Is God good?

I'm not sure what you mean by "rightness" here. From context, it appears to be something that prevents a good and just being from behaving in a good and just manner. In which case, I am at a loss to know why you call it "rightness". No-one, even according to your own theology, since I'm a non-believer. You say: "God is not interesting in our BEGGING. He is interested in our BELIEVING." I could certainly beg, but I can't believe.Fortunately, you believe. You've got enough belief for both of us. "Verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you."So you can set the world to rights. And then when you've done that, I'll start believing too.

I was responding to a typical put down of believers, Crash, couldn't you leave it at that? I really do think that if you recognize that someone is not stupid but does think things through, that that should be some reason to seriously consider their opinion about certain subjects. I see by the rest of your post that's a naive expectation but it still seems to me to be a reasonable opinion.I was once an atheist myself, for most of my life, so when I became a believer I already knew most of the arguments, and once I knew the Bible is God's word I knew it in a way that is very solid. I think it's less like something your mind figures out and more like things that are revealed and recognized, maybe sort of like suddenly seeing the solution to a puzzle you've been working on, or suddenly recognizing who the murderer is in a mystery story.And once you've recognized the Bible IS God's word, you DO submit your mind to it. You couldn't learn from it any other way. You may have to battle through many points -- I did, still do, that's inevitable, but you CAN'T rest any more in any opinion that contradicts God's word, you simply cannot. So if something in the Bible isn't clear to you, as many things aren't of course, you either battle it through until you understand it or you put it aside for later. Often if you are a reader as I am you'll come across some great old (or new) book that explains a particular point. There is no other way to use your mind about a revelation you KNOW is from God.However, as far as originally judging the Bible as God's word goes, I did make the judgment that the Biblical witnesses were credible while many on the other side seem to spend all their time making up reasons not to think they're credible.And besides that I do have a long history of Bible believers to look back to as well, you know, from whom I've learned a great deal, believers who *know* just as I do that the Bible is God's word, who also trust the Bible witnesses as I do, quite a large company, great preachers, great men and women of the faith. Yes, in a certain sense, but once you've come to believe you've also entered this huge company of other believers who are all "of the same mind" on the basics. So I don't rely only on my own interpretation for any of this, I've got a large storehouse of the teachings of others down the centuries to support my take or correct it. If you're like jar anything's possible so you ARE relying on your own personal take on things, but if you identify with the whole history of Christian Bible-believing faith you've got thousands of others who share the same faith who can help you figure out things that your own mind isn't up to at any given time, and although you can't have perfection because we're all still fallible human beings, overall it works together so beautifully it's a building and confirming process instead of the tearing-down process of the fallen mind. See above. See above. See above. Wow, sure doesn't do any good to make the effort to explain anything to you I guess. I use my intellect all the time, I've never abandoned it, I use it for instance to try to GRASP the meaning of God's word, and I use it to try to explain things I know through other sources of knowledge than intellect. And if you think so highly of my intellect I would think that ought to be a reason to take what I say somewhat seriously. But obviously it isn't. I guess I should have said SOME things can't be judged by their surface appearance. But some things can. Such as the fact that biological systems HAD to have been created by an intelligence and couldn't have simply arisen by purely chemical processes. I do think that's quite obvious.But other things can't be known except through Biblical revelation. When it comes to the existence of evil, there's really no way to explain that through your mere fallen mind, you HAVE to have the Biblical revelation to begin to make sense of it. Blaming God for the horrible evils done by human beings, (and yes by the devil -- there is such a creature who has billions of spirits under his command) is false and scarily blasphemous.God mercifully gave us a revelation of things our fallen minds CANNOT grasp, it's really not a very good use of your mind to reject such a great gift.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

But isn't the atheist really denigrating your faith in the Bible by ridiculing what it says in comparison to academic and scientific knowledge used gainst the way you have decided to understand Genesis, in particular???I mean, they have a weak case today in disputing that Sexual Immorality is destructive of fmikies and children in America and essentially weakening the Nation by imposing a $1 trillion dollar annnual Welfare expenditure while packing the cities with violent kids being raised father lessly by Single Mothers.

