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Originally Posted by willravel
He doesn't intend them to be interdenominational. That's the point. Actually, most of the Lutheran and Methodist sermons I've seen are unintentionally interdenominational (say that 6 times fast!). I don't go to church at all, but my dad's sermons are available online, and I usually read them.
Maybe we can perform an experiment. Attend different protestant and catholic churches over the next few weeks and write down everything that's not interdenominationally applicable in the sermons. I think you'll find, as I have, that most sermons take some text, from the Bible and then simply weave a broad moral tale about it.
If you really want to test it, attend a few temples and mosques. I've only been to a few of each myself, but even they are surprisingly consistent.
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So just to be clear, this has nothing to do with how all denominations are pretty much the same?
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"All powerful". It means all powerful. It's a simple definition that's provided in Sunday School classrooms all around the world.
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We all know what it means according to the dictionary. What the selective quotation of holy books won't necessarily tell you is what that power means in the context of how it is used. You don't necessarily get enough information.
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That's not relevant to Ep's logical symphony. He has the power and does nothing, or he doesn't have the power and isn't god.
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Epicurus defines malevolence as having power to prevent evil and doing not doing so. Even if this definition of malevolence wasn't ridiculously broad and simplistic, it's still a problematic statement in that it presumes an understanding of the relationship a completely hypothetical being has (god) with a completely subjective idea (evil; subjective as far as we experience it).
Even then, it isn't necessarily as interesting as a critique of theism as it is as an appeal for a logically consistent definition of god. It presumes that god is defined in a certain way, and then seeks to show that this definition is inconsistent. The thing of it is that it is completely irrelevant when brought up in the context of deities who aren't defined in precisely the same way.