No, you were referring to Hindus themselves; in the present tense, so obviously to modern ones. You moved the goalposts to the Vedas after.
Clearly, I showed here. I was talking about the ancient Hindus. And that’s from a much earlier post. Nothing recent either way. I WILL ADMIT MY MISTAKE I SHOULD HAVE PUT “ANCIENT” HINDUS AGREED WITH ME 100%. No problem However i’m still correct as to the points below.
- I proved my point that the ancient Hindus were originally monotheistic and that they deteriorated to polytheism nowadays.
- I also proved my point that there’s a physical description of a physical throne in heaven. Therefore, God must be a literal king.
- Finally. I proved my point that creation can be for the benefit of creation and not the creator a creator can have no desire whatever for his creation. Thank you very much.
It’s a chair, used for sitting. I own several myself.
This is exceptionally broad inference, to the point of triviality. It happens that I am now sitting in a chair. The previous sentences is a literal description of me sitting in a literal chair. A throne is literally a type of chair. Therefore I am literally a king? Fiddlers three, attend! 
I do not doubt that your faith is sincere, but I find it increasingly difficult to take you seriously.
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@LogosOfLogic Your comments would benefit from using the Quote feature of Discourse. Do this by selecting some text and clicking “Quote”, which will pop open an editing window with the selected text, or add that text to the current cursor location of an editing window that is already open.
@LogosOfLogic: you are now making a mess of your post by failing to differentiate between where you are quoting me and where you are replying.
(See – this makes it clear which bits are statements of yours I’m responding to, which bits are me responding.)
Balderdash.
That “a creator can create a creation for the benefit of its creatures and not the creator” (which is in any case a bare unsubstantiated possibility) does not negate the fact that the creator wants something.
In the case of your claim:
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God wants his creation to exist; and
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God wants his creation to benefit from its existence.
The inescapable conclusion is:
God creates = God wants creation (and God wants the creation to have the attributes he created them with)
The fact that you are claiming that God wants something altruistically, does not change the fact that he wants something.
“Actually” it doesn’t, because it simply attempts to make the unsubstantiated claim that the question is unanswerable.
This claim fails because it is reasonable to assume that, if God didn’t want “contingent imperfect mortal beings with that (purported) need [to worship him]”, he could have created them without that need.
Your philosophical self-indulgence about God’s “divine plan” is largely irrelevant.
God did therefore God wanted what he did.
NO! “According to” me, the existence of war crimes would seem irrelevant to the disanalogy between the USMC (which has a clear chain of command) and world religions, collectively (which don’t).
Kindly stop putting words into my mouth! (Particularly words that have absolutely nothing to do with what I actually said. I am not responsible for your wild and unsubstantiated speculations as to what I might mean.)
And I provided evidence for, on a different point, that “when your commander commands you to do something [that is an unlawful order]” – YOU DO NOT HAVE TO OBEY!
But Christianity, whose Bible you cited in making your original claim about free will does not. (Your claim also raises the issue of whether Jinn have free will.)
Your jumping around between religious viewpoints in the middle of the same claim is highly problematical:
Firstly, it makes your already barely coherent line of argument even less coherent.
Secondly:
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Different religions frequently make different, often inconsistent, claims.
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Taking inconsistent claims as axioms mean that you can ‘prove’ anything, no matter how contradictory or illogical.
“We know right from wrong” because of a combination of evolved instincts, cultural indoctrination and introspection. That “he has a conscience that conscience comes from God” is just another in a very long line of unsubstantiated assertions.
Similarity of word does not entail identity of concept.
Even assuming that this evidence exists (an you have merely claimed its existence, not cited it), it is unclear what you mean by this claim. What “different groups” are you talking about, and what "same name"s? And how does this demonstrate that the gods of all religions are the same?
These are families of languages. Just because the language might have similar word for “food” does not mean they necessarily eat the same food. Likewise, just because they have a similar word for “god” does not mean they worship the same being.
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You have only asserted this, not provided evidence for it.
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It does not follow that, if the Hebrews had different names for God, that all other religions worship that same god.
EVIDENCE for this ludicrous claim? Because it seems to me to be complete, ahistorical, humbug and/or wishful-thinking.
Also, even if “most religions were originally monotheistic” it does not follow that they are the same god.
That is a highly inaccurate claim. There seems to be no evidence that Ancient Egypt was originally monotheistic.
