Chap;
Also we can see around us; the people who seem to get ahead in this world are not the same people who practice the teachings of God; especially, "love your neighbor as yourself"
Statements like this need proof. This is just opinion. It's like where it says <paraphrase> 'and people will say, where is this calamity you speak of, this has how it has always been ... and the end will suddenly be upon them'. Saying that doesn't make what is being said true. I could tell you the world was going to be destroyed by a mutant star goat unless everyone ate a kilo of brocolli each day, and you'd laugh and say 'where is this calamity you speak of, this has how it has always been ... '. Low grade mind trick - like where is says <paraphrase> 'when you find people doing as they should who do not know god, then it shows you how true god is'.
And which god? As with many Westerners, you assume (despite lack of proof) that the god you were bought up with is God and don’t even consider your god has equal proof (i.e. zero) as any other god.
I agree with pom that we do not have free will. We serve Satan or we serve God. God commands us to obey his laws and glorify him. Satan wants us to believe we can do whatever we want; deluding us to serve him.
And the difference is? Would you like your dad if he were a totalitarian dictator? Or would you love him more if he cherished your inclinations and desires (provided they didn’t harm others). I think it would be more human to love the latter father. We are supposedly made in god’s image, inclinations, desire etc. This alone disproves your assertion of the character of god, as human's have shown a historical tendancy to dislike totalitarian dictators, or whatever they may have been called according to the political make-up of the period.
I believe that one of the things Satan is trying to do is to defile the character of God. God says he cannot lie. He also says he is all knowing, all powerful, etc. Therefore, all Satan has to do is to make something that God said not be true (a prophesy) and he could call God a liar who is not all knowing, all powerful, etc. Satan can than argue that God isn't any better than himself.
Let’s look at the all knowing all powerful thing. If god is like that, then everything is his responsibility, and he can do anything. It does not take a genius to figure out that god set things up in a rather careless and irresponsible fashion if he knew the consequences, and that he could have set it up in other ways that would stop his experimental animals (by your definition we are no better than lab rats in a cage) living quite such a miserable life.
If God predicts something is going to happen and everyone is willfully serving him, it could be said that it isn't much of a prophesy, right? Since most people in the world are not practicing Christians, God makes Satan unwittingly fulfill his word with the use of the people in this world who are serving him. I'll show an example of that within the next couple of days because I got to get some sleep.
I’ll await that with interest. I have to say I find your conception of god amoral and chilling. I would also like to see you prove scriptually some of your claims, and if you cannot do so clearly, explain how you can make these claims. Look at the traps pom gets into in the thread you reffered to;
I am basing it on the Bible and what I see around me NOW. If God created everything in the beginning within a certain alloted time, then rested totally from ALL creating, that means everything the way we see it now was pretty much the way He created it then. Of course, excepting the numerous extinctions throughout time that are obvious by the fossil record.
Mmmm. Bible. Fossil Record. Very nice to try and use the fossil record to back-up a theory, but as the creation account and the fossil record disagree, this is wrong.
Because there was no LAW for what Satan was doing. Defying God was never done before Satan did it, what Satan had created by defiance was NEW TO EVEN GOD, as such as thing never came into God's mind. Defying God was bad, but there was no Law against it.
God is just, and if justice is to be true, then if there is no Law, then there is no transgression so JUSTIFIABLY there can be no punishment. So, God being just, he could not do anything immediately to Satan, so, He begins to create the means by which to have him eliminated JUSTIFIABLY. We then have Genesis 1:1, the beginning of the plan to have Satan eliminated JUSTIFIABLY.
This is great! God gets pissed off when someone doesn't toe the line. But there are no LAWS! So to justify him being pissed off and 'allow' (yeah, I know, he's god, it's his show, but apparently he needs permission) him to kill Satan justifiably, God creates the world as it is, and makes up laws.
Normally a court of law would not pass a conviction on someone who had committed a crime before it was actually a crime, so the use of justice in that sense mystifies me. Obviously the counter argument will be that Satan also showed defiance once the laws were in place. If god knew that would happen, then that’s akin to entrapment, but also makes going to the trouble to make a Universe when someone is b-b-bad to the bone illogical in the extreme; the Universe would be a guillotine… you’d think god would make it a school room… If god knew what was going to happen, then he’d have known Satan would have been defiant in the first place, which rubbishes the entire argument. If he did not know what was going to happen, then he’s not much use as a god, is he?
Also, under this argument, every drop of human blood spilt, every heart ache, every tear, every inhumanity done in the name of god, ALL OF IT, is just because god wants to prove a point. Is THAT just? Is that CARING? Is that LOVING?
If it is by god’s definition, I don’t think I’d consider a god like that even worthy of worship.
Pom has a good line in patter; one of the first comments on the thread seemed apt – it was along the lines of ‘you could start a new religion with that’. And just like the rest, it would be based on a human’s opinion, but claim to be something better…. Despite the lack of proof of virtually anything that he advanced, despite the implication that he had special knowledge… who does that remind you of???
