Jump to content
Seriously No Politics ×

Baptism and the Atonement


Recommended Posts

1 hour ago, HappyJackWagon said:

The problem with your last post is that it is confusing omnipotence and omniscience.

Omnipotence= All powerful

Omniscience = All knowing

NO, that IS the point!  There is no practical difference- pragmatically.  The apparent differences are semantic.

Think about it.

Imagine McGyver raised to the level of God.  There is no obstacle to anything that he cannot think his way out of.  In any situation he can use his intelligence to "fix" it.  Effectively he knows every way to get out of every possible problem and can come up with a solution, to meet his plans and needs through his intelligence.

An example is the fall- perhaps.  Ordinary Christians believe it was a disaster, but we know it was part of the plan all along.  God used his intelligence to make the "moves" which he knew would turn out in his favor.  He created the situation through his power- organized the garden, got Satan to appear there, brought Adam and Eve into the picture and let everyone make their own "moves" in the chess game.

He used his power which IS intelligence or intelligence which IS power ("Knowledge is Power") to organize the "game" so that the outcome was inevitable.

He caused no one to act in violation of their agency- it's just that whatever move they made, he was ready with a counter-move to accomplish his purposes.

In fact the whole purpose was that A&E would USE their agency to give US agency and the knowledge of both good and evil.   Without that KNOWLEDGE there could BE no agency.

The old sectarian differences never DID apply to anything once you see it this way.

Pure confused jibberish!

They were creating a false distinction and reifying that distinction into real "things"- making them concrete.  Intelligence IS power- yet they made it into two forces- knowledge AND power.

That is the logical error I was pointing to in the other thread that people took personally.   I should have explained it better as an error a person was making consistently rather than making it personal.  I am sorry I did it that way.

Edited by mfbukowski
Link to comment
1 hour ago, mfbukowski said:

NO, that IS the point!  There is no practical difference- pragmatically.  The apparent differences are semantic.

Think about it.

Imagine McGyver raised to the level of God.  There is no obstacle to anything that he cannot think his way out of.  In any situation he can use his intelligence to "fix" it.  Effectively he knows every way to get out of every possible problem and can come up with a solution, to meet his plans and needs through his intelligence.

An example is the fall- perhaps.  Ordinary Christians believe it was a disaster, but we know it was part of the plan all along.  God used his intelligence to make the "moves" which he knew would turn out in his favor.  He created the situation through his power- organized the garden, got Satan to appear there, brought Adam and Eve into the picture and let everyone make their own "moves" in the chess game.

He used his power which IS intelligence or intelligence which IS power ("Knowledge is Power") to organize the "game" so that the outcome was inevitable.

He caused no one to act in violation of their agency- it's just that whatever move they made, he was ready with a counter-move to accomplish his purposes.

In fact the whole purpose was that A&E would USE their agency to give US agency and the knowledge of both good and evil.   Without that KNOWLEDGE there could BE no agency.

The old sectarian differences never DID apply to anything once you see it this way.

Pure confused jibberish!

They were creating a false distinction and reifying that distinction into real "things"- making them concrete.  Intelligence IS power- yet they made it into two forces- knowledge AND power.

That is the logical error I was pointing to in the other thread that people took personally.   I should have explained it better as an error a person was making consistently rather than making it personal.  I am sorry I did it that way.

I appreciate the attempt but just because knowledge is power doesn't mean all power is knowledge. I agree that the difference between omnipotence and omniscience is semantic. Of course it is. They're different words so they have different meanings :)

Can God use His knowledge to create matter ex nihilo? Does he act in the physical world at all? If he does, not only is power derived from intelligence but also from the physical. If he doesn't act physically, then I guess I don't see much value in His physical body. The knowledge (omniscience) may inform how he interacts with eternal laws, but it doesn't override a need to act physically.

 

Link to comment
2 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

NO, that IS the point!  There is no practical difference- pragmatically.  The apparent differences are semantic.

Think about it.

