Interventionist God or Non Interventionist God?

[paradox3]

If we talk about Harry Potter, then Harry Potter has intervend in our lives. What you're saying can be applied to any fictional character, immediately becoming a "presense".

More truthfully, JK Rowling and the authors, translators and editors of the bible still have a presense.

I know you are being silly but you sound more like some United Church people than you know.
We must be rubbing off on you.

 

[chansen]

That was dead serious. Here is what Dave wrote:

Hi Pilgrim's Progress, The point I am making is that the very presence of God, or the concept of God is interventionist. We are all sitting at our leedle keyboards and devices talking about God. God has intervened in our day just by her presence...

It's a similar argument to something I remember blackbelt or airclean using, to do with me supposedly believing in God because I write about God.

But that concept makes every fictional character real in that sense. Hey, if Christians want to put God in the same bin as Harry Potter, I'm not the one to stop them. But the point is serious, even if I use humour to drive it home.

 

[PilgrimsProgress]

Came across this song in a movie. I like it. It speaks of not believing in an interventionist God-but knowing others do. Well worth a listen.

We Aussies stick together - Nick Cave is an Aussie who just happens not to believe in an interventionist God also.

 

[PilgrimsProgress]

Exactly. While "divine intervention" is often taken to be direct action like miracles and burning bushes and the like, the mere act of God communicating with humanity through any means for the purpose of advancing God's purpose is an intervention. Process, if anything, proposes a God who is very actively and constantly intervening in the world, just not normally in a way that is directly visible as being God since it consists of inspiring other beings to action rather than of acting directly.

Process Theology is a relational theology. God is in relationship with the world, not the controller. As such, God grieves with us when we grieve. God's aim is for the common good, where love reigns. Sin is the thoughts and actions when we fail to love. God needs us just as much as we need God, as God's power resides only in unconditional love. God works with us to bring about the common good and never gives up on luring us to that purpose.

I'd like to stress that Process Theology isn't my faith - it's a framework for my faith. As such, it leads to a more loving way of relating to God and other people. It talks to me about the optimum way to relate to others.
Also, I have felt God's nudges, lures, often in my life. Initially fear has often prevented me from responding, but God has never given up on me and when I've ultimately found the courage to respond it's given me peace of mind.

 

[Mendalla]

God is in relationship with the world, not the controller

Right, but by being in relationship, God can't help but be intervening. God may not be in control, but God is definitely taking action. "Luring" is still intervention.

 

[Neo]

We are a reflection of the Mind of God, albeit a dim reflection at times. This "image" we are, is also "self-aware", which I believe is an important concept to realize.

Intervention from God occurs as much as we want it to. Awareness of God is like a seed deep within us.

 

[Dave Henderson]

Of course then you're left with the concept that God chooses not to intervene quite a bit. What do you do with that?[/QUOTE


Or the concept that God chooses to intervene based on his knowledge and wisdom. I know, it doesn't answer Rabbi Kushner's Why do bad things happen to good people question. That is the real question...

 

[unsafe]

Worth the Read -----

http://www.aish.com/ho/i/48961526.html ---

The Silence of God

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The Silence of God
"Where was God in those days?" asked the pope. Here's a possible answer.
byJeff Jacoby
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"Where was God in those days?" asked Pope Benedict XVI as he stood in Auschwitz. "Why was he silent? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil?"

It is the inevitable question in Auschwitz, that vast factory of death where the Nazis tortured, starved, shot, and gassed to death as many as a million and a half innocent human beings, most of them Jews. "In a place like this, words fail," Benedict said. "In the end, there can be only a dread silence, a silence which itself is a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, didyouremain silent?"
News reports emphasized the pope's question. Every story noted that the man who voiced it was, as he put it, "a son of the German people." No one missed the intense historical significance of a German pope, on a pilgrimage to Poland, beseeching God for answers at the slaughterhouse where just 60 years ago Germans broke every record for shedding Jewish blood.

And yet some commentators accused Benedict of skirting the issue of anti-Semitism. The national director of the Anti-Defamation League said that the pope had "uttered not one word about anti-Semitism; not one explicit acknowledgment of Jewish lives vanquished simply because they were Jews." The National Catholic Register likewise reported that he "did not make any reference to modern anti-Semitism."
In truth, the pope not only acknowledged the reality of Jew-hatred, he explained the pathology that underlies it. Anti-Semites are driven by hostility not just toward Jews, he said, but toward the message of God-based ethics they first brought to the world.

