You don't understand what I'm saying. You have an extremely simplistic belief system, which completely ignores Mathew 19 24, btw, and whenever anyone posts anything that challenges that belief you have a kneejerk reaction.
Most of the time I doubt you know what's being discussed. Do you even know what Gnostic Christianity is, and how it differs from standard Christianity?
Unless you know what is being discussed, and half the time you don't seem to understand the first thing, then you don't stand a chance of progressing things.
The OP is a self styled Gnostic Christian. Their beliefs are different, as is the account of events.
If you don't understand what it is you're arguing against, you've got no chance...of anything.
The OP seems to want to blame God for not making people perfect, but if I read my bible right he did create them perfect. Is the OP then blaming God for giving people free will to choose what they will or will not do and for allowing them to do what they will. My minister always says that God respects our free will and would never take that away from us. Should people not have free will?
Romans 5 NIV
6 You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. 7 Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. 8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
9 Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! 10 For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! 11 Not only is this so, but we also boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.
The OP seems to want to blame God for not making people perfect, but if I read my bible right he did create them perfect.
There are major difficulties in accepting Luke's account: the gospel links the birth of Jesus to the reign of Herod the Great, but the census took place in 6 CE, nine years after Herod's death in 4 BCE; there was no single census of the entire empire under Augustus; no Roman census required people to travel from their own homes to those of ancestors; and the census of Judea would not have affected Joseph and his family living in Galilee, there is no time in the known career of Quirinius when he could have served as governor of Syria before 6 CE, the Romans did not directly tax client kingdoms, and the hostile reaction of the Jews in 6 CE suggests direct taxation by Rome was new at the time. Conservative scholars have argued that Quirinius may have had an earlier and historically unattested term as governor of Syria, or that he previously held other senior positions which may have led him to be involved in the affairs of Judea during Herod's reign, or that the passage should be interpreted in some other fashion,. These arguments have been rejected as "exegetical acrobatics", in the words of Geza Vermes, springing from the assumption that the Bible is inerrant, and most critical scholars have concluded that Luke's account is an error.
The bible doesn't say God made man perfect. I guess that was just an assumption on my part that I based on God creating man and the world and declaring his creation good. Also on the fact that man was created in God's image and it didn't seem likely that he would create something like him that was imperfect. It seemed to me life was ideal until man's fall from grace when he turned away from God to follow his own desires. It is indeed an assumption on my part that we were not enemies with God from the very beginning.
Gen1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him...
Gen.1:31 And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.
Genesis 1 New International Version (NIV)
The Beginning
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
The Wages of Sin
14For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace. 15What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law, but under grace? Absolutely not! 16Do you not know that when you offer yourselves as obedient slaves, you are slaves to the one you obey, whether you are slaves to sin leading to death, or to obedience leading to righteousness?…
I'm beautiful in my way
'Cause God makes no mistakes
I'm on the right track, baby I was born this way
Don't hide yourself in regret
Just love yourself and you're set
I'm on the right track, baby
I was born this way (Born this way)
Oh there ain't no other way
Last I heard, it was either the Romans or the Jewish leadership to blame for Jesus' death. Could be argued either way.
Just the way the book reads to me.
I wish I had a god. It would be nice to have something to blame.
Quote:He saw it coming!
Absolutely right. So you could argue that it was suicide by cop.
OTOH, soldiers are lauded for willingly sacrificing life for country.
Context is everything.
Who are "they" that tell you this bullsnot? Do you worship "they" so you assume "they" always tell you the truth? Did "they" create a planet that feeds people automatically? God did that. The Earth is such a wondrous accomplishment that the angels rejoiced when it was created. There is nothing "poor" about the craftsmanship. What is poor is these random fools making up crap to blame on God.
Words in the bible are defined by the context of their first usage. The first word in the bible is "beginning". If men had written the bible they would have put God's name first: "God created the heaven and the earth in the beginning." They thought the name was important. But God puts His word above his name, so the first word had to be "beginning". No man is that smart. It took thousands of years for some man to notice it was done that way.
"They" do not offer anything comparable to that perfection. They only offer lies.
Greatest I am wrote:
I also thought that Yahweh was the Jewish god, yet Christianity does not have Yahweh following his own law. Christians have Yahweh murdering his own son as a sacrifice that goes against most sane laws.
God didn't kill Jesus. Jesus was crucified, like many other victims of crucifixion, because ruling authorities failed to forgive and take mercy on sinners, as Jesus preached. Sin is judged through natural patterns of cause and effect. We can forgive and have mercy on each other because we are all guilty of sin and thus condemned to death. What Jesus did was bring us realization of eternal life through rebirth.
Quote:Ezekiel 18:20 The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.
Deuteronomy 24:16 (ESV) "Fathers shall not be put to death because of their children, nor shall children be put to death because of their fathers. Each one shall be put to death for his own sin.
God, it seems to me, has screwed up creation and wants to blame the creation for his own
incompetence.
Thoughts?
