King David found guilty on all counts.

Everything. People today are the only standard we have for comparison. They're the only people we know personally. But you're the one who's saying that that "barbaric thinking process" was chosen by God. But we're talking about people that God might have chosen to be king. They could not be kings. The only comparison we can make is with candidates for king - non-kings. I didn't say anything about "perfection". I said that it's reasonable to assume that God would make the best possible choice if He was the one making the choice. I also said that it doesn't seem plausible that David was the best possible choice. Therefore, I conclude that it is most probable that God did not choose David.It's much more probable that David chose David. Have you never heard of another case in history where a king seized the throne of his own volition, for his own sake? I didn't think anybody believed in the Divine Right of Kings any more. Sure I can. Watch me:It was a bad choice.Or rather, it would have been a bad choice, if God had made it.I don't have to be able to explain every bad thing that happens to every good person to know that George W. Bush was a bad choice. Ditto for David. Bullshit. Don't blame God for Hitler. Blame Hitler.And don't blame God for David. Blame David. Don't you hear the alarm bells going off?Who wrote the psalms? Wasn't it (supposedly) David? Do you really think David would write a psalm that said, "David stole the throne"?

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No, the knowledge base is the same. I said (plainly) that I was talking about people we know personally. That is the same group whether we are comparing them to people of the past or people of the present that we don't know."The way they were brought up" isn't relevant because all we know about them is the results of their actions - same as we know about the people of today.Since we know from history, archaeology, etc. that not every person in the past committed murder, yes it is logical to conclude that David was not the best choice for king. It's no worse speculation than your speculation that there was no better choice than David. And I'm saying that - given what we know about human behaviour throughout history - it's highly probable that very many people would have done better than David. And to what we know from history, etc. Do you really believe that every king in history was a murderer? As I have said, if David was "chosen" he was chosen from among non-kings. You can't ignore the moral standards of everybody else in the world. Because none of the other kings in the Bible were on God's short-list for King of Israel. They were not candidates for the job. Their moral fiber is irrelevant. Read some history. Of course. My eyes are the only eyes I have. You are no more privy to God's inner workings than I am, yet you feel free to claim that He made a good choice when anybody with eyes can see it was a bad "choice". Your question answers itself:1. God makes good choices all the time.
2. God lets bad things happen. He does not "choose" them. No, you can not say "probable". You have no way of knowing what God was thinking or what His goals were, so you have nothing to base your probability calculations on. From your point of view, there is no way to calculate the "probable value" of the choice.My point of view, on the other hand, is based on what we know about human nature, today and in the past. We know that some people are not murderers, so it is reasonable to suggest that there probably could have been a better king than David. That's not what I said. I said that you can't trust everything that David said about David.If Hitler wrote a song entitled, "God chose Adolf", would you take it as the truth? Don't trust study notes. Do your own thinking. Daniel didn't say "all", you did. Could you do me a favour? Just for once, read what I write instead of being so defensive. One more time, I didn't say anything about "perfection".God didn't have any perfect humans to choose from. But He did have a lot of non-murderers to choose from. So, if He did make the "choice" it seems highly probable - yes, probable - that He would have chosen a non-murderer over a murderer.So it seems highly probable that He didn't make the choice.

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I haven't denied any such thing. I've been saying that you don't have the inside track on "what God thinks is bad". Since none of us knows that, we can only go with our own judgement. No, it is not clear that David was "given an oppurtunity". As I have been saying, it seems much more likely that he seized the oppurtunity. Well, yes, it is a one-way street. My viewpoint is based on human knowledge of human nature. It is possible to estimate the probability that David was the best "choice" based on that knowledge.Your viewpoint is based on what we don't know about God's nature. It is not possible to estimate a probability based on lack of knowledge. What example was that? Give in to your basest instincts and steal your neighbour's wife? Then abuse your power by having him murdered?Pardon me if I don't learn that "lesson". We don't really need examples of what not to do.

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Of course. What other knowledge do we have? No, I didn't say that. I spoke of human behaviour and what we know today about human behaviour three thousand years ago. For one thing, we know that not everybody was a murderer. The Bible can only "teach" that God's ways are not our ways by explaining things in our own terms. Because God's ways are not our ways, it can never "teach" us completely what God's ways are. That doesn't follow at all from anything you have said, or anything I have said. You are basing your opinion on what men wrote about God in the Bible. Even worse, you're basing it on what David wrote about himself. Even worser than worse, you're claiming that the people in Old Testament times were more "barbaric" than we are, and yet you take them at their word when they write about God. How can it be "making stuff up" if we see it? You can only compare long ago with today because all we have left of long ago is what we see today. That's a completely different topic (and most fundies would claim that only born-again fundies are changed by Jesus). So you're actually wishing I would make up stuff about way back when instead of seeing what we see. It's straight and narrow too. (That one's for the lurkers. I don't expect you to get it. ) Not as hefty as the price paid by his victims. So why do you claim that the Judge appointed the criminal?At best, it would be conflict of interest for the Judge to try His own appointee. At worst, it would be entrapment.(No, I don't expect you to get that one either. )Edited by Ringo, : Spelling.

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Where did he do that? It was somebody else who exposed David's crimes. You're making a bad assumption there. The only ones written about in the Old Testament were the ones who were supposedly chosen by God. We have no way of knowing whether or not there were thousands of others to choose from. I'm not the one who discredits it. You discredit it by taking it so literally. And David was more like the extremist, which is why I think there were better choices. What a disgusting suggestion: God can do any wrong He pleases as long as He bribes us with goodies? A human judge who did that would go to jail. The afterlife doesn't excuse God from behaving properly in this one.

