Tribute Thread For the Recently Raptured Faith

I would waffle in this case and learn more towards GDRS position. God may have inspired the Bible but not every writer was so pristine as to be free from the cultural bias of their era. It would be as if an inspired scribe were writing of the Amerikites in today's modern climate and wrote that God commanded us to pursue the 9-11 terrorists to the ends of the earth and killing them all. With our modern drone attacks we managed to attempt to do just that, and if you had asked any observant Christian in America they most certainly would justify it as Gods vengeance against the enemy.

Nonsense. You can have words without characters. Do you think the U.S. Constitution or the Declaration of Independence or the Magna Carta is "empty" just because they're not being recited by Long John Silver? That would be Gladiator. Again, nonsense. The words would be just as inspiring written down, with no fictional character to verbalize them. Consider Thomas Paine's Common Sense, which did a lot to inspire the American Revolution. Often the words borrowed by the leader are as important as the leader himself. Nonsense. The early Church (see Ananias and Sapphira) did exactly that.

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Matthew 18:2-3 And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them, And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.

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I can't be wrong about this because God cannot commit sin and what is being called genocide is in fact justice. We don't call the death penalty homicide, nor should we call it genocide.

All that just illustrates the unfortunate fact that American Christians are biblically illiterate, which was demonstrated amply enough by the general inability of Christian leaders to recognize that 9/11 was God's judgment on the nation.

So you are going to limit God by saying that He can’t do anything wrong. Presumably then you are saying that because He is God then whatever He does is right. However, if we are to understand the Bible as you do we can see that God is capable of committing genocide Himself as in Sodom and Gomorra, but even worse He is getting humans to do His dirty work for Him in other cases without regard to how that will affect their hearts and minds. You are essentially saying that ultimately there really is no right and wrong. Obviously when you say that the Bible is God breathed your reasoning is circular. Yes I believe that God breathes life into and speaks to us through the Scriptures but that does not make them inerrant in the way that you understand them. When we read stories of God committing or commanding genocide or public stoning, we can read them and understand how severely we humans can distort things by assigning evil to God thus relieving them of the responsibility for the evil and even justifying it. That is what God has to say to us in those ancient stories.You go even further and justify the actions of the 9/11 terrorists and agreeing that they were simply acting as agents of God. That is so unbelievably far from what Jesus lived and taught, and this is what happens when Christians make a false idol out of the Bible instead of actually following Jesus. Your understanding of God becomes no different than the god of the 9/11 terrorists. Yes God was involved that day. He was active in the hearts of those who risked their lives rescuing people and in the hearts of those that reached out to the families of the victims. He suffered with those who lost their lives and their families. I agree that God is a god of justice. But God is also a god of mercy and forgiveness. I think that the person who understood that best was CS Lewis. I know I have quoted this here previously but it is worth quoting again. From the book The Great Divorce:

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There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.

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My Christian belief is that God is just, merciful and loving, and that ultimately there will be perfect justice. I was raised in a middle class Canadian home where I was loved and cared for by moral and ethical parents. So many grow up in homes where they are not valued and in an atmosphere that is neither loving, moral nor ethical. One reason that I feel at peace with God’s judgment is that I am confident that God’s plan will see an understanding of our experiences in this life so that the individual that emerged from a negative environment will be treated mercifully and with compassion for those circumstances.I don’t have all the answers that you seem to believe that you have. I am content that even though I have opinions of the ultimate future of this world I am content to leave it to God. As a Christian I do trust that ultimately there will be perfect justice for all, and that justice will involve mercy, forgiveness and above all love. I guess I’m just happy that it is God judging me and not you. Incidentally I don’t reject salvation. My point is that salvation should not be the focus of our Christianity. Salvation is God’s business and our business is to fulfill the task that we have been given which is to be grateful for the gift of life, to humbly love mercy and kindness, to act justly, and above all to reflect God’s love into His creation,

Limit God? By understanding that He is absolute Perfection? What on earth has happened to bring such a nonsensical idea about? I can't fathom this weirdness. Why would you even WANT an imperfect God? I ADORE His perfections, His perfect beauty, His perfect understanding, His perfect moral law, His perfect judgments, His perfect righteousness, His perfect power, His perfect knowledge . I'm aghast at such an idea as an imperfect God. Absolutely, unequivocally, unquestionably, right. That is why we can use the Bible as our standard for judging absolutely everything and don't have to second guess anything or wonder which part is true etc etc etc.I'm so flabbergasted by this idea there may be nothing else to say about the rest of what you wrote, but I'll come back and see.

