God the merciful

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dantana
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Re: God the merciful

Post by dantana »

Rivendale, I appreciate your straightforward and science based posting style. I'm not sure, but I think it was you that posted a comment somewhere else as to how some people can take a little bit of 'woo', and make it go a long way. I am prob. still a little bit guilty of that. Not as bad as I used to be. I had spent about ten years in 'new age' theory after leaving Mormonism and then soon after Deity theory.

You know what might be an interesting topic... defining woo. It might not be as easy as it seems. Black cats and four leaf clovers are the easy ones. The borders might get a little fuzzy though.
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Re: God the merciful

Post by huckelberry »

Rivendale wrote:
Sat Feb 26, 2022 11:18 pm
Physics Guy wrote:
Sat Feb 26, 2022 10:55 pm
What if the question isn’t whether you are saved, but how much of you is saved?
That encapsulated some Mormon theology accompanied with Christian theodicy. " How can mom be happy knowing her son is in hell?" Answer? That part of mom is gone.
I think Physics Guy is making a useful observation. It even has precedence in Paul thinking with Paul's comment about straw in ones life being burnt away to ones loss.

But Rivendale's unpleasant comment has its point. The question about who does not disappear. One might ask why is the woman's son in hell? Is he really that dangerous?

Doc made the criticism that the variety of Christian views indicates no moral center, though he may be thinking that forgiveness corrupts justice( perhaps unless appied equally). Christian thinking has a variety of thought about the details of death and afterlife. The majority believe there is purgatory to purge us of sins that have been forgiven in principal. Most Protestants think the evil portions if forgiven are gone. If one imagines there is a jack the ripper who repented and was saved little of his destructive life and self would remain.Perhaps to clarify I am not aware of a Christian version which thinks simply saying words will make Jesus wink at rape and murder. Real and not fake repentance would have to be involved and those are things sociopaths are not inclined to do.

The other end of the image, the poor candy thief in hell, just leaves me wondering why he is supposed to be in
hell. Did the candy theft start a life of petty maliciousness?

Despite a variety of doctrinal or speculative variations in detail Christianity is unified in seeing the project of forgiveness being the method to get rid of evil and establish Gods justice. The atonement shows and establishes that God both is able and wills to forgive humanity. Most all of Christianity considers the possibility that this forgiveness will not reach some individuals due to hardness of heart. Because nobody knows the full picture of how that works the speculations people make vary.

In general I think it is in line with Gods nature and justice to think that Jack the rippers," save me Jesus", w
was fake and he is not saved while the kid who stole candy has been forgiven. Yes he is guilty before God as we all are but God has established a relationship of forgiveness toward us.
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Rivendale
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Re: God the merciful

Post by Rivendale »

dantana wrote:
Sun Feb 27, 2022 2:23 am
Rivendale, I appreciate your straightforward and science based posting style. I'm not sure, but I think it was you that posted a comment somewhere else as to how some people can take a little bit of 'woo', and make it go a long way. I am prob. still a little bit guilty of that. Not as bad as I used to be. I had spent about ten years in 'new age' theory after leaving Mormonism and then soon after Deity theory.

You know what might be an interesting topic... defining woo. It might not be as easy as it seems. Black cats and four leaf clovers are the easy ones. The borders might get a little fuzzy though.

Thanks this forum is fun. I try not to be such a black and white thinker . I really am working on it. For instance I have always thought their are objective truths to almost everything. A chimpanzee will never understand Shakespeare. But the fact the chimpanzee will never understand it does not make Shakespeare objectively unreal. I now think it possible there are truths surrounding us that are forever out of our reach. Maybe this is the boundaries of woo land. I know of scientific facts that will be forever out of our reach of our reality.
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Re: God the merciful

Post by Physics Guy »

As huckelberry says, I was thinking of that somewhat cryptic verse in Paul, but also just generally. People are complicated patterns, and it's not clear to me how God—or anyone—should distinguish the pattern from the background and from the noise.

For me to be "saved" need not mean, I suppose, that all my mitochondria need to be reproduced in some eternal form. Perhaps they were never really part of the pattern that is me, but only part of the platform that hosted me for a while. Perhaps I will be ported to a new kind of architecture that does not include mitochondria. So could some of my vices and character flaws also simply be left behind with my mitochondria? It would be a shame not to try to spruce me up a bit while we're porting me anyway. Yet if one takes that too far, the new me might really be—as I believe Betrand Russell worried—not the upgraded me but rather somebody else. Whatever the technical challenges of salvation may be, it seems there are logical ones here as well.

It's true that "how much of you can be saved" might allow, say, the mother of some horrible criminal to enjoy eternal beatitude without grieving her unsaved child, because her memory of him was simply not preserved in her. Perhaps heaven is full of happy lobotomized angels that way. The obvious alternative, however, is that whatever part of the horrible criminal that a mother could still love might nevertheless have been saved, even if, say, most of that criminal's adult life is simply consigned to the fire. Perhaps the little kid that the mother remembers is indeed saved with her, perhaps they even get another chance to grow up.

And perhaps we will all have cotton candy and ponies. Speculation obviously doesn't prove anything about any afterlife. It does perhaps serve to show how hard it is to prove that anyone's hopes for an afterlife must be self-contradictory, by pointing out this or that absurdity in some traditional scenario.
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Re: God the merciful

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How to define "woo" is an interesting question that reminds me of defining pornography. An otherwise obscure US Supreme Court justice gave us the "I know it when I see it" test. More helpfully, though, Umberto Eco gave us a really good test for identifying pornographic films, at least, as such.