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None of us knows what God perceives.We only know what we perceive as good or bad. If we perceive something as bad, we should conclude that God didn't "choose" it - humans did. No. It's good sense. We should base our conclusions on what we do know, not what we don't know. That's like saying you can do what you want to your kids because you "made" them.No. The creator does have a responsibility to his creation. No. If bad things happen, we can find the real cause instead of shrugging it off as "God's will".

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There is nothing contradictory about it.

1. We do not know what God perceives.
2. We know what we perceive.
3. Therefore, we can only use what we perceive to determine "bad" and "good".
4. If God is good, then things that we perceive as bad can not be His choice.

You might not agree with #4, but it isn't self-contradictory. No you're not. You're basing your entire argument on God making the "right choice". But we don't know if there was a better choice than David. Your entire argument is based on the "God works in mysterious ways" cop-out. Once again, we can only go by our own perception. We don't know whether God "feels" such a responsibility, so we can only go with what we do know. And human creators do feel a responsibility to their creations.Why do you expect less of God?

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How can what we perceive contradict something we don't know? I have said right from the beginning that David probably wasn't God's choice. You have been arguing against that.If you're switching from probability to "possibility", you're moving the goalposts. But you can't "explain" it because you can only speculate on what God's motivations might be. That's why it's a cop-out - any old "explantion" will do because it might be true. Once again, I have never denied the possibility that God chose David. I have said that, based on human reasoning, He probably didn't.Do you understand the difference between probability and possibility?Do you know what it means to move the goalposts?

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One more time, I have not said anything about "what can not be God's choice". I have only talked about "probabilities" I have never denied "possibilities". Do you or don't you understand the difference?You are either changing your position (moving goalpoats) or you are misrepresenting my position (strawman). One moral would be that we are all responsible for our own actions. We should not claim that something was God's choice when it was our own. We should not use the "God's ways are not our ways" cop-out.

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Okay, I could have worded that better:If God is good, then we can not logically conclude that things we perceive as bad are His choice."Good" and "bad" are strictly a matter of our perception. We have no way of knowing what God perceives as "good" or "bad". So, when we perceive something as "bad" - e.g. David's adultery and murder - we can only conclude that it would have been "bad" to choose him as king. What God's intentions "might have been" are irrelevant.If we are assuming that God is "good" (and remember that that can only be by our perception, not His), we can only conclude that He didn't make a "bad" choice - i.e. David was not His choice. I have answered that question. Yes, if God chooses somebody who does "bad" things, then God is responsible for those "bad" things. (Remember once again, that "bad" can only be defined by our perception, not God's.)I gave the example of Goober W. Bush. If the American voters choose a president who starts a war, then yes, they are responsible for the war. If it was a "bad" choice, they are responsible for fixing the damage.On the other hand, the Iraqi people are less responsible because they didn't choose Saddam Hussein.By the way, do you think God chose Saddam and Dubya too? Isn't that a bit like choosing to put a fire out with gasoline?

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That doesn't follow. There can be good and bad cosequences to our choices and God allows us to make those choices. That doesn't mean that "bad is good" to Him. It just means He allows bad things to happen.(Once again, it's the difference between God "allowing" things to happen and God "choosing" what happens.) And that's why we shouldn't take those stories literally. Not at all. It's plain to see that the stories written by man are not an accurate depiction of God. What if you read the Bible intelligently instead of literally? What if you told yourself, "God is good, so He wouldn't have chosen an a**hole like David. David probably just wanted the crown for himself like so many other human kings."It's so much easier to conclude that God is good if you use good logic. Then what's the difference with David? Not by His "doing", by His "allowing".It's the difference between actively electing an a**hole and passively allowing an a**hole to stay in power. The Iraqis passively allowed Saddam to remain in office because they decided it wasn't as bad as rising up in armed rebellion to actively remove him.Similarly, a good God would be more likely to passively allow David to be king than to actively choose him to be king. Yes. Yes. Yes. As many times as you ask that question, I'll give you the same answer.God is responsible for what He actively does. He is "less responsible" for what He passively allows us to do.By reading the Bible too literally, you are putting more blame on God than He deserves and putting less blame on David than he deserves.

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Short answer: if it wasn't good, God didn't do it.(And of course we do know that the flood never happened.) It's safer to say that many of the stories in the Bible never happened - and many things that did happen were the works of men, not God. Sure. There's no reason why Jesus had to be God's son. His message would still be just as valid. Not at all. The usefulness of a book or story has nothing to do with whether or not it literally happened. If you were really "filled with the Holy Spirit", you would read the Bible exactly the same way as everybody else who claims to be "filled with the Holy Spirit". That doesn't happen, so somebody's claim must be wrong. That's your problem, not a problem with the Bible. Once again, the value of the Bible has nothing to do with whether or not the stories are literally true.

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A story can be inspired without being literally true. No, you're jumping to conclusions.Jesus might not have existed at all, or the gospel writers might have lied about Him, or they might have been mistaken about Him.None of that has any bearing on the value of the message. Doesn't matter.If the words have any value, their value is in what they say, not where they came from. I didn't say anything about the Holy Spirit's existence. I said that since different people claim different messages from the Holy Spirit, at least some of those people must be mistaken.That's not to say that different people can't get different versions of the same message or even completely different messages. But the messages can not be contradictory and all be true.That's what we see. One person claims that the Holy Spirit told them "God hates fags". Another person claims that the Holy Spirit told them to love the sinner but hate the sin. Another person claims that the Holy Spirit told them homosexuality is not a sin.They all can't be right, so the safest course is to discount all of them. Don't believe anybody who claims their interpretation of the Bible comes from the Holy Spirit. Assess the interpretation on its own merits.Once again, the value of the Bible has nothing to do with whether or not the stories are literally true.

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I've been where you are. I moved on.

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You don't need to do that standing still - or trapped in a literalist box.

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