Epictetus

Oh noooooooooooooo...you said IF! Just like Linus in "The Great Pumpkin"..."If the Great Pumpkin comes"....."Oh no. I said 'If.' I meant 'When he comes!' "One little slip like that and the Great Pumpkin will pass you by."

Does that count for the Rapture as well?? Seriously, though, Eric, it makes much more sense that if he exists he would make himself quite understandable. As we have it (the NT), it is a mumbled, jumbled mess of half-truths, myth, and outright unsubstantiated nonsense.

God would not be inconsistent regardless of whether we understood him or not. That would make him arbitrary and hypocritical. Helping some people, killing others. Raining on some countries, sending drought on others. This is what we see in a natural world. It makes much more sense that no one is minding the store than to try to justify some big guy sitting up in heaven doing all this arcane stuff for his own purposes and coming off looking like a big hypocrite or nut case.

Happy Wonderer

Forget about the complexities of modern life. Don't you think a God who cared about his creatures would warn them about the true cause of many of the things that they suffered? A stern wash your hands before preparing a meal would have been a start. Do not suffer rats, for verily the fleas upon them can spread sickness and death far and wide would have been another. A few diagrams of how to set up a septic system would have allievated untold suffering and prevented people from being burned as witches when typhoid struck a village. Even the most basic rudiments of germ theory would have saved vastly more lives than have been actually been saved by the love thy neighbor request. A mention of the necessity for vitamin C would have saved the lives of lots of sailors.

These were very tough problems that took us a long time to solve, at the cost of much suffering. Don't you think that a God would have thought to mention them?

hw

Eric H

Hello Biff the unclean,
I feel sad that you seem to have had a hard time with Christianity, but Christianity can be a fulfilling way of life. I live mainly in peace with my faith in God.


Hello Zeda,
It is something worth striving towards, I can imagine that starving beggars may no longer want to be beggars, but I can’t imagine that billionaires would no longer want to be billionairs.


Hello Happy Wonderer,
I suppose if you took that to an extreme conclusion you could say why didn’t God make us immune to all illness and poverty, give us supreme knowledge and why didn’t he give us immortality first time round.
Then you look around and see how we use the knowledge that we already have. We seem to use knowledge in fairly equal amounts to do good and evil.
In the end however little or how ever much knowledge we have; we should still use it for the good to love our neighbour.

peace,

Eric

Biff the unclean

Hello Eric, do you always use smuggness to avoid dealing with issues?

Eric H

Hello Biff the unclean,
The main issue you bring up is that there is no God, and as there is no conclusive proof either way I felt it was not necessary to contest that just for the sake of an argument.
You may think I am beating myself up over my beliefs but I was only trying to say in my last post that this is not so. I am not sure how that came over as smug
I did say that ‘I feel sad that you seem to have had a hard time with Christianity’ if I am wrong to conclude that then I apologize.

Peace
Eric

Toto

Please stick to BCH topics here and avoid trying to psychoanalyze your fellow posters.

Toto
mod, BCH

MIchelleDawn

Well if god is omni then he would have known that the Canon of the bible was going to be ugly. :huh: He would not have wanted his signature associated with a book that shows god at the first of the book as an evil dictator/ conqueror. :notworthy In the middle as a loving god that says we should love everybody. :wave: Then end the book with a god that says we should tell anybody that believes differently from this book to go to hell. :devil3:

Magdlyn

YHWH did say this, but Jesus mocked the Pharisees for doing so, oddly saying what you put in your mouth will not defile you.

YHWH supposedly did tell Moses and his followers to take a shovel and bury their shit.



YHWH did not seem to know about Vit C, but he did know about the infestation of pork and shellfish with bacteria, apparently. And made it part of the law.

Au contraire, mon frere.

environmentalism-Plenty about pruning and weeding. Letting lands lay fallow every 7 yrs--the sabbatical?

energy policy--don't put your lamp under the bed

medical policy--exorcising demons all over the place.

Come on dude, be serious.

Atheos

(From Numbers 23:13)

Yeah, but in the passage YHWH told 'em to do that because he was going to be walking through their camp at and didn't want to step in their shit. Didn't sound like he was that worried about the sanitary issues.

It follows that YHWH suffers from poor vision or lack of attention as to where he's stepping as well as a general lack of omniscience. Otherwise he'd know where the shit was and where not to step. :funny:

-Atheos (getting serious!)

Magdlyn

Ah, he just said that b/c he knew the idea of damaging micro-organisms would be beyond their BCE comprehension, you see.