Craig’s first two recent questions raise question (2) of this thread’s stated agenda.
2a. [Craig:]  “An all-powerful god should not require worship, unless he had an ego.”

God is the ultimate universal Self or Ego who created all other egos and God experiences reality both through those egos and independently of them.  No insecurity or loneliness is implicit in the claim that God requires or desires worship and the Bible never makes such a claim.

2b. [Craig:] “Why does God need worship?”

`Need’ means “a lack of something useful, required, or desired.”  To claim that God needs love (= PUL) or worship implies that there was a time when there was no intelligent creature to love or worship `Him’.  But there is no justification for the claim that God ever lacked a created universe or intelligent companions.  The Genesis creation story implies the existence of intelligent life prior to the creation of our universe (1:26).  God is love and love is relational; i e. love expresses a relationship between A and B, C, D, etc.  So love cannot be real without both lover and beloved. Some New Agers imagine that PUL floats in etheric realms like a mist that can be exhaled or an energy that can be projected.  They act as if this PUL energy is independent of its creator-lover rather than an intimate expression of `His’ essence.  The inextricable lover-beloved  connection naturally prompts the assumption that God whose essence is PUL desires love to be expressed to `Him’ or rather to manifest in an intimate bonding with `Him’. Worship is just another term for loving God.  But in an intimate encounter with God’s Spirit, one typically experiences fear in the sense of reverential awe and inadequacy due to a humbling awesome distinction between Creator and creature.

2c. [Craig:]  “Why would God need worship to heal you?”
Nowhere in the Gospels is worship a prerequisite for Jesus’ healing.  In fact, Jesus rarely even urges those He heals to become His disciples after their healing, though some do for obvious reasons. Kathryn Kuhlman was a gifted Christian faith healer whom I’ve observed a few times in person, It was commonly recognized that non-Christians were just as likely to be healed as Christians in her spectacular services.          

I now turn to Craig's other recent questions.
[Craig:] “How can god judge...the things which he could not have experienced?  For He has never been mortal.”  

God is both omniscient and the very ground of our being.  Of course, He can experience what we experience from our limited point of view.  In the person of Christ He has “been mortal” and has experienced all our temptations and human limitations as a human too (Hebrews 3:15)..  

[Craig:]  “But it was god’s fault for not giving them...the opportunities in life, to give and receive the good things which earn us brownie points?”  

According to the New Testament, we can’t “earn brownie points” with God (Ephesians 2:8-9).  From the perspective of our vast universe, it is absurd to imagine that relatively insignificant creatures like us earn or merit divine favor. Salvation is by grace, not an earned reward for worship.  Therefore, your  question "Why would an omnipotent being... require worship in exchange for a pleasant afterlife?" misses the New Testament's point.

[:Craig:] “Does God punish so easily?”

We punish ourselves by unconsciously choosing postmortem company which is just like us. According to Jesus, God is in effect saying: “OK Craig, I have no absolute standard of justice.  So you will be judged by the standard you apply to others (Matthew 7:2).  For example, if you deem it satisfying to seek revenge, you’ll find yourself in a plane where the inhabitants find satisfaction in taking revenge against you.  

[Craig:] “Really sounds like a dictatorship, and what kind of all loving, all powerful god would act in such a manner?"

You aeem to think that your Creator should feel really fortunate to cater to your every whim. God can create any creature He wants for any purpose He wants.   But He is no dictator.  You can choose to ignore Him, in which case, He’ll respect your wishes and ignore you until you learn your lesson. God is love.  So if you choose a permanent lifestyle of separation from God, you will learn what it's like to live apart from divine love.  .  You can create your own essence, but. just remember, the essence you create will destine you to a heaven or a hell with other souls with the same core personality.  In the spiritual realm  communication is telepathic; so you cannot keep your thoughts or essence private (Luke 12:2).  

[Craig:] “Magic arts?...What kind of arts?”
In the ancient Mediterranean world magic arts would include magic curses and spells intended to harm others.  From the perspective of Revelation 22:15, it is irrelevant how effective these black arts are.  What affects one’s postmortem fact is the intention to hurt others.

Don

(3) THE PROBLEM OF NATURAL EVIL AND THE
     SEEMINGLY UNFAIR DISTRIBUTION OF PAIN

3a. [Craig:] "God must want us to suffer...Why would God allow you to be injured in the first place, and then heal you?"
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God doesn't want robots.  To God the value of our free will is a function of the strength of our inclination to make choices that alienate us from Him.  This insight is the basis of the mystery of spiritual warfare.  Only God knows how strong this contrary inclination needs to be to maximize the value of our freely offered love.

