Will Theists Accept A God That is Inferior to Another's?

All things are perfect in this sense:

Things aren’t anything more or less than what they are.

All things perfectly are what they are.

Planet earth is not a perfect sphere, nor is it perfectly blue, but however rough its shape and color is, it perfectly is that rough shape and color.

We have these ideas like shape and color, sphere and tetrahedron, blue and red.

It may be that nothing in the observable universe can perfectly match these ideas, but I don’t see why it’s impossible, in our universe or beyond.

God doesn’t have to be perfect either.

Was Zeus perfect…was Mars?

Jehovah is normally thought of as perfect, but not everyone thinks of him that way, and in the bible, Jehovah arguably has moments of impotence, imminence, ignorance and malevolence.

Some people claimed to have experienced God directly, some call them mystics and prophets, others call them charlatans and schizophrenics.

Are their experiences hallucinations or lies?

The same can be asked of all paranormal experiences and states of consciousness, indeed of all experience.

Nonetheless for these people and the ones who believe them, God or the Gods are very real.

I have stated there are two categories of perfection, i.e. Relative and Absolute Perfection.

Relative perfection is perfection that is relative to some defined criteria or conditions.
A perfect score of 300 pins in a ten-pin bowling competition is only perfect within the rules set up by the World or Local Tenpin Bowling Association.
All perfections attributed to empirical elements are relative perfections.

There are many lesser gods who are not claimed to be perfect gods, e,g, Zeus, Neptune, Hanuman the monkey God, etc.

God per se ultimately must be absolutely perfect, i.e. a perfection that is totally unconditional i.e. inherent to God itself.

Those theists who are very casual with their God generally are ignorant what their God is expected to be, i.e. absolutely perfect. When they are informed of such a gap, they will naturally and readily insist their God is absolutely perfect.

A lesser inferior God is logically vulnerable to be dominated by a God which is more and absolutely superior. In such a case there would be doubts in the minds of those who accept an inferior God that their God will not be able to deliver the promised eternal life in Paradise since and capable of all possibilities, as such is monopolized by the absolutely perfect God.

Logically, given such an awareness, all theists will end up with an absolutely perfect God who will not be dominated by any other God.
So God per se must be an absolutely perfect God and no other.

Greatest I am wrote:

You can’t put a price on how much damage the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandals have done to the victims. But you sure as hell can count how much the Church has paid out as a result of those lawsuits.

Nearly 4 billion.

Plus all the air fare that the Vatican pays to move the pedophile priests they want to protect to fresh stomping grounds.

Bastards.

Regards
DL

If you have a religion based on forgiveness, then you are going to have a problem of what to do with repeat offenders. That’s not restricted to pedophilia.

Presumably you would have to just forgive the first offense. And you’re going to get criticized for that in itself when it comes to pedophilia. Right?

To forgive or not to forgive. That is the question.

Forgiveness is to the victim to give. Not us and certainly not to a mythical God.

Regards
DL

So what was Jesus doing when he let the adulterous woman go in John 8:1-11? Why doesn’t Jesus condemn her if she broke the law? Why ought she not be punished?

Forgive and remove from the priesthood.
Forgive and let them be judged in court.
Forgive and do not simply transfer them to a new setting where they have access to children, parents do not know they are a threat and they are in an authority position.
Forgive them and make sure they get treatment and no longer have contact with children.

Forgiveness is not tied to inaction or any specific action.

A mild form of punishment. And the pedophile is released into the general community where he can offend again.

A washing of the hands and probably a punishment by the secular legal system.

That’s what happened in a lot of the cases. It does seem to be the most consistent with the concept of forgiveness.

This is fairly similar to “let them be judged in court” because that might be the court ordered punishment.

Did you get my point or not?

I see no problem at all with turning priests over to secular courts after defrocking them. However, My point was that pretty much any action is available while forgiving them. YOu seemed in your earlier post to be saying that to forgive precluded certain actions.

That doesn’t seem to be consistent with the spirit of forgiveness.

“I forgive you but I’m going to turn you over to someone who does not forgive you and who will almost certainly punish you.”

Seems like just “passing the buck” and feeling good about it.

Well, yes.

A long time ago, I started a thread which asked what Jesus would do if the adulterous woman did not stop the adultery. What if she was brought to him over and over?

If he keeps letting her go, then he is accepting/condoning her behavior.

It appears that eventually he would have to condemn her and punish her in some way.

But that’s contrary to the concepts of “judge not lest ye be judged” and “forgive your brother 70 times 7” which Jesus is promoting.

It appears to be a problem with Christian ethics.

I never did get an answer in the thread.

