Have you ever forgiven someone? If so, who needs God to forgive a second time?
It is to the one sinned against to have the first right of forgiving when forgiving is possible. That would be most sins and crimes save murder.
I have had the pleasure to forgive on a few occasions. I will assume here that you have also forgiven someone at some point in your life. I have had that pleasure after the pain and hope you have as well. I have stepped up to ask for forgiveness as well after sinning against someone and am thankful that people can and do forgive. This benefit I also hope you have enjoyed.
Our consciousness and ego are what we use to judge what should be forgiven. If we lose that ability to judge or if it is usurped, damage is done to our consciousness and ego. It would negate intelligent use of our freedom of choice. It would negate our free will and deny us closure.
The Government has taken our freedom of the body from us with various restrictions. Everything from what we consume to our right to die with dignity. God has taken our freedom of choice after death from us with his judgement. Jesus has taken our freedom to face our accuser from us by saying --- only through me --- as our only judge.
These usurping of your free will to forgive means that you could never get closure from offence and hurt.
That would make Jesus as big of a disgrace as his father in ignoring our free willed choices. People judge constantly. We cannot help but to do so. To have our judgements usurped or ignored shows a flaw in the justice system you follow, be it secular or religious.
The God of the Jews who evolved to be the Christian God had a different view of forgiveness than Jesus had even though Jesus was a Jewish Rabbi. Jesus as God would be from the Christian perspective. Not the Jewish one that has the majority of Jews as never accepting Jesus as their messiah. The claims to judging and Jesus’ status, or not, --- as a messiah--- needs not be discussed in this O P.
“Jewish belief states that G-d doesn't forgive our sins against others until we ask and receive forgiveness directly from the person we wronged.”
“In Judaism, the acts of repentance and forgiveness are inextricably linked, and we must never let our anger toward others cause us to lose sight of self-reflection and cleansing.”
http://www.thepowerofforgiveness.com/pdf/A_Jewish_Perspective_on_Forgiveness.pdf
Did Christianity and their version of the Jewish God usurp your power and benefits of forgiving?
Does that negate your free will, and your right to forgive?
Regards
DL

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thunderlips11 says
dont forget, his coming was fortold. That was a kinda new twist to things.
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thunderlips11 says
I thought grace is simply doing something beautiful without being required to do so.
In a religious-agnostic way, divine grace is simply grace performed by a willful God.
Is it necessary that God be willful?
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Peter P says
Actually, that's neither a tautology nor true. The tautology you are aiming for is A system of knowledge can only incorporate knowledge that fits within itself. A system, in general, could of course produce knowledge that doesn't fit within the original system's bounds by creating a revised system. Science does this all the time. Example: The Theory of Relativity subsumes Newton's Theory of Gravity as a limiting case.
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Fine. You win. :-)
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It's not about winning. It's about clarifying.
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Peter P says
Yes.
Now deal with my question and do not just try to sidestep it.
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DL
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Peter P says
Hogwash.
We choose according to all we know plus our hardwired sense of morality.
Stop hiding in other peoples clichés and pet phrases.
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DL
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Greatest I am says
I just did. Infinite regression takes the paradox out of self-causation.
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Bap33 says
`
Yes. And it knows enough to correct it`s mistakes as new information comes in instead of ignoring mew and better ideas the way religions have.
Science is self-correcting while religions wait for their fantasy Gods to correct their more stupid ideas and will li.ve with them forever as they wait for their fantasy to become real.
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DL
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Greatest I am says
There is no hardwired sense of morality.
People took some of our hardwired behaviors and called them morality.
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Raw says
You fear what your God already embraces. The genocide of mankind. Remember Noah?
God is good. Not.
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DL
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Greatest I am says
Market is self-correcting. Science is just the sum of all scientific egos.
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Peter P says
Following that idea, there is no god, no creator of the universe. Time dilation simply approaches infinity as you approach the Big Bang. No causality for nature itself, no god.
