On Power

So the Rockies lost the World Series and I blame all of you for not praying hard enough. I expect a cake from each of you in penence.

I was listening to Guerilla Radio today, if you get the chance they do a podcast that is alot of fun, and I started thinking about the power of God.

So we know that evil things happen, hence God allows them to happen or does not have the capability to stop them from happening. Simply put, this is an old debate, does God have the capability to stop bad things from happening?

It seems to me that many beleive that God intervenes to keep bad things from happening at times and to make good things happen. Now if you beleive this then the next question should be why God always some bad things to happen and not others.

So if God does have the capability to stop all bad things from happening, as we believe God to be all powerful, then the bad things that do happen either happen because they have a role in the design of God, or God just did not stop them from happening which might be a wrong in and of itself hence God would cease to be God. So should we focus afresh on the bad things that happen in this world and what role they might have in the design of God?

Now what if God does not have the ability to stop all bad things from happening? Does this contravene the idea of God being all powerful?

THe Euthphro question asks whether Right is Right because God says it is Right or whether God says it is Right because it is already Right? So does God make what is right or does God follow what is right? If God creates what is right God is truly all powerful, if God follows some kind of higher law God's status as an all-powerful being needs much closer examination.

But if God does have to follow a higher law then the bad things that are allowed to happen are outside God's capability to alter. I say it is outside of God's capability because if God follows a higher law then God, while having a choice to follow the law or not, cannot break that law and remain God.

So the question is, if God has to follow a higher law, and stopping some bad things from happening is outside God's capability, because stopping those bad things would violate the higher law, then is God really all powerful? Do we need to redefine all powerful since we can only think of power in the temporal terms of our mortal experience?

Would love to hear your guy's comments on this. Thanks and you all keep rockin.

Hallowe'en

Hey, folks - if you're still looking for something to do Halloween night, some folks from Langley and I are putting together a trip to the Arlington Cinema and Drafthouse to see the greatest movie ever made. I speak, of course, of the 2004 British masterpiece Shaun of the Dead, which both perfects and transcends the honorable timetested genres of romantic comedy and apocalyptic zombie thriller, while seemlessly intertwining the both into something that is, gloriously, more then the parts.

Drop me a line or comment here if you'd like to join the crowd.

The Ten Commandments

Something I was thinking about today and wanted to pose to the group.

Every few years there is a national debate about the place of the Ten Commandments in U.S. government building or state houses. For example various federal or state judges have gone to court over the placing of copies of the Ten Commandments in the court in which they preside.

My question is why the Ten Commandments, as it is no longer applicable and had been fulfilled and why not the admonition of Christ when he said that "Whoever sues (takes you to law) for your coat, give him your cloak also"?

Preliminary Thoughts on Miles

So there are alot of things to talk about with Miles so I guess it is just an issue where to begin. Some things I have noticed and please feel free to comment further on anyone or all or interject your own!

1.) An overarching theme of God as incredibly human, possesing human emotions almost (or entirely) and reading this has given me new thoughts on the idea of all of us being created in God's image. Miles walks a fine line between just raising possibilities of God's motives, reactions and making an argument that God is really confuzed at times.

2.) Of course Miles is able to do this because he is taking a literary biography of God and, let's be honest, the Bible is not very clear on one, two or possibly even three things (joke). But the vagueness of the Bible does open itself to this type of literary hypotheticals that Miles puts forth. I would think if you flip this around on its other side it might become a question of how much is really in the Bible? How much room is there for interpretation of possible core doctrines of not just Mormonism and Christianity but possibly all Abrahamic faiths? Hopefully later on I will maybe introduce some specific issues in Miles (ie. creation and the fall of man to be specific).

3.) We have talked about enternal progression and "man is as God once was". Of course both of these ideas can mean many things but they both practically point to the possibility of God being able to eternally progress (since we are made in God's image and we are able to eternally progress) and possesing some of the same emotional and mental characteristics of man (since as man is, God once was). When these are combined it does not make Miles correct in all his hypothesis and arguments, but does it open the door a little more on them?

Now everyone pray for the Rockies to win the World Series.

A nice little supplement

Sorry I did not include this in the comment I just left on Miles but I am a big dumb animal and forgot. By the way, do we get an email when someone leaves a comment on a new post or we only get emailed when there is a new post? The comments are great because it seems the origianl post is the question and the comments are the attempts at answers.

For anyone interested or if you have the time. I just finsihed reading a quick little book, it is small pages and less than two hundred pages long and an easy read, on the life and philosophy of Gandhi by Loius Fischer. It is a fantastic read if you really don't know alot about what Gandhi did, his ideas of religion, God, violence, politics, etc. It will also be a ncie read since we are reading Tolstoy's "The Kingdom of God is Within You" soon and this is a book that Gandhi based alot of his ideas and practices on. You can pick the book up for cheap used on Amazon for like two bucks.

I was talking with someone the other day about it and I really enjoy reading about Gandhi as I consider him to be one of the more Christlike humans to walk the planet since Christ and no one took the sermon on the moun more seriously and more literaly than Gandhi. So in reading the details of his life and ideas, the way he change his mind, fails at some things, makes mistakes, etc., I am thinking about the life of Jesus which we don't know alot about. So since we do not know alot of the details about the life, practices and philosophy of the Messiah, I really enjoy learning all those things about one of His greatest Diciples.

Past and future

A successful inaugural meeting, I think. Apologies again for my misadventures with Pizza Hut; we could have started on time if not for that. Thanks again to Allison for the brownies and the table.

Look forward to adding three or four more to our starting five.


Next time: Jack Miles's God: A Biography; 7:30 PM on November 8. This is, happily, a Thursday.

Miles will be an interesting counterpoint to Armstrong, I think; while she ranges very broadly, trying to cover 4000 years of history in 400 pages, Miles offers us a very close, literary reading of the Old Testament, and its central character, God. He draws sparingly on sources outside the Bible itself (though he's a PhD in ancient languages, so he's quite capable there). Rather, he looks at how the relationship between Israel and God changes and develops, and how this interaction seems to transform how God is represented in that text.

In short, Miles presents a God with a history - like Armstrong. But for Miles, God's own behavior and actions shape that history in tandem with the humans he grows with.