Lie #7: ‘If God was really powerful and good, he wouldn’t allow so much evil and suffering to go on.’

This is raised by just about everyone: Priests and ministers, college students and housewives, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers.

It’s one of the hardest questions anybody ever asks.

Just a few days ago, a close friend of mine, Laurin, passed away after a fierce 18 month battle with cancer.  What a horrible experience this was for him and his wife Diana.

I’ve visited the slums of Sao Paulo Brazil, where 500,000 homeless street kids sniff glue and steal for a living.  Sometimes the police hunt them down and kill them, just to reduce the crime rate.

Last year my wife spent a week in Mozambique where she saw an infant in her mother’s arms, dying of pneumonia in a hospital waiting room.  She met hundreds of other kids with malaria and malnutrition. We’ve given some money for a medical clinic, and every bit helps.  But the problems are so huge, what little you try to do still seems like a teardrop in the ocean.

If you took all the parties, the humor, the success and happiness in the world, and put it side by side with the suffering and pain, the comparison would be almost absurd.

There’s a lot of sickness and sadness in this world.

How can God let it go on?

Well, I can’t give you an answer.  I can only tell you a true story.

~~~

A certain man threatened the Religious Gestapo, who in turn convinced the Roman government that He was a threat to them, too.

His followers were disappointed that He didn’t overthrow the Romans and declare himself King, like the Messiah was supposed to do.  So they abandoned Him.

The ancient Romans pioneered what was possibly the most cruel form of torture ever devised by man:  Crucifixion.  They would drive spikes into their victim’s ankles and wrists, smashing his nerves.  He would hang there in blinding sheets of pain, slowly suffocating and dehydrating for days, until he finally expired.

Jesus was whipped and beaten, literally beyond recognition, then nailed to a cross between two common criminals.

One of these criminals was cursing and shouting at Him in a fit of rage: ‘HEY! If you’re the KING, why don’t you get yourself down from there!  And US, TOO!!!’

The other guy went along with this… for a little while.

But he saw that Jesus wasn’t hurling insults at his torturers.  Instead He was asking God to forgive them (?!).

He sobered up.  He said to the other criminal, ‘Hey dude, you and I are here because we deserve it.  But this man Jesus has done nothing wrong.’

Then he said to Jesus, ‘Remember me when you take charge of your Kingdom.’

Jesus simply replied, ‘Today you’ll be with me in Paradise.’

~~~

Stop the camera.

What you have here, in this brief conversation, is a snapshot of the entire world.

You have two criminals who have gotten themselves into a horrendous, awful mess.  And you have the Son of God, who has not only chosen to live with us in our world of pain and suffering, but has personally taken all of it upon his own shoulders.

Even though he is completely innocent.

One thief refuses to accept any responsibility for his actions. He’s unwilling to admit that he created the very mess that he’s in.

He lives in denial until the bitter end.  He grits his teeth and dies in his sin.

The other thief comes clean.  He recognizes that Jesus possesses divine authority.  He admits his guilt.  He is required to do nothing, other than to let go of his pride.

He asks for forgiveness.

Forgiveness granted.

Jesus’ pardon doesn’t make the cross or the agony go away.  But finally the struggle ceases and this man crosses the Great Divide. The intense pain dissolves and he steps into a New World, designed by God Himself — with renewed body and soul.

That’s a picture of the entire world, right there. You and I are in this mess together, and we’ve all contributed to it.

We’ve all rejected God in some way or another, we’ve all committed some kind of crime, and we all experience suffering.

The situation is what it is.

So we have a simple choice: Accept that fact that God has suffered with us — or mock him and be furious because the suffering exists in the first place.

Which way do you want it???

