"If two people worship their own God who is in fact supreme, even though they may think they are worshiping a different God than that of another religion, they are in essence worshiping the same supreme God." Lets examine this sentence closely. In my example, two people use faith to conclude that they have the only right god AND that the other persons god is NOT their god. There are TWO parts to this. Part A: MY god is the god which exists Part B: Your god is NOT my god Faith is used to conclude BOTH of these assertions. Now look at what YOU are saying: You are saying that faith is CORRECT for part A, and false for part B. So FAITH succeeds for part A and FAILS for part B. Once again, proving that faith is not consistent. I can attack this a different way. You are ALSO making the claim that YOU KNOW THIS FOR A FACT. You do NOT posses the authority to CLAIM that these peoples faith are incorrect when they state that their god IS NOT the other persons god. How could you possibly know this? You cant. As inconsistent and contradictory as ever. Try again. peace axeman
Your responses belie your anti-supernatural bias. Both person A and person B can be "correct" in a sense. Before I became a theist I was into the occult and "believed" and received positive supernatural verification for what I believed. Now I am a theist and have received positive supernatural (and scientific I might add) verification for what I believed. There was a spiritual reality behind my former belief system and there is a spiritual reality behind my current belief system. It's not a question of existence, it's a question of who is right.
I disagree. Religions have underlying belief frameworks and spiritual realities behind them. There are consequences for following any one of them. Universalism, which is what I am assuming you are promoting, makes huge underlying assumptions.
My assumption for the sake of this discussion and explanation is that there is only one supreme God, not two. Anything less than supreme, is not God. In the same way if I say the largest possible number, that means nothing possibly larger. What would the largest number possibly be? The sum total of all possible numbers. So God the supreme, is the sum of everything, there is nothing greater. If you want to call that universalism, okay by me. God is certainly universal.
Again what you see as inconsistency is not inconsistency of faith, but inconsistency of the intellect. Say there are two boys who go to the same school. The begin talking one day about their respective fathers. Boy A says: "My father is better than your father." Boy B says: "My father is better than your father." The boys naturally fight, as is their human nature to fight to try and prove who's father is better. Who is right? Well, in this example neither is really right as they actually have the same father. Their father is a polygamist who has two separate families who do not know of each other's existence. One boy may know one side of the man who is the father, and the other boy may know another side of the man who is the father. In fact, those two sides may be completely different in appearance, as the man is living two separate and distinct lives. In one family he is a very strict disciplinarian, and appears mad all the time. In another family, he appears loving and joyful all the time. So the boys describe their father according to their understanding of him...but they are not able to know the entire story of their father. When I use the word God, I mean God the supreme. God the supreme is the highest, the greatest, the most loving, the most of everything etc. There is nothing beyond God, and God is beyond everything that is relative in nature. God is absolute. That is the definition. Can you grasp that concept? So, if a man practices faith in God the supreme, it is by his faith that he will come to know God, and as his faith deepens he knows God more and more until such time that his faith is 100% and perfect in nature. If two people are worshiping God the supreme in their own style, or worshiping God the supreme in two very diverse forms, their intellect may become confused and think their God is better than or different than someone else's God, but if they both worship God the supreme they are both right in a relative sense and wrong in an absolute sense, as they are seeing only one aspect not God in His entirety. It is not faith that causes the problem, it is the intellect that has a need to think in a style of better or worse than. Faith has nothing to do with that process. The love boy A felt for his father was equal to the love boy B felt for his father, and they both knew some things about their father, they simply did not know everything about their father, and their intellect was compelled to act as the intellect does, either superior or inferior is the normal way of functioning of the intellect. The intellect is constantly comparing and contrasting everything, categorizing everything, in its never ending search for perfection in an imperfect world. Had they chosen to simply love their father and be filled with that love, they would not have cared about what anyone else's father does or who he is. That is not the fault of their father, that is their human nature and their limited intellect.
