Nature of salvation (response to comments about Hitler and his victims)

ThaddeusB

03:06

@WadCheber Interesting stuff on the mummy masks - this is the first I've heard of this... Glad you liked my answer on the "son of Mary" question. I did not mean to start a debate in the comments section yesterday, so I apologize for that. (This seems to be a more appropriate place to ping you than leaving another technically out of scope comment. :) )

@fredsbend This conversation started because of an off-hand remark related to Star Wars, not an attempt at evangelism, so my comment was indeed accurate about this case being a chance encounter was correct.

As to the substance of your comment, God uses ordinary human communication to spread his message because he values human relationships and in particular love. He could, of course, induce people to believe through "undeniably" acts of power, but that would not cause them to love.

While (spirit filled) human efforts are the normal way He spreads his message, direct intervention can not entirely be ruled out. I have read plenty of conversion stories which start with the person in a low place basically daring God to prove Himself. The interesting thing with these stories is that quite often the person telling the story says the sign they received got them out of the low place and started their path towards God, but didn't actually convert them directly.

In other words, it was enough to make the believe in God's existence, but not enough to make them a Christian in thought and action. So, what I'm saying is signs may cause some form of belief, but generally not the kind God actually desires - the kind that is manifest primarily by the way believers treat other people. (And yes, many so-called believers treat other people poorly. From my point of view, they quite clearly are not experiencing what Christianity truly has to offer.)

fredsbend

03:54

@ThaddeusB It's not a chance encounter because you believe that God may have orchestrated it. I believe it occurred by chance, and then any evangelistic efforts were the sole actions of those evangelizing. It was you who suggested otherwise.

@ThaddeusB Okay, so you are saying that God wants to expand human-to-human love and relationships more than human-to-God relationships?

The substance of my comment was that God does not seem to be doing very well in the God-to-human domain.

With regards to God seeming completely detached from this world, I don't see how you've addressed that.

Wad Cheber

@ThaddeusB Unfortunately, very few people have heard about the destruction of the mummy masks and cartonnage. It has caused an uproar in the archaeological world, but the general public hasn't heard anything about it except for an article on CNN's website, the tone of which was largely favorable toward the destruction of the relics.

fredsbend

@WadCheber If you mean this CNN article: cnn.com/2015/01/21/living/gospel-mummy-mask

I don't think it was in favor of the destruction at all. In fact, I found it snarky in a few places. Consider the last two paragraphs:

> If a mask is to be destroyed, surely that process should be documented thoroughly, with constant photography and annotation, rather than undertaken as a classroom project with undergraduates using a bottle of Palmolive and a little elbow grease.

> It is possible that the earliest text of the Gospel of Mark has been discovered. But until the world is given access to the papyrus through its publication, there is no story here, except that ancient Egyptian mummy masks are being destroyed in the ongoing search for Christian relics.

The author spends the last half of the article questioning whether destroying the masks is a good idea.

ThaddeusB

04:35

@fredsbend What I meant is that the conversation wasn't initiated through evangelist efforts. Naturally, I believe it wasn't complete chance and you do - like I said initially it is not convincing evidence of anything, just something to consider.

@fredsbend No, what I mean is that the nature of relationship God desires is the kind that mimics human-to-human relationship. This kind of relationship is not induced by a display of power, so direct intervention is not the way things are usually done.

By "detached", do you mean "there is too much evil in this world" or something else?

fredsbend

05:10

@ThaddeusB I'm not sure how you communicate with people, but if I do not directly intervene into their path and fill their senses with my presence, then no communication occurs. In other words, talking, seeing, and hearing is real. Whatever we're supposed to get from God is not.

If God truly wants a relationship with me in the same way that I have with other humans, then he would certainly talk to, see, and hear me. And I would him.

So I see two options: 1) There is no God, or 2) Your theology is wrong and God does not strive for this kind of relationship.

Lee Woofenden

15:15

@WadCheber I just re-watched the 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still, and you are right about Klaatu's threat to destroy the earth only coming into effect if Earth became a threat to other planets.

However, if anything, that makes it even worse morally than what I thought (that Klaatu said humans on earth had to stop fighting among themselves or be destroyed). Basically, Klaatu's position is that we can oppress and decimate each other as much as we want, as long as we keep it to ourselves. But if we threaten anyone outside earth, they'll fry us.

Not a particularly elevated moral position. Earth is ghettoized . . . stay in your ghetto and beat each other up as much as you want. But don't venture out of your ghetto or you're dead.