Imagine McGyver raised to the level of God.  There is no obstacle to anything that he cannot think his way out of.  In any situation he can use his intelligence to "fix" it.  Effectively he knows every way to get out of every possible problem and can come up with a solution, to meet his plans and needs through his intelligence.

An example is the fall- perhaps.  Ordinary Christians believe it was a disaster, but we know it was part of the plan all along.  God used his intelligence to make the "moves" which he knew would turn out in his favor.  He created the situation through his power- organized the garden, got Satan to appear there, brought Adam and Eve into the picture and let everyone make their own "moves" in the chess game.

He used his power which IS intelligence or intelligence which IS power ("Knowledge is Power") to organize the "game" so that the outcome was inevitable.

He caused no one to act in violation of their agency- it's just that whatever move they made, he was ready with a counter-move to accomplish his purposes.

In fact the whole purpose was that A&E would USE their agency to give US agency and the knowledge of both good and evil.   Without that KNOWLEDGE there could BE no agency.

The old sectarian differences never DID apply to anything once you see it this way.

Pure confused jibberish!

They were creating a false distinction and reifying that distinction into real "things"- making them concrete.  Intelligence IS power- yet they made it into two forces- knowledge AND power.

That is the logical error I was pointing to in the other thread that people took personally.   I should have explained it better as an error a person was making consistently rather than making it personal.  I am sorry I did it that way.

Omniscience would mean that absolutely every play in your proverbial chess game analogy, would already be known and no adaptation in play and strategy would even have to be made in order to counter balance an outcome. Omnipotent would be the ability to make the chess board and pieces in the first place, in your analogy. I personally think that God knows each and everyone of us so well that he already knows exactly what we will choose in any given situation, perfectly. That knowledge doesn't negate the free agency of those whom God knows so well as to know exactly 100 percent what they will do, even before those people know themselves. I personally don't believe that God can be taken by surprise, and that the chess analogy doesn't serve Him justice in the fact that He knows absolutely everything.

It's kind of like getting to know some of the people on this forum group. If I post something opposed to the common held belief in global warming, I will know who will respond to those posts, well before hand and it won't change their agency to post or not. I don't even know them very well either. Heck, some of them don't even have a picture of their face. If my knowledge was perfect, as God's is, then I would already know exactly when they would be posting their replies and what they would be posting, perfectly, before it was even done. An omnipotent God, would use His omniscience to place everyone when and were they need to be in order to make His ends meet, in a clock wound scenario, but without the chance of random outcomes because all will have been foreseen enough to be accounted for in the manufacture of the clock and the timing of the winding. He will know when people will ask for Him to help, and when they won't He will know who is sincere in their asking, and who is just vainly going through motions, all ahead of time. In essence there is no such thing as coincidence or random choices that God won't already know about, as evidenced in 1 Nephi 9: "Wherefore, the Lord hath commanded me to make these plates for a wise purpose in him, which purpose I know not." That wise purpose was because God knew that Martin Harris would eventually loose part of those records, as both Martin and Joseph Smith would play a part in, in a series of asking and praying trying to get a different result from God, and God allowing both of these men to learn a lesson, so He changed His answer, not because of a different chess move type of scenario, but to teach with love, with a perfect plan already planned for in advance. It illustrates God's omniscience here and that God knows us all so well that nothing is left to chance by allowing us to each have a free agency still, God is never taken by surprise.

As far as allowing for suffering here on Earth, that seems totally unfair. I think if we too were omniscient and had the eternal perspective God has, the bad things experienced are far outweighed by the good that will come out of all the pain and suffering.


These are my opinions anyway, and I am not omniscient myself so perhaps God can be taken by surprise, not knowing the outcome in advance as a master chess player does, knowing enough possible outcomes to counter each and every one of them, but it sure does kind of seem like God would be kind of like the Dutch boy plugging up the holes in the dam with his fingers as ever more and more keep popping up.

