Pick and Choose Fundamentalism

Why? Even supposing this is true (and there's no real reaosn to do so) why does that automatically make him RIGHT? The god, as described in the Bible, is not one I would want to follow. He is hypocritcal, fascist, contradictory, immoral, and overly concerned about my penis.When someone says one thing but does the opposite, that makes me less likely to follow them, and when they command things that make no sense and in fact contradict other commands, I begin to question not only his motives, but his sanity. If god exists, he's paranoid perhaps suffering from multiple personality disorder.

Where do you get this from? It's certainly not in the Bible.

So, if I determine that the family across the street is an "enemy" I'm ok if I decide to run my car over their 3 month old? But God doesn't discern. How many pople in a vast society have to disobey to qualify the entire society for being punished? Again, if the family across the street has 5 people: 2 Adults over 40, two teenagers and the aforementioned 3 month old. If the teenagers run riot, does that make it ok to kill the entire family? Or should we limit our punishment to only those who are actually doing wrong? Or do you think the fact that the parents didn't kill their own children mean they were evil by proxy? And still, what does the 3 month old have to do with this at all? Does god expect all babies to be like Stewie and build a ray gun to kill their family if they act up? The Bible lacks coherency...and even if it didn't, coherency doesn't prove a story true. All good fiction is coherent, otherwise no one would read it.There is enough archeological evidence to prove the Bible false, but even if there were reams of archeology present, that wouldn't prove the entire Bible true, it would merely show that the writers of the Bible weren't dumb. They wanted people to believe the stories, so they used real places and people rather than making shit up...like L. Ron Hubbard...There is some consistency, but there are a lot of contradictions as well, but again, you're three for three here, consistency doesn't prove something true. All good fiction is consistent, otherwise no one would read it.What proves something true? Evidence. What does evidence prove? The specific claim is true, not an entire body of work. You seem to think that if a person proves one word out of every 100 is right, then the other 99 must be, but that's just poor reasoning.

Everything God says is true. God says he respects life, therefore no matter what God does, it's out of respect for life, even when killing indiscriminately. Duh.

So, would you agree that if I go around and kill all the just born babies, I may be damning my own soul, but giving a great gift to all those babies who will never have to worry about their souls being tarnished and will forever live in the innocence and grace that God believes we all should have?Doesn't this belief seem to encourage infanticide? Doesn't this strike you as vile, wrong, and despicable?

In fact, the best thing we could do is blow up the planet and kill everyone. Sure those of us who haven't repented are doomed, but all the children and other innocents are saved for eternity. It seems like a small enough price to pay...

Well, seeing as it's my soul I'm sacrificing, I think I'll wait until I'm on my deathbed before I hit the button, so no worries there.

If God knows, and I mean really knows, every minute detail of every thought we're going to have and every action we're going to take, how can we have free will?If God knows, before I'm even born, that on July 17th, 2009 at 5:35 pm Central Time, I will make a left-hand turn, do I then have the option of going to the right? Really? If I turned right, then God's knowledge would be wrong, and every thing he knew that was based on my turning left would be wrong, and in only a few instances, God wouldn't know Jack anymore.If he really knows, in the sense that he can't be wrong, then I don't have any real option of choosing counter to how God knows it will turn out.Do you or do you not understand how this is different from your example?The assigning God blame doesn't have to do with his foreknowledge, the assigning blame is from the fact that he created this universe with me in it, knowing I would never repent or believe. Why did he create me, if not to have me burn in Hell?

But the knwoing that the police do is different. They assume you will do the thing that they're stinging you for, but because they're not omniscient, they need you to actually do it before than can arrest you for a crime. Before you do it, there isn't a crime committed, so they can't charge you with "Well, he looked like maybe he was gonna do the thing we thought he might do when we were there to catch him do it."On the other hand, God KNOWS what you are going to do. In my example, can I turn right?

Why? If killing an innocent baby guarantees the baby will be accepted into Heaven, then how is that bad for the baby? Unless, of course, you're saying that a baby killed by me won't go to Heaven, which seems to contradict what you said before.

