Gabriel... I remember when you sought to learn peace. I remember urging you for it. I remember trying to help you with it.

And I see you throwing it all away, here...

You need to lighten up on people. Like has been mentioned before, you know how easy it is to make a mistake or to trust the wrong person at the wrong time. Case in point: Windner.

I'm well aware of how Frank talked down to me, and if I really thought it needed to be addressed, I could've addressed it, myself. I have thicker skin than I once did. If he wishes to judge me unworthy of his attention because of one little (slightly running) joke, it's his choice. If he can't lighten up, and if he always talks down to others, well, then, we know him by his fruits, don't we? But even knowing the quality of man he is, we still have to put him ahead of ourselves... Instead of lashing out in the anger I know runs in abundance in you, just ignore him. Find better things to occupy your time.

You mentioned taking in one of the local kids once, and named him Adam... Did you name him after Adama? Why don't you spend more time with him? I know I don't spend enough time with my kids...

I guess what I'm saying is, chill out and relax. This is the Internet, and neither of us have a way of getting to him to check him out right now... So just keep an eye on him, and stop feeding this senseless chatter. Natasha said it pretty eloquently, I think.

I just thought this needed saying... I've had a long day, and want to get some rest, soon...

Gabriel wrote:Skeptic: I really could not care less about him, his convictions, or what happens to him. Right now, I'm just fucking with him for the sake of fucking with him. It passes time, it's amusing, and he's letting me get to him.

Except that you're not getting to him.
You're just feeding his delusions.
Which makes him more dangerous.
Yes, you have made him more dangerous.
Keep on joking right up to the point he butchers a child. You're doing great so far.

KonThaak, I'm not sure how thick your skin actually is, if you think Frank's talked down to you.

Since when is not saying “shit” a hallmark of piety?

Yes, I read the whole thread. I simply pointed out where you were wrong.

If you can't see how you're making him more dangerous, I'm not sure I can explain it to you.
In Frank's mind everything is a test of faith.
When he passes each test, his belief that he can do no wrong strengthens.
As his belief he can do no wrong strengthens, he becomes more dangerous.

It was said that jokes would be at his expense.
Frank responded that they would not be at his expense.

KonThaak spoke as if he was more knowing that Frank.
Frank disagreed.

If you understood how Frank's mind works, you would realise that he was not accusing Joshua of accusing God of being a deceiver.
Frank has through some introspection claimed that he knows it is God talking to him and he knows that God will not lie.
Any suggestion that someone else could be talking to Frank falls on deaf ears.
And since Frank scarcely mentions God without adding praise, it's only natural that Frank praises God's honesty.

Frank clearly has little use for canned responses that don't actually respond to what he says.
Frank clearly has little time for wikipedia education and arguments. And I can respect that.
But the biggest mistake that Joshua made was to pretend that one's faith can be queried with logic.
Frank understands that is impossible, and so Frank doesn't bother to try.

Who was talking down to whom?

Frank keys off of words like “nervous” and has trouble realising that different people are talking to him.
At times it's as if he thinks you, KonThaak, and Shang Li are simply just one person.
And it's not that he think you are they are wicked.
He just went off on a tangent.
It's just how Frank's mind works.

Misunderstanding what somebody says or having a bruised ego is not the same thing as being talked down to.

If you don't like Frank's responses, you should take that up with him.
Not with me.

And...

Gabriel wrote:Even if my statement was intentionally exaggerated, there was most certainly arrogance and self-righteousness involved.

Then I suggest that in the future, try to cut down on the exaggeration, as well as the arrogance and self-righteousness.

Huh. I'm surprised at Sebastian.

Not because of his response, it's pretty typical of him... and not necessarily a bad thing I'm learning.

But because he let my self-reference as a 'greater evil' pass.

Sorry Sebastian, I probably shouldn't refer to you as though you're not able to read this. Or as though you're not able to talk to me face to face.

Gah, that probably came out wrong too.

It was noted for later, yes.

And you're not evil.

skeptic wrote:It was noted for later, yes.