"Deep down, those vicious criminals" -- he was speaking of Hitler and his followers -- "by wiping out this people, wanted to kill the God who called Abraham, who spoke on Sinai and laid down principles to serve as a guide for mankind, principles that are eternally valid. If this people, by its very existence, was a witness to the God who spoke to humanity and took us to himself, then that God finally had to die and power had to belong to man alone -- to those men, who thought that by force they had made themselves masters of the world."
Hitler knew that his will to power could triumph only if he first destroyed Judeo-Christian values.

The Nazis' ultimate goal, Benedict argued, was to rip out Christian morality by its Jewish roots, replacing it with "a faith of their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful." Hitler knew that his will to power could triumph only if he first destroyed Judeo-Christian values. In the Thousand-Year Reich, God and his moral code would be wiped out. Man, unencumbered by conscience, would reign in his place. It is the oldest of temptations, and Auschwitz is what it leads to.

"Where was God in those days?" asked the pope. How could a just and loving Creator have allowed trainload after trainload of human beings to be murdered at Auschwitz? But why ask such a question only in Auschwitz? Where, after all, was God in the Gulag? Where was God when the Khmer Rouge slaughtered 1.7 million Cambodians? Where was God during the Armenian holocaust? Where was God in Rwanda? Where is God in Darfur?

For that matter, where is God when even one innocent victim is being murdered or raped or abused?

The answer, though the pope didn't say so clearly, is that a world in which God always intervened to prevent cruelty and violence would be a world without freedom -- and life without freedom would be meaningless. God endows human beings with the power to choose between good and evil. Some choose to help their neighbor; others choose to hurt him. There were those in Nazi Europe who herded Jews into gas chambers. And there were those who risked their lives to hide Jews from the Gestapo.

The God "who spoke on Sinai" was not addressing himself to angels or robots who could do no wrong even if they wanted to. He was speaking to real people with real choices to make, and real consequences that flow from those choices. Auschwitz wasn't God's fault. He didn't build the place.

And only by changing those who did build it from free moral agents into puppets could he have stopped them from committing their horrific crimes.

It was not God who failed during the Holocaust or in the Gulag, or on 9/11, or in Bosnia. It is not God who fails when human beings do barbaric things to other human beings. Auschwitz is not what happens when the God who says "Thou shalt not murder" and "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" is silent. It is what happens when men and women refuse to listen.

 

[Dave Henderson]

That was dead serious. Here is what Dave wrote:

It's a similar argument to something I remember blackbelt or airclean using, to do with me supposedly believing in God because I write about God.

But that concept makes every fictional character real in that sense. Hey, if Christians want to put God in the same bin as Harry Potter, I'm not the one to stop them. But the point is serious, even if I use humour to drive it home.

Hi Chansen, My point remains valid. I wasn't trying to use the fact people are talking about God as a way to prove that God exists. I was showing that God has intervened in all our lives, at least passively, by our talking about him today. Whether you believe in God, the concept of God or deny God altogether, the fact remains that you took it upon yourself to discuss God today - several times. Therefore, God has intervened in your life several times. You could have chosen to talk about Harry Potter, or Justin Trudeau, or Donald Duck. The fact is, you chose to talk about God. I'm not saying that Donald Duck is real because his character intervenes in someone's life. And I'm not saying God is real because he we are talking about him. We can argue the existence of God some other time. The question in the thread is, Is God interventionist? The fact God is a topic of conversation means that, at least passively, she has intervened in our lives.

 

[chansen]

Hi Chansen, My point remains valid. I wasn't trying to use the fact people are talking about God as a way to prove that God exists. I was showing that God has intervened in all our lives, at least passively, by our talking about him today. Whether you believe in God, the concept of God or deny God altogether, the fact remains that you took it upon yourself to discuss God today - several times. Therefore, God has intervened in your life several times. You could have chosen to talk about Harry Potter, or Justin Trudeau, or Donald Duck. The fact is, you chose to talk about God. I'm not saying that Donald Duck is real because his character intervenes in someone's life. And I'm not saying God is real because he we are talking about him. We can argue the existence of God some other time. The question in the thread is, Is God interventionist? The fact God is a topic of conversation means that, at least passively, she has intervened in our lives.

You can not be serious. This is awesome. You're actually going to argue against my point and make my point at the same time.

I'm not sure if I should try to rebut your post or thank you for it.

