Well, first of all I'm an igtheist and a materialist.
Second, all an omnipotent God has to do to forgive sins is snap those omnipotent fingers and bingo! I've never understood why it was necessary for an omnipotent God to sacrifice [his] son to [him]self in order to "redeem" people. Assuming it...
Old English yfel simply meant 'bad'.
Evil these days mostly has theological connotations, meaning something like, 'states of affairs, actions and intentions displeasing to God'.
However, it's also serviceable as a word simply meaning "very nasty", "malicious".
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There is only one allusion to a day being a thousand years in the Tanakh, and there it's unambiguously a poetic usage.
I can think of no reason why the authors of Genesis would have said what they said, in our terms a solar day, if they hadn't intended such a day plain and clear, with the...
How is that a vice? How else is any historian to approach any ancient document?
Yes, that's correct. There are five versions of Jesus in the NT, and each of them denies that he's God and never claims to be God.
Don't take my word for it. Here yet again are some of the relevant quotes: >Jesus...
Then by all means point to the source of your confusion and I'll sort it out for you.
On what basis do you suggest that Ehrman is not a reliable historian of early Christianity? That he bases his arguments on evidence instead of dogma? What exactly is the problem? What lies, exactly, has he...
In Revelation the chief figure is God and the other figure is the Lamb ie Jesus. who in 22:16 boasts of being the offspring of David. That's an odd brag for God to make, wouldn't you say?
I'm still waiting for someone to place on the table a quote in which Jesus says, "I am God".
Whoever says...
In the Tanakh, the word for specifying a virgin is (with various transliterations) bᵊṯûlâ.
The word in Isaiah 7:14 is ʿalmâ, young woman of marriageable age, which may include virgins but is not virgin-specific.
And as for whether Isaiah 7:14 is a prophecy of Jesus, note that this "prophecy"...
But before we lose ourselves in the detail, where's that quote of even one version of Jesus saying "I am God"? (I've already given you examples of all five NT versions of Jesus saying they're NOT God, but if you wish I'm happy to refer you to them again.)
And wasn't the Trinity doctrine adopted...
That seems to follow.
That's one way of looking at it. But the subjective view, often found in court decisions, for instance, doesn't go into why you might prefer vanilla to pumpkin icecream, or prefer to go shopping than to watch reruns of NCIS on TV, or make, or cancel, a booking at Le...
No, the NT gives three distinct versions of Jesus' origins. The closest to a credible one, Mark's, appears however to be the least publicized.
The Jesus of Paul, like the Jesus of John, pre-existed in heaven with God, and (since God was spirit of such purity that [he]'d never do it himself)...
I respectfully disagree with that, as you know.
No argument, really.
That depends on which definition of 'freewill' we're using. On the one hand it can mean simply that in situation A we can decide what to do or not do without external constraints and pressures.
The alternative is noting that...
We're speaking of the Jesus of Matthew and the Jesus of Luke here, not the other three (where the Jesus of Mark is a standard Jewish male until God adopts him, and the Jesus of Paul and the Jesus of John pre-existed in heaven and came to earth in an undescribed manner that according to their...
It's the 'omni' prefix that makes them equal. They both thus claim total knowledge and total power.
By definition God could only do that at the expense of [his] omniscience.
Not really, simply the usual scientific view of best understanding at this time. Science is always a work in progress...
The vindication of the theory of relativity is the usual one ─ it works.
You'll find that it hasn't contradicted fundamental laws of physics, merely updated them ─ as is the way with successful scientific theories.
That's not to say that they're absolute statements or in any way the last word...
But the human brain makes its choices and decisions by processes that are biochemical and bioelectrical chains of cause and effect, which have been the subject of considerable study. Human choices aren't literally 'free' but the result of those processes. Of course to us brainowners they feel...
I don't see how anyone could be omniscient without perfect knowledge of future random events, which would include the acts of beings with the classical concept of free will.
I also don't see how any being could have literally free will. For example, the decision-making processes of the brain...
I don't see how that could be the case. God is omnipotent AND omniscient, so when [he] does something, it's certain that the outcome will be exactly as [he] foresaw, and (since [he] could have any future outcome that [he] wished), exactly as [he] intended.
I see no way around that. When you're...
But surely the scope of God's mind is not confined to the universe, but includes every mode of existence anywhere in the Totality of Everything?
And even if it isn't, even if God's omniscience is confined to this universe, the question remains ─ by what means has God determined that there's...
However unlikely abiogenesis may be, we know it happened at least once on earth, and 3.5 billion years or more later, here we all are. It's an area of active enquiry in science, and every now and then the discovery of another apparently relevant aspect of research is announced.
If the...