/lit/ - Literature

>>21717869
Vestigial (neo)platonism, which is the only part of Christianity worth anything. Everything else is dumb jewish fables about an evil god.

>>21717899
This was an answer to
>Why do Christians believe God is Omnibenevolent?

>>21717869
>>21717899
To go into more detail, the New Testament (especially the Johannine corpus) reads far closer to Plato's dialogues than anything in the Old Testament. It's quite remarkable. There are several Church fathers who, mistakenly (and frankly, quite bizarrely), claimed that Plato was familiar with the Pentateuch because his works are so close to Christianity, and, out of piety, could never admit that it was Christianity that was borrowing from Platonism. Hence their nonsensical solution: that Plato copied Moses. The early Church was so used to reading the Old Testament in a "spiritual" way that they took this for granted. After all, that trend predated them (see: Philo).

>>21717869
>7 I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.
So you're saying God creates evil? Is this the solution to the problem of evil?

>>21717869
>I am the Lord, and there is none else
Pay attention to this right here.

All are God. You are God. I am God. Everybody in this thread is God. The air we breathe is God. The floor we step in is God. The walls, the sky, the birds, the threes, the Sun, the wind... Everything is God.

So... Why would God not love Himself in all of us? God os benevolent because He loves Himself. And that's what we have to realise. We have to love God because we are God, and we must love Ourselves.

This is the Truth, but you'll notice that a lot of people are not ready for the Truth.

This is the only way anything makes sense

If we suppose that God exists and that he's almighty, all powerful, etc. Then it necessarily follows that everything which occurs is within his dominion/control.

"But nooo, my conception of God is kittens and grassy fields"

>>21717899
>t. kike

>>21717913
Some say Moses learned from Hermes Trismegistus and I say it is not that far off. Greek philosophy was influenced by Hermeticism or vice-versa.

it doesn't say that

>>21719312
See
>>21717913

..and then tell me how anything I said is "kikery", you filthy kike.

>>21719387
Funny you mention it, but it does. "Disaster" isn't sunshine and rainbows either. What's relevant isn't your choice of translation, but what the original text says. "I create evil" is an apt choice of words.

>>21719333
The Hermetic writings postdate Christianity, my dude. (Nice digits tho.)

>>21717869
>assuming an omnibenevolent god wouldn't create evil
maybe that evil is necessary for a greater good? maybe god creates evil insofar as he is responsible for man's free will and thus evil tendencies?

Also, be careful not to ignore the original hebrew: עֹשֶׂ֥ה שָׁל֖וֹם וּב֣וֹרֵא רָ֑ע (ose shalom ouvore ra)
the word used before evil (ra) is 'bore' and the word used before peace (shalom) is 'oseh'.
'Bore' means 'creator' (or 'creating') and is also used as a nickname for God as the creator of the universe. 'oseh' means both maker and 'doer'. An interpretation could be that 'Bore' refers to God as the creator of the universe: he created all of it, including evil. 'Ose' translates to 'making' more than 'creating', and the fact that it also means 'doing' could imply that God is BRINGING ABOUT peace as well as creating it, whereas he's just creating (bore) evil rather than bringing it about.

Don't take this too seriously, its just coming from my little knowledge of biblical hebrew, not from actual commentary.

>>21717869
Because he is, in order for good to exist there must be evil there too.

>>21717869
When I was 19 I got into a car wreck and legally died in the hospital before being brought back. There is nothing after death. Nothing. Consciousness ceases to exist because your brain stops functioning. That's it. Maybe there is some larger than life being but it doesn't matter for us. When you're dead it's bakx to nothing for eternity.

it's implied by omnipotence

>>21720429
You didn't: Death is the point that your cells decay too much to be revived. You were unconscious.

>>21717869
>Why do Christians believe God is Omnibenevolent?
Like many thinkers of his time, jesus was influenced by Indian philosophy. The Hindus and Buddhists understood that what gave man continuity over countless lifetimes was not his body, or even his mind, but his labour, his karma. The bible determines his future, not his class or the whims of God. If you want to understand jesus idea of god, you have to understand the Upanishads

>>21717869
Good cannot exist without evil, and any grey area is a perversion of nature. All pleasure leads to pain and all pain to pleasure. You cannot have happiness without strife, the old parable about the road to hell and good intentions and all that. It’s pretty simple.