Why didn't God create a world without pain, suffering, and hardship?  Because without these, there would be no pain-dependent virtues.   Courage requires danger and risk.  Compassion requires suffering.  Generosity requires want.  Patience requires frustration and nerve-wracking delays.  And who are we to say that a moral order would be better off without courage, compassion, generosity, and patience in God's eyes?

3b. [Craig:] "Earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, famines, disease, random accidents, the suffering of children and babies, the suffering of innocent people as a result of things that are beyond their control.  These are natural evils...These things are not punishment for poor judgment.  Therefore, God is immoral."  
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John celebrates Christ as God's Logos (John 1:1, 14).  This Greek term is usually translated "word", but it really means the rational self-expression of God as opposed to God in His unknowability.  God makes it clear that His ways and thoughts are very different than our ways and thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9).  God is in effect saying, “Beware of excessive anthropomorphism.  Realize that the father/child analogy has a very limited application to my relationship with people."  Practically speaking, we should limit our claim that God loves us to what God has done for us in history (e. g. sending Jesus) and what God promises to do for us in both this life and the next.  Still, if God willed Hurricane Katrina or the recent Asian tsunami, then any claim to His loving character is open to serious challenge.

But I don’t believe God willed these natural disasters.  It is well known that the Bible teaches that at creation God brought order out of primordial chaos.  What is less known is this:  the Bible also teaches that God has never gained complete control over the forces of chaos.  The Bible is not a scientific book.  Its teaching about chaos is a poetic way of saying that God set the laws of nature in motion at creation, but does not micro-manage the operation of those laws.  Chaos has nothing to do with the demonic. Apparently the Creator’s penchant for free creatures beyond His control requires a universe that He does not completely control.  Ecclesiastes 9:11 is a good example of this biblical teaching about chaos: “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor favor to the skilful; but all are victims of time and chance (Ecclesiastes 9:11).”  At the same time, God reserves the right to empower us to fulfill aspects of our destiny and to mitigate the destructive power of chaos (blind chance) through prayer, faith, and love.  Thus Paul can insist: “We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him (Romans 8:28).”  Notice the implication that “all things” might be working against us, but that God is “plugging away” for the good, trying to salvage a wonderful purpose from often horrid disasters that He never intended.  

This role of chaos in Nature dovetails neatly with a philosophical rationale for the seemingly unfair distribution of pain.  Suppose pain were fairly distributed on the basis of merit.  No one would have any incentive to make selfish or evil choices because they would then pay the penalty.  Suppose instead that pain was evenly distributed.  Then no one would have a strong incentive to choose evil since it would make no difference in terms of pain avoidance.  In our world, choosing the good often involves great sacrifice (e. g. our troops in Iraq) and hence unfairly high amounts of risk and pain.  When pain is unfairly distributed, the inclination to make self-serving choices is greater and so the value of freely offered sacrificial love greatly increases.  Besides, if pain were fairly or evenly distributed, then God's existence would be most strongly confirmed.  We would worship and serve God more out of a sense fear and self-serving duty than out of love groping after God in the darkness of spiritual ambiguity.  

A Russian parable eloquently illustates this point.
An eccentric king wanted to get married.  So he disguised himself as a peasant and wandered the countryside searching for the right girl.  His troubles began when he thought he'd found her.  Her father wanted his daughter to live a good life with a financially secure husband.  He saw little in this peasant to command his respect.  But the peasant king was determined.  He worked as a farm hand for minimal wages and continued to woo both father and daughter.  Finally, his charms won both over and Dad agreed to the marriage.  

In making the marriage arrangements, the king was then forced to disclose his true identity.   Dad was incensed: "Why didn't you make your true majesty immediately apparent?  I would have deemed it a privilege to grant you my daughter's hand."  The king replied, "Yes, and you would have been too intimidated to make a free decision.  You would have approved out of being overwhelmed by my rank and resources.  I wanted a family to love me for my character masked by poverty to make its core stand out in sharp relief.  So it is with the hiddenness of the courting God in this world.  

[Craig:] "God can't love all His children equally, as it says in the Bible...Why would god heal one person and not everyone?"
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The Bible teaches that God "does not show favoritism (Acts 10:34)."  But this means neither that God loves all His children equally nor that God loves some people more than others.  Divine love is not quantified in this way.  It is better to say that we are all unique and God expresses His love for each of us uniquely.  Though the Bible does not teach reincarnation, it does imply that our souls exist prior to birth (e.g. John 9:1-2; Jeremiah 1:5; and especially Wisdom of Solomon 8:19-20).  None of us know how this brief life fits into the big picture of our preincarnational and postmortem lives.  