Eco was a professor of semiotics who wrote a lot of interesting stuff about lots of things besides his bestselling novels. The Eco porn test has nothing directly to do with sex in a film. Instead it asks us to look at all the non-erotic scenes in the film, and notice whether there are ever any cuts to skip over boring bits of everyday life, like opening doors and walking up stairs and so on. If there are no such cuts, but every mundane event apart from the sex scenes is filmed in real time, then Eco argued that the film has no leg to stand on, to defend itself from being classed as pornography, because the film is simply a collection of sex scenes held together with real-time footage of boring events. That just gives the game away.

You could, of course, find films that other people besides Eco would call pornographic, but which would not be pornographic by Eco's definition because they actually had a little bit of editing around trivia. Eco would be fine with this; no matter what other people might say, he would not classify those films as porn, or at least he would admit that it was debatable. His point was to identify a line beyond which pornography is beyond debate, and for my money he succeeded.

Perhaps something in a similar spirit could be done with woo.
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Re: God the merciful

Post by Marcus »

I wasn't quite getting the Eco test, but it made much more sense when I read a review that included this quote from the end of Eco's essay:
Umberto Eco wrote: I repeat. Go into a movie theater. If, to go from A to B, the characters take longer than you would like, then the film you are seeing is pornographic...
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Re: God the merciful

Post by huckelberry »

Wo is not a word I find myself inclined to use. I am unsure of its meaning. Perhaps it refers to magical connections that are supposed to be happening according to natural laws hidden beyond the scientifically familiar natural laws. I associate it with mental power cures or gross claims like name it and claim it. It might fit a pretty wide variety of other things. Perhaps the idea of Karma fits.

Physics guy, you present an odd digression into the identity of pornography. Then I think , are you proposing that wo is when the normal links of real life experience and effort are skipped over for moments of unrealistic wonder? Perhaps that is a pointed observation.
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Re: God the merciful

Post by Physics Guy »

Yeah, pornography itself isn’t so often relevant but the notion of an indirect test like Eco’s often is, I think. His test is impressive to me because one naturally expects that whether a film is pornographic or only erotic must have something to do with how it represents sex, but actually that’s a subjective quagmire and the real defining issue is whether the film is only about showing sex scenes. The “only” means that the pornographic character actually shows up most clearly in everything besides the sex scenes, in that no effort at all has been put into them. I think a lot of other things besides pornography might be definable in similar indirect ways.

So for example woo. Woo seems to be about weird theories about reality, but I think that’s not the real issue with woo. Plenty of really weird things do seem to be true. What makes something woo, as opposed to just weird, is not weirdness.

Maybe it’s just me but I think of “woo” as a sort of portmanteau-by-compression of “woo-woo”, meaning crazy, and “wow”. Woo has wonder, I think, the way porn has sex. The problem I see is that all woo ever does is savor its hit of wonder. After enjoying the wow for a while, it doesn’t go on to ask why it’s like that or what can we do with it. Or at least its efforts towards deeper understanding and application are trivial, showing about as much appreciation for how hard it can be to apply something practically as a kid who thinks they can turn their soapbox racer into a real dragster just by pouring gasoline into the box.

Maybe the analogy with pornography is closer than I thought, actually.
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Re: God the merciful

Post by Res Ipsa »

Physics Guy wrote:
Tue Mar 01, 2022 7:51 am
Yeah, pornography itself isn’t so often relevant but the notion of an indirect test like Eco’s often is, I think. His test is impressive to me because one naturally expects that whether a film is pornographic or only erotic must have something to do with how it represents sex, but actually that’s a subjective quagmire and the real defining issue is whether the film is only about showing sex scenes. The “only” means that the pornographic character actually shows up most clearly in everything besides the sex scenes, in that no effort at all has been put into them. I think a lot of other things besides pornography might be definable in similar indirect ways.

So for example woo. Woo seems to be about weird theories about reality, but I think that’s not the real issue with woo. Plenty of really weird things do seem to be true. What makes something woo, as opposed to just weird, is not weirdness.

Maybe it’s just me but I think of “woo” as a sort of portmanteau-by-compression of “woo-woo”, meaning crazy, and “wow”. Woo has wonder, I think, the way porn has sex. The problem I see is that all woo ever does is savor its hit of wonder. After enjoying the wow for a while, it doesn’t go on to ask why it’s like that or what can we do with it. Or at least its efforts towards deeper understanding and application are trivial, showing about as much appreciation for how hard it can be to apply something practically as a kid who thinks they can turn their soapbox racer into a real dragster just by pouring gasoline into the box.

Maybe the analogy with pornography is closer than I thought, actually.
At first, I thought the analogy was fairly weak, but I now think it's pretty good. I agree that its sources is "woo woo" and means something like crazy/silly. I tend to use it only for things like homeopathy that pretend to be evidenced based but are essentially based on magic.
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Re: God the merciful

Post by dantana »

Physics Guy wrote:
Mon Feb 28, 2022 11:24 am


And perhaps we will all have cotton candy and ponies. Speculation obviously doesn't prove anything about any afterlife. It does perhaps serve to show how hard it is to prove that anyone's hopes for an afterlife must be self-contradictory, by pointing out this or that absurdity in some traditional scenario.
I couldn't decide for sure if this was a bit of gruffness aimed at me or just a simple point to be made. I decided it wasn't. But if it was, in my defense, any air of condescension that creeps into my posts is only aimed at Mormonism. I do not mock those who hold the belief that their identity continues after death. That is also my view. Just without the one God person in charge. If Philo can have his Christianity without the judging and sorting, then I guess I should be able to have my Pantheism. My intention isn't to point out absurdities, but to present thought experiment as to why I like coop theory better, because of what I see as holes in deity theory.

I don't think it is mocking or out of line to ask the question; Why do souls need sorting? Where did they first go wrong?
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