Is the Bible a magic book?

[DBT]

Double post.

 

[DBT]

What, are you saying that God is in opposition to the very same evil that He creates?

Do I really have to repeat what I've explained about evil being the ontologically created opposite of good?

Yes, God is in opposition to evil.

That was not an explanation. What you said doesn't justify God in creating evil, then supposedly opposing the very evil that He creates.

It makes no sense.

If you create evil, you are the evildoer. If God is the author of evil, as stated in the bible, God is, by definition an evildoer.

 

[Swammerdami]

Do I really have to repeat what I've explained about evil being the ontologically created opposite of good?

It wouldn't have been so awfully difficult. Here it is in its entirety:

So God creates evil but doesn't do it deliberately? Is it unintended evil?

If His deliberate act of creating (forming) a thing called 'good' has the ontological result of there now being a thing we conceive of as an opposite of good then, yes, it's deliberate - in the sense that He knows how ontology works and what it entails.

Yes, God is in opposition to evil.

Can you explain this in little words? Was the omnipotent God somehow forced (ontologically??) to create evil?


What is "evil" anyway? Some humans are "evil"; how about serpents?

 

[steve_bank]

Maybe 3000 yeras from now somebody will think a guy lived at th North Pole dekivering toys at Christmas.

Or maybe people will believe a woman actually lived in a big shoe.

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.
She had so many children, she didn't know what to do.
She gave them some broth without any bread;
And whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.

We have no idea what the stories meant to ancient Hebrews, We can imagine. What was the nuance, body language, tone of voice when stories were told?


In the Oxford Commentary I read that Job was probably part of a lost set of teaching materials. It had something to do with assimilation o captivity, which any Hebrew in the day would have understood.

 

[Elixir]

Do I really have to repeat what I've explained about evil being the ontologically created opposite of good?

It wouldn't have been so awfully difficult. Here it is in its entirety:

So God creates evil but doesn't do it deliberately? Is it unintended evil?

If His deliberate act of creating (forming) a thing called 'good' has the ontological result of there now being a thing we conceive of as an opposite of good then, yes, it's deliberate - in the sense that He knows how ontology works and what it entails.

Yes, God is in opposition to evil.

Can you explain this in little words? Was the omnipotent God somehow forced (ontologically??) to create evil?


What is "evil" anyway? Some humans are "evil"; how about serpents?

C’mon Swami. It’s not like you’ve never encountered the Xtian wall of large-word nonsense. They throw out words like “ontological” (the study of ‘being’) and “epistemological” (the study of meaning) to excuse their inability to resolve the Stoopid in their fav book. In fact, they got NUTHIN’, and I do believe you know it, Swami.
It’s pretty easy for Xtian apologists* to level every possible playing field by asserting that they have studied “being” and “meaning” (any anything else that only exists as a human concept with no actual correspondence with reality) and you haven’t!

 

[Tigers!]

It's funny how they gloss over the fact that "a love of money is a root to many kinds of evil" is still a pretty firm condemnation of capitalism, to a reasonable mind.

Yes no socialist has ever loved money have they? I would have though that it is a pretty firm condemnation of greed myself. Which is found in any monetary system.

The premise of capitalism is that greed is not just present, but is made the very center of the social contract;

Do you have a citation? Not just your opinion.

people are given the option of either participating in the exploitation of their neighbors for the bottomless monetary advantage of a small investing class, or starving. Not the same thing as a socialist system, in my view.

 

[Politesse]

It's funny how they gloss over the fact that "a love of money is a root to many kinds of evil" is still a pretty firm condemnation of capitalism, to a reasonable mind.

Yes no socialist has ever loved money have they? I would have though that it is a pretty firm condemnation of greed myself. Which is found in any monetary system.

The premise of capitalism is that greed is not just present, but is made the very center of the social contract;

Do you have a citation? Not just your opinion.

people are given the option of either participating in the exploitation of their neighbors for the bottomless monetary advantage of a small investing class, or starving. Not the same thing as a socialist system, in my view.

Well, we can go to the work often credited with launching the system, however true that may be:`

"Whatever part of his stock a man employs as a capital, he always expects it to be replaced to him with a profit. He employs it, therefore, in maintaining productive hands only; and after having served in the function of a capital to him, it constitutes a revenue to them. Whenever he employs any part of it in maintaining unproductive hands of any kind, that part is from that moment withdrawn from his capital, and placed in his stock reserved for immediate consumption
...
Whatever a person saves from his revenue he adds to his capital, and either employs it himself in maintaining an additional number of productive hands, or enables some other person to do so, by lending it to him for an interest, that is, for a share of the profits. As the capital of an individual can be increased only by what he saves from his annual revenue or his annual gains, so the capital of a society, which is the same with that of all the individuals who compose it, can be increased only in the same manner."

