Problems With Christianity

[_huckelberry]

chap,"God didn't love them"

I should be clear that Gods love for Adam and Eve did not express itself in having them avoid death. They died. Everybody in the thousands of years since died. My grandparents died. My mother and my father died. I will die.

If there is love for Adam and Eve it is expressd through the preservation of their family and that towards a future hope of the Kingdom of God. It is expressed in the human families learning to love each other.

Frankly I have zero belief in a literal flood. The pysical evidence against it is overwhelming. I have some inclination to avoid your criticism of God by pointing that out. However I was then faced with the fact that all those people died one way or the other. Huge numbers of people have died in various disasters. The flood as a story is about the end of old bad ways and the promise of new ways for the human race. I believe that story. I think life is more complete if one sees that what a single individual accomplishes passes on to the family of humans while they themselves die.

[_Chap]

chap,"God didn't love them"

I should be clear that Gods love for Adam and Eve did not express itself in having them avoid death. They died. Everybody in the thousands of years since died. My grandparents died. My mother and my father died. I will die.

If there is love for Adam and Eve it is expressd through the preservation of their family and that towards a future hope of the Kingdom of God. It is expressed in the human families learning to love each other.

Frankly I have zero belief in a literal flood. The pysical evidence against it is overwhelming. I have some inclination to avoid your criticism of God by pointing that out. However I was then faced with the fact that all those people died one way or the other. Huge numbers of people have died in various disasters. The flood as a story is about the end of old bad ways and the promise of new ways for the human race. I believe that story. I think life is more complete if one sees that what a single individual accomplishes passes on to the family of humans while they themselves die.

I am sorry to have to say that you don't seem to make a lot of sense here.

[_Jason Bourne]

Why not just punish Eve and start over with Johnny and Sue?

A few responses, first starting over may well not accomplish anything. It would end up in the same place anyway. If if Johnny didn't sin,and he likely would, his teenagers would do it. I cannot see what would be accomplished by punishing Adam and Eve, whats to become of them? Did you mean erase them and start over? Sounds like the start of an eternal circle going nowhere.

So then God has a rotten plan overall. He created flawed creatures fully knowing they were flawed and had the intent to punish them forever unless repent and they accept the sacrifice of His son. That may be loving for him to do that much but it still leaves the majority of his creations suffering in Hell forever. I would think the all powerful God of this Universe could do better.

The tradional view is that the fall was known from eternity by God and was part of the plan which through atonement would open the doors to the human family becomming something much greater than Adam and Eve started as

That sounds like the Mormon view found in 2 Nephi 2 not the traditional Christian view.

It could well be observed that God did not erase Adam and Eve because God loved them.

Then why did he not just forgive them same as I do when my kids screw up?

you ask, " so God puts the rest of us in a no win world because Adam and Eve blew it"

This teaching is Satans only.

No it is not.

God, Jesus and the Bible teach that God so loved the world that he gave his son. This world baskes in the hope of eternal life, becoming Sons of God and living in the Kingdom of God. Only Satan wants to pretend that there is no win.

It is a no win for most of mankind. Most of mankind do not accept Jesus. So why does God demand blood? Why can't he just say "Hey humans that I created. I know it was tough. Learn and do your best and I will just forgive you and let you come and live with me."

[_huckelberry]

Jason, I agree with you that if the atonement is limited only to helping people who perform a religious ritual of accepting Jesus then the whole thing is a complete mess.The world is a meaningless trainwreck.

But I do not see the atonements affectiveness being under any such limitation. I see the decided majority of the human family, at the very least, being saved. I believe I said that earlier in the thread but I can certainly repeat it. Romans 11;32 for God has bound all men over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all.

[_ludwigm]

From http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/short ... nal-t.html:

UK national treasure David Attenborough revealed this week that he gets hate mail from creationists for not crediting God for the wonders of nature in his documentaries.

"They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds," he told Radio Times magazine. "I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs."
... ( + links for people who are happy seeing some even more disturbing pictures) ...
I guess that eye-burrowing parasites are just one more test for that age-old religious dilemma about how God can let bad things happen.

I can add nothing.
I can't add anything.
( As a non-native-english - You know - I don't really understand the difference. Please choose the proper one! )

[_antishock8]

Sooo.....

Your god is the Architect and Creator, to include sin, disease, deformities, misery, pain, death... Etc...

But it's Man's fault because his all-knowing and all-powerful creator and designer designed him to suffer. If your god knows everything and is all-powerful, why would he design a man who chooses sin?

