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To: GunRunner
How can you on the one hand say "Christ's miracles were fact" and then say some parts of the Bible "remain a mystery to us"?

I don't know everything; that's pretty easy to admit that.

Do you know the nature of it all or not?

I believe that the Bible is God-breathed and entirely true, and I have enough of a knowledge of the fundamentals of Biblical doctrine to know as much as I need to in order for me to have faith.

Didn't Christ often speak in parables? Why wouldn't his book do it as well?

Why not read the words for what they are and admit what they truly say ?

Just because you say something is a myth does not make it so.

The whole of idea of "justice" as described in the context of the God you worship is not any form of justice that is conceivable to me and many other people.

Yes, you're absolutely correct. Absent the Holy Spirit, people reject Jesus Christ. They hate him; the world that crucified Christ hated him. The fallen state of man is such that he hates and rejects God and his Law Word.

You keep missing the third option. If there were good evidence that any of this stuff were true, I don't want any part of it. I don't want to live on eternal divine soma, not caring about anything and singing hymns for a trillion years, and I reject the ridiculous idea of eternal torment for not thinking the right thoughts.

So you don't want to be punished. You reject the punishment. You even reject the reward ! I've heard children do this, as well as adults. I didn't want the ice cream anyway ! I hate ice cream !

There's no reason to believe that 60 to 90 years of Earthly existence in any way merits eternal reward or eternal punishment, and it isn't justice in any way that is recognizable to me,

First, who are you to say what merits what ? Second, it's quite easy for people to do a lot of good and evil during their lifetime; just study history.

where your teenager who was abused by a priest turns away from God because of the abuse, and goes to the flames, while the priest who did the abusing legitimately repents and sits next to you in the clouds. How is that justice?

First, your example is hypothetical, second, you've only described three events in lifetimes of many years that will contain many other events.

What's left out is the whole story of the two lives. This is an oversimplified hypothetically unjust situation, regarding which you then proceed to speak for God and say what his judgement would be, and that he would judge the situation unjustly. Even though God's Word says the penalty for such an offense would be death in a Christian nation.

So for all your study of the Bible, you claim to know the mind of God, and you know what's right and wrong better than God - and that God is actually unjust.

Even though you're arguing that God does not exist from a scientific basis. If that were really true, you'd be completely wasting your time commenting on what you thought of the "nonexistent" God.

In order to believe in God, one has to be convicted of one's own sin.

That is very, very painful for people to experience. Those who are saved come to see their own need for Christ's atoning sacrifice. I wrestled with that for a week of agony, as I remembered more and more sins and feared that I was beyond redemption. I was moved to want to learn about the Bible. After much agonizing, the idea of Christ's atoning sacrifice suddenly really sank in.

Those who are not saved reject God, their conscience wanting to hide from God and his Law Word. Folks who study God's Word for the purpose of finding fault with it are not honestly studying it, but they are rejecting it. Stiff-necked, stubborn, they say they will only accept a God that fits in with their ideas about the natural world and their ideas of justice. It becomes a matter of pointing at anything and saying - ha ! That's why I don't believe. Bertrand Russell wrote a whole book on the subject.
526 posted on 06/01/2014 1:29:51 AM PDT by PieterCasparzen (We have to fix things ourselves)
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To: PieterCasparzen
Just because you say something is a myth does not make it so.

Of course not. But as a free person with no presuppositions, I can weigh the evidence and make the determination as to what is more likely.

Is it likely that mankind suffered under war, pestilence, disease, early death, and ignorance for hundreds of thousands of years, until Heaven finally says:

"Hmm, maybe it's time to get involved. And the best way to do that would be a solution that copies the other religious human blood sacrifice myths and scapegoating rituals that exist from Peru to Israel to the Far East, and we'll have it happen in a middle east backwater of already credulous people (not in China which was a much more advanced society), and it will work so that God sacrifices himself (or his son), to himself, it order to appease himself."

Perhaps one day you'll have the luxury of looking at Christianity from the outside in; only then can you really grasp the archaic gruesomeness of the idea.

Absent the Holy Spirit, people reject Jesus Christ. They hate him; the world that crucified Christ hated him. The fallen state of man is such that he hates and rejects God and his Law Word.

You don't even really understand the fundamentals of unbelief. I don't reject the God of Abraham or Jesus any more that I reject Zeus and Allah. They are all manmade religions when the evidence is considered in a universal context. If Christ existed, and I had lived during that time, I would not have hated him, and I would have spoken against the torture and murder of an eccentric preacher, and supported his right to say whatever he wished. Regardless of your subjective opinion, I had no say in, nor did I take part in, killing Jesus.

So you don't want to be punished. You reject the punishment. You even reject the reward ! I've heard children do this, as well as adults. I didn't want the ice cream anyway ! I hate ice cream !

Actually the opposite is true. It is childish to think that it all comes out well in the end because some father figure will make it all right. Like Paul said, when I was a child I thought as a child. Now I've put away childish things and understand that the world works in a certain manner, a manner which is perceivable by observation, and it's my responsibility to live in a way that minimizes suffering of others, because I can accept a world with less suffering is preferable to one with more suffering.

It is not childish to want to have a say in the justice system in which one lives. In fact, it's one of the prerequisites of a free man living in a free world. The authoritarian celestial dictatorship of monotheism is surprisingly unconservative and anti-liberty.

What's left out is the whole story of the two lives. This is an oversimplified hypothetically unjust situation, regarding which you then proceed to speak for God and say what his judgement would be, and that he would judge the situation unjustly. Even though God's Word says the penalty for such an offense would be death in a Christian nation.

The story of their two lives is irrelevant if what Christ said was true. He is the only way. It doesn't matter if the abused atheist kid spend his entire life volunteering to feed homeless children, and did nothing else, just like it's irrelevant that the priest hypothetically kept abusing until the last few seconds of his life, when he finally repented. They're both judged on their thoughts at the time of their death; the thought being do they accept Christ as their savior?

Don't start going all wobbly on your own doctrine.

In order to believe in God, one has to be convicted of one's own sin.

That is very, very painful for people to experience.

It isn't difficult or painful at all to know one is a very imperfect primate. Like all other homo sapiens I was "designed" with huge adrenal glands, a smaller than needed frontal lobe, and destructive urges as well as constructive ones (not to mention the beautifully 'designed' appendix and wisdom teeth, which had to be removed), and it's up to me and no one else to make sure that I live a life parallel with the happiness of my family and those around me.

To those who realize it, the lack of cosmic justice forces most to understand the tremendous responsibility to make sure that this life is a good one, instead of throwing it all to the wind and living like a libertine. Probably explains why the prisons are not filled with atheists.

Like that scene in Zero Dark Thirty where the head CIA analyst says "If you thought there was some secret cell somewhere working on this, I want you to know that you are wrong! This is it. There's no working group coming to the rescue. There's nobody else hidden away on some other floor. This is just us!"

Coming to the realization that this is what the evidence shows, my first feeling was a tremendous air of responsibility, not "Ice cream!".

527 posted on 06/01/2014 7:39:19 AM PDT by GunRunner
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