I promise not to kick and scream this time.

Gabriel, Skeptic, both of you, please stand down.

It's done. It's dealt with. Skeptic, Gabriel has some problems with anger. Throwing this sort of thing in his face is like throwing gasoline on a fire to put it out. At best, without intervention, you can expect that which you wish to stop to get worse. At worst...well, you'll get caught up in the fire you tried to stop. I was dealing with it.

Gabriel, I *just* talked to you about going easier on people... Do you really want to pursue this?

Skeptic, there were barbs in what was said to me. I understood what Gabriel was talking about; that's enough. If a man walks through brambles wearing a leather trench coat, he doesn't feel them...but if he acknowledges they are there, does that mean he's hurt by them? No. I acknowledge that Frank's responses were barbed, but I'm not hurt or offended by them.

I claim to know more than Frank because I've worked with angels before, and I have a pretty decent understanding of what's going on...though you seem to have a much deeper grasp of Frank's broken mind than could be expected from just what's been posted here. Out of curiosity, have you worked with such people before? The extent of my experience is just working with standard fundamentalist Christians, and almost all of his responses have been completely in-line with what a standard fundamentalist would argue. The mixing Shang's, Gabe's, and my own responses, and treating us all as if we were basically the same person, making responses that twist the speaker's words (I know you claim they aren't, but if they aren't, then you must admit, they're worded in such a way that they certainly seem to be), and assume that whatever is said must not apply to them, if they can't immediately see the relevance.

Whether he's broken as you think, or just a fundamentalist following the voice of some other force, he is still mistaken. He does not love; he hates, and does not realize it. I know this to be true, because I have seen it all too often, and seen people open their eyes to it all too seldom.

I do not believe that Gabriel had much of an impact on him, either which way. Anything that Frank is willing to do at this point is something he would've been willing to do prior to this. He did not make the man "more dangerous"... At the worst, maybe he hastened things, but if so, then it was only a matter of time.

Also, for the record, sir, I did not "pretend" that one's faith can be queried with logic... It can, and it does, on a daily basis. It is how mine has become so strong.

Gabriel, unless you have something constructive to add, please try and refrain from responding to this thread anymore...

I don't get caught up in anything I don't want to.
And I do not throw things in people's faces.
What I do is get them to be honest and face their issues.

You only assume that his words are barbed.
There's a perfectly reasonable explanation why they're not barbed.
That means you're taking them personally, even if you claim to be armoured from them. That's irrelevant.

Apparently Frank has worked with angels, too, and has a pretty decent understanding of what's going on.
His word against yours, I guess.
Why should I believe you?

I've worked with people for decades, and while I haven't seen it all, I've seen plenty of the lot of you.

Again, the words are only twisted if you take them personally and not for what they are.

Who does Frank hate, incidentally?

How do you query the illogical with logic?
This, I admit, is a favoured question.
The responses are always entertaining.

If you see religion as illogical, then no response can be given to your satisfaction. However, I say it need not be illogical. Since junior high school, I've been finding ways of reconciling what I've learned of the universe with what I know of my faith. What I've gotten from it is a lot of questions, a lot of hypotheses, and a deeper understanding in general of the world around me.

For instance, pagans from around the world have taken auras for granted for anywhere from centuries to millennia, and the rest of the world scoffed...but none scoffed so much as modern science. Now, we have devices which allow us to photograph a person's aura at that precise moment in time. Science claims it is NOT an aura, though, just a rather colorful electromagnetic field given off by all living creatures...but is that necessarily different? Until now, we've had no real scientific definition of what an aura is. Perhaps, now we do.

In addition, science has shown that a person loses "weight" at the time of death... "Weight" is the measurable relationship between mass and the effect of gravity on that mass. If mass does not change, then we ought to look to the effect of gravity. After all, if a body ceases producing electromagnetic energy, or an "aura", then it stands to reason that perhaps that electromagnetic aura has something to do with the effect of gravity on our bodies. The overly pious call this situation "the weight of a soul", and maybe they're right, in this manner. Indeed, it could be that the aura contains the Potential Psychic Energy that Victor Lazlo spoke of, which would explain why psychics who can see auras can tell if a person is possessed of magical or psychic abilities.