Well, He's TOLD us how we are allowed to approach Him, we can't make it up for ourselves, find out first and then approach Him. He's GOD, after all, you CANNOT tell Him He has to put up with your "honesty" about thinking He is "evil" when it's a contradiction of His revelation that *HE*IS*GOOD* which all those who believe in Him affirm. He gave us His revelation but you think it's OK just to ignore it and require Him to obey YOU? That is NOT how it works. We do not judge God, He judges US. We do not judge His word, It judges US. You, in fact most here, talk about God as if He's somebody you have a right to push around. Wow, is that ever a scary mistake. Some Kings would have had you in the dungeon in a flash for anything near this sort of effrontery. He's awfully kind and merciful to you nevertheless, puts up with all your nonsense no doubt because it's so obvious how ignorant you are.Now if you are at least WILLING to give up your opinion and you approach Him with that much humility, and really do want to know the truth even if it contradicts everything you've always thought, I'm pretty sure you'd get answers to your questions. What confusion? You are unwilling to play by His rules, you want Him to play by yours, that's all that's going on here, no confusion.

No it's not, it is something we KNOW, and the Bible and the God of the Bible are the ONLY things that are known in this way. This is one of those things I'd ask you to CONSIDER you might be wrong about. It's like this: This simply denies His whole revelation about How He operates and how reality is structured. You want Him to violate His own laws. Theoretically, as I said, He COULD have set things up entirely differently, even in such a way that would require Him to intervene, but He didn't, He set them up the way He set them up, and again, He could only do the most just and righteous thing so that's how He set things up whether we can grasp any of it with our fallen minds or not.And again, I think this is all about His leaving human beings made in His image free to make a nearly perfect mess of things on our own. The way to prevent evil is to follow His laws and to make laws for nations that follow His laws, but you all violate His laws and are supporting laws more and more that violate His laws. We can also pray for His righteousness to prevail, but you all work against His righteousness. I'll agree that the church isn't on top of these things as we should be either, too many of us get drawn away into the kind of thinking on EvC forum instead of following God. I guess that makes you happy but that's one explanation for why the evil you decry occurs as it does and in fact is growing worse every day. I don't judge God. You want Him to eradicate sin -- certain kinds of sin anyway since I'm sure you're very fond of your own sins -- or to have prevented it in the first place, but if He did that we would no longer have free will, we'd be automatons.Fear not, all sin will be judged in the end. By the God you despise so much because He doesn't obey you but requires that you obey Him instead. Again, I simply humbly suggest CONSIDER that God's way of doing things is better than anything you could dream up, and that, maybe, really, the existence of such evils is really partly your own fault since you DO like your sins, you just don't like others' and you think God's law should allow yours and others you decree to be morally acceptable by your standards. As jaywill pointed out those were not children they were young men, probably something like an inner city gang, and they were taunting a servant of God, therefore taunting God.Oh God is certainly unalterably opposed to sin, and has promised that it will all be punished to exact perfection in the end, as Jesus also affirmed when He said He came not to abolish the Law but to fulfill it, down to every jot and tittle or comma and period. You, however, despise His Law, so does the rapist-murderer. If God intervened to stop the rapist-murdered He'd also intervene to stop your long list of everyday sins as well. And some of yours have committed a form of rape and murder too, if you understand the sermon on the mount. I don't have any more natural liking for God's laws against my sins than you do, I had a big struggle with a lot of His decrees at first; I don't have any more natural understanding of why He does what He does than you do. The difference is that I am willing to give up my opinions and submit to His revelation because I believe it IS His revelation. That is NOT at all imposing my own thinking on Him the way you impose yours on Him. You are simply FOLLOWING where your brain leads you, I've had to learn to STOP following where my brain leads me and learn a whole new way of thinking. That's called REPENTANCE, which I think also describes what I keep recommending about stopping and considering you might be wrong in where your brain leads you. The rewards have been well worth it, to put it mildly, but the method is NOT how you are characterizing it. Of course if that's what you think I'm advocating I can't blame you for refusing to consider anything I say. I rather think that can't possibly be what you get out of what I say, but if it is, it is, that's your choice in the end. But where on earth are you getting the idea that's how God should operate? He's never said He operates that way, you are just making it up and imposing it on Him. Again they were not children.So now you are talking exclusively about God's judgments in this world. Yes, and He's made it clear in the Old Testament that this IS how He operates in this world. This is His Law inexorably judging sin. He also time and time again sends prophets to warn that such judgments are coming so that people can repent and avoid them. They usually don't, at least not on a national scale, so they get zapped but they were warned and that has to be understood as God's mercy.It took Noah a hundred years to construct the ark and we understand that he preached incessantly to the people to repent of their sins because a great judgment was coming, but they ignored him and treated him as a moron, so when the Flood did finally come only the few who were with Noah were saved.Nineveh however is an interesting case of a pagan nation that followed idols that DID repent and was spared that judgment preached by Jonah.If you want God's judgments to stop, you REPENT. If you go on mocking and insulting God and those who believe Him you can't say you weren't warned. Trivial by whose standards? Yours of course. Not His. But like others here you know so much better than God how things ought to be. Which is how all those people Noah preached to also thought. Well if you are going to go on ignoring His revelation about how He does things you're going to go on making up stuff about Him and He's going to leave you to it. God is intervening all the time to keep this world from falling into total ruin, as a matter of fact, and He does restrain evil according to the prayers of His people, but this isn't apparent to you because this world IS so overridden with sin and evil. One way God intervenes for our good IS to judge sin. Like the death penalty they can protect us from worse evils and if they led us to repentance which is really what should be our response, then we would be protected from worse calamities to come. I keep watching all the destruction that keeps coming from natural disasters and think how it's only going to get worse because there's never a call to repentance, it's all just ask the government for more money etc. etc. Churches pray but the sin is enormous. You don't understand anything about how He works because you ignore what He's told us, so it looks whimsical to your little mind.Again, try restraining your own opinions about these things. That's the only way you might come to learn something. OK so you aren't judging God for not intervening in the rapist-murder? No, you just don't believe He exists. OK, whatever. All the same to me.