I know I'm unable to debate at axeman's level of skill, but I can field this one: Let's say I offer you the following game: You roll a six sided die. if numbers 1,2,3, or 4 come up you win a dollar. If the die shows 5 or 6 you lose a dollar. While you are not 100% guaranteed to win in the long run, elementary comprehention of simple odds makes this an obvious 'good bet'. You don't need any sort of mystic faith to understand that the odds are in your favor, just basic grade school math. Rearden Metal ___________________________________________ You are absolutely correct on the odds issue and that is part of where I was going. Supposedly we are seeking truth. Supposedly we are using logic and reason to find that truth. Supposedly we want that truth to be 100% accurate. If we want truth in the dice example then it has to be 100% accurate. A "good bet" shouldn't suffice in finding the truth. Logic and reason annalyze the outcomes and are 100% accurate in retrospect but only can project the outcome a certain percent of the time. (I believe Axe said his systems were about 75% accurate) What about the other 25% of the time. His systems aren't showing the 100% truth of the market, but if his logic is totally complete they should be. Logic and reason can do it but they must be expanded to be able to capture the full truth or 100%. To be able to feel that you are consistently winning debates it is certainly desirable to limit the parameters of that debate and the definitions used in that debate. This is certainly the case in the legal profession and it works. But as in the legal profession it many times just doesn't yield the truth. There are just too many unknowns in the universe and beyond to maintain that we can totally find truth from a limited logic. It would be much more logical to include all the possibilities but this makes winning debates much tougher so must be avoided at all costs.
Logic is just a set of rules, it is not truth. It was quite logical, based on physical perception at one time, to believe the sun revolved around the earth. Correct logic, wrong point of view. When the point of view changed based on deeper knowledge, the logic itself did not change. The logic just adapted itself to a new set of experiences and information. All of logic is based on relativistic information, not on absolute information. Unless we start from absolute information, the conclusions logic brings are not absolute. They may be absolute within the framework of a limited knowledge, but are not all encompassing of all possible knowledge or all possible experiences. This why some seekers of truth move in the direction of searching for absolute knowledge from which to construct their reality from. Absolute knowledge would come from an absolute source, and that source is commonly known as God. My own opinion about the debate that takes place by the atheists is that they are not really searching for truth, but rather attempting to defend their choices of intellect over a balance of intellect and heart working together in a spiritual practice. There is typically an extreme need for the failed theist who becomes and atheist to defend their line of thinking, as in their heart they will never know if they made the right decision. They have to destroy all intellectual doubt that they could have been wrong in their decision. So they construct arguments of an intellectual manner to attempt to silence their spiritual selves. It is folly, as man is not just intellectual, he is also spiritual. If he were fully intellectual, and not also spiritual, we would all come to the same conclusions logically, and that just doesn't happen beyond closed systems like mathematics. In reality, and in life, we all know (some deny) that there is more to life than meets the eye and can be reasoned with the brain.
Belief in a deity is not universalism. Universalism is the belief that "all roads lead to the same path". That's the part I was referring to and that's the part imo opinion that leads to many logical inconsistencies.
Logical inconsistencies all have their basis in individualism. It would make sense that universalism, as you call it, would lead the logicians to apply their perspective to the concepts that one can appear as many. The classic statement of a logician about the world is that it is not possible for it to be raining and not raining at the same time and place. However, since God is everywhere at every particular time, from that perspective it is possible to have the co-existence of opposite values. As I have stated before, God's world is the exact opposite of this world. The intellectual and purely relativistic mind just runs like a nervous hamster on a cage wheel when you discuss some of these abstract concepts.
Personally, I don't subscribe to all roads leading to the same path. I subscribe to one single God who has only one path available, and that path is faith in Him. What form of God someone chooses to worship is irrelevant, as long as they are worshiping supreme in God in their heart. If they worship the angry aspect and form of supreme God or the loving aspect and form of supreme God it is still supreme God they worship. Personal preference.