The decision is yours.  You and I will never get a true ‘answer’ about the pain and suffering we experience in this life.  But in the midst of our pain, we have a companion.  You and I can have the same conversation with Jesus that this criminal had, and we can experience the same forgiveness.  All we have to do is ask, just like the thief on the cross did on that sad day.

~~~

This is the last of the Seven Great Lies of Organized Religion. I pray that I’ve helped to strip away all the baggage that the Religious Gestapo adds to the story and reduce it to the bare essentials.  I hope this has stirred your mind and your heart.

Are you trying to strip away the baggage and get to a deeper truth? We’d like to hear from you. Simply submit a comment below.

We often run behind, but will do our best to respond.

Respectfully Submitted,

Perry Marshall
www.CoffeehouseTheology.com

640 Responses to “Lie #7: ‘If God was really powerful and good, he wouldn’t allow so much evil and suffering to go on.’”

  1. Shayan Khan says:

    With knowledge, almost everything is practical. Yes, even Earthquakes.

    • Conway Redding says:

      Shayan, you write,”With knowledge, almost everything is practical. Yes, even Earthquakes.”

      Huh? What is your definition of the word “practical?” Under the usual definitions of the word, to wit, “concerned with actual use or practice, having or put to a practical purpose or use, or guided by practical experience and observation rather than theory,” your statement just doesn’t make any sense, man. Maybe “practical” means something different in your native language, which pretty clearly isn’t English.

  2. Luke West says:

    Hi Perry,

    I am at the very beginning of exploring a spiritual life at the age of 35, it is not easy, can be pretty unsettling and simultaneously profoundly moving. Having tentatively acknowledged a void in my life I started from looking at the cosmos, hence I found your sister site (it popped up on my computer while I was reading the paper online)and trying to find a reasonable explanation for existence.

    The obstacles to my achieving a relationship with God are simple ones but perhaps not so easy to overcome. In relation to this thread, someone in my position has firstly to accept the scientific possibility, at the very least, for the existence of a God. In my case this has been relatively easy and my limited scientific research to date leads me to conclude that existence is the creation of a God. As you say here on your site, there can only be one truth and I would agree; but in a purely logical manner a person exploring spirituality should therefore pursue the study of practised religions one after another until arriving at the truth – this could be the first religion or the last to be studied. In this context, all religions must deal with the fact that there is evil in the world, and tragedies occur without explanation as to why a benign God would allow this. In my relatively uninformed view there are two possible reaponses to this – accept that there is a God who is working with a purpose above and beyond our complete understanding or deny the existence of God.

    These are words, which of course have their place; however, I believe that when a person is touched by God, as I hope to be, although the questioning and imperfect understanding will continue that person will accept that God knows better. That for me is perhaps what faith is about, not acknowledging the existence of God but rather having faith that the universe and us with it are progressing as he intends.

    yours,
    Luke

  3. Khaled Barakat says:

    when people ignore god orders, god will ignore them and leave them in an affliction world, everybody will start looking for what he is missing and fight for it, without god we are living a few meters away from hell, a word i feel i have to say to every Agnostic, if you are walking in a desert and suddenly saw a glass on the sand, you will be sure that someone was here, you will never be able to put him under your sight, you will never feel him, and if you search a million year you will reach nothing except one thing, someone was there.
    have another look at the world my friend
    wish everybody a great day

  4. Todd Smith says:

    Believe in jesus the human being not the made up BS from the catholic church from 320AD. Jesus is/was not supernatural. It is irrational to believe that this is so and none of it can be proven. Most of the bible is metaphorical in nature and should be treated as such and much can be learned from these myths. However literal interpretation of the bible will only cause confusion and contradiction which is exactly what I am reading in alot of these posts.

    • perrymarshall says:

      Nearly all historical scholars date the gospels before 100AD. We have manuscripts dating to 150. Paul’s letters are dated 40-50. The above statements do not stand up to scholarly scrutiny.

  5. murari das says:

    God IS all powerful and all loving, also all knowing, and many other ALLs.
    Bad things do NOT happen to good people.The universe is far more complicated than a spiritually uneducated person can possibly imagine. Every single act from birth to death produces a reaction. There are stringent laws in operation, every bit as unforgiving as the laws of physics, that govern activities
    Life is eternal, every living creature has always existed and always will. The circumstances of a living being’s birth are determined by their previous activities, combined with their desires. The mundane happiness and distress they experience in that body are predetermined before they even take birth.
    There is no such entity as Satan who tries to run interference with God’s plan and keeps messing things up.
    Any and all experiences disconnected from God have no more reality than the activities in a Hollywood movie. They may look real and provoke reactions, joy, excitement, even tears or horror, but they aren’t real. They are temporary and pass away in time. That which is real endures forever. It is the responsibility of, and the possibility for every man and woman to free themselves from this illusion, and realize their natural state of spiritual existence full of knowledge and bliss.
    Judeo/Christian/Islamic scriptures give some glimpses of this, but due to the nature of the people at the times of instructions, the teachings were fairly basic and centered more on morality than real spirituality, as basic morality is a prerequisite for spirituality. Killing animals for food, drinking and smoking mind-altering substances, copulating purely for the pleasure of it, all present serious barriers to self-realization, and without knowing your self, how can you know your father?
    Everything is still happening by the will of the Lord and always has been, the only regrettable feature of this world is that too few people truly love God.

  6. Shayan Khan says:

    Conway, practical, in this case, means the practicality of knowledge. The practical implementation of knowledge. If you have knowledge of how magnetic fields work, how current is induced in the coiled copper, (before motors were developed) then you can certainly implement that knowledge for practical purposes.
    I don’t know what you think of “practical” as.
    Yes, English isn’t really my native language.

  7. «Practical mind», this is what is missing from the people who believe God would use an earthquake to punish bad people or that God would write scriptures that could become obsolete. One thing religious people have got to answer for now is that over 4 out of every 6 person on this planet use a cellular telephone. 4.5 billion people!

    Cell phones depend on a type of physics that is in direct contradiction with the scriptures. So either, your are a true believer and you stop using cell phones and computers or you keep on using them and you are not a true believer any more.

    It may take some time to sink in, but this conclusion is unavoidable…

  8. I believe in God, but the God I believe in has nothing to do with the one most of you are talking about here. It is the God of all, of every human being, good or bad, young or old, stupid or wise, of ALL of them, no exception.

    It is also the God of the animals, the plants, the rocks, the planet, the stars, the galaxies, all the way from the smallest particle up to the biggest aggregate.

    Nothing can do anything outside of the realm of God.

    So saying that someone may have done something against the will of God is irrelevant. Whatever we do is whatever God does. It is the same thing. Separation is a delusion.

    God is doing both the good and the bad. So to reach higher in God consciousness, you have got to raise above the «good vs bad» duality. Many of us here in Quebec have gotten quite closer to God after dropping out of religion.

  9. Shayan Khan says:

    It actually depends on the usage of those particular devices. It is not in direct contradiction with the religious scriptures. I don’t know where you got that from. It’s the misuse of certain devices which is undesirable.

    How exactly is “nature” (the physics) in contradiction with the scriptures (God’s words)? So, what you’re saying is, God’s creation of nature is in contradiction with his statements.
    Incorrect, my friend.

    • I was raised in the Catholic religion which says that God created the universe in 6 days a few thousands years ago, that Eve was created from a piece of Adam, and all that crap.

      I believe that God is still creating the universe properly in this very moment. But I don’t believe that the God in charge of the whole universe over billions of years would waste his precious time writing scriptures for a few lost souls living on a third rate planet in some unknown galaxy.

      The scriptures of all the religions that I know of were written by human beings and show anthropomorphic ways of thinking that are in no way related to how a God capable of maintaining such a gigantic universe would think.

      • perrymarshall says:

        I would encourage you to look at the Genesis story through the lens of a modern cosmologist: http://www.cosmicfingerprints.com/audio/newevidence.htm

        • I agree with the facts, but I draw different conclusions. The fact that there is «intelligent design» doesn’t automatically means that God is «personal» whatever that means.

          The fact that all the odds were biased deliberately towards nurturing life as we know it on this planet doesn’t mean that God created this whole universe in order for Dr. Hugh Ross to be able to explain to us on April 16, 1994 how christians got it all right and everybody else got it all wrong.

          I spent a big part of my childhood having to learn by heart the one hundred questions of the catechism, and the ten commandments, and about Adam and Eve. Later I learned about inquisition and the role of the church in the political affairs of the world. A lot of hypocrisy from my point of view.

          Knowledge about reality came to me through science, not through religion.

  10. Shayan Khan says:

    Conway, there are things which happen on Earth because God has allowed “freedom” of certain actions. He has the capability to “control”. It would be quite foolish to consider such a ruler as “God”. What God is there with no authority of absolute control? I wouldn’t consider that ruler as a “God”.

    God= Absolute, supreme ruler of all existence in the multiverse.
    Fabricated God= stripped capabilities. Depriving abilities and authority.

  11. Liliana Bertolotti says:

    The question about the ‘why’ of evil finds a reasonable explanation in Karma and Reincarnation – we get what we deserve or what we need to progress in our spiritual evolution(which may be painful). The whole point is that our life on earth is a school and a preparation for a higher state of being and one lifetime is insufficient to achieve this. The Gospels have been cleared of any reference to reincarnation by the church, with one exception: read Matthew 11:11-15 and 17:10-13

    • Tony Francis says:

      Hi Liliana,

      I still cannot find the answer to the why – in the Karma – re-incarnation cycles. Why go repeatedly through these cycles? What is the final product?. Will these cycles ever end? Why is it not ended yet? What will happen after they end? When did these cycles start? Who started them, and why? Why did he make it into an instantaneous act like a Bigger bang?

      • perrari das says:

        Hi Tony,

        don’t get mad yet, I can answer your questions.

        The repeated births are to go on fulfilling material desires. If you die with some material desire, you will have another birth in order to fulfill it.
        It ends only when you give up all material desires and surrender to the will of the Lord. At that point since you have no material desires it is not necessary to take birth again in the material world, you go back to Godhead.

        The cycle of birth and death (samsara) has been going on since the beginning of time – eternally. It starts for each individual when they desire to live separately from the Lord and so take their first birth in the material world, and ends for them when they give up their independent mentality and return to the spiritual world. It is in the own hands of each individual.
        In this way souls are constantly coming and going to and from the material world.
        Karma carries the living entity from one birth to another, from one universe to another under the instructions of the Supreme Lord. Only the individuals desire to become free coupled with the Lord’s mercy can end it.

        take care,
        Perrari

    • Bethea Weinberg says:

      I, too, believe in reincarnation and karma. Jews, Christians and Muslims: here is my question, which none of you has ever answered to my satisfaction. Perry Marshall, too, have a go at this one: Why is one baby born healthy, bright, attractive, talented, well-loved, with a pleasant family life/good upbringing and education, while another baby is born poor, sickly, deformed, unwanted and abused, given little or no opportunity in life? Reincarnation and karma provide an answer. So far, the standard Abrahamaic-faiths answer is: “God moves in mysterious ways.” Translation: “Don’t ask any more questions! Please!”

      • Joseph Udoka says:

        God is holy, righteous and good, but we may be far from understanding all about Him. My dear sister, there is a reason for all that God does, but most of it cannot be accessed by just our intellect, hence the “mysterious” conclusion. But all that will soon come to an end, He is making it clearer.
        When we sin (meaning that we abandon God), His Grace may leave us temporarily, and the enemy comes in, there is no telling how far he (Satan) will take us, he could give us deformed children, all kinds of hardship. All the suffering come from sin, the devil continues to suit us before God.
        But some of these sufferings come from God Himself, for our instruction,otherwise we may look away for a very long time, bringing eternal disaster. Our Father has a plan for us, and does not want us to fail. If you investigate close enough you will find many of the reasons for all of these troubles, at least the physical ones.
        The Devil have gone very far in deceiving us, the darkness is so tick that some people do not believe there can be light. Many people have made covenants to work for the Devil and his associates many generations ago, and these agreements are still binding upon their children, some of whom are nations today. That is why you find many people possessed by demons, their ancestors agreed to one or more arrangement with the Devil sometime in the past, remember Canaan.
        If God is with us, no evil shall befall us, but as we sin, He will punish us. When our sins become gross, He hands us over to the one we love. Satan has power to do evil, and is always ready.
        Let us obey God by following Christ, as we do, you will see we will no longer have unexplainable questions. The Spirit of God will come to you, answering your individual questions before you are able to articulate them to writing, giving you very clear explanations noone can offer to you physically.
        If you care to hear much more, especially about the issues of demonic covenants, what it is and what it does, write to me.
        Joseph Udoka
        mezienye@gmail.com

  12. Shayan Khan says:

    Actually, Serge, the scriptures were not compiled for a “few” lost souls. That is just a conjecture. The reason for a systematic compilation containing rules and regulations was to direct the faiths of the misguided communities to the correct and desirable pattern. All of humanity needed those scriptures. The prophets thought it would be best to preserve the divine revelations for future generations.
    You may also know, God is not susceptible to the progression of time. He is exempted from time. His time, and our time are entirely different. He does not experience the “loss” of time. For him, he doesn’t lose time for completing tasks.
    Why would God actually supply this form of species with versatile tools and elements? We live in a planet containing the vital elements needed to harness and sustain life. What makes you think we are a race which has no importance to God? He created us, therefore he would quite clearly care for this particular species of life. Hence, every creature is provided with intrinsic neccessities of life. Therefore, God certainly cares, which is the reason he provided his creations with basic neccessities for progression.
    What makes you say this Galaxy is unknown to God? God is ubiquitous. This statement was quite extraneous.
    I’m not sure if God is doing any “bad”.
    Yes, i believe faith can only be discovered by the individual. The only requisite is to believe in a common God, since there is only one God. But also, try to follow the commandments of God, as their only purpose is to guide without potential harm sustained in the journey to acquire perfect spirituality.

    • Pink Floyd sang «we’re just a few lost souls swimming in a fish bowl». As far as I’m concerned, all of humanity past, present and future, compared to the size of the universe remains a small number of people.

      I believe in God, but not in a god that would make a difference between those of one faith over those of another faith or those with no faith at all.

      I believe in God, but not in a god that would favor what was written by one person over what was written by another person. We are all part of God. And the words I write and you write and anybody writes come exactly in the same way as the words written in the Bible, or any other holy book.

      Also, I have had to learn about the ten commandments and have no problems with that. I have a problem with the fact that religious authorities all over the world use the commandments as a front while behind the scenes, they keep on torturing and killing people shamelessly.

      The religious people in the United States support the army and an unfair economic system. Their journey to perfect spirituality is going to be very long since they are headed in the wrong direction.

      All you need is love, love is all you need.

      • Bethea Weinberg says:

        Yay! Finally, someone talks about love, instead of”Believe this! Or God will be mad at you!” Beliefs are from the mind. Love is from the heart/soul/spirit. God is supposed to look at our hearts!

  13. Calix Lewis Reneau says:

    I’m not sure that my voice here much matters, but having been a committed follower of Jesus for thirty years now, I find that my thinking has shifted over time from wondering “why is there evil in the world? Why do bad things happen?” to living daily in amazement and joy simply noting that good exists, that good things happen.

    I guess as I’ve gotten older I’ve recognized the innate and unavoidable inclination to do ugly things in my personality, and seen the brutality of both man and nature when left unchecked.

    So it seems to me the “way of the world” – the natural order of things, from the laws of thermodynamics (tending toward disorder) to the inclinations of human behavior left unchecked – is, as Hobbes eloquently put it, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

    Which leads me to ask “why is there good in the world?”

    And when I see the hand of my Master in every aspect of life, wooing all creation to Him, I can’t see evil as evidence of His absence, but of His grace and mercy and longsuffering.

    So if the existence of evil troubles you, maybe you could take a day or so to look at life around you and ask a more fundamental question:

    “With all this evil around – the world, the flesh and the devil – where could any good possibly be coming from?”

    Cheers,
    Calix

    • “Why is there good in the world?”

      Good question!

      The media tell me about all the evil in the world, but when I look around me, friends, family, neighbours, I see mostly good people doing their best.

      So I wonder, could it be that the world is a better place that we think ? Could it be that we are led to believe it is mostly bad when in fact it is mostly good?

      Being good is a personal choice that we each have to make over and over all the time. And many people have been making that choice since the beginning, regardless of where or when they were born.

    • June Dewar says:

      Dear Calix

      Yes it’s good you and I are blessed with adequate food and clothing and can see the good in things. But do we give thought to all those in the world we sometimes get a glipse of thanks to our media who are not blessed the way we are? Do we ever give a thought to the magnitude of children who suffer horrendous abuse within the confines of their own homes with no one to save them? Have you seen the documentary on Bulgaria’s abandonned children? Have you seen the news report where governments were depriving poor people of their only food source to convert it into fuel to sell to western society leaving starving people to eat earth.

      Yes isn’t it a wonderfull world. But not for the majority. Oh perhaps we should only look on the bright side. Tell that to the masses suffering persecution and starvation, by the way people often do.

  14. Kay Jay says:

    Put this in context and see how it fits..

    The world is created by God.

    He creates mosquitoes that carry viruses to kill babies, he creates parasites that literally eat the hearts of man, he made wasps that inject their unborn into catepillars so they may eat the living catapiller until it dies. He made the world with continents arranged so their will be volcanoes, quakes, floods, storms, great winds and great droughts. He made the black plague. He made some plants poisonous and some plants edible, then for his amusement he decreed that we shall not eat one of the few safe plants.

    He decreed we must spend our time worshipping him and telling others how great he is. He tells us not to kill, while in his book it is recounted how many hundreds of thousands he personally has killed. He decrees SADNESS one of the deadly sins (removed from later kersions of His Book) and never includes KINDNESS as a virtue. (the great adversary, Lucifer it may be noted from the great book, is noted as killing only a single person, but he is we are told, evil)

    Of all the books in His Book, only a few are permitted to be retained in the later years and The Church is (apparently ordered so by Him) made to edit out: The Book of Enoch, The Book of Mary and some dozen others..

    This is a god to be sure of, a great god, a terrible god, a vengeful god. A mad god, a cruel god – and in my mind, a very, very evil god.

    Yes, our world was created by an evil god and men so worship him out of fear.

    And so..

    I will kill no wife for not being virginal

    I will kill no man for eating shellfish

    I shall not condemn any man who is ‘cut’ or ‘crushed’

    I shall not cut the hand from a woman for any ‘crime’.

    Nor shall I follow any of His commandments which are cruel or condemn my fellow man who may be confused or uncertain of his place in this world..

    Instead ..

    I will go to this god’s Hell spitting and roaring in fury at his evil ways and denying him any dominion over me, having not spent one moment of my short life wasted in worshiping him, his evil ways or showing him anything but fury at the pain and misery he has chosen to subject us all to for no purpose but his amusement.

    • perrymarshall says:

      Sounds like you’re a man who holds bitterness and cynicism in fairly high regard. How’s that workin’ out for you so far?

      • Conway Redding says:

        Labeling Kay Jay as being bitter and cynical in no way refutes the point she/he makes, Perry, which is essentially that if there were a cosmic Child Protection Agency, the deity y’all worship as “God,” who is usually said to stand in the same relation to us mortals as that of a loving father to his children, would be up on charges. In any event, I commend for your consideration Ambrose Bierce’s definition of a cynic: “A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.”

        • perrymarshall says:

          Conway,

          I considered whether to respond to Kay Jay’s questions, or not.

          I decided not to, since he asserts God “never includes KINDNESS as a virtue.”

          If he believes that then his ignorance of Christianity is so total as to be irredeemable.

          I’m not going to debate the Bible with Kay Jay if he won’t read it for himself.

          Does he raise valid questions? Sure he does.

          But to hold God responsible for Man’s evils is total abdication of personal responsibility. Regardless of what one does or does not believe about God, man has ostensibly been allowed the freedom to do what man wants to do in the world.

          You can’t curse God for that, and in the same breath get angry at people who want to impose conservative forms of morality on others. I have no doubt that Kay Jay would be the first to defend the party line of liberal “rights” – abortion, euthanasia, etc.

          He has every right to want those things, and every right to have those things, and only the Church Lady will attempt to stop him.

          But in claiming those rights he forfeits the right to blame God for the bloodshed we see on planet earth.

          Planet Earth is no a cosmic Child Protection Agency. Planet earth is a realm of free thought, free inquiry and human beings empowered to behave in the world as they see fit. If you don’t like it, blame man. But don’t blame God.

          • Conway Redding says:

            Perry, the Coffeehouse Theology site doesn’t permit me to lay out my response as I would like, with your comments in one font color and mine in another, so I have simply enclosed those of your comments to which I am responding in quotes, and have left mine unenclosed.

            “But to hold God responsible for Man’s evils is total abdication of personal responsibility. Regardless of what one does or does not believe about God, man has ostensibly been allowed the freedom to do what man wants to do in the world.”

            Perry, I couldn’t disagree more. If one believes, as most religionists seem to, that there is some sentient being called God, Yahweh, Allah, Jehovah, whatever, who created this frame of existence and all that’s in it, and who is also omnipotent, omniscient, all-wise, all-good, and so on, then one has to concede that 1) God created Man, and that, since Man is so obviously flawed, that, 2) God created Man flawed. One further has to concede that God knew that his creation was flawed, and proceeded with it anyway. Or do you suppose that, to take the myth of the Fall of Man as an example, that when Eve, under the blandishments of the Serpent, ate the Forbidden Fruit (usually said to have been an apple) and then encouraged Adam to do likewise, God slapped himself on the forehead and said, “Wow! I didn’t see that coming!” Well, by the same reasoning that now has Toyota in trouble, in that Toyota is being held liable for having knowingly made a flawed product, the conclusion is inescapable that, whatever bad things happen on this planet, whether man or inanimate nature is the agent whereby they occur, God is ultimately responsible for them.

            Now, let me make it clear that I, for one, don’t believe that God is responsible for them, because I don’t believe that God exists in any other sense than that in which Ebenezer Scrooge, Mickey Mouse, and Wile E. Coyote are said to exist. But those who do believe in the real existence of the entity called God have, as Ricky Ricardo used to say, “some ‘splainin’ to do.”

            “Planet Earth is no a cosmic Child Protection Agency.”

            I think you may have misunderstood my point, Perry, which was not that Planet Earth is a cosmic Child Protection Agency, but that if there were such an agency, God would be subject to prosecution for abusing us, his children, whom he is said to love so inordinately. I don’t find much love to be inferable from the recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, or from any of a string of natural disasters going back thousands of years (remember Pompeii?), or from the existence of such boons as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, supranuclear palsy, scleroderma, glioblastoma multiforme, retinoblastoma, disseminated cancer of the breast or prostate, Parkinson’s Disease, multiple sclerosis, etc., or from the fact that the pedophile, John Couey, kidnapped and raped little Jessica Lunsford and then left her to die of suffocation when he buried her alive. Now, granted, Couey was acting of his own free will, but what did Jessica’s free will have to do with what happened to her? Or for that matter, what does the free will of any of the victims of the human predators that prowl our planet have to do with what the predators do to them?

            So no, Perry, if God created this frame of existence, then God is responsible for whatever unpleasantnesses it contains, and people who recognize this inescapable conclusion are entitled to curse his very name. I don’t waste my time doing so, simply because, as I see it, there is no God, and the bad things that nature inflicts upon humankind are, for the most part, random events.

            But I agree that we humans, and we alone, bear responsibility for the evil that we inflict upon ourselves and each other.

            • perrymarshall says:

              Conway,

              I believe that human beings have a “free will” that is granted by God; that free will is a real, actual ontological entity, and that your decision to stop at a red light or blow right through it is a decision that you and you alone make. And that you and you alone are responsible for. And will be judged for, ultimately.

              Yes, our free will operates within severe constraints of whatever is around us but we are nevertheless free to choose what we do and say. I think Viktor Frankl’s book “Man’s Search for Meaning” is a beautiful explanation that even in a concentration camp, nobody can take away your will to be a living, thinking, self-aware human spirit.

              Thus I believe that God has truly granted us a gift of being allowed to make such choices and as such He is NOT responsible for the choices we make. 6 billion people make 6 billion choices and 6 billion people enjoy the rewards and suffer the consequences.

              You may agree or disagree, but I submit to you that what I have said here is rational and coherent.

              And yes, in some sense it’s inevitable that the world is this way because God decreed that it would be created with these degrees of freedom. I understand that this is aesthetically repulsive to many people. But I can only respond that Christian theology does not flinch from this reality for a single nanosecond. Read the book of Job – it is ALL about this question. And consider that Jesus Himself said, “Father remove this cup from me – but not my will but thine be done.” Jesus – God in the Flesh – came and suffocated to death just like Jessica Lunsford.

              And THIS is the key to understanding Christianity: Whatever you think about the world as it is, God joined us in our sufferings. God UNDERSTANDS. God takes His own medicine. Is this a mystery? Yes. But when you are able to accept this, you enter into a fascinating journey of redemption and discovery.

              I think the following story adds flavor to this question:

              http://www.perrymarshall.com/articles/religion/esdras-and-evil/

              By the way even though we’ve disagreed I appreciate your participating in this discussion with us.

              Sincerely,

              Perry

              • Stef Coulombe says:

                Interesting discussion. Just a thought for Kay Jay and Conway: if you wrote a computer program, and somebody else wrote a virus to infect and cause it to damage somebody’s computer… does that mean that *you* wrote a flawed, evil program?
                Translate that to God, creation, the devil, and sin: God created a perfect world, but because He chose to allow free will (call it “open sourcing” or perhaps “allowing user modification” if you will… or would you rather have no free will?), the devil (a rebellious angel, remember) brought his rebellion and offered it to Adam and Eve. They CHOSE to accept it. God gave them the “anti-virus” to protect themselves; they had hundreds of other “websites” (fruit), but they had to choose the one that had a red warning flashing all over it; they chose to “download anyway”. Did God create the mosquito? Why not? It used to drink sap, or nectar, or some other plant juice (read Genesis 1 again). Now, it drinks blood, and carries disease, because WE chose to allow it to. (Or would you blame Adam and Eve, now, and say “but it’s not MY fault”? Because the first sin was rebellion… exactly the spirit in which you both are “condemning” God.)

