Righteousness through faith
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Hmmm, i think u are right abt the gnostic gospelsOriginally posted by laoda99:U are ironic...whatever u write here abt Jesus and Abraham u read from the bible too....
Anyone here can be ambiguous like u....just mix here and there and u create ur own theology....think u read too much gnostic gospels liao.....
I rem watching NG programme on Gospel of Judas, and they depicted this guy reading from Gospel of Thomas (?)
something about the kingdom of god is within you and something like that -
that's the problem. I don't understand .. 'cos you never bother to explain. All your fautl!!Originally posted by casino_king:You want to put your faith in a god that you understand. If you want to put your faith in a god you can see, you end up with what you see in temples. That is why you require FAITH. -
Reading this thread gives me the high man! I was feeling real bored this afternoon becoz no one here =)Originally posted by Icemoon:you masturbated?
It is ok if CK says I am a monkey, becoz it takes a monkey to talk to another one...... -
I'm not surprised (thought slightly dissapointed) by CK not wanting to respond to whatever I put forward to him , for he is simply avoiding the obvious. As much as I have warm respect for his fighting spirit I have to declare that it is apparent that he has very little understanding of the word 'faith', or even the very word 'experience' itself.
Firstly I am not sure how he can make the statement I am totally confused, beyond the useage of sheer jargon. But of course as much as 'confusion' may be a powerful metaphor as a jargon, it is useless if it is not true. And that is what it is, my justification is this. My stance has been crystal clear since the first post, and I wonder who it is here, with a constantly changing, and self-contradicting case here that could be a better fit of confusion. He may deny the courts of logic, but it is going to try and find him guilty anyway.
What we have heard from him is jargons and slogans for faith, most of which he had never attempted to justify, but simply put it onto people as something we ought to listen to anyway. Indeed most of his verbage here has been spent on making jargon and slogan, and very little in the way of justifying it.
If anybody is to be guilty of a false notion of faith, and is guilty of cutting it down to a reductible and cynical concept, then it would very well be he.
But for the sake of the rest, I shall put his fallacy in simple terms for the rest to understand, having seen through it quite clearly:
What CK is quite clearly saying is this, that in order to have faith there can be no justification besides faith itself. Which is utter nonsense at a moments' thought. This was never what the apostles meant when they said that it was impossible to please God except by which through faith.
It is really simple to see why CK, as brave as he is in an attempt to defend the self-contradictary, is fatally flawed in the sense that his own argument kills itself.
What he is saying to us in effect is, "have faith in anything", he derives this 'anything' from the sole fact that God cannot be comprehended rationally and hence no concepts or intellectual notions of God must ever be held in the faith. What is most amazing is that he harps only on this fact without considering other first principles, which was what he first stepped on to arrive at his conclusion at the first place.
C.S. Lewis and G.K Chesterton put it nicely: that in order to believe in anything at all, you must have something to believe in, but that something cannot be simplyanything. Stripping away ideas of God on sheer virtue that they come from the intellect is obviously C.K. idea (and oddly enough he uses the intellect to arrive at this conclusion). If you do that you will arrive at anything which is the exactly opposite of faith, simply because faith is exclusive.
By saying 'believe in anything', you are simply saying 'it does not matter what you believe.', which is tatamount to saying 'what you believe does not matter at all.', which is equal to saying 'faith does not matter'. In one fell swoop, C.K. has sawed off the plank he is sitting on, and curses everybody else at the incongruity of his own case.
The appeal to sheer faithful faith destroys all truth, for truth is exclusive of falsehood, and in any case it was never what the apostles were talking about in the first place. It is obvious that he never knew what he was talking about in the first place, except that the jargon sounded good to him, and was good to defend because by appealing to the sheer internal logic of the slogan he can deflect all logic.
Of course we know better. I rest my case, let all who are here see and judge. -
Faith in GOD is not Faith in anything... do you see how SingaporeTyrannosaur is confused?