I was raised as a Christian, but my parents pulled me out of church because they didn't want my brothers and me learning about God's love through God's hate. We lived in Kansas, and there were a lot of hellfire-and-brimstone preachers there at the time...but my parents never did find a decent church to take us to that would teach us to their satisfaction. My so-called "friends" at school told me that God would send my parents to Hell because they stopped going to church, and that they were dragging my brothers and me down with them...and though the Bible supposedly has a great deal of instances of God's "wraith", it was logic that pointed out the issue with that.

If God is a parental figure to us all, then we are all the children of God. It is stated that God is eternal. Therefore, our entire lifespans pass in the blink of God's eyes... What loving parent would cut out the tongue, cut off the hands, tear out the eyes, burn, brand, and torture their child for all eternity, because the child failed to take a bath in a terribly short amount of time? Or ate cookies before dinner? Or fought with their siblings? Or in some other way disobeyed their parents' orders? If I did that to my children, I'd find myself in jail, whereupon the guards would turn their backs so that the other inmates could see to it that the justice system wouldn't have to waste any further time or money on me.

Speaking of my kids, when I became a parent, I realized that one of the biggest and most important jobs of parenthood is to see to it that your children become self-sufficient. While there may be exceptions, in general, if any of your children grow to physical adulthood but still need you to take care of them (barring, of course, mental ailments and issues), then you, as a parent, have failed. If we are God's children, then mankind could be seen as growing. Our understanding of the universe has progressed just as a child's understanding of the world around them progresses as they grow older. So if we truly are the children of God, then it stands to reason that we should try and be independent of our parent. This doesn't mean we shouldn't love Creator, or stop speaking to it altogether, but it does mean we shouldn't try to rely on it for every little thing. This is a sentiment that's echoed in the phrase "God helps those who help themselves"... Yes, I am aware that this is not a biblical quote, but it makes sense.

It's been told to me that because Creator is all-powerful, it can do as it pleases. Indeed, if it created the entire universe, then it stands to reason that it could, correct? But let's take a look at this. Every religious person I know is quick to say that our morality comes from God...but there are many atheistic philosophers who can rationalize why it is "right" or "wrong" to do this or that, and lo and behold, much of their rationalized morality falls similar to the non-religious ideologies of Christianity...such as that murder and theft are still wrong. With the philosophers' rationalized morality, though, they have more of a reason than just "because God said so". If, as the religious claim, morality comes from God...then could it not be that our moralities are hardwired into our brains? If the point of our specie "growing up" is eventually to become strong enough to stand on our own, would it not stand to reason that morality is something that DOES have a rationalization behind it? After all, we teach our kids that it's "wrong" to hit, and when they're three years old, we expect "because I said so" to be enough...but when they're five or six, we can start explaining that hitting hurts the other person, and if we don't like to be hurt, we shouldn't do that to others. A rationalization exists, but we don't burden someone who can't handle that rationalization with what it is, exactly.

Stay with me on this point a moment longer, if you would, please... Going back to God being omnipotent and omniscient, I'd like to add "the source of morality", though on a standpoint of being more than just "because God said so". If God is, indeed, the source of morality (and logic, according to Frank), then we must assume that God is not a hypocrite. Once God creates a law, God is bound by those laws--not because God is limited, but because God chooses to abide by those laws. After all, we do not respect--and, indeed, we punish--those who are in power and abuse their power... For a recent real-life example, there's a Chicago police officer who's currently on trial for the suspected murder of a number of his wives, all of whom were originally shown to be "accidents"...and the man is a forensics investigator. So if we punish or otherwise fail to respect authority figures who do not follow the laws they are supposed to uphold, what good is a heavenly body who abuses its power? We can learn NOTHING from such a being...and so I say to you that God obeys the laws of the universe, by choice, if nothing else.