No. What I “see” is that your response was hopelessly incoherent (“a word salad”) that failed to answer my question of why God allowed other religions, often with contradictory tenets, to proliferate.
“So again According to your rationale” = @LogosOfLogic making bullshit up.
I was speaking of knowledge, not belief. You may believe anything you darn well choose. But lacking anything to back that belief up, it has no more weight than belief in the Easter Bunny.
In conclusion, I find your malformatted, punctuated-at-random, incoherent, illogical, unsubstantiated, strawmaning correspondence to be annoying in the extreme!
Please put some more care into your posts.
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That only works for religions that humans deliberately invented from scratch. It doesn’t work for any religion which has roots in a previous one (which is most of them). It doesn’t work for any religion that was deliberately invented but which wasn’t explicitly monotheistic, since inventing one deity doesn’t rule out the ide of their being others. It doesn’t work for any religion whose founder was capable of being imaginative. As you note, it doesn’t work for shamanism - which means it probably doesn’t work for any of the earliest religions.
It doesn’t work for any religion that is true, and which humans discovered rather than invented.
By the way, how do you know that the Egyptians originally only worshipped Ra?
Yes , my faith is sincere and my logic is sound. You see all thrones are chairs l, but not all chairs are thrones. So to answer your question you are not a King and you do not have a throne for reasons shown here:
A “throne” is a highly decorative chair specifically reserved for a monarch or other high-ranking figure, signifying their power and status, while a “chair” is a generic piece of furniture designed for anyone to sit on, with no inherent implication of power or status; essentially, a throne is a special type of chair used by royalty, whereas a chair can be used by anyone.
So this chair that you have at home, would you take offense if anybody else sat in it? Probably not. Is it encrusted with precious jewels? No. Does it symbolize power and authority? I doubt it.
Because a throne is only meant for the king.Specifically we were talking about the Revelation 4 and what is contained therein:
I saw a throne in heaven, and someone was sitting on it. 3 The one sitting there looked like gray quartz and red quartz. There was a rainbow around the throne which looked like an emerald.
4 Around that throne were 24 other thrones, and on these thrones sat 24 leaders wearing white clothes.
There are lesser thrones to the main throne. However, those are occupied by leaders. God’s throne is reserved only for God. So your question is essentially a non-sequiter. As you can see:
2 Immediately I was in the Spirit; and behold, a throne set in heaven, and One sat on the throne.
The Throne of God From the perspective of the book of revelation is clearly a one of a kind feature in the entire universe and there is no copy or anything similar to that, and The One sits on it.
Faith has its place, and so does logic.
Indeed. You are frantically moving goalposts, but you have yet to admit that you don’t know what others believe, now or in the past.
That’s still not true. You don’t know what others believe or believed. Most people agree that what people do is a better indicator of what they believe than any text they claim to be following.
You’re still not answering my question about real-life Christian belief in one of the most important teachings that the Bible directly attributes to Jesus:
This even applies to you:
So, let’s see the extent of your own belief.
I think we should add “prove” to the list of words that you use incorrectly.
@LogosOfLogic: rather than continuing to simply react to your (often incoherent and unsubstantiated) claims, I thought I would attempt to marshal my own views.
Free Will
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The Bible only appears to involve the concept of “Free Will” to the extent that humans are not automatically obedient to God’s will.
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This would seem to also apply to non-human animals, so it is unclear that animals lack Free Will, in the biblical sense.
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This would also not conflict with any form of Determinism, so would appear to be, at most, making a claim of Compatibilistic Free Will.
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The Bible appears to provide no explicit information on the nature of Angels, and is silent on whether they have Free Will. What we ‘know’ about Angels appears to come solely from extra-biblical speculation.
In conclusion, there appears to be no reason to view God as seeing “Free Will” as anything special.
Monotheism and God-known-by-other-names
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There does not appear to be evidence that Ancient Egyptian religion was originally monotheistic.
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There is evidence within the Bible that Judaism was not originally monotheistic (and may have developed from Canaanite polytheism via monolatry).
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Many polytheistic religions, e.g. Norse and Greco-Roman paganism, show no sign of a monotheistic origin.
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Non-theistic/pantheistic religions such as Buddhism and Taoism are even more difficult to make the claim of monotheistic origins for.
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Although the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, share a common root, their outlooks and perspectives (and thus the God they envision) differ considerably. This makes it difficult to make the claim that they share a common God. Even if that claim is made, it is clear that these religious differences serve to obscure that commonality, rather than leading its adherents to “know” this common God.