When people want to talk to God, what do they do? Universally? They pray.
Do they say, anything, anybody who is out there listening, hear my prayers. This is what SingaporeTyrannosaur wants you to believe is what I am saying. He is totally confused.
He is telling you this because he does not know God. All that he knows about God is "second hand." It does not matter where he gets his second hand knowledged of God.
You must have first hand knowledge of God.
When you pray, how do you know that God is listening? How do you know that it is God who is listening? By Faith.
There is only one God; when you pray to God, only God is listening.
Do you say: OK I am only praying to a particular God, the one with attributes I have written down on a piece of paper in my wallet. All the other Gods that does not have the attributes written down on the piece of paper in my wallet, please don't listen.
When idolators pray before a certain statue, that is what they are doing. They are praying to God with the attributes represented by the statue.
If you do that you are demeaning God. You are saying that there is more than one God. You are approaching God as if God is like a human. Worse, you are approaching God under your own terms. Is this approaching God with humility or arrogance?
You might not have it written down in a piece of paper in your wallet; if you have it written down in a mental note, it is the same.
You have to come to God in total humility. You have to come to God with no conditions attached. You have to come to God acknowledging that you have no understanding of God. You have to come to God and "wait." You have to cry out to God and simply to cry out to God. You have to come to God acknowledging that you have no evidence of God. You have to come to God demanding nothing and expecting nothing. You have to come to God and throw yourself totally and completely at the mercy of God. You have to come to God by Faith.
When you do that, you meet God and you know God and nothing in this world will be able to tear you away from the love of God.
How can I put this to you? You cannot come to God expecting to meet God and know God; expecting to experience the love that nothing in this world will be able to tear you away from. To meet God you have to come to God wanting nothing; expecting nothing; desirous of nothing but only with total humility and totally at the mercy of God, by Faith. Understanding and remembering what I say and the ability to repeat it means nothing. You must have Faith in God. -
pot calling kettle black?Originally posted by casino_king:Faith in GOD is not Faith in anything... do you see how SingaporeTyrannosaur is confused? -
haizzz....ask u har....where do u come across GOD in the first place....scriptures right? Where/what is ur basis of faith? u dun just pop out from ur mum's womb and believe there is a God out there suddenly right?Originally posted by casino_king:Faith in GOD is not Faith in anything... do you see how SingaporeTyrannosaur is confused?
Even ur 666 theory comes from the bible isn't it? Why u dun have faith har? Must read bible?
if everybody like u, then very dangerous.....God can be anything.......u can even invent ur own theology
there must be certain guidelines to ur beliefs.....not just anyhow.....we not talking abt legalism, but principles...do u have any principle at all?
one last question...have u met god? -
saw this immediately last night but need to sleep lah...Originally posted by casino_king:This one turned out to be another monkey as well!
hmm.... I question his sanity, he calls me a monkey,
he calls other folks confused, and he is???? orang utan???
another typical CK double standard.
name calling don't work on me lah...
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Originally posted by casino_king: 17 May 2006 · 09:12 PMYou do not question GOD. You put your faith in GOD, there is only one GOD; you cannot go wrong.
KSM?Originally posted by casino_king: 17 May 2006 · 11:08 PMFaith in GOD is not Faith in anything...
.....
You must have Faith in God. -
Just stating a fact.Originally posted by Chin Eng:saw this immediately last night but need to sleep lah... hmm.... I question his sanity, he calls me a monkey,
he calls other folks confused, and he is???? orang utan???
another typical CK double standard.
name calling don't work on me lah... -
me tooOriginally posted by casino_king:Just stating a fact. . -
Wow, oddly enough you suddenly had to respond.
Faith in GOD is not Faith in anything... do you see how SingaporeTyrannosaur is confused?
Simply put, my faith in GOD is not a faith in anything. That's the point I am putting across quite clearly.
