After months of fruitless exchange that Kristor of the Orthosphere triggered here, I finally asked him what his motivation for initiating the discussion had been.
Kristor, what was your motivation behind initiating this whole fruitless, months’-long exchange via comments on my blog back in September?
I only ask because I wasn’t the one looking for a discussion. You were.
Here is Kristor's response: (Bold added)
I sympathize with your frustration. It sucks for you that there is an intractable problem with your idea of perpetuity. But it is what it is. Believe me, it’s not that I’ve been stubbornly unwilling to entertain your arguments; on the contrary, I’ve confronted them all head on. It’s the problem that is stubborn. And the Kalam problem is not alone, unfortunately.
When we say there are many beings like God, all of whom are infinitely old and will live forever, we dethrone him (and we contradict scripture, massively; but that has so far proven no impediment).
If he is of the same sort as we, or as Satan, then his will is no better than ours, or Satan’s. We might as well disobey him, then, if that’s what we feel like doing; after all, he is not the boss of us, so who is he to try to judge us?
Who is he to establish a Church, or before that a holy nation, and a royal priesthood? By what right does he expel Adam and Eve from the Garden? Indeed, how could he even effect such an expulsion … or anything else, for that matter? Who is he to try to run a cosmic project?
If God is in fact Ultimate, it’s foolish and deadly dangerous to disagree with him.
If he’s not, then, hey, all bets are off, as there are no odds, no odds maker, no contest to bet on, no field of contest, no rules, no judges or referees, no score. Then do as you wish is the whole of the law. I.e., there is no law. It’s you against all others, and the will to power is all there is. Nietzsche was right! To hell with this idiotic cosmic project of YHWH!
I’ve been motivated to engage with your arguments in the first place because I find such engagement edifying. I always learn a lot from such exchanges. I’m extraordinarily interested in them when they concern notions that if carried into practice could harm people.
And the rejection of Christianity entailed by the idea that God is of the same sort as we would harm people a lot. As I wrote to you recently:
It’s no good to object that these recondite topics are merely a matter of private opinion, and so are no big deal: that, after all, readers are free to stay in Church and chant their mistaken creeds if they like (the poor fools, deluded by false or premodern consciousness) and by them irrationally form their lives (Dawkins says the same); why then get all het up about them?
Well, in the first place, by publishing them, you make them public; and in the second, it is a Very Big Deal to vitiate the faith of the faithful, thus to promote their apostasy (whether or not intentionally), and so worsen their chances at everlasting life in Heaven. It is like posting essays online that suggest fentanyl is cool.
Moreover (as Dawkins has recently noticed), the abandonment of Christianity is not merely an inconsequential private matter: as apostasy propagates, it has disastrously vicious social and cultural sequelae.
The post-Christian world looks categorically, profoundly worse than the pagan world that preceded it; for, paganism having been long already utterly moribund and incredible to moderns, it has not even the benefit of pagan morality. It is totally unmoored from morality, reason, truth; from reality, from life.
I use the present tense because, despite the fact that a quarter of the world is still Christian, the character of the post-Christian culture bereft even of pagan cults is already horribly clear in peoples among whom apostasy has spread. When you derogate the Church or her dogma, then whether you mean to do so or not, you promote that insane anti-Christian, anti-human culture and cult of death.
Where Christ wanes, Moloch waxes. It’s a deadly serious matter. It is serious as Hell.
That’s why I take your arguments seriously, and try to refute them publicly, rather than wave them off as harmless idiosyncrasies.
Kristor, what was your motivation behind initiating this whole fruitless, months’-long exchange via comments on my blog back in September?
I only ask because I wasn’t the one looking for a discussion. You were.
Here is Kristor's response: (Bold added)
I sympathize with your frustration. It sucks for you that there is an intractable problem with your idea of perpetuity. But it is what it is. Believe me, it’s not that I’ve been stubbornly unwilling to entertain your arguments; on the contrary, I’ve confronted them all head on. It’s the problem that is stubborn. And the Kalam problem is not alone, unfortunately.
When we say there are many beings like God, all of whom are infinitely old and will live forever, we dethrone him (and we contradict scripture, massively; but that has so far proven no impediment).
If he is of the same sort as we, or as Satan, then his will is no better than ours, or Satan’s. We might as well disobey him, then, if that’s what we feel like doing; after all, he is not the boss of us, so who is he to try to judge us?
Who is he to establish a Church, or before that a holy nation, and a royal priesthood? By what right does he expel Adam and Eve from the Garden? Indeed, how could he even effect such an expulsion … or anything else, for that matter? Who is he to try to run a cosmic project?
If God is in fact Ultimate, it’s foolish and deadly dangerous to disagree with him.
If he’s not, then, hey, all bets are off, as there are no odds, no odds maker, no contest to bet on, no field of contest, no rules, no judges or referees, no score. Then do as you wish is the whole of the law. I.e., there is no law. It’s you against all others, and the will to power is all there is. Nietzsche was right! To hell with this idiotic cosmic project of YHWH!
I’ve been motivated to engage with your arguments in the first place because I find such engagement edifying. I always learn a lot from such exchanges. I’m extraordinarily interested in them when they concern notions that if carried into practice could harm people.
And the rejection of Christianity entailed by the idea that God is of the same sort as we would harm people a lot. As I wrote to you recently:
It’s no good to object that these recondite topics are merely a matter of private opinion, and so are no big deal: that, after all, readers are free to stay in Church and chant their mistaken creeds if they like (the poor fools, deluded by false or premodern consciousness) and by them irrationally form their lives (Dawkins says the same); why then get all het up about them?
Well, in the first place, by publishing them, you make them public; and in the second, it is a Very Big Deal to vitiate the faith of the faithful, thus to promote their apostasy (whether or not intentionally), and so worsen their chances at everlasting life in Heaven. It is like posting essays online that suggest fentanyl is cool.
Moreover (as Dawkins has recently noticed), the abandonment of Christianity is not merely an inconsequential private matter: as apostasy propagates, it has disastrously vicious social and cultural sequelae.
The post-Christian world looks categorically, profoundly worse than the pagan world that preceded it; for, paganism having been long already utterly moribund and incredible to moderns, it has not even the benefit of pagan morality. It is totally unmoored from morality, reason, truth; from reality, from life.
I use the present tense because, despite the fact that a quarter of the world is still Christian, the character of the post-Christian culture bereft even of pagan cults is already horribly clear in peoples among whom apostasy has spread. When you derogate the Church or her dogma, then whether you mean to do so or not, you promote that insane anti-Christian, anti-human culture and cult of death.
Where Christ wanes, Moloch waxes. It’s a deadly serious matter. It is serious as Hell.
That’s why I take your arguments seriously, and try to refute them publicly, rather than wave them off as harmless idiosyncrasies.
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