as I’ve shared already.
previously litigated
Perhaps it’s John Calvins joy too:
Yet sometimes he also causes those whom he illumines only for a time to partake of [grace]; then he justly forsakes them on account of their ungratefulness and strikes them with even greater blindness.
So according to John Calvin God illuminates seeming Calvinists with false hopes, beliefs and spirits claiming that they are saved, then on account of their ungrateful disposition (a disposition that God foreordained) he “strikes them with even greater blindness.”
On another note are you not aware that people are ordered to “obey” the gospel? Not only are they ordered to obey but there are guaranteed punishments for those who hear and won’t obey.
He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus.
Notice there Calvin's reference to grace is not to saving Grace. Yeah, get over it. Apples are never oranges.
Rejecting the premise “is this logical or not” as invalid means you reject logic.
Thus saith the Purveyor of Logic, who insists on his paradigm as entirely representative of the bare facts, from which to draw polar logic.
It’s your philosophy that’s argued for illusory experiences, not mine, so it’s hard to see where your objection lands other than in self reporting. You’re writing about Gods perspective as force of habit, as though you live there, while I’m here on planet earth writing about human experiences.
Hardly. But here I remark how you are claiming I speak from what I suppose to be God's POV, while earlier remarking that I claim God's POV cannot be known to any degree. I claim neither, but that our POV is not God's.
You can explain what you believe though when you are prepared to be logically consistent, as I’ve been sharing from the start. It’s only because you refuse to be logical that the end of this whole discourse is nonsense like “the premise of ‘is this logical or not’ is invalid” and “I’m refusing to answer.”
You’re trapped in an inability to answer because you are trapped in Calvinism.
Yet you will find it impossible, I think, to admit that this whole matter of a valid "offer" is a moot point, although you yourself too referred above to the 'command' vs the supposed 'offer'.
See here, you’re on the sauce again. Your philosophy isn’t “Gods point of view,” and to write as if we don’t know what well meant and sincere means because God operates so different is to demand a response from the great C.S. Lewis:
On the other hand, if God's moral judgement differs from ours so that our 'black' may be His 'white', we can mean nothing by calling Him good; for to say 'God is good', while asserting that His goodness is wholly other than ours, is really only to say 'God is we know not what'.
And an utterly unknown quality in God cannot give us moral grounds for loving or obeying Him. If He is not (in our sense) 'good' we shall obey, if at all, only through fear - and should be equally ready to obey omnipotent Fiend.
The doctrine of Total Depravity - when the consequence is drawn that, since we are totally depraved, our idea of good is worth simply nothing - may thus turn Christianity into a form of devil-worship.
Devil worship is in line with what the great British author John Milton believed about Calvinism, that if he were to make an argument about that particular system, it would be “God is not the devil.”
"Argument R". You continue to characterize what I say as being either that we know all about God, or that we know nothing about God. Enough of the misrepresentation! Lewis is talking in terms of your bogus extremes, but I am not.
But fwiw, here Lewis demonstrates how the common miscomprehension of the term, 'Total Depravity', can be extrapolated. I don't remember the passage you quote here, but I would not very much be surprised to find you have quoted the whole matter out of context.
To loosely quote the irrepressible Mark Quayle: “Haha, you have no arguments.”
Fair enough. And your whole argument in the matter is moot.
Yes, I’d like those. Since however you’re arguing that we know nothing about how God defines those terms, I’m guessing Calvinism won’t provide those.
A sound enough conclusion, given the false premise that we know NOTHING about how God sees things, as I have several times already mentioned here. Argument R
Yes, I’d like that. That’s why I became a Christian and not a Calvinist.
Then what do you make of God's command to repent? I expect you reject Romans 8:8.