Kof, I don't want to ignore you but I'm also afraid of responding because I have NO idea what you are trying to say. I might agree with your assessment of the sad state of the culture but I don't get how it relates to anything I said and seems to me to be completely off topic.

I've considered it. I'm not. What you have is opinion and not knowledge. I'm still open to the possibility that it happens to be a correct opinion, but that wouldn't make it knowledge. Is the faith of the Muslim and the Hindu and the Sikh also evidence of things not seen?Faith isn't evidence for things. It's just faith. No.Please point out what is wrong with it.(1) An omnipotent being can do whatever he wants.
(2) If an omnipotent being doesn't do something, it's not because he can't, but because he won't. Does that mean you don't think that what he does is good? That you are neutral or agnostic on this subject? I don't see why. I am physically unable to do certain things, such as grow wings. I am psychologically constituted so as to be in effect unable to do certain things, such as eat a dogshit sandwich. I am unwilling to do certain things, which I won't dwell on, out of fear of arrest and punishment, or of social censure. None of this makes me an automaton. If God made a rapist physically unable to rape, or psychologically unable to rape, or literally put the fear of God into him to make him unwilling to rape, would the ex-rapist thereby be an automaton without free will?And again, I would point out that your Bible does in fact repeatedly portray God as intervening. The deity of the Old Testament, and to some extent of the New, does not sit about saying: "Well, if I send plagues against Egypt to persuade Pharaoh, if I smite the armies of Sennacherib, if I make Nebuchadnezzar eat grass like an ox, if I kill Ananias and Sapphira, then what happens to free will?" It's obviously not something that worries him in principle, is it? If there was a God, there'd be nothing I'd like better for myself than for him to actually communicate his approval and disapproval, and to prevent me from doing anything wicked. It sounds like a great idea to me. No. Your brain led you to Christianity. I very much doubt it was your liver or your kidneys.The fact that the conclusion you came to is conventional and second-hand doesn't mean that you didn't come to it. You did. No, my point is that anything could be defended in this way. I've made the point on another thread, so I'll just quote myself. I am merely remarking that God does not work in that way. Making fun of a bald guy, shazam, magic bears. The killing fields of Cambodia? Bupkis.

No, I already said this only applied to the Bible and the God of the Bible. Because it's the only true religion and it's revealed by faith, a kind of faith that is evidence for things unseen. I suggest you consider you might be wrong about this.Perhaps I'll have time later to answer more of your post.Just saw this though: My brain couldn't have led me to Christianity in a million years, not without God's somehow applying His grace such that I was enabled to see in a new way. For that reason I often do think such attempts as I make here to persuade people are useless. On the other hand, scripture says "How will they believe if it is not preached?"Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Which is, of course, what they all say.The fact that you - and they - dismiss this plain and obvious fact out of hand, should tell you a lot about what your faith actually is: delusional wishful thinking and self-importance.

If God affected your brain to bring you to him he has taken away your free will.How does that work?