Edited by waveslider
Misplacement of words
Link to comment
57 minutes ago, HappyJackWagon said:

I appreciate the attempt but just because knowledge is power doesn't mean all power is knowledge. I agree that the difference between omnipotence and omniscience is semantic. Of course it is. They're different words so they have different meanings :)

Can God use His knowledge to create matter ex nihilo? Does he act in the physical world at all? If he does, not only is power derived from intelligence but also from the physical. If he doesn't act physically, then I guess I don't see much value in His physical body. The knowledge (omniscience) may inform how he interacts with eternal laws, but it doesn't override a need to act physically.

 

Good question and I will explain it as well as I can in this brief space

This actually probably requires having read several books on philosophy that probably you have not had a chance to read.   Not everyone is into this stuff and I know i am weird

Your question presumes a difference between physical reality and thoughts and knowledge.  This view was put forth famously by Descartes and is called "Cartesianism"

This view has been debunked in the last 300 years or so of philosophy because the distinction between "physical reality" and what we KNOW about what we call "physical reality" cannot be sustained.

What we "know" is the best we can do.

I learned this from a great Kant scholar named Robert Solomon as an undergrad at UCLA.  You can look him up if you like.   He later wrote textbooks on this subject.   Here is a quote from one of his textbooks- warning it is not an easy read:

(And the transcription is not very good either)

Quote

 

To use one of Kant's examples, my perception of a house from various perspectives could not be considered a perception of a HOUSE (or any object) if the several expereinces constituting this perception were not unified or synthesized as various experiences (of the house), but my synthesizing these expereinces as experiences of a house.  Because expereinces alone can never give us objects, there can be no perception of objects unless there is a synthesis of the manifold of experience.  Moreover, because we never perceive simply, or experience simply, but always perceive or experience SOMETHING and because perceiving or expereinceing something depends on synthesis there can be no unsythesized experiences.  (We shall see this same major thesis become the central principle of Edmond Husserl's Phenomenology, the philosophy wich will gice a major impetus to the metholdootocial inovations of the twentieth century existentialists)p 18 [-And also Pragmatism- MFB]

Because a synthesis cannot be foound in experiences themselves, it must be imposed on them by the Understanding.  Kant thus agrees with Hume that our expereinces themselves never include experience of a necessary connection between experiences, but that these connections are always added by us.
"We cannot represent to ourselves anything as combined in an object which we have not ourselves previously combined".....

p 19

Transcendental arguments do not argue what the world is like but what it must be like because of the rules to which any experience and any knowledge of consciousness must conform.  As soon as Kant claims that any world of which we are conscious must have this for he has not simply added a new metaphysical theory to philosophy, but he has changed the entire character of the philsolophical enterprise.  

Although Kant reamined bery much dualist continuously speaking of inner and outer expereinces of subjectivity and objectivity and of the world as it appears and the world-as-it-is-in-itself he succeeds in undermining the dualism on which is founded tradtional metaphysics and consequent problems of knowledge.  Rather than speak of the conformity of our knowledge to objects, he insists that we speak instead of the necessary conformity of objects to our knowledge.  In order to be known, an object has to obey our rules. [Bold by MFB] This is not merely a radical change inperspective, now taking the knower as primary rather than the known; it is a complete change in the very forulation of the problems of knowledge.  Kant would no longer ask whether it is true that the world as we know it conforms the the world as it "really is".  Because the world as we perceive it is in accordance with the a priori principles of the CRITIQUE, is the ONLY world we can know or about which we can intelligibly talk.  The world as it really is, if by thgat is meant a world independent of and pssibly different from the world we know, cannot be our concern.  For us, there CAN only be the world we know and this world is not passively constituted by our experiences but actively regulated by our understanding

 

Robert Solomon From Rationalism to Existentialism: the Existentialists and their Nineteenth Century Backgrounds
Rowman & Littlefield, Jan 1, 2001

Notice that all these boys coming out of BYU now are trained in Phenomenology!  Adam Miller, Mason, and others are students of Faulconer who is a phenomenologist.  THIS is the view coming out of BYU philosophically 

Furthermore, a few hundred years later we have this view of Rorty, which essentially says the same thing:

Quote


 " To say that the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include human mental states.  To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences, there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations.