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I can't be wrong about this because God cannot commit sin and what is being called genocide is in fact justice. We don't call the death penalty homicide, nor should we call it genocide.

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wikipedia expressly lists capital punishment as an example of homicide. Indeed the general definition the killing of one person by another clearly does include executions.When we have, not an orderly execution, but a military force exterminating men, women and children the idea that we should not call it genocide seems even further fetched.

To put on my nitpick hat, yes we do. Homicide is someone killing someone else. From Farlex's free legal dictionary discussion of homicides that are not criminal:

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A homicide may be justifiable or excusable by the surrounding circumstances. In such cases, the homicide will not be considered a criminal act. A justifiable homicide is a homicide that is commanded or authorized by law. For instance, soldiers in a time of war may be commanded to kill enemy soldiers. Generally, such killings are considered justifiable homicide unless other circumstances suggest that they were not necessary or that they were not within the scope of the soldiers' duty. In addition, a public official is justified in carrying out a death sentence because the execution is commanded by state or federal law.

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Fair enough. I don't know enough about Faith to actually pass judgement on her so I am assuming what I said about her. Certainly I find it distressing that she so distorts Christ'a message but at the same time she is able to justify OT atrocities without seeing them as being justified in her own life.As for the last statement it seems to me that we are capable of somewhat objectively judging whether or not an individual has a more loving nature than some other individual.

All I'm trying to do is get the standard idea about this recognized. You want to change definitions and fool around with words in such a way as to obscure my simple point that God cannot be wrong or unjust. I'm not insisting that you agree with me, but I am insisting that you stop confusing things so that my opinion can't even be correctly stated.

I'm not talking about some kind of prissy pedantic legal definition, I'm talking about how ordinary people talk about these things. Yikes, why can't a simple point get recognized around here?

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All I'm trying to do is get the standard idea about this recognized.

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The standard idea is that it is genocide.

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You want to change definitions and fool around with words in such a way as to obscure my simple point that God cannot be wrong or unjust.

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No. I am just objecting to your attempts to change definitions and fool about with words. I am not at this point arguing about whether the genocide was justified or not.

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I'm not insisting that you agree with me, but I am insisting that you stop confusing things so that my opinion can't even be correctly stated.

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There is no confusion in pointing out that - according to the Bible - God ordered genocide. That is what it says.

But I think in this case it's more than just a prissy and pedantic definition. Homicide is only really a legal term; and it refers to killing people. Then there are all kinds of different types of homicide depending on whether it's justified and whether it's intentional.Genocide is killing a whole people, rather than just individuals. You seem to be invoking some kind of concept of justifiable genocide; but it's clearly still genocide. We are obviously having difficulty with conceiving what could justify genocide; and the Bible passages quoted don't shed much light on this.

Absolutely I believe in a perfect God whose nature is perfectly embodied by Jesus. Genocide and public stoning are completely contrary to what Jesus taught so we know that they are wrong. You however are prepared to accept and call right the idea that God both committed and commanded these atrocities. In other words it is you that worships an imperfect God and I would in turn ask you why you would want to do that. You say you use the Bible as a standard. You actually don't. You have to twist the basic meaning of the Bible so badly that the message that God actually has for us becomes unrecognizable. As I've said before, it becomes Biblleianity instead of Christianity.

We do not say that genocide is wiping out a human population - but only if it is wrong.We say that genocide is wiping out a human population - and that is wrong.That is why trying to avoid the use of the word genocide is nothing more than spin.