                • Indranie Singh says:

                  I totally agree with u!!!!! these days every body is carried away with the sins of the world and all they wana do is put blame on things that dont deserve it… God bless u my friend because u have spoken the plain truth….

              • Keith Taylor says:

                Hello everyone,
                I somehow think that people are all a little confused about this question of good and evil. God ‘created’ neither: the concept is man’s alone. Good and evil do not exist in nature: animals do as they do and none ‘blames’ the other for being what they inherently are. Shifting the blame for evil onto God or some other agency (the devil) is simply looking for a scapegoat and not accepting responsibility for your own actions.
                Our societies have a great many flaws: there is not one left that is ‘perfect’. The question now arises as to whether any ‘perfect’ society ever existed. The answer is yes, at least one did. Unfortunately, this society was destroyed by modern culture (if one can call it that), who viewed this perfect society as flawed. The Bushmen are now caught up in our mad, modern striving for riches, eating rubbish and the wearing of the most ‘desirable’ labels.
                Permit me to tell you a little about the Bushmen. They lived in a vast area called the Kalahari. This region is designated a ‘desert’, even though it teems with wildlife and has a multitude of indigenous plants. The greatest feature of this area is that it rains for only three months of the year. The water soon disappears, leaving the landscape covered with dry grass, which the animals find most nutritious. The Bushmen lived here, trekking from place to place when the mood and the need to do so took them. The Bushmen had no concept of ownership: everything was shared unconditionally and unreservedly. They knew where to look for tubers and roots and these they would consume in a variety of ways. Some were simply shaved down and squeezed to release their moisture, which the Bushmen drank. Whenever he killed an animal to eat, the hunter would kneel down and apologise to the beast for taking its life, explaining that, in order for him and his people to live, it was necessary to kill and eat the animal. Every part of that animal was used: nothing was ever wasted. They knew which plants cured which ailment and disease, which were good to eat and which should, at all costs, be avoided.
                In contrast to our quest for a high ‘standard of living’, the Bushmen had the most enviable ‘quality of life’, because they spent all their time in the company of friends and family, every single member of which they could trust implicitly. They knew no jealousy, had no concept of covetousness or anger. The children learned in the most natural way possible: by mimicking their elders and peers. Their ‘neighbours’ were wild animals, spiders, scorpions and snakes. They learned, from a very early age, which were potentially dangerous and which would do no harm. The dangerous ones were avoided and the harmless ones left unmolested.
                The Bushmen were pacifists, doing no harm to others, each band keeping to itself, perhaps meeting one or two other bands in a year, because no other people could survive in that unique environment. Some people go so far as to call it ‘hostile’, but nothing in nature is hostile: nature is unforgiving and inhospitable toward those who do not know and obey the rules, but nature is not hostile. Look at it this way: we all know where the ‘tornado alleys’ are; where there are active volcanoes and where earthquakes occur. Anyone who lives in these areas must make provision for these threats to their lives and property. It’s no use praying to God to protect you from them, because God does not take sides against nature. He created nature to be in charge of the processes that operate on the planet and if you are too damned stupid to see that certain places are too dangerous to occupy, then you must suffer the consequences. That is all.
                Neither God nor nature are ‘out to get you’, but they have no sympathy for ignoramuses. Your sole defence against any environment is knowledge, but man, in his headlong race toward …what? … does not study the processes of earth, or those that govern his existence on the planet.
                Man has become a parasite: perhaps the deadliest parasite ever to have existed. This is as a result of his own skewed perspective of his importance on the planet. Many people, especially those who are slaves to organised religions, think that they have certain ‘God-given’ rights. These so-called ‘rights’ are not given to you by God, but are condescendingly granted to you by such authorities as your religious leaders and magnanimous governments. The fact is that you have no more ‘rights’ than the fleas you crush or the bacteria you try to eliminate with your antiseptic compounds. God created them all and I think that He is quite proud of His creativity and abilities. I know of no man on this earth who can build a mosquito, or even a single, living cell from its base elements, so what ‘right’ do men have to kill any of them? You become ill because your body has not been given the opportunity to develop an immune system that is powerful enough to ward off the causes: you keep disinfecting yourself and your environs so that your body does not have time to learn to fight the germs and bacteria that threaten you. My wife and I have a small shop, so we are exposed to people with all manner of ailments every day of our lives. Since we only wipe our bodies down daily (using no more than about two litres of water and mild, liquid soap for this purpose) and shower once a week, we not only have constitutions of stainless steel, but we use less water in a month than most of our peers waste in a day! Although I am over sixty and she is in her middle fifties, neither of us has had a cold or ‘flu in over ten years and we are free of headaches and other ailments and pains. Over the years we have discovered that her blood group requires different food to mine, so she eats a lot more fruit and vegetables than I do, while I consume a vast amount of animal fat, which she cannot stomach. We live far away from the nearest town, surrounded by our animals and as much of nature as circumstances will allow.
                Frogs, lizards and spiders are our ‘insecticides’ and I catch and release into safe areas any venomous snakes that come visiting. The egg-eating snakes are welcome to any eggs they find in our aviaries and the odd genet that kills and eats a chicken is left unmolested. They were here before we arrived: we ‘stole’ their habitat, now we do not deny them their ‘right’ to eat the things that we used to replace the prey that once roamed freely on our piece of land. We love nature and understand natural processes and are thus able to thrive in areas in which even indigenous human inhabitants struggle to survive.
                There is no ‘good’ and no ‘evil’: God is immune to such delusions. God did not make you so that He could have someone upon whom to vent His spleen. God made you in the same frame of mind that He created the earthworm and the elephant. The only difference between us and them is that we have the unfortunate flaw of having a brain that we cannot hope to learn to use to its full capacity. This is because we permit others to delude us and beguile us with their selfish agendas. We also manage to delude ourselves.
                Ask anyone you know, who has read the Bible, what is meant by “God made man in His own image”. I am willing to wager a sizeable sum of money that they don’t have the foggiest notion. Well, I will tell you: it means that we humans have incredible powers, so powerful that we can, for example, influence the processes of nature. However, no thanks to the canard spouted by parents, priests, professors and politicians, we never realise this and therefore never learn to wield them. It is only lately that such people as Gary Craig have discovered a simple and profoundly effective healing method and quantum physicists are beginning to understand that everything is most definitely NOT as is seems.
                Until every person realises that they have such powers and are ultimately responsible for their own actions, they will never discover the meaning of life, the universe and everything. Break out of the mould that your tutors, parents and ‘authorities’ have cast: find yourself, BE yourself, take responsibility for yourself. Oh, and stop taking yourself so seriously!

                • Stef Coulombe says:

                  Would you encourage your own children to break free of your “mould”? Not every authority is evil–while I have little use for most politicians, there are those who do seek what is best for their people, and I would suggest that the majority of teachers, more than half the priests, and even some parents are on the right track in spouting certain moral values.

                  If we can’t take the future of our eternal souls seriously, then what?

                  Otherwise, you have some neat ideas. ;p

                  • Keith Taylor says:

                    Stef, since I did not know at the time just how the world would turn out, at the tender age of 18, ‘way back in 1967, I decided that I would have no children. Had I nevertheless had some, I would not have sent them to school, but would have taught them myself, always encouraging them to do their own research and not simply take MY word for anything. Why this attitude toward myself? Well, although I have read many more books on more subjects than anyone else I know, I submit that I have not read ALL the books ever written about these subjects, so that I have probably missed something of vital importance. I have, in the course of the years, had to change my perceptions and understanding about a great many things, so that, much to the perplexity of friends and family, I’ll say one thing one day and the diametric opposite the next.
                    Oscar Wilde made these two observations, both of which apply to me: “I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying” and “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”
                    …and before you accuse me of being a fan of Mr. Wilde, I am not: I know only that he was regarded as some sort of literary figure by some people. I came upon these quotes by accident and like them, that is all.
                    Those politicians, pedants, priests and parents to whom you refer may have the best interests of their people and children at heart, but they have been brainwashed by their parties, school authorities, churches and societies, so that they will only operate within certain perameters. My children would have had no such limitations, as I would have taught them to be self-sufficient, self-reliant and self-sustaining. As an example, if the economy were to collapse completely, my kids would not have been affected in any adverse way whatsoever. They would never have had to go out and “look for a job” in order to survive, but would have been able to thrive without any contact with other people. I would have encouraged them to go out and mix with other people, so that they could see for themselves that the other people are trapped in a spiral of slavery from which even their ideas of death cannot free them.
                    What is morality? Is it moral to keep a dying person on mind-numbing drugs for extended periods until they eventually expire? Are they extending the person’s life or drawing out their deaths? My wife knows that I am not afraid of dying, so that, when my time comes, she knows she must let me go. This is MY life and I will decide when enough is enough, not any doctor or priest.
                    You write as though your soul is something apart from you: as though you don’t really know what it is. Well, I AM my soul and my body is a vehicle I use in order to expess myself. What happens to me after I die is between God and I: it is not up to some priest to decide whether or not my words and actions meet with God’s approval. I know what I am doing and I accept full responsibilty for my words and deeds.
                    Thanks for the kind words at the end of your post.

                    • Stef Coulombe says:

                      Sorry to have missed your reply earlier; I’ll also reply to your recent comment, here, as I can’t find it on this page.

                      First, I respect your decision to have no children; however, the first thing I learned when my son was born, was that people who don’t have kids can’t speak with any authority on how *they* would raise kids, if they had them. (“No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy” and all that.) ;p

                      As to changing your views as you learn, I see no problems. It’s called “learning”, right?

                      I’m not overly fond of Mr. Wilde, but I also find those quotations “appropriate” at times, for myself. I have no truck with “doing things the way they’ve always been done, because they’ve always been done that way”. On the other hand, change for the sake of change is not always wise; it’s important to make decisions consciously, and with discernment.

                      I’m sorry you’ve had such bad experiences with priests and teachers and…, but I still maintain that there are those who not only want what’s best for the children, but also actively seek it, even in the face of the authority above them. The society you describe seems exceptionally militaristic, where not a single soldier has a mind of his own. I am a teacher, as my father before me, and what I learned from him was to do what *I* think is best for my students–which often coincides with the curriculum, but sometimes does not. When I find myself in error, I apologize and correct myself. The things I learned from my teachers did not “brainwash” me; I learned to think on my own, and accept certain teachings while rejecting others. Isn’t that what school is all about?

                      I agree that what happens after death is between God and me–BUT if God has tried to communicate certain concepts with me, like, perhaps, the way to eternal salvation, and I refuse to listen, then I can’t exactly look forward to a good “meeting” with my Maker, now can I?

                      The soul is distinct from the “self” only in the sense that this body is temporary, and the soul is eternal; I refer to “my soul” to emphasize that distinction, not to suggest that it is not *me*.

                      Now, as to your more recent comments:
                      “The Catholic Church was the originator of the religion that has become known as Christianity: Jesus was not. In fact, I cannot find anything in the Bible that indicates that Jesus required a religion to be created in His name.”

                      John 14:6 “Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.””

                      “Religion” is an often mis-defined word; personally, I associate “religion” with the human traditions and practices of the church. The church itself, however, is built by Jesus.
                      Matthew 16:18 “And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.”

                      “Neither Catholicism or Protestantism adhere to these laws anymore, so that they have both become species of “do-it-yourself” religions.”

                      Well, Luke 10:25-28:
                      25 On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
                      26 “What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”
                      27 He answered: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”
                      28 “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”

                      “Love God” and “Love your neighbour”–this *IS* the Old Testament Law.

                      The Christian faith is NOT “choose your own path”; we have disagreements on less important issues, but rather than fight, we choose to have different denominations. (Yes, there are those who *do* choose to fight, and no, we don’t all agree *which* issues are “less” important; this happens within individual families, and is a “human” problem, not just a “Christian” one.)
                      However, as “Bible-believing” Christians, we must all agree that:
                      1) All have sinned, and are destined for Hell. (Sadly, some have fallen from the Chrisitan faith, and no longer believe in eternal punishment–but those are not “Bible-believing” people, as eternal salvation vs. damnation is the message throughout the Bible.)
                      2) Jesus is the Son of God, and He died and rose again, to defeat death and Satan, so that (John 3:16) anybody who believes in Him can have eternal life.
                      3) (John 14:6) Jesus is the *ONLY* way to the Father. No matter how logical or intelligent or faithful or “good” your belief is, if it isn’t Jesus, it won’t work.

                      Now, the teachings of Jesus Himself emphasize certain things, but above all, He calls us to follow Him. Yes, He did start a “religion”, and yes, we His followers have messed it up quite often, but He’s still alive and willing to guide those who seek Him into a better understanding of His will for us, as individuals *and* as a church.

                      Will God honour a “do-it-yourself” faith? Well, for those who have never heard of Him, who *never* had the opportunity to *reject* Christ, I really don’t know. The Bible isn’t clear on that. I believe that God has many plans that are not in the Bible, but He can’t be honest and just and still have conflicting plans for salvation–any other plans are not going to contradict. So, if you never have a chance to reject Christ, I believe that God, being above all *loving*, has a way to save those who can be saved.
                      HOWEVER, for those who have heard the truth and rejected it (Christ), the Bible makes it clear that there will be no discussion/negotiation/second chance, after this life.

                      Now, then: why believe in anything the Bible says, unless you accept the whole thing? If Jesus wasn’t the Son of God, then He was the biggest liar ever, and we shouldn’t trust anything He said.

                      We can’t say He was a “great man” or a “great teacher” if He lied about being “the way, the truth and the life”, now can we?
                      If He was (is) the Son of God, then everything He said has to be true. “NO one comes to the Father but by [Him].”

                      The last argument is that Jesus didn’t lie, but people lied when they wrote the Bible. Or, perhaps, the translators messed it up. Or, the evil priests and bishops stitched together a concoction of lies with some of God’s own writing, and called it “the Bible”.

                      There’s only one answer to that: the God of the Bible is all-powerful and omniscient, and He does not *want* to lose even a single soul to Hell; however, He gave us freedom of choice, and those who *choose* Hell by rejecting Christ will get what they chose. So, what can He do? He can prepare a Message for His beloved people; He can write, through various human authors, an “instruction book” for finding Him and for living a good, holy life.

                      Don’t you think He has the ability to safeguard that book? To keep His message intact?

                      There will be people who lie “in His Name”; there will be those who abuse the power of His church; there will be those who, as a result, choose to abstain from any “organized religion”, and whose words will lead others to follow them away from Christ. God allows free will, but He also gives us wisdom. Yes, there are different translations of the Bible, just as there are different denominations in the church. What matters is whether they teach of Jesus, the Son of God, and His plan for our salvation.

                      We are individuals; “unthinkingly” accepting what others say as absolute truth is, for lack of a stronger phrase, indescribably stupid. However, rejecting God’s truth only because it is taught by an organized religion, or because it’s found in a transcribed, translated, trans…..ed book, well, that’s the kind of mistake that will cost an eternal soul.

                      God bless. Search for truth where it may be found; think for yourself, but don’t forget to ask God for guidance. Your writing shows wisdom and careful thought; please don’t let the mistakes of Christians blind you to the message of Christ.

                  • Keith Taylor says:

                    Stef, you’re right about the raising kids issue: I’d probably have had to move far away from the reach of the authorities to have raised mine and I do not spreak with “authority” on the subject as I have had no experience in the field. I do not quite understand why you say “The society you describe seems exceptionally militaristic, where not a single soldier has a mind of his own” as individuality would be of prime importance in such a society. Everyone would be encouraged to find their own way after having been taught the basics of self-sufficiency. The more diverse the ideas of the people, the more I would have to discuss with, and more importantly, learn from, them.
                    Concerning “doing things the way they’ve always been done, because they’ve always been done that way”: that’s fine as far as it goes, but I am stuck with a mind that is always seeking better, more efficient ways of doing everything. I have often lost jobs as a result thereof, as who can countenance a rank amateur coming along and finding ways of doing the job, better, faster and with less effort than you have been doing along tried and trusted lines for forty years? Instead of congratulating me and asking to be shown my methods, the older folks immediately accused me of trying to make fools of them, when my intention was nothing of the sort.
                    I am inherently lazy and will ALWAYS look for the fastest, most efficient way to do anything. I remember my father taking two weeks to build kitchen cupboards for my mother. Later on, my wife required something similar to be done for her. It took me two days … and what’s more, where my father’s had to be left in place forever more, mine can be dismantled and taken away at the drop of a hat. Dad used to shock himself until his eyes lit up when testing sparking plugs. I test plugs now, but with no such discomfort, because I found a better way. It is not, as you put it “change for the sake of change”, but rather change for the sake of simplicity and efficiency.
                    My wife and I have always cooked on a gas stove and I remove the battery from our car and keep it in the house, next to an inverter. “Blackouts” mean nothing to us because we are in no way inconvenienced by them.
                    I am also a “teacher”, but not in the way that you are. You have no choice but to follow a curriculum, whereas I can teach anyone anything they want to learn, but from every possible angle, not along predetermined lines laid out by academics, most of whom, by the way, I regard with more than just a little jaundice affecting the eye.
                    The problem is that academics and journeymen and almost everybody else have been taught to see things from a certain perspective. Since I am not thus constrained, I can view everything from any perspective I choose … and I do. I keep changing my tactic until it works, though oftentimes I can see through the situation within a few minutes of encountering it and formulate my plan of attack accordingly. My silly brain never rests: it will wake me up in the middle of the night and demand to be taken to one of my computers. From then on sleep is impossible, for I will either have to draw (SketchUp is invaluable here) or research something or re-evaluate my position and view something from a totally unheard-of position, but in the end I will come away with something I had not considered before and have to find a way to correlate it with everything else I have discovered about the world about me.
                    Scientists are often specialists in their fields and when they come across an anomaly that has its roots in another field, they put it into the proverbial “black box” and forget about it. I cannot do that: I have to take it to someone who is an expert in that particular field and ask for his input. This may lead me into ‘leventy two other fields, but I MUST get to the bottom of it. Are YOU affected in this way? If not, then, I am afraid, you will never be able to understand why I think the way I do: why your beliefs make no sense to me and why I am who I am.
                    I think that when God put me together He gave me the best second-hand brain He could find. He could not trust me with a brand new one because I don’t simply blow a fuse or get my circuits crossed: I push them to their limits and try to burn them out.
                    Have I told you that I have spent fifteen years reading Genesis 1 to 5? That every time I get to a certain point, something makes me go back and read it again and again until I find what I have missed? Fifteen years, Stef … and in that time you have probably looked at ALL the words in the Bible quite a few times, not so? Well, God let you off easy, because I have to make sense of it all, not simply marvel at the words.
                    John Muir said: “Just when you try to take anything by itself, you find it attached to everything else in the universe”. He was right.
                    Arthur C. Clark said: “In order to determine the limits of the possible, start by doing the impossible”. That is the story of my life.
                    If God had wanted me to believe what and how you believe, he would have given me your brain, but He didn’t: He gave me this one … and believe me, YOU don’t want it!

                    • Stef Coulombe says:

                      “I do not quite understand why you say “The society you describe seems exceptionally militaristic, where not a single soldier has a mind of his own…””

                      Sorry, I’m refering to society as you see it, not the society which you would rather see. You seem to feel that all teachers (for example) are constricted by the curriculum; if everyone simply taught what and whom they felt like, there would be rather a great deal of misinformation going about. Math is taught according to certain methods, in a certain order, because that is what has been found to be effective; it’s called “learning from the mistakes of others” and “learning from history”. We know certain teaching methods are generally more effective and efficient than others; why ignore them, simply for the sake of not following the curriculum?

                      “Concerning “doing things the way they’ve always been done, because they’ve always been done that way”: that’s fine as far as it goes, but I am stuck with a mind that is always seeking better, more efficient ways of doing everything.”

                      I’m not disagreeing with you. I, too, prefer to find the “easier/simpler” way; I too end up in trouble with others (like my boss) because I look for better solutions. I would say that the majority of the teachers I have known are the same way: I’ve had one or two who can’t see beyond the book, but people as a whole are lazy, and “convenience is the mother of invention” and all that.

                      “The problem is that academics and journeymen and almost everybody else have been taught to see things from a certain perspective.”

                      Again, my experience has been that education helps you to see *different* perspectives.

                      You know, for the most part we seem to agree. However:

                      “Well, God let you off easy, because I have to make sense of it all, not simply marvel at the words.”

                      I’m sure you don’t mean it that way, but that statement is rather offensive. I always ask “why”. I teach my students and my children to ask “why”. Like you, I have woken up at night, brain rushing pell-mell through a new problem, and had to solve the problem before I could get any rest. The difference is that I do not rebel at those things in the Bible with which I have issue–I assume that if God is Who He says He is, then there are things I will not be able to fully comprehend, and it would be arrogance and nothing more to question God because of it. Now, I do *ask* God–but only a fool will go to the Lord God and *demand* an answer.

                      “If God had wanted me to believe what and how you believe, he would have given me your brain…”

                      Nonsense. We are all created as individuals, but we have this in common: we are all created in His image. God created us with a space in our hearts and minds for Him, and filling that space with anything else–money, philosophy, “freedom”, …–will leave us unsatisfied and unfulfilled. Again, if Jesus is Who He says He is, then there is ONE way to God, and we must all come to accept it, or pay for our choice.

                      I do think much as you do; I have challenged my faith, I have played “devil’s advocate”, I have wondered why. In the end, I always come back to this: God is Who He says He is, the Bible is His Word, and He will help me to understand His truth according to His schedule, not mine. Much of what you say about yourself rings true for me; however, I have found a certain peace in my faith. Some will call it “voluntary blindness”–but they don’t *see*. This is why discussion and argument can not force someone to accept the truth of Christ; we can only encourage someone to re-examine those things which he has rejected, and pray that the Holy Spirit will open his eyes.

                      God bless.

                      P.S. Given the way you think, I think we would be close friends if we had grown up in the same place. ;p

              • Dalibor Sver says:

                This is an excellent and simple answer. Way to go, Perry

            • perrymarshall says:

              Conway,

              Thanks for tracking with this discussion. 2 issues:

              1) Collateral damage: In Genesis 3 God pronounces the curse and says Adam will labor by the sweat of his brow and to the dust he will return. Thorns and thistles are introduced and he is no longer protected from the evils outside the garden, including disease. If Adam was immortal before he is now mortal.

              Adam doesn’t get to choose how he dies – he could die of any number of things. He has chosen death (which was promised) and he doesn’t get to choose how it will manifest itself.

              2) You can accuse God of being cruel by allowing Adam to choose this (and Adam DID choose it; I think he knew what death was) but God also became flesh and suffered just as Adam does. The alleged cruelty of God is absolved by the cross. There is no suffering that God was not willing to enter into. God feels ALL the suffering you describe. God’s child was murdered, too.

        • Tony Francis says:

          If the spirit controlling the earthy matter out of of which Kay Jay is made could be stirred up into such fury by the God’s Word, that he / she is prepared to go to Hell spitting and roaring against evil, this world has served God’s purpose in His creating it.
          Like how man, using a computer program brings a sense of order, and sequence to how some silicon atoms behave, and control electron flow through them; and educate them to perform result oriented tasks for him, God has succeeded using His Word, to make Kay Jay recognise evil from virtue, and has educated him/ her to abhor evil. Is God’s Word not a wonderful program?
          This earthy world is God’s mould for moulding his creations. Once the perfect creatures of His imagination are moulded, the moulds can be broken and thrown away.
          After a child has passed from one grade to his next, his books (which were causing him a lot of pain, anger, and sometimes joy, and which he kept carefully)are given away, because their use is over.
          My mother used to scare me (when I was a child) with stories of a pandaran (ogre, or monster) to make me eat my food, or prevent me from getting out of her sight. The pandaran was a lie, which like all lies died when I became older, and knew better. But it served its purpose when I was being moulded.
          This earthy world (with viruses that kill babies, parasites that eat men, and wasps that inject their unborn into catepillars so they may eat the living catapiller until it dies) along with all its gold, and paper currencies, and mortal cruel rulers, are all but a BIG LIE to mould Kay Jay into a perfect soul fit for entering the perfect Heaven God has prepared for him/ her. Kay will then realise that he was all the time in this world experiencing a life long educational documentary cinema.

          • Conway Redding says:

            Tony, can you point to one bit of evidence that the scenario you outline is anything other than pure fantasy? And from a logical point of view, don’t you find it bothersome that God, usually viewed as being perfect in every way, would resort to a BIG LIE to teach us mortals anything? I understand your mother lying to you, because, as a mere human, she simply didn’t have the resources to get you to behave as she wanted to without lying. God, on the other hand, presumably has at his disposal the resources of infinite wisdom and infinite knowledge, not to mention infinite power. I would expect his pedagogical methodology not to include lying or deception of any kind. Lying/deception are techniques that would be more appropriate in the Devil’s repertory of ploys,don’t you think?

