Atheos

Lee, I'm not afraid of what you said in your previous post. You and I have had discussions in the past and it is obvious that you believe because of personal healing experiences. The most obvious rejoinder is, "Why won't god heal amputees?". Answer this and we'll discuss your matter further.

I am completely unimpressed with your "fulfilled prophecies" arguments because:

• these fulfilments are so subject to interpretation as to be laughable
  • Jeremiah 51:26 - "Babylon will be desolate forever" - yet the same land whereon the city of Babylon once rested has been continuously inhabited since the time of this prophecy.
  • Matthew 12:20 - "Three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" - yet according to the gospels Jesus was buried Friday evening and on Sunday morning the tomb was empty. This is another opportunity for some creative interpretation.
  • Genesis 2:17 - "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die" - yet according to the same myth Adam lived another 900+ years after "eating thereof". Feel free to wow me yet again with more "spiritual death" creative interpretation.
• there are many unfulfilled prophecies in the same book
  • Genesis 4:12 - Cain would be a fugitive and a vagabond. Yet Cain ends up settling in a place, marrying and starting a family and builds a city.
  • Genesis 26:4 - Isaac's descendants will be "Numerous as the stars of heaven". They always have been and likely always will be a small minority of the world's population.
  • Isaiah 13:19-20 - Babylon will be so desolate that tents won't even be pitched there and shepherds won't make their fold there. This area of land has never been uninhabited. Period.
  • Isaiah 19:18 - There will be five cities in Egypt that speak the language of Canaan. This never happened, and never will as the "language of Canaan" is not spoken anywhere anymore.
  • Jer 34:5 - Zedekiah will die in peace. Jer 52:10-11: Zedekiah watches his sons get killed, gets carried off in chains, is blinded and dies in prison.
  • Jonah 3:4 - Nineveh will be destroyed in 40 days.
• the prophecies are of unknown origin and could easily have been authored after their "fulfillment". In an effort not to derail this thread any further I'll merely suggest a link for further reading if anyone's interested.

<mod hat on>
I'm only responding to this because the challenge appeared to indicate that I was ignoring the post or somehow afraid of what I might find there. There are many threads where these same issues have been bandied about mightily and everyone is welcome to jump right into those threads and argue to their heart's content. The title of this thread is "God cares about us?" - therefore further discussion should center around evidence or lack thereof for the proposed topic. Fulfilled (or unfulfilled) prophecies should be discussed in BC&H. If this thread moves that way any further I'll split and move the derail.
<mod hat off>

-Atheos

Atheos

Carin, as I've said several times, this thread isn't about me or what I believe. My participation in it is simply an ongoing extension of my personal search for truth. I'm not alone in deconverting from christianity. And of course there are many who have become christians after living a secular life for many years. People change.

If you're just insanely curious about my personal history you can indulge yourself at my personal website, just a vanity site I put together a few years ago in an attempt to collect my thoughts on several issues. My deconversion story is included there as I've chosen to tell it, but there are many more details that might never go in.

-Atheos

Atheos

In an effort to shepherd this thread back to its original topic I'd like to redirect everyone's attention to this excerpt from OP:
The point here is very compelling. If "heaven" is a place where sin does not exist then it is possible for God to create such a place. Why didn't the Yahweh just do that in the first place? There is no reasonable answer to this question, other than "god doesn't care about us".

To those who argue against my "Adolph Hitler" analogy, I simply ask this question: Is it possible for a person like Adolph Hitler to go to heaven? Can such an individual be saved? Is that not the message of christianity?

If the Adolph Hitlers of the world can still be saved and the Mother Theresas of the world can suffer eternal torment because one "believed without evidence" in the right god and the other "believed without evidence" in the wrong god (or simply did not believe in any god), then what, exactly is god trying to accomplish with this experiment?

-Atheos

jackrabbit

How could they "remember" the flood if it killed them?

