The US Supreme Court Thread - Post Roe v. Wade reversal edition

No benevolent deity would put us through the last 400 years

 

Christians believe in free will.

 

Poster #1: "God is not loving and kind"

Poster #2: "Yes, it is because it lets us do grotesquely evil things while representing it!"

 

Yeah, Boom, I've pretty much left it behind. Carry on

 

You’ve asked me many times to debate or show what I believe, and I won’t do that because it’s nuanced and in some ways unverbalizable.

This is a good post to tell you why.

What I believe God is doesn’t even fit into the paradigm you’re describing here. It’s like asking what soccer tastes like, or what color astronomy is. What I believe doesn’t have the same…I guess “properties” is a reasonably good word…as what you don’t believe in.

 

Since when? I can't tell you how many times I've heard Christians say, "God has a plan". That seems the opposite of free will.

 

But the problem is you often "speak for" Christians when your beliefs do not always represent other Christians and, on occasion, might even be considered heretical by other Christians. You simply refuse to even define what you mean by "Christian". As such, it's impossible to have a meaningful conversation with you on these topics because you use the same words we do, but you define them differently and won't share your definitions. You refuse to tell us how you define them and then criticize us for not using them the same way you do.

In this particular case I'm just highlighting that arguments about "free will" are not very convincing at all, but are nonetheless revealing. Appealing to free will comes across as a Jedi knight waving his hand and saying "these are not the droids you're looking for".

Exodus very explicitly talks about God hardening Pharaoh's heart, which is clearly contrary to free will. You will argue you don't take that passage literally, unlike many Christians - but then are they really Christians, given how different they are to you and you, apparently, are a "real Christian"? Then you talk about God giving people free will to explain why a loving God won't intervene when God's followers perform extreme evil on others, all while ignoring what is written in the Scripture that supposedly gives us insight into God (or as I would prefer to say, insight into how early believers understood God's "nature").

This loving God will slaughter innocent babies to get a leader to change his behavior, knowing full well slaughtering babies won't do the trick. Now this loving God refuses to stop its followers from slaughtering babies because "free will". Maybe God's followers are simply made in the image of their god: they perform cruel and horrific acts because their god did the same thing. Or, just maybe, the people created their god in their own image and as the times have changed, with individualism becoming more prominent, they have recast God into their new image. This new god is apparently all about free will, one of the most important things related to a worldview focused on individualism, while the god in their Scriptures was totally about taking vengeance upon and killing people who exercised their free will.

tldr: In my opinion, appeals to "free will" are simply attempts to justify the unjustifiable and is based entirely on modern Western values which focus on individualism. Of course, once you realize God does not exist, it all makes complete sense.

 

Boy howdy, I'm not a Dave, but I've got to say I don't see anything clear at all about that...

People pray all the time for things they should not have, and I see no logical reason why a god should not grant such prayers as a sort of reductio ad absurdum to lead into the next lesson... "Here's what you do to yourself when you ask for that."

God can in fact make a rock so heavy he can't lift it. Because afterwards he can make himself an arm strong enough to lift it. He's God, after all. His world, we're just rocking on in it.

 

God is the agent, the pharaoh the recipient. God was causing his heart to harden, not "allowing" it to harden because that was the natural trajectory.

Exodus 9:12 (NIV) - But the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart and he would not listen to Moses and Aaron, just as the LORD had said to Moses.

It's not free will if it's God causing you to do it.

 

Am I going to have to explain metaphor and allegory to an anthropologist? seriously?

The Pentateuch is considered metaphor and allegory in my church.

 

And your church is the "true" church, of course. Those other churches are all "fake" churches. Because, unlike you, they're not "true Christians" (TM).

And I believe I said:

So no, you don't have to explain it to me as I already understood that. I'm an anthropologist, I know better than you how not historical it is. Maybe I need to explain to you what the point of my comment was about how you don't represent what Christians think, generally speaking.

 

The average atheist is a pretty unsophisticated thinker too.

 

They just don’t drink the Kool-aid.

 

Ahhh, the benefits of a color-blind society. It's what Martin died for!

 

I know looks are subjective, but I always felt that the way the show made jokes about Tichina Arnold not being attractive while treating Tisha Campbell as some great beauty was an example of colorism.

This was before I met my wife.

 

He really needs to believe that.

 

But those others aren't "true Christians" (TM), obviously.

 

Does a chess master have a plan? Does his opponent have free will? Is there any contradiction there? And neither of them is even omnipotent...

 

You're saying God is not omnipotent? That seems like blasphemy based on what most Christians say.

 

I didn't follow this commandment:

 

Not staying on this topic because the Semper Strident will show up to complain that it somehow demeans all women to suggest that any of them are attractive...

Tichina Arnold looked better IRL than she did in the show, and it's not her skin color that made Tisha look better. Tisha has since jumped the shark.

There's something I call "Disney Pretty" and "Song Girl Pretty", where there's an appearance theme that transcends race. You look at the USC song girls, they look alike despite being White Black, Latina and Asian. There are no racial features on display, just beauty. You can see it in most of the female Disney characters whether they're human or anthropomorphized animals. I saw my ex-fiancee in Mrs. Frisby. Tisha has a bit that going on, so does (example of someone White) Alex Quinn, and for a while, Denise Nicholas circa Blacula. You can also see it in the older women in those telenovelas. Tisha has a bit of that going on. Tichina does not.

 

Go back.
Reread,
Think first.
Then react.

 

Buried the lede