Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
Spookybot - Motivation
pwhodges:
--- Quote from: pecoros7 on 31 May 2018, 00:39 ---Jacques Derrida said "One cannot want God for a friend." God, assuming we are speaking of the "tri-omni" God of Abrahamic faiths, is a perfect being who is complete in themselves. They cannot experience lack because they do not want or need for anything. They cannot experience disappointment because perfect foreknowledge means they can never have expectations that are not met. They cannot experience regret. They cannot experience death or grief or surprise or fear or confusion. There is a vast array of human experience that God, by their nature, simply cannot share. Such a God could never relate to their creation, not would it have any reason to.
--- End quote ---
This completely misses the point of the Trinity. While God is complete as a whole, the persons of the Trinity, even while still being the essence of God, are incomplete, and thus able to experience the feelings of humanity. This experience is spelt out explicitly in the passion narrative in which Jesus, the Son, expresses pain at the sense of abandonment by the Father.
Storel:
--- Quote from: pecoros7 on 31 May 2018, 00:39 ---Jacques Derrida said "One cannot want God for a friend." God, assuming we are speaking of the "tri-omni" God of Abrahamic faiths, is a perfect being who is complete in themselves. They cannot experience lack because they do not want or need for anything. They cannot experience disappointment because perfect foreknowledge means they can never have expectations that are not met. They cannot experience regret. They cannot experience death or grief or surprise or fear or confusion. There is a vast array of human experience that God, by their nature, simply cannot share. Such a God could never relate to their creation, not would it have any reason to.
--- End quote ---
I remember reading something -- a novel, I think, but no recollection which one -- which suggested that God had that problem of not being able to relate to humans until They put Themselves into a human body, in the form of Jesus. Actually experiencing what it's like to be human was how the novel explained why the Old Testament was all "You shall Obey My Laws -- Or Else" and the New Testament was "God Loves All of You Unconditionally".
Might have been one of Anne Rice's books, maybe... probably Memnoch the Devil if so.
Dandi Andi:
--- Quote from: pwhodges on 31 May 2018, 00:58 ---This completely misses the point of the Trinity. While God is complete as a whole, the persons of the Trinity, even while still being the essence of God, are incomplete, and thus able to experience the feelings of humanity. This experience is spelt out explicitly in the passion narrative in which Jesus, the Son, expresses pain at the sense of abandonment by the Father.
--- End quote ---
I've drafted this response a few times. I'm trying to make sure I convey a tone appropriate respect for your beliefs. I'm afraid of accidentally stepping on your toes since I don't share those beliefs. Please let me know if I offend.
I appealed to Derrida's conception of God as unable to relate to their creation because I had hoped that it would be an accessible analogy for the alien nature of Spookybot. The doctrine of the Trinity may offer an opportunity for a divine being to understand human experience, but the doctrine is not universal to among those who believe in God. It is clearly not a part of Jewish or Muslim faith as they both reject the divinity of Jesus. It is also not a part of any non-Abrahamic monotheistic faiths. I think the analogy still holds in those cases.
But given the doctrine of the Trinity, the analogy can still work by looking at the relationship between God and humans in the other direction. Humans cannot comprehend the nature of the existence of a perfect God. We cannot comprehend omnipotence. Once "very powerful" becomes "allpowerful", we can no longer abstract our notions of ability far enough to encompass it. We suddenly fall into conversations about lifting rocks that can't be lifted or barbers who both do and do not cut their own hair. We also cannot make sense of the Trinity itself. The idea that God is both one and three simultaneously is one that has never been adequately explained even after hundreds of years of academic exegesis. The idea that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine seems to defy reason. At some point, the notion of a perfect divine being requires faith, because such a being is fundamentally unlike humanity. “'For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways,' declares the LORD. 'For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so My ways are higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.…'"
I hope that's as coherent as it sounds in my head...
pwhodges:
--- Quote from: pecoros7 on 31 May 2018, 22:20 ---I'm trying to make sure I convey a tone appropriate respect for your beliefs. I'm afraid of accidentally stepping on your toes since I don't share those beliefs. Please let me know if I offend.
--- End quote ---
Thank you for your trouble. I'm slightly embarrassed to have put you to it on my account, because I am not a believer myself, Christian or otherwise - some forum members are, though. I just happen to know plenty about Christianity because of my background and upbringing (some of my father's books are on reading lists for priests in Church of England training colleges, for instance).
I don't see any need for God's perfection (Trinitarian or not) to prevent knowledge and understanding of our feelings and experiences, though. If we consider omniscience as an aspect of God, there is no trouble in including that knowledge within their knowledge of everything - after all, what use is omniscience if it is not just that!
Comprehending the incomprehensible is a curious matter, and how the mind handles it is amazingly variable, not only between people, but for an individual in different areas of thought. We cannot "envision" infinity; and yet a mathematician can define different kinds of infinite number and study the relationships between them. I do not find the Trinity a particularly difficult idea to handle within the framework of religious thought; but my mind rejects any understanding of God, in whatever form, as a part of the world in which I live. And even though I know I have a mind, I find the nature of that mind incomprehensible while still believing it to exist solely within this physical realm. So seeing Spookybot as an incomprehensible being within the QC world is no problem to me.
Dandi Andi:
--- Quote from: pwhodges on 01 Jun 2018, 00:46 ---
--- Quote from: pecoros7 on 31 May 2018, 22:20 ---I'm trying to make sure I convey a tone appropriate respect for your beliefs. I'm afraid of accidentally stepping on your toes since I don't share those beliefs. Please let me know if I offend.
--- End quote ---
Thank you for your trouble. I'm slightly embarrassed to have put you to it on my account, because I am not a believer myself, Christian or otherwise - some forum members are, though. I just happen to know plenty about Christianity because of my background and upbringing (some of my father's books are on reading lists for priests in Church of England training colleges, for instance).
--- End quote ---
Oh thank goodness! I try to be very careful around matters of faith. When I post something about religious beliefs, I try to read it back to myself and ask "If, instead of writing this, I was reading this 15 years ago when I still practiced this faith, would I appreciate this?" The answer is usually a hard "no", so I am always worried I'm going to cross a line.
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