            • Tony Francis says:

              Conway, What you see as evil is only evil to you. To God, everything is good. To God, a rose flower will be as evil or good as cow shit.
              A jail sentence will seem to the victim as very evil. But to the whole world, it is something good. It may be also good to the victim, because it can correct him and bring him back to a good life, and put a fear in others to keep them in the right tracks.
              Actually there is no evil, or pandaran, or ogre or monster. Evil is like darkness, which is absence of Light , which is nothing, which means it is non-existent. Light is like the truth, which exists, and will exist for ever, and cannot be killed. A lie will always be exposed.
              Time is a litmus test for finding out what is truth and what is not. Lies and untruths (earth is flat) always get exposed, and die, But a truth (eg 1+2=3) will always endure – through centuries, storms, empires, disease, or the atom bomb.
              So everything that is temporary is a lie. The Sun will have to die after some time. So are the other created things in this Universe – due to rise in entropy, or contraction, or expansion of Universe or some other reason. Therefore this Universe has to be a lie – A temporary home or a correction centre or possibly a jail, to mould something more valuable and of a more permanent nature – like a clay mould to mould a gold ornament. The clay mould will be broken and discarded once the ornament is moulded. The clay mould has to be the negative or inverse shape of the ornament, like the good will seem to be the opposite of evil. But the mould is a necessary evil, if we have to make an ornament.
              If I have to make a table, there has to be boundary for it, outside of which is not a table. So I have to take a piece of wood, and saw off or chisel off things that are not the table. So during creation, there will always be some waste (which you call evil) for which disposal will become a problem; (which is one man is facing in this world today).
              God is smarter. Instead of using real books and paint, and colour pencils (which will bring disposal problems)-to educate men, he uses a virtual world (temporary, like my mother’s pandaran) which he can and will switch off after its use is over.
              Even our body can be considered a temporary home for our soul, to get disciplined, which will be destroyed after our soul is moulded.
              Mankind is like the embryo in an egg, which is getting developed into a chicken. His body, the earth, and other material things are the shell, within which a perfect living soul is getting moulded. But if the soul gets too much materialistic and gets attached with this world, he will become part of the shell – which will get discarded or destroyed. While those who believe in life after hatching, will stick to the chicken, and will become part of the living chicken.
              Those of us who do not believe in life after death, will become part of the shell (earth) – and will never resurrect, and will be dead permanently. Those who are guided by the Living spirit, will rise (hatch)into eternal Life.

      • Sandon says:

        So what do you call the rest then? Cynics.

        Oh, would like to add to the above too. God is so much about love, any person who holds true unconditional love to thier children or wife must be subject to losing that love. Once you lose the ultimate love, then there is nothing left. So much for a loving God.

        So has does that work out for you. Great comeback you had. Typical defender of a fake lying God that has wreaked so much torture and torment the world over. Oh yes i can see that a new born baby deserves the punishment handed to it when it dies or starves or has parents that don’t love it.

      • Bethea Weinberg says:

        You didn’t answer, Perry Marshall. Indeed, Jehovah often behaves badly and so do his prophets. Let’s take David. He is a “man after my own heart”, says Jehovah/Yahweh. David was asked (for some unholy reason) by his prospective father-in-law to kill 100 men, cut off their foreskins and bring them to him….to win his daughter as a bride. David did this…and more…he killed 200 men! He was a mass murderer. Today, he would be on Death Row, with tabloids discussing his bloody crimes. I could go on and about other prophets and their major felonies, as well as Yahweh’s constant thirst for blood, ordering mass slaughter and genocide, being A-OK with rape, incest and slavery…but let’s keep it simple. The god of the Old Testament cannot be Jesus Christ or His Father. Jesus Christ is the opposite of Jehovah/Yahweh. I believe that Jesus Christ and Buddha, who are remarkably similar in character, reflect true God/Spirit. Not Jehovah. Not Allah. Not any bloodthirsty, savage, arrogant Lord of Cruelty,Aggression and Death.

        • perrymarshall says:

          Bethea,

          What you read in the Old Testament is life under the law. Your very judgment that all this was wrong comes through a lens of the grace that is taught in the New Testament.

          It then becomes clear why the book of Hebrews urges believers to not fall back into slavery to the law.

          Question:

          What is the difference between God ordering tribes of people to be killed and God permitting death and disease to exist? Or God permitting earthquakes or natural disasters?

    • Indranie Singh says:

      OMG… dude u ga some terriable thing goin on with u!!!! my friend i sit here n wonder to myself if u hav family??? Or futher anyone cus im sure a person of ur stature doesnt need anyone or anyting… u my friend i will pray for u futher i will fast and repent for u because u kno not wat ur saying… I urge all those who will read tis plz plz pray for our fried he needs it now more than ever… God bless!!!!

    • June Dewar says:

      Dear Kay Jay

      I appreciate your sentiments. “Jesus the son of the living God speaks at the sermon of the mount Matthew 5:4 “Happy are those who mourn since they will be comforted. “Happy are the mild tempered ones since they will inherit the earth”. “Happy are those hungering and thirsting for righeousness since they will be filled. “Happy are those who have been persecuted for righteousness sake, since the kingdom of the heavens belongs to them”. etc.. I feel so sad for all those suffering on earth today.

      I wish people would look to the true God and believe in him because this is necessary before his Kingdom comes to power and he will wipe out every tear from their eyes, death mourning outcry and pain will be no more Revelations 21:4 The badness, sadness and suffering is due to humans turning away from God who created the earth.

      We have to recognise that the whole world lies in the power of the wicked one..1st John 5:19. That is the reason there is so much suffering. People like yourself need to know that God is love and it pains him to see all the suffering brought about because people are selfish and some are evil preferring to obey the powers set out by Satan and the fallen angels.

      They have power and are misleading the whole inhabited earth. Revelations 12:9. When God’s Kingdom comes and many including myself believe this is the time Satan and his evil angels will be hurled into an abyse and will not be able to cause suffering anymore.

  15. Following Jesus says:

    Suffering, evil, hatred, injustice. It’s everywhere in the world and the same Christ faced when He was with us. When sin entered the world everything went downhill because creation decided to take its own course. We face evil, the Pharisees in our lives, we face Pilot and the crowd just like Jesus did. Our Father could have erased everything facing His Son and made it easy for Him – but He did not. Our Father saw His Son suffer, be tortured and put to death. Why stop the same for us?

    Is that too extreme to believe? Any contradictions?

    Thank You for considering this.

    • Carl Dick says:

      My views on evil and suffering in the world: We must remember how all this got started. If we consider all of Creation we’ll see that nothing, absolutely nothing compares with MAN in God’s creation. We are God’s masterpiece! We are the apple of His eye! And we were created perfectly. However we have become damaged goods. How did that happen? It all started when Satan got kicked out of heaven for his rebellion. It has been his purpose to ruin God’s masterpiece in revenge ever since. (like one painting a moustache on Michael Angelo’s Madonna).

      God, however, purposes to fix His masterpiece rather than scrap it(lucky for us) In this endeavor, God has His own timetable and has fixed a time for judgment. However, we must remember that God is JUST and having set a date for judgment, will not pronounce sentence before the trial. He is bound by His own word. In the meantime, all who are to be saved are being saved (Rom 8:29 For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son). Satan, on the other hand is taking advantage of this pre-trial period to inflict as much damage as he possibly can. (For the devil… knoweth that he has but a short time. Revelations 12:12b) All this evil and suffering doesn’t come from God, it is Satan’s doing.

      • Tony Francis says:

        But why did God allow the creation of a Satan? Or why is he not in the dock yet?

        • June Dewar says:

          Dear Tony

          Satan was made a free agent with free will just like we humans. We were not created to be robots or preprogrammed. Neither was Satan. Satan chose to oppose the way he was made in goodness and perfection in the image of his creator just as Adam and Eve were created also. The name Satan means resister of God and the name Devil means slanderer of God. Just as we can choose to love God and be guided by him or work evil as Satan chose to do and become like Satan a liar and slanderer.

          Revelation 12:11 reveals Satan being conquered by the sacrifice of Christ and those proving to be faithful witnesses of God and Christ who followed his example being prepared to die at the hands of their persecutors rather than deny the truth.

          It is my understanding that all suffering on earth today is because Satan has had free reign over the earth for 6,000 years. I perceive him to be the ultimate psychopath, totally deficit of love or compassion. When images of destitute children, war and starvation come to my attention in comparison with all the selfish persuits of those unaffected I feel sick at heart and blame the Satanic Psychopath for causing all the grief in this world and for blinding the minds of pleasure seekers who have no knowledge of what it is like to suffer.

          You ask why he is not in the dock yet. That is a good question Revelations chapter 20 gives information that he will be chained by an angel who comes down from heaven and seizes him and binds him for a thousand years and Satan is to be hurled into the abyss and it is to be shut and sealed over him so that he is no longer free to mislead the nations. The Revelation then explains a judgement and the ressurection of those who have died both the righteous and the unrighteous. Many bible teachers believe evil murderers will be ressurected but I don’t agree with that belief.

          It will be the judgement of God and the authority given to Jesus that will decide these things though and not me or bible preachers.

      • Sandon says:

        Typical, it is always Satan that causes the damage, what a load of rubbish. It goes if you believe and be positive you shall be rewarded but that never happens does it? Then when you love wiith all your heart, it is taken from you. Isn’t love meant to be the most pure of anything according to dimwit christians who believe in a fake. Love, Relationships are a total waste of time. This planet is finished. If Satan is the cause as you say then this planet is finished. If god nurture and protects his children then i would love to see it because it isn’t happening. Seems Satan is winning. Then the bible tells how all will be finished so if God is that powerful why would he let Satan do this in the first place? The bible is a whole lot of contradiction and christians will defend it in any means with not one shred of evidence to prove any of it.

        God has great things for you

        Things happen for a reason

        God has chosen a great path for you, no matter how messed up it is.

        God God God. What a load of crap

      • June Dewar says:

        Dear Carl

        Thank you for this enlightenment. Our belief is the same but put in a different way. I appreciate your explanation. Please keep writing and spreading the Good News of God and his Kingdom.

    • Conway Redding says:

      Golly gee, Following Jesus, what is your understanding of why “Our Father” arranged for “His Son” to suffer, be tortured and put to death? I also take exception to your implication that if suffering, being tortured and put to death was good enough for Jesus, it is good enough for us. The standard dogma that Christ died for our sins has never made any sense at all to me, in light of the fact that the deity who, in Christian mythology, arranged for him to do so, is said to be, among other things, omnipotent, and presumably could have forgiven all our sins with a mere word or two, such as, “Te absolvo.”

      In passing, I mention that the Procurator of Judea from 26 AD-36 AD, the man who, legend has it, presided over Jesus’ trial and subsequent execution, was named “Pilate,” not “Pilot.”

      • Stef Coulombe says:

        Conway, I notice that you do not reply to Carl Dick’s comment. It’s quite a good explanation, I think. For such an expert on Biblical history and Christian “mythology” and “legend”, you pretend not to understand basic principles like justice and goodness. Your argument that if He can do anything, He can just forgive everyone, “no questions asked”, is purely stubborn rebellion against something you already know in your heart. It’s like using the “unstopable force/immovable wall” argument: can God create something so big He can’t lift it? It’s a “fun” discussion, but if you use it as an excuse to reject salvation, then you knowingly accept the consequences.

        • Conway Redding says:

          Stef, my comment was not directed at Carl Dick, about whose posting I shall have more to say later, but at someone who signed him/herself “Following Jesus.”

          But I must ask you, from which of my statements, in any of my postings, do you infer that I “pretend not to understand basic principles like justice and goodness?”

          I also fail to follow your point when you say that “Your argument that if He can do anything, He can just forgive everyone, ‘no questions asked’, is purely stubborn rebellion against something you already know in your heart.”

          How so? What is it that you, telepath that you seem to be pretending to be, have ascertained that I already know in my heart? Leaving aside the technical objection that I never, ever said, “no questions asked,” all I am doing is pointing out the logical inconsistency between you true believers claiming on the one hand, that God is all powerful, but, on the other, that he could not have absolved Mankind of all its sins with, as I said, a mere word or two.

          This has nothing to do with the question of whether God could create a rock so heavy that he couldn’t lift it. The concepts “immovable object” and “unresistable force” simply cannot exist in the same universe of discourse, any more than can the concept of a square that is simultaneously a circle. To talk in the same breath about immovable object and an irresistible force is to talk nonsense, as is talking, except metaphorically, as when sports writers refer to a boxing ring as “the squared circle,” about a circle that is at the same time a square.

          But with respect to the sins of Mankind, a major point of Christianity, if not its whole point, is that those sins are in fact redeemable/forgivable, so there is no question of, say, some sin of such enormity that it cannot be redeemed/forgiven. So once again I find myself asking, as I asked the writer whose moniker is “Following Jesus,” what’s up with God’s chosing such an unpleasant means of redemption as having his only begotten son tortured and killed in a manner almost unspeakably cruel, when, presumably, God, omnipotent as he is, and also, as you yourself say in another post, “absolute good,” could have accomplished the same end by saying simply, “Te absolvo?”

          If you have a logically coherent answer to this question, I would be most interested in hearing it, but free of any Betazoid fantasies of yours about what I know in my heart.

          • Stef Coulombe says:

            Fine; I don’t know what’s in your heart. You know what’s in your heart, though, and you’re responsible for it.
            As to the basics of justice:
            Irrestible force = perfect justice.
            An absolutely just God has no choice but to destroy us for our sin. That is the essence of Law: action, re-action; rebellion against God, death. There is no “slap on the wrist” when the crime is treason against the Almighty Creator.
            It is similar to a light of infinite brightness shining through a pane of glass: only glass of infinite purity will allow the light to pass harmlessly; even a single, tiny imperfection will cause resistance, turn the light into heat, and destroy the glass. God has no wish to destroy us: His perfect nature requires it.
            So, how can He give us His absolute purity, so that we can co-exist with Him and not be destroyed?
            According to His Law, sacrifice is allowed to pass the impurity on to another creature; other creatures already being impure, though, this is only a partial and temporary solution.
            Christ, by living a perfect, sinless life, and by not inheriting the in-born sin of His human father, is the perfect sacrifice: our blemishes, stains, sins went onto Him at the cross, but because He is integrally sinless and perfect, God’s holy justice could destroy the sin off the surface of Christ’s “glass” without destroying the glass itself.
            Now, I admit, light and glass are not perfect images for the process; they don’t have to be, do they?

            Regarding the choice of crucifixion itself: why second-guess God? If there had been another way, a better way, He would have chosen it. You’ll say that this is circuitous logic, perhaps, but I see it as simply definitive: apples come from apple trees, because they are apple trees. Well, the crucifixion was the best/only way, because it’s the way God chose.

            I actually just wrote a short article for my school about the cross; I’ll quote part of it here.
            “Some non-Christians accuse us of sadism, claiming our joy in the cross is related to the suffering it brought. While the original purpose of the cross was indeed to execute the vilest of criminals in the most horrific way, I do not believe that God is glorified in gruesomely detailed explanations of how much agony Christ was in before He died. It should suffice to know that He suffered; certainly some people have experienced greater physical pain in their lives, but His greatest suffering was of course separation from God, and thanks to His sacrifice, none of us ever needs to know that pain.
            The cross was also one of many forms of “deterrent” punishment: He was lifted up so that everyone could see Him. Public punishment, both corporal and capital, has been used in almost every culture and time as a warning that crime does not pay; for some people, the fear of being humiliated in public is more powerful than the fear of pain or death itself! Interestingly, Man lifted Him up onto the cross to shame Him, but God turned that lifting up into His greatest glory: salvation for mankind.
            Horrible, shameful death on a cross is by no means beautiful, but what about life on a cross? Let us not forget that the cross is but a tree–tortured and twisted, but still a tree. Adam’s sin barred Man forever from the Tree of Life in Eden; the cross, offered to us as a new Tree of Life, can never be taken away.”

            Why did He have to suffer? Again, second-guessing. Which way would you have it? “Te absolvo” wouldn’t work; it defies and destroys any concept of justice. Would you prefer a quick, painless execution? That way, we have our perfect sacrifice, but none of the gory agony. Yeah, ok, but then you’d call it a cop-out. “Sure, He died for our sins; didn’t hurt, did it? He knew He was going to live again; so He went to sleep and woke up again. Great, meaningful salvation!”
            You can’t please everybody, and to be honest, some people you can’t please at all. Who chose the cross for Christ to die on? Well, that would have been the Romans; their culture and punitive practices were the results of their experiences with other, older cultures. God knew what would happen, so He gave prophecies so that people would know the Messiah when He came. So, now we blame God for sending Christ at that time, that place, instead of here, today, for example, where He’d get life imprisonment instead. Oh, wait, if Christ came 2000 years later instead, we’d blame Him for waiting so long… You know, this could go on forever.
            You want your “te absolvo”; ask God, and He’ll give it to you. (Oh, right, you don’t want to ask, because then you’d have to believe… ok, so, God is supposed to not even let you make a choice, and just forgive you automatically… oh stink, now we’ve gone and upset the people who believe in God, but actually hate Him, and don’t want to be forgiven…).
            Good night, Mr. Redding, and God bless; I’ve already commented on your discussion with Carl Dick (before I looked up here and saw your reply). Search your heart.

            • Rockie Spinks says:

              That was beautiful. Don’t know who you are but that was beautiful.

              • Sandon says:

                So we pay for Adams sin, makes sense to me and then Jesus saves us from our sins, makes sense to me. All rubbish the whole lot. I stopped believing when my heart was ripped out for what for loving. Of course it would be. Love is a sin isn’t it, i must pay for loving.

                What a joke. My life is finished because of your hypocrit nonsense

                • Stef Coulombe says:

                  …Sorry, I don’t quite follow you. People often misunderstand “love”, and then accuse God of punishing them for “loving”. Absolute, unconditional love requires a perfect lover; so, only a perfect, absolute God can love truly unconditionally. No human mother (or father) can love perfectly because no human (parent or otherwise) can be perfect, except Christ Himself.
                  If you’re “paying” for the “sin” of loving, then perhaps it wasn’t love… because if it were, it would be worth the cost. (True love doesn’t end in bitterness.)

          • Stjepan Marusic says:

            actually, I think there might be something like a consistent reply to this question. God – in christian belief – is not simply god, but the trinity of father, son and spirit. This is vague of course, but it is supposed to be a “mystery”, so it’s fair enough I think.

            Keeping that in mind, the death of Jesus – an aspect of god as father, son, and spirit – can be seen as the physical manifestation of god’s forgiveness, and his suffering and sadness at the sight of our sins. Our sins pain him – and his “son” aspect they also pain physically – but he forgives them nevertheless.

            What do you think of that explanation?

          • RoyJover says:

            I have a personal question for you Sir Conway? If somebody would rape and murder your daughter and ask for forgiveness will you let him go free or scream for justice. I probably guess because you are a human being its normal that you want the guilty one to be in death row right away. That’s justice, sin needs to be punished. Sin’s punishment is hell. And the death of a perfect, blameless substitute is the only way for man to escape the punishment.(That is why Jews in the old testament do sacrifice spotless animals to picture the death of Jesus in the cross in the future- you prolly know this stuff already.) My point is God indeed let us go free after His Son Jesus received the punishment on the cross(Justice). My last point, although Jesus paid for all sin of all men it does not mean all will be saved.(FOR WHOSOEVER shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. Romans 10:13) I don’t like using the word absolvo or absolved its kinda have something to do with penance which contradict grace.(Ephesians 2:8-9 For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the GIFT of God: NOT OF WORKS, lest any man should boast.)
            So salvation is a GIFT all you need to do to be saved is RECEIVE it. If Christ died for all Why not all men will get saved? The answer is simple, not all will receive Him,still others is trying to earn salvation by their good works. On your birthday you have a choice to reject gifts or accept gifts. You cannot call the gift you rejected your own even though its intended for you. But the gifts you received is yours forever.
            God is fair, just, perfect, righteous at the same time loving, merciful, compassionate. God is wiser that all human intelligence combined.God is unsearchable. If anyone would like to believe a god he can figure out that’s gonna be a cheap god, much like the ones people carve out of wood or a molded metal of an image of man of which some man bow down to.

            • Conway Redding says:

              RoyJover, I will stick to my usual format for responding to posts on this site. Your comments will be enclosed in quotation marks; mine will not be thus enclosed.

              Author: RoyJover
              Comment:

              “I have a personal question for you Sir Conway? If somebody would rape and murder your daughter and ask for forgiveness will you let him go free or scream for justice. I probably guess because you are a human being its normal that you want the guilty one to be in death row right away.”

              You’re right. I’d probably dispatch the miscreant myself, given the opportunity. But I wouldn’t kill someone who had nothing to do with the crime. And in any event I’ve never claimed to be all-merciful and all-compassionate, which are two of the traits usually attributed to this God of whom you prate.

              “That’s justice, sin needs to be punished.”

              If sin demands punishment, why are you True Believers even talking about forgiveness at all?

              “Sin’s punishment is hell. And the death of a perfect, blameless substitute is the only way for man to escape the punishment.”

              Sez who? Your statement simply makes no sense, RoyJover. If God is all-powerful, then surely he could come up with a better way for “man to escape the punishment” than the one you True Believers think he arranged. As I’ve commented in other posts to this site, it seems to me that God, one of whose soubriquets is “The Almighty,” could with the merest raising of one eyebrow have obliterated all of mankind’s sins.

              In any event, even if one supposes that the death of Jesus was the bail that got mankind out from under the threat of eternal hellfire, let me ask you, was the bail good for all time? Does it still count? Can every person since the death of Jesus rest assured that he/she has been forgiven, since Jesus has already died for his/her sins?

              “(That is why Jews in the old testament do sacrifice spotless animals to picture the death of Jesus in the cross in the future- you prolly know this stuff already.)”

              The Jews of the Old Testament sacrificed spotless animals because the Jews of the Old Testament were a bunch of primitive, Late Stone Age to Bronze Age barbarians, and it is only in such primitive cultures that you find this business of blood sacrifice/atonement. I understand, from a psychological point of view, how this foolishness may have gotten started, but foolishness it is, the whole idea of let’s toss a virgin (spotless, you know) into the volcano to appease the gods, or let’s rip a virgin’s still beating heart out of her breast, or let’s nail a presumably spotless creature (Jesus, born of a virgin, or so the myth goes) to a cross. In some such benighted cultures, the blood sacrifice/atonement also involves cannibalizing the body of the sacrificial offering, an idea which is perpetuated, in much less gory form, in the Eucharist, or Holy Communion (“This is my body, broken for thee; take and eat…”). It’s all pure, ignorant superstition, and seems rooted in the unarticulated sense that if one commits an enormity, one can somehow expect an enormous payback, in the form, rather incredibly, of some sort of boon, from the unseen sentient forces that many mistakenly believe have something to do with the course of our lives here on Planet Earth.

              “My point is God indeed let us go free after His Son Jesus received the punishment on the cross(Justice). My last point, although Jesus paid for all sin of all men it does not mean all will be saved.”

              Why not, pray tell?

              “(FOR WHOSOEVER shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. Romans 10:13) I don’t like using the word absolvo or absolved its kinda have something to do with penance”

              Absolution has nothing whatsoever to do with penance, RoyJover. It is simply the granting of remission of sin(s). There is nothing about the concept of absolution that strictly entails that the one whose sin(s) has(have) been remitted must do or have done penance.

              “which contradict grace.(Ephesians 2:8-9 For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the GIFT of God: NOT OF WORKS, lest any man should boast.)
              So salvation is a GIFT”

              First, quoting the Bible is not cogent reasoning, RoyJover, if only because, like the song from “Porgy and Bess” puts it, “The things that you’re liable to read in the Bible, it ain’t necessarily so…”.

              Second, my idea of a gift is something that is freely given, with no conditions attached. When the giver begins to expect something as a result of what he/she, or God, has given, it stops being a gift and becomes a kind of bribe.

              “all you need to do to be saved is RECEIVE it. If Christ died for all Why not all men will get saved? The answer is simple, not all will receive Him,still others is trying to earn salvation by their good works.”

              So, if what you’re saying is true, then worshipping and adoring God, which are usually accounted to be “good works,” avail nothing, and there is no point in doing them. Or am I missing something here?

              “On your birthday you have a choice to reject gifts or accept gifts. You cannot call the gift you rejected your own even though its intended for you. But the gifts you received is yours forever.”

              See my comment above, anent whether or not the forgiveness purchased with Christ’s blood is indeed “forever,” and if so, why any of us should need to be concerned about, or try to make up for in any way, any of the sins mankind has committed since Christ’s crucifixion.

              “God is fair, just, perfect, righteous at the same time loving, merciful, compassionate. God is wiser that all human intelligence combined.”

              All the more reason for this fair, just, perfect, righteous, loving, merciful, compassionate God to have devised a better way of remitting the sins of humankind than sending his only begotten son to experience torture and degradation and then to die a messy, cruel death. Once again, “Te absolvo,” or that aforementioned merest raising of one eyebrow, is sounding pretty good to me.

              “God is unsearchable.”

              What does that even mean, exactly, RoyJover? You almost seem to be implying that, since God is unsearchable, those who seek God will never find him. Is that what you intended to convey?

              See, as far as I am concerned, if you haven’t picked up on this by now, the God of whom you speak is purely imaginary, like Daffy Duck, Dick Tracy, Scarlett O’Hara, and multitudinous other creations of the human mind. Now, I grant that anyone has the right to believe whatever. There are those who believe, for example, that Barack Obama is a Muslim and was born in Kenya; there are those who believe that the 1969 moon landing never happened but was filmed on a movie set in the Nevada desert; there are those who believe that the events of 9/11/2001 were perpetrated by the U. S. government and not by Islamic fundamentalists; there are those who believe in the possibility of a perpetual motion machine, and that the FBI and/or CIA have somehow implanted microchips in their heads that allow those agencies to control their thoughts, and that the TV medium John Edward actually talks to the dead.

              And then there are those who believe in the real existence of God, and associated tommyrot.

              Unfortunately, in most cases these beliefs, like the delusions of the certifiably insane, are absolutely impervious to reason, but every once in a while I run across someone who still has a shred of critical thinking capacity left, who understands what I and other nontheists are saying, and who begins to find his/her way back to the real world. I don’t imagine, however, that you will be one of those, Roy Jover.

              Conway Redding

              • RoyJover says:

