I was backpacking the Seven Devils last weekend and life’s demands have been overwhelming lately. Previously you offered a few essential comments on “free salvation” and stated “none of this is arbitrary. It’s the way it has to be.” I took your words and put them in a Harveyism context as follows,
This Harvey question is important, so could you respond to it?If I said, “Harvey the Invisible Rabbit was the God of the universe who offers salvation freely to all. The only necessity is that we must turn form sin because that's counter to love and love the basis of all things. When we disbelieve in Harvey we are rejecting the good. We are not being wilful and the wilful old man who has to prove he's boss steps in to preserve his authority, we are really fucking things up by assertion our own wilful refusal to accept the good.” Would it lack sufficient evidence? If so, how so? If not why not?
I went on to say,
You responded with,? Christianity ties “pursuing the good” with accepting its unjustified claims, and to tie disbelief of those claims with “rejecting the good.” I’m trying to focus on that error.
Here you are confusing tradition with truth. The discussion we’re having is about differentiating true things from false things. Some traditional claims are true in that they comport with reality. Others are not. Can you see the difference? If not, we may need to auger in here.No it doesn’t. It comes from a tradition that has a certain take on answers to the Question of God. You are trying to find fault with people for working within the tradition that best speaks to them. That's not fair. Your ignoring the nature of a religious tradition and imposing your own sense of ideology sans benefit of social sciences.
I had agreed with you and said,
You responded,Of course we think our approbations, those things that we approve of, are rational. And we both agree that often our approbations are in error. If we are in error enough of the time, we quit existing. No one is wilfully in error.
Of course it doesn’t. What does make each and every one of us the arbiter of right is the fact that we and we alone share the ultimate autonomous responsibility of passing final judgment on what is judged to be true and what is not. While we can help one another in this process, no one can do it for us. No one. We have no choice but to do it. We can do it well or we can do it poorly. Reality itself and a claim’s relation to it makes the claim true of false, and we are the ultimate arbiters of that relationship. Do you agree?That does not make you the arbiter of what's rational.
Now, I have claimed,
Two of Christianity’s most fundamental tenets are:
a) The claim that escaping God’s judgment to all mankind prior to and independent of any actions of our own requires belief in Jesus' resurrection.
b) The claim that God is just (that He renders that which is due).
...What’s essential here is that you believe that “a” and “b” are fundamental tenets and that the theist’s belief and the atheist’s lack of belief are pivotal to God’s judgment of salvation or damnation.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but we agree that these are two of Christianity’s most fundamental tenets so far, right? And the first point that I offer to demonstrate that these contradict one another is:
Now, I am not claiming that my point #1 has demonstrated the contradiction. It is only the first step in doing so. The question for you then is, do you agree that this claim #1 is true?1. As rational beings, our success at arriving at an accurate knowledge base for guiding our choices and actions correlates to a great degree with our ability to be rational, in particular, to correctly associate and integrate effects with their causes. This is what rational beings ought to do.
Finally, I previously compared the miraculous claims in the Bible to magic. I should have defined magic. Here I intend it to be definition number one of the American Heritage Dictionary “The art that purports to control or forecast natural events, effects, or forces by invoking the supernatural.” According to this definition, the Biblical claims of the Bible are claims of magic.
Let’s agree on this basic points before moving on.
Rob