The creation includes the possibility of sinning, but it excludes the possibility of sin failing to cause harm. I.e. you can choose to steal, but you can't prevent your act of theft from causing loss/harm to whomever you steal from.
That is simply the interaction of free will with deterministic causation. Some interactions involve free will while others involve mechanistic determination. It isn't true to say that you don't have a choice when you do, or that a falling stone has a choice whether to keep falling or stop in mid-air.
Both free will and deterministic causation occur within the creation. Free will may itself be a product of deterministic mechanisms taking place within the brain, but somehow that doesn't prevent us from having and exercising choices in certain situations.
Saying that God 'blames' us for things is a projection of human egotistical logic onto God. When an apple falls out of a tree and hits you on the head, it is not because God 'blamed' you for standing under the tree at the moment the apple fell. On the other hand, though, if you were standing under the tree because you were picking apples in an orchard planted by choice, and you made the choice to work in the orchard, and you made the choice to stand under the tree even though you knew that apples were ripening and falling regularly, etc. then you could probably extrapolate some pattern of causation that attributes blame to various moments of decision-making, AS WELL AS to the natural phenomena that helped the apple fall, such as ripening/softening of fruit, gravity, wind, etc.
All those various factors interact to cause effects, and they include human choices/actions as well as natural forces and patterns of causation. By attributing the entirety of the universe and all its causal complexities to God, you can blame God for everything and anything, but it would be like slipping and falling when you walk into a local store and then blaming the CEO of the corporation. I.e. it would be sloppy logic.
The OP seems to want to blame God for not making people perfect, but if I read my bible right he did create them perfect. Is the OP then blaming God for giving people free will to choose what they will or will not do and for allowing them to do what they will. My minister always says that God respects our free will and would never take that away from us. Should people not have free will?
Where in the Bible did you read that God made people perfect?
livinglava wrote:
Where in the Bible did you read that God made people perfect?
The bible indicates at the perfect creates perfect while the imperfect create the imperfect.
Matthew 5:48 Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.
If a god can only create good, then he is not a perfect god.
Regards
DL
Greatest I am wrote:
livinglava wrote:
Where in the Bible did you read that God made people perfect?
The bible indicates at the perfect creates perfect while the imperfect create the imperfect.
Matthew 5:48 Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.
If a god can only create good, then he is not a perfect god.
Regards
DL
It sounds like you regard sin as part of perfection. I would say perfection is the absence of sin, if such a state existed, which it doesn't.
This world is plagued by sin. Some people want it saved and redeemed from sin, while others just want to relish in the sin.
Sin is a part of perfection for evolving creatures like us, if you have what it takes to understand reality and evolving perfection.
Can you help but do evil? I do not see how. Do you?
And if you cannot, why would God punish you?
Christians are always trying to absolve God of moral culpability in the fall by putting forward their free will argument and placing all the blame on mankind.
That usually sounds like ----God gave us free will and it was our free willed choices that caused our fall. Hence God is not blameworthy. Such statements simply avoid God's culpability as the author and creator of human nature.
Free will is only the ability to choose. It is not an explanation why anyone would want to choose "A" or "B" (bad or good action). An explanation for why Eve would even have the nature of "being vulnerable to being easily swayed by a serpent" and "desiring to eat a forbidden fruit" must lie in the nature God gave Eve in the first place. Hence God is culpable for deliberately making humans with a nature-inclined-to-fall, and "free will" means nothing as a response to this problem.
If all do evil/sin by nature then, the evil/sin nature is dominant. If not, we would have at least some who would not do evil/sin. Can we then help but do evil? I do not see how. Do you?
Having said the above for the God that I do not believe in, I am a Gnostic Christian naturalist, let me tell you that evil and sin is all human generated and in this sense, I agree with Christians, but for completely different reasons. Evil is mankind’s responsibility and not some imaginary God’s. Free will is something that can only be taken. Free will cannot be given not even by a God unless it has been forcibly withheld.
Much has been written to explain evil and sin but I see as a natural part of evolution.
Consider.
First, let us eliminate what some see as evil. Natural disasters. These are unthinking occurrences and are neither good nor evil. There is no intent to do evil even as victims are created. Without intent to do evil, no act should be called evil.
In secular courts, this is called mens rea. Latin for an evil mind or intent and without it, the court will not find someone guilty even if they know that they are the perpetrator of the act.
Evil then is only human to human when they know they are doing evil and intend harm.
As evolving creatures, all we ever do, and ever can do, is compete or cooperate.
Cooperation we would see as good as there are no victims created. Competition would be seen as evil as it creates a victim. We all are either cooperating, doing good, or competing, doing evil, at all times.
Without us doing some of both, we would likely go extinct.
Be you a believer in nature, evolution or God, you should see that what Christians see as something to blame, evil, we should see that what we have, competition, deserves a huge thanks for being available to us. Wherever it came from, God or nature, without evolution we would go extinct. We must do good and evil.
If theistic evolution is true, then the myth of Eden should be read as a myth and there is not really any original sin.
Doing evil then is actually forced on us by evolution and the need to survive.
