Hi, iQ,iQuestor wrote:Yes, but God gave us free will, then punishes us with eternal burning death if we exercise it! Why would He make Man a curious animal, then throw a whole tree in front of us and tell us we have to stay away from it? Isnt that a recipe for dissapointment? That seems sadistic.rusmeister wrote:Here you're imposing the Fallen human condition on unFallen humans. Free will means the will to always choose to reject a temptation as well as succumb to it. If you periodically walk by a fire alarm switch, is it inevitable that sooner or later you will pull it?iQuestor wrote:
The thing is, it was possible for Adam and Eve to sin because God made them that way. We aren't perfect -- but its because how we were made. If we were made perfect, we'd be perfect. But, because we are human, sooner or later, somebody was going to eat from that tree.
Why would he even make the Tree of Life anyway? If he is God, why not put it out of reach, or not create it entirely?
Here, here! The Bible was written by humans, so it must be imperfect. Thats the explanation I get. Most of it was written well after the events themselves happened, so we rely on generations of oral histories before they put it down on paper. I think some details were lost or got switched around.I hope no finds this offensive, but, I always have to roll my eyes at people who believe "You can't pick and choose what to believe in the bible". Every single religion and denomination of those religions picks and chooses what to believe, it's just that most don't realize, because it their religion or denomination who is doing that picking and choosing. It is impossible to believe everything in the bible, because there are so many diametrically opposed statements. In Genesis it tells you man came first in one passage, and the beasts or birds came first in another passage. Two different passages tell you different father of Christ (or Joseph?). And many other examples where in one place in the bible it tells you one thing, and then in another place it tells you the exact opposite, and this is far more than New Testament over-riding what it disagrees with Old Testament on.
I agree with not picking and choosing, and I also agree most, if not all religions do that to support this or that religious dogma. Like you say, how can you not when many things are contradicted in the Bible.
This illustrates the difficulty in talking with people here on western terms, because you take as a given from the outset something that from the outset eastern Christianity denies. (saying that God gave us free will, then punishes us with eternal burning death if we exercise it, for example)
Until you get that the eastern paradigm is different from what you know, we can't talk; that the nature of the Fall and its consequences is that man turned to self, away from God, and sought to find life in food, rather than God, etc. he essentially cut the umbilical cord of (eternal) life - and so we all die. Sin is seen, not as a violation of laws that demands punishment, but as an illness that draws us toward self-destructive behavior - and some of the behaviors are more difficult to perceive as destructive than others. Kind of like a person with a complex mechanism who violates (generally very frequently) all of the instructions in the owner's manual to properly run the mechanism/organism.
So your talk of "being thrown into a burning hell" (by Someone else) may perhaps be consistent with a lot of what you know about western theology, but is inapplicable to the east (Orthodoxy).
Again, your (and Sindatur's) problem with Scripture is that you, like many people in the west - most generally Protestants who accept Sola Scriptura (the idea that I can read the Bible on my own without any knowledge or understanding of the ancient cultures which produced it) are interpreting what you read based on the limitations of what you know. We all have those limitations. In the most traditional forms of Christianity (most especially Catholicism and Orthodoxy), there is a thing called "Holy Tradition" (distinct from 'traditions of men') which includes a huge body of writings and ancient practices which clarify these seeming contradictions - which sometimes are only paradoxes, rather than contradictions, and overcome the difficulty of our personal limitations. The catch is, you have to surrender the idea that you yourself are the supreme authority; the arbiter of truth. When you begin to recognize how little we, personally, know, this is not so hard. You are dealing with various translations, from which it could indeed seem that there are contradictions or inconsistencies. If, for example, you are unfamiliar with the ancient Hebrew penchant for hyperbole, then you would interpret all descriptions 100% literally and find contradiction or seeming falsehood or inaccuracies. When you learn of these cultural differences and forms of expression, as well as the meaning of words in ancient texts, which often do lose things in translation, then you begin to see resolution of these difficulties. For us, the Holy Tradition makes many things clear - the writings of the Church fathers, for instance, were written by people MUCH closer in space, time and cultural terms than we are. And you begin to realize "Oh, there's something I simply don't know yet - and there are some things that I will never know..." I have already offered the example of the doctrine of the ever-Virgin Mary - something rejected by Sola Scripturist Christians - as an example of the limitations of our knowledge.
In a sense, Sindatur, you are right, in that when genuine contradictions come up, religions DO choose what to believe. This is what those pesky ecumenical Councils of the first millenium en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecumenical_Councils were all about. But as they were committed to altering nothing that had been passed down to them, they chose to reject Arian and Nestorian teaching and interpretations, for example - it's called "heresy" (which really means teachings that are fatally wrong). But it is not right to think that people pick and choose what they believe today. In Orthodoxy and Catholicism, they look to those councils, and to the dogma (which really only means confirmed teaching on a question that has been thoroughly examined and therefore is a basic truth, and whose purpose and function is to combat heresy and prevent fatal system-wide errors from getting a foothold) of the Church, which is passed down and not messed with, and to which all members, clergy and laity, and all teachings MUST conform to. In short, no one is allowed to make anything up. Of course eastern and western histories had diverged by the time of the Great Schism, and the concept of a universal Pope in the west DID allow the introduction of other doctrines later (I would say, for one man or a few people to 'make things up', such as the Catholic doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and papal infallibility (ex cathedra), which Orthodoxy denies. But that's just an example of why I see Catholicism (and western Christianity in general) to be wrong, if still closer, to greater or lesser degrees, to the Truth.
