Posted on 08/22/2009 6:43:08 PM PDT by TBP
"The questions [people are asking] have changed quite significantly in the past 30 years," he told me. "It used to be, 'Is there a God?' and now it's 'What I know about God I don't like.' Their biggest complaint is that God acts in morally inferior ways compared to us."
Not only that, but the God who appears in the Bible is especially offensive.
The God who gets communicated to the young sounds vengeful and angry and over-anxious to consign people to hell, plus he gets all wrought up about divorce, homosexuality and whether people sleep together before marriage -- which are non-issues to them.
Plus, the typical Gospel presentation of God becoming a human and dying for the sins of the world does not reach these students. No court of law would punish an innocent person for the sins of the guilty, they reason. Why kill off an innocent man for the trespasses of a world that didn't ask to be saved in the first place?
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
How quickly so many surrender Earth to that which you label the prince.
False.
That’s a fairly adept advocacy of Christianity, but it doesn’t address the question at hand.
No.
But if you could save a toddler from being hit by a train, would you?
I would.
Extrapolate that to a cosmic level and you get an excellent view of what needs to happen.
What is wrong is real, and not an illusion.
The premise of a time limit on a poor approach doesn't make the approach any less poor.
I'm not an atheist.
But the path has to be reasonable.
But God has promised there will come a day when He will bring peace and justice and an end of suffering - for those who are his. Belong to God, and one day, you will experience an eternity with no suffering, no hatred, no sin, no violence, no death, no tears, no pain. That is HIS promise to His beloveds. He is the sovereign ruler of the Universe, He is its creator. Therefore His rule is righteous and just and good.
Evil is called in the Bible a “mystery”. We simply do not know all there is to know about “why” bad things happen.
If God had left man alone, had not come to this earth as the God-Man, Jesus Christ, who bore our sins in His body on that cruel cross, so that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but should have everlasting life (with God - free from the pain and suffering you mention), then you would have a case for a cruel and uncaring God.
Instead, Jesus did come, the Messiah, promised for thousands of years did come, and did take upon Himself the punishment for OUR iniquities, giving to those who believe on Him - HIS righteousness (what an exchange) - because God so loved this mean old world.
Man was created a truly free moral agent and man chose rebellion against God - leading to the entry of sin in to the world. God did not leave us orphans but sent His dear Son to be our Savior, our deliverer, our healer, our friend, and our Lord.
Hallelujah, Praise His Name forever!
Obviously, allowing evil is not good.
Nice try, but I said nothing about a 'time limit'. Although you imply such in your statement, creating the seed of a strawman.
I merely pointed out there was a point at which tolerance of man's willfull rejection would result in a rather rough end. When or why is anyone's guess. Rather than using the baser phrase I would use to describe it, I would rather use humor and say that the 'idiot' watches the theologians/scientists argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, then says, "You're missing the point."
From my reading of your post, you make the mistake of casting God through a human lens. It doesn't work.
If God got involved with every little thing in life, people would bitch that they had no freedom and God controlled everything. You would not like that, I would bet. If you don’t like the government controlling most of your life, and they do, why would anyone want God to be involved in everything? He gives us “volition”. The right to screw up but also the right to fix it and to do good. Mankind is sinful, everyone must know that by now. Don’t blame God for our shortcomings.
I don't.
But anyone with the power to replace evil with good should do so to the full extent of their capability.
Life on Earth is very non-moot.
Come now, that’s a bumper sticker, not a cogently developed contention.
And the choice by which Person A finds themselves adversely affected may very well have been made by Person B.
You seem serious in your discussion. I would recommend that you talk directly to God about this in your own privacy.
Saying something does not make it so. Unless you can offer some argument for your answer, it is meaningless.
After you.
“More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame...” (Romans 5:3)
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