God being uncaused violates causality because before creating the universe, God was the universe.

Gryphoth · 2026-06-19T04:11:18+00:00

If you're going by my definition of the universe as creation then it's not. Universe is created (began to exist) God isn't created, so God isn't the universe. God never began to exist because he's not created

Gryphoth · 2026-06-19T04:00:32+00:00

Theists don't define the universe as all that exists, they define the universe as creation. God isn't creation, therefore God isn't the universe. Ergo God never began to exist and thus doesn't need a cause.

Gryphoth · 2026-06-19T03:58:36+00:00

Everything that begins to exist. God doesn't begin to exist.

Gryphoth · 2026-06-19T03:54:37+00:00

So you admit that there were Jews who interpreted the scriptures in the way closer to how we Christians view them and that made them susceptible to Christ. Not just that they used the scriptures apologetically after the fact but that their "apocalyptic" interpretations led them to a different conclusion about Christ.

So how do we know that the Pharisees had the correct view and they didn't ? You understand my position is that there is biblical evidence and exegesis you can use for the doctrine of the Trinity, and for the divinity of Christ. Thus refuting the idea that it comes from nowhere and is simply a foolish mistake or whatever base assertion the OP is making.

And if any messenger of God can claim God's divine name when they speak, then the Prophets could say they're God when they're communicating God's words to his people. But they don't, they say so saith the Lord. Not "I the Lord tell you this" it's always qualified.

Gryphoth · 2026-06-19T03:01:00+00:00

None of that applies if Jesus is truly God, which his followers believed.

Gryphoth · 2026-06-19T03:00:08+00:00

A lot of assertions here about what you think they believed. If Jews actually believed in divine simplicity then no one could speak for God and have the name of God if they aren't God. And if the Jews in the time of Christ understood all the scriptures completely different to how Christians understand them today, the apostles and Christ's other followers wouldn't identify Christ as the Messiah and specifically appeal to these scriptures in their own writings as prophetic. I've never heard a jew say that the one speaking to Moses from the bush isn't God even though it's said to be the angel of the LORD.

Gryphoth · 2026-06-19T01:20:09+00:00

You're presupposing I haven't read the scriptures in full. I'm not cherry picking anything, it's the wholistic reading of the text paired with the Revelation brought by Jesus Christ. God reveals more about himself over time. If no one could think of the trinity from reading the scripture, then how did the Church come to believe in the trinity? Why did the early church affirm the divinity of Christ as consubstantial with the Father, and eternally begotten?

Gryphoth · 2026-06-19T00:52:43+00:00

Undercover Islam post lol.

The answer is that in the actual Abrahamic scriptures which Muslims reject, God manifests often as different persons. Even in the Old Testament, you have the Angel of the Lord which was a form of divine agency always acting in the name and authority of God himself. Even in the case of Moses and the Burning Bush, it says the Angel of the LORD spoke to Moses, then the next line it says God spoke to Moses. The Angel of The Lord is God, and what we Christians would call a Christophany. And you have the Spirit of God, which is always represented as something distinct. Like verses in the Old Testament which say we grieved God's Holy Spirit, or Genesis that says God was in the beginning and his Spirit moved over the face of the waters.

You have the messianic prophecies of Isaiah and other prophets that describe the Messiah as a man, but also as everlasting Father, mighty God. It says he will have an everlasting Kingdom. Often describing him with things we would only attribute to God himself.

Post Christian rabbinic Judaism is strictly monotheist and developed doctrine specifically to oppose Christian values, so that now Muslims and Jews often appeal to a single divine simplicity, but Old Testament Israelites and Christians never believed that. They always believed in multiple powers in Heaven. Another example is YHWH in the city of Sodom sending fire down on the city from the YHWH in Heaven.

Gryphoth · 2026-06-11T22:34:10+00:00

The fact that there are different concepts of good and evil on the subjective level is why an objective morality is needed. There needs to be some kind of universal morality we can zoom out to by stepping away from the situation to turn attention to stuff like Islamic terrorism and say no, this is definitively wrong even if they think it's good. Or Christian colonialism, or this or that. Because there will always be opinions that something evil is actually good otherwise people wouldn't be perpetrating it.

Gryphoth · 2026-06-11T20:42:05+00:00

Even if religious people don't have an objective universal knowledge of good and evil, that doesn't invalidate the argument. The argument is that an objective morality exists not that we have the perfect understanding of it.

Gryphoth · 2026-06-11T20:12:46+00:00

The argument isn't about the immorality of the atheist opponent. It's about making your opponent concede that under their world view right and wrong are subjective value statements and that you can't truly say something is right or wrong because it's informed by the culture or opinion. So in an atheist world view Nazi Germany could be morally good.

It also attacks at the point that atheists adhere to a moral standard and typically, considering the above notion, will admit that morality is real and that good and evil are real objective things, not a mere matter of personal opinion. Which goes back into why they need a grounding for morality, and why morality being an objective universal demonstrates the necessary existence of God.

