Perfetto, signore!

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So we get back to the pick and mix scriptures the believer loves to use. Exclude anything that opposes your view but accept those that helps you make a debate more prolonged than it aught. Sweeping statements, what sweeping statements, the references you ignore or class as invalid? Scriptures are scriptures, what would you prefer me to remark on instead of scripture. The gospels according to Aedes and his notes on the dismissal of large sections thereof. Ruth to be included but not Elijah's,s bears.

First of all, I'm not a believer.

Secondly, religions themselves pick and mix scriptures. You think that Jews and Christians interpret Ezekiel and Isaiah the same way? They don't even interpret Genesis 1:2 the same way.

I'm not excluding anything except for blind generalizations, which you've been known to make in the past. All scripture is open to discussion -- but don't tell me about the story of Lot's wife or of Noah and then tell me that therefore God does this or that to all the disobedients.

You say "God expects perfection". That is a sweeping statement. It's also both wrong and unfounded. You say "I see a vengeful god who throughout scripture demands we act in accordance to his laws and if we dont we may expect his anger." That IS a valid interpretation if you're Cotton Mather. That is NOT a valid interpretation if you're Desmond Tutu. Why the difference? Because scripture does not provide a clear answer as to what God generally wants, what he specifically wants, or what he'll do about it.

I'm not dismissing them at all. I'm only dismissing your penchant for taking small snipets and quotes and generalizing from them as if they are representative of the whole. Different day different flavor.

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"How you get so big eating food of this kind?" -Yoda

Your posts are becoming more and more rhetoric and dismissal of valid arguments. Small snippets of mine are invalid but yours are? oh how superior you have become. Most of your posts tell me of your attention to your faith and then you inform me your not a believer. Do you perform out of fear or to acknowledge your doubts. If you doubt yourself dont insist my certainty is without investigation. God of scriptures, demands and refusal is judged by him and his entourage of angels. You dont judge your own creation when you imposed the failures by imperfection.

I haven't offered you small snippets. I've simply pointed out that your chosen anecdotes don't justify your thesis.

Based on what generalizable statement? And why is it that this is not universally believed?

And I'm not a believer. I practice Judaism out of respect for my grandparents and parents, because of the togetherness that comes with family events, and to commemorate the fact that most of my family died because they were Jews in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is an authentic practice on my part. It has symbolic importance to me, even though I don't believe the stories or the theology literally.

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"How you get so big eating food of this kind?" -Yoda

I can understand the ritual of your faith and the respect it shows your loved ones but you should never, ever use it as a reason to justify your argument. I have conformed for many years, for social benefit and i do know the fear that religion instills into its followers. Don't convince me that scriptures dont request perfection, convince the hierarchy of those bigoted faiths. I have no dispute with Judaism , it always appeared a secluded faith that never imposes itself on others, or caused suffering through its dogma.

I don't. It's only because you keep using the word "your" and the phrase "your God" in reference to my argument that I respond.

If you had even the slightest respect for me as an interlocutor with you in this conversation, then you'd do me the favor of reading my posts at a level commensurate with your intelligence. I say again and again, in this thread and others, that there is such tremendous diversity in religious practice and scriptural interpretation that broad generalizations are doomed from the start.

How is this possibly an example of someone using one's own beliefs to justify an argument? It's the exact opposite. I'm openminded -- my whole argument is that you shouldn't be basing a thesis on one of many common interpretations. My personal interpretation is basically anthropologic / historiographic, but that doesn't inform an argument about metaphysics.

As soon as you show me an unambiguous scriptural quote in which "perfection" is requested by God, I'll lay off this argument. Until then, you may as well be telling me that God created unicorns.

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"How you get so big eating food of this kind?" -Yoda

You dont get it, what is imperfection what is perfection? Any desire to compel , desire, to obey, conform is a requisite of perfection. The mere act of a creator, who knows his creation is imperfect, who then gives guidance or give laws is the act of a nutter. You dont create an imperfect creature and make requests you know are not built in to its being by the nature you instilled in it. I'm sorry but I dont know if its my lack of skill in informing you or your unwillingness to understand. It covers all the faiths you might select , its relative to them all.

You are the one who said that "God requires perfection". If by "perfection" you mean something other than perfection, then perhaps we need to choose a different word or concept.

This I agree with -- and it's why perhaps the single greatest philosophical conundrum of Western monotheism is how to account for evil. Different traditions have different rationalizations of it. They're all flawed, but then again so is any God proof and the hypotheses that there is no god (or that god is amoral) remain explanations for why there is evil.

I'm sorry if you think I've overemphasized the 'perfection' issue, but since perfection is not specifically part of doctrine and there is recourse for sinners (through repentance), I have to maintain that perfection per se is not what is required by God.


If you've ever read Dante's Divine Comedy, it's in the very last three lines of the Paradiso that Dante finally achieves perfection, in the moment when he experiences the beatific vision and directly beholds God. You can understand a lot of Dante if you read the Aeneid by Virgil and understand some of Aquinas' theology.

Dante experiences the beatific vision much as Aquinas describes, he writes:

"but now my desire and will, like a wheel that spins with even motion, were revolved by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars."

(John D. Sinclair translation of:
ma gia volgeva il mio disio e 'lvelle,
si come rota ch' igualmente e mossa,
l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle)

The relevance here is that in Dante's view, in a journey that takes him from earth to perdition to limbo to hell to purgatory to Eden and then up through the planets in paradise, it is only in paradise at the moment of beholding God that he is synchronous, that his desire and will are unified in that vision, i.e. he is finally perfect.

Aquinas wrote, regarding the beatific vision, one will "enjoy the same happiness wherewith God is happy, seeing Him in the way which He sees Himself" in the next life.

So it seems to me that in these two nondoctrinal but important members of Christian intellectual history, the dominant view is that humans cannot be synchronous with God until we are in Paradise. THAT is where we become perfect. Life is the trial.

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"How you get so big eating food of this kind?" -Yoda

[QUOTE=Yogi DMT;101937]1) Why would he plague us with the ability to think outsides the confines of the religion's teaching? 2) Why would he infect humans with the anti-religious idea of free will? 3) Why would god give humans the ability to disagree with his religion? 4) Why would god create humans so that they may create conflicting or different religious beliefs other than Christianity? 5) Why would god ever want to condemn his own children or to add, give us the ability to do such that he would condemn us for? 6) Why would god create humans with the reason to prove religion irrational in many areas? 7) Why would god ever make humans susceptible to the dangers of having a train of thought other than a strictly religious one?

Lets start with one: First is the probably false presumption that any existing teaching is from God. That human aspirations to a greater good yet to be realized via religious tradition or natural reason only sets the stage for the 'final God event'. Two: Free will is slippery concept. I would suggest that we do not have free will in any true moral sense. It is for that reason that war, injustice, environmental degradation and all the rest continue. In that sense we don't have either the free will or knowledge to be a sustainable species, the ultimate measure of a moral conception. three: back to the assumption that HIS religion exists? I would suggest that what does in fact exist is no more than a theological counterfeit, the ultimate intellectual vanity, humanities greatest own goal. Four:That 'spiritual' chaos only reflects the absence of an ultimate defining reality. We have only our illusions. five: While any 'judgment' is as yet not fully understood, to live within the current limitations of our natural condition is its own condemnation. If God intends, at some point, to save us from ourselves, and we decline the invitation, we condemn ourselves. six: because religion as it exists is irrational, and yet for religion to exist as it does must also mean that there exists within human nature an irrational component. Call it perfect ignorance it you like. seven: That is a result of the 'fall', a condition in which we still exist within that perfect ignorance.