I hardly call demon possession "Obsession"....You examples were of extremes,ie clinical obssession, whereas, the dictionary didn't deal with extremes obsessives, but those that were quite plausible and in the course of human activity and still outside of the clinical realm. My examples were of those obssessions where the dictionary painted a realistic picture of 'noraml' . And Lucifer was quite obssessed with the idea of being like God.



I did provide that to you...you rejected it....Go back and look again...

And wanting to be God is not extreme?



I guess Christians are guilty of that as well. They just keep singing this song "I want to be more like You" and by the way obsession is spelled with one "s" at the beginning not two, since you seem to keep referencing the dictionary you might want to use it for what it's intended.



You might want to check out this link to Wikipedia on obsession (spiritism) before you speak further on this.

Obsession as Spiritism



I did look. You only provide a definition. You have stated that he was obsessed, but you haven't stated WHY he was obsessed. You keep saying that he was obsessed because he wanted to be like God. But WHY did he want to be like God.

You just keep stating his desire, but not his motivation.

Um, maybe when you get to see Him all the time, and you get to talk with Him and get to know Him....probably not....



Which are we talking about here, Richard? Christians or Lucifer?



Obsession is one of the cornerstones of the religious activity within Spiritism. It is defined by Allan Kardec as the interference of a subjugating spirit on a weaker one and, although usually taken for granted as meaning the negative influence of the spirit of an evil deceased person on the mind of another one that is alive, can occur either way.

Doesn't apply to Christianity nor to Lucifer. Spiritism is a whole new set of prinicples and thier definitions do not apply. SDAs believe that when a person dies, there is no 'spirit' to influence the living nor the dead.




Gee, are you blind as well???? Oooh..Didn't Jesus say something about...Oops, my bad....

I'll repeat this...

You just keep stating his desire, but not his motivation.

What was his motivation? You can't answer this, can you?

He wanted to be god because he wanted to be like God. How many times do you want to hear it?

That's called desire. His motivation would explain why he wanted to be like God.

What did God have that he didn't?

What is the difference between desire and motivation? My guess would be that according to they Biblical myth, Lucifer wanted to be like God for the worship and power accruing to such a likeness. But that would be a desire too, a desire for power and for being worshipped. What am I missing?

The question would be what would that particular power and worship give him that he didn't have already? If you can answer that you have his motivation.

Motivation is based on a rational or irrational belief.

If Lucifer is rational then he would have a rational motivation.

If Lucifer is irrational then he would have an irrational motivation. And if Lucifer was irrational then he was not created perfect.

We claim our original motivation is a sinful nature that has irrational destructive beliefs. This would not be true for Lucifer or Adam or Eve. No one that I know of has been able to establish rational motivation for a sinless being to sin.

I happen to believe that this whole model is flawed, but that is the model most fundamental Christians have set up to be true for them.

If one were a machine, this statement would be true. But intelligent beings have choice...and being intelligence beings, they have control over thier own choices and in the course of thier interaction with other intelligent beings. Perfection, for intelligent beings, is based upon choice, that is, the continual choice of being close to God. Perfection, for the created,is NOT being or becoming God but rather to fulfil thier being a creature doing God's will...



He didn't have God's power, and the ability to create intelligent beings. Thus, he was not like God. And he wanted to be god, a part of the Godhead.



That's because there is no reason for the existance of sin. There is no reason that Adam and Eve, when given the temptation to obtain the knowledge of good and evil, should have fallen, when God only wanted to give them the knowledge of good.

But WHY would he want that? Choice isn't a spin of the wheel or a roll of the dice. It is based in a rational setting. Having the power of choice is not a reason to develop jealousy or desires for power. These come from needs or when something is lacking.



Judgements of guilty are based on cause and effect. If sin is a mystery, then how can we condemn Lucifer, because evidently it was a mystery to him as well? We hold judgements over people who have informed choices.

Let me ask you this Neil. Did you choose to be born a sinner on a sinful planet?

And if we have no idea what sin is or where it came from, how can we be so confident that we have the cure?

The cure that Christianity offers has so many versions and so many unsubstantiated claims that one would have to toss out rationality to promote it. And Christianity has had almost 2000 years to demonstrate its ability to cure the problem of sin, and yet when it has been in power we have seen the greatest violence and brutality based on a very literal understanding of the Bible as God's actual commands on earth. We are looking at anywhere from 50 to 150 million people killed in the name of the Christian god. This exceeds every other evil power by many magnitudes.

Reason, while not perfect, self corrects, while religious assumptions have no avenue of change. They only die when the force required to sustain them dies.

And the last force that sustains Christian belief today is fear and intimidation. Because what I notice happens when Christians hit the end of reasoning, they appeal to fear. And it doesn't take too many quotes from the discussions within Club Adventist to provide ample proof.