Sadly, what you are suggesting by your notion of faith in GOD is equal to a faith in 'anything'. You are the one mixing up the concepts of 'infinity', with 'everything goes'.
Which is my main bone of contention with you. -
I will save you descriptions of CK's mental state and novice grasp of debate and logic- it is clear enough for anybody who read it in here.
I shall look at his case instead.
First and foremost let's just look at where CK is actually right, he is right in saying that unless one has faith, it is actually impossible to know God at all. The reasons for this are obvious, and in fact there would be no fight at all if he didn't decide to make such a big issue of it in here.
Any sane Christian would accept that principle- that if you want to know the unknowable, you have to be able to float on the infinite sea and not try to cross it with finite means. You must stick your head in heaven and not try to let fit it into your head, lest it splits.
And secondly, CK is also right in saying that one has to approach God in humility and admitting that one actually knows nothing about God. Only those who are willing to be taught by the master will ever learn anything as opposed to the student who insists that there should be this and that reality without listening to the ultimate master.
So far, so good. But where does CK go wrong?
Simply put, he is fuddling humility and knowing nothing, with the concept of mental and emotional nullity when one comes to a point of faith. He suggests this when he says :' How can I put this to you? You cannot come to God expecting to meet God and know God; expecting to experience the love that nothing in this world will be able to tear you away from. To meet God you have to come to God wanting nothing; expecting nothing; desirous of nothing but only with total humility and totally at the mercy of God, by Faith. Understanding and remembering what I say and the ability to repeat it means nothing. You must have Faith in God.'
Unfortunately this is a state that is by far for us, impossible. Basically one has to desire and expect this state. And basically this is also a rather Keatian point of view, which was considered for a moment by many great thinkers but then thrown out- for good reason.
The thing about meeting God is that in the first place, you must know if there is a God to meet at all. Already this is a first thought which is undeniable, that one has to believe that a God (of any kind), exists out there and that He (or It) is meetable. As buddhist-like as CK tries to suggest a frame of mind for us to meet God with, we realize that we can't start unless we have a beginning notion of Him.
I can't reach for the cheese unless I know there is such a thing as a cheese to reach for, what kind of cheese this is, if it is rotten or not is something I may not know, but obviously one needs to start with this conception of cheese. Of course this is the very concept that CK wants to reject, for he says quite clearly that one cannot have any mental notes:You might not have it written down in a piece of paper in your wallet; if you have it written down in a mental note, it is the same.
But this is unavoidable, one has to start with a mental note of God in some way or another, it is a unavoidable logical barrier. The only way to deny this is to deny logic itself, in which case there would be no need for CK to make any case for the logical congruity of his point of view at all, he should just leave it up to us to decide and believe. He don't need to bother to prove me wrong or 'confused' simply because it does not matter and helps his case nothing anyway.
Back to mental notes, as you can see it is impossible not to start with a mental note of sorts. What CK is annoyed about is that he assumes I start with mental notes like:
Jesus is God
God's way is Christianity
The best picture of God is provided by Christianity and Judasim
Which is untrue. What actually happened to me is that I started with just one singular notion, and that is:
God exists
Obviously the acceptance of that notion is based entirely on faith at first. You have to have faith in any kind of a belief for it to grow on you.
Now the thing is this: If you have faith in a God that exists, you must now believe certain things about Him. The very logical next step to do would be to believe that you can know Him. And by know I do not mean they way you know a frog by cutting it up or a car by taking it apart, but by know I refer to a contact of knowledge.
If I believed that God didn't want to be known, or choose not to reveal Himself in any possible way to us mortals, then all of CK's mind-emptying exercises would be in vain, an exercise in futility in trying to reach a God that does not want to be reached.
So the very next article of faith would be to believe that God wants to be known.
Beyond that, one again needs to believe that this God is worthy of knowing. We have to believe if He is either good or evil, omnipotent or omniscient (or both), we have to start believing what kind of God He is. Before long, you might realize that you have formed a core of faiths about God that is the very thing CK attacks.
