Fence Sitter wrote:KevinSim wrote:Someone is only obligated to define what a term means if the people listening to her/him don't already understand what the term means. We wouldn't even be having this discussion if you, me, and everybody else on this forum didn't think that open, honest discussion was a good thing. People say that what good is needs to be defined, but it really doesn't. After all, saying that the term good needs to be defined is nothing more than saying that it would be a good thing if that term were defined. Does any serious poster respond to something a troll posts? What is a troll, other than someone who is not working toward the good of everyone else? On the other hand, if someone is a genuine poster, people are glad to post in response to the things s/he says. So are you really going to assert that you don't know what the term good means, and you need me to define it?
We have been down this path too many times. Good is such a relative term, that while we all have some general concept of what it means, when it is inserted into your phrase "preserve good things forever", it becomes meaningless. You cannot define what that term means or why anyone else should accept what you mean by it.
For example, do you believe God is going to preserve the imbalance between men and women forever? Many within the church see that as a good imbalance while many do not? Is it good or is it not.
Is God going to preserve polygamy forever? If yes, is it a good thing or not?
Is God going to preserve one's sexual orientation forever? Why or why not, and which ever way you answer there are those who do not see that as a good thing.
This is a good argument for state's rights. By this logic, gay marriage should be legal in Colorado but illegal in Utah, since, as you say, good is such a relative term, and people in Colorado (let's assume) think gay marriage is good, while people in Utah think gay marriage is not good. But that's no way to run a nation like the United States of America. Its constitution provides a way for people in
any state to have certain rights, and I think that's a good thing (no pun intended).
Fence Sitter, your post seems to show a disregard for history, from ancient to more recent. While Bill Clinton was president, a majority of citizens of the United States thought gay marriage (just one example) was not good, but during Obama's presidency a majority started thinking it was a good thing. The idea of what is good evolves with time, and I see no reason to be pessimistic about the direction it's evolving; I would hazard the guess that the idea of what is good generally evolves in the right direction.
Sure there's still a lot of disagreement about what is good and what is not. My wife (and many others with similar views) thinks legalizing gay marriage is a bad thing because, noting it is legal now, she thinks many more youths now are going to experiment with homosexuality, and she sees
that as a bad thing. If there was that direct link, from legalizing gay marriage to those youths experimenting with their sexuality, then you'd have a point; there might never be a way to disentangle what is good from what is not, because classification of the act of those youths experimenting as good or not is just as controversial as calling legalizing gay marriage good is. But I think the evidence indicates that legalizing gay marriage
doesn't result in those youths experimenting. If the evidence continues to bear that out, then we may very probably have made significant progress in determining whether or not legalizing gay marriage is a good thing.
What I'm trying to say is the idea that we will never have a general consensus about what is good and what is not, is a gross simplification of the subject, and I don't think it's borne out by the facts. People who say item X is evil usually have a reason for believing X is evil; perhaps they say item Y will result from that. That might last for a thousand years, but in a progressive society someone is eventually going to try item X and then we'll all find out whether Y really does result from it or not. If it does or it doesn't, either way we've learned something, and we've made progress towards learning what is good and what is not. It certainly is not clear to me that we're going to spend the rest of eternity with the idea of good being as relative as it now seems to be.
I also object to your statement that "while we all have some general concept of what it means, when it is inserted into your phrase "preserve good things forever", it becomes meaningless." I
already gave you an example where we all agree in at least one specific case that it's not meaningless at all. I said if we didn't all agree that open and honest discussion was a good thing, then we wouldn't even be having this conversation. There probably was a time when open and honest discussion
wasn't considered a good thing. So we've made progress. I really don't see any compelling reason to believe that we won't make more progress in the future.
Fence Sitter wrote:There are no answers to these questions and a myriad of others like them in which "good" is universally acknowledged or understood by all. In the end "good things" are defined by you. So when claim a "God who preserves good things forever" you are claiming a belief in a God who preserves things you deem to be good which may or may not be thought to be good by others.
When have I ever said anything that indicated that what I meant by good were those things that I personally thought were good?
I have a question wrote:KevinSim wrote:I started off this thread stating that I believed in God and that I was still a devout Latter-day Saint, because I didn't want to give anybody a false impression by my questions about how solid the evidence was that Jesus of Nazareth had actually risen from the dead. I did not intend to argue that anyone should believe in God or that that God had inspired the LDS Church. (I could do that, but that was not the intent of this thread.) All I wanted to do was get some kind of perspective on what we know about what happened in Jersusalem in the First Century.
Thanks to a lot of you, I have gotten precisely what I needed on that subject. But, contrary to my wishes, this thread has turned into a pretty serious discussion on the subject of whether or not someone can know that God exists and, to a lesser extent, whether or not someone can know that that God has inspired the LDS Church.
I guess I'm just curious whether anybody has anything else to tell me about whether or not someone can know that Jesus rose from the dead. I don't want that to get drowned under all the other discussion.
The question about Jesus rising from the dead and the one about Gods existence are fundamentally the same. You believe both, there's no objective evidence for either, so now what?
Now what? Now I go back to the man who's telling me I should believe in traditional Christianity because of the evidence Jesus rose from the dead, and tell him that I'm not convinced that evidence makes the resurrection even likely, let alone decisively proven. Perhaps I will tell him why I think it makes sense to believe in God, even without any scientific proof that there is a God, and I will talk to him about LDS ideas for finding out whether Jesus rose from the dead, based on faith that God lives.