>Q: Can God create a stone He cannot lift?
>
>A 1: yes. Therefore God cannot lift the stone and is thus not
>omnipotent
>A 2: no. Therefore God cannot do something and is thus not omnipotent
>
>And so neither of the /rational/ answers are acceptable if God is to
>remain omnipotent. That's why a Christian must answer thusly:
Well, a traditional Christian anyway. I'd tend to answer 2. No. 1. Because
that makes God less impotent than than 2. :-)
This is one of those issues I don't bother to concern myself with. I think
the omnipotence issue was borne of MGCBUYG authority thinking. Kinda like a
bunch of school kids...
"My God is twice as strong as your God."
"Nuh-uh! My God is three times as strong as your God."
"Well, My God is two times infinity stronger than your God!"
"Rats! I should have thought to say that..."
>> Radical Progressivism? Socialism? Also to ancient Eastern religions (since
>> that's where I stole the idea from, basically).
>
>I just got the classic book on Zen out of the library... gimme a week or
>so and I'll see.
Zen is Buddist. I think I got the idea from a branch of Hinduism. The
concept was kind of a wild meme that hit me and I'm not real sure where it
came from, except the guy formulated God & people like this:
"All of the Universe is God playing a game, and each person is part of God.
It's just that some people have gotten so involved in the game that they've
forgotten they are actually part of God. The wisest people are the parts of
God that remember what game he's playing."
>The way I see it, the paper and his mind actually /are/ two
>individuals. I know when I'm writting that if I leave it for a while
>and come back it seems as if someone else has written it... and then
>those written meme's act on me as if from an outside source. But
>something that's even deeper than that is so called "level 3." Since
>last night, I've been thinking about it some more, and have decided that
>there are actually /two/ different things contained in my message of
>last night. First, there is "level 3" which is "meme space flexing on
>the fly" As I see it, this would be like having the ability to have two
>conpletely differnet "level 2" personalities with different memes and
>switching between them. I can do this. But what I can't do is acheive
>the higher level where I am aware of /both/ of these views at once and
>understand that they are different sides of the same truth. So if you
>like, the writer in the forest is actually composed of different "level
>2" people and the meme's act between these "people"
>
>> BTW: Thanks for de-lurking.
>
>My pleasure.
>
>ERiC
>
>"The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being
> said." -- Peter F. Drucker
>
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John Williams ICQ Address: 1213689 prefect@tricon.net
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Various Artists: Raising the Tide of Mediocrity for Two Years
http://www.3wave.com/~prefect/