~from "On the Accumulation of Capital", the 2nd Book, 3rd Chapter of Adam Smith's influential work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

To wit, the only real human motivation is the desire for personal profit, and it is the only trustworthy insurance against the dangers of "prodigality" in Smith's terms. The desire for profit is not inevitable, but a moral responsibility, as the only agent that can preserve parsimony within the economic superstructure of capitalism. We are assured that this ultimately works to the common benefit of all, that by various menas the system is capable ot continually producing sufficient new wealth to ensure the satisfaction of its principal actors and their flexibility and capacity to restart the cycle of wealth creation through investment of stock. Though of course Smith never called his system "Capitalism", I thought him a better citation than the man who work did popularize that term, as I can easily imagine your response to having Marx quoted at you as an authority...

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Can you explain this in little words? Was the omnipotent God somehow forced (ontologically??) to create evil?

The way it is worded it comes across as a cop out or maybe minimization to me. In the first case, the usage is a little bit vague but probably could be replaced with "category," like in creating "goodness" there is an implicit creation of "not goodness" which is or at least contains evilness by definition. But we're talking about an omnipotent being and so wouldn't it be able to create everything as good without evil? Like you wrote, would it really be forced as it were? Even if there is a category of not goodness, why would there need to be a concrete instantiation of an evil entity?

Besides this according to the mythology isn't the supreme being supposed to have existed for an eternity and isn't it supposed to be omnibenevolent, i.e. supremely _good_? So how could it have created goodness if it is already goodness? And then if it always existed, by this bizarre ontological rationale, wouldn't evil also have always existed since not-god would also have always existed? But then that would mean that it never created evil in the first place which would beg the question of what exactly created the universe if it didn't.

And besides this, the specific creations that turn out to be evil entities need not be created by an omniscient being that knows ahead of time, they will commit evil, like Lucifer or Hitler or the bad humans he allegedly had to murder in a flood.

These kind of questions are masturbatory at best because (1) there are alleged to be specific concrete creations of evil, not merely ontological or metaphysical, and (2) the so-called yahweh/jehovah/allah itself commits to evil actions and (3) it allegedly orders people to do evil.

These concrete observations are far more important than metaphysics.

 

[Tigers!]

It's funny how they gloss over the fact that "a love of money is a root to many kinds of evil" is still a pretty firm condemnation of capitalism, to a reasonable mind.

Yes no socialist has ever loved money have they? I would have though that it is a pretty firm condemnation of greed myself. Which is found in any monetary system.

The premise of capitalism is that greed is not just present, but is made the very center of the social contract;

Do you have a citation? Not just your opinion.

people are given the option of either participating in the exploitation of their neighbors for the bottomless monetary advantage of a small investing class, or starving. Not the same thing as a socialist system, in my view.

Well, we can go to the work often credited with launching the system, however true that may be:`

"Whatever part of his stock a man employs as a capital, he always expects it to be replaced to him with a profit. He employs it, therefore, in maintaining productive hands only; and after having served in the function of a capital to him, it constitutes a revenue to them. Whenever he employs any part of it in maintaining unproductive hands of any kind, that part is from that moment withdrawn from his capital, and placed in his stock reserved for immediate consumption
...
Whatever a person saves from his revenue he adds to his capital, and either employs it himself in maintaining an additional number of productive hands, or enables some other person to do so, by lending it to him for an interest, that is, for a share of the profits. As the capital of an individual can be increased only by what he saves from his annual revenue or his annual gains, so the capital of a society, which is the same with that of all the individuals who compose it, can be increased only in the same manner."

~from "On the Accumulation of Capital", the 2nd Book, 3rd Chapter of Adam Smith's influential work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

Thank you for that quote of Smith's. I did expect that you would reply with something similar to that. I do note that Smith never uses the word greed in that writing, that is something others have read in. I can not readily recall any instance where Smith advocated taking advantage of others.

To wit, the only real human motivation is the desire for personal profit, and it is the only trustworthy insurance against the dangers of "prodigality" in Smith's terms. The desire for profit is not inevitable, but a moral responsibility, as the only agent that can preserve parsimony within the economic superstructure of capitalism. We are assured that this ultimately works to the common benefit of all, that by various menas the system is capable ot continually producing sufficient new wealth to ensure the satisfaction of its principal actors and their flexibility and capacity to restart the cycle of wealth creation through investment of stock.

