CheesyFox comments on God and Lucifer were chatting one day

[–] CheesyFox@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 2 hours ago (3 children)

if "omnipotent" doesn't mean "can do literally anything", then "real" doesn't necessarily mean "exists in our reality" either.

You can squirm and manipulate the terms however you'd like, just know that nobody in the right mind would take your words seriously if you do that. If a manual needs to be interpreted, it's a bad manual. Any religion is just a fiction, pretending to be non-fiction. Same kinda thing as horrors with "based on real events" tagline, just turned up a few notches.

If a fiction needs interpretation and head-canons to be coherent, it's a bad fiction. The Bible is just bad from a literary standpoint, fiction or non-fiction. Its authors failed miserably at portraying a being that is so potent, it created literally everything.

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[–] zloubida@sh.itjust.works -1 points 1 hour ago* (2 children)

I squirm nothing. The discussion about exceptions to omnipotence predates Christianity by several centuries. You can’t use a term without studying how people use it: words don’t have meanings on their own; their meanings are given to them by their users. And when a word has meant “maximal power” (and not “absolute power”) for at least 2500 years, you can’t reject that definition as illegitimate simply because of its etymology. That would be like refusing to call a smartphone a smartphone because it isn’t “smart” in the strict sense.

And the word itself doesn’t appear in the Bible at all.

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[–] CheesyFox@lemmy.sdf.org 1 point 32 minutes ago (1 child)

You see, I'm not refusing the definition you're giving. I say that using it, rather than the definition of the term people usually assume hearing it is misleading at best. In other words, what you're doing can be considered a demagogy.

Whether the term appears in the bible is immaterial to this discussion, because what the bible does, is it attempts at describing an omnipotent being, as said being creates the world, and then does some stuff that breaks the laws of physics and logic.

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[–] zloubida@sh.itjust.works 0 points 19 minutes ago

people usually assume

Words are polysemous. In all fields, most words have different technical and general meanings. When discussing statistics for example, it's normal to use “significant” with a different sense than when you're speaking about something else. I can say that a totally unimportant statistical result is significant. It wouldn't be demagogic, would it be? In philosophy and theology, omnipotence always had a different meaning than in the general population. But again, the chosen word is absolutely not important. God can be omnipotent of the word is technically defined, and not omnipotent when it's not. I don't understand why you think it's important, as I have already said more than once that I have no problem saying that God is not omnipotent if the word is broadly defined, for the Bible never describe God as capable to break the laws of logics.

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