His point still stands. Christianity lives or dies based on Jesus. If you can prove that, all else falls into place. I haven't seen that much disagreement on what Jesus taught.

That humans are a bunch of sinners who can only be perfected by a being that can't be shown to exist is pretty much what makes christianity a rather tedious proposition.

It's a degrading and silly view on humans as far as I am concerned. I'm a nice guy and that some lady ate an apple many aeons ago isn't my fault and though I am far from perfect this little tidbit is not what causes that.

I would not base any doctrines on what the theists on this site say, including myself. If you want to learn then you should do research on the matter. There are many people that spend a lot of time studying these things and breaking it down for people.

Don't blindly believe anyone. Take everything with a grain of salt and investigate on your own. If you do that you will be fine.

The problem of Christians not agreeing often comes from lack of knowledge of the text.

First I do agree that the definition of omnibenevolent needs to be established anytime you are discussing the matter.

But I think that it is far from a contradiction. This is a subject that we have not gotten into yet on RGT, so maybe I will start a thread in the next couple of days.

OH, sometimes I feel that I am in my own little Christian world as so few Christians agree with me. But I am OK with that.

Do you want to contest this?

Not with your definition of sin.

No, even with your definition of wrong you can't defend mankind.

Here's the link. Its in the history section of the book of Enoch.

Sometimes I wonder if certain deeper pre-aspects of the bible shouldn't be delved into. I do believe good people can and probably are being manipulated all the time though that scares a lot of people to hear that.

Its really a battle of the mind. Thats why we need the scriptures. They are the only thing that cuts away the false illusions that attach themselves to our mind that our fed to us mostly through culture.

Illusions are some of the most powerful things going: Romantic love, keeping up with the Joneses, etc.

http://exodus2006.com/History.htm

This is a problem of discernment.

I know but there are still powers at work albeit not as frequent as my posts seem to imply. We're on a lot of autopilot plus mostly our own flaws do us in.

Read Peck's Glimpses of the Devil.

Also we can have too much knowledge. I believe the bible says it wearies a man. We have to be careful not to thin our focus.

Seems like a true statement.

This is sad. Really, really sad.

Christians have disagreements about what Jesus taught all the time. The simple idea that the only way into heaven is through Jesus is argued between Christians. Is Gandhi in hell or heaven? Ask that question to 10 different Christians get 10 different answers.


I was raised in the church and have investigated on my own.

Lack of knowledge has never stopped even the most studied Christians from disagreeing. If you put the Pope and Pat Robertson in a room together and started asking them questions do you really think they will give the same answers. To some questions they would give fundamentally opposite answers.

This is all way off topic though lets get back to the kill count.

So you are saying that some are simply collateral damage from god's wrath or divine plan? This makes him no better than a military who inadvertently kills civilians during a bombing campaign.

Again, you can get away with this, but only if you do away with your claims of omnipotence. Here's what I don't get about you Splendour...

I've read your posts and it's clear that you're not stupid. Yet, why isn't this so obviously clear to you? You start off with the premise of an omnipotent loving god and then proceed to cram, bend, and twist all logical arguments to the contrary in any way necessary to fit your initial premise. Why do you do this?!?

• Martin Amis's Time's Arrow[18]
• Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights[19]
• Angela Carter's Wise Children[20]
• Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales
• Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone[21]
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground
• Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho[22]
• William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury[2]
• F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby[23]
• Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans[24]
• James Lasdun's The Horned Man[25]
• Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire[26]
• J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye[citation needed]
• Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman[citation needed]
• Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn[citation needed]
• Machado de Assis's Dom Casmurro
• Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus[27]
• Henry James's "The Turn Of The Screw"

You take me too seriously sometimes. I was just giving a sense I have from the prevalent metaphor used in the bible that we are vines. Also the bible mentions angels swinging sickles and harvesting souls.

Re: Divine Judgment. God can't make a mistake and there are mysteries we don't have access to.

I'm probably due to leave because its like atheists inhabit a different planet. I have a singularly high regard for God. I've always had it and I was always under the impression most people had it too until I started reading forums. Thats why atheists are such a mystery to me. The detached kinds of questions an atheist regularly asks is quite baffling to me. Where do these ideas come from? They ask things and draw comparisons that it would never occur to me to make in a million years and they seem to give no credit to God for being able to balance the books on the end as if the next world wouldn't be different from the current one. I find the atheist worldview strangely perplexing.

They come from not having a weird, ******ed dogma funneled up your ass as a child.

I made my religious choice well after college but hug that stereotype if you must. Its such an openminded position.

Like the same type of stereotyping that atheists come form science.

You probably won't believe this, but I know exactly how you feel. I felt the exact same way when I thought there was a god. I would have looked at someone who talked about god the way I do now, and absolutely shuddered with fear and pity for them! These types of strange question never occurred to me either.

The only difference between you and I is that once they DID occur to me... I thought them through.

I was not necessarily referring to you personally and even if I were, the point stands.

Questions about religion and faith come from the objective mind.

Unquestioning faith with virtually no willingness to examine or grant credence to evidence come from the dogmatic mind.

Well I'll never ask the questions that typical science types ask. I don't have enough scientific curiosity.

What I do perceive is that Christ gave an iron tight individual morality on the Sermon on the Mount. To me its one of the things that prove his divinity because if you do what he says along with the 10 Commandments and the Golden Rule you can reduce the chance of personally committing any major sin. If everyone in the world would follow it then the world would come as close to perfection as it humanly can without God intervening in it.

I glean my evidence through my legal perspective and history. I don't discount science but I think God will only allow us to half see him through science. He constantly hints through science and leaves us hanging. I think that is intentional because he's designated faith as the mode. Through faith he can personally shape us and draw his diamonds out of the rough. He's not as interested in satisfying our curiosity as he is in shaping us. We're participating in a rite of passage from this world to the next and we have some say in just how bumpy that road gets but because of the lack of our own personal observation in the process that we are undergoing we make things harder than they have to be. God can perform a work of redemption in you if you will let go and let him.

(Note: a lot of people have trouble with the concept of sin so you can substitute committing any major wrongs for it.)

Life is full of its little ironies.

I just ran across a book presenting Apocrypha writings and in The Wisdom of Solomon writing what we've been discussing Lestat was aptly stated in the very first chapter.

http://www.nccbuscc.org/nab/bible/wisdom/wisdom1.htm