I've just finished an exercise of re-watching Deep Space 9 on NetFlix. There were gaps in my original viewing that needed to be filled.In the Dominion, the ruling species, known as The Founders, was seen as gods by their subjects. Their genetically-engineered warriors, the Jem-hadar, were commanded by the genetically-engineered Vorta, the administrators of the Dominion's dominion. After the Cardassians joined the Dominion, there was a conversation between the Cardassian leader, Damar, and the Vorta, Weyoun. Weyoun was scoffing at the Bajoran's religious belief in The Prophets (non-corporeals who had an interest in Bajor, "lived" within the near-by worm-hole, and experienced time in a very non-linear fashion), basically saying that those aren't gods and the Bajorans are being stupidly superstitious. Damar compares that with The Founders and Weyoun's expression becomes deadly-serious as he says coldly, "But the Founders are gods!"Similarly, circa 1979 I was sitting reading in the rec center of an Air Force base waiting to report for a detail to which I had been assigned. It was Saturday morning and some completely idiotic sports thing was on (much more idiotic than a professional or college game, if you can believe that) and somebody asked if they could change the channel. So now the TV was changed to a tel-evangelist show. The TV preacher offered a scenario wherein the audience member/viewer was a member of an inter-faith conference involving all the worlds religions. Furthermore, you were to present your arguments to the rest of that conference why the Bible was superior to all the rest. Your argument was obvious and simple: The Bible is the Word of God Himself!My jaw literally dropped at that point. What an audaciously ludicrous thing to say! Any truly believing member of a religious group would have said the equivalent. All of them have some kind of divine origin for their religions and for their sacred texts. All are equal in that regard. A fundamentalist Christian's claims about the Bible are no different! The Emperor is directly descended from Amaterasu, the Sun-Goddess! The complete imperial genealogy has been written down! Christian bogus claims are meaningless in the face of the Truth of Amaterasu!I looked about in that room and immediately saw that most had taken no notice at all, which the few who were actually paying any kind of attention were just lapping that swill up. More than a decade later, and more than a decade ago, on a Yahoo Groups forum a creationist finally gave me the key of understanding. He had just re-made some PRATTs (mind you, this was before I had learned that acronym) and I asked him in a very straight-forward manner why he had to use such unconvincing claims and arguments. His eye-opening response was: "You do not find my claims convincing, because you are not yet convinced."So then, if you are already convinced, then you will accept just about any lame claim without questioning it. Any kind of swill, just so long as it argues for what you are already convinced. It does not matter how nonsensical it is, just so long as it says that it supports what you are already convinced about. That is what I read Faith's approach to be.Will you question it in any manner? Will you even bother to examine it? Will you even bother to question whether you understand it or not? That is completely contrary to Faith's approach, as I understand it.My own church (Unitarian-Universalist) has an anti-authoritarian slogan attached to it that is actually quite useful: To Question is the Answer. Our church also has an adult religious-education program: "Inventing Your Own Theology." Even a fundamentalist Christian co-worker has affirmed that that is what they also must do. Oh, you can proclaim as loudly as you possibly can that you adhere absolutely to this particular theology, but when it comes down to brass tacks what you proclaim is an impossibility. The absolute best that you could ever do would be to adhere to your own personal best understanding and misunderstanding of that target theology. But just exactly how good is that? To Question is the Answer. Question your theology, always! Because your own personal theology is flawed. Because your understanding of the theology you actually want to practice is imperfect and flawed. Question your theology, always! Because in doing so you are never questioning God (whatever that is supposed to mean!), but rather your own imperfect misunderstanding.And if you truly believe that your beliefs and understanding is perfect, then you could not possibly ever be more lost!

Tangle, Dwise and Larni:Wow, I so underestimate the ways it's possible to deny whatever you all want to deny and explain away whatever I say as if I couldn't think up the same mind-numbing stuff you think up.The fact is that the other religions are NOT the same in just about any way you could think of, they do NOT claim that faith is a method of knowledge, they do NOT even claim that they are inspired by God. Even Islam only claims to have been given by an angel, not God and it was all made up by one man. The Bible is written by many for a reason, so you don't have to put your trust in one man but have many witnesses.Also, Biblical Christianity is above all a history of real events intended to demonstrate the reality of God and His workings in this world, and all other religions are merely collections of teachings. God has spoken ONLY through the Bible and no other religion has anything remotely like that.And they all teach earning your way to heaven if they have any teaching on salvation at all, they certainly have no Savior who came to die for sinners. (Yes I know there are "dying gods" in the old mystery religions but their death didn't pay for your sins)I'd STILL say, CONSIDER that you might be wrong.Oh well. Obviously it just proves once again that God must open eyes. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

If you think that, then I think in your naivete you have precious little experience with the various brands of stupidity that seem to accrue only to the intellectually exceptional: supply-side economics, Objectivism, Bon Iver, etc. Just being smart doesn't absolve one of the responsibility to believe things only on the basis of good evidence. See, this is more interesting. I'm surprised that having been an atheist you're so insensitive to what would convince the rest of us atheists, now. Why on Earth would you think we'd be convinced by your special pleading? Like this, from your other posts:

quote:

---

No it's not, it is something we KNOW, and the Bible and the God of the Bible are the ONLY things that are known in this way.