 

[BetteTheRed]

@unsafe, that whole article completely whitewashes the culpability of Christianity's inherent anti-Semitism in the Shoah.

 

[chansen]

Who takes unsafe seriously at this point anyway?

 

[Mrs.Anteater]

Hi Mrs. Anteater, I mentioned the website in this thread only as a quasi-humorous response to a post by Chansen. Having said that, I certainly don't want to become an irritant regarding the United With God campaign. I pledge myself to ensure that I do not.

Hi Dave,
Sorry, posted this to the wrong thead, it was the other one that sounded like you kept repeating the same thing over and over..
But I guess, one can call it commercials, others call it evangelism.

 

[Mrs.Anteater]

You can not be serious. This is awesome. You're actually going to argue against my point and make my point at the same time.

I'm not sure if I should try to rebut your post or thank you for it.

As a Harry Potter fan, I can only say: Harry will live on forever ! (Together with Elvis, Donald Duck and so on- not sure about Justin)

 

[Dave Henderson]

You can not be serious. This is awesome. You're actually going to argue against my point and make my point at the same time.

I'm not sure if I should try to rebut your post or thank you for it.

Hi Chansen, how many times have you taken time out of your day to talk about God? Several that I know of. The more you post, the more God has intervened in your life.

 

[Dave Henderson]

Hi DaveSorry, posted this to the wrong thead, it was the other one that sounded like you kept repeating the same thing over and over..
But I guess, one can call it commercials, others call it evangelism.

Hi Mrs. Anteater, No problem...just out of curiosity, I looked up the definitions of"commercials" and "evangelism." The concise definition of commercial is an advertisement to gain revenue. The definition of evangelism is preaching of the gospels. Given that my United With God campaign proclaims the gospels and has cost me money rather than made me money, it fits the definition of evangelism.

 

[Dave Henderson]

Who takes unsafe seriously at this point anyway?

Hi Chansen, I'm sure unsafe has made some valid points here, your disagreement notwithstanding. He should, as WonderCafe2 requests, be treated with courtesy and respect.

 

[chansen]

Hi Chansen, how many times have you taken time out of your day to talk about God? Several that I know of. The more you post, the more God has intervened in your life.

I agree that the authors and the translators and the fans make discussing Christianity fascinating to me. But the popularity and personal fascination doesn't make it true, no matter how much you wish it would. And most people here get that. They may have other reasons for believing it, but they realize your argument is a dead end.

But if it helps, I bet unsafe is totally on board.

 

[chansen]

Hi Chansen, I'm sure unsafe has made some valid points here, your disagreement notwithstanding. He should, as WonderCafe2 requests, be treated with courtesy and respect.

"She," technically. Still, I admit she's handy if you want to be reminded where in the bible to find the whole speck vs. plank in eye bit.

Seriously, she has had a tough road. She has shared enough to make me realize that. But I can't respect the prosperity gospel she espouses. Which is why she gets no traction with her attempts at persuasion here. Hence my comment.

 

[Dave Henderson]

I agree that the authors and the translators and the fans make discussing Christianity fascinating to me. But the popularity and personal fascination doesn't make it true, no matter how much you wish it would. And most people here get that. They may have other reasons for believing it, but they realize your argument is a dead end.

But if it helps, I bet unsafe is totally on board.

• One more time Chansen, I'm not using the idea of passive intervention as a tool for belief. As for most people here realizing my argument is a dead end, that is complete conjecture on your part. For someone who is so insistent on empirical evidence, you're awfully quick to throw out terms like "most people" without a clue as to whether it's true or not. Now I know I'm going off-thread, but regarding my beliefs in general being a dead end, perhaps we could talk about the big bad world out there and evidence that is empirical. A major university study released this summer shows Christian churches who have a strong connection to God are growing and churches with a weak connection to God are declining. Maclean's magazine published a very interesting article on the study. The basic equations are not difficult: Christian Faith Community + God = Growing Faith Community. Christian Faith Community - God = Declining Faith Community. Of course I'm sure you'll just dismiss the folks in the growing churches as weak-minded lunkheads, not at all capable of reasoning and intellectual thought and fooled by hocus pocus. That there may be thoughtful, intelligent, intellectually astute Christian believers out there doesn't seem to be something you can accept. But it's true. And I'm not just trying to score points here. But what I can say with certainty is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, fully revealed in Jesus Christ, resonates with people. It always has. It always will.