Picrel. The key is to remember that God sees it as a test. Satan sees it as temptation. God puts things in your way to test you or teach you lessons. You become sick or lose your job? For a reason. You win the lotto or get a new job or power position? For a reason. So remember friends realize the devil wants to use what God did in your life against you.
So I’m just this creature constantly getting tested and tempted and am going to be eternally judged for my reactions?
That’s stressful
What about the millions of little kids that die from diarrhea in third world countries? Was it just a test?
this is the thing that continues to short-circuit the baby-brained karmic system of christianity. I don’t consider myself a gnostic but their characterization of earth as a hell-like planet that was corrupted by its moronic creator makes a lot more sense than making human souls pawns in a battle between the hubris of two supernatural beings
What do you think of this writing? The writer sees Satan as God's lapdog in his theology
it’s the same shit. as an amateur student of theology it’s hard not to see the hellenistic syncretism in Christianity’s depiction of the conflict between God and Satan, it’s all very primitive and very human, where I don’t think God is anything like this. I consider myself a Spinozist on the topic of God, and I don’t believe that God is ever *present* in what you perceive as a moment. God has already woven the tapestry of not just your entire life but the entire life of the cosmos, and we are about as capable of interfering with it as an ant is capable of toppling over a skyscraper i.e. not capable at all. if we’re here for any reason it’s to evaluate what exactly creation is, to lend God the perspective of a mortal on this imperfect material world. not sure why God makes it at all because imo we were all better off totally unified in the fundamental substance of God, without awareness or individuality but also without separation or desire, yet here we are anyways in a shoddy facsimile of God’s perfection
>Spinozist
What’s that? I heard Elon Musk claim to believe in the god of Spinoza too.
>Elon Musk
sadge. Spinoza was a sephardic israelite whose family was expelled from Spain and was consequently raised in the Netherlands. he was a israeli scholar until he got exiled from the israeli community in the Netherlands for heresy, because he described the nature of God using geometric proofs to infer only things which are logical to assume about God and the nature of reality. his only completed work, The Ethics, was posthumously released and used to be required reading in Latin classes. it’s not easy to read, but if you understand mathematical logic and love God you’ll probably like finishing it. I recommend the Edwin Curley translation.
I have a hard time believing Musk is an actual Spinozist, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he just meant he was “pantheist” and chose to parrot a quote from Einstein (who wrote quite a bit about his love of Spinoza’s writing) to seem intelligent
personally I feel like there are some things in Spinoza’s Ethics that could use updating, in fact I’ve planned a long term writing project to try and marry Spinoza’s Ethics to Einstein’s Relativity and explain God relativistically instead of geometrically
Pantheism is basically what occult kabbalists teach, and that's where he was getting it from ultimately. It's very wrong, so wrong. A good critique of Spinoza given by Schopenhauer (in Parerga und Paralipomena, Vol. 1, p. 13.) is this: "In general, Spinoza commits the great error wherein he obviously misuses words to denote terms that have other names elsewhere to the rest of the world, while on the other hand takes away the meaning that they have everywhere: thus he calls 'God' that which is everywhere called 'the world'; 'justice' that which is everywhere called 'power', etc."
didn’t know that pantheism is taught in kabbalah. I don’t find Schopenhauer‘s critique to be compelling because this is literally the only way one can criticize Spinoza’s Ethics i.e. by disputing the definitions for terms he very generously supplies and methodically details. it’s a brainlet criticism of all philosophy to say
>that’s not what that word means
well no shit sherlock the author literally defined the term the way they did so that you could understand their use of it. the logic of Spinoza’s Ethics is indestructible, even though like I previously mentioned I don’t agree with all of it, it is indisputably logically consistent
>didn’t know that pantheism is taught in kabbalah
It talks about the monad and how everything is just emanations of it. In turn it is a blatant ripoff of Gnosticism, and it along with the Talmud itself takes a lot of terminology including deity names from the Manichean texts, which gets most of its mythology from Zoroaster in turn. Many of the "Christian kabbalists" of the renaissance noted this fact, see for instance "Theologia Platonica De immortalitate animorum: duo de viginti libris," pp. 81-82.
I’ve been definitely meaning to look into Zoroastrianism, thanks for the recs.
Sure thing
What about panenthiesm? To me that makes the most sense
That there is a distinction between God and the world but that the world is a subset or a sub-part of God? To my mind, it's kind of a mushy middle ground because you've allowed there to be a distinction between God and creation, but in doing so you have to specify what exactly this "intersection" is now, what the nature of it is. That's what I think of it descriptively. And I definitely don't think it's true based on biblical truths which I place firm belief in.
I think there are probably infinitely different kinds of panentheisms. Because to be a panentheist, you have to say that God and the universe are separate in some respect, but yet somehow the same in other respect. There are so many different ways one could probably choose to say what that relationship is, but I would choose none of them. I place a clearly defined separation between the Creator and creation. I base this for one thing on the statement from John chapter 1, "He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not."
I understand what you’re saying. I would say the distinction between the world and god is that the world is dependent/sustained by god but the reverse isn’t true. I think his omnipresence sustains us, because he is the source of life. So if he weren’t part of our word then it simply wouldn’t exist.
