Which is secondary evidence that it is true. The primary evidence that it is true is that Jesus Christ referred to it as a fact. Moses recorded it as a fact and the Babylonians apparently had a similar story (thus giving the story a secular source).
Why would he kill them in wrath when the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these?
So do all dead children go to heaven? If so, then Forest's contention that God sometimes kills off children in order to show mercy upon them would be true.
So, whoever dies is 'killed' by God?
If God does not want you to die, you are indestructible. Nobody dies in contradiction to God's will. God knows the number of your days. You will die at the appointed time.
Does God determine all (predeterminism)? Or does He simply know (free will)?
Whilst I believe that God nudges people in the direction that they ought to go, it is still our free will in the end that determines our fate.
The Bible teaches us that God predetermines us to Heaven and it simply is up to us if we would go to Hell.
Geological evidence shows that no such thing occurred (worldwide). Are we to believe a myth, which by all accounts the Hebrews may have borrowed from the (older) Babylonian accounts, just as the birth of Moses is a strikingly similar Babylonian story, but never consider real geological evidence?
I wonder how many people who take the Bible for literal truth refuse medicine and depend on prayer alone? They don't mind the benefits of science (radio, tv, cell phones, etc.) but when it comes to geological evidence we go by mythoogy. Go figure.
So do all dead children go to heaven?
The Bible doesn't say. Forest Keeper believes so and the Orthodox don't discount that God can save anyone He wishes, but anyone who believes unbaptized children go to heaven do so on their own (extra-biblical) conviction.
If so, then Forest's contention that God sometimes kills off children in order to show mercy upon them would be true.
That's a big "if" and it's not scriptural. Personally, I think to suggest that God is showing His "mercy" by killing children is, frankly, grotesque.
If God does not want you to die, you are indestructible
So, God kills everyone? That is just incredible! In fact, that is unrecognizable to me as an Orthodox Christian! That means God, who is Life, created death. He "preordained" all of us to die. From which we must logically conclude that the Fall in the Garden had nothing to do with our mortality: it was all preordained by a wrathful God before the foundations of the world.
The more I read these various Protestant versions of theology, the more I believe Professor Kalomiros was correct about western "Christianity" when he said Salvation, for Westerners, is to be saved from the hands of God! (Prof. Alexander Kalomiros, "River of Fire")
We die, P-Marlowe, because through the sin of Adam our nature became separated from God, our and destined to death. It was not His doing, but ours. The fact that he knows when everyone will die is simply his foreknowledge, and foreknoweldge doesn't kill.
God is life, not death.