A question to Christians...

reply to post by halfoldman

When the priests first found the Caribbean Indians they complained that their lifestyle was too good and comfortable, and they might never convert unless misery was brought into their lives.

A lot of missionaries will be in hell, not for spreading the Gospel but for only giving part of it. Professional religionists is a bad idea, always.

Ultimately it returns to the philosophical Problem of Evil: Why does a good God allow evil and suffering in His perfect creation, and why do good people suffer?

There is a cosmic law of consequences, like if you jump off a fifty story building you will die.

To focus on starving children, I'd say that nowhere does God/Jesus promise earthly paradise at present.

That is wrong.

He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. And he stood up to read. The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to release the oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, and he began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

I agree on some missionaries.

While the law of consequences applies to evil to an extent, one of the central features of evil is that it befalls good people who did nothing to deserve their suffering.
I think this is the point, not examples of divine justice or karma.
Evil strikes us as "Evil" because it causes the innocent to suffer.

As for the last verse - very interesting!
In my reading it was fulfilled to a point when people let go of dogma, and rather focused on core teachings about loving others.

Then the blind could see, because medicine and surgery developed.
Then the oppressed became more free, as the concept of human rights was born.
So it did come to pass, and is still advancing.

reply to post by halfoldman

So it did come to pass, and is still advancing.

Right.
Christians need to get off their dead #sses and join in and stop looking at
their navels, or whatever.

reply to post by Nosred

AND WHEN IT IS SAID TO THEM:- ``EXPEND IN CHARITY (SOME) OF THAT WHICH ALLAH HAS GIVEN YOU.'' THE NON- BELIEVERS SAY TO THE BELIEVERS:- ``SHALL WE FEED HIM WHOM, IF ALLAH WILLED, HE WOULD HAVE HIM FED? YOU ARE ONLY IN A PLAIN ERROR''

quran

God gives everything he wants to everyone he likes to test.

Test : If you give a part to expend in charity , you will be blessed . Otherwise there is pain.

note: Rich people should choose to give the poor ?

Originally posted by ken69
reply to post by Nosred

 

I dont think God is making little children starve. The earth has enough food to feed everyone. If everyone followed the teachings of Jesus then none would starve. Rest assured God is very sad that man is allowing the children to starve. We have enough food to feed everyone and WE choose not to.

First of all, you have no proof that god gives a toss or that god even exists. Second, if god is sad yet controls everything, it is choosing not to. I'm assuming a god has it's own free will?

Originally posted by Nosred

Originally posted by Jaydee055
He is a moral God who makes men responsible beings with freewill to choose how they will act.

He lets babies starve to death because of someone elses' sins? Babies don't get a choice of how to utilize free will, and God is alright with them dying? That's not moral at all.

But babies don't go to hell so some might say this is a better life than most

reply to post by Garfee

First of all, you have no proof that god gives a toss or that god even exists. Second, if god is sad yet controls everything, it is choosing not to. I'm assuming a god has it's own free will?

Do you have an alternative cosmology?
You seem to have at least the beginnings of one,
with some speculations on the nature of god or gods.
Maybe you should offer up what you have so far,
why the world is the way it is.

reply to post by Nosred


Checkmate, is an inoperable move in the world of chess, no return, the end.

For starving children it is our choice, it is the human condition that makes them die it is the decisions we make, not God.

It has nothing to do with Christianity,
as a matter of fact I'm anti religious.

Kids die because we as human beings cannot make adult and respectable decisions end of story.

Originally posted by Nosred
If God exists, why are there starving children