But that’s my point about objectivism. Whether rooted in religion or reason or ideology or deontology or nature, there have been hundreds and hundreds of arguments – hopelessly conflicting and contradictory arguments in many respects – embracing what you have just said.

The only difference then being that they are predicated on their own argument/analysis/assessment, and not yours.

You either grasp [as I do here and now] the psychological element that seems embedded in this or you don’t.

Here I can just imagine all the “serious philosophers” trying to pin down precisely what Kant meant by God, by “transcendental idealism”. Technically.

But, sans God, mere mortals of your ilk [who are anything but omniscient and omnipotent] still manage to insist that they and they alone have accumulated just enough knowledge to grasp what those “absolute moral laws” will be.

If only in the future.

Only [with me] that is almost never explored existentially pertaining to particular contexts and particular conflicting behaviors.

Again, I’ll let the “Kant scholars” sort all this out such that the definitive argument/analysis/assessment is finally subscribed to by all of them.

Has this in fact already been accomplished? Has there come to be one optimal understanding of the man and his ideas?

In any event, with an omniscient/omnipotent God, one would seem either obligated to tell the truth to the murderer and disclose the location of the woman [if lying is always wrong], or, instead, in this, that or some other context, it might be okay to lie.

And the actual contexts of course could number in the thousands.

So, in a No God world, you tell me: what would you say to the murderer?

And in what particular context? Would your answer change with the changing contexts?

In other words, there have been folks here who have argued for a universal morality, and those who insist that an objective morality does exist…but only pertaining to each and every particular context.

Why on earth would anyone want to grasp what a square circle is when by definition they describe two different shapes? Do you often confuse the two? I suspect though that this may well be another “technical” discussion that is way over my head.

On the other hand, existence itself can either be wholly understood or it cannot. And, either way, how succinctly would any mere mortal be able to fit their own moral narrtive into whatever may or may not be All There Is.

Indeed, from my perspective, the only way in which you are able to fit it all in is by stuffing it all inside your own particular intellectual contraption.

In other words, sometime in the future human interactions [in the is/ought world] will finally be revealed as wholly in sync with your own “progressive” assumptions here and now.

Only you won’t at least broach that future by situating your “progressive morality” in the present.

What would the argument sound like pertaining to a particular conflicting good? And how are you not entangled in my own dilemma in describing this?

Thus:

Once again, you had the opportunity to flesh this exchange out substantively by bringing these abstractions down to earth. From my frame of mind then you really do need to ask yourself why you refuse to.

This seems somewhat analagous to Satyr’s “genes ever and always trump memes” dogma. There is a “natural” way to behave that, going all the way back to the caves, trumps any and all renditions of culture.

Perhaps you should take up your own narrative here with him over at KT. See what he gets wrong according to you or what you get wrong according to him. My point though revolves around the assumption what while both of you believe that only one of you can be right, it is always going to be one or the other. And certainly not the multitudes who embrace their own entirely different narrative.

You would both insist [to each other]:

My point in other words.

Then I note this:

And how do you respond? By, once again, doing the same thing:

Another “world of words” defining and defending itself up in the scholastic clouds.

In my own opinion of course. After all, who am I to actually demonstrate that my own intellectual contraption here isn’t just another “philosophical” rendition.

All I can do here is to situate my own value judgments [in a No God world] in an “assessment” that does in fact come down to earth.

This one:

1] I was raised in the belly of the working class beast. My family/community were very conservative. Abortion was a sin.
2] I was drafted into the Army and while on my “tour of duty” in Vietnam I happened upon politically radical folks who reconfigured my thinking about abortion. And God and lots of other things.
3] after I left the Army, I enrolled in college and became further involved in left wing politics. It was all the rage back then. I became a feminist. I married a feminist. I wholeheartedly embraced a woman’s right to choose.
4] then came the calamity with Mary and John. I loved them both but their engagement was foundering on the rocks that was Mary’s choice to abort their unborn baby.
5] back and forth we all went. I supported Mary but I could understand the points that John was making. I could understand the arguments being made on both sides. John was right from his side and Mary was right from hers.
6] I read William Barrett’s Irrational Man and came upon his conjectures regarding “rival goods”.
7] Then, over time, I abandoned an objectivist frame of mind that revolved around Marxism/feminism. Instead, I became more and more embedded in existentialism. And then as more years passed I became an advocate for moral nihilism.

Will you or will you not provide me with a similar trajectory? Such that I might more clearly understand the existential evolution of your own thinking here.

Your ‘objectivism’ is a straw man in this case.

