If you like, you're welcome to elucidate.

True. Some people suffer from partial color blindedness and have trouble telling blue and green apart. Still they manage to communicate.

Try having a conversation about the colors with someone who is color blind. It goes no where. Curious.

If you dont always know what is right and wrong in the eyes of God, like you say in the bellow post, then you're doing what you believe is "in your own eyes" right or wrong in those situations.

Is it any wonder why spiritual conversations go nowhere when one of the conversants is not spiritual, and not intending to honestly seek spirituality?

Very true. I can only make decisions based on how I understand the situation to be.

However, Christianity asserts that God has not left us completely in the dark, and has given us plenty of information from which to understand his desires, and is actively involved in helping us to understand more. In this manner, over time (as one matures as a Christian) the way that we understand the world becomes more and more aligned with the way that God sees the world.

Aaron, thanks for the reply. Earlier, you said that God is the authority defining right and wrong. In the quoted post, you say that we may not know what is right or wrong according to God. But as long as we want to do what is right, even if we fail to do what is right (because we lack knowledge of God's position) we benefit from grace.

Can you explain the difference between making a moral decision without knowledge of God's position on whether it is right or wrong, and making a moral decision without believing there is such a thing as God's position on whether it is right or wrong? In other words, if God does not define the answer, then what is the source of the answer?

Its been said a number of times but ill say it again. What about all of the people who have seeked for years apon years to find whatever it is you have claimed to have found and found nothing. I'm one of those people, as are a bunch of others on this board. To say that we dont "honestly" seek spirituality is a bit ignorant to say the least.

It has nothing to do with wanting to do what's right. Grace is UN-merited favor. As stated, you've qualified the receipt of grace by putting for some effort or desire for what is right. One of the most difficult aspects of grace is that one must completely abandon the idea that anything one does will have an impact on the grace that is extended.

As for the second paragraph, it's not exactly clear what you're asking in the first half, so I won't say anything about it.

To answer the second question, God *is* the one who defines the "answer" (meaning that he is the one who defines the morally good and morally evil decisions). If God does not define morality, then the question of morality is unclear and perhaps meaningless.

So basically every absolute moral truth you learn about God the less narcissistic you become.

Knowing nothing about your particular story, I can do no better than speculate about your experiences, which is at best very dangerous. Instead, here are a number of things to consider:

* How would you describe the "spirituality" you were looking for?
* Did you predefine certain notions that had to be met for you to believe that an event was "spiritual"?
* Was this something you pursued on your own, or in the company of friends who possessed the "spirituality" you desired?
* Did you have predetermined notion of what you would do if you happened to find this "spirituality"? Were you intending to follow it if found, or was it just a curiosity that you wanted to satisfy with no real intent to turn it into a life-long pursuit?

I don't know what you just said (I think you dropped a word somewhere), but if I'm guessing what you meant correctly, then I agree with you.

The first four words in Rick Warren's "Purpose Driven Life": It's not about you.

No i didn't drop a word, im just confusing sometimes.

Typically people that can see in color don't say that their experience of color represents an absolute truth about the universe.

The color "red" can be easily quantified objectively, while "God" cannot be.

Aaron, let me try again. So you are saying that there are situations where we don't know what is right or wrong in God's eyes, and it doesn't matter to our salvation whether we try to do what is right in the absence of that knowledge?

As for my second paragraph, I'll try to clarify. You say here that God defines the answer. But in some cases, we don't know what that answer is. Even if it has no relevance to grace, I take it that you, like me, still want to make the "morally right" decision. Neither of us knows that our decision is right, but it is the best we can come up with given our moral guidelines. From your reply to Batair, I take it you would argue that you have some guidance from God to help with the decision. My guidelines come from within me, but have undoubtedly been shaped by societal conventions and expectations and other factors. I can't say where the balance lies, but I am quite comfortable going against the majority on certain issues. And not surprisingly, I disagree with the Catholic position on certain issues (though many Catholics I know disagree as well).

I have seen the argument that morality requires an objective position on right vs wrong, and that God fills that need. But if we are unaware of the objective moral position while making a moral decision, is it really all that different than making a moral decision without a God? Or to put it in still other words, are there guidelines from God that you believe could not have come from any other source?

Suppose you point to a color and say "this is red." And someone else looks at it and says "that's not red." If you truly felt that the thing you were pointing at is "red" you would say that the other person is "wrong" and I don't think you would call it a matter of perception. (I've had this type of discussion with an artist friend.)

So while you're trying to say that the experience of color is not an absolute truth in the universe, I think reality plays itself out differently.

Except that one does not actually go about learning "red" in this manner. And once this is done (say, red is light whose wavelength is 650 nm), the definition of "red" becomes mostly useless in practice and does not correspond precisely with many experiences of "red" in people's lives.

Totally irrelevant.

Yes. I'm saying that in Christianity, salvation is not based on trying hard to be good.

"Guidelines" are a set of basic principles. One of the "problems" (if it really is a problem) with basic principles is that they often don't give sufficient detail to answer every possible circumstance.

It is entirely possible to attempt to make a moral decision based on societal guidelines. It's entirely possible that societal guidelines may overlap with the guidelines that God has set forth.

But to the question of making a "moral decision" the decision *IS* a moral decision, regardless of what set of guidelines you use. You use whatever guidelines you have chosen to direct your life, and the consequences of those decisions will be whatever they will be.

Catholics have a different sort of "problem" (again, if it can be called that) -- and based on your presentation I'm assuming you're Catholic. The theological framework is centralized and controlled in a way that it is not for a protestant. At least under Catholic theology, you can be expelled from the church (and heaven) for actively disagreeing with the Vatican's position. I think that setting a human institution as the primary arbiters of salvation is a theological error. But this is what their position is, and they can hold that position if they want. In the end, I think that it's God who decides, and not man.

And I could be wrong about it. Maybe St. Peter will be sitting up there by the pearly gates taking roll. But based on my understanding of the Bible, that's not going to be the case.

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In the exact same sense, we can define the color "red" to be colors of wavelength about 475 nm. It's a concrete definition, but even further outside the realm of people's experience of the color "red."

So if you want to insist you're right because you can objectively define "red" to be whatever you want it to be, you can do so.

We can come to a majority consensus of what "red" means and objectively quantify that consensus. The same is NOT true for "God".

The colour red being a subjective experience might be true, though I'm not seeing a solid case that it is except "because I tell you so".

However, few people are arguing that the colour red created the universe and as proof of their statement use the fact that you can't know if it didn't happen either way hence the colour red exists.

So the connection is rather dubious.

It should also be mentioned that regardless if the color red is a subjective experience, one can still use it to make predictions and you can't about most accounts of god. For example..."I worshipped god today, so my white t-shirts are going to come out pink" or any other causative prediction regarding god is not going to work.

So in short, who cares.