                As I said before your reasoning is way out there. You answer with insult and sarcasm. There is really no point in wasting time to convince somebody who is already convinced of something. If you still have one drop of science left in your head, search the video of the lecture on Religion of Ian Morison in fora(dot)tv. He is a professor of Astronomy in Gresham College. This time it is a man of science who will teach you about our existence and about God. It’s a 5 hours video BTW and it is not a bible study. Take note also about his conclusion. Science does not have to say God has to exist but certainly science cannot say a God/creator does not exist. If all of a sudden you came up to a conclusion that God is fairy tale, your science is as good as voodoo.

                I can tell you right now that you believe things you cannot see / or did not see / or you have no proof. Or you believed things as facts only because someone else said so. Your “Duffy the Duck” insults will fall back in your head. Please disagree with these statements so I can start enumerating. You believe in imaginary things (THINGS WE CANNOT SEE). You have tons of it in your head. Think about it for a while.

                • Sandon says:

                  likewise to you no point convincing someone who is already convinced. Jesus died for our sins so not all will be saved. That is just another contradiction. The bible is full of this rubbish. God is a loving god so you must pay.

                  Of course if my child was raped i would kill the sick perverted animal. Of course, christians apparently believe in non-adultery but sex is rampant throughout this world. Hearts just keep getting broken. How many christians have cheated. I would say plenty.

                  You too have sinned so will you be saved or do you just hope that you will be? Jesus died for our sins so i guess it wouldn’t matter if i went and killed a million people, i will be saved? Non believing is an apparent sin, so i guess i will be saved.

                  So Roy, if your daughter was raped would you forgive the culprit? I really don’t think many people would but remember it is christians who created the marriage, only one partner rubbish drummed into our heads over the centuries, when really we a animals that mate just like animals, which means relationships love rape are all just rubbish. I found out the hard way, having my heart completely smashed so that now i will be alone forever because i refuse to be in any nasty relationship again. Oh by the way she was a very beautiful woman her personality was one of the best i have ever seen. My point is because of loving her and being treated the way i was all my life, i lost her. Love has ended me. All i see now are sex shops, porn sites, Kids having sex and getting pregnant. Governments and christians taking our children away and then making us pay the villians who take our kids. Tearing our hearts out. So is loving a sin? since it seems everytime you love someone, you have to pay for it.

                  You christians will never get out of your fantasy land. Why is it that someone who is negative can gain so much more then someone being positive. Law of attraction and God are just marketting schemes. That is all it is.

          • Keith Taylor says:

            “…man will cease to commit atrocities when he ceases to believe absurdities.”
            -Voltaire

            • Stef Coulombe says:

              Out of context, that seems to suggest Voltaire is blaming belief in God for the evils in the world. I can’t say I knew the guy personally (not that old, hee hee) but I do know he believed that there is a God. Quotations like that are more helpful when placed in context. ;p

              P.S. To some good men, Voltaire was a hero; to other good men, he was a traitor. Just because everybody knows his name doesn’t make his words universally relevant.

              • Sandon says:

                I guess that would go for all the rubbish in the bible. It is irrelevant. Everything that anyone says to each other is irrelevant because you have no more power over me then i do you. What i choose to do is my choice as is yours. Too many governments and religious freaks think they own us all and it is these governments and religious freaks that create the wars. Hence are Christians going to be saved for these attrocities that they have brainwashed people into doing.

                If religious people were true to there words, they wouldn’t care about other peoples business or religious beliefs. Why do they try to keep drumming such rubbish into peoples heads.

                There is so much crap out there now, who knows what to believe. As far as i am concerned i can only believe in me.

                I have written on so many of these blogs and rubbish but one day it occurred to me how many other people think they know it all. How they think what they say is right. Like when someone is devastated over someone else, they say it passes in time. Then somoene tells them they have been in heartache over somone for ten years. But this is that person and how they feel not you or me or anyone else. I personally know a lady who has not been in a relationship for 20 years because she was sick of her heart being broken. No sex, nothing.

                This is her and yes it is a choice but the point is, it isn’t a choice because she wants to. Its because of everyone else not feeling like she does. Just like me now. 2 and half years it has been and i still refuse. I am still majorally heart broken, angry and upset but i can’t just put it behind me because i am not you or someone who can. It is over for me and this time i know it, i know it in my heart. It just isn’t the same anymore. It is all i lived for so i am finished on this earth. I have done what it is i was sent here for. Staying here is just putting myself in further agony, each and everyday, I look at all my beautiful furniture and it now does not mean anything to me. Nothing means anything to me now. I am dead. All because of love. Now how can a God be so selfish to make me lose my dream like this and yes, i caused it myself, you will say but if that is so then why did i suffer all the torture, no love and torment as a child, to have made me this way where i destroy my own relationships out of fear of abandonment. What did i do as a baby that desrved punishment in this way. When i became a good person and was travelling such a great path, why wasn’t God fair to me. By one post it said God is just. So i guess all that i have endured like many other, it is justification.

                All i see is Bad people being rewarde and good people paying the price for it. Is that one of those gifts, that should not be reewarded. Should people slave and starve to keep a criminal in a jail. Should people slave and go without food so gluttenous governments live like kings for all there lives, taking it easy, controlling us all? Aren’t we all meant to be equal. Well if that is so, i feel i was born into a place i never had the choice to be born in. I have to pay to live here just like most others, while the select few, live on easy street at the expense of others as if they were gods themselves, making up there own laws to control us all. Wasn’t that one of the ten commandments not to treat someone else like a god. 99% of people have sex before marriage, i guess we are all doomed.

                All a load of rubbish the whole lot.

                • alexk says:

                  Sandon,
                  It is obvious that you are a very smart man. You bring up many valid arguments about many injustices in the world. It also seems obvious to me that no end of arguing facts and theories will be enough to satiate. You’ve also mentioned that you’ve been hurt. Coming from a man whose first love ran off with another man, its better to forgive and go on, and thats true for all of the hurt. Forgiving doesn’t mean that what they did to you was right. It doesn’t mean that they “get off free”. It doesn’t mean that you have to give up all your rights. And it doesn’t mean that its easy. A friend of mine who had to walk through lots of forgiveness issues had to start with trying to want to forgive. But unforgiveness only hurts you, not the person it’s directed at. And God doesn’t want you to be in pain. Ask him to help and he will. He loves you.

              • Keith Taylor says:

                Stef, I think that you have taken this in the wrong spirit. I was not talking about the man, but about his observation. The quote could have come from anyone and would still be relevant. Whether he believed in God or not is also neither here nor there. The fact is that men do believe the most absurd things and even argue and go to war about them. On concentrating on Voltaire and not on his statement and then telling me that my quoting him is out of context makes YOUR observation absurd.
                Let us stop picking nits and get on with the original question: that being whether God created evil and why He permits it to exist.

                • Stef Coulombe says:

                  I also refer to his observation, and the problem that, without the original context, it seems to suggest that atrocities are committed because people believe. (Given the context of the discussion into which the stripped-down quotation was placed, that is.)
                  So, no, it doesn’t matter who said it except that seeing his name, the average person says, “oh, that’s an important opinion!” and is therefore distracted from other more valid (and thoughtful) commentary. ‘Tis easy to muddy the waters, and such quotations (with no accompanying explanation for their use) do not exactly add to clarity.

                  Nits sometimes have to be picked, so as to clear them from the path to truth. So, back to the original question…?

                  (Incidentally, note that your explanation in response to my “nitpicking” has actually put that quotation into some sort of context, perhaps even justifying its use to begin with. Which therefore justifies my nitpicking. And, by the way, now that you have explained your standpoint, I agree: people do stupid things for stupid reasons. Now, how is that in any way related to this discussion on God, other than that it is a blanket comment on humanity in general?) (You know, so we can get back to the original question…)

                  • Keith Taylor says:

                    Stef, your irony has not gone unnoticed.
                    I would have thought that my point was obvious, bit (obviously) it is not, therefore I will spell it out.
                    Christians believe their Christian stuff and believe that all other beliefs (even those of other Christian sects) are wrong and will plunge the believers of anything but their narrow beliefs into eternal damnation.
                    Moslems believe something similar.
                    There have been holy wars, with one religious group pitted against another, a kind of “your deity against mine” situation. The absurdity steps in when members of the same basic religion do battle against one another, thus making their deity either ‘choose sides’ or have to do battle with him/her/itself. They all pray to the deity, exhorting him/her/it to award them with victory over the ‘other side’, even though their adversaries may be fellow Christians, Moslems or whatever.
                    Adherents of the theory of evolution regard the creationists as being bereft of intelligence. Creationists think that the evolutionists are damned as a result of their ‘heretical’ stance. Does any of this really matter? Neither side can conclusively prove their points: evolutionists cannot tell us how life began in the first place, though creationists are quite certain that God created it, even though their sole source of this information is the Hebrew Torah, which the Christians highjacked in order that their religion could have a foundation upon which to stand, shaky though it may be.
                    Instead of putting their heads together and trying to find some common ground, they bang them together, each side hoping to knock the other senseless with the power of their futile arguments. Neither side can ever win because they do not look beyond the confines of their respective dogmata and seek the bigger picture.
                    Many Christians now accept the possibility of reincarnation, which effectively throws their beliefs out the window, because it means that their Messiah was not the only one who returned from the dead, because reincarnation holds that anybody can.
                    Evolutionists cannot accept the fact that giants, some many times the stature of modern men, once roamed the planet, because it hurls their theory, with great force, against the nearest wall.
                    It is all absurd and as long as both sides do not give ground and accept that there are holes the size of galaxies in their arguments, the ridiculous notion that they, and only they, are right will continue to cause unnecessary friction between them.
                    Neither side realises that the correct answer may, indeed, be forty two.

                    • Stef Coulombe says:

                      “Many Christians now accept the possibility of reincarnation…”
                      Sadly, many Buddhists are gluttons, prone to violence, and many Muslems are alcoholics. That doesn’t mean that they in any way represent their “faith”.

                      “It is all absurd and as long as both sides do not give ground and accept that there are holes the size of galaxies in their arguments, the ridiculous notion that they, and only they, are right will continue to cause unnecessary friction between them.”

                      More absurd is the “maybe we’re all a little bit right” philosophy. IF there is a God, what are the odds He’s going to be ok with a “believe whatever you want to believe” religion? I mean, really, the concept of eternal life after death is so much a part of who and what we are, as people, that religions are present throughout history, around the world; given how the natural world is black and white, highly consistent no matter how complicated its logic, is it at all likely that the one gray area is going to be in religious truth?
                      (By black and white, I mean this: gravity works consistently, not off-and-on; we may not fully understand how it works, but we wouldn’t ever suggest that gravity works this way for me, but differently for you. We don’t fully understand light, but what we do understand is quite logical and consistent–it behaves predictably, as far as we understand it. Among animals, the rules are black and white: two dogs won’t produce a litter of kittens. Even “random motion” is the result of a system of influences so complicated that to us, it seems “chaotic”–but chaos theory fully understands that it is not random chance, it follows the rules.)
                      There is absolute truth. You will never get pure water by mixing a bunch of drinks together, will you? If what you’re looking for is a drop of a hundred different things, just in case a single drop of one of them is the right answer, then by all means go ahead and believe a little bit of each one. Some religions embrace that kind of thing. If, however, God is at all knowable by His creation, there’s a good chance that there’s one absolute truth, and what you’re drinking is either pure water, or mud.

                      Yes, atrocities have been committed in the names of many different leaders, including God. So what? I could kill people in *your* name. Would that make *your* teaching wrong?

                      What about the atrocity of abortion? How many innocent children have been murdered because people *stopped* believing what the Bible says?

                      As to the absurdity of “members of the same basic religion [doing] battle against one another”, well, what about the absurdity of “members of the same basic nation/culture/… doing battle against one another”, like the American Civil War? (Don’t pretend it was purely religious–the “church” was simply another tool used to manipulate the people, another weapon with which to attack the enemy; if not for the “church” to serve that purpose, “school” would have been used, or “mother Earth”, or their “venerable ancestors”… and if nothing else, the mighty Dollar.)

                      Atrocities and absurdities are the natural result of being human. Picking on religion or faith as the divisive factor in an “otherwise peaceful world” (or some such) is no answer. Wars have been fought over much less than the soul’s final destiny.

                      The answer to “life, the universe and everything” may well be 42; that still doesn’t tell me where I’m going when I die. ;p However, “bigger picture” wise, methinks the God of all creation sees the biggest picture of all, and He’s been nice enough to share with me what I’ve needed so far, so I’ll stick with my “high-jacked Torah”, and the Good News that comes with it. ;p

                    • Wow, I agree completely with Mr. Taylor, I could not have said it better myself. Though I’m afraid that «forty two» is too far ahead for most people reading and writing here.

                  • Keith Taylor says:

                    Serge Grenier, thank you, your comments are greatly appreciated.

  16. Following Jesus says:

    Some of the comments seem to make sense and others may just be fill-ins for what we’ve yet to discover. I sometimes wonder if we make God out to have some varying personality factors than he really has. Our Father is beyond all comprehension, so what seems to be an answer for us is only an answer by us. Take care of and serve your fellow brother and sisters and Our Father will take care of the rest. Doesn’t that sound even clearer, easier and totally realistic?

  17. Conway Redding says:

    The statement, “Our Father is beyond all comprehension” is self-contradictory, since some degree of comprehension of this entity’s traits is required in order for anyone to claim that the entity is in fact incomprehensible. In other words, when you aay that God is incomprehensible, you are simultaneously claiming to comprehend something about him. If God is incomprehensible, then, in this context, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s aphorism, “Worauf man nicht sprechen kann, darauf muss man schweigen,” becomes singularly apt. The aphorism translates, roughly, as “If you can’t talk about something, then shut the hell up about it.” I see that you and your fellow religionists continue to prae about God, so I presume y’all believe you know something about him, which would not be the case were God truly incomprehensible.

  18. Khaled Barakat says:

    hello everybody,
    I think no body yet answered Kay Jay questions, why god created viruses, diseases, starvation,…
    and i like to answer him with a question, what do you feel when you see a disabled person? if that doesn’t remind you that one day you may be in his place i think you are making a mistake.
    death, illness, disaster they all alarms and reminders that u made of dust and u will return to dust, and one day u will standup again and you still have a chance to be by god side, don’t miss that chance because at the moment u go to hell, u will not be that brave to spit.*think again*

  19. Stef Coulombe says:

    Some thoughts on the whole “if God is good, why does evil exist?” issue:
    I’ve never found this to be complicated. God didn’t/doesn’t create evil, for evil is not an independent thing, just as darkness and cold can’t exist outside of the concepts of light and heat. Darkness is the absence of light, evil is the absence of good. God is good; God is also omnipresent (He is everywhere); so, there should be good everywhere. However, light banishes the dark, heat chases away the cold, and good destroys evil. God is absolute good; if He were to get rid of all the evil… He’d have to get rid of us, too. (Nobody can honestly convince him/herself that he/she is purely, 100% good–you can lie to yourself about it, though.) So… why doesn’t God just get rid of the worst of the evil, and leave us “some good, some bad” people alone?
    Silly question, when you really think about it: God could have stopped Hitler. But… then Himmler or Heydrich would have taken over, and many agree that they could have been even worse. Ok, so God could have killed all the Nazi leaders. Well, then we’d blame Him for allowing the Spanish Inquisition, and the Crusades. So, He should have not allowed any of those evil people to have been born in the first place. … Hey, where did everybody go?

    That, dear people, is why we really have no right to “second-guess” God. He tried killing off all the evil-doers (the flood, having His chosen people take over Canaan, strict punishments for breaking the commandments, …) and instead of appreciating His motives, we call Him “cruel” or “vengeful”; He’s also tried letting people go their own way, and appealing to them through kindness and compassion, and gotten blamed for “allowing” evil to exist. The truth is, no matter what God does, we’re going to say that He should do it differently. When will we grow up?

    • Kewi Asendadmarster says:

      Of Psychos, Psychics and Soap Boxes:
      On “God could have killed Hitler”. Interesting point Stef, but apparently Hitler had a psychic medium working for him, so perhaps the odds were stacked against it. A good reason Hitler eventually lost WWII is that Winston Churchhill also used a psychic, (who even had a room paid for in the Park Lane Hotel). This brings up a fascinating point about the Church of England establishment and how it actually supported Christian Spiritualism (those of us who believe there is a God and that we all reincarnate many times over until we go back home to the Godhead through good karma and spiritual enlightenment. Psychic mediums, past life hypnosis, gift dreams from dead loved ones and near death experiences are our evidence of the souls eternity). In 1939 Arch Bishop Lang in the Church of England had a committee study spiritualism. It took two years to complete (and was during world warII), but their “Majority Report” came out concluding that spiritualism is valid, ie that some psychics are real (as we all know: some are, some aren’t). It was also 1939 when apparently Hitler tried to infiltrate the Vatican with some soldiers dressed as monks, buying up land right next door. The monks aroused suspicion unfortunately as they were womanising far too much for a typical monk and knew far too little about Catholocism (so that evil plan was foiled as they were sprung bad)! Interestingly the Majority Report of the Church of England was put in a pigeonhole for 9 years after that and no conclusive mainstream media comment was given about it (just bits dribbled quietly to alternate press magazines). So that certainly explains 1. Why Hitler took a while to die
      2. Why The Orthodox Church establishment has an aversion to psychics and mediums and
      3.Why many Christian fundamentalist evangelists propose that if you dabble with psychics, you dabble with the devil.
      4.It makes me understand and forgive those poor dudes in frocks who have held from us the real teachings of Jesus about the eternal soul and reincarnation of each of us. They have come out appearing to be a bunch of old guys who haven’t told the whole truth about God and our place in the universe just so they could have more respect, authority and control over us all. Of course another reason why the Majority report was kept quiet is that coming out in suppport of fortune telling gypsies would have given the Bishops the label of fruit and nut cakes at the time within the scientific community. That respect, authority and control of Christian religions leaders has diminished considerably recently anyway by other ways: The controversy of Paedophilia -and its cover-up-within the whole church establishment over the last decade (which has crept into the Vatican of late). I now feel sorry for Arch Bishop Lang in 1939. He had formally revealed an eternal truth that the world were really on the brink of needing, but the evilness of Hitler caused the report to be kept secret. The fear that this spiritual knowledge could be used for evil again all over the world obviously kept them from acknowledging and teaching us about it. It set back the spiritual evolution of our world too. The fear. Nothing to fear but that eh? Imagine if we were actually taught in our Sunday schools that our mission on earth is to be as much like an Angel as possible (and not the kiddyporn variety). Imagine if we were taught that if we do it well, we WILL become one (an Ascended Master, or spirit guide they are called), and be able to help others reincarnate and transform into one sooner too.
      I’ll get off my soap box now! Peace, Truth and Love 4 all!
      Kez

      • Stef Coulombe says:

        “…but apparently Hitler had a psychic medium working for him, so perhaps the odds were stacked against it. A good reason Hitler eventually lost WWII is that Winston Churchhill also used a psychic…”

        So, psychics are more powerful than God? Sorry, but that’s a strange sort of God to believe in. It’s really simple: God is all-powerful, or He isn’t. If He isn’t, then He isn’t worth believing in, because He can’t save you and *keep you saved* for all eternity. If He is all-powerful, then we’d better do things His way, because He knows what He’s doing (at very least, a whole lot more than we do). Now, the only all-powerful God I’m aware of is the one in the Bible; He says that psychics and mediums are of the devil. He also says that astrology and any other sorts of divination or fortune-telling are evil. So… I’m going to go with what He says. Whether *people* in the church have at some point or other disobeyed God–be it with psychics or paedophilia–is irrelevant.
        Just because a group of people decides to disobey God and “recognize” spiritualism does NOT make it acceptable to God. “Karma” and reincarnation are NOT what Jesus taught, nor in the Bible anywhere, outside of the proverbial “getting what you deserve” and resurrection into either a new, eternal life or judgement (and death).

        It’s a good thing our Sunday school teachers DON’T teach us to be like angels–the Bible is very clear that it is better to die than to mislead children! What they DO teach, because it is what the Bible teaches, is to be like Jesus Christ–hence the name, “Little Christ” (“Christian”).

        • Bethea Weinberg says:

          So, I guess you don’t believe in karma and reincarnation, Mr. Colombe. Then, I’m sure you can answer this: Why is one baby born healthy, bright, attractive, wealthy, well-loved, with every possible opportunity…while another baby is born poor, sickly, deformed, unloved, abused, little or no opportunity, education, etc…? Can anyone answer this?

          • Stef Coulombe says:

            How does karma answer your question? As pointed out exhaustively below (near the bottom of the page, if you’re looking), karma only works if there are no new souls, because new souls should have neither good nor bad karma, and therefore deserve neither good nor bad until they choose for themselves to act good or bad. If there are no new souls, well then, logistically, reincarnation is impossible.

            Here’s your answer: this world is messed up. That’s in the Bible (though not in exactly those words). Sin and its consequences are in the Bible; by the grace of God, so is salvation.

            For curiosity’s sake, why are you questioning my statement that karma and reincarnation are not Biblical? There seem to be quite a few lately who think they can take “the good” from the Bible and leave out the stuff they disagree with, but that’s about as valid as me reinterpreting my country’s constitution, and taking out all the punishments for theft and drug use, and making listening to rap a criminal offence. If you don’t believe in the Bible, then say so; if you do, then you should know better.

    • Tony Francis says:

      If you assembled a computer, and if it didn’t work well, who should be blamed?
      What is the point in punishing the computer by dipping it in water, or boiling water, or kicking it with army boots?
      Will it start working perfectly if you “punish” it with floods, and torture it with burning flames?

      • perrymarshall says:

        Computers are deterministic. They do not have free will. Humans truly have the ability to choose for ourselves what to do. So I fully understand your reasoning but it’s flawed because God is not responsible for what you do. You are. The acceptance of this fact is the first step towards freedom.

        • Tony Francis says:

          Don’t many people chose the wrong path because the whole truth is not visible to them? God has for some reason, chosen to hide a lot of truth in mysteries.
          Even with access to computers, books, internet, and bible resources, we can see that all participants of this forum do not agree on what is truth and what is not. Surely one group is misled. Who can we say is responsible for those who are misled. I am sure all of us here, are sincerely seeking Truth.

          • Stef Coulombe says:

            I am sure all of us here are NOT sincerely seeking Truth. People do not want to believe that they are ultimately responsible for their choices. It’s much more fun when you can be “a product of your environment” and place the blame on somebody else, because then YOU don’t have to change yourself.

            Where is God hiding? Look up at the sky. Are you willing to see God’s truth in the wonder of His creation, or do you insist on belittling Him with a firm belief in evolution and random chance? Look at your hand–are you not “fearfully and wonderfully made,” as the Bible so eloquently says? When God says that your sole purpose in existence is to praise and glorify Him… are you thankful for His truth, or resentful that it’s not all about *you*?

            Don’t say that everybody seeks the Truth, and don’t try to blame God for “hiding”. There are many “versions” of what we call “truth” simply because we are too arrogant to believe that things are not the way *we* think they should be. If you choose not to listen, you can’t blame God for “keeping silent”.

            Now… certainly there is someone trying to mislead. The Bible speaks of the “deceiver”, the “father of lies”, Satan. Certainly, he is trying to keep you from God. Certainly, he can only succeed if you *let* him, because God is greater than he is. Certainly, the devil is very successful–many people want to believe him–because his message is easy on the ears: “Don’t worry, you don’t have to choose *right now*, you can wait until tomorrow, until next year, until your deathbed…” The lie, of course, is in that by “not choosing”, you are choosing “no”. Of course, if you don’t believe that the devil exists, then you make his job a whole lot easier.

            People choose the “wrong” path because they CHOOSE it. If they do not “see” another choice, then that choice is not available to them–ie., there is no other choice. We are condemned for *rejecting* Christ; those who never have a choice (aborted fetuses, for example) can’t be blamed for a choice they never have the opportunity to make, now can they?

            • Carl Dick says:

              Excellent writing, Stef. I haven’t seen a -2 apple either. As long as you write like this, you take the load off of me and I can take a rest. It is a most wonderful thing to be led by the Holy Spirit and receive His revelation as is obvious in your case. Congratulations and God Bless,
              Carl Dick

              • Stef Coulombe says:

                To God be the glory… and thank you. (I’ve felt the same about your comments… so keep on sharing, be it here or elsewhere, eh!)
                I don’t think it likely we’ll meet here on Earth, but I’m sure that in the place Jesus has prepared for us, you and I will have much to discuss.
                God bless.
                Stef
                P.S. To *everybody* else who reads this comment: I truly hope we’ll see you there!

              • Carl Dick says:

                “1. When people are backed into a corner and do not want to change their beliefs. They go into denial. No amount of logic, evidence, scientific findings or proof can change their minds. I guess somehow I had thought that if you put enough peer-reviewed, non-controversial textbooks, definitions and examples in front of them they would admit that I could be right.
                Nope… not the case. If someone doesn’t want to believe something, there is nothing you can do to change their minds.
                NOTHING.”
                Dear Perry, It probably took me longer than it should to arrive at your conclusion, stated above in “THE MOST FAMOUS, PASSIONATELY ARGUED, LONGEST-RUNNING DEBATE” for which reason I have decided to drop out of my discussion with Conway Redding on Lie #7. It’s an absolute waste of valuable time. However, my comments along with Stef Coulombe’s may have been helpful to others who were not so obstinate in their thinking.
                If we were to let the atheists have their way on the site, the damage they could do could be incalculable. I personally believe the influence of Satan is driving these guys even though they may never know it. I will henceforth carefully choose which comments are worthy of debating.

                • Conway Redding says:

                  Usual format, Carl — your comments enclosed in quotation marks, mine not.

                  “‘1. When people are backed into a corner and do not want to change their beliefs. They go into denial. No amount of logic, evidence, scientific findings or proof can change their minds. I guess somehow I had thought that if you put enough peer-reviewed, non-controversial textbooks, definitions and examples in front of them they would admit that I could be right.