I agree within the history of mankind, there have been and there are thousands and hundred of arguments – hopelessly conflicting and contradictory arguments in many respects – many are true within their respective perspectives.
Note Kant’s antinomy - ‘the equally rational but contradictory results of thoughts.’

The point is when one venture to explore knowledge there is a necessity to embrace its divergence. But the problem with the direction of divergence is it is forcing one into an infinite regression and thus inducing frustration, e.g. 2->4->8->16->32->64->128->256-512-1024-2048-4096-> …68,719,476,736 … and the forms goes on infinitely. I had the same problem when I started and worried where it this going to end, which one will realize it is an impossibility.
Then I turned inward to the convergence of all knowledge, i.e. its substance or essence. But this also face a problem of infinite regression on the opposite side, thus another cause of worry due to conflicting goods and evil. This is where theists resolve their worry with a final cause, i.e. God.

The solution to the above dilemma is complementarity [I used this very often].
To enable complementarity has has to explore as far as possible in each opposite direction and understand how they interact in affecting oneself and the collective.
What is most critical is to develop the base critical requirement, i.e. a state of equanimity so that one is not shaken easily by conflicts one is sensitive to.
As I had stated understanding the theory [knowing] is one thing but it has to be complemented with doing and acting [actual rewiring of the brain].

From what I gather you are very low in term of the venture and understanding of the necessary knowledge and not much in terms of doing, acting and practicing the necessary to promote a state of complementariness within your psyche.

It is not easy is exploring as much knowledge as possible and also doing/practicing what is learned. Such take a lot of time and brain power in reflecting then practicing what is learned.

Not everyone have the capacity or the time to do such necessary extensive researching and practicing the necessary. The alternative to this requirement in the event of limitation is thus to anchor oneself with the cultivation of equanimity to deal with conflicting goods or evils.
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=193778
Here you are rejecting this suggestion outright.

The cultivation of equanimity takes time.
If one do not have the time, then one has to understand its usefulness and force it upon oneself logically, rationally and psycho-analytically and hope it works.
E.g. in NLP -neurolinguistic programming can induce happiness from outward to inward as a short-cut by consciously reproducing the genuine smile [“Duchenne smile,”] of happiness.

If the above is not possible due to various reason, then the drug option [prozac, other tranquilizers, weeds, etc.] is the only way and bearing in mind its inevitable side effects.

The above issue is very complex, wide and deep thus a lot of coverage, time and effort are needed.
Since I have gone through the necessary generic phases, personally I would have no issue resolving the above if I am in those conditions.

I would recommend the solution is to adopt the approaches I have listed above, i.e. explore as much necessary knowledge as possible [e.g. all you need to know of the “I” its existential elements] with the complementarity of divergence-convergence in mind and mindful there are no definite answers in philosophy. In addition one must engage in the necessary practices, i.e. action and doing.

Then depending on whether you are faced with constraints or not, take the relevant optimal path and as a last resort, take the necessary drugs or just give up if there are no other options.

phyllo

So what do you think Christ ought to have done? Join the herd and stone her to death?
I would think that since Jesus was the supposed Son of God, he might just simply listen to her, not once, not twice, but each time she was brought to him.
He might ask her why ~~ you know, try to get to the bottom of it.
Would he actually condemn her or would he let her know that he did not condone her behavior?
Do you see any distinction between condemning the behavior and condemning her?

Maybe she was an adulterous woman because her husband had no respect for her, beat her, regarded her as simply so much chattel. Maybe it was love and affection which she was looking for - not the sex.
Perhaps it is the husband who needed to be condemned. Did you ever think of that?

I do not think that Christ was promoting forgiving someone 70 times 7.
Is the wife suppose to forgive the husband for beating her up 70 times?

"Matthew 18:21-22 (NKJV) - Then Peter came to Him and said, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus said to him, "I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven. The interesting thing about this verse is that Jesus is not saying that we should forgive 490 times or simply a lot of times for that matter. I came to understand recently that there is a very specific meaning when we look behind the symbolism of those numbers. In the Bible, the number “7” symbolises completeness or a finished work, while the number “70” signifies ‘perfect spiritual order carried out with all spiritual power and significance’ (Bullinger, 1921, p.235). Therefore, 490, being the product of 70 x 7, signifies spiritual perfection of perfect order and completeness. Peter asked Jesus how often he should forgive someone and eagerly offered an answer to his own question. He thought that forgiving completely would suffice. But Jesus responded by saying that it wasn’t good enough to just forgive completely but to forgive to the point of spiritual perfection! If we think we have no unforgiveness… we need to stop and examine our hearts. This is one of those things that makes me go “ouch” whenever I stop to think about it or have those creeping negative thoughts against someone… We are required to forgive to the point were we no longer meditate on the hurt or have any anger or animosity towards the person who sinned against us. Our hearts need to be completely cleared to say the least. Unforgiveness hurts us and not the person who hurt us. It also hurts and hinders our spiritual lives. I often use something I’ve heard to illustrate, it gets a laugh but gets the point across: “Unforgiveness is like taking poison while waiting for the other person to die!”… I quoted E.W. Bullinger, Number in Scripture: Its Supernatural Design and Spiritual Significance, 1921

christianblog.com/blog/doul … mes-seven/

Perhaps if we dropped the Christian part of it and suggested a humane ethics, it might work better - but probably not.