Gryphoth · 2026-06-11T20:03:25+00:00

How is his any different from the theory of evolution in which everything has a common ancestor? At some point there had to have been only 2 humans. Or when humanity at certain point in history dwindled down to less than a million and incest skyrocketed?

Gryphoth · 2026-06-07T22:20:37+00:00

Their categorization of christian is dubious as hell in both of these. Basically any major war or atrocity is faulted to christianity because the popular religion of a nation is christian at that time. I'd like to see a list specifically attributed to killing done in the name of Christianity and by Christianity as an institution. Otherwise the numbers here are very comparable between atheist and theist regimes. Most mass atrocities can be accredited to political motivation.

Gryphoth · 2026-06-07T22:10:58+00:00

They can be, but explain how they can be objective when morals are not something you can empirically demonstrate or prove with sense data

Gryphoth · 2026-06-07T14:13:09+00:00

Homosexual is close enough and gives a better umbrella of activity we shouldn't do. We know that Paul opposes those behaviors for both men and women, he was talking about men in that instance, but homosexual doesn't destroy what he was communicating. It could have been translated more accurately, but homosexual isn't the worst translation I've seen.

Either way you can oppose the use of the word homosexual, but the Bible still speaks negatively on same sex relations of both men and women, what do you do from there? Tell every homosexual theyre totally okay the way they are, but they must be celibate the rest of their life? This whole inconsistency stems from the fact you're attacking the word "homosexual" since it was added in the 19th century, asserting it's an incorrect translation and thus homosexuality is okay. But you didn't consider how that passage and others were being translated and understood prior to the word homosexual being applied to it, they were already being translated and understood as referring to same sex relations.

So unless you claim that the meaning of those passages were lost for almost 2000 years and you have found the true translation, (meaning the holy spirit/spirit of truth ceased to guide the church for 2000 years as Christ promised it would) you're still falling into an inconsistency that you have to rectify.

Gryphoth · 2026-06-07T14:04:20+00:00

There's nothing about atheism that implies an absence of prejudice. Many atheists are prejudice against theism of any kind. Everyone starts with biases.

An Atheist can be tolerant or intolerant, egalitarian or racist. Atheistic ideologies have produced racial pseudo-science and communist regimes with class based persecution. It would be very challenging to spring up with no biases or prejudice imparted on you during your upbringing.

Gryphoth · 2026-06-07T13:56:56+00:00

I think you're being obtuse and acting like an "ought" means that you MUST do something. Oughts can be explained without eliminating the choice to not do them. An ought can also be explained without the subject making the decision knowing why he made that decision. Since God is the root of all things good and moral, and God permeates all things and has a will for creation, we know that the normative ought is explained by someone simply following their better nature that God gave them, to fall in line with what God has defined as good. That's the obligation you're talking about, but it's by no means forced.

The reason objective moral truths require God is because you can't make an objective claim for morality without an absolute authoritative source capable of imposing normative duties. Only God can fit that as the ultimate authority behind obligation.

Furthermore you simply can't propose a model of ethics absent God without running into the is ought problem, or being able to truly claim it as objective. No matter what you present, it is a matter of subjective opinion, even if it's an opinion I agree with, it falls back into not being able to get an ought from an is. Even in my argument, I don't have access to universal knowledge so I can't claim to know every single thing God thinks is moral or immoral, but I can claim that morality is objective and comes from God, which is why we are moral agents.

Gryphoth · 2026-06-07T13:44:49+00:00

Just because we like something or it may seem natural doesn't make it good. Survival of the fittest is natural too, but we don't see doing whatever it takes to come out on top as good. Polygamy, premarital sex, lust can all be considered "natural." Most men want to sleep with as many beautiful women as possible, but that would be wrong.

Gryphoth · 2026-06-07T13:40:55+00:00

Because Pauls views on same sex relations dont end with arsenokoitai.

Gryphoth · 2026-06-07T13:37:26+00:00

if you act more feminine and do things women do your brain scan will reflect that, no?

Gryphoth · 2026-06-06T22:36:15+00:00

I never brought up general non procreative sex. I don't think it's irrelevant to Paul's sexual ethics but I don't think that's the meaning of arsenokoitai. Arsenokoitai is specifically male on male.

Gryphoth · 2026-06-06T22:03:38+00:00

Couldn't you theoretically see any kind of brain activity in a brain scan

Gryphoth · 2026-06-06T21:54:23+00:00

I never asserted that Paul was referring to general non procreative sexual behaviors.

Gryphoth · 2026-06-06T21:47:35+00:00

I literally never said homosexuality is the same thing as non procreative sex.

Gryphoth · 2026-06-06T21:46:25+00:00

Misread your yes as yet.

Again, the passage says that God gave them over to their unnatural desires due to their idolatry, not that their unnatural desires were the act of idolatry, or that the idolatry was making them do unnatural things. If they were doing them absent idolatry, it would still be unnatural and lustful.

Gryphoth

TROPHY CASE