                  Nope… not the case. If someone doesn’t want to believe something, there is nothing you can do to change their minds.
                  NOTHING.'”

                  Gee, whoever wrote this (I’m guessing it was Perry Marshall) seems to be describing him/herself and his/her fellow True Believers to a T. To some extent, y’all remind me of the story about the psychotic man who believed that he was dead. A psychiatrist asked him, “Do dead men bleed?,” and the psychotic replied, “Of course not, doctor. Don’t be silly. Everyone knows that dead men don’t bleed.” Whereupon the doctor pricked one of the man’s fingers with a lancet and squeezed out a drop of blood. “Hmm,” said the psychotic, “What do you know? Dead men DO bleed.”

                  Perry Marshall is right — nontheists will probably not change their minds, and theists will probably not change their minds. But I aver that, at this point, logic and reason are on the side of the nontheists, and of the aforementioned psychiatrist.

                  “Dear Perry, It probably took me longer than it should to arrive at your conclusion, stated above in “THE MOST FAMOUS, PASSIONATELY ARGUED, LONGEST-RUNNING DEBATE” for which reason I have decided to drop out of my discussion with Conway Redding on Lie #7.”

                  It seems to me, Carl, that you’ve decided to drop out of the discussion because you’ve recognized that my counterarguments are logically unassailable.

                  BTW, I notice that you never did say anything attempting to rebut my reasons for believing that Matthew 16:27-28 was not, as you averred, referring to Pentecost, but in fact to the Second Coming of Christ.

                  “It’s an absolute waste of valuable time. However, my comments along with Stef Coulombe’s may have been helpful to others who were not so obstinate in their thinking.”

                  Helpful to others only if their thinking is as muddled as yours and that of your fellow True Believers, Carl.

                  And since you’ve mentioned Stef Coulombe, let me say that it has been amusing to watch his convoluted reasoning about the existence of evil. He seems to be arguing that since evil is simply the absence of good, it doesn’t exist in its own right. He is wrong on two counts, the first one being that evil is not a material substance but a quality that we humans assign to various events and circumstances, depending, it appears, on how harmful, either physically or psychologically, those events/circumstances are perceived to be to humankind. According to you True Believers, our sense of what is evil and what is not derives from God, but if that is so, one has to explain how it is that at different times and in different places, different events/circumstances have been labeled “evil.”

                  The second count of Stef’s errancy is this: if evil is the absence of good, and if God is absolutely good and also omnipresent, as is usually claimed, then there is really no place from which good can be absent. Stef Coulombe, far from solving the problem of the presence of evil in a frame of existence created and overseen by an all-good, all-powerful, ever-present deity, has made his position even more difficult to defend. And y’all can just forget all that crap about free will as an explanation for the evil that we inflict on each other, until y’all can account for the role that the free will of someone like 11-year-old Jessica Lunsford or 7-year-old Adam Walsh played in the evil that befell them because of the exercise of free will by, respectively, John Couey and, it is believed, Ottis Toole. I asked Stef Coulombe a while ago to attempt such an explanation, and at this point I am prepared to believe that that his failure to do so is evidence of his inability to do so, just as I am now prepared to believe that your dropping out of the discussion about the occurrence of evil is evidence of your inability to reconcile that occurrence with what you believe about the real existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, all-good, all-compassionate, all-merciful deity. That’s okay, though. As Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry Callahan character said in the movie “Magnum Force,” “A good man always knows his limitations…”

                  Another poster to this site recently said that I want “proof of God.” Nope. I don’t want proof of God. What I want, evidently in vain, is for those who insist on believing in the real existence of a deity, with the traits usually attributed to that deity, to account for the multiple illogicalities and inconsistancies that such a belief entails. So far no one, least of all you, or Stef Coulombe, or RoyJover, or Perry Marshall, has risen to the challenge in any rational way.

                  “If we were to let the atheists have their way on the site, the damage they could do could be incalculable.”

                  Only if you think that it is damaging to attempt to rob religious twaddle of its power to lead people to do stupid and cruel things, such as the recent enactment in Uganda under the prompting of fundamentalist Christian religious missionaries, of statutes calling for capital punishment for homosexuality (I guess Ted Haggard, one of your own, needs to stay the hell away from Uganda, eh?), or, as I have mentioned in another posting, the suicidal destruction of the World Trade Towers and 3000+ human beings on 9/11/2001, by men who believed that doing so would assure them a place in paradise where, among other things, they would enjoy for all eternity the sexual favors of comely virgins.

                  “I personally believe the influence of Satan is driving these guys even though they may never know it.”

                  Of course you believe that, Carl, along with a bunch of other hooey. That’s the problem. What can I say.

                  “I will henceforth carefully choose which comments are worthy of debating.”

                  You might try debating only those comments for which illogic and irrationality can carry the day, Carl. It won’t be much of a debate, though, since those comments will be the very ones with which you agree.

                  I was going to say that this will be my last posting to this site, but I am sure that as in moments of idleness I monitor the site I will come across something so abysmally irrational that I will feel compelled to respond, despite my awareness that the blind faith of the True Believers is an absolute shield against logic and rationality. But the main point about blind faith is that it is blind.

                  Conway Redding

                  • Stef Coulombe says:

                    “…until y’all can account for the role that the free will of someone like 11-year-old Jessica Lunsford or 7-year-old Adam Walsh played in the evil that befell them because of the exercise of free will by, respectively, John Couey and, it is believed, Ottis Toole. I asked Stef Coulombe a while ago to attempt such an explanation, and at this point I am prepared to believe that that his failure to do so is evidence of his inability to do so…”

                    To the real people out there: has anybody, anywhere, claimed that everything that happens to *me* is *strictly* and *absolutely* the result of my own free will? That would be the belief in karma, not belief in the Bible.

                    Many/most of the bad things that happen to me are because I make bad choices and stupid decisions. I’m an individual human.

                    Many are also because I’m part of a human society that chooses not to serve God, that chooses to do evil instead. Our society loves Hollywood, with all the sex and violence on TV; that has consequences. Did Jessica or Adam “bring it on themselves” by watching TV? Of course not, don’t be stupid. Could God have saved them? Certainly. Why didn’t He? Well, do I look like God to you? Why don’t you ask God? Oh, right, you don’t believe in God. MAYBE there is some good to come from it. (“Blasphemy! To think that the tragedy that befell those poor children could ever result in anything good…!”)
                    My daughter is two. Some time ago, when she was less than a year old, we heard a horrible report in the news: a father of a six(?)-month-old baby threw the baby into a pot of boiling water because she was crying.
                    If you want to focus on two poor children because they made the headlines in your country, and ignore the hundreds of millions throughout history who have suffered worse–yes, WORSE–fates, then you are truly as arrogant as you sound. Why does this stuff happen?
                    It’s in the Bible, but you don’t want to hear it. I’ll write it again anyway.
                    God created the world; He created man. God gave the world to man. Man sinned, and gave the world to Satan. God does not yet take the world back by force, so that man can (and must) choose which side he wants to be on. There are, sadly, casualties in any war; God could have ended it all to save one child’s life, but He’d be condemning all those who had not *yet* chosen the right side. God could have stepped in and rescued the child from that terrible situation, and often He does (though skeptics like you would never recognize His Hand–you’d say “the neighbour” or “some kid walking down the street” or “pure coincidence” saved her); when He does not, either we believe that God is good and He has a good reason, or that He is a liar and a fraud.

                    Now, at the risk of sounding “Betazoid”, I’m going to guess that Conway Redding’s puppeteers are going to argue that God could just perform His “te absolvo” and abolish the need for free will. That argument is getting old. Answers have been posted; whether you accept them is your CHOICE.

                    If some horrible thing should befall my daughter… you have no idea the love I have for her. It would destroy me, I’m sure. I can not speak with experience, as by the grace of God both my children are healthy and safe; however, I can only hope and pray that should something happen, that God will take and keep her soul, and that some good would come of it… and that my faith in Him should grow as a result. More than that… what would you expect?

                    And now, a somewhat unrelated comment: I am generally careful in my typing and spelling. Should there be a typo in my recent comments, before “using it against me”, understand that I injured my hand last week and it still twinges a bit. (This comment is added because I know some of us–even, on occasion, I–like to nit-pick, mock, and otherwise belittle those with whom we disagree.)

                    • Stef Coulombe says:

                      I seem to have a few moments to spare earlier than expected, so I’d like to make one further reply to the comments ascribed to the (fictional) Conway Redding:

                      “And since you’ve mentioned Stef Coulombe, let me say that it has been amusing to watch his convoluted reasoning about the existence of evil.”

                      I’m always happy to entertain.

                      “…He is wrong on two counts, the first one being that evil is not a material substance…”

                      Hold evil in your hand, anyone? Where can I buy a bucket of the stuff?

                      “…at different times and in different places, different events/circumstances have been labeled “evil.””

                      That IS hard to understand. Killing in self-defence is absolutely the same as pre-meditated murder, then? (Not by my Bible, but then if you’re going to make sweeping generalizations about a book, it’s best not to read it too carefully, I guess.)

                      “The second count of Stef’s errancy is this: if evil is the absence of good, and if God is absolutely good and also omnipresent, as is usually claimed, then there is really no place from which good can be absent. …”

                      Math lesson: infinity plus one equals… anybody know the answer? Anyone? It’s infinity, right? Infinity plus a million? Hmmm… anybody? Oh, hey, it’s infinity again. Pretty cool, huh? Now for something more difficult: infinity *minus* one. Gee, that’s tough. No, wait, it can’t be… but it is! Ding ding ding! The answer is… infinity!

                      So, let’s apply our limited, finite comprehensions to something quite simple:
                      dimensions being limitless (space defined as “space being occupied by matter” may be finite, according to some theories, but the x/y/z axes themselves are certainly infinite), omnipresence must also be an infinte quality; therefore, God being “omnipresent” is not altered or reduced if He is *not* as present in a particular locale. As suggested before (and thoroughly mocked and derided, oh well), God’s perfect Presence must destroy sin and imperfection. So, should He choose to be fully present in every heart where He is not wanted, those hearts would simply cease; those souls would be destroyed. “Oh, but an omnipotent God can forgive sin anyway He wants to!” Hark the voice of those who think they know better than God! Much though some stubborn ears refuse to listen, God does give us a choice–He does not force Himself into our hearts. *That* is freedom of choice.

                      (By the way, this works equally well with God’s omniscience: His “forgetting” our sin in no way reduces the infinite quality of His knowledge and wisdom. Oh, and on the omnipotence issue: “Superman” is not omnipotent, not just in the limits on his strength, but in the limits on his *control* over his strength. For example, he can not voluntarily allow a needle to penetrate his skin. Let’s not forget that “infinite ability” includes the ability to control and even limit that ability–such that in order to allow freedom of choice, God can and must limit His infinite justice from destroying us all as we deserve… He didn’t kill Hitler, because He doesn’t want to kill you, either.)

                      “Stef Coulombe… has made his position even more difficult to defend.”

                      Depends on what war you’re fighting, now don’t it?

                      “…And y’all can just forget all that crap about free will… until y’all can account for the role that the free will of someone like 11-year-old Jessica Lunsford or 7-year-old Adam Walsh played in the evil that befell them because of the exercise of free will by [their murderers].”

                      Dude, seriously, anybody saying stuff like this is missing a few. ‘Tis explained elsewhere, but for the insistent blind, here we go again: why should *my* free will stop you from hurting me? In what convoluted, twisted yarn of logic would that even make sense? My free will allows *me* to help or harm, as I choose. If *my* free will stopped *you* from acting, then *you* wouldn’t have free will, now would you? (I mean, like, duh!)

                      “I asked Stef Coulombe a while ago to attempt such an explanation, and at this point I am prepared to believe that that his failure to do so is evidence of his inability to do so…”

                      It’s so much fun to be a hypocrite. Shall I tally all the arguments I’ve put forward that have not been answered?

                      “…As Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry Callahan character said in the movie “Magnum Force,” “A good man always knows his limitations…””

                      Wow. Rejecting the wisdom of the Bible for Hollywood quotations. Forgive me for a little bit of ridicule, here. Ah, good times…

                      (Should “Conway Redding” actually be a real person–which I don’t believe, of course–and should he actually be touched by any thing on this page, he need only open his heart to God. His “te absolvo” is there for the asking. If Conway is real, then God loves him too…)

            • RoyJover says:

              I agree. Please let me add. A lot of people say show me a proof of God and I will believe Him.These days a lot of people ride this band wagon of reasoning. In my opinion its both st*p*d and dangerous. In the New Testament Jesus was healing sick,lame, mute, blind, raise the dead, walks on water and did all other mind blowing stuff. Did they believe Jesus? No They hanged Him on the cross. Even the disciples who lived with Him for 3 years or more fled when he was arrested. Peter who walked on the water with Jesus, the most loyal one even denied Him 3 times. Faith has nothing to do with proofs.

              Still others would insist for proof and say I only believe what is logical and can be proven by science today. Well, even Ian Morrison (Scientist & Astronomer)once said in his lecture that after much research and technology which science has to offer, Scientists were NOT able to find any Goldilock planet like ours. He concluded since science has not proven it yet (Goldilock Planet), we cannot deny it exist. Then he continue to say something like this, since we don’t have the technology to prove God WE CANNOT SAY HE DOES NOT EXIST.

              Right now we already have tons of archeological and geological proofs about the Biblical events. Bible is not like a hindu book of Hindu gods(Vishnu,and the rest of the million gods they have, Bible can be verified through history.

              After much logical/scientific discussion still others will continue to argue about their disbelief and say I will believe God if you can prove it. Well, here are some practical contradiction to that kind of Philosophy:
              1. Point to an airplane up in the sky and ask, Do you believe that there is a pilot flying that plane? If the answer is “yes” say, do you have proofs. If the answer is no ask the same question.
              2. Ask them something about the future, Anything in the future. Then continue by asking, Do you have proofs on what you just said? We are only sure of what is present, future is a dimension we cannot cross even science cannot prove what is going to happen tomorrow. We can calculate and predict but its not guaranteed to happen.
              3. If the person had a divorce, it meant that when the person got married the person was thinking/believing their marriage will work (with no proof) and he was wrong.
              4. If you have sat on a chair and you broke a leg of that chair it simply meant that when you sit you believe the chair can carry your weight (You have no proof about it but you believe it).
              If you are observant there are tons of things that will refute the idea that says I only believe God if there is a proof.

              One of the main reason people turn away from faith is not the credibility of the God or the Bible but the failures of Christians to live what they believe. “My family goes to church and call themselves Christians BUT they don’t even read their Bible, only in church the Bible get opened,” is what they always say. It is a sad fact. If you have been living in a Christian family most likely you know a lot of the waeknesses of your loveones. If thats the case it does not mean God is not real or God is a fake. I been in church my whole life and i’ve seen leaders in the church do disturbing and terrible things. I have a choice to walk away and say God’s not real, It’s all fake and stuff like that OR I reason to myself that these Christians are but people that is prone make mistakes just like I’m prone to make mistakes. They will give an account of the things they did in the meantime I’m not gonna judge them, God is not done fixing them yet.

              Hope I was of help. God bless you all.

              • Stef Coulombe says:

                Amen. Ghandi said, “If Christians would really live according to the teachings of Christ, as found in the Bible, all of India would be Christian today.” He also said, “If it weren’t for Christians, I’d be a Christian.” This sentiment is repeated ad nauseam by philosophers and religious men alike. Sad, but true.

                Even sadder: despite the failings of Christians to show Christ, it is still ultimately the choice of the individual to accept or reject Him. Sorry, Ghandi (and everybody else), but even if we (Christians) are not perfect–however extremely so–it is still your soul, your choice, your responsibility.

                • GyanP says:

                  Stef, i will balance your quotes of Gandhi with the following utterances of Mahatma gandhi, scattered all around his body of work –

                  Gandhi also said the following-

                  “Hinduism as I know it entirely satisfies my soul, fills my whole being. When doubts haunt me, when disappointments stare me in the face, and when I see not one ray of light on the horizon, I turn to the Bhagavad Gita, and find a verse to comfort me; and I immediately begin to smile in the midst of overwhelming sorrow. My life has been full of tragedies and if they have not left any visible and indelible effect on me, I owe it to the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita.” — (Young India: June 8, 1925)

                  And the following –

                  “I regard Jesus as a great teacher of humanity, but I do not regard him as the only begotten son of God. That epithet in its material interpretation is quite unacceptable. Metaphorically we are all sons of God, but for each of us there may be different sons of God in a special sense. Thus for me Chaitanya may be the only begotten son of God. God cannot be the exclusive Father and I cannot ascribe exclusive divinity to Jesus.” (Harijan: June 3, 1937)

                  And, the following –

                  “If a person through fear, compulsion, starvation, or for material gain or consideration goes over to another faith, it is a misnomer to call it conversion. Most cases of conversion have been to my mind false coin. I would therefore unhesitatingly re-admit to the Hindu fold all such repentants without much ado. If a man comes back to the original branch he deserves to be welcomed in so far as he may deem to have erred, he has sufficiently purged himself of it when he repents his error and retraces his steps. ” — (Collected Works: Vol. 66, pp.163-164)

                  “I disbelieve in the conversion of one person by another. My effort should never be to undermine another’s faith. This implies belief in the truth of all religions and, therefore, respect for them. It implies true humility.” — (Young India: April 23, 1931)

                  And, the following –

                  “It is impossible for me to reconcile myself to the idea of conversion after the style that goes on in India and elsewhere today. It is an error which is perhaps the greatest impediment to the world’s progress toward peace. Why should a Christian want to convert a Hindu to Christianity? Why should he not be satisfied if the Hindu is a good or godly man?’ — (Harijan: January 30, 1937)

                  • Stef Coulombe says:

                    You missed the reason for my using those quotations, I think. Actually, I’m not entirely sure what you are trying to say, with your quotations. My point was not that Ghandi wanted to be a Christian, but rather that Christians themselves (or at least, those people who claim to be Christians) are the biggest impediment to many people accepting Christ. Obviously, if Ghandi had truly understood the Bible and wanted to accept Christ, he would have done so, regardless of what the “Christians” were doing in his country. Your last quotation, “…Why should a Christian want to convert a Hindu to Christianity? Why should he not be satisfied if the Hindu is a good or godly man?” itself shows Ghandi’s complete lack of understanding of the Bible’s message of salvation.

                    A Christian wants to convert a Hindu because the Christian’s Bible says that the Hindu’s soul can be saved *only* by him accepting Christ. Salvation, according to the Bible, has nothing to do with being a “good or godly man.”

                    The belief that all religions are valid is flawed, because they contradict each other: take away Jesus’ divinity, and Christianity does not exist; insist on Jesus’ divinity, and Hinduism is a false religion. As mentioned elsewhere, it is actually quite selfish (not “humble”) of Ghandi to “know the truth” and not try to share it. It is like the lifeguard at a beach insisting that it would be “arrogant” of him to suggest that your style of swimming is ineffective; in his “humility” he shows “respect” for your method of flailing your arms and sinking below the waves!

                    • GyanP says:

                      “A Christian wants to convert a Hindu because the Christian’s Bible says that the Hindu’s soul can be saved *only* by him accepting Christ. Salvation, according to the Bible, has nothing to do with being a “good or godly man.””

                      If you are really so satisfied in your ignorance as to believe what you just said above, God bless you! It only shows how flawed the Bible is!

                    • Stef Coulombe says:

                      GyanP, why do you feel it is so “ignorant” a position? What is more likely, that God in His infinite goodness will open His arms to *every* last defiant soul, and drag them all to paradise, willing or not? Or is there going to be some arbitrary cut-off point, which means that those who are marginally less evil will make the grade, but forgetting one too many “pleases” or “thank yous” condemns you to hell? Or that there is simply no way for a sinful man to make himself “good” enough to present himself before the infinite Creator without being destroyed by the evil within himself?

                      Human “goodness” is not good enough, for it is not infinitely good. Or would you rather I lie, and tell you that it doesn’t matter what you believe?

            • Tony Francis says:

              You are absolutely correct. All of us here are not sincerely seeking TRUTH.
              Many here already are brainwashed into believing what their parents / mullahs, pastors have told them. Each one holds fast to their own belief, and want to impose it on others.
              Some of them have difficulty in believing that this universe was not created, and existed from the beginning, but they have no difficulty at all, in believing in another entity (called God) who they say created this universe, and existed from the beginning. If somebody questions their logic, they call them names, and accuses them of being foolish, or like “Pharisees of the Bible who seek to entrap”.
              When I buy a car, I would like to know who made it, and where it was manufactured. All responsible car manufacturers usually have their names boldly displayed on their products, and some also displays the country of manufacture. So when I see a Benz car made in Germany, I can from previous experience, know how much reliability, value for money, etc. I can expect from the car.
              If all the things in this universe had a plastic tag “Made by GOD” or Made by Krishna, or Allah, or “Made in Heaven” stuck on them, it would have saved us consumers a lot of trouble, fights, and bloodshed. If there is a God, who created everything, there must be a reason why he is not showing his face, or refuses to put a plastic tag on his products. He expects us to worship Him, obey Him, and die for Him, but does not want to show us His face. This is like asking a girl to consent to marriage with a person she had never met, seen, or talked to.
              I do not claim to know all the answers. But I have contempt for people who claim to know everything, has no answers for simple questions, and brand real Truth Seekers as “foolish ” and “Pharisees”.

              • Stef Coulombe says:

                So… there are other Creators? Car manufacturers label their products for competitive reasons only. If there is only ONE car manufacturer, then he doesn’t need to label his product because everybody who buys one should know who made it.
                You want your “made by God” tag? It’s in your heart.
                You want to know why “made by God” is not universally recognizable? Well, haven’t you ever heard of counterfeit products? People make cheap rip-offs and sell them as the real thing ALL THE TIME. People also steal the original, re-label and re-package it, and sell it as their own. Name tags don’t prove anything.

                I don’t believe I know everything. *My* problem is with those who present a part of the truth and then contaminate it with a lie. My parents once told me that a *little bit* of knowledge is the most dangerous thing in the world.

                If you believe in the God of the Bible, please stop openly blaming Him for all the wrong in the world. I love my God, and it hurts to see people lying about Him.
                If you think God “created evil”, then sorry, but you don’t believe in the God of the Bible.

                *That* is simple.

                • Tony Francis says:

                  I am not convinced. You first say that God does not need tags because He has no competitor, then you go on to say that He has competitors selling counterfeit products.
                  The way you explain God, He must be working under many constraints, and may not be omni-potent after all. Otherwise, an omnipotent God could
                  1) destroy Satan and all his counterfeit products. Recently the Rado watch company, with the help of local authorities confiscated fake Rado watches in many places, and destroyed them, and got the trading licences of the offending shops cancelled. God with His omnipotence should be able to do better.

                  2) At present, people get punished for their crimes after a delay. God can give some very visible warning signs with a quicker response: eg. the nose of a liar can be made to go red even when he thinks about lying; or the ears can be made to glow green when he is jealous. This will discourage him from lying, as well as warn others around him when he is about to lie.
                  I could think of a hundred ways of how I would straighten corrupt politicians, adulterous people, liars, etc. if I were omnipotent.
                  But God, I feel deliberately makes some poisonous fruits taste good, and obnoxious tasting fruits healthy and nutritious. God could have made chocolate fudge taste like spinach and vice versa. Stef would argue that all this was done by Satan to tempt man to do the wrong things.
                  If God has forgiven man his sins, why should He still insist that man live by the sweat of his brow, and women deliver children with pain?
                  There are definitely more things than what Stef can get from the Bible. I would like Stef to give me Bible based answers for the following questions.
                  1) The Bible explains how Man was tempted to sin by Satan, but who tempted Satan to sin and how.
                  2) The Bible also says about Sons of God having sexual intercourse with Daughters of Men which resulted in monsters and giants who taught men how to commit different types of sins. Was God not omni present and omnipotent when all these things were happening, or was He taking rest in Heaven, and were all these things being done behind his back?
                  3) Are Angels incorruptible? Or can they also sin? Are Angels holier than men? Why were they put in charge of watching men in the world?
                  4) Jesus said that in heaven, everybody are like angels , and do not marry. How can spiritual angels have sexual intercourse with women? Are Angels male or female?
                  5) Can sons of men have sexual intercourse with angels and produce offspring?
                  6) Why is satan trying to corrupt only men, and not angels? Are the present angels vaccinated against sin? Why are men not given the same vaccination?
                  7) Are angels or Men more dear to God? Why is God forgiving only the sin of Man, and not of the angels?
                  8) Why did God send His only begotten Son only to save the lost sheep among men, and not the lost sheep among angels?

                  I could go on with a hundred more questions, and if I had the answers to all of them in the Bible, I probably would not have read any other book. But Stef, as seekers of Truth, should we not explore what is available outside the Bible also? Can such a great Being as God be explained completely in one book of a thousand pages?

                  I believe that God has given us many books and many paths, to reach Him. And in all the paths, the traffic rules are almost the same; except for some minor differences like left hand drive, and right hand drive. But if you decide to be in a right hand drive path, you have to stick to all the rules in that path; otherwise you can have fatal accidents. You cannot have right hand driving and left hand driving motorists in the same path.The other rules like do not steal from others, do not murder others, do not pinch or kick others, etc., are almost similar in all the paths.

                  There are many ways to skin a banana, and many ways to reach Mount Everest, and a million paths you can take to travel from the South Pole to the North Pole. I think that any path that takes you to your destination can be called a true path, and any path that leads you astray from your destination is a false path.

                  • Stef Coulombe says:

                    “You first say that God does not need tags because He has no competitor, then you go on to say that He has competitors selling counterfeit products.” No, I was simply showing the holes in your argument that God *should* have used tags on His creation. YOU claimed that God is just like a car manufacturer; I’m saying that this is a mis-representation. Further, tags wouldn’t prove anything, because there will always be liars.