---

Like, what? Why should I believe that, when anybody could say that? Why would you think just telling me that's true would be something that would have convinced me? Would that have convinced you, when you were an atheist?If you were convinced to move from atheism to Christianity, then it seems reasonable to speculate that you may be in possession of an argument that convinces at least some atheists to become Christians. What I wonder is, why don't you share that with us instead of making these intellectually-empty fallacies of special pleading that you can't honestly believe could be convincing. Anybody can say "it's something we know, but only this is something we know." Obviously the first thing anyone says when they're trying to convince you is to affirm that they're not lying. Even the liars. Truth-determining has to rely on a more rigorous process than "look and see who says they're telling you the truth." The problem is, there are no Biblical witnesses. That's like saying that Frodo is a "witness" to the events detailed in Lord of the Rings, and hey, why would Frodo lie? You've got the scope completely backwards. The fact that the Bible says that some people witnessed something in the Bible doesn't corroborate anything that happened in the Bible, because if the Bible can't be corroborated (and is therefore made-up) then the witnesses in it could be (and likely are) made-up, too. What makes something a witness is independence; two people who have no reason to conspire together, but tell the same story anyway, corroborate each other. But a story from the first that there is a second, but that guy's not here to actually tell his story, isn't independence. It's not corroboration when you just make up a story about a second guy who was there and saw it all, and if only he was here he could tell you that. It's just another story. Well, yeah, Faith. Explanations ring hollow when they don't fit reality as I see it. Why would I accept the power of "faith" without seeing some kind of evidence that it makes anything better? That it's a better tool for learning about the natural world? I mean I'm coming up on my twelfth year of being a rational skeptic, and I have to say, it's been working out like gangbusters for me in terms of questions answered, learning made possible, new skills, my career, my marriage, all of that. If I thought there was actually someone out there who was blessing me I'd be forced to describe myself as "blessed." (But I don't.) All of that made possible, as I see it, by a commitment I made to evict from my mind any belief I couldn't support, at least to myself, with good evidence. You've asked us to consider that what you and they believe might be true, without giving any argument that it actually is. I'd like to ask you to consider that all these great men and women, and yourself, might be completely wrong. And I'm prepared to offer arguments that suggest that they are, if you want to hear them. (Most of them you already know, though.)

I give up.

Look, of course it's mind-numbing to simply dismiss religious special pleading; special pleading is a fallacy, one of the best-known, and so there's no mental effort required at all to recognize it. Fallacious arguments aren't convincing because they don't lend any support to their conclusions. (That's what "fallacy" means.)And you can't just say "oh, but my special pleading is different" - that's the special pleading! You're acting like we're the ones who aren't taking your arguments seriously. We're sitting over here, wondering when you're actually going to give us an argument. But nobody who wrote any part of the Bible was a witness to its events. Not even the Biblical fundamentalists claim that the Bible was authored by eyewitnesses. The best they can claim is that the Bible claims eyewitnesses to its events, but it names almost none of them and certainly no independent corroboration survives to this day, if there ever was any. We're all considering that we might be wrong by engaging with you. But what's the evidence we're wrong?"Consider that you might be wrong" isn't an argument, because without additional evidence we just arrive at whatever conclusion we arrived at the first time. "Ok, I might be wrong about atheism. Let me just go over the evidence one more time... nope, atheism still looks right." You have to give us something new if you actually expect our consideration to cause us to arrive at a new conclusion. How else do you expect it to work?I mean, let me tell you what it was like for me, Faith, to go from Christian to atheist: I knew that Christians said the Bible was uniquely the product of divine inspiration and the sole testatment of the Lord. I already knew that Christians said that without faith, the wisdom of the Bible would seem as foolishness. I knew that Christians said that only Christianity had the savior who died for our sins that we might reach salvation.I knew all those claims already, Faith, and believed them, and when I started considering that I might be wrong about them I discovered new-to-me-evidence that they were wrong. The Bible isn't the testament of divinity but a human work built by a committee. The "wisdom" of the Bible seems foolish to outsiders because it is foolish, and Christians go through elaborate efforts to convince themselves that it is not. Christianity isn't the only religion with substitutionary atonement; it's not even the first. The idea of a divine-as-man savior come to die for our sins goes back 2000 years before the supposed birth of Christ.So when you tell me to "consider that I might be wrong", Faith, I do - but because you don't have anything new for me, that consideration leads right back to the same place it did the first time - atheism.