     Truth cannot be out there- cannot exist independently of the human mind- because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there.  The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.  Only descriptions of the world can be true or false.  The world on its own- unaided by the describing activities of human beings- cannot."   Richard Rorty- Contingency Irony and Solidarity, P 5.

 

Humans- and God AS HUMAN organizes reality through our intelligence- we learned it from "Dad"!

So "physical action" becomes our bodies THOUGHT being translated to our muscles (this is not accurate but what is "really happening cannot be communicated) and our thoughts perceiving the reality we have created.

There IS no KNOWABLE distinction between our thoughts and reality or the "physical world".  Essentially we have thoughts altering other thoughts and perceptions.   I perceive that the "lawn is too long- it needs to be mowed".   I will do it now." 

That thought is translated to my muscles and I perceive what I know as a "can of gas" and put it into the gas tank, and "mow the lawn".   I look back and perceive that the lawn length is now socially acceptable and I am "pleased at my accomplishment"

These were all mental phenomena- as FAR AS WE CAN KNOW or TALK ABOUT THEM 

We cannot talk about anything that is not a mental phenomenon.

This point of view is now adopted by nearly all philosophers now.  IT CANNOT BE ARGUED AGAINST really except semantically- that the distinction is a semantic one.  But then ALL distinctions between the mental and physical drop out of the equation.   We have eliminated that distinction from the equation and talk about reality AS A MENTAL PHENOMENON.  Cartesianism is dead- it just doesn't work any more.
So now let's look at your question

Quote


Can God use His knowledge to create matter ex nihilo? Does he act in the physical world at all? If he does, not only is power derived from intelligence but also from the physical. If he doesn't act physically, then I guess I don't see much value in His physical body. The knowledge (omniscience) may inform how he interacts with eternal laws, but it doesn't override a need to act physically.

 

God's intelligence ORGANIZES "matter unorganized" just as Kant and Rorty suggest our minds create reality.  For God there IS no "physical world" independent of his "mental world"  His intelligence ORGANIZES just as ours does!  That is why it makes sense to speak of humans as "Gods in embryo" and is the strength of Mormonism.

Postulating God as human is a pure act of genius far beyond Joe Smith's ability to figure out.   It makes Mormonism perfectly in line with contemporary philosophy IF WE WOULD RECOGNIZE IT as such.

"Ex nihilo" doesn't even makes sense- there has to be something to organize.  Humans cannot even envision how ExN. works.   It is outside what our brains can envision.  It never happens to us.

"Acting physically" is indistinguishable from "acting mentally".   The difference I guess would be perceived muscular activity and perceiving the results of that activity,like mowing the lawn.

Yes we perceive gravity.  Things never fall "up".  On this postulate "natural law" are regularities in our perceptions.  What we call "the moon" is a regularity in our perception which can be calculated to the point we can go there and further our knowledge of the regularities of perception about what we perceive and name "the moon"

Of course we don't speak that way, and that is the illusion.

Think of astronomy.  All we know about the stars is perception of what they "used to be"  We cannot see them "as they are"

All of what we call "reality" is in that category- it is just that our perceptions are immediate of most of it.  Astronomy kind of brings it home because it is not in "real time"

Link to comment
43 minutes ago, waveslider said:

Omniscience would mean that absolutely every play in your proverbial chess game analogy, would already be known and no adaptation in play and strategy would even have to be made in order to counter balance an outcome. Omnipotent would be the ability to make the chess board and pieces in the first place, in your analogy. I personally think that God knows each and everyone of us so well that he already knows exactly what we will choose in any given situation, perfectly. That knowledge doesn't negate the free agency of those whom God knows so well as to know exactly 100 percent what they will do, even before those people know themselves. I personally don't believe that God can be taken by surprise, and that the chess analogy doesn't serve Him justice in the fact that He knows absolutely everything.