Craig asks, "Why would god heal one person and not everyone?"  In an sense, (3b) above already answers his question.   Clearly, people seem to be assigned different exit strategies and that means that each us reaches a point when we cannot be healed.  Beyond this, Paul in effect poses Craig's question in 2 Corinthians 12:7-9.

If ever there is a man you'd imagine is God's special darling, it's Paul.  He does more to put Christianity on the map than the 12 apostles combined.  And yet, his missionary work is merely a hobby practiced while he supports himself as a tent maker.  Paul is puzzled by an unidentified physical affliction--his "thorn in the flesh"-- which plagues much of his ministry.  Most scholars think Paul had serious eye problems in addition to an acute vulnerability to malaria.  In 3 prolonged prayer sessions, he pleads for divine healing.  After a long delay, his petition is denied with this answer: "My grace is sufficient for you; for my strength is made perfect in weakness."  It dawns on Paul that his infirmities help check his potential for conceit over his "surpassingly great revelations."  He recalls that his illness became the instrument of blessing for the pagan Galatians who were kind enough to nurse him back to health and, in the process, formed a church as a result of his testimony (Galatians 4:13-14).  In God's eyes, then, physical infirmities can be the catalyst for extraordinary humility and inner beauty.

Finally, I'll address 3 of Craig's other issues posed in  his last post.

a. [Craig:] "When I say ego, I'm using the definition an exaggerated sense of self-importance."
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Ego in your sense properly applies to peers.  God has no peer.  How could the Ground of Being who is infinitely great, powerful, and knowledgable ever exaggerate His sense of self-importance?

b. [Craig:] I don't see how 1:26 ["Let US make man in OUR image."] implies any creatures before us."
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"The plural "us" is neither a literary "we" (another way of saying "I") nor an allusion to the Trinity.  The doctrine of the Trinity is unknown in the Old Testament.  In any case, the Trinity refers to 3 images of the one God, not to "3 guys" who might engage each other in conversation.  So most commentaries speak of a pre-creation heavenly council.  This case is analogous to the poetic Job 38:4, 6: "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation...and all the sons of God shouted for joy?"   Are these "sons of God" angels or creatures like us from prior universes?  

c. [Craig:] "When god was mortal, did he know what it's like to have no legs?"
______________________

Good point!  God's identification with our human estate (= Jesus) allows Him to assume our limitations; but it is not entirely comprehensive.  Still, there is no reason why an omniscient God could not experience our limitations through our egos and gain total empathy that way.

Don

Morning Don,






If a car engineer, built his own car - and it broke down should he not be able to fix it? Should'nt god be able to fix his own planet?

Praying to god, does'nt seemingly do nothing for anyone. 15,000 people prayed for 1 woman with cancer, and she still died.
If god made the earth, then it's his fault for natural disasters, and therefore god is the direct cause of many peoples pain.
If there's a fault with an aeroplane and it ends up killing half it's passengers - it's the companys responsibility to make compensation. If god did exist, he would have massed quite a debt. To which i never seem him pay anything back.

If god, gives to those whose worship him, and also gives to those who dont, why go to church? why read the bible? follow his rules? you are just wasting time, doing these things for god - does'nt give you peanuts. Would you give a stranger 1000000 million pounds/buck, in exchange for a promise written down on a peice of paper?











I believe it could be possible, for a god - to sap our memory's of an event, but the interpriters overlay affect always occurs. God would judge based upon infinite wisdom, is it possible to understand the limitations of a lower species? could you understand the pain a cockroach feels by being stepped on? even though you are greatly smarter, then it, you cannot understand - what was occuring from the confines of it's brain.

Have a good day
Craig

Ive gotta go to bed, im shattered - i'll reply tommorow don.

Toodaloo

[Nje:] "With true omnipotence, why must pain be required for his conscious creations to exist a certain way?"

Nje, I'm confident I'm speaking for Craig when I say that your contributions are welcome.  But please follow Craig's combative example and address my arguments point by point.  I've already answered your question in detail in reply #32 (3a and 3b).

By the way, how did you get the A-word past the censor gods?  Even my slightest vulgarities are often censored in a manner compelling an overly sensitive Berserk to do penance.

Don

Courage and compassion is worth all that suffering?

You haven't experienced real pain if that's what you think.. otherwise, you've got a pretty disturbed point of view as far as my opinion's concerned.  This is how flamming here always starts, someone's point of view is so alien to another's, when they give their opinion of it, it's seen as an insult.