Smith was fully aware of the moral aspect to economic activity which is so often missing in modern thinking. Historically 'capitalism' has taken more people out of poverty that any other 'ism'. Much of Africa/Asia got their people out of abject poverty when they implemented various forms of 'capitalism' rather than state control. Certainly capitalism does need checks upon it but to paraphrase Churchill about it being the worst form imaginable but better than the alternatives.

Though of course Smith never called his system "Capitalism", I thought him a better citation than the man who work did popularize that term, as I can easily imagine your response to having Marx quoted at you as an authority...

Very correct.

 

[steve_bank]

Derail over to social science. I'll start a thread.

Like most political terms the meaning of capitalism changes and needs context.

Laisseez-Faire Capitalism. Our republican conseratves are LFC

What is the laissez-faire capitalism?
What Is a Laissez-Faire Economy, and How Does It Work?
Laissez-faire is an economic philosophy of free-market capitalism that opposes government intervention. The theory of laissez-faire was developed by the French Physiocrats during the 18th century. Laissez-faire advocates that economic success is inhibited when governments are involved in business and markets.

What Marx saw as capitalism in his day is not what we see as free market capitalism today.

In the days of Marx where owners of mans of production were a ruling class and wielded direct power of employees.

In more modern times Apple was stared in a garage by two guys. Same with HP, Hewlett and Packard started out making electronic instruments in a garage,

Today anyone cam start a business, it is not limited to an aristocratic class. Big difference.

Marx was correct in his analysis of his times, but his framework no longer applies. There are die hard Marxists who hang onto the old terms and categories.

China is still the Chinese Communist Party but in name only They have almost totally gone over to a form free market capitalism and individual entrepreneurship.

 

[Jarhyn]

Yet again, I can't help but observe that people are criticizing the motives of a hypothetical creator on the basis of the creation of evil, and that doing so is not rational.

In the framework wherein the ultimate goal of any such entity is to "not be alone", and to uplift their creations to their own environment, evil existing as an available course of action in the creation is fairly well necessary IF the creator exists in a place where similar actions exist. Taking something from a relative garden of peace and harmony, a sandbox where nothing bad happens and shoving those creatures forever into a setting where they can would itself be an evil act: plucking something from relatively heaven-like existence only to subject it to something relatively hellish.

In this paradigm it is more monstrous to create a world without evil than to create one where children can get cancer, because it inoculates the creations against the inevitability of tragedy that would be encountered "outside".

The problem of evil is only a problem for those who expect creators to exist without existing within some environment of some kind, AND who think that such a creator necessarily interferes with the operation of the creation.

The whole thing in my mind rubs up against the concepts of "necessary" and "sufficient" in my mind, and the only things that are "necessary and sufficient" about the host/simulation relationship is that the simulation is instantiated in some larger environment, and that this necessarily creates the possibility (but not necessarily the reality) of the forms of omniscience and omnipotence a computer engineer has over the state of hardware.

 

[Elixir]

Today anyone cam start a business

Sounds to me like not anyone can start an Apple or HP. Having an idea isn’t enough. It begins with an education that not only confers an understanding of a problem to be solved, but also a technical understanding of possible solutions. That may not mean being elite, but probably not living hand to mouth either.
Then of course, the main prerequisite for starting a world-changing business, would seem to be a garage.

 

[Politesse]

I do note that Smith never uses the word greed in that writing, that is something others have read in

Nor "capitalism", but synonymy is relevant.

greed

1. a very strong wish to continuously get more of something, especially food or…

dictionary.cambridge.org

Also, you seem to have gotten distracted. Whether capitalism has been good or bad for Africa is not relevant to whether it can be reconciled with the magic book.

 

[Elixir]

Whether capitalism has been good or bad for Africa is not relevant to whether it can be reconciled with the magic book.

STOP CALLING IT A MAGIC BOOK.
It’s not a magic book. That was already clarified; it’s supernatural, but supernatural is (somehow, mysteriously) different from magic. Proper terminology is important - ontologically, epistemologically and in other ways to which large words apply.

 

[steve_bank]

God works in mysterious ways, beyond our understanding.

 

[Politesse]

Whether capitalism has been good or bad for Africa is not relevant to whether it can be reconciled with the magic book.

STOP CALLING IT A MAGIC BOOK.
It’s not a magic book. That was already clarified; it’s supernatural, but supernatural is (somehow, mysteriously) different from magic. Proper terminology is important - ontologically, epistemologically and in other ways to which large words apply.