It's kind of like getting to know some of the people on this forum group. If I post something opposed to the common held belief in global warming, I will know who will respond to those posts, well before hand and it won't change their agency to post or not. I don't even know them very well either. Heck, some of them don't even have a picture of their face. If my knowledge was perfect, as God's is, then I would already know exactly when they would be posting their replies and what they would be posting, perfectly, before it was even done. An omnipotent God, would use His omniscience to place everyone when and were they need to be in order to make His ends meet, in a clock wound scenario, but without the chance of random outcomes because all will have been foreseen enough to be accounted for in the manufacture of the clock and the timing of the winding. He will know when people will ask for Him to help, and when they won't He will know who is sincere in their asking, and who is just vainly going through motions, all ahead of time. In essence there is no such thing as coincidence or random choices that God won't already know about, as evidenced in 1 Nephi 9: "Wherefore, the Lord hath commanded me to make these plates for a wise purpose in him, which purpose I know not." That wise purpose was because God knew that Martin Harris would eventually loose part of those records, as both Martin and Joseph Smith would play a part in, in a series of asking and praying trying to get a different result from God, and God allowing both of these men to learn a lesson, so He changed His answer, not because of a different chess move type of scenario, but to teach with love, with a perfect plan already planned for in advance. It illustrates God's omniscience here and that God knows us all so well that nothing is left to chance by allowing us to each have a free agency still, God is never taken by surprise.

As far as allowing for suffering here on Earth, that seems totally unfair. I think if we too were omniscient and had the eternal perspective God has, the bad things experienced are far outweighed by the good that will come out of all the pain and suffering.


These are my opinions anyway, and I am not omniscient myself so perhaps God can be taken by surprise, not knowing the outcome in advance as a master chess player does, knowing enough possible outcomes to counter each and every one of them, but it sure does kind of seem like God would be kind of like the Dutch boy plugging up the holes in the dam with his fingers as ever more and more keep popping up.

I think you are right, but not everyone can understand that.  They get confused by words

"If God knows everything then he knows what we will do.  That means we cannot do otherwise therefore there is no free will"

There are at least 3 errors there but who has all day to rehash old points?  I suppose that is all we do anyway 

Rather depressing actually.   I need a vacation- maybe a permanent one - from this place

It's great if you are new, but after the 100th iteration of the same argument it gets old.  And that is why I did not want to teach philosophy and here I am.  :wacko:

Link to comment
3 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

   I need a vacation- maybe a permanent one - from this place

Don't you dare.  ;)
I think we need the viewpoint of someone more traditionalist and conservative than the progressives and liberals. 
And someone more open minded, philosophical, and big picture viewing than the by-the-book policy hawk members.

Link to comment
1 hour ago, HappyJackWagon said:

I appreciate the attempt but just because knowledge is power doesn't mean all power is knowledge. I agree that the difference between omnipotence and omniscience is semantic. Of course it is. They're different words so they have different meanings :)

 

The key is knowing that different words do not "correspond to different things in the world" and that because we have a name for something that it is "real".

What color is virtue?   What is the color of cosmic rays"

Virtue has no color even though we can formulate a sentence asking the question.   Even though cosmic rays are identified as part of the electromagnetic spectrum we cannot perceive their color so it is nonsense to even ask the question

These are analogies for nonsense questions.  We can dream them up all day.  One is how we get three beings in one "substance".  That is a pretty famous one.  These are sometimes called "category mistakes.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_mistake

Link to comment
1 hour ago, JLHPROF said:

Don't you dare.  ;)
I think we need the viewpoint of someone more traditionalist and conservative than the progressives and liberals. 
And someone more open minded, philosophical, and big picture viewing than the by-the-book policy hawk members.

What about publicly conservative, inwardly fundamentalist, political social democratic members who wax theological despite their general dislike for philosophy?