I see it like the Holy Spirit is a sort of collective consciousness/pantheism, the father is outside of creation, and the son is his physical form within creation
>John chapter 1, "He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not."
interestingly, one of the core ideas in my project to write a relativistic version of the Ethics echoes this. I think even Spinoza’s ethics echo this. I don’t get the sense that Spinoza draws any kind of hard separation between God and creation (granted you were describing panentheism and not pantheism), but he repeatedly describes human perception as “deformed”, and essentially incapable of truly knowing God beyond understanding their relationship with God and expressing a love towards God. imo I feel like this is essentially codified by conclusions reached by Einstein’s theory of relativity, in that observers are temporally isolated and can experience causal events differently from each other, and Einstein’s theory does not preference one observer over the other. so I feel like this “inability to know God” is a given based on our uniquely personal perception of reality i.e. we only observe an inherently biased slice of reality (biased in that the facts of perception are conditional to the observer) and God, necessarily being an all-encompassing being, is only ever known to us in a fractional and incomplete way as a result. of course I’m aware actual Christians would disagree, and find my reading of John to be incorrect, for through the worship of Christ one comes to fully know God, but I just felt like sharing~
>The key is to remember that God sees it as a test.
the key is to remember that an omniscient god does not need a test.
>God does everything for a REASON.
an omnipotent god does not need to do anything indirectly, via reasons.
Actually it allows God to produce evidence. Yes God knows the outcome of each test but without the test there is no evidence.
If you get sick, if you lose your job, if you win the lottery, anything major in life you best believe God caused it to happen for a reason.
why does he have to produce evidence?
Because it is more just if there is evidence vs. if there is none. For example, if someone dies unsaved because they were born into a country where religion was hated due to thinking it was primitive. This produces evidence for damnation.
Okay so who is responsible when you get sick or when you get the job of your dreams? Do you think God has nothing to do with this?
>Okay so who is responsible when you get sick or when you get the job of your dreams? Do you think God has nothing to do with this?
A non teleological, deterministic series of natural causes is responsible for it, not the Abrahamic God.
>Okay so who is responsible when you get sick or when you get the job of your dreams? Do you think God has nothing to do with this?
are you some sort of illogicalBot or what? this question has nothing to do with the post you are replying to.
>Actually it allows God to produce evidence. Yes God knows the outcome of each test but without the test there is no evidence.
Aren't you the same dude who said that the reason God doesn't reveal himself to tribesmen and isolated peoples is because He knows that they would reject him if He did? It seems that God didn't care that much about evidence when it came to the damnation of literally every single person who didn't know about Jesus.
Them not believing at the end of their life is valid evidence enough for God.
How can they believe in something they have never heard about?
God brings evidence like angels or missionaries or dreams to those who genuinely seek truth. God foresees all those people would never seek truth so God has them born in places they will never get access to it.
>God foresees all those people would never seek truth so God has them born in places they will never get access to it.
Are you unironically moronic? You just said that God tests people even though He already knows the result in order to produce evidence. Why doesn't He do so here?
Them not believing at the end of their life is enough evidence for God. Similarly, if you don't know smoking crack is illegal you can still get arrested for it in court.
>Similarly, if you don't know smoking crack is illegal you can still get arrested for it in court.
Room temperature IQ tier analogy. The law is publicly available and accesible for every citizen, while the message of the Gospel is not if you're an isolated tribe.
This is ignoring God's providence. Consider Cornelius. This proves God, with His intervention would never leave a genuine truth seeker without information. This shows if someone dies without info it's for a reason.
>God brings evidence like angels or missionaries or dreams to those who genuinely seek truth
why does this god not make everyone genuinely seek truth?
Maybe it would defeat the purpose of the game.
the purpose in question apparently being that some people must lose.
Evidence is a human concept which we created because we lack omniscience and are capable of lying.
>god gives your kid cancer as a test to see if he'll torture you or not.
Cuckstainity is evil and should be eradicated.
>animeonly gays
Touma is fricking a GODDESS
why is it so important to fear god? is a healthy relationship based on fear?
Because God is pleased and sees it as respect and gives you the things in picrel.
"Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.
In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths." - Proverbs 3:5-6
how can i be sure it’s really him i’m trusting? what if i’m opening myself to a dark force? or simply wishfully thinking there is something out there so I can ignore harsh truths of this wld?
Christ said, "And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find;" (Luke 11:9)
And the Bible also says, "The LORD is nigh unto all them that call upon him, to all that call upon him in truth." Psalm 145:18
I believe God is capable of doing this. He is our Creator, and He is capable. As soon as I see it written here that He will, that is what I believe.
what if the person who wrote it made it up?
I just don't have those doubts. I'm just telling you what my thought process is as simply as I can. And it is really up to each person to either come to the truth or turn away for something else if that's what they're looking for. The Bible says that God will "cause every man to find according to his ways." Like it's written, broad is the way that leadeth to destruction.
It's the Evangelical interpretation of what G*^ wants and likes
Lesson? God is in control.
Your demonic boss sure likes his genocides and atrocities and serial killers and famines and deformed babies and hideous diseases, eh? Praise Him. Under His Eyes.
So is the author being heretical or is this not heresy and true?
You make yourself rich. God makes you poor.
So God is responsible for bad things that happen to you but you are responsible for good things that happen to you? Is this not heresy?
No it is exactly not heresy. Again. Read the magnificat (or pray it even better)
This line indicates it could be both:
He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble.
Take it or leave it. He didn't give them the will to be powerful you know.
No it is not heresy. God humbles the rich and powerful. Read the magnificat.
So what, God sees us as his equivalent to a cosmic lab-rat? Constantly being tested and observing the results for thousands of years, for what purpose?
Don't ask questions and keep praying stupid impious