Two things today, (if I get to them; I'm waiting for Chowon to finish something and then we're gonna snuggle), Sheol and other religions.

I'll try to be brief about Sheol, because I want to get thinking about the other religions kick as soon as possible... (although that's a huge topic, so maybe I shouldn't attempt it until I have more time...)

Anyway there are a few key points on the Sheol topic.

The OT never mentions heaven or hell. It talks about "Death" or "The Grave" as a place (Hebrew "Sheol"). The OT has both good and bad people going to the same place: Sheol.

Aaaaand Chowon is ready...

[3 days later]

I'm finally not busy again! Time to finish this post!

hmmm... on second thought, I'll talk about Shoul later. Here are the primary verses I was planning to use: Luke 16, 1 Cor 15, Rev 1, Rev 20, 1 Peter 3, 1 Peter 4, and the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith.

Actually, I'm a little too tired right now to go into the religions thing also. I'll give sort of an introduction:

First of all, I'm operating on the underlying principle that absolute truth exists. I know that there are some people out there (and I've spoken with more than 2 of these in person), who do not believe in the existence of absolute truth. Eventually, if you probe enough, you find that they are willing to tell you that you're wrong about something, or that they would be willing to tell someone else that that person was wrong in a hypothetical scenario -- in either case, they've defeated themselves. If there's no absolute truth, then nobody is ever necessarily wrong about anything, because nobody else is necessarily right about anything. The a priori assumption that absolute truth exists is necessary for all cognitive functions.

Second, this thought experiment is based on the idea that truth is a full and complete system. Every truth is linked to every other truth. If you lie about something, then your lie is inconsistent with some truth, and so a worldview which contains your lie is not fully internally consistent. Therefore, every accurate truth is necessary to form the bigger picture of what is truly absolute truth. That operating assumption is demonstrably true, and is compatible with the Christian worldview.

I feel like a few caveats are necessary here. First, that you cannot therefore derive all truth from any truth, [for example, knowing that there is a table in my dining room does not enable me to deduce that there is a toaster in your kitchen]. Second, it is possible to believe a lie without thereby becoming unable to function for lack of a rational worldview. This is done, simply, by not considering the lie carefully, or by not knowing the truth that would connect the lie to the other parts of your worldview, [for example, I might believe that there is a man standing outside the window because of a shadow I see. In reality, it's not a man, but a tree; and in order for that tree shadow to have been a man's shadow, all manner of changes would have to have been made to the time leading up to now. Who is this man? Why is he there? Why is that tree not there in this scenario? What about the ancestor of that tree, from which the seed fell? Then what of the cat that recently died by falling out of the tree, and the effects of that on the timeline? Eventually, as these changes expand their scope, we find that this one lie makes full change of all knowledge. Indeed, the laws of physics may have to be different somewhere along the line, so that a seed might fall elsewhere or a sperm not reach its egg. All manner of things must change in order to compensate for the shadow being a man's shadow and not a tree's shadow, but I don't know the things in detail, I am not omniscient, so I may believe the lie until the truth is made known to me.]

So, the third point, drawing on the previous points and adding a new optimistic principle, is that by examining the truth we may identify why certain parts of it are irrevocably necessary for an internally consistent worldview.

At that point, what I intend to do is to re-examine God with this goal in mind, and to identify characteristics of God which make Him necessary for a functional worldview, and throw out some conceptions about God which would be incompatible with a functional worldview, (so that Christianity will have more well-articulated feet to stand on after it demolishes Atheism, or find itself a similar failure). I will not be unbiased in this endeavor, but I will attempt to be a little bit more careful than I was last time I attempted this.

"Over there is all the alcohol you can drink."