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I have seen Hinduism described as having elements of polytheism, pantheism, and panentheism, as well as monotheism.
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Cherry-picked quotes of the Riga Veda are unpersuasive. What would be needed would be expert interpretation based on the entirety of that text.
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Even if it were demonstrable that Hinduism was originally monotheistic, that would not demonstrate that it has the same creator god as Christianity. The latter claim would require comparison of the attributes/perspectives/embodied-values of the respective gods. Zeus and Thor are both Gods of Thunder – but they are nothing like each other and any claim that they’re the same god would be laughable.
In conclusion, it cannot be shown that “God is known by 1001 names to over 10000 different peoples”.
Scholars have long debated whether traditional Egyptian religion ever asserted that the multiple gods were, on a deeper level, unified. Reasons for this debate include the practice of syncretism, which might suggest that all the separate gods could ultimately merge into one, and the tendency of Egyptian texts to credit a particular god with power that surpasses all other deities. Another point of contention is the appearance of the word “god” in wisdom literature, where the term does not refer to a specific deity or group of deities.[144]
In the early 20th century, for instance, E. A. Wallis Budge believed that Egyptian commoners were polytheistic, but knowledge of the true monotheistic nature of the religion was reserved for the elite, who wrote the wisdom literature.[
Hornung, Erik (1982) [German edition 1971]. Conceptions of God in Egypt: The One and the Many. Translated by John Baines. Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-1223-3.
Oh I get it … you think you can define things however you like, read in any interpretation you like, and declare yourself to be right and everyone else wrong. This is not logic, this is something else.
Now it’s my turn …
MY chair makes me King of my own home. I like to decorate my throne with spilled coffee, and use it to conduct TV watching ceremonies. Now my argument is every bit as valid as yours - That was EASY!
Easy, and trivial. What’s the point in faith if you only trivialize it?
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It does logically follow if there is only one God in actuality only 1 God in all of existence. Which is exactly what I’ve been seeing 1 God known by different names so there can only be One God. Only one can be one only God can be one.
Hogwash! Not if my original claim was that that there’s only One God known by a thousand names.
The ancient Hindus were originally monotheistic according to their own original primary ancient texts before they deteriorated into polytheism. As I have proven above with direct quotes from the primary text of the ancient Hindus. So they agreed with me in theory.
Their adherents took actions over thousands and thousands of years in practice that does not align with their ancient texts, however the point that the ancient Hindus were monotheistic according to the tenants of their own faith is valid.
Yes, numerous late 19th and early 20th Century authors, including Budge, attempted to force a monotheistic interpretation, as Hornung delineates in his ‘Historical Introduction’ section.
Hornung himself however concludes:
The attempts to see in Egyptian conceptions of god precursors of monotheistic belief has the character of an apologia and leads away from reality … [Conceptions of God in Egypt, p252]
The correct term is Henotheism.
If there is one God known by a thousand names, this does not rule out other gods known by other names, or different gods known by the same name. Or for that matter, this does not rule out unknown gods wise enough to stay out of mortal affairs.
- if there is only one God in actuality (“thousand names” is not required),
- then there is only one God in actuality.
This is Circular Logic, or perhaps Begging the Question.
No it doesn’t.
Even if “there is only one God in actuality” (a claim that we have no evidence for), this does not obviate the (strong) possibility that there may be beliefs in a monotheistic god that does not exist.
Now you are simply committing the fallacy of Begging the Question. So your statement is thus fallacious and itself “hogwash”.\
For somebody you claims the grandiloquent pseudonym of “LogosOfLogic”, your command of logic is woefully inadequate.
Please try to do better.
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3 posts were merged into an existing topic: The Argument Clinic
The more I look into @LogosOfLogic’s claims about Comparative Religion, the more Procrustian they seem – stretching some bits and amputating other bits in order to make the facts fit their argument.
Neither the current scholarly consensus on Ancient Egyptian religion, nor on the Rig Veda(e.g. what is summarised here) appears to present *either religion as originally monotheistic in the Western/Abrahamic sense of that word.
I suppose I should not be surprised at this, LogosOfLogic appears to be an apologist rather than a scholar, and thus more interested in winning their argument than in coming to grips with the nuances of this field.
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^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
This.
You contradict yourself in two lines.
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