                    As to why God doesn’t just kill all the liars (“destroy Satan and his counterfeit products”)–come on, buddy, do you even read what you yourself write? Have you already forgotten all those “free will” issues?

                    Now, in the search for truth, there are indeed many “good” books, but the Bible states that it alone is the inspired Word of God. If that is a lie, then we can’t trust anything in it–similar to the “Jesus was a great man, but not God’s Son” argument: if He was not God’s Son, then He was a monumental liar, and therefore, hardly a “great man”. If the Bible is not God’s Word, then it has NO value except as rather dry and sometimes moralistic entertainment; if it IS God’s Word, then we’d better believe everything in it, including the parts that say it is the ONLY Word, that say Jesus is the ONLY way, that say that there IS NO OTHER PATH to God.

                    The argument for “any path that gets you there” is easily abused, as Macchiavelli showed with the “ends” justifying the “means”. Even popular advertisements share this truth: the destination is important, but so is the journey.

                    Can God be explained in a thousand pages? No less than He can in a billion pages. Infinity, remember? All the writing by every person in a million years would still not be able to define an infinite Being. Isn’t it considerate of Him to not require us to study billions of books, but rather have all the answers we *need* in one convenient package?

                    And to that list of questions: if it’s not in the Bible, we don’t need to know the answer. (Come on, smart-alec comments welcomed from everybody: “What about science? What about medicine? Are you saying burn all the other books?”) Science, medicine, entertainment even, it’s all good and valuable, but not necessary for eternal salvation. Why do we need to know what angels are like? Really? What business is it of ours? If God doesn’t tell us, it is pure arrogance on our part to think that we “deserve” to know. If we believe that God is good, then certainly if such knowledge were helpful, He would share it with us. The Bible does NOT tell us those things about angels; it would be pure foolishness, however, to start randomly believing what everybody else writes about angels. I *could* make up answers for you, as many do, but God doesn’t really like it when we lie.

                    IF WE BELIEVE, then we have assurance that our eternal life in Him will be (humanly) unimaginably awesome–and we do NOT need the details right now.

                    “But God, I feel deliberately makes some poisonous fruits taste good, and obnoxious tasting fruits healthy and nutritious.”
                    Not the God of the Bible. Luke 11:11-13. (Of course, the gods of all these other books may very well be like that.)

                    As to the consistency of non-Biblical laws: yeah, I would take that as evidence of God trying to limit the damage of our sin. You that whole accusation against God, that “He is responsible for all the wrong in the world”? Well, He does not *have* to do anything about it–it’s our choice to sin, and our choice to rape, murder and steal; however, because of His great love, He shared some kind of conscience, some desire for justice, with various civilizations throughout time. It’s not enough to save you, but it does make life on this Earth a bit less miserable for people who refuse to know Him–imagine the suffering, if no God-fearing people had any concept of law! Can’t you see the tears in His eyes, as people then take His gift, and use it at evidence against Him? The real kicker: He knew it would happen. Despite His knowing what people would do, He still loves us so much, that He would rather take all of our anger and hatred if it means some measure of “peace on Earth”.

                    “If God has forgiven man his sins, why should He still insist that man live by the sweat of his brow, and women deliver children with pain?”
                    You’ve already answered this yourself. Forgiveness must be accepted. And, though our (Christians’) sins be forgiven, there is still the consequence of past choices. What would we learn, if we could just say, “Oh, sorry!” and have all the negative results of our actions taken away? Jesus offers forgiveness and salvation to eternal life; it’s not a magical 100% on every test we’ve ever failed. Why should it be?

                    And finally, “The way you explain God, He must be working under many constraints, and may not be omni-potent after all.”
                    Let’s see: He is perfectly good, so He “can not” lie. Is that what you mean? He is omniscient, so He “can not” make a mistake. Or, perhaps you mean those examples about “forcing” people to tell the truth–which goes back to the question of free will (a question which, again, you YOURSELF have answered already).
                    Omnipotence is a human word for something we can’t understand, obviously. We use it to describe God’s infinite power. It comes back to the question, “Can God create an object so big that He can’t lift it?” And once again, I’m going to turn to Mr. Redding’s answer that “unmovable object” and “irresistible force” are mutually exclusive.

                    Searching for truth you may be, but you don’t really seem to be thinking this through. I start to wonder if my time would be better spent somewhere else.

                    • Tony Francis says:

                      ” No, I was simply showing the holes in your argument that God *should* have used tags on His creation. YOU claimed that God is just like a car manufacturer; I’m saying that this is a mis-representation.

                      Why is there this hide and seek game? When Apostle Thomas insisted in putting his finger through Jesus’ wound to confirm that Jesus had risen, why are Christians asked to believe it without any proof, after 2000 years? What would happen if there were more transparency?

                      Further, tags wouldn’t prove anything, because there will always be liars.
                      Of course, and God will easily be able to expose the liars, like he is doing even today. But the problem is that the warning light comes on after the engine is burnt. Can’t we have the warning light flashing when the temperature starts to rise,or stop the engine before it destroys itself, surely because of some faulty design or manufacturing technique?

                      As to why God doesn’t just kill all the liars (”destroy Satan and his counterfeit products”)–come on, buddy, do you even read what you yourself write? Have you already forgotten all those “free will” issues?
                      For an engine, it may be O.Kay. But will we leave your child on top of a cliff, and tell him to keep away from the edges, and humanely give him the “freedom” to choose whether to obey you or not?

                      Now, in the search for truth, there are indeed many “good” books, but the Bible states that it alone is the inspired Word of God. If that is a lie, then we can’t trust anything in it–similar to the “Jesus was a great man, but not God’s Son” argument: if He was not God’s Son, then He was a monumental liar, and therefore, hardly a “great man”. If the Bible is not God’s Word, then it has NO value except as rather dry and sometimes moralistic entertainment; if it IS God’s Word, then we’d better believe everything in it, including the parts that say it is the ONLY Word, that say Jesus is the ONLY way, that say that there IS NO OTHER PATH to God.
                      Just as the Bible is “THE” holy book to you, Muslims have Koran, and Hindus have their texts. How can anyone say their text is holier and more truthful than others, especially, when all of them are saying more or less the same things?
                      Do you honestly think that a honest and devout Hindu who loved his neighbours, and worshipped his God daily but did not read a page of the Bible, and never even heard of Jesus would land up in hell after he died?

                      The argument for “any path that gets you there” is easily abused, as Macchiavelli showed with the “ends” justifying the “means”. Even popular advertisements share this truth: the destination is important, but so is the journey.

                      I do not see any reason why anybody has to “justify” his path, if he is not breaking any rules, or stepping on anybody’s toes.

                      I can travel from New York to Chicago by car, or by air. If I can afford both, and have enough time for both, and don’t steal money for paying the fare, why should anybody care, and to whom should I justify using one path over another?
                      If a Hindu decides to find his God sitting under a tree in the Himalayas, instead of sitting in a church listening to a pastor, to whom should he justify his choice?

                      Can God be explained in a thousand pages? No less than He can in a billion pages. Infinity, remember? All the writing by every person in a million years would still not be able to define an infinite Being. Isn’t it considerate of Him to not require us to study billions of books, but rather have all the answers we *need* in one convenient package?

                      Is man satisfied with knowing only things that he needs?

                      Why should man know whether something can travel faster than light?
                      Why does man “need” a car, or fly an aeroplane?
                      Why should man know how far the Sun is from earth, or whether the sun goes around the earth, or vice versa?
                      …and about the things that are available in the Bible, Why does he need to know if there is One God or 5 gods, as long as he has enough food clothes and shelter?
                      How will it matter if God has a daughter instead of a son?

                      And to that list of questions: if it’s not in the Bible, we don’t need to know the answer. (Come on, smart-alec comments welcomed from everybody: “What about science? What about medicine? Are you saying burn all the other books?”)

                      No I mean to say, we need to read books other than Bible also. We should not look for all answers inside the bible.
                      God has also pre-programmed man’s brain with a copy of the Bible. He will feel guilty when he steals or commits a murder, even if he has never seen a bible or other holy book.

                      Science, medicine, entertainment even, it’s all good and valuable, but not necessary for eternal salvation.
                      So are theology, religious books, and clergymen and sermons, and religious ceremonies, and holy places. I won’t be surprised if I find more people in heaven who have never read a holy book, than popes, and bishops, and mullahs, and theological scholars, and people who have dipped in holy rivers, or gone on pilgrimage to holy places.

                      Why do we need to know what angels are like? Really? What business is it of ours? If God doesn’t tell us, it is pure arrogance on our part to think that we “deserve” to know. If we believe that God is good, then certainly if such knowledge were helpful, He would share it with us.

                      How does it help you to know that the Son sits on the right hand of the Father, and not on the left?
                      Why does the Bible not tell us how to recognise liars, how to control tsunamis, how to stop global warming?

                      The Bible does NOT tell us those things about angels; it would be pure foolishness, however, to start randomly believing what everybody else writes about angels. I *could* make up answers for you, as many do, but God doesn’t really like it when we lie.

                      I am not particularly interested in knowing much about angels, but the little information given to us in the Bible leaves us guessing.- how they procreated with daughters of men when they are sexless, and how their children taught civil engineering and metallurgy to men to corrupt them.

                      IF WE BELIEVE, then we have assurance that our eternal life in Him will be (humanly) unimaginably awesome–and we do NOT need the details right now.
                      This is something I have always failed to understand. Is it enough that we believe something, or is it not necessary to act on your belief, if you are to obtain a certain result? Suppose I get a bottle of wine by post from a certain Stef. If I believe all Stefs are good, I will drink it. But if it was sent to me by a bad Stef who had mixed some potent poison with the wine before sending, my belief would be wrong, and I would die. (like how Eve was tricked into eating the apple.
                      Now, the result of dying will happen,
                      if Stef is bad but I believe him to be good, and drink.

                      I will not die
                      if Stef is good and I believe him to be good,and therefore drink
                      if Stef is bad but I don’t believe him,and therefore didn’t drink
                      if Stef is good, but I believe that he is bad , and I don’t drink.

                      Is “believing” or “drinking” more important, in deciding the outcome?

                      So is it not safest not to believe anybody?
                      Serpent, God, holy books, charlatans, scamsters, pastors, popes, et al?

                      Is not in-action safer than enthusiastic action under a belief ?

                      “But God, I feel deliberately makes some poisonous fruits taste good, and obnoxious tasting fruits healthy and nutritious.”
                      Not the God of the Bible. Luke 11:11-13. (Of course, the gods of all these other books may very well be like that.)

                      Why is creamy chocolate fudge cake tastier than boiled broccolli?

                      As to the consistency of non-Biblical laws: yeah, I would take that as evidence of God trying to limit the damage of our sin. You that whole accusation against God, that “He is responsible for all the wrong in the world”?
                      Well, is He not, if He is the author of everything seen and unseen in this Universe?

                      Well, He does not *have* to do anything about it–it’s our choice to sin, and our choice to rape, murder and steal; however, because of His great love, He shared some kind of conscience, some desire for justice, with various civilizations throughout time.
                      He could have shared the whole of it. Is it necessary to make babies, and grow them up? Was Adam created as a baby, and made to grow up, or was he created as an adult?
                      When we make a truck, do we make a small truck and then let it grow, or do we make a 1950 model truck, and then replace the parts with parts of better design, to finally get a 2010 model truck? We directly build the most modern truck with all the latest electronic gadgets.
                      Why does man have to be born as a baby, and grow up gradually, repeating all the mistakes his father and grandfather did, and learning from them? Why can’t his brain be straight away loaded with the latest software ?

                      It’s not enough to save you, but it does make life on this Earth a bit less miserable for people who refuse to know Him–imagine the suffering, if no God-fearing people had any concept of law!

                      Why do you think people refuse to know him? half the people of this world are at war with the other half, because they are not sure who their God is. Why is the Son still sitting on the Father’s right hand. He could come here and become the ruler, and put satan in jail. Why should he come stealthily like a thief? Why can’t he come in a 3 piece suit and land in JFK airport, in full sight of all press photographers, and start ruling the world, and end all misery in this world?

                      Can’t you see the tears in His eyes, as people then take His gift, and use it at evidence against Him?

                      This is all happening because He is not
                      The real kicker: He knew it would happen. Despite His knowing what people would do, He still loves us so much, that He would rather take all of our anger and hatred if it means some measure of “peace on Earth”.

                      This is like a father giving a Ferrari to his 5 year old son to drive, to stop him from crying, because he loves his son dearly.

                      “If God has forgiven man his sins, why should He still insist that man live by the sweat of his brow, and women deliver children with pain?”
                      You’ve already answered this yourself. Forgiveness must be accepted. And, though our (Christians’) sins be forgiven, there is still the consequence of past choices. What would we learn, if we could just say, “Oh, sorry!” and have all the negative results of our actions taken away? Jesus offers forgiveness and salvation to eternal life; it’s not a magical 100% on every test we’ve ever failed. Why should it be?

                      If I break your beer glass, and if you forgive me, will you still insist on my paying for a new glass? Then what is the meaning of “forgiving”?

                      And finally, “The way you explain God, He must be working under many constraints, and may not be omni-potent after all.”
                      Let’s see: He is perfectly good, so He “can not” lie. Is that what you mean? He is omniscient, so He “can not” make a mistake. Or, perhaps you mean those examples about “forcing” people to tell the truth–which goes back to the question of free will (a question which, again, you YOURSELF have answered already).

                      No I don’t think I have the answer yet. I am still seeking answers.
                      God need not reduce the freedom of MAN. But He can restrain SATAN.

                      Omnipotence is a human word for something we can’t understand, obviously. We use it to describe God’s infinite power. It comes back to the question, “Can God create an object so big that He can’t lift it?” And once again, I’m going to turn to Mr. Redding’s answer that “unmovable object” and “irresistible force” are mutually exclusive.

                      Do you imply that satan is so powerful, that getting rid of him off is impossible for God, like lifting an unliftable weight?

                      Searching for truth you may be, but you don’t really seem to be thinking this through.
                      I may be not very clever, but I am enjoying this journey towards Truth.

                      I start to wonder if my time would be better spent somewhere else.
                      Don’t give up too soon. The fruit we get after a lot of effort will be sweeter than what we will get easily.

                    • Stef Coulombe says:

                      Tony, there doesn’t seem to be a “reply” link under your comment, so I’ll put it under my own.

                      In your own words:
                      “Why is there this hide and seek game?” And “Can’t we have the warning light flashing when the temperature starts to rise,or stop the engine before it destroys itself, surely because of some faulty design or manufacturing technique?”

                      And then:
                      “God has also pre-programmed man’s brain with a copy of the Bible. He will feel guilty when he steals or commits a murder, even if he has never seen a bible or other holy book.”

                      I’m sorry that I simply don’t have the time to respond to each of your comments… but I don’t really need to, because you’ve answered most of them yourself.

                      Really, second-guessing God is an exercise in futility. Why can’t we walk on water? Why do we have to breathe oxygen? Why is the sky blue?

                      Do we really think that God never considered those questions? Dare we accuse God of not thinking it through?

                      If God is as described in the Bible, then the way He did it was the only and best way. END OF STORY. We may still respectfully ask Him why, but to start saying the He should have done it differently is like the ignorant bystander telling the professional how to do his job–except that in this case, the professional knows everything and can do anything.

                      As to doubting Thomas, Jesus specifically said that it was better to believe without seeing; besides, the “evidence” is in our hands, it’s the Bible.

                      On the Qu’ran and other “holy” scriptures: the Bible says that Jesus is the only way, so if the Bible is true, then the other scriptures are WRONG because they teach a different “salvation”. If the other scriptures are true, then the Bible is WRONG, and therefore not worth the comparison. It’s NOT like choosing between driving and flying–it’s choosing between the “easy” path that leads to death, and the “difficult” path that leads to life. Why is the good path so difficult? Well, that brings us to your broccoli/cake question: for someone with healthy eating habits, broccoli DOES taste good; in fact, “creamy chocolate fudge cake” is so sickeningly sweet that only in the West, where the diet uses so much sugar that we can’t taste it anymore, is such a thing actually “delicious”. (Far Eastern pastries tend to have much less sugar, because they’re not used to the sweetness.) At first, the healthy diet seems restrictive and “bland”, but once you get all the poisons out of your system, you find a world of flavour that doesn’t leave you sick to your stomach afterwards. SAME THING.

                      Now, briefly (for I must also sleep at some point): it is not wrong to be curious and inventive; these are God-given qualities. However, you ask why the Bible doesn’t tell us “useful” things: “Why does the Bible not tell us how to recognise liars, how to control tsunamis, how to stop global warming?”
                      It does tell us: liars tell you things that don’t agree with the Bible. (This seems almost like one of those “well, duh!” statements, but I’m actually trying not to offend here: the Bible is Truth. ANYTHING that disagrees with the Bible is therefore a lie; anyBODY that disagrees with the Bible is a liar. Easy, no?)
                      Tsunamis? Prayer. Jesus calmed a storm by speaking to it. He can do the same again–if we would only *ask*. Global warming? Don’t steal, don’t be selfish, don’t be greedy, don’t be lazy… hey, that would solve the problem.

                      “I won’t be surprised if I find more people in heaven who have never read a holy book, than popes, and bishops, …”
                      Well, I can’t disagree with you there. Most of the human leadership of the Church is in it for the power, not for God’s glory. It’s sad, but true. On the other hand, you keep going on about finding truth in “other” books, and that is where the majority of those “religious leaders” go wrong! A pastor who has read the Bible and ONLY the Bible may never have a huge church, but he will be a good and faithful shepherd, as long as he reads the Bible truly.

                      Now, on the matter of the Stef and the Wine: if God had said, “You may drink any wine but the Vignet ’89,” and the Stef sends you a wine bottle clearly labelled “Vignet ’89”, then OBVIOUSLY your faith in the Stef is irrelevant– what matters is whether you obey God! If you believe nobody, then you see a wine bottle and drink because you are thirsty. “Faith” and “actions” can not be separated; you can’t start deliberating which is “more important”. (Lots on that in the Bible, but there’s no point in reading it until you’re willing to accept that the Bible might be true, and all “competing” scripture false.)

                      “If I break your beer glass, and if you forgive me, will you still insist on my paying for a new glass? Then what is the meaning of “forgiving”?”

                      If in your rebellion against me, you broke my glass, and then asked for forgiveness, I would forgive you for your rebellion, but perhaps still ask you to pay for the glass–especially if it wasn’t the first time. My forgiveness means that we can still “be friends”.

                      “Do you imply that satan is so powerful, that getting rid of him off is impossible for God, like lifting an unliftable weight?”

                      Again, NO, you’ve got to read more carefully. “Infinite strength” and “unliftable weight” are mutually exclusive by definition. The Bible says that God is infinite in power, so therefore, there is no such thing as an unliftable weight. Please stop mis-representing my words! Every time I start to think that maybe you are being sincere, you go and pull something like that.

                      “This is like a father giving a Ferrari to his 5 year old son to drive, to stop him from crying, because he loves his son dearly.”
                      Holy crap, but you are frustrating. There are none so blind as those who WILL not see!

                      You ask why God doesn’t limit Satan more. Again with the second-guessing! Either God loves us and does what is best for us–like the Bible says–or He doesn’t. IF THE BIBLE IS TRUE, THEN YOU HAVE TO TRUST GOD. IF THE BIBLE ISN’T TRUE, THEN SATAN DOESN’T EXIST ANYWAY.
                      好不好? Ok?

                      “I may be not very clever, but I am enjoying this journey towards Truth.

                      Don’t give up too soon. The fruit we get after a lot of effort will be sweeter than what we will get easily.”

                      Don’t take this wrong, I mean, I’m glad you’re enjoying this, but really: if the Bible is true, then every moment you delay in making a decision, you are risking your soul. Death comes so easily– my mother-in-law went into the hospital last weekend with pneumonia. She’s recovering, but she’s still in the ICU. One of my former students died last fall from stomach cancer. Airplanes crash, bacteria on sandwich meat makes deadly toxins, people DIE– don’t be one of those to whom Jesus says, “I never knew you”!

                      There are moments in your comments where you seem truly earnest in your search… but mostly, you seem to be playing devil’s advocate. It may be time for you to stop doubting. I will pray that God keep you safe until you come to know and accept Him, but don’t take too long– the devil wants nothing more than for you to die thinking you can still decide “tomorrow”.

                      I fear I may be too busy to keep in contact for the next little while… take care and God bless, and please stop running from God. He loves you so much…

                • Bethea Weinberg says:

                  “If you think god created evil, then sorry, but you don’t believe in the God of the Bible.” So says Stef Coulombe.

                  “God is the author/creator of good and evil”
                  So says the Bible.

                  What now, Mr. Coulombe?

                  • Stef Coulombe says:

                    ““God is the author/creator of good and evil”
                    So says the Bible.”

                    Yeah, where exactly? That word “evil” has already been discussed; there are a number of places where it actually originally meant natural disasters or plagues, not an all-inclusive manifestation of “that which is not good”. The Bible also says that God is good, and that He only gives good things. If you want to believe that God created “everything”, great; He did. If you want to believe that “evil” is one of those things, well, that must be a terribly unpleasant imaginary world to live in. There are only so many different ways a simple concept can be expressed, so forgive me for repeating myself: darkness does not exist, it is the absence of light. Did God “create” darkness? Only in the sense that He created light, and then moved the light around so that there was more in some places and less in others. Cold is the absence of heat; did God create cold? (Same answer; tired of repeating it.) Evil is the absence of good; God is good; God is also love, so we could call evil the absence of love, or simply, the absence of God. Did God remove Himself from our hearts? Hmm, let’s see, the answer would be NO, we did that ourselves. WE told Him to leave us, and wishing us to have the freedom of choice (which some people seem incapable of understanding), He did indeed leave us. Of course, He wishes to be invited back into our lives. Sadly, He gave the earth to us, and we passed it on to our buddy Satan, so there’s an aweful lot of absence-of-God in the world today.

                    If you’re not going to read posts where issues like this are already dealt with, cute little comments like “What now, Mr. Coulombe?” are not going to be much consolation when God calls you to account, Ms./Mrs. (sorry, you didn’t specify) Weinberg.

        • Conway Redding says:

          You are so right, Perry, when you say that God is not responsible for what we do. But our perceptions of why that statement is true differ by a large degree. To you the statement is true because God gave us free will. To me it is true because, there being no God in any other sense than that, as I have said, imputed to other creations of the human imagination, there is nothing out there to be held accountable for what we do. It’s all on us, for weal or woe. Too much of the time we seem to choose woe.

          But using the free-will dodge to explain the existence of evil goes only so far. It doesn’t explain amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or glioblastoma multiforme, or anencephalic terata, or multiple sclerosis, or supranuclear palsy, or Hansen’s Disease, or the 1931 China floods, for which the death count was 1-4 million. And the free-will ploy raises some questions, as I have said in prior postings on this site, about how it can be used to explain such happenings as the rape and murder of, say, 11-year-old Jessica Lunsford by the pedophile, John Couey. Yes, John Couey’s free will can certainly be invoked here, but what role do you suppose Jessica Lunsford’s free will played in what happened to her? How about the free will of Chelsea King, recently raped and murdered here in the San Diego area by, it seems fair to speculate, John Gardner?

          I continue to await a sensible answer to these questions, from someone who believes that God has a real existence, is all-good, all-powerful, all-merciful, all-compassionate, is intimately involved in our daily lives, and bears the same relationship to us mortals as that of a loving father to his children.

          • perrymarshall says:

            I would like you to consider that atheism doesn’t get you around this question either. The most common form of atheism, materialism, doesn’t give a foundation for believing that free will truly exists, since it assumes that everything simply obeys the laws of physics which gives rise to determinism.

            Part of my reason for believing that free will exists is simply from taking it as axiomatic because ultimately it is a theological proposition. Which happens to be consistent with my perception.

            All the diseases you mention are explainable as either 1) the result of information entropy, or 2) competition in an evolutionary world.

            Rape and murder of children etc: I am appalled by these things as you are. Any view one might hold about God must necessarily account for the fact that some evils are simply not prevented.

            My book tells me that Lucifer is the God of this world. Let’s be very clear: Christianity tells us that a dark, evil being runs the show on planet earth.

            Leszek Kolakowski, the famous Polish philosopher who lived through the holocaust, said: “I can understand people who do not believe in God, but the fact that there are people who do not believe in the devil is beyond my comprehension.”

            Those who live in this world all have only a certain range of freedom. Some more, some less. Some people can take our freedom away completely.

            The ultimate answer to your question lies in the cross. It’s no coincidence that the #1 icon, symbol and brand logo in the history of civilization is a cross – an instrument of hideous torture – and there’s one at the top of nearly every church in the world.

            The cross is about suffering. Jesus is about suffering. “A man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.”

            Elie Wiesel tells of seeing a child twist and turn on the gallows for three days before dying. Forced to watch the innocent victim suffer and die, Wiesel hears a voice within him asking, “Where’s God? Where’s God?” The answer comes back, “God is on the gallows.” For Wiesel, God dies with the innocent who suffer.

            The situation is what it is.

            So we have a simple choice: Accept that fact that God has suffered with us — or mock him and be furious because the suffering exists in the first place.

            Which way do you want it?

            • Stef Coulombe says:

              Good answer, though personally I still think the issue is a misunderstanding of free will. Some would believe that free will is karma, that “my free will means that I only get what I deserve”. Any dictionary will point out the difference between the two, but to humour the insistently blind, perhaps repeating it once more will make some tiny difference: my free will has nothing to do with keeping somebody else from hurting me. Perhaps the confusion is based on pronoun trouble, so: Tom has free will. He chooses to hurt Pete. Pete has free will. He would rather not be hurt by Tom. Tom’s free will has nothing to do with Pete’s preference, or Tom would not have his own free will, he would in fact be one of Pete’s puppets. As Tom has free will, he may choose to either do good or not do good. If God intervenes, and says that Tom is only allowed to do good, then once again, Tom no longer has his own free will; he is in fact a puppet. Free will has nothing to do with whether or not God exists, unless you wish to believe that all your actions are purely reactions to stimuli, in which case there is no point to the argument so you may as well give up.