@fredsbend Option 3) God is talking to us, but we're not paying attention because our focus is elsewhere.

fredsbend

@LeeWoofenden It seems to me that SciFi is often fixated on the idea that people of one planet should not be involved in the affairs of the people of another planet. I thought perhaps that there might be some work on this, so I googled "xeno ethics", but didn't find much.

Whether this is "elevated" or not is mostly subjective.

Lee Woofenden

@fredsbend Morality in general seems to be mostly subjective from a materialistic point of view. Who's to say whether frying a planet is wrong? After all, even without humans, whole species and whole orders of species, and even whole planets, are fairly routinely wiped out by asteroids, climate change, tectonics, and so on.

From a material perspective, why is it really wrong to eliminate, or allow to die, society's "less fit" members? After all, that's what would happen everywhere in nature.

fredsbend

@LeeWoofenden Oh, well, the ethics of destroying an entire planet is certainly more questionable than refusing to intervene in their intraplanetary wars and strife.

Lee Woofenden

@fredsbend How so? In sci-fi, destroying entire planets is practically a meme for the ultimate horror of war.

Oops, I think I got that backwards. I was still thinking of the movie's version of "intervening in interplanetary wars and strife."

fredsbend

@LeeWoofenden Your confusing me. Destroying a planet is morally questionable and certainly worse than intervening in intraplanetary affairs.

I can't really say about the 1957 version of that film. Never seen it, and I hardly remember the remake.

Lee Woofenden

15:29

@fredsbend Yeah, as I said, I got it backwards. The morals of Klaatu in the movie are very questionable.

fredsbend

@LeeWoofenden From what I gather, Klaatu is an automaton, right? So perhaps its just programming. Keeping your planet's strife to yourself might be their galactic law, and breaking it is a capital offense.

That certainly makes it less morally repugnant. He also gives them a full warning.

Lee Woofenden

@fredsbend Klaatu is the humanoid alien. Gort is the robot.

@fredsbend Gort and the other robots that Klaatu's race created are tasked with preventing interplanetary war by frying anyone who does it.

fredsbend

@LeeWoofenden Now that I've spelled it out, I'm not sure it makes a difference in this "galactic law" sense.

@LeeWoofenden So it is law. Klaatu's race clearly has the authority, via force.

And they've decreed that there shall be no interplanetary war.

Now that we're saying it, I'm not sure it's too horrible that the punishment is planetary destruction.

Consider the date of this film.

Mutual assured destruction

Mutual assured destruction, or mutually assured destruction (MAD), is a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy in which a full-scale use of high-yield weapons of mass destruction by two or more opposing sides would cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender (see Pre-emptive nuclear strike and Second strike). It is based on the theory of deterrence where the threat of using strong weapons against the enemy prevents the enemy's use of those same weapons. The strategy is a form of Nash equilibrium in which neither side, once armed, has any incentive to...

Undoubtedly influenced the logic.

Parents do this all the time. "I don't care which one of you started it. You both were fighting and now you both are being punished."

Lee Woofenden

@fredsbend It's basically a planetary death penalty for anyone who initiates interplanetary war. All people on that planet will be killed, regardless of whether they did or did not support those from their planet who initiated the war. That may be moral by the standards of 1,000 B.C., but it's not moral by today's standards.

@fredsbend Key words: "You were both fighting." Would it be fair if two of the children were fighting, but all, even those who had nothing to do with the fight, were punished?

fredsbend

@LeeWoofenden I think perhaps you should make the distinction that western individualistic culture finds this bad, compared to other more collective cultures.

Lee Woofenden

15:37

Reality calling. gtg now.

fredsbend

@LeeWoofenden A war is communal. They decided, though there may very well be individuals that did not want to do it.

Extending individual moral responsibility to the social level is not only effective, but Biblical. Christians are supposed to hold each other accountable. However, in western individualistic thought, you have no right to tell another they are doing wrong.

I personally think that if warring countries were assured of their destruction, then there might be a few at first who won't listen, but once they are obliterated, you can bet there would be no others for many, many years.

Suddenly, we'd all be able to get along.

Lee Woofenden

16:33

@fredsbend No, it would just suppress the impulses to aggression until it could no longer be contained. The resulting conflagration would be worse than if it were allowed to break out in smaller ways from time to time.