CK's beef with people of religion starting from a conception of God and then believing in it is upside-down. Rather people start believing in God then they start believing in their conceptions of Him. If these conceptions are wrong or right is another matter, but you can't start with make judgement on anything if the nullity of your very logic has knocked the feet from under you.
He is correct in saying that you can't know God unless you have faith, where he gone wrong is asserting that if you have faith in God and start to know Him, you cannot say anything about Him. It seems obvious to me that there are some people who say certain things about God because they don't know anything about Him, but all the same there are those who say certain things about Him precisely because they know Him. -
But poor CK however, is forced to take the position of Bree in The Horse and his Boy when it comes to his formulation of his idea of God. Like Bree, he says a lot about what Aslan is, that when people refer to Him as a lion he is of course not literally a lion because to do that would be disrespectful and demeaning (sounds familiar?), what Bree suggests is a nullity, a void of mental thought and emotion that suggests a lion, but is obviously not as the Narnians say Him to be, being deluded by their finite conceptions of him.
Of course the very next instant Aslan actually turns up and shows to Bree that He actually all beast, fully tailed and with wiskers. And it is Bree, not Hwin who bolts and runs away from the God he tried to describe in null-theology. It may very well be that CK is suggesting the mysterous while forgetting the obvious, which is what made the mysterous mysterous at all.
Now another matter which I do find suspect. First and foremost one is not even sure what CK is. Is he a materialist or a deist? A athiest or a theist? While he has sought to keep the nature of his own thinking (if there is anything cohorent at all) hidden by avoiding any questions about them. One then finds it hard to believe anything he can say at all. One moment he turns up as a firestarter and tries to tell arsonists how to do their job, the next he is a fireman and claims to be able to tell the firemen how to do theirs.
It is very likely that he might very well be neither, a person who has a lot of ideas and things to say about every profession in the world without actually knowing anything at all.
When he mentioned experiencing God through faith, I wonder if it was ever CK himself who has experienced God? He touts the value of faith but does he actually use the very faith he is suggesting? It is the novice's mistake to make large and concrete claims about anything (as CK has done from materialism to theism to fideism), but it is the master's to know the subtle nuances of the issue. And in any case the master is far more consistent then the novice (not prone to jump from materialism to theism to fideism).
It may very well be that the person who screams for humility in knowing God may not really be humble at all. That aside, when I realize the command of loving God with all of our strength, all of our soul, and all of our mind, it is hardly a buddhist statement of nullity. If anything it seems that God wants us to have desire and desire exceedingly beyond what we currently experience. To love Him with all of our mind means making every thought captive and handing it over to Him, only to realize that He hands us back something far more thoughtful in the end.
Have I experienced God? Certainly, and it wasn't my intellectual notions of Him that I worshiped. Rather my intellectual notions of Him formed as a result of that experienced. I know He is Good because I experienced His love. I know He is omnipotent and omniscient (by any rational terms I might choose to describe) because I experience His creation. All these thing had to start from faith.
I did not, as CK might claim, start from a point where I supposed the Christian God was right and that He was this and that and then move on to form a 'faith'. As to why I believe the Christian God is the correct God, it's a matter of another post but it certainly did not come for the fallacies CK suggest. The fallacies only exist in his own mind. He may think his mode of though unique, but they have already been stated a long time ago by Kierkegaard, Hamann, and Tertullian among others. It is an old dog with a new tie (a poorly tied one at that) and CK would be slightly mistaken to think that no more faithful answers exist to refuse his assertations. What's more I suspect Kierkegaard, Hamann, and Tertullian actually believed in what they are saying, as do I in what I am saying. I can't say CK actually does, or would not change to some other novel kind of though later, such as Freud was valid about everything. It seems to me that CK can only manage to criticize Christian theology because he is riding on some shred of it he has borrowed of it out of it's context, and ridden to the death. It is anything by a new idea on his part. -
All it boils down to is this, that ST has no Faith in God or he has Faith in some sort of God, a notion of God in his head; he has faith in a God with certain attributes; I would suggest that he is no better than the statue worshippers.
