rhutchin

The cut and paste artist at work, apparently.

Break it up into smaller comments if you want people to respond.:wave:

Johnny Skeptic

Ok, God deliberately withholds information from some people who would accept it if they were aware of it. It is not likely that a loving God would reveal information to people who he knows would reject it, and withhold information from people who he knows would accept it if they were aware of it. If God exists, there is no doubt whatsoever that he could easily decrease the number of people who go to hell by providing more information, but refuses to do so. Decent people are not able to love a God like that. You have said that that is all that we get, which is in fact sufficient grounds for decent people to reject God. Adolf Hitler is all that we got, but surely you do not approve of Adolf Hitler. The God of the Bible is in fact much more dangerous and unmerciful than Adolf Hitler could ever be. Hitler did not injure and kill his own followers like God does. Decent people know that God is not a moral being. No moral being makes people blind, deaf and dumb, punishes people for sins that their ancestors committed, orders the death penalty for a Jew who kills a Jew, but not for a Jew who kills a slave, kills babies, kills innocent animals, and allows people to starve to death.

The main question is how much does God really want to keep as many people as possible from going to hell? Obviously, not much. If God exists, he is much better able to keep people from going to hell than anyone else is. Therefore, he is much more culpable than anyone else is regarding the number of people who might end up in hell.

Is it your position that hurricanes create themselves and go wherever they want to go?

If you have children, and they were drowning, would you be willing that any of them perish, or would you try to save all of them?

Are you ready to debate inerrnacy if I start a new thread, or bring back a thread that someone else started? You have been quite elusive regarding the topic of inerrancy. There were two recent threads in inerrancy, but you conveniently did not make a post in either one of them. You must not be nearly as confident of your arguments as you pretend you are.

rhutchin

You seem to be arguing that (1) God knows what it would take to convince each individual to turn from their sin and serve Him and (2) God purposely does not do what is necessary to convince all people to turn from their sin and serve Him. Your complaint is that it does not appear that God will save all people (i.e., that God wants all people to be saved).

In Romans 1 (as cited earlier), Paul argues that this position is not true (it does not accurately describe the situation that exists). Unless you are going to explain why Romans 1 is in error, it does no good to repeat everything over and over. If you can explain why romans 1 is in error, then you will have provided substance an argument that needs support (i.e., currently it is no more than your personal opinion).

The Bible plainly tells us that God will not save all people. He is willing to save all people (as many as desire to be saved) but will only personally intervene to save the elect.

God created a system in which hurricanes form naturally from conditions that can be observed. Hurricanes go where high and low pressure systems allow and their movements can be predicted by weather forecasters within some margin of error.

I would be willing to save them. The issue is whether I should allow my children the freedom to reject my efforts to save them or save them despite their desire to perish. Would your children did not know about God and were headed to hell, would you force them to learn about God?

Start something that is yours and that you understand well enough to explain yourself: not a hand-me-down from someone else.

Johnny Skeptic

God is not willing to save all people who desire to be saved. No mentally competent man would ever willingly choose to go to hell if he believed that he had sufficient evidence that hell exists, and that there was a way to escape going to hell. Any mentally competent man would choose to avoid being injured or killed by a drunk driver if he knew in advance that a drunk driver would injure or kill him if he did not avoid the drunk driver. Are you going to claim that God is not able to do anything more than he has to prevent people from going to hell? Anyone with just a modest amount of common sense knows that an all-powerful and all-knowing being would easily be able to do much more than the God of the Bible has to convince people that he exists, that heaven and hell exist, and that he has good character. Decent people are not able to love a God who refuses to do everyone that he can to keep people from going to hell.

If I believed that hell exists, and that there is a way to avoid going to hell, I would sell almost all of my assests and donate all of the proceeds to missions. In addition, I would tell as many people as possible about the Gospel message. I certainly would not waste any precious time watching useless football games (meaining utlimately useless from a Christian perspective) like you do. If God exists, I do not tell anyone about the Gospel message out of ignorance, but you refuse to do everything that you can to let people know about the Gospel message out of intent. Therefore, you are much more culpable than I am. Of course, it should be obvious to you that human effort alone has never been able to let everyone know about the Gospel message, especially in the 1st century, and that that is the way that God wants it to be. If God does not exist, it is to be expected that the spread of the Gospel message would be limited entirely by the prevailing secular means of communication, transportation, printing, and translation.

From a Christian perspective, there is no such thing as a natural disaster. You believe that God created the weather, including hurricanes, and that he knew that hurricane Katrina would go to New Orleans, right?

It is legitimate in debates to quote expert sources. Christiains do it frequently. Surely you do not expect me to be well-read on all subjects. You most certainly are not well-read on all subjects. You just don't want to have to deal with Farrell Till's arguments, and a lot of other arguments that I will use from other sources. I don't need to start a new thread on inerrancy. I will bring a recent thread on inerrancy back to page one. That way, we can debate some the previous posts, and there will probably be more readers and participants.

Toto

Please don't dig a deeper hole for yourself, at least in this forum.

At the rist of dragging things further away from the topic of this forum -- Why was the existence of God a certain event in the past? What changed? Why should the probability of the existence of your god not be .5? Why only 1 or 0?