Hmm. Supernatural is certainly a broader category than magic. Magic requires a will, the supernatural simply exists (if, of course, it does at all). And many practitioners of magic reject the concept of the supernatural as an unwelcome intrusion of Christian dualism into their Work. But I don't see how any of that could render the Bible itself mundane, when people use it for magical purposes all the time.

 

[steve_bank]

Today anyone cam start a business

Sounds to me like not anyone can start an Apple or HP. Having an idea isn’t enough. It begins with an education that not only confers an understanding of a problem to be solved, but also a technical understanding of possible solutions. That may not mean being elite, but probably not living hand to mouth either.
Then of course, the main prerequisite for starting a world-changing business, would seem to be a garage.

Of course. Many start small to medium size business. Having a good idea is not enough. Point being it is not perfect but anybody has a chance to try to sucked with an idea.

I was not around when Starbucks was started. Somebody who was told me you could see the guy down on the docks picking up sacks of coffee beans.

I just love to hear the moralizing of elite intellectuals who basically live a comfortable life pursuing things that serve no material purpose based on the economy that creates the excess wealth to support him or her self.

I think to some the writings of Marx and Adam Smith are 'magic books'. Both models today are equally impractical.

 

[steve_bank]

Magic is practiced though supernatural powers.

The RCC would call anything supernatural not from the church as magic. If it is an RCC ritual it is not magic, it is ordained by god.

If a mystc munbles a spell over somenody and the person recovers from an illness it is magic and the mystic prcalims the authenticityof his or her supernatural magical powers. If somebody prays to an RCC sant and recovers that is not magic and te RCC proclaims the autenticty of the faith.

A burinng bush that is not consumed, Moses parting a sea both are magic.

A fotume teller predicvmg he future is accordin to the bible evil. A Christia who says god revealed the future to him or her is not magic, it is god.

Fortune Tellers

www.bibleinfo.com

Home / Bible Topics /
Fortune Tellers

The practice of fortune telling is forbidden by God. It's in the Bible, Deuteronomy 18:9-13, TLB. "When you arrive in the Promised Land you must be very careful lest you be corrupted by the horrible customs of the nations now living there. For example, an Israeli who presents his child to be burned to death as a sacrifice to heathen gods, must be killed. No one may practice black magic, or call on the evil spirits for aid, or be a fortune teller, or be a serpent charmer, medium, or wizard, or call forth the spirits of the dead. Anyone doing these things is an object of horror and disgust to the Lord, and it is because the nations do these things that the Lord your God will displace them. You must walk blamelessly before the Lord your God."

The future is known only by God. It's in the Bible, Isaiah 8:19, TLB. "So why are you trying to find out the future by consulting witches and mediums. Don't listen to their whisperings and mutterings. Can the living find out the future from the dead? Why not ask your God?"

To me RCC priests are wizards. They wear costumes. They have obkects imbued with a spirt. They can cast spells and cast put demons. They turn wine and bread into flesh ad blood which is ritually eaten. Ritual canabalism

Theyare given powers above oters when ordained.

 

[Elixir]

I remember a guy - a ex-army schlub - back in the 90s set up at the Outdoor Retailer show. One guy with one product (a foldable litter) looking pretty pitiful all alone in his 10’ booth.
Fast forward 20 years … it’s a 9 figure Company now and a major manufacturer of military medical equipment.
But it’s not an Apple or an HP.
Bill Gates’ dad was a wealthy lawyer. We all know Elon’s easy street. John Dell’s parents were a stockbroker and an orthodontist. Steve Jobs had wealthy Syrian parents and Wozniak’s dad was a Lockheed engineer.
I don’t think just “anyone can start a Company” and succeed at that level. You gotta be born into or adjacent to “the elite”.

 

[bilby]

I remember a guy - a ex-army schlub - back in the 90s set up at the Outdoor Retailer show. One guy with one product (a foldable litter) looking pretty pitiful all alone in his 10’ booth.
Fast forward 20 years … it’s a 9 figure Company now and a major manufacturer of military medical equipment.
But it’s not an Apple or an HP.
Bill Gates’ dad was a wealthy lawyer. We all know Elon’s easy street. John Dell’s parents were a stockbroker and an orthodontist. Steve Jobs had wealthy Syrian parents and Wozniak’s dad was a Lockheed engineer.
I don’t think just “anyone can start a Company” and succeed at that level. You gotta be born into or adjacent to “the elite”.

If you are not, then your brilliant idea (as long as it's genuinely and sufficiently brilliant) can still lead to vast wealth and commercial success.

Just not for you, but for the elite (or elite adjacent) person who can afford to buy your idea for peanuts, while you are still too poor to make anything more from it.