Thor Q. Mada

St. Robert

What do you mean by God is not hiding he is seeking. Seeking what?? I would think that an omnipotent being doesn't have to seek. And by the way, in all the recorded 6000 years of praying (inclusive the 2002 years praying to the one and only as you say), there has been not one single acknowledgement of receipt. And by the way, I guess you know that there are other people on this crazy planet who are equally convinced that their God is the true one, and that by the way you are an infidel and will go to hell. And if numbers have any meaning in this delusionary game, those that believe that your God is an aberration are largely in the majority.
But I guess that doesn't penetrate a thick skin does it??
Quite frankly I am fed up with that backward area called the Middle East. That area has caused nothing but misery, and keeps on doing it, all in the name of God. Look at that pathetic struggle around that church in Betlehem. Disgusting.
Have you ever considered the crimes in the name of God?? Because if those crimes are a proof for his existence then he surely has manifested himself very well.

St. Robert

God is seeking men and women who are willing to follow him and worship him in spirit and truth.

God is saddened by the events in the Middle East, but they must take place to fulfill biblical prophecy. Man is causing destruction in the Middle East, not God.

Truth is exclusive by definition. Truth excludes falsehood. If a person follows Jesus as the one true God and is wrong, then he/she is a fool. If, however, they are right about Jesus being the one true God, then the skeptic is a fool.

HRG

Why "must" ? Who was responsible for the prophecy in the first place ?

An omnipotent and omniscient being is omniresponsible, too.

Not necessarily, since there are three-valued logics (truth is a concept of our language).

In addition, there are different kinds of truth: mathematical truth, scientific truth, religious truth (which is further split into Christian truth, Muslim truth, Hindu truth ....)
If someone accepts the above criterion for foolishness, then he is a fool. One can believe a statement for perfectly rational, non-foolish reasons - and yet be mistaken.

Would you call Einstein a fool for not believing the fundamental indeterminacy of quantum mechanics ? He had reasons for his stance, but he was mistaken.

HRG.

bd-from-kg

St. Robert:

God is omniscient. He can’t be “seeking” such people; He already knows who they are. And if He wants us to “follow” Him in truth, He might consider leading us to the truth. The old hymn says, “Open my eyes that I may see.” If God answers prayers at all, this is one prayer that He must surely answer. Yet He doesn’t.

In the first place, He can’t be “saddened” by them. He knew that they would occur from before the beginning of time. He set in motion the train of events that caused them.

In the second, God cannot be “saddened” by anything. God is perfect. Being sad is an imperfect state. Therefore God cannot experience sadness.

Someone who is so quick to call others “fools” would be well advised to avoid displaying his own foolishness so publicly. The events in the Middle East are not fulfilling any biblical prophecies. We are not living in the “end times”. Nut cases like you have thought the Apocalypse was nigh ever since some nut case wrote Revelations.

Don’t you see a teensy weensy contradiction between saying that the events in the Middle East are all part of God’s great plan and saying that God is not responsible for them? If A causes B to do C, it’s A who is the real cause of C, and A who bears the ultimate responsibility for it. B is being used.

This displays the religious mindset as well as anything I’ve seen recently: the truth is always knowable, so anyone who fails to believe it is a “fool”. Well, the truth isn’t always knowable. In fact, one often has solid, rational grounds for believing something that’s false. A person who read the headline “Dewey Beats Truman” in the Chicago Tribune in 1948 would have been perfectly justified in believing that Dewey had won the election, but he would have been wrong.

One is a fool for believing something if the evidence doesn’t justify rational belief -even if it happens to be true. If Jesus is God, but the evidence doesn’t justify believing that He is, it’s the believer who’s the fool.

free12thinker

Why should people follow god and be willing to worship him in spirit and in truth? Can you answer this one question?

St. Robert

Because our hearts were designed to lead us to an open, honest, and guilt-free relationship with God.

Awesome question, free12thinker.

Thor Q. Mada

St.Robert,

Your answers are awesome in their simplicity. I am a sixties boy and they are sounding so much like the dogmatic and simplistic reasoning of Marxist-Leninist dialectic that it is uncanny.
These guys also always had an answer which was never based on sound reasoning but just on a few theoretical and utopean books and a belief in a world which will never be and has never been.
You have a brain. Use it. Remember that your god doesn't like people not using the talents he has given to them.

St. Robert

Why do you insult me, Thor Q Mada?

hezekiah jones

I don't know about you, but my ticker was "designed" to circulate blood.

St. Robert

God seeks in that he pursues the heart of man.

Who told you that sadness is an imperfect state?

God gives free will. He allows man to chose destruction over restoration. There is no contradiction.

The Bible contains paradox. It doesn't contain contradiction.