Predestination

me likey foundation and context.

 

mmm...okey dokey.

 

OWNED!

 

I suffer from partial depravity, unconditional election fever, limitless atonement for same, happen to be irresistibly graceless, and am against the Saints, which brings me into conflict with my Cajun brother-in-law.


Otherwise, I'm hunky dory, okey dokey?

 

The only solace of KateBeckinsale7 being drunk again is my mind's eye picturing the real kate Beckinsale drunk and wanting to talk drunken philosophy with me.

 

predestination? didn't you learn anything from these guys?

 

Congratulations, you win!

 

Sometimes, when I am driving to my grandmas, I like to mess with her. She is a predestinationist too. So when thinks I am coming over when she calls me, and I tell her I am going for a ride to see the sweetest old lady. Instead, I go to a strip club. She stopped calling a while ago. Maybe she is at a strip club too.

 

This is an interesting and potentially challenging Christian topic.

I’ve read most of the passages that are said to point to predestination and there is only one I that I find remotely convincing, the passage in Romans 8. But scripture must be read in context and it must be consistent with the rest of the Bible, and predestination the way we typically think of it is inconsistent at a fairly fundamental level with the rest of the Bible. Why would Jesus have called the disciples to be fishers of men if there was no possibility of them actually catching anything? So, while I’m not sure what the end of Romans 8 means, I believe I can find lots of other referenced that speak to the issue of predestination, and I see no convincing support for it.

More importantly, if you’re a Christian is shouldn’t matter one way or the other if someone else is predestined (it’s certainly not our job to judge who is predestined or not) and if you’re not a Christian the concept can be quite off putting. So my question is, what’s the purpose of such a belief with such a dubious foundation and that is at best essentially irrelevant to living a Christian life? I’m not suggesting that this is Kate’s position, but for some it can be an excuse for hard heartedness (in Christian terminology). It’s easier not have compassion for someone if you have the excuse that they are not one of you, that they are unredeemable. In this way the idea tempts Christians into making excuses for treating people in very un-Christian ways.

So, from my perspective the concept has an very dubious foundation and serves no positive, Christian purpose in any event, a fact that casts further doubt on its legitimacy.

 

I'm reading a great book on deja vu.

However, I can't shake the feeling that I've read it before.

 

I'm predestined to skip threads started by this cat.

 

And yet you posted?

 

Damn, Grizzled. You should post more!

 

Thanks Jeff. I’d like to but this place is so darn interesting that it’s just too easy to consume huge amounts of time getting into great discussions, so I have to be disciplined and manage my CF.net addiction.

 

Predestined, from this point on

 

I am a Calvinist too.

I believe in wearing ugly suits and fathering lots'o'children with lots'o'different chicks.

Thanks, I'll be here all week.

 

I tend to lean towards a Calvinist viewpoint as well. Essentially, it comes from tracking emotions of Paul like, "I could have never chosen You....too screwed up...it took some pull from you first."

But I'm not dogmatic about it. Not at all. Mostly because I can't explain it. If He's Alpha and Omega then He knows my "choices" well out ahead of time. I think the problem is we can't comprehend the infinite...maybe we can contemplate forever from this point forward, but I'm not sure we can contemplate an infinite existence before us. Anyway...I agree wholeheartedly that if this doctrine gets in the way of the love of Christ, then it's either misunderstood or inappropriate. I've never seen someone come to a relationship with God because they were so moved by Calvinism! But I think there is at least some kernel of truth to it.

Have you read Calvin's "Institutes", Grizzled? It's a good read. There's more than just Romans 8 to it. It deals with a God from the Old Testament who works with covenants and His chosen people, etc. And then carries that through Christ. Interesting read, anyway.

 

Nothing is created. Nothing is destroyed. It is eternal.

http://www.fm/7-sphere/eternal.htm

The 7-D Einsteinian Hyperspherical universe is eternal. It has no beginning and no end. As Stephen Hawking said so well: "The Universe just IS". Einstein himself said: "Time is an illusion".

From our frame of reference, time is anything but an illusion. We cannot even avoid describing the Hyperspherical Universe, except in reference to time! Yet we know that time ceases to pass at the speed of light. There are frames of reference in the universe where the universe, as we know it, can either be seen instantaneously in its entirety, or doesn't exist at all. There are parts of the universe, such as the antiverse, which are as real as we are, and yet cannot be seen, except indirectly by mass measurements, because of their unusual energy/space/time coordinates. My grandmother was talking about the 1990s some years ago, and commented that the 90s were "after her time". She was right. She died in 1971. She never heard of the 7-D hyperspherical universe but she had an intuitive sense that she had a special "place" in time. This is completely congruent with GR and QM.

Einstein's universe (to use a 1905 analogy) is like an eternal book with pages. Everything is just there. It is finished before it begins and like some huge computer chip or videotape, everything is preserved- including us. How is this possible? I am only describing a mathematical model, and, as we have seen, a well verified one: the model of Einstein. We live in a world of almost endless frames of reference, and the "chance" of Quantum Mechanics, yet the bottom line is fearsome determinism. We experience, and re-experience our lives endlessly without memory of previous excursions. Is this not the essence of virtual reality?

The essentially unchanging nature of the 7-D Einsteinian Hyperspherical universe is the key to its stability. The existence of the whole depends on each and every part. The universe according to Einstein is much like one of the later, lighter, gigantic cathedrals in Europe. It vaults to a peak in both corners of the universe, and it shelters all of our reality. Yet so sensitive is the whole of this vast entity, that one slight change in its construction could destroy it, in the same way that removing a single block from a cathedral could bring it down on ones head! In this light it is interesting that king David, circa 1,000 BCE, in Psalm 23 of the Judeo-Christian scriptures, describes the universe as "the house of the Lord"..."surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord- forever." (Read also Psalm 139!)

Paul Davies, Professor of Physics and Natural Philosophy at the University of Adelaide has perhaps detailed the fragility of our existence more than any living person. He describes the fantastic odds against such complexity arising from chaos and concludes in his masterpiece: "The Mind of God" that "we are truly meant to be here". Eternal existence is Einstein's answer, but still we sit under the shadow of the finite speed of light, and mass of the universe- and wonder.

"There are moments in mans mortal years when for an instant that which long has lain beyond our reach is on a sudden found in things of smallest compass, and we hold the unbounded shut in one small minutes space and worlds within the hollow of our hand..." -- H.B. Carpenter

 

I was a Calvinist, but then all those window stickers started appearing on the back of trucks with him peeing on stuff. Not cool.

I'm sticking with Hobbes now.