Gawen

I have asked this question this way many times:
If fervent Nazi's believed in Christ and get to go to heaven because they believed, why does Anne Frank (an innocent Jewess teenager swallowed up into a concentration camp only to die there) go to Hell?

lee_merrill

Hi everyone,

And the obvious reply, is, he does!

Matthew 15:31 So the crowd marveled as they saw the mute speaking, the crippled restored, and the lame walking, and the blind seeing; and they glorified the God of Israel.

And I also came across a mention of such a healing, in a Peter Wagner book: "That Sunday evening Doris and I had gone to Anaheim Vineyard, and before the service, we dropped in at Pastor John Wimber's office to have a Coke with John and his wife, Carol. As we chatted, I told him of a case the preceding week where I had been privileged to pray for a six-year-old boy who had been born with no ears. Miraculously, the ears started to grow a half hour after the prayer session."

"When John heard the story, he spontaneously asked me to share the testimony with the congregation. To say the least, I was not prepared to speak to 3,000 people about an incident so dramatic that I myself had not had time to process it, while focusing attention on the power of God, not myself, and drawing out an application for the congregation."

"But the sharing went well..." ("Prayer Shield," pp. 170-171).

Peter and Doris Wagner are still ministering, they are now based here in Colorado, and he is a person I have high esteem for in the area of integrity. Cathy Shaller (one of the people who pray for the Wagners) was also aware of this incident, not to mention the audience that heard his testimony that night.

Your proof, though? I would also like to make a reservation and speak to some of said continuous residents.

More topics! Maybe I should raise the issue of ID and complex specified information, by way of refutation. But yes, spiritual death is real.

Prison is not war? Well, it's not, and the kings there were kind of like trophies, in some instances, some even sat at the king's table eventually. But I agree that it would not be appropriate to open a dozen more questions, given the topic of the thread, though I didn't respond to the OP, since it seems the author had stopped responding, and the subject had changed. And you had issued a direct challenge! Now when someone responds to your challenge, that is not the time to cry "Off-topic!" is it?

And according to the second point (which is indeed true) God cannot alter reality so that good is evil and evil is good. Though I'm not sure quite what AF was saying, in this first statement.

"If God is God, he is not good, if God is good, he is not God." Yes, this is an important question.

Some considerations, first, if there was nothing to overcome, what would there be to reward? Then also, love seems to invariably involve a sacrifice. So then to show the depth of love, there would have to be a depth of sacrifice, such as in the cross, such as in bearing sin and suffering, and this would show (and not be the same as only a statement) of God's love.

Yes, he can be.

Again, I insist that there is good evidence, and that mere belief in a fact does not save a person, belief that means obedience is what saves someone, and if Mother Theresa obeys God, then she will not be in hell, if Hitler says he believes, and doesn't obey God, then heaven would be hell for him, for there God's will is done everywhere and without exception.

It would be Noah's descendants who remembered, certainly...

And a fervent Nazi will not obey the God of Israel. And Jesus was Jewish, you know, and his way was the cross, and self-sacrifice, and care for the weak, and all that's dead against Nazism.

Anne Frank I do not say whether she is in heaven, the point again is obeying God, and doing his will, even union with Christ. I do hope that people can turn to God after dying, even.

Romans 11:32 For God has bound all men over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all.

Which would be implying that there are none of us unstained and innocent, as well...

Regards,
Lee

jackrabbit

What kind of shuck and jive are you trying to pull here? Did you forget what I was asking, or were you hoping that I did?

Here is the sequence again:

So basically these civilizations somehow didn't notice there was a worldwide flood, even though they all should have all died from it. I don't thnk the people in china and egypt were members of noah's family. Instead, they kept on trucking.
So you say that every culture does remember it, even though they were underwater and dead. Shouldn't their history have abruptly ended with "Yaaaaaaa! Where did all this fucking water come from? <gurgle, gurgle>"?

So I point this out.

Oh, so Noah's descendents are doing the remembering now. Well, that makes more sense. But how do they "remember" what happened in China and Egypt before the flood?