Johnny Skeptic

You obviously do not know very much about probabilities. The probability that God told Christians via James that if a man refuses to give food to a hungry person he is vain, and his faith is dead (KJV) is virtually zero. If giving food to a hungry person is a worthy goal, it is worthy for humans AND for God. Human effort alone could never feed all of the hungry people in the world. True love will always provide help when those who ought to provide it refuse to provide it, but God won't. In addition, God frequently destroys food supplies with hurricanes, tsunamis, and other means. From a Christian perspective, there is no such thing as a natural disaster. If God created the weather, he created hurricanes. Injuring and killing people with hurricanes, and destroying their property, is not necessary towards the achievement of any worthy goal. Such deplorable conduct is a form of indiscriminate terrorism. The Old Testament says that God killed all of the inhabitants at Sodom and Gomorrah. That was an example of God deliberately killing bad people, that is, if the babies at Sodom and Gomorrah were bad, but today, for some strange reason, God indiscriminately kills people with hurricanes. How utterly detestable.

Will you please tell us why God punishes people for sins that their ancestors committed, and why God ordered the death penalty for a Jew who killed a Jew, but not for a Jew who killed a slave?

Julian

Groan. I don't know why I bother. Maybe I am hoping some lurkers will benefit. The truly bizarre part of your post is that you actually bolded the part that you misunderstood. Key word in your bolded section is INTERVAL. When they talk about an interval between zero and one, they are talking about something impossible (0.0) and something certain (1.0) and all the shades in between. They are not saying either 0 or 1. They are saying that a probability can be anywhere between 0 and 1. That means that the probability of the existence of god being factual could be, say, 0.00235667, or maybe 0.762094, or maybe something else entirely. It is up to you to determine, USING PROPER EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT YOUR PROBABILITY CLAIM, to set the chance (or probability between 0 and 1) as to that existence. The result would be 0 or 1, i.e. god does not exist or he does. That determination is based on the probability but since that probability cannot be determined, nor can it be resolved, it hardly matters.

If you roll a six-sided die, what are the chances of you rolling a 3? Obviously, it is 1 in 6 or 1/6. Once it is rolled it is either a 3 (probability now 1) or not (probability now 0). In this case we are not able to roll a die. The probability merely serves to show us what is reasonable.

Now, please stop with the math since you don't understand it. You may think you do, but looking at your posts from outside your subjective perception, they are quite embarrassing. You may not see it, but take my word for it. Stick to philosophical arguments, which you are equally bad at but, at least, there no one can prove you wrong.

Julian

Joan of Bark

Most of us agree that to kill in order to avoid being killed, or to prevent someone else being killed, is not murder (and our courts generally agree). If there was some way to stop Hitler without anyone being killed, then I would agree that as a president in the 40's I would be guilty of mass murder. (The bombing of Dresden and the use of the atomic bomb in Japan might qualify under this definition).

My point, though I did not state it clearly, is that your loving and merciful God is guilty of ongoing murder as a result of the terrible diseases he has inflicted on humanity throughout the ages (I'm not even touching on natural disasters, like earthquakes). Why should I worship and love a being who gave the world smallpox, for no good reason. Population control? He could have simply made us less fertile. After all, he is omnipotent.

Face it, the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God is a killer of babies and other innocents, and with NO justification. Compared to him, Hitler and Stalin were saints.

rhutchin

Again, a refusal to deny personal responsibility. God has given people a free will which Adam/Eve used to open the Pandora's Box of sin of which few people seem to be upset.

You state that God is omnipotent (probably sarcasm rather than actual belief). However, if you actually beleieved that God was omnipotent, you would personally ask God to intervene to control diseases and you would tell others to do the same. You don't. Why would you ask someone you despise for help?

One day, you will stand before God to be held accountable for your sin. Assuming nothing changes, you will be denied entry into heaven because of your sin and spend eternity outside heaven (in what is commonly called hell). The same fate awaits all who sin. Against the backdrop of eternity, it makes little difference whether God allows a person to live 10 years or 100 years before calling them before Him to be judged. God gives people the freedom to sin, so why should people get upset that God should reserve freedom for Him to judge that sin or the timing of that judgment?

If you were that upset over sin (and its consequences -- disease, murder, etc.), and you actually believed that God was omnipotent (meaning that He could do something about it), why would you revile Him? Would it not be prudent to ask God for help?

Johnny Skeptic

Message to rhutchin: God deliberately withholds information from some people who would accept it if they were aware of it. It is not likely that a loving God would reveal information to people who he knows would reject it, and withhold information from people who he knows would accept it if they were aware of it. If God exists, there is no doubt whatsoever that he could easily decrease the number of people who go to hell, but refuses to do so. Decent people are not able to love a God like that. The main question is how much does God really want to keep as many people as possible from going to hell? Obviously, not much. If God exists, he is much better able to keep people from going to hell than anyone else is, and is therefore much more at fault than anyone else is that so many people will supposedly go to hell. A truly loving God would always provide help when those who ought to provide it refuse to provide it. That is what true love is all about. A perfectly moral being must by necessity be perfectly and consistently loving. The God of the Bible is not even close to being perfectly and consistently loving.