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God Bestows Meaning

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Jason Thibodeau writes a long article, "Can Humans Create Meaning? Can God?" [1] I will concern myself  with only a  small part of the article, the argument that God cannot create meaning. Jason argues: "The conception of meaning is not altered by whether God, or any other supernatural entity, exists. Whether life is meaningful depends on whether there are, in our lives, things that matter." [2]
He sets up a dichotomy in arguing that God bestowing meaning is an ambiguous claim:
The claim that God makes life meaningful is ambiguous. There are two different things that it might mean:
(A) God creates the things in life that are valuable and worthwhile (and that, in virtue of being valuable and worthwhile, give our lives meaning).
(B) God makes it the case that the things in life that are valuable and worthwhile are valuable and worthwhile. Thus, by making these things valuable and worthwhile, God makes it the case that our lives are meaningful.This is a false dichotomy an…
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Yet another story about transformations (part 1)

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Tim Wood joins us this week. He has had articles, interviews, reviews, profiles, poetry and fiction published in various places. He serves as an editor for GrandViaduct press and previously was publisher of artsDFW: the monthly guide to the arts in Dallas, editor for Negations: an Interdisciplinary Journal of Social Criticism and has been cited in The Facts on File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry. He holds a Bachelors Degree in Physics and has completed course work for a Masters in Humanities. Follow him on twitter: @4til7.
When Joe asked me to contribute, he was pretty open ended about what I could write. He suggested I could share my testimony. The short version of that is that I went off to college and had some long talks about Gd0 with several people and I ended up praying the sinner's prayer. Which isn't much of a story. Certainly not an exciting one involving divine light (although I ran into that latter) or the many other things that can crop in conversion st…
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no one has responded so I assume no one cares

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about the comments
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Reckoning

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I really need to know if anyone reads the comments,please let me hear from you? Does anyone think the components are worth  keeping?
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Metacrock's Famous Gardener Parable

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Garden of the Gods

The point is to show the decision making process and what goes into belief or disbelief. Gardener parables are a tradition in philosophy of religion. I always think those like Flew's and Wisdom's are loaded against the believer.

The basic parable, although in many versions, goes like this: two men see a garden. The state of the garden makes one suspect there is a gardener, the other suspects there is none. In some versions they steak out the place, keep watch all night. They see no garden and the believer decides he's invisible and the other decides he's non existent. In Felw's version they put up electric wires, search lights, dogs, all kinds of things. No sign of a gardener. The believer decides he's oderless, colorless,invisible,intangible and doesn't do much. The sketic asks what's the difference in that and no gardener at all. Flew gives the moral: "the death of a fine brash hypothesis comes through a million qualifications.&…
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