If God is omnipotent and omniscient, and created the universe, then it's easy to believe that it was just a fingersnap for God to do it...but according to Genesis, it was quite a toil. (I've been told that if you look at the original Aramaic, the word we translate as "days" is actually something more along the lines of "period of time"...) If it was a toil, then it's easier for me to believe that modern science's understanding of the Big Bang is extremely likely, and that at the Big Bang, the laws of physics were "written". Once those laws were in motion (pardon the pun), God was honor-bound to adhere to them...and that means that in order to make humanity the thing it is today, then certain natural progressions had to follow, including the formation of hydrogen nebulae, the births and deaths of stars to release matter other than hydrogen into the universe, so that we could have enough accretion material to create a planet that was so amazingly volatile that it could actually generate life...and then that life had to progress from a basic single-celled organism to many multitudes of complex multi-cellular organisms...and from there, into more complex creatures...until you finally end up with computers and televangelists.

Now keep this in mind for a minute... For eons, whenever a natural disaster has struck, people have bemoaned that it was "God's will" (or the will of the gods, or whatever). Even today, insurance companies label damage caused by natural disasters as "acts of God". Many people think of these natural disasters as "evil", or associate them with "God's wraith, striking down the wicked"...but if God is a moral agent, who created a world where we COULD survive, then does it not stand to reason that the natural disaster just happens because it had to, and the way people support each other after the disaster is the true act of God?

I've been writing for quite some time...and I'm still nowhere near done. ALL of this conjecture was gathered through introspection and philosophy, and measuring and weighing what people attribute to "God" to what I know about "God", and have shaped and re-shaped my beliefs and attitudes for 16 years, now. If I make a statement that I'm pretty certain of, you can take it for granted that I've put a great deal of thought into it.

One last thing... My father-in-law made a statement that I very much agree with. "I can conceive of a universe without God... I choose to conceive of a universe with God."

God can go to hell.

Religion being illogical has nothing to do with me and everything to do with being illogical.
In order for it to be queried with logic all premises must be true.
But we can't validate the first one.

KonThaak wrote:One last thing... My father-in-law made a statement that I very much agree with. "I can conceive of a universe without God... I choose to conceive of a universe with God."

Was your father in law Anselm of Canterbury?

I had a few other questions I asked, too, but that's ok.

And now, so I'm not guilty of doing what has been accused of others...

skeptic wrote:I don't get caught up in anything I don't want to.
And I do not throw things in people's faces.
What I do is get them to be honest and face their issues.

But you are quite blunt about it. Do keep in mind, please, that we have only text to communicate with. We cannot hear the nuances in your voice. Your words can come across as sharp when you do not intend, and can carry implications you did not realize...and it cannot be called a "misunderstanding" if you say "the pot is black", and then later say "Well, what I MEANT to say is this..." What's been said has been said, and whatever meaning came along for the ride is a "failure of communication". It is the fault of the poster, not the reader, if the message was flawed.

Furthermore, why concern yourself with the actions of others on the Internet? Why is it so important to you that Gabriel face his issues, but not Frank? For if you truly believe Frank is dangerous, as you claimed to Gabriel, why not confront him about it? This could be another failure of communication, but this seems a bit hypocritical to me. You want people to face their issues...when you want them to?

You only assume that his words are barbed.
There's a perfectly reasonable explanation why they're not barbed.
That means you're taking them personally, even if you claim to be armoured from them.

There's also a perfectly reasonable explanation why they *are* barbed: If he is not a sociopath, then he is a fundamentalist, and the way he spoke was intentional. I need not take it personally to recognize when there is implied slight.

You said it's irrelevant, so let's move along.

Apparently Frank has worked with angels, too, and has a pretty decent understanding of what's going on.
His word against yours, I guess.
Why should I believe you?

Is his understanding truly that decent?

You shouldn't believe me. You should question me. You should doubt me. You should weigh my arguments. You should consider. You should debate me. You should come to your own conclusions.

