That’s like asking how lime jello is not limestone. You just can’t list all the ways. Go ahead and reread the questions you put that answer up for. None of them relate to that answer.
But “rewards” was your word. If not heaven, then what were you saying was the reward for endurance of suffering or for overcoming adversity? And it must be something other than “refining”, because that was a separate reason.
You could. But there we stop, still with none of my questions answered.
Many theological problems here, especially if you subscribe to C.S. Lewis’s view of Hell. Also have to say that Abraham comes across as a bit of a dick in that story. Are you really in favor of torture? How is the rich man being refined?
Which is idiosyncratic and without scriptural support, wouldn’t you agree?
This is like a guy who trips you because it’s good for you to ask him for help in getting up. What’s another reason?
You keep repeating this even though nobody has ever agreed with you and in most cases have pointed out to you why it isn’t true.
Naturalists again; I thought we’d agreed on “materialists”. And Lewis is out to lunch. there is no such tacit request. Have you ever heard the term “emergent property”? A cause doesn’t have to share the same properties as its effect. If arguments are caused by reasoning processes, what causes the reasoning processes? You are once again supporting the homunculus theory of consciousness, which leads to infinite regress.
No, still backwards. I claim your statements are due to non-reason because they aren’t reasonable statements. And sheer speculation isn’t a cause, it’s a description of the statement.
To you, perhaps. Not to me. It’s true that I trust much of the time in statements of observed fact, which requires the assumption that the one stating is neither lying nor deceived. But many of those statements can be checked from independent sources, and that helps. But we have to distinguish questions of observable facts from questions of unsupported opinion. Caesar’s authorship is a claim made in his book, and other contemporary sources agree that he was the author, as well as agreeing that he existed.
No such thing. You have to learn to distinguish unsupported opinion from claims of fact. Note that your various quotes are not claims of fact and are not evidence that the opinions expressed are correct, just evidence that some people held those opinions.
And it’s not evidence that they are valid concerns, only that they are concerns those people had.
You didn’t use that word. Must you obsess over particular synonyms?
If you don’t know what “ad hominem fallacy” means, just say so and then go look it up. I’ll wait here. But it’s clear from that reply that you don’t know.
Very well. Why does he want us to depend on him?
No. I’m saying nothing even slightly like that. At this point, do you even know what you’re trying to say?
You did, and I pointed out the important difference, which you continually ignore.
Of course, the appeal to mysterious ways is a get-out-of-problems-free card. But what purposes?
Because it keeps us humble, not uppity?
And yet that training and correction apparently results in a lot of people going to long-lasting, perhaps eternal torment. Thanks. There are so many holes in this reasoning one doesn’t know where to begin. For one thing, if he could create the best possible world, it wouldn’t need training and correction. No reason for this temporary imperfect world when he could go straight to the goal.
Sure, until you ask yourself what’s initiating the actions of the puppetmaster, and we’re back to the homunculus theory, and infinite regress.
But do they think about what that actually means? What is “I”?
You still have this caricature view of consciousness that prevents you from thinking about it at all. Ironic, really.
Then your point is opaque.
Not odd at all. I respond to your points without regard to their source, though I strongly suspect that you are quite irrational, based on the irrationality of what you say. (See the direction of inference there, the opposite of what you keep claiming?)
I see no indication of that in your little stories.
That’s not at all what I do. Again, I reject what you say because it makes no sense, and on a case by case basis. I do hypothesize about the causes of your incorrect statements, but I reject them because they’re incorrect, not because you’re an irrational person.
Still just one case.
True. But how do you know it’s really supernatural? This is why quantity has a quality all its own. Perhaps you were initially misdiagnosed. Perhaps there are rare, spontaneous recoveries that your doctor didn’t know about. That’s why I brought up the missing limb; harder to explain.
This makes you less credible, if anything. Why are you so special? Most people who pray for miracles don’t get them, yet you do repeatedly.
Sure. Which god should I start with? And why?
). I don’t think this can be clean break, so I’ll probably just move recent and future of comments.