>>21720429
To preface, I'm making no claims here about religion, metaphysics, or an after-life.
>There is nothing after death. Nothing. Consciousness ceases to exist
How would you know there's nothing if the very faculty by which you know anything ceased functioning?
If there was an experience of nothing, then there was still consciousness knowing nothing. If there was no experience/consciousness, then how could you know there was nothing? You can only experience prior to a gap in experience/consciousness and then immediately and seamlessly experience after it. You couldn't know anything at all about the gap and it'd have no perceived duration.
>When you're dead it's bakx to nothing for eternity.
People say that death is just like the billions of years before you were born, but this is incoherent. No one has ever experienced their experience/consciousness beginning, you'd have to already be conscious to experience it not existing for billions of years and then coming into existence. Rather, for us our experience/consciousness seems to have always been. Likewise for consciousness/experience ceasing: from our perspectives, it can't. What this means for us after we die I can't say. But in any case, to me it makes no sense to say that death is nothing for eternity.

>>21719947
No, kike

because they are so terrified of the implications of that not being true, their minds go into a state of catatonic denial of reality which they call "faith"

Because Christians are retards

Except 4chan Christians. Those are larpers

>>21721476
So heaven cannot exist, then?

>>21717899
Deflection from the question. God is not Omnibenevolent in neoplatomism.

>>21719387
>NIV

>>21721476
>All pleasure leads to pain
nope
>and all pain to pleasure
wrong again

you've never left your (mom's) house, have u?

Read Leibniz.

>>21722982
Why don't you explain why he solves it in your own words, you dumb namedropper

>>21717913
>claimed that Plato was familiar with the Pentateuch
Clement of Alexandria quotes someone else here. This was a common belief in intellectual Alexandria early 200-300.

>>21722415
>their minds go into a state of catatonic denial of reality which they call "faith"
Describe how you can know reality without faith

>>21723017
You won't read him if I do.

>>21719266
>All are God. You are God. I am God. Everybody in this thread is God. The air we breathe is God. The floor we step in is God. The walls, the sky, the birds, the threes, the Sun, the wind... Everything is God.
lol absolutely not. Is dog shit God? Go worship it
>>21721988
This.

>>21717869
Because he does all the goodness and is all the goodness.

>>21722458
>>21723050
Is it winter break or something and all the kids are out of school?

>>21723049
Yeah, sure. Or you're just a retarded pseud who read somewhere that Leibniz has something to do with this, without ever bothering to read any of the stuff you recommend to others. Imagine being retarded enough to this that anyone will read something you apparently don't find very interesting yourself

>>21717899
How are Proverbs and Ecclesiastes fables?

>>21722415
>because they are so terrified of the implications of that not being true
Doesn't bother me one bit. Omnibenevolence was the dumbest of the three omnis. The fact is that God is beyond good and evil. For all his atheist larping, Nietzsche was constantly going back to the Bible and the works of Luther for inspiration. This only stopped in his later career, when he rejected it entirely (Antichrist) and became a fatefag (Ecce Homo), though that could be blamed on his declining mental health. Ironically, he somewhat returned to his original self the madder he got.

>>21723135
His works aren't very long, stop making excuses for yourself to not read.

>>21719963
No it isn't. Placing evil in someone's heart is very different from permitting man the freedom to make the wrong choice - a wrong choice which then leads to an imperfect, though beautiful, natural world in which disaster sometimes occurs. As James says, God urges no-one to evil, nor can He be swayed by evil (James 1:13).

>>21717869
Personally I don’t; God is anything I cannot understand, the only way to perfect the will is through this perpetual dusting off

>>21723079
not an argument

>>21723043
i eat an apple, my body receives and sends signals that let me know i ate an apple. my senses have given me an accurate description of reality, no faith involved.

i can believe i have eaten all i want, but if i don't in fact do so, i will be dead in a couple of weeks. this has happened to psychotics before. their faith gave a completely wrong report of reality and they died as a consequence

Don't religion threads belong on /x/?

>>21724407
>apple
Let's review:
>english
>apple
>taste
>eat
None of these things come from your all mighty senses but from people telling you what these things are. If you did not have language and its definitions your senses would not be able to create those definitions.

>>21724729
you're missing the point. a termite has no definitions, and yet it knows when it needs to eat, when it has eaten enough and when it needs to eat again. a termite has no faith and yet survives just fine, because its senses paint an accurate picture of reality.

>>21724923
sorry could you write that in taste

>>21724411
>Doesn't racism belong on /b/?