Not even one though there could be moooooorrrrrrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeee than one?

If he does nothing, then the crowd will eventually stone her or the crowd will change their minds and think that adultery is okay.

He becomes her therapist/psychiatrist? For how many years? And all the time she is doing the same behavior?

Then the behavior is accepted as “basically okay”.

He calls it a sin. But it has no consequences “in this world”.

Maybe in how she feels about herself there is a difference but in a practical sense it’s the same.

Sure, it can be rationalized. The blame can be shifted to someone else. Maybe the pedophile priests were abused so that the blame for their behavior really rests on some acquaintance or relative.

Yes, he is promoting endless forgiveness.

According to Jesus, yes. Of course, the husband is a sinner for beating her.

The symbolism of numbers in the Bible. No, I don’t buy that. People find all sorts of numbers in texts and assign meanings to them and arrive at all sorts of fictitious conclusions.

How would it work? Besides redefining adultery so that it’s not a crime … which magically makes the dilemma go away in this example.

What I am looking for revolves around the existential evolution of your views on abortion. Your own rendition of this:

1] I was raised in the belly of the working class beast. My family/community were very conservative. Abortion was a sin.
2] I was drafted into the Army and while on my “tour of duty” in Vietnam I happened upon politically radical folks who reconfigured my thinking about abortion. And God and lots of other things.
3] after I left the Army, I enrolled in college and became further involved in left wing politics. It was all the rage back then. I became a feminist. I married a feminist. I wholeheartedly embraced a woman’s right to choose.
4] then came the calamity with Mary and John. I loved them both but their engagement was foundering on the rocks that was Mary’s choice to abort their unborn baby.
5] back and forth we all went. I supported Mary but I could understand the points that John was making. I could understand the arguments being made on both sides. John was right from his side and Mary was right from hers.
6] I read William Barrett’s Irrational Man and came upon his conjectures regarding “rival goods”.
7] Then, over time, I abandoned an objectivist frame of mind that revolved around Marxism/feminism. Instead, I became more and more embedded in existentialism. And then as more years passed I became an advocate for moral nihilism.

Why?

Because this relates precisely to my argument about values being rooted substantively in the actual life that you lived. Embedded in a particular historical and cultural context. Predicated on a particular sequence of experiences, relationships and access to information/knowledge.

Once you are able to grasp “I” here as an existential contraption, you can then begin to work on an argument that would enable you to transcend it. As a philosopher. To explain to me how you are not entangled in my dilemma above.

By noting specifically contexts in which you confronted others who were at odds with your own values. Contexts/conflicts in which your description might allow us to more clearly grasp a set of behaviors that “in the future” would come to reflect an objective morality in a world sans God.

Sure, this may be deemed an adequate rejoinder by you, but certainly not by me. Again, just imagine yourself outside that abortion clinic telling those pro-life/pro choice folks to “just focus on the present and plan for the future.”

How on earth does that even begin to obviate the conflicting goods that they will be pummeling each other with?

Instead, I get this…

I have no doubt that you have much invested psychologically in believing that this is true. I need but recall how much I had invested psychologically in my own wholly intact dictums.

On the other hand, there have been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of others down through the ages able to construct a “right makes might” contraption in their head. Anything to sustain “I” in the is/ought world as though morality could be grasped objectively as really just another manifestation of the either/or world.

You just take away the part about immortality and salvation and predict that in the future you will be vindicated.

For the No God folks, this may well be the mother of all psychological defense mechanisms.

Let’s just agree to disagree then regarding the extent to which your own “world of words” here is, say, deftly intertwined in the lives that we live “for all practical purposes” from day to day. Lives that ever go in and out of sync in a world of conflicting goods.

You know what you believe.

I once did too.

I believe the above is the critical bottleneck where you are wearing your own straight-jacket.

You are not being realistic at all.
The real thing is you cannot do anything much at all with the majority of pro-life/pro choice folks at present or hope for them to change their mind immediately or even in the short term. (a insignificant few may change their mind over the short term but not all).