Oh, and someone whose currently doing a study through Handbook 2, but finds big picture doctrines and principles therein. :P

I guess what I'm trying to ask is...who am I???????

Edited by halconero
Link to comment
  • 9 months later...
On 8/11/2016 at 0:03 PM, mfbukowski said:

Can non-members have their sins forgiven through the atonement without being a member of the church? (without being baptized?)

The question seems to me to obviously be "YES" without question, and I am sticking to that.  THAT is my belief and interpretation of doctrine and I am not likely to change it unless the spirit testifies otherwise to me

It seems to me that the atonement is a requirement for the ordinance to even exist, that Christ said to the thief that he would be in paradise, obviously without baptism, and we have other instances of Christ forgiving sins without baptism.

Because John Williams made the assertion, and we often do not get along, I will avoid further comments- I have made my opinion known.

Here is a link to one of the assertions made:

http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/67921-disciples-of-christ-or-disciples-of-church/?do=findComment&comment=1209650942

I suppose this will inevitably end up being about ssm, but I really would like to stay on the topic of whether or not baptism is a pre-requisite for having sins forgiven through the atonement

THAT is the question I am interested in

I lean toward your description, mfbukowski.  But I believe that, ultimately, all the ordinances are necessary to be saved in the Celestial Kingdom (see D&C 138) hence the Gospel being preached in the Spirit world, and Temple work.

My mortal experience is that the Holy Ghost testified to me that Jesus Christ lives and has taken my sins upon Himself, independent of any church.  That knowledge, and the influence of the Holy Ghost, changed my life and began the process of removing my desire to sin.  I consider that a "Born Again" experience common to many faiths.  I also understand our LDS emphasis is that Baptism is the Born Again experience.  To me, both are real.  Both are true.

I know many people of other faiths whose lives have been transformed by faith in Jesus Christ.  So I believe the work will be done partly in mortality for most people, and partly in the Spirit World.

Link to comment
10 hours ago, Meerkat said:

I lean toward your description, mfbukowski.  But I believe that, ultimately, all the ordinances are necessary to be saved in the Celestial Kingdom (see D&C 138) hence the Gospel being preached in the Spirit world, and Temple work.

My mortal experience is that the Holy Ghost testified to me that Jesus Christ lives and has taken my sins upon Himself, independent of any church.  That knowledge, and the influence of the Holy Ghost, changed my life and began the process of removing my desire to sin.  I consider that a "Born Again" experience common to many faiths.  I also understand our LDS emphasis is that Baptism is the Born Again experience.  To me, both are real.  Both are true.

I know many people of other faiths whose lives have been transformed by faith in Jesus Christ.  So I believe the work will be done partly in mortality for most people, and partly in the Spirit World.

Yes I agree with that, and as I read my own comment now a year old I was thinking of temple baptism etc.

We are the only church that is consistent in that area I think, both that baptism is required, being reborn is required and we have provided a mechanism for all who never have received those ordinances to receive them.  No one else has that.

For me, ordinances are tokens of a covenant, they are the line in the school yard we need to step over to be on the team, they are the handshake to get us into the club. They are active memory devices in time and space that marks a change which is spiritual, an event that makes the change concrete.   That's why marriage is not just "a piece of paper" even if it something that happens in a court house, it is the effort to make a public statement that we hereby declare to the world that we are now one flesh.

And we are here to serve the "least of our brethren" and who is among the "least" but those whose names have not been uttered for hundreds of years?  To declare to them that they are not forgotten, that they too are among God's children is not only an affirmation for them but for us as well, in demonstrating leaving the 99 and going after the 1, perhaps crying in the wilderness of the spirit world.

So all I say can often be taken on a literal level, as this comment has been, but the philosophical point is usually underlying it all, as was the comment to which you replied.  I often stick to what I see as the philosophy behind the doctrine but I mean to include the doctrine in it as well.

Link to comment
Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...