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Greatest I am says
This is called, "the god of the gaps" argument.
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Peter P says
Additionally, squirrels will sacrifice their own lives to save other close family members. Meerkats will risk their lives to save the offspring of others.
There is much hardwired sense of morality in our species and others. This hardwiring is the result of evolution. Now, now all of morality is hardwired though. Brains continue to develop morality where genes left off.
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Peter P says
The market never learns from its mistakes.
Peter P says
Never has such a blatantly false statement been made on this site. An infinite sum of egos could not achieve placing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth. That takes knowledge, understanding, skill, and productivity. And that is but one of a multitude of accomplishments of science.
That Internet thingy that you are using to have this argument, is another accomplishment of science. As is the doubling of the human life span, the virtual elimination of childbirth deaths for both baby and mother, the ability to communicate and travel anywhere in the world, air-conditioning, and all the things that make life today comfortable and safe.
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Dan8267 says
No matter how much I wanted that to be true, the market is really very good at making itself efficient. Otherwise, why would old trading models stop working?
Dan8267 says
Yet without which we would not have to go there at all? The moon is not made of cheese, you know? :-)
Dan8267 says
Not sure if that is a good thing.
And do not confuse science with technology. The creative spark is a very intuitive thing. Science might have been use to validate theories, but it is more of a matter of epistemology.
Note that I am not dissing mathematics, logic, and other form of reasoning.
I am pointing out the empirical nature of inductive reasoning and its limitations.
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There is no profit in going to the moon per se. It was an amazing feat, and it stroked a lot of ego, but so what?
Things might have been invented or improved as a side-effect. Then it is really a matter of marketing and financing.
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Peter P says
If the market were efficient, then the Goldman Sachs of the world would be out of business. As much as I wished the market was efficient and self-correcting, it is not. If the market actually learned from its mistakes and improved itself, the housing bubble would have never happened.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/339761-just-how-efficient-is-the-market
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Dan8267 says
I think you have an overly simplistic view of market efficiency. Rent-seeking can be profitable even in the face of market efficiency.
The market is self-correcting, yet it may not happening. It is just being as efficient as possible.
That said, the market is NOT completely efficient. It is about 97% (just a number I pulled from my ass). It corrects inefficiencies, but there will always be the new ones.
And by the way, the market is a representation of expectations, not of established facts. Of course the stock prices will diverge from what a value model will predict.
The market is about crowd psychology.
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Peter P says
Keep believing that Medieval society could put man on the moon if you like. That's a delusion.
Peter P says
Whether or not you consider it a good thing, it is certainly an impressive and important accomplishment. I, for one, will gladly take the second half of my lifespan.
Peter P says
After discovering the basic principle of electromagnetic induction in 1831, Michael Faraday was asked by a skeptical politician, William Gladstone, what good might come of electricity. "Sir, I do not know what it is good for," Faraday replied. "But of one thing I am quite certain - someday you will tax it."
Today electricity is the basis of our entire civilization, and yes, it is taxed.
The benefits of space exploration are long term, but without space exploration our species will most certainly die when our sun exhausts its nuclear fuel. Most likely, there will be a plenitude of material benefits long before that happens.
How profitable is space exploration? Would you like a solid block of gold the size of Mount Everest? There is more gold in the solar system than has ever been mined in all of human history. And that's just one thing.
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The bottom line is that science's track record has been stellar, whereas religion's track record has been abysmal. No amount of turd polishing or poo-pooing can change that. The difference is so stark that any attempt to make religion look even nearly as good as science is laughable.
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Dan8267 says
The Pope would disagree.
Science is a VERY useful tool. But we just need to know its limitations.
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Dan8267 says
gold is only valuable because it is rare ... on earth. Breathable air is valuable in space, but cheap on earth.