              Perhaps instead of looking for more “sensible answers” we should start weeding out some of the “insensible questions”.

      • Stef Coulombe says:

        Some animal rights’ activists call them “inhumane”, but the truth is that for most pets, invisible fences work. You know, those beacons you set up in a perimeter which send a signal to a dog’s collar, giving him a shock when he tries to pass beyond the perimeter–and if well designed, the shock gets stronger the further the dog ventures out of his allowed territory. Now, assuming the owners are not complete morons, and they actually take time to try to teach the dog where the limits are–“don’t leave the yard, stay off the neighbour’s lawn”–then the dog usually learns quickly, and relatively painlessly, not to leave the yard.

        Do the owners do it to be sadistic? No, they don’t want their beloved pet getting run over on the road.
        Can the dog still choose to ignore the pain, and run away anyhow? Sure he can–that makes it his choice, though, doesn’t it?

        If he does run away, and gets hit by a car, is that his owners punishing him?

        Sure, the owners *could* tie him up, so he can’t leave the yard. I’ve never met a tied dog who was truly happy, though. I’ve seen a lot of miserable dogs in cages, who have good enough reason to think their masters are petty and powerless, and whose only thought is escape because *anywhere* else has got to be better than where they are.
        I’ve also seen a lot of happy, content dogs, who have learned to stay in their yards because–however they were trained–they got to know their masters well enough to believe that there’s nowhere better to be than with their masters.

        Does God put us in cages? Or does He actually try to teach us what the boundaries are, to keep us safe, and sometimes resort to discipline to help us learn, so that we will eventually come to know Him well enough to not *want* to leave?

        I’ve left the yard a few times, and on occasion gotten zapped for it, but by HIS grace, I’ve not yet gotten run over by a car.

        As to your computer analogy… Perry gives a pretty good answer. ;p

        • Tony Francis says:

          One simple question can put to rest both the arguments. Will you give your son the same freedom that you give your dog, even though your son is more intelligent and logical than the dog?

          • Stef Coulombe says:

            In what way is that “simple”? Mr. Francis, you’re not thinking carefully, here. Your question suggests that because my son is more intelligent, I should give him *less* freedom. (Perhaps you should reconsider the meaning of “even though”). Really, your question solves nothing–but rather, like the Pharisees of the Bible, you seek to entrap: whether I answer “yes” or “no”, you will have some seemingly clever comment to distract readers from the truth.
            I still strongly suspect you are only trying to start arguments. The Bible has much to say about such foolishness.
            Now, you’ve had plenty of opportunity to learn and understand; you have the “freedom”, however, to choose not to. If you are as young as your comments seem to suggest, then a word of warning: your smart tongue will get you into trouble, one day. (Mine did for me, when I was your age.)
            God bless–and grow up.

            • Tony Francis says:

              You can call me by any name, but my intention is not to distract people from truth, but to make them think and arrive at their own conclusions instead of being satisfied with what they are fed by pastors and mullahs and priests.
              When we are children, we usually have hundreds of different rules we have to obey. eg. Do not touch knives, do not touch electric plugs /appliances. Stay away from the stove/ oven, stop playing and get back home by 6 Oclock, Take bath by 6-30, etc., etc. etc.
              As you grow up, the same father who told you not to touch a stove, may ask you to boil some water and make a tea for him. When you grow still more mature, the number of rules will decrease further.
              But when you were small, you could get away with passing urine in bed, or soiling your clothes. But when you become more mature, your responsibility increases though the number of rules have reduced. What was not a crime when you were ignorant, becomes a crime when you become more mature, though you have more freedom like staying away from home even after 6 Oclock, or have access to all electric plugs / utensils.
              What happened in the Garden of Eden is that Man chose to trade restrictions for responsibility.
              He chose to venture out of the restrictions (do not eat that apple) and face the consequences. In other words, he “matured” from a boy to an adult. He knew what is right from what is wrong, unlike the child he was before.
              Will any Father want to lock up his son in a cellar and feed him three times with nutritious food with the correct amount of calories, so that he will never go out and get hit by a car , or have an accident, or get obese eating junk food?
              Why should we think that God “punished” Adam for “growing up” and venturing out?
              Every tree tries to send its seed as far away as possible from itself, so that it can grow into another full fledged tree, instead of it falling down, and having a stunted growth under its shade.
              So if you exercise your freedom to venture out, you will grow up, otherwise, you will have stunted growth, and remain a boy within the boundary of your home.
              So Stef can decide whether to grow up, or remain stunted believing that there is truth only in the bible, and none elsewhere.
              Also in my home, my 2 years old dog has more freedom than my 10 years old son. The dog can come and go any time, eat or sleep any time, and pass urine on every tree or boulder it comes across, but my son is not allowed these freedoms. I hope that you will now understand why I used the expression “even though”

              • Stef Coulombe says:

                “He chose to venture out of the restrictions (do not eat that apple) and face the consequences.”

                That’s not maturity! Maturity is growing up and understanding the need for the restrictions; being mentally able to have the rules explained, not just dictated. Adam didn’t show maturity, he disobeyed. Before, he knew what was wrong: eating the fruit from that tree. My son will show his maturity when he chooses to FOLLOW the rules, not when he chooses to disobey them. Really, man, think! When he follows the rules willingly, he shows that he is ready to understand–or already understands–the reason for the rules. As long as he rebels, he clearly does not understand the purpose of the rules! (Or is the ten-year old son supposed to be smarter than the father, and show this by challenging his authority?)

                “When you grow still more mature, the number of rules will decrease further.” Wrong again. As a two-year-old, your rules encompass your environment–one room of a house, perhaps–and as an adult, the same is true–but now, your environment is the whole world. Fewer rules? Think again.

                God WANTED Adam to “venture” out–remember, “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the Earth…”– but Adam refused to do things God’s way.

                “What happened in the Garden of Eden is that Man chose to trade restrictions for responsibility.” No, what happened is Man sinned. He traded ONE restriction (the fruit) for a whole world of restrictions. Responsibility? He was already responsible for his decision regarding the fruit, and showed himself incapable of handling even that responsibility.

                This is what happens when you look outside of God’s Word for His Truth. Again: if it disagrees with the Bible, then either “it” is wrong, or the Bible is NOT the inspired Word of God; if the Bible is not the inspired Word of God, then why use it at all?

                “Also in my home, my 2 years old dog has more freedom than my 10 years old son.”
                Your dog has the freedom to use the phone, eat with a knife and fork, take a bath on his own, buy comic books, do chores, get an allowance, get dressed, choose his own clothes to put on, tell you what he wants for breakfast, ask for birthday presents, brush his own hair, read books, participate in school activities, go shopping with you, ……………………
                You’re right. Poor kid, eh? The dog has “more” freedom than he does.

                Thanks, but I’ll stick to the Bible. Perhaps it will “stunt” my worldly growth, but that doesn’t seem to important to God, so I really don’t understand why it should be important to me.

                P.S. I will apologize for one thing: if your son is ten, then you are probably older than I am; the Bible says to respect one’s elders, so I must say sorry for some of my less polite comments. On the other hand, the Bible does say an aweful lot about pointless arguments, as well. So: if you insist on disregarding the Bible, there’s not much more for us to discuss; if, however, you wish to examine the truth of its claim to be the inspired Word of God, there may be some profit in the discussion.

                • Tony Francis says:

                  “When you grow still more mature, the number of rules will decrease further.” Wrong again. As a two-year-old, your rules encompass your environment–one room of a house, perhaps–and as an adult, the same is true–but now, your environment is the whole world. Fewer rules? Think again.

                  Why was Moses given 10 commandments, while Jesus taught only “LOVE”- Love of GOD and Love of your Neighbours.?

                  Did Jesus reduce the number of rules because men during Moses’time were more holy, and responsible?

                  God WANTED Adam to “venture” out–remember, “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the Earth…”– but Adam refused to do things God’s way.
                  “What happened in the Garden of Eden is that Man chose to trade restrictions for responsibility.” No, what happened is Man sinned. He traded ONE restriction (the fruit) for a whole world of restrictions. Responsibility? He was already responsible for his decision regarding the fruit, and showed himself incapable of handling even that responsibility.
                  Its O.K for us to say now, that Adam sinned. But considering the circumstances God had put him in, anybody would have acted like him.

                  In the first place, why was the forbidden tree put in reach of Adam or Eve.
                  Why do parents lock away medicines, razor blades, guns, etc. out of reach of their immature children?
                  Did God make a mistake while assessing the maturity of Adam and Eve/ or was the stage set for Adam to sin?
                  How would Adam know that the serpent was lying, when he was ignorant and innocent of all sins ? How would he have known that there are some beings that are not to be trusted?
                  Even today, how would a man know whether, Krishna, or Allah or Jesus is God, and whom he should trust?
                  If a man (Mr. M)is brought up in a certain faith where he is taught that it is “holy” and a virtue to kill people of other faiths, and if he sincerely believes it and obeys the teachings, is he committing a sin?
                  1) according to you
                  2) according to Christianity?
                  3) according to his faith?
                  4) according to him?

                  This is what happens when you look outside of God’s Word for His Truth.

                  Should Mr M look outside of what he was taught, searching for the real truth?

                  If yes, why should not Adam or a Christian do the same?

                  Again: if it disagrees with the Bible, then either “it” is wrong, or the Bible is NOT the inspired Word of God; if the Bible is not the inspired Word of God, then why use it at all?

                  But to Mr. M, the Christian Bible would be “another book” that does not agree with his faith.

                  “Also in my home, my 2 years old dog has more freedom than my 10 years old son.”
                  Your dog has the freedom to use the phone, eat with a knife and fork, take a bath on his own, buy comic books, do chores, get an allowance, get dressed, choose his own clothes to put on, tell you what he wants for breakfast, ask for birthday presents, brush his own hair, read books, participate in school activities, go shopping with you, ……………………
                  You’re right. Poor kid, eh? The dog has “more” freedom than he does.

                  The dog does not have to come home by 6 PM,
                  He does not have to do home work.
                  He does not have to brush his hair.
                  He does not have to brush his teeth.
                  He does not have to flush the toilet.
                  He can roll in dust, mud, and go for a swim anytime.
                  He can chase birds, cats and mice any time he feels like.
                  He can continue sleeping even when the telephone rings
                  I can go on and list 2 freedoms of the dog for every freedom you mention for the boy.

                  Thanks, but I’ll stick to the Bible. Perhaps it will “stunt” my worldly growth, but that doesn’t seem to important to God, so I really don’t understand why it should be important to me.

                  Then you will not be following God’s plan. There must be a reason why God put the forbidden tree and the “other ” books within man’s reach. If all boys did only what their parents taught them, we would not have had any inventions, or computers or advancements in science.

                  P.S. I will apologize for one thing: if your son is ten, then you are probably older than I am; the Bible says to respect one’s elders, so I must say sorry for some of my less polite comments.

                  On the other hand, I will appreciate if you respect my logic rather than my age. What an aged person says need not necessarily be more “truthful” than what a younger man says. Einstein was only in his 20s when he postulated his Theory of relativity.

                  I did not notice any un-politeness in your comments so far. But if that was your intention, then, I accept the apology.

                  On the other hand, the Bible does say an aweful lot about pointless arguments, as well. So: if you insist on disregarding the Bible, there’s not much more for us to discuss; if, however, you wish to examine the truth of its claim to be the inspired Word of God, there may be some profit in the discussion.

                  Now that I know that you are younger than me, may I ask you a few questions that may liberate you from some constraints which are restricting your thoughts.

                  Do you think that our world is progressing or deteriorating?
                  Is it following God’s plan, or has God made a mistake?
                  Why did God want to “test” Adam?
                  Did he not know what the result of the test would be?
                  Did God give freedom of choice to man in the hope that he would never exercise it?
                  Is man progressing or deteriorating?
                  Will God achieve his purpose of Creation in the end?
                  Has God started on plan B (for saving man from eternal destruction) after His plan A was foiled by Satan?
                  Was Satan a part of God’s plan, or another earlier mistake?
                  If God had made a mistake while creating Satan, why did He not use the lesson learnt from that mistake, while creating Adam?

                  and finally, can you find fault with – terrorists carrying out suicide bombing etc. who do so blindly following some instructions from a book they fanatically claim to be “WORD of GOD” without going through them logically, and verifying if it would achieve the desired results, if you are doing the same with Bible?

                  Personally, I do believe that the Bible is the true “WORD OF GOD”, – not because a pastor or my parents told me but because it has passed all the “tests” that I have subjected it to.
                  There are hundreds more of tests and questions I have in mind, and I don’t think I will have time in this lifetime to explore all the possibilities, and understand it all. But that should not kill my curiosity which is what makes life so interesting. If that forbidden tree was not planted in the Garden of eden, Adam would have had a very boring life- living a today which is like yesterday, and will be like tomorrow having nothing new to know, or invent.

                  • Stef Coulombe says:

                    I finally have a moment to read through your comment again, and I’m not going to answer it all, because quite simply, we don’t believe in the same God. My God doesn’t make mistakes. That’s what the Bible says. You don’t believe it.

                    Claim to believe in the Bible if you wish, but don’t forget Jesus’ words that there will be those who say to Him, “Lord”, but He will reply to them, “I never knew you.”

                    Infinity requires perfection. It’s simple physics. No imperfect system–or being–can last forever. If your god can make mistakes, then he’s not perfect, and he sure as snot can’t save your soul for eternity.

                    “Personally, I do believe that the Bible is the true “WORD OF GOD”, – not because a pastor or my parents told me but because it has passed all the “tests” that I have subjected it to.”

                    You think that no muslims “test” the Ko’ran? No mormons “test” their Book of Mormon? No devil worshippers “test” their unholy scriptures?

                    I believe that the Bible is the Word of God because I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. My life experiences have “proven” the Bible to me, but just because it is logically consistent does NOT mean that it saves me! The dictionary is logically consistent, too.

                    You believe that sin was necessary for life to be “interesting”; you believe that God made mistakes; you believe that God *wanted* Adam to sin by eating from the tree. None of that is consistent with the God of the Bible; therefore, you don’t believe in the God of the Bible.

                    Have you read the Chronicles of Narnia? I’m thinking of the seventh book, The Last Battle, towards the end, where the black dwarves refuse to see Aslan. Why do you refuse to see the glory of God? You write extensively about it, but when it is spread out in front of you like a banquet, you grumble about rotten turnips! The one concept alone, that without sin God’s creation would be dull and boring, that you so stubbornly cling to–that one idealogy of yours proves your insistent blindness. IF God is great, then He does NOT need suffering, conflict, SIN to make our lives interesting! OPEN your eyes and read the words that you yourself have written!

                    (This is at the root of everything you write–please, ask God to open your eyes!)

    • Sandon says:

      God does create evil, he did from the beginning, he created lucifer. He created eve who picked the apple from the tree and then he condenmed us all for that one sin. Condemning is a relative to evil or bad or negative. God does create evil. He created us all apparently your bible says. He can’t have created some things and not the others. His only son died on the cross, He created it all. We are Gods creation and so are the heavens and earth. God created everything. He created evil for sure. Stop denying it. He can’t create some things and not others. If god forgives us for our sins. Why did we sin in the first place. He created us to be sinners. Just another contradiction

    • Keith Taylor says:

      Why does everyone think that God is “good” and how do you define “good” in the first place, when measured against the creator of the universe? When bacteria go to work against dead organic matter and turns it into compost that enriches the soil, it is “good”, but when other bacteria go to work against YOU and try to do the same while you are living, you regard it as “bad” or “evil”. There is no good or evil in the universe, just as you point out: there is reverse and obverse, different sides of the coin, that is all.

      • perrymarshall says:

        I doubt that you actually live your life as though there is no good or evil in the universe, nor do you want anyone else to behave as though that’s true.

        • Keith Taylor says:

          Perry, I actually DO live my life “as though there is no good or evil in the universe”. As I pointed out earlier, evil is a man-made concept and only man can practise evil. If such people direct their evil at me, I retaliate with a ferocity that usually keeps them very far away from me in the future. Once again, these are MY actions and I accept responsibilty for them, but they are also the laws of nature. Is it too much to expect others to take responsibility for theirs?

          • perrymarshall says:

            Retaliating with ferocity IS living as though there is evil. Because you obviously believe what they are doing to you is evil.

            • Keith Taylor says:

              Yes, Perry, absolutely. If a man did something to me out of spite or greed or in order to gain control of me, he is being “evil”, but it is not God or Satan or any other force or power or being making him do it. If an animal attacked me, I would know that I am at fault, either encroaching upon its territory, or am too close to a baby that I have not yet observed or am in some way being a threat or am potential lunch.
              I do not understand why you and a number of other contributors keep missing the point of my argument, which is that “evil” can only exist in the realm of man. It does not exist on any other level and does not exist anywhere else in nature. You may perceive a certain deed as being evil, but that same deed, performed by one animal upon another, is simply a law of nature.
              Only man can conceive of the concept of “evil”, so it does not exist in any other realm, but that of man. God does not feature here at all, because, as I have pointed out, God does not have to adhere to anyone’s rules: He does not even have to adhere to the rules He promulgates, but that in no way makes Him prone to evil. This is His universe, so He can do as He jolly well pleases: He is not bound by the labels that you, or anyone else, attaches to Him. If God created a foil against whom He is playing a cosmic game of chess and we, the pieces, suffer all kinds of miseries as a result, so be it. It is God’s game and He is going to play it whether it meets with your approval or not. If you don’t like, invent your own game, but whatever you do, you will still be caught up in God’s game, unless, unlikely as it may be, you can find a way out of it.

    • Keith Taylor says:

      Stef, sorry that I have had to post my reply here, but there appears to be no “reply” link to our discussion.
      I do not know what your particular persuasion is, but I will endeavour to comment on the idea of “do-it-yourself” or “believe whatever you want to believe” religions. The Catholic Church was the originator of the religion that has become known as Christianity: Jesus was not. In fact, I cannot find anything in the Bible that indicates that Jesus required a religion to be created in His name. First and foremost, Jesus was a Jew and, if memory serves me right, He promoted the Mosaic Laws. Now, the Mosaic Law is very strict: in fact, it is strict as, and may have been the foundation for, the Sharia Law of Islam. Neither Catholicism or Protestantism adhere to these laws anymore, so that they have both become species of “do-it-yourself” religions. Both have deteriorated to such a degree that people no longer mete out corporal (and even capital!) punishment upon their offspring as is, under given circumstances, a prerequisite in Mosaic Law. This but one example of how far Christianity has strayed from the path of Jesus’ teachings. When Moslems stone people to death, as is commanded by the Mosaic law, many (if not most) Christians label it “barbarism”, yet all these “barbarians” are doing is obeying the Mosaic Law. Your and my opions do not count here: it is God’s Law and if you do not promote and practice it, then you are either a heretic or a hypocrite – take your pick.
      The Protestant factions broke away from the Catholics and formulated their own beliefs, making them all kinds of “believe whatever you want to believe” religions.
      In the beginning of the Bible (Old Testament) repetition and reiteration are used as emphasis, so when, in Gen 1:11 and 12 this appears: “GEN 1:11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
      GEN 1:12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good” we know that the plants, trees and herbs here are specifically seeding plants (notice that they are not mentioned in Genesis 2, so that the plants that Adam had to tend, “because there was not a man to till the soil” were different and needed outside (human in this case) intervention in order to propagate). Now, there is a sentence in the same chapter that everyone seems to gloss over because no-one appears to understand whar it actually means, even though the repetition occurs no less that three times and the reiteration once. Let me clarify here: ‘repetition’ means that the exact same words are used and ‘reiteration’ means that the same thing is being said, but tht different words are used. I have used Italics to highlight the repetition and bold script to indicate the reiteration. It goes like this: GEN 1:26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
      GEN 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
      Then, just in case you missed it first time around: GEN 5:1 This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him;
      GEN 5:2 Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.
      Another thing that most people have missed, just by the way is this: GEN 1:29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. What is so significant here? Well, Adam was told, in GEN 2:16 “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat”, bit when he was banished, this: GEN 3:17 “…cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
      GEN 3:18 Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
      GEN 3:19 In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread…” Adam could not eat the seeding plants, but had to process them first (make bread) in order to be able to digest them!
      As I said, this is an aside. What really matters is that we were “made in the “image” and “likeness” of God. I have yet to receive a coherent answer from anyone as to what this means, so I have no choice but to try and figure it out for myself. It must be figured out: why else would God have set it down so many times if He did not intend that we should take particular notice of it?
      This, then, is my understanding of it: I (and the rest of the universe) are composed of the same fundamental substance as God, but our bodies occupy only the material realm, whereas God occupies all realms. The one distinction that brings me a little closer to God is my mind, which has certain abilities and capacities that other Earthly living organisms do not have. This also means that I have certain ‘powers’ that other creatures do not have, one of which is the abilility to make sense of what God has done and is doing. God has no reason to hide anything from me, as there is no way in which I can possibly assail His position (not that I would want to, in any case, but nevertheless). I do try to understand God’s works and so far, I have not yet found anything that cannot be understood. It has meant that I have had no option but to believe what makes most sense to me. Why is it so imperative that everything must make sense to me in particular? Well, because I am made in God’s image, that is why. If I am part of God and some of God is in me, then God must make sense to me … and He does … but only if I approach it from my own peculiar (“One’s own; belonging solely or especially to an individual; not possessed by others; of private, personal, or characteristic possession and use; not owned in common or in participation” – Everest Dictionary) perspective, so that, in a rather long-winded reply to you question: yes, it think that God is ok with my “believe whatever you want to believe” philosophy. Mine is not a religion, but an understanding based upon my own personal obsevations and deductions. Whether they are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is not in question here, but whether they make sense to me is of paramount importance.
      Thanks to my (open-minded) philosophy, I can make sense of many things that completely bamboozle other people, simply because I do not have to approach them from any one direction, but can attack them from every direction.
      I have no dogma: anything only becomes certain knowledge once I have tested it, so that I will not accept as valid anything that anyone tells me. I will listen to their arguments, take note thereof and go out, where it is possible to do so, and test them. If I am unable to test them, they have to hang in abeyance until I can test them. This is how I have always worked and I have made some startling discoveries that many “mainstream” people do not yet know and will be quick to refute long before they put them to the test. I will accept or refute nothing until I have tested it exhaustively. I think that this is the basic difference between you and I. Just because Darwin or Newton or Kepler or Pope John said something does not make it a “law” in my book: those were their observations and they do not necessarily hold true for me. Your analogies concerning graity and light and dogs having kittens and mixing drinks to get pure water hold true for us here and now, but I accept the possibility that God can change the rules any time He wants to. That would also be perfectly acceptable to me, though it might leave certain dogmatists in a quandary. Wars are always fought in order to gain power: the excuses for waging them may vary, but power is always at their roots.
      Absurdities and atrocities are almost always the result of listening to the warped views of the people whom you hold in esteem, as you have so aptly pointed out and I think that the world would be a much more peaceful place if people would simply say “no” and not listen to the canard spouted by the so-called authorities.
      The Good News is that we are all individuals and that each of us has the ability to formulate our own unique perspectives. It is only when we unthinkingly accept the words of others as Gospel that the news becomes very bad indeed.
      Your killing “in my name” is not acceptable to me: if I require any killing to be done I will do it myself, thank you.

  20. Shayan Khan says:

    Actually, Conway, the statement regarding our inability to completely comprehend the characteristics and abilities of God, is an assertion (in this case). The original statement, is an assertion. Meaning, most people would understand its exact implication. We don’t quite know the complete set of abilities God possesses. Well, apart from a few stated by the deity, Himself.
    In response to Kay Jay’s implications; If all microbial life wield the possiblitiy of severe disease(s), then God has also provided the more capable members of the society with minerals/materials/objects needed for curing/healing purposes. God has provided us with everything. He has provided us with intellect and pertinence, to comprehend and process a multiplex of occurences, or events. “Understanding” voids us of any doubts of the impossiblity of certain tasks. Everything within our realm of possibility can be achieved.
    If we attain “all knowledge” there is to acquire, we would be able to perform certain tasks seemingly impossible, considering the current frame of thought of people regarding the extrapolations of impracticality.

    • Sandon says:

      Then he created greddy governments to stop us from using these help aides, when really it is our own right to do what we want. If i wanted to hang myself, it would be my choice and noone elses. If i want to have children, it would be 50% my choice and 50% my partner or the girl etc. Not government or any other. They know how to run cars on water also but why isn’t it being done. Oh the scare stories, unsafe etc, how can it be not safe, it is water. Fuel,/ gas explodes also. All it is is greed, control over others, this is why wars also get started. They can cure any disease with pure oxgen machines but government slam that. I can tell you, if bill made a machine that could cure me and i was on deaths door. It would be my choice to use his machine and his choice to make the machine not government or doctors. All those people are greed, They let ther own people starve and slave., while they drive around in luxury on the backs of others. They created a business out of something that was meant to be a rep for each country to liase, not to control us all but still people do not see it. I couldn’t care less if it was the queen of england, she has no more power over me then i do her so she would not be telling me i could not see my own children or if dying wanting to use bill machine. If it killed me, that would be my choice. If it cured me that would be my choice.

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