I have done these things, to the best of my abilities. Just because I have, doesn't mean you should, too. I'm not even demanding that Frank believe the way I do; I'm only asking him to question the motives of that which gives him the demands it makes of him. He seems to refuse to do this, choosing blind faith over anything else, and so I cannot help but to be concerned over where this will lead him.

Apparently, you do, too, or you would not be so harsh when telling Gabriel he is "making Frank more dangerous".

I've worked with people for decades, and while I haven't seen it all, I've seen plenty of the lot of you.

Honestly, Skeptic, I do hope this is another communications failure... For one who is eager to tell me I am finding barbs where there are none, I find "the lot of you" to be a phrase that sounds almost condemning.

Take the advice I gave to Gabe: Loosen up. Lighten up. Enjoy life, as much as you can.

Again, the words are only twisted if you take them personally and not for what they are.

Words are a faulty means of conveying ideas. They can carry connotations, implications, condemnations, insults, kindness, compassion, love, hate, well-wishings, happiness, sadness, or any number of other emotions...but it is the job of the communicator to invoke those emotions. A communicator who cannot convey the message he wishes with words alone should learn to find different ways of saying what he wishes to say.

"It is raining" is a neutral statement.

"The rain cascaded down in a gentle deluge, soaking the earth with its life" says exactly what the previous statement did, except now it's spun in a positive light.

"The cold, wet deluge poured down from the leaden sky like suicide planes into an enemy ship" also says the same thing, but conveys the communicator's utter dislike for the weather.

You, yourself, said that Frank has sociopathic tendencies--not in so many words, but what you describe--as well as how he describes himself in his stories--fits that personality type. If this is the case, then his communication skills are likely lacking, and who's to blame if what he says comes across as being barbed? You wish to blame me because a faulty communicator conveyed an insulting message that I shrugged off?

Who does Frank hate, incidentally?

That depends. If he's just a fundamentalist Christian, he hates everyone who believes differently than himself. If he's a sociopath, he hates everyone in general, but suffers them until God tells him to kill them. Most immediately, he hates Gabriel, and he probably isn't terribly fond of me, either.

How do you query the illogical with logic?
This, I admit, is a favoured question.
The responses are always entertaining.

I've already answered this, and I'll give you a chance to respond.

EDIT:

I see in the time it took me to type this up, you responded.

As far as Anselm of Canterbury is concerned, I would imagine my father-in-law has probably used his arguments before, yes. I am not, at this time, familiar with any theological works of his that mention my father-in-law's quote. As far as I am aware, there is an atheistic argument that just simply states, "I can conceive of a universe without God. Therefore, I do not believe." My father-in-law was simply refuting that argument, and others of its ilk.

In all seriousness, I tend to think I do a pretty entertaining re-telling of Biblical passages. Remind me to relate some of them to you, sometime, if you're interested! I get quite a few laughs, usually.

I understood it.
You didn't.
It's not flawed, you just didn't understand.

Since Frank's first post I have hired an investigator to search for him.
I am not more concerned about Gabriel, he's just more accessible here.
For instance, he responds at all.
I have tried to contact Frank, to no avail.

Yes, there are two reasonable explanations.
You chose one of them for a reason.

Frank has already said that he has undergone intense introspection and all that.
You seem to think he's refusing to do something that he does on a regular basis.
Checks and affirms his faith.

I'm not going to debate irrational things with you, or anybody.
That's not my job.

Be sure to not confuse honesty with condemnation.

I am loose and I am having fun.
Just because I take care of business, doesn't mean I'm not loose and not having fun.
This has been hashed out on this site already, no sense going over it again.
So let's just say that you can keep your presumptions to yourself.

In other words, you don't know what's the source of Frank's troubles.
Yet you presume to know that he hates somebody.
Yet you still can't say who precisely.
Although there's plenty of speculation and presumption.

I'm sure I'll find your re-telling as entertaining as I have found Frank's.

It's getting late. I need to talk to Nemesis

Good luck helping this one, skeptic.

Frank is not the only one to have claimed angelic visions and callings here on these boards.

It makes me think of something else.