I think Dr. DeGrasse says that we (our human bodies) are made up with the exact same percentages of the elements as the universe. That's pretty cool. God is a clever operator.
p.s., Science has been wrong a billion times, but it has the auto-correct function of being a never-ending-quest for answers (a good thing, in my opinion). Science (and all of the names it was called before 1600 A.D.) has been off the mark a few times. Lets not forget, the creation "myth" was deemed correct by science about 7,000 years after it was "wrote" down. Between the time it was wrote down, and about 1920, science was not sure of the ordering of the appearance of life on earth, (you know, water plants, water animals, land plants, land animals, and the very very last thing -- man) Ancient text had it right, and then science found it out! p.s.s. the creation myth had nothing to do with religion, it was just the answer to "how did we get here".
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I will not be surprised if a civilization on earth 10000 years ago had more advanced technology than we do now.
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Peter P says
Why should I care what the Pope, a former Hitler Youth and current and long time cover-upper of pedophiles, thinks?
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Peter P says
Whereas the entire educated world would be shocked. Any society with world-wide telecommunications, computers, and space travel that existed on Earth 10,000 years ago, would be a very, very big discovery.
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Dan8267 says
I am not easily surprised nowadays. Unless it is good food in some unlikely places.
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Bap33 says
Science is a methodology. Individual scientists are wrong. Science is the methodology that filters out incorrect hypothesis and revises and improves correct ones.
What exactly do you have against the scientific method and what superior alternative do you propose?
Religious leaders are deliberately incorrect. They lie for the sake of gaining wealth and power. Science ensures that any deliberate fraud and any accidental mistake are caught and exposed. And science's track record has been phenomenal and exponentially improving. It is science that enable mankind to progress more in the 20th century than mankind progressed in all prior centuries put together. That alone proves the incredible value of science. Nothing in religion can compare.
Bap33 says
Even if there were a god and it were a clever operator, it would not be your god. It would not be Jesus and god the father. That's for sure.
Bap33 says
Not even remotely true. Any pseudo-science caused by the religious perverting the scientific community by disregarding the scientific method is pure bullshit.
Bap33 says
Although science does not have a precise beginning, the modern meaning of the word comes from the methodology began in the 1600s and published by Francis Bacon in Novum Organum in 1622, and by René Descartes in Discourse on Method in 1637. The scientific method was revised and improved so that by the late 19th century, it was a world-wide standard. It is during the late 19th century that we start seeing the exponentially increasing knowledge, understanding, and technology of mankind. The scientific revolution is what started this.
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Bap33 says
There are countless species which have come into existence after man came about. HIV comes to mind.
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Peter P says
We've just got this thing for conquering frontiers and propagation. I don't get it either. We could've stopped after the bottle opener and the remote control, and I'd still be in awe of humankind.
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JodyChunder says
I think molecular gastronomy is more useful.
Space exploration is not my thing. Can't pay me enough to go to space.
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Peter P says
I've got the Eureka Dunes near enough if I ever get the hankering.
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Dan8267 says
nope. don't be silly.
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Dan8267 says
I really like science and support it. Sorry if it sounded different. I support an active pursuit of the unknown in all areas. Science is way bitchin if you ask me. Scientific discovery has done as much to solidify my understanding of God, man, and the universe, as anything else. Along with Plato, Sam Clemens and Ben Franklin.
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Peter P says
The world's pyramids, the Nazca lines, and the degradation of modern man, seem to point at an ancient advanced society.
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Bap33 says
Is it acceptable writing style to refer to Mark Twain by his real name if you are referencing the ideas or writings published under the pseudonym? It's like referring to Leonardo DiCaprio as "Leo" or Nicholas Cage as "Nick" when you don't personally know them. . . .
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Bap33 says
Yes, and they could be advanced in different ways.
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Peter P says
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Philistine says
I was not refering to Sam Clemens in the familure, I was refering to the person who invented the thoughts, words, and personage of Mark Twain. Sorry if I came off as being disrespectful. I am a cad at times. If you don't mind, please tell me one thing, who is it that would be offended by my reference? Sam or Mark?