It would be like covering over a wound without cleaning it out. The wound would fester and spread under the skin until a whole limb was lost to gangrene, or the entire body was corrupted from within until it died.

You can't solve human problems with external solutions. The only thing that solves them is internal change on the part of the human beings in society. Without that, no amount of Skinnerian training or suppression will root out the problem. It will just crop back up in other ways, or fester until it finally breaks out in major ways.

The only social experiments in communal living that have worked for any length of time have been religious ones. Secular ones inevitably crash and burn, because although the social system has changed, the human mind and heart have not. Religion has the power to change people from the inside out. And religious communities based on its member becoming "regenerated" people from the inside out can accomplish what secular social experiments such as socialism and communism cannot.

@fredsbend The Bible itself shows a clear trend from communal responsibility to individual responsibility. Early in Israel's history, whole families were held responsible for what the head of household did, such as the families of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram being killed along with them when they violated ritual law.

But by the time of the prophets, that view was being assailed and rejected. Ezekiel 18 is perhaps the key passage, in which the idea of children suffering for the sins of their parents, and vice versa, is decisively rejected, and the principle is established that "it is only the person who sins that shall die" (Ezekiel 18:4).

By the time of the New Testament, it was firmly established that individuals are responsible for their own sins, and must also work out their own salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12). Also, Christianity established that every person, of every social rank, was equal in God's eyes, and was responsible for his or her own life and salvation.

All of this takes place within the Bible itself. There is a clear trend from the Old Testament narrative to the New Testament away from communal responsibility, and toward individual responsibility. And this, in fact, is reflective of the individual responsibility of the first few chapters of Genesis, as reflected in the story of Cain and Abel.

Yes, communal responsibility does still have validity. But communal responsibility is based on the individual responsibility of everyone in the community.

fredsbend

22:42

@LeeWoofenden Anything less than war is a smaller way of dealing with problems. I don't understand what you are saying.

Yes, if war kind of just happened (though I trouble to fathom how it would), then they'd all be like "Well, let's do as much damage before we're both destroyed."

@LeeWoofenden I think negative reinforcement is both effective and rightly labeled a psychology that Skinner would approve of.

No, I don't think MAD would fix all the problems between all societies, but it would at least prevent war.

Naturally, like with pretty much everything else, a synthesis of MAD and other things would actually change society.

What those things actually are, I don't really have the brain power at the moment to come up with a short list.

@LeeWoofenden I was not talking about any economic systems or whatever when I said the word communal. I meant to point out that war is not an individual decision, especially in democratic societies. The people at large make that decision.

And regarding communes relative success when comparing religious ones to secular ones, I have little knowledge of any, other than the Amish, if we count them as one.

fredsbend

23:12

@LeeWoofenden Relative to the OT, yes the NT is individualistic. But relative to modern western society, the NT is communal. "One Body, one Mind", "cleave the branch that produces no fruit" and all that jazz.

I'd rather see more communal behavior and thought in our society today, but that's not necessarily supportive of my original assertion that MAD is not immoral.

fredsbend

23:52

I think we were talking about the Trinity in here, right. Anyway, before the question is deleted, I hope you guys can see this excellent answer.

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A: Does the Bible teach Monotheism or Polytheism?

Before there was formulated a "Triune God" there was formed a "Biune God". That is, in ancient Rome there was a growing movement, most likely originating from gentiles of polytheistic backgrounds, to declare that Jesus was divine. The emperor, Constantine, who was a non-baptized sun worshiping pa...

I guess I can copy the text.

Before there was formulated a "Triune God" there was formed a "Biune God". That is, in ancient Rome there was a growing movement, most likely originating from gentiles of polytheistic backgrounds, to declare that Jesus was divine. The emperor, Constantine, who was a non-baptized sun worshiping pagan, in the interest of greater glory and control seized upon the new idea. He assembled a group of bishops to his summer home in Nicaea and had the bishops draft a creed which he and the bishops would use to establish a supreme body of people and law that could be enforced throughout his realm. The…

Might as well show you the "question" too:

Why do people continue to believe that the Bible teaches monotheism when in fact it teaches polytheism?

Consider the following:

While the traditional Christian seems to believe that God the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ are one and the same God, a careful study of the New Testament clearly shows to the enlightened mind that they are two separate and distinct beings, united as one in their knowledge, efforts and purposes. Anyone can read through the New Testament scriptural references to God the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ, and easily understand that they are two distinct beings.

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Nature of salvation (response to comm…