He also said: "I can't reach for the cheese unless I know there is such a thing as a cheese to reach for, what kind of cheese this is, if it is rotten or not is something I may not know, but obviously one needs to start with this conception of cheese."
Obviously God is not "cheese." There is no need to start with a conception of God.
I am of the opinion that every human being "knows" that God is. Instead of just calling out to God like Abraham in Faith, they start asking each other what God is. Some smart aleck like our dear ST will come around and propose a God to them.
No scientist worth his salt will tell you that there is no God. All that he will tell you is that unless you can show him evidence of God, he cannot accept that there is a God. The minute someone comes up with credible scientific evidence of God; all the scientist will tell you that God exists and will call you a fool if you say otherwise.
You cannot also tell people that so many believe and use that as a "proof."
Faith must be like Abraham's faith. He cannot tell anybody that there are "so many like him." For all intents and purposes, he was alone in his Faith in God. Everybody else at that time as far as we know put their faith in some notion of God. They even have statues (idols) to prove it. Just like our dear ST. The difference is that the notion, the idol representing God is not a statue but it is a mental note in his head.
ST must understand that once he starts comparing God to cheese.... there is nothing else to say to him. -
Actually people before Abraham already had faith in God. Just look at Noah, or Cain the murderer.Originally posted by casino_king:Faith must be like Abraham's faith. He cannot tell anybody that there are "so many like him." For all intents and purposes, he was alone in his Faith in God. Everybody else at that time as far as we know put their faith in some notion of God. They even have statues (idols) to prove it. Just like our dear ST. The difference is that the notion, the idol representing God is not a statue but it is a mental note in his head.
Genesis 4:26 - To Seth also a son was born, and he named him Enosh. At that time people began to invoke the name of the Lord.
Comments, anyone? -
aaaa? you also use my wife as an example what? again you can others cannot..... hmmmOriginally posted by casino_king:Obviously God is not "cheese." There is no need to start with a conception of God.
alamak the proof thing again.... that falls under the category of evidence as testimony, not scientific.Originally posted by casino_king:You cannot also tell people that so many believe and use that as a "proof."
actually there is nothing much to say to you also what. you have your perogative and Christians has ours.Originally posted by casino_king:ST must understand that once he starts comparing God to cheese.... there is nothing else to say to him. -
Did I hear a monkey jumping about again?
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Actually, its prerogative. I made this mistake last time too.Originally posted by Chin Eng:actually there is nothing much to say to you also what. you have your perogative and Christians has ours. -
same same lah.... it's always you do can, others do cannot....Originally posted by casino_king:Did I hear a monkey jumping about again?
monkey see monkey do...very simple right? -
braddy hail, collect my engrish some moreee.....Originally posted by laurence82:Actually, its prerogative. I made this mistake last time too.
but seriously, ok, thanks.... monkeys can correct each other.... and pick the ticks off our back sometimes. -
Its ok to be labelled monkey. We are 99% similarly to orang utan if I am not wrong in terms of DNA matches.Originally posted by Chin Eng:braddy hail, collect my engrish some moreee.....
but seriously, ok, thanks.... monkeys can correct each other.... and pick the ticks off our back sometimes.
Some people will be nitpicking on the 1% difference, but then, 99% would be a good scientific evidence that humans are just monkeying around.
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Oo Oo Aa Aa Aa!Originally posted by casino_king:Did I hear a monkey jumping about again? -
na bei .. I can't believe lau, laoda and CE still clowning around.
we should steer back to serious discussion. -
nicely put yourself out of blame horOriginally posted by Icemoon:na bei .. I can't believe lau, laoda and CE still clowning around.
we should steer back to serious discussion.