To get back to the original question that you tried to sidestep, why is there not a huge disruption in the historical records from china and egypt, since their civilizations should have ended?

jackrabbit

This is the funniest fucking post I have yet seen on this forum. Do you really expect us to believe this? Do you have the before and after pictures?

Gawen

You mean to say...And the obvious reply, is, he DID!

Isn't it simply amazing how we hear of such miracles from the devout, but we don't hear of such miracles in Medical publications? Lee, the Bible tells us that all adherents of Christ will be able to perform such miracles. Why don't we see this more often?

And here we have your belief from just hearsay. Why, if I believed in miracles they would all be held in high esteem.

Then I guess all Christians are screwed for not obeying the Law.

Yes..."You have the disease. Fortunately I have the cure!"

Atheos

I bet the doctors, hospital, etc., somehow neglected to make any notations about this great miracle. Somehow the whole thing ended up completely undocumented. What a shame. :boohoo: Maybe all the doctors and nurses were card carrying members of the EAC.

Lee, I (and many others) are perfectly willing to discuss the bible criticism issues with you in the appropriate forum which this thread ain't. Derails generally don't happen immediately, they happen because something that is on-topic leads to a discussion of something that becomes more and more off-topic. I made the call earlier and I'm sure my fellow mods will agree that this thread was heading for a complete derail into a biblical criticism thread. I'm not crying "off topic" to get out of the discussion, I'm simply stating that in this thread we will continue discussing the proposition "God cares about us?". If a complete derail is detected it will be split off and moved to BC&H, where it can continue to the satisfaction of all who wish to participate. This is consistent with the policies of IIDB and my commitment as one of its moderators.

This thread is a variant of the "Problem of Evil". Lets all please try to stay in the ballpark of that issue whether using bible quotes or philosophical meanderings.

Nearly every religious text and tradition has its miracle stories that proclaim the power of its god (or gods). I'm certainly not denying this. I'm skeptical because your anecdotal evidence isn't any better than the hindu milk miracle or the "face of Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich" miracle. A poor hindu person could have made a million dollars by presenting one of these statues to James Randi.

I stand behind my assertion. God never has and never will restore an amputated limb. "Miracles" will always be in the form of unverifiable anecdotal evidence because they are all the products of wishful thinking on the part of believers. People pray all the time for relief from headaches, body aches, fevers, pains, arthritis, rheumatism, etc., and give god the glory when they feel better. But amputees pray with sincerity, humility and ferver simply to walk again or be able to have a hand with which to labor and feed their children. Every one of these prayers -- every last one -- receives the same answer: Reverberating silence.

Concerning biblical examples of Yahweh's "caring", did Yahweh care about Nadab and Abihu when he allegedly blasted them out of existence with fire from heaven (Leviticus 10:1-2)? A noble, caring god of the magnitude ascribed in the J/C bible wouldn't be so petty or impulsive. Ditto Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5). Did Yahweh care about the Midianite virgins he let the invading Israelite hoards plunder (Numbers 31) or the mothers and little boys who they ruthlessly killed (Numbers 31:17) while keeping the virgin daughters to do with as they pleased?

The evidence strongly tells me that Yahweh only cares about blind, unquestioning obedience. The whole insane story is of this power mad Caligula type god who toys with humanity. He gives them "free will" and then sets up arbitrary roadblocks, some of which make a lot of sense ("Thou shalt not kill"), others which leave you scratching your head ("Thou shalt not seeth a baby goat in his mother's milk"), and still others that seem thoroughly abominable (condoning slavery, killing people who gather sticks on Saturday, etc). He rewards blind, unquestioning obedience with heaven while blasting people like Nadab and Abihu into eternal torment for simply flicking a Bic instead of getting the fire from some other place to light the incense offering.

Seems to me he could have just created a bunch of unquestioning, obedient servants in the first place and spared everyone all this suffering. Yahzi's right. There is a child being abused right this second. Gratuitous, pointless suffering. God doesn't care because GOD DOESN'T EXIST. The whole thing is ludicrous.

-Atheos