Take for example, those who were protesting against chattel slavery since 3000 years ago or even 500 years ago. There was no way, the protestors or anyone could expect the slave owners to give up chattel slavery or laws banning chattel slavery then, i.e. 3000 or even 500 years ago.
It is the same with racism, no black Americans could have agreed with any proposals it is possible for a black to be a US president 200 or even 50 years ago, but it happened.
There are so many “cannots” and not-possibles in the past that became possible in the present.

It is the same for the pro-life/pro choice folks re the issue of abortion. In their current psychological state it is not easy for the majority of them especially the hardcores to change their views or deal with their emotions on those matters. Thus to be realistic the optimal choice for each is to tolerate the opposite views. Otherwise at present it has to be an issue of might or else.

But the fact is humans also has an inherent drive to improve toward the better and the truths will always prevails eventually in time like how the banning of Chattel Slavery by all Nations is the norm.

Your problem is you are stuck in one view and thus suffers because there are conflicting views in opposition to yours. If you do not do anything to yourself [as I had suggested with the range of alternatives strategies,] you will continue to suffer.

If you don’t change, humanity will not give a damn with you as an individual at present [only you can get out of the hole yourself], rather humanity will “just focus on the present and plan for the future” to ensure there are no individuals like yourself in the future [50, 75, 100 or > years ] who will be entrapped by the issues of abortion.
It is possible the question of abortion will even not arise at all because in the future the majority will have greater impulse controls [yeah equanimity, etc.], have access to easy preventive methods and others.

@Prismatic

And you’re claiming only relative perfection exists in the empirical world?
Well, I countered this, I just posited: all things are absolutely/perfectly themselves.

Furthermore, the universe is either finitely or infinitely divisible.
Which of these is more perfect, finitely or infinitely divisible?
In one sense, finitely divisible is more perfect, because this means the ultimate, or smallest things, which everything else is made up of, are perfectly solid, and the void surrounding them, perfectly, but on the other hand, infinitely divisible is more perfect, as it has no restrictions.
So either way, there’s some perfect in the universe.

Many polytheists think of their Gods as imperfect.
Wiccans believe the supreme beings are a seemingly imperfect horned God and a triune Goddess.

Zoroastrians believe their supreme deity Ahura Mazda is imperfect in the sense that he can’t yet vanquish Ahriham his evil counterpart.

Hindus admit their Gods are imperfect, however they believe there is this ultimate reality called Brahman that’s perfect.
However this Brahman isn’t outside the cosmos so much as it is the cosmos (pantheism), in stark contrast to the Abrahamic conception of God (monotheist).
They believe the cosmos is essentially consciousness, that matter is either illusory, can be reduced to or is a by-product of consciousness, and that this ultimate reality is available to all of us and experiential, via exercises and practices such as meditation and studying/reflecting upon scripture, which elevates our consciousness, and since we’re all a manifestation of this perfect God perceiving itself an infinite amount of finite entities.

I don’t think this is so, why do you believe it to be?

That’s only if you believe there is another God.
And most theists seem to like a little danger in their lives and their spirituality, I mean most of them believe in hell don’t they?
If they believed in things only to make themselves feel better, wouldn’t they want to feel more certain they’re not going to hell, but not even believing such a place exists?

Note ‘absolute’ in this case meant totally unconditional.
Your concept of “Universe” cannot be totally unconditional but credibly it has to be conditional within the Scientific Framework and System which is human made.
The most credible knowledge human has is the empirical-rational basis which is always conditional. Whatever is empirically-based cannot be totally unconditional.

Only the idea of God as thought can be totally unconditional.

Most polytheists has a hierarchy of gods but at the topmost is the absolutely perfect God e.g. Brahman in Hinduism.

The idea of God is based purely on reason and by reason, logically a God has to be absolutely perfect.
Why? note my reasons below;

Believing in Hell is one reason why they need to believe in an absolutely perfect God to ensure they absolutely and certainly will go to heaven.

If they believe in a lesser God, then a more superior God can exists to prevent them from going to heaven, sent them to Hell or worst make them eat shit. Their inferior God cannot stop that.

E.g. an Islamic God [absolutely perfect God] assert Christians will go to hell because they believed in a lesser god who had given birth to a son. In this case the Christian logically can only counter at most, their God is also an absolutely perfect God an on par so their God is not lesser than the Islamic God.
So it is the same with other theists who logically has to claim their God is absolutely perfect, i.e. a God than which no greater can exists to dominate their God.

The above is why, logically a God via thought by default MUST and IMPERATIVE be an absolutely perfect God.
Can your counter this logic? Gotcha!