I think we're just not going to see eye-to-eye on this, so I'm going to go my separate way here, much like Jews, Islams, Hindus, Christians.. have all realized the same of each other and go their separate ways.

in my judgment, people who love themselves less - do more to help others. thus the statement of 
Quote:

is not greatly based upon fact, a recent program about overweight woman was on tv the other day, a woman had a stomach band fitted, and she lost alot of weight, when she was fat she was a super mother, great wife - after she lost the weight, she was a bad mother, bad wife, cared only for herself.




while i agree, virtue's require pain- we should have free will over how much pain one is allowed to suffer - a life of nothing but pain - is a waste.

we would have morals without god, we did so for thousands of years before he decided to show his face, we will do long after the idea has left our minds. morals, are based upon 30% instinct 70 percent education, we are but mearly programmable machines, and the basic software[instinct] is slow changing, while education is fast.

if i saw an animal injured on the street, i would take it to the vets, the way you describe god, he would walk by the animal just so the animal could know what prolonged suffering is, and he would repeat this situation with the same animal time ang again, this to me - is not a lesson it is a punishment, and if a god allowed this to occur - he/it is not worthy of any worship, this is what my instinct/education tell me, that my morality is far higher then gods, if he/it existed.



proper moral order, whos morals? gods? if god cannot fully control the planet, why would he risk his children by sticking them here, and offer them not 1 bit of help, thats what i would call a very bad parent.

you make god sound arrogant, why should he not create an existance, like ours? because it's wrong, lifes not fair - we dont all have equal oppertunitys. if you look at it from that view point, why dont they stick micheal shumacker 1 metre from the end of the race, while everyone else has to start at the begging?

i could create different existances, for say rats - is it not wrong that i chop of one set of rats hands and feet, just so i can see what happens when there forced to squirm about?



when i said peer, i ment it as a judge - like a hamster judges it's owner by how much food it is given etc, if i thought god existed - i would judge him purely based upon what he's done for me/what he has'nt done for me, based upon his power of influence.



point 1 can be dismissed for as you said yourself - the christian god is not omnipotent in the meaning of all power, all knowing etc. thus he can be exagerated.
point 2, god wants worship, yet he shows no love in return, if i do something for god, should he not give me something back, which currently he does not, such a relationship in my oppinion is bogus and not worth entering.



you see im not sure about this, god as his christianic omnipotent self - would have our views tainted by his power, even if he could split sections off from himself, eventually the knowledge would have to go back to the whole god, and based on all that knowledge/power you would be judged.

Don, you wrote:
*****************    
I now turn to Craig's other recent questions.
[Craig:] “How can god judge...the things which he could not have experienced?  For He has never been mortal.” 

God is both omniscient and the very ground of our being.  Of course, He can experience what we experience from our limited point of view...
*****************
Don, you've "stepped in it" again. You remind me of some guy wearing a blindfold, walking barefoot through a poorly-maintained dog pound...
You once told me that "God" CAN be surprised by our behavior - that is, "he" didn't KNOW that Joe Blow would be a hellbound sinner before "he" created Joe Blow. Therefore, "God" is not to blame for the sins of Joe Blow.
But if "God" is omniscient (there YOU go with the "Greek" concept, what's up here???) then he KNEW Joe Blow would be a sinner and was destined for "Hell". By any stretch of logic then, "God" is responsible for Joe Blow's sins and/or crimes. An OMNISCIENT God is therefore AT FAULT for our "sins", Don!
Once again, you got tangled up in your own arguments and lost your CONSISTENCY. Why? It's tough to be consistent when you're trying to CANDY-COAT your true beliefs... which you've been doing, face it.
So let's see you weasel out of this one. OR at least admit what you TRULY believe, which is THIS...
Here we go -
"God" is so infinitely superior to us, because he CREATED us. Thusly, we are his possessions, to do with as he pleases.
Since we are his possessions, he has a right to TRASH us if he pleases, just as we have a right to smash up our own cars if we want to. (It makes no difference that we are fully capable of suffering (uinlike a car!), God is ALL-POWERFUL which places him above our moral judgement. POWER IS THE FOUNDATION OF "RIGHTEOUSNESS." The better a stomper you are, the more righteous you are.)
And we mere humans have no right to complain, because MIGHT MAKES RIGHT. All other arguments are trivial and frivolous.
We can't kill "God."
But "God" CAN kill us.
That's the foundation of Desert Monotheist/Yahwist morality... the BETTER KILLER IS ALWAYS RIGHT. Whether in Christianity, Islam, or Orthodox Judaism. Thus, we must grovel and cower and offer to lick "God's" boots (i.e., "worship") because he can squish us like little worms if we don't.
And THAT is the foundation of "morality" - SLAVISH, GROVELING OBEDIENCE. Deal with it."
Why don't you just come out and ADMIT it, Don? I could at least respect that. But no, you insist upon beating around the bush. Why?

B-man