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Alabama lawmakers have voted 24-4 to allow Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Birmingham to establish a police department. The church has over 4,000 members and is also home to a K-12 school and a theological seminary with 2,000 students and teachers:
"After the shooting at Sandy Hook and in the wake of similar assaults at churches and schools, Briarwood recognized the need to provide qualified first responders to coordinate with local law enforcement," church administrator Matt Moore said in a statement, referring to the mass murder of 20 first graders and six teachers at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut by a deranged man with an AR-15 style rifle just before Christmas 2012. "The sole purpose of this proposed legislation is to provide a safe environment for the church, its members, students and guests." The church would pay the bill for its officers.
[...] "It's our view this would plainly be unconstitutional," Randall Marshall, the ACLU's Acting Executive Director, told NBC News. In a memo to the legislature, Marshall said they believe the bills "violate the First Amendment or the U.S. Constitution and, if enacted, would not survive a legal challenge." "Vesting state police powers in a church police force violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment," his memo states. "These bills unnecessarily carve out special programs for religious organizations and inextricably intertwine state authority and power with church operations."
(Score: 2) by marcello_dl on Thursday May 11 2017, @02:15AM (6 children)
> because you're implying this God does not, as it is stated, "know the end from the beginning."
Nope. In fact a god outside time sees/creates end and beginning and can have freely evolving things in the middle, all "in one go" (can't say at the same time, can we). But this is theology.
> to knock out inseparable fundamental attributes he has and needs in order to *be* God?
Still theology. There is no fundamental attribute of god other than transcendence, and that only because it is part of the modefinition. Immanence already is a theological matter.
> An omniscient being. Does. Not. Run. A simulation.
Read again what I wrote. "Let's say you run a successful sim". YOU, not an omniscient being. I do NOT NEED to imply that this world is a simulation by an omniscient god for my argument. All I need is to bring to the table ONE example that says it is perfectly doable to have consequences in the domain of the creator for the acts done in the domain of the created.
My impression is that you reply on autopilot, lumping together my ideas with those of others. For example, a self aware thing is like I am, qualitatively speaking. Yet the right of the guy who runs the sim to MAKE THOSE THINGS ENTER HIS OWN WORLD trumps whatever right they have.
But You were probably discussing the right of the sim things to keep existing. It is not there, if resources are limited, for obvious reasons. If resources are unlimited? Still there is no right. It is a privilege. If you think those things should be saved, since resources are unlimited, you can take a backup. Still it's a privilege conceded by your magnanimity, right? or a cruelty inflicted on all the other aware things, that will be affected by your decision, depending on the kind of simulation. Tricky, huh.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday May 11 2017, @03:09AM (5 children)
Just curious, is English your first language? There's something weird I can't quite place about your sentence structure that makes my brain squeak a bit trying to look at it.
Your bigger problem, though, is that you don't actually seem to be paying attention to anything that's being said to you. I am saying this for the fourth or fifth time now; try and get it through your head: any being that actually had the qualities or attributes necessary to be God would be the *only thing that exists.*
You seem to have trouble with this concept, as the last couple of times I brought it up you deflected with some irrelevant bullshit and went right on righting on. What are you not understanding about it?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 12 2017, @05:56PM (4 children)
#500092 already replied. Yours is a theorem. If god is X then does Y (or does not do it) because Z. I have already pointed out that the theorem is inapplicable from the POV because absence of time => absence of the same concept of causality we have. It is like the sim creature asking us how what kind of RAM is our world using.
Valid for theology. Cannot be formulated outside it. Also incompatible with Christianity but who cares. I am not a native English speaker too.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday May 12 2017, @06:35PM (3 children)
Er, no, it is not a question of time or causality. This is a simple definition of what it means to BE GOD. Perfection, complete aseity, and utter self-sufficiency entail that nothing else would ever be created. It has nothing to do with the flow of time or causality and everything to do with plain logic.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by marcello_dl on Saturday May 13 2017, @09:41PM (2 children)
> BE God
note "What it means to be god" is in the domain of meaning of the domain of god.
> entail
Entail is causality. But let's pretend it is not, you are likely not making your own theology but telling me the Christian one is inconsistent because perfection is (according to some ad hoc mental model which I could challenge if I had not already won) logically at odds with omnipotence. Now, remember the principle of no contradiction is invalid in one domain, like U={}, so our logic system is not universe-independent (which is banal if you think how it came to be). You call it a matter of definition, but you cannot "define" where the principle of no contradiction is not necessarily valid. Definition means separating A from not A. Such a separation needs the principle of no contradiction to be valid in that domain, which is not proved now nor likely provable ever. The end.
You are making theology dressed up as logic, and no matter how you keep calling it logic you don't make it so.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday May 14 2017, @04:14AM (1 child)
Hey, dipshit, I didn't say perfection is at odds with omnipotence. I said if a being is perfect AND self-sufficient AND possesses complete aseity AND transcends space/time/causality, nothing else but that being would exist. You have not "already won," you lost before you even started.
Thanks, by the way, for fatally undermining your entire argument; you are working from the assumption of the law of noncontradiction being invalid, which means instant game over for you as you can no longer say anything with any meaning, as anything you say may mean itself and not-itself at the same time. Jeez, you *suck* at this. This is *not* how you do apophatic theology.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by marcello_dl on Sunday May 14 2017, @08:02AM
> I didn't say perfection is at odds with omnipotence.
So could he create a reality external to him and consubstantial WRT him or not? your theorem, or application of definiton as you put it, says no.
> nothing else but that being would exist
you simply reformulated the theological "god is one". You do not deny creation, you deny a particular creation standing external and at the same level of god which is not part of christian theology.
Define existence. I did, experience is what you are doing right now, real is what can be directly or indirectly experienced, existing is what belongs to the set of real things. How does that apply to god? theologically only. What is real at one level is abstract in another.
> you can no longer say anything with any meaning.
I can, I do in fact, but: whatever I end up with has no meaning necessarily, this is my entire point. I am not putting forward ideas, I am defining the limits of others'. You want to sick with coding using maybe uninitialized vars? your choice. In the case of your theorem there are other problems in the code. Such as implying an imperfect world precludes a perfect and immanent god, but matthew 5 already offers a working model for it.