i go to a Catholic high school and while there i had to take a religion class every semeser and by this i have found some possible contradictions

1. if Catholics are supposed to believe the end does not justify the means why then is it o.k. for Jesus to die in order to open the gates of heaven ,is that not the end justifying the means?

2. if God is omniscient (knowing everything) then how do people have free will. he knows exactly who you are and every detail of your enviorment that will affect how you react to a given situation. doesnt that mean your just a pupet reacting to a stimulus?

i'M not trying to put down the relligion or be blasphemous its just been bugging me for a while and i was hoping someone could help

Smart, all of the Great "contradictions" in a little post. Even Luther used a few pages...

Try looking up some older posts, those points have been brought up several times.

I have answered this. Basically, it can be summed up like this.

Humans cannot enjoy both free will and a world free from sin. Once God chose to create human beings with free will, it was up to humans as to whether there was sin or not. God created the possibility of evil, but it was humans who actualized
that potentiality.

God might tolerate certain short-range evils in order to achieve long-range goods that humans cannot foresee.

Imagine a bear in a trap, and a hunter who
wants to liberate him. The hunter tries and fails to win the bear's confidence, so he has no choice but to shoot the bear full of tranquilizers to knock him out so he can be freed of the trap. The terrified bear thinks the hunter is trying to kill him. He doesn't understand that the hunter is acting out of
compassion.

God does the same thing to us sometimes, and we can't comprehend why he does it any more than the bear can understand the motivations
of the hunter. We simply have to trust God.

Imagine the tranquilizers as the test, and the trap as the filth of the world. What we think is harming us may actually be doing us good. God's reason for his action is his own.
It can't be defined by anything else than this: His. The tranquilizers either break us, or teach us a valuable lesson. They destroy those who do not learn from them and it is they are doomed to repeat that failure until it is corrected. The others, those who learn, associate the trap with the horrible sting and pain of the darts and so, will turn from the trap and live the life that God has created for them.

Yes, God already knows the outcome of the trials which we face, but what good is it if he doesn't let that person experience it? Just because he knows doesn't mean that he interacts directly with his creation. Its like playing a fighting game with an invincibility cheat. You know the outcome, your victory. but you still wantt the other player to experience it. (REAL BAD ANALOGY: comparing theology with video games)


i hope that this clears things up a bit

B.R.H.

i think you may have missed my point i was not talking about wether something is right or wrong but i was talking about the ability to freely choose your actions . i probably should have stated earlier that this is all based upon the belief that people are products of their enviorment . maybe i am wording this wrong what i mean is that if God knows everything and is perfect which includes never being wrong we just have to follow along with the plan he has set up in his mind(by using our physical/mental enviorment) or maybe this was just a dumbass post either way i won't be offended if you close the topic and take it off

apparently syphon detonator you have never experienced enough in life and the actions of others to know how they will react to certain situations.

does this make you omniscent?

does the fact that you can "foresee" their actions mean they don't have freewill?

knowing somethone is going to do something does not necessarily mean that that someone had no freewill in determining it's action.

people who question god neither understand nor comprehend or even appreciate what free will even means.

they look at it as an excuse as to why their miserable little world that only they know is so rotten.

quote:

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Originally posted by lostmind:
apparently syphon detonator you have never experienced enough in life and the actions of others to know how they will react to certain situations.

does this make you omniscent?

............(part of quote left out)

they look at it as an excuse as to why their miserable little world that only they know is so rotten.

---

lost mind whats up with you telling me i havent experienced enough in life and then asking if that makes me omniscent.are you being sarcastic or are you just unclear on the meaning of the word because if i havent experienced enough in life to predict peoples actions i am definitly not omniscent

and also whats up whith the miserable little world thing? you dont even know me, how do you know my life is rotten ?

besides you totally missed my point if God knows all,(past present and future and is also outside of time)then how can we change what he knows by doing someting unpredictable (use of free will)that would mean he is wrong and an all knowing perfect God cant be wrong

You claim that jesus was wrong to die to save us because the end does not justify the means. Do you know any other ways for us to clean ourselves of the original sin othe than Jesus giving up (momentarily) his immortality? Would you have done a better job than Jesus?

Make me immortal and I'll let you know.

