However, it's only o.k. to "challenge" a christians beliefs and the benefit of the doubt is always stripped from those which you owe your life, limb, and country to.
well i just got home and i missed your replys but no matter!
This thread reminds me of what a perfect subject this is for dinner parties.
Catholic Atheist
Let's suppose there really is a god. Not some wimp deity who can't even create his own time and logic. No, let's suppose the Big Omega is the guy in question, someone so vast and powerful that all your conceptions of god, no matter how elaborate or degenerate, all fit inside with plenty of room to spare. We're talking a god who can happily create walls so high he can't jump over them, who can solve the General Halting Problem, who is benevolent, irrelevant, and malignant at the same time, who exceeds any origin or ending, who is contained by no distinction, who is bigger than any god any religion ever invented or can ever invent. The kind of god that's bigger than this page can distinguish. The god so big he doesn't care whether or not you capitalize his name. The god who owns all names, all behaviors, all attributes, all physics, all specifications, and all infinities. A god who forgives and damns you no matter what you do, who is 100%, completely, utterly, and without bound, unpredictable, an impartial god of random chance and an intimate god of unfailing love at the same time. The mystery god who resembles, cherishes, and ignores you neither more nor less than he resembles, cherishes, and ignores lichen, water, cattle, neutrinos, stars, pistachio jelly beans, the story of the Lusitania, and one particular cherry-red 1968 Plymouth Barracuda.The trouble with most theists is they can't stand the idea of a really big god like this. They want a god that acts like their parents did. Someone who buys you ice cream if you're good and sends you to the eternal lake of fire if you're bad. The idea of a god of howling chaos, crystalline order, and all myriad flowing variations in between just scares them stupid, or else their imaginations are too impoverished to conceptualize someone that large.Give me a religion with a god like this and I might come have tea with you to chat about it. But take your poor excuse with his hands banged onto a tree, or that other poor excuse sitting under the tree clawing his way into his own navel, or that whole tribe of poor excuses playing celestial parlor games with humans for dice, or that poor excuse who doesn't even trouble himself to exist, and leave them at home. All human religions are just pretty children's stories next to Big Omega.
i think that large text you quoted was a bunch of gibberish
Hmmm... Its meaning is crystal clear to me, so I'm pretty sure it's not gibberish.Do you mean that you didn't understand it?
Formal shebangWe're going to construct a couple of mathematical objects which we call the ordinal numbers. The ordinal numbers form a total order, i.e. for every two ordinal numbers n and m, we have either n < m, n > m, or n = m.Now if we have a set of ordinal numbers V, then we call an ordinal number w an upper bound of V if for all numbers v in V, we have v < w. This essentially means that w is bigger than all elements of V.Now there is One Basic Rule: if we ever have a set of ordinal numbers V, then we can construct a number sup(V) which is has the following two properties: 1. sup(V) is an upper bound of V 2. for every upper bound w of V, we have sup(V) <= w The second property essentially says, in a math-speak way, that sup(v) is the smallest upper bound of V. Think about it...OK, how do we start? Let's consider the empty set. According to the One Basic Rule (OBR), there is some ordinal number larger then every number in the empty set. Let's call this number 0. Since it was created with the OBR, property 2 guarantees that it is the smallest number that is larger than... nothing. So 0 is the smallest ordinal number.Now we apply the OBR to the set {0}. This gets us 1, apply OBR to {1}, gives 2. In this way we can build all the natural numbers.But we can also apply the OBR to this set N of natural numbers, i.e. {0,1,2,3,...} ad infinitum. No one said that the OBR can only be applied to finite sets. So applying the OBR to N gives us omega (note the small o, this is not yet the Big Omega). omega is the smallest infinite number. Of course, we can apply againg the OBR on {omega}, giving omega+1, omega+2, etc.. Again, we can apply the OBR on the whole infinite set {omega, omega+1, omega+2 ,...}, resulting in 2omega. Applying the OBR on {omega, 2omega, 3omega, ...} gives omega^2. It gets a bit messy on notation now, but you get the idea. In fact you can even write down the set that generalises this idea, and apply the OBR to it. This gives you an even larger transfinite number.Everytime you feel you have a mechanism to create larger ordinal numbers, you can formalize this mechanism, create a set out of it, and apply the OBR on it, to create a number that is larger than all previous attempts. In fact, you cannot talk over the set of all ordinal numbers; if you could, you could apply the OBR on it and get a new ordinal number, not in the set. So mathematicians don't talk about the set of all ordinal numbers, they talk about the class of ordinal numbers. No one knows what exactly makes a class different from a set, except that you cannot apply the OBR to a class. (But you can write a stronger version of the OBR, call it meta-OBR, saying that you can. Then you can produce even more (meta-)ordinal numbers. Of course, all meta-ordinal numbers don't form a class, they form something different, say, a metaclass. Repeat ad nauseum, and to arbitrary levels of meta(n)-ness, with n being finite, transfinite or even meta-ordinal.)So what is Big Omega? Big Omega is the limit to all of this. The number bigger than all numbers, ordinal, meta-ordinal or otherwise. The only number bigger then itself, violating all previous set-up rules. Of course, formally, there's no such thing. Its existence violates the OBR, and the meta-OBR, and all the others. But we like to talk about it anyway.Don't think too much about Big Omega. Cantor did, and he became mad.
This will be probably hard to explain, because it involves familiarity with the implications of the mathematical Big Omega concept.
So, what I love about the BigOmega diety concept, is that by nature it encompasses and contains every other human God concept ever invented or described with plenty of room left over.What I find intersting, is how easy it turns out to be to imagine and conceptualize a deity that completely dwarfs the traditional god concepts of all religions.For example: Some religions say, our god is infinite and all-powerful. And figure that nothing can be bigger than that.But BigOmega is way bigger than that...Regards,quadz
"God made Man in his own image and likeness"
Quote from: quadz on December 13, 2007, 07:21:55 PM"God made Man in his own image and likeness"When deciphering the meanings of the words in the Holy Bible, it is important to understand the context that these words are used in when you aren't completely clear on what a phrase means. On the whole, the translators working for King James did a pretty good job of using english words with definitions and usages mirroring the words used in the original greek and hebrew texts. From my own studies, this particular phrase is not to be understood as "God is suseptible to illness etc." as you have mentioned.
I believe the human mind cannot comprehend infinte and all-powerful because we are finite beings. So, anything we comprehend as being infinte and all-powerful is limited by what we can comprehend these terms to mean. Since we are finite and our comprehension of these terms is necessarly bound by this, there must be lots of space past what we can comprehend, lots of room for, if you will, continued revelation and understanding as we gain knowledge.
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December 03, 2024, 09:55:10 AM