>>21725756
don't need to. i can witness it visually

>>21720429
>>21722415
>>21721461

My mother was visited by Saint Anthony and was given a message that concerned another person; information that she could not have known otherwise. These things have been proven to me.
My mothers experience sounds like a legitimate contact with an angel of light. She wanted to know who visited her in her dream. Some days later she heard a voice in her head say “Saint Anthony.” It turns out that day was his feast day. My mother didn’t even know there was a Saint Anthony nor is she a Catholic.

I have also received information via intuition that I could not have known otherwise that has been verified by a disinterested third party. The spiritual realm is real. Christ is our Lord and Savior.

There is a method of knowing the truth that is gained through faith in Him. Empiricism and Rationalism are not the only ways of gaining the truth. Intuitions, visions and miracles from the spiritual realm are legitimate ways of discovering the truth and these truths can be verified after the fact.

>>21723738
Way to run away from the point

>>21717869
>The word translated “evil” is from a Hebrew word that means “adversity, affliction, calamity, distress, misery.” Notice how the other major English Bible translations render the word: “disaster” (NIV, HCSB), “calamity” (NKJV, NAS, ESV), and “woe” (NRSV).
Stop trying to pull off lazy gotchas. Athiests have been trying for centuries and it never worked.

>>21727460
this is untrue. the word is רָע, which translates to 'evil', and is used to mean 'evil' throughout religious hebrew texts.

>>21721988
"Nothing for eternity" is just a way of phrasing it, there is simply nothing, there is no time so no eternity. And yes, I didn't experience anything before my birth, that's the point.

>>21724407
Read some Hume and you will see how "knowledge" is just belief. And Hume was an atheist.

>>21727855
It is also used several times to refer to things that are not moral evil - such as disaster. As is entirely fitting with the context of the verse (which is rewarding Israel for obedience and punishing for disobedience).

>>21717869
Because of Greek philosophy exclusively. The god of the Bible is morally ambivalent at best. Christians managed to shoehorn him to fit the conceptions of Plato and Aristotle, that saw god as the highest good.

>>21727855
Spinoza noted how phrases such as "God's strength" means "incredibly strong". How come our languages today can have nuance but whenever it's an ancient language it's always "it can only mean this one thing"? Because we don't know their ways. There are probably memes in Bible but we can't pick them up.

>>21717869
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrTr3I1C7so
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WREvu9p_4E4

>>21719387
NIV is a willful revision and distortion of the text. If you doubt that I suggest you dig into the matter further. They consistently change the tense of verbs to "correct" what they perceive to be problems with the timeline in stories, or eliminate gendered language, or omit entire words and phrases based on their "thought for thought" translation.

>>21724729
>If you did not have language and its definitions your senses would not be able to create those definitions.
This leads to an infinite regress and is obviously false, unless you think God invented language and taught it to the first human.

>>21727892
>there is simply nothing, there is no time so no eternity.
Not exactly, if death is the end of experience then death is not even nothing. You can't say anything about it all, because you can't know it and there's nothing for whatever you say to be about. I acknowledge this is difficult to understand because we're talking about "something" you can't possibly imagine or experience.
>And yes, I didn't experience anything before my birth, that's the point.
My point is that there weren't billions of years of no experience before your birth; for you, those years didn't happen at all. And for you, this supposed timeless nothing after you die can't happen either. If anything is eternal, it's your experience. You can't experience coming into existence and you can't experience going out of existence, there is no coherent sense from your perspective in which your experience began or ends. This is the case regardless of metaphysics, even if you're strictly a materialist there's no contradiction because this refers solely to the nature of your experience.

>>21727892
>there is simply nothing, there is no time so no eternity.
Not exactly, if death is the end of experience then death is not even nothing. You can't say anything about it at all, because you can't know it and there's nothing for whatever you say to be about. I acknowledge this is difficult to understand because we're talking about "something" you can't possibly imagine or experience.
>And yes, I didn't experience anything before my birth, that's the point.
My point is that there weren't billions of years of no experience before your birth; for you, those years didn't happen at all. And for you, this supposed timeless nothing after you die can't happen either. If anything is eternal, it's your experience. You can't experience coming into existence and you can't experience going out of existence, there is no coherent sense from your perspective in which your experience began or ends. This is the case regardless of metaphysics, even if you're strictly a materialist there's no contradiction because this refers solely to the nature of your experience.