Okay. By the powers invested in me by the province of Quebec, I now declare you, Spiffy McBang, immortal.

red rover

i never said it was wrong for Jesus to die on the cross. personaly i belive the end always justifies the means for the person involved or no one would ever do anything.if there was no reward or greater goal to acomplish people would just be lazy. i wasnt disagreeing with the actions of Jesus i was just pointing out that the church contradicts itself on this issue

yes, i was being sarcastic.

and i believe in god,

but,

if it takes a MAN'S interpretation of another MAN'S translation of stories that were told by many MEN, before one MAN wrote them down,

to make you a good person and not kill or steal,

then i truly feel sorry for you and that is the true original sin.

notice in my breakdown of religion's past not once did i mention god,

but did mention MAN, quite often.

ever played that game where one person whispers something to the person next to him and throughout the room.

that's how fast something can change in a few minutes,

how much does it change in a few millenia?

*is immortal*

Heh. Cool.

*becomes a wandering mendicant for the next thousand years*

although i believe that some of the new testament might have been lost through many translations you have to remember its only gone from:
Aramaic (originally written in)
...to...
Greek (usually referenced to by scholars)
...to...
Most bibles

lost mind i agree that much of the story was lost or changed during the oral tradition but, i think that contradictions occur when people examine religion too closly or do not view it in contex of the time frame. some things now do not make sense to us as they did to people in the past.

but to take it as the word of god?

a man who lived 7,000 years ago writes in a book that god told him these things.

god spoke to me last night.

he laughed at us.

he laughed really hard.

lost mind i have to tell you at first i thought you were an asshole but now that i have read more of you posts i totaly agree with you.i think that many of the religious contradictions have no single cause or explaination but in the end you have to follow your own personal religion.

Redrover, you asked for any other way for Jesus to "clean ourselves of the original sin other than Jesus giving up his immortality." My question for you is why couldn't Jesus (or God) jus say "Fuck it, I am God and can do anything I want. To hell with sin." Of course, according to popular theology God would not use profanity but I am including it to elaborate my point.

Okay, now this might get a bit muddeled so bear with me. I'm no expert on theology but the way I see it, Jesus was the son of god. Now we, as a human race, pissed off god by eating the forbiden fruit. Now a few thousand years later, God sent Jesus to earth as a gift to the human race. Now Jesus decided to let himself get killed, to infact let humanity sacrifice their great leader that was Jesus, so as to punish ourselves to show God that we are really sorry and to aks God to let us go back to the garden of eden. Now God could have forgiven our original sin whithought sacrifieng Jesus but then God, according to the jews and the old testement, isn't one of those types of people that forgive easely.

On a second note, if you disregard what was written above, I'll steal an idea from the film "Dogma". If God said that we shall never enter eden again after eating the forbidden fruit, then that is the word of god. If we are let back into paradise, we will have broken the word of god, somebody who is omnipotent, who's commands always happen. That means that God is not omnipotent and that as a consequence, reality itself will cease to exist.

let me paint you a picture.

you live in a society of arranged marriages.
you live in a society that will banish for having a child out of wedlock.
you live in a society that will banish for having sex before marriage.

you tell your husband to be that you are pregnant.
he asks whose the father.

what do you say?

my theory;

mary was in love with someone else but promised to joseph.

she had to experience her true love before going on with the "arranged" love.

when she became impregnated, whose the father?

god is; i was visited by an angel last night(he lives three houses down from here and we played together as kids) who told me i was going to bear the seed of god.

i wish that back then medicine had progressed to the point of being able to do a penetration test.

if god is omnipotent why was sacrifice necessary at all?

he would already know if you were doing for worship or going through the motions.

which would negate the practicality; and if he knew how we would turn out and only let a select few into heaven;

this would negate the need for existance he would only need to create that which was needed.

one fault of religion is that everything is supposed to be done for god.

and doesn't realize that god did all of this for us.

god doesn't need worship; he's omnipotent he knows how you feel.

some relationships don't need the "i love you" constant reminder;

it's implied in all you do.

has anyone considered that we may just be entertainment for God?like a cat or dog is to us.they provide companionship ,and that may be what a single all powerfull God is looking for.why else would he create us? anyone have any opinions on this theory or is it just shit

I like your theory syphon... except I would make us flying monkeys if I was made for entertainment. But hey, whatever floats his/her/its/their boat(s).

an evolutionist might say a pilot is a "flying monkey".

Some sort of celestial version of The Sims? Well that could explain thing like why fruit roll ups exist.

God made adam ,eve ,and then fruit rollups