It's because your god likes it. If your god didn't prefer death, misery, and sin it's reasonable to assume he wouldn't make it, and he would't make beings who choose it. Rather, he would design and create systems that avoid such horrors.



This innocent man just had his head sawed off by your god's creations who were designed to commit that kind of atrocity. Your god created beings capable of that, created the ideology that imbues that evil in them, and then did nothing to prevent that poor man from having his neck hacked at until he was dead.

Your god loves death and misery. Loves it.

[_Some Schmo]

Threads like this are always fun, since they show people, when confronted with the inanity of their beliefs, making crap up to justify those precious beliefs.

But then, that's what apologetics is all about, isn't it? Making crap up...

And eventually, when argued into a corner, they play the faith card and thus, end of discussion. People believe this stuff because they want to; that's the bottom line. Essentially, an admission of faith is an admission of defeat.

Of course Christianity has problems. Anything which involves magical thinking and supernatural events (ie religion) is problematic.

[_Calculus Crusader]

I do not believe hell is a literal lake of fire. As Origen wrote in De Principiis, Book II:

We find in the prophet Isaiah, that the fire with which each one is punished is described as his own; for he says, "Walk in the light of your own fire, and in the flame which you have kindled." By these words it seems to be indicated that every sinner kindles for himself the flame of his own fire, and is not plunged into some fire which has been already kindled by another, or was in existence before himself. Of this fire the fuel and food are our sins, which are called by the Apostle Paul "wood, and hay, and stubble." And I think that, as abundance of food, and provisions of a contrary kind and amount, breed fevers in the body, and fevers, too, of different sorts and duration, according to the proportion in which the collected poison supplies material and fuel for disease (the quality of this material, gathered together from different poisons, proving the causes either of a more acute or more lingering disease); so, when the soul has gathered together a multitude of evil works, and an abundance of sins against itself, at a suitable time all that assembly of evils boils up to punishment, and is set on fire to chastisements; when the mind itself, or conscience, receiving by divine power into the memory all those things of which it had stamped on itself certain signs and forms at the moment of sinning, will see a kind of history, as it were, of all the foul, and shameful, and unholy deeds which it has done, exposed before its eyes: then is the conscience itself harassed, and, pierced by its own goads, becomes an accuser and a witness against itself. And this, I think, was the opinion of the Apostle Paul himself, when he said, "Their thoughts mutually accusing or excusing them in the day when God will judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ, according to my Gospel." From which it is understood that around the substance of the soul certain tortures are produced by the hurtful affections of sins themselves.

And that the understanding of this matter may not appear very difficult, we may draw some considerations from the evil effects of those passions which are wont to befall some souls, as when a soul is consumed by the fire of love, or wasted away by zeal or envy, or when the passion of anger is kindled, or one is consumed by the greatness of his madness or his sorrow; on which occasions some, finding the excess of these evils unbearable, have deemed it more tolerable to submit to death than to endure perpetually torture of such a kind. You will ask indeed whether, in the case of those who have been entangled in the evils arising from those vices above enumerated, and who, while existing in this life, have been unable to procure any amelioration for themselves, and have in this condition departed from the world, it be sufficient in the way of punishment that they be tortured by the remaining in them of these hurtful affections, i.e., of the anger, or of the fury, or of the madness, or of the sorrow, whose fatal poison was in this life lessened by no healing medicine; or whether, these affections being changed, they will be subjected to the pains of a general punishment. Now I am of opinion that another species of punishment may be understood to exist ; because, as we feel that when the limbs of the body are loosened and torn away from their mutual supports, there is produced pain of a most excruciating kind, so, when the soul shall be found to be beyond the order, and connection, and harmony in which it was created by God for the purposes of good and useful action and observation, and not to harmonize with itself in the connection of its rational movements, it must be deemed to bear the chastisement and torture of its own dissension, and to feel the punishments of its own disordered condition....

[_antishock8]

I'm surprised the Stealth Christian, Dartagnan, hasn't shown up on this thread, yet.

[_antishock8]

when the soul shall be found to be beyond the order, and connection, and harmony in which it was created by God for the purposes of good and useful action and observation, and not to harmonize with itself in the connection of its rational movements, it must be deemed to bear the chastisement and torture of its own dissension, and to feel the punishments of its own disordered condition....

Again, CC, it is your all-knowing and all-powerful god that created that soul knowing exactly what it was doing and exactly how that soul would react under the conditions in which it was placed. There is nothing an all-knowing and all-powerful god can't know or do without knowing what he's doing. Shifting the blame to the creation is an odd way to deal with one's internal conflicts.