I see you're having trouble with thinking logically, so I'll try to use small words and extreme detail so you can try and follow the line of reasoning.God is sitting in the nothingness that exists before he creates anything. He, knwoing everything, knows what will happen when he creates the universe. He knows, before he moves a muscle, that Adam will eat of the tree of knowledge and therefore doom all human life until the end times. He knows there will be evil on the world, that he will need to wipe out all of humanity, at least once, in order to rid the world of this evil. He knows that at 5:35, on July 20, 2009, I will leave my office, get in my car and drive. He knows that a person using the moniker Hill Billy on an EvC forum will again misunderstand, misrepresent, and ridicule a concept he has never thought of and can't comprehend.He KNEW all that before he created the Universe. He went ahead and created the universe anyway. Thus it comes to pass that Adam eats the apple. God knew it would happen, did nothing to stop it, and thus is ultimately respinsible, since Adam couldn't have chosen otherwise, else God would have been wrong, and we know that can't be allowed to be a possibility.God KNEW that the entire world would be so full of wickedness that he would have to flood his entire creation, killing all the people he claimed to have such love for, except for one family and the things they could fit on a boat. How could those people have been anything but wicked, since God made the universe knowing they would be so. If they were not wicked, God's foreknowledge would have been wrong, and we can't let that be a possibility.God KNEW that I would turn left. All the things set in motion by his creation have led to that moment, and I have no option but to turn left, because if I turned right, God's foreknowledge would have been wrong, and we know we can't let that be an option.God KNEW you would not understand this argument because you either don't want to consider the implications, or you can't comprehend the logic behind this. If you all of a sudden did understand, God would be wrong in his foreknowledge, and we know that can't be an option.Foreknowledge, of the kind that God has, does indeed equal, exactly and unequivocably, predestination. The ONLY, and I mean ONLY way out of this is if God doesn't know the future, in which case he's not omniscient, he can be wrong, and your entire house of cards comes tumbling down.

Those who loved the baby would be sad, but if you're right, their sadness is nothing compared to the joy and innocence that the baby exists in for eternity. The parents and other loved ones should be comforted by the fact that their baby will never be corrupted, will never have to contend with evil and will spend eternity in the joy and grace of God. Being sad at that just doesn't make sense, so they're just delusional.The civil servants may be inconvenienced doing, you know, their job, but again, that's a minor thing compared to the ultimate, eternal joy that the baby is enjoying. They will also get paid for their work, and so, ultimately will find temporal joy down here by spending that money on things they like.It's bad for me. I've sacrificed myself to the torment of Hell so that the baby would never have to experience the evil that lives in this world. In fact, I don't want anything to be left away from God, so I will kill all babies, and all people in the world, figuring that many people are in a state of grace and will go to God, and most of the ones who aren't probably won't convert anyway, so leaving them alive would be just as bad as letting Sodom go on living, and we all know what God did there.So, yes, like a famous person I've heard of, I'm willing to sacrifice my very soul to make sure that all the righteous people in the world are able to go and live in the grace of God for the rest of eternity. I'm probably the biggest martyr in the world.So, what does it say about yourself that you're not willing to sacrifice yourself for the joy of all those babies and true Christians that are daily tempted and led astray by the forces of evil? Are you just too selfish to do that?Ain't it a good thing I'm not actually going to do this because I find your philosophy (and yes, this is your philosophy taken to it's logical conclusion) repugnant and unbeleivably callous and evil?

But wouldn't god already know that we would change course and thus go to door B, and thus he would know that we would never open door X, thus making door X just an illusion of a choice on our part?Most people who believe in free will, will assert that there are many possibilities and we are choosing which one we ultimately pick, but with exact and perfect foreknowledge, the choice is just an illusion, since picking contrary to the foreknowledge is not an option.

True, that may happen, but if I perform the action with the intention of repenting before I die, then is it really repenting? Maybe. Also, repenting means I decide that what I did is wrong, and except for God commanding "Thou shalt not kill" it seems that what I did was right, so why would I repent, except for save myself the torment of Hell, which again, doesn't seem like real repentance. And if anyone would know if I've really repented, I think God would be it.

This example really wasn't dealing with the problem of free will, it was dealing with the fact that Hill Billy said all innocent babies go to Heaven if they die before they have been corrupted. Based on that, it seemed to me that killing the babies in that state of purity would be the best thing. This is true whether Free Will exists or not.As for repenting, whether God knew I would do it or not makes no difference on whether it works or not. He could have known I would repent falsely, so that I had no chance of making it to Heaven, so I'm still sacrificing mysekf, despite playing out a part written for me form the beginning.The question that came out of this, again regardless of free will, is whether repenting just to get into Heaven, therefore not feeling remorse, as such, but just wanting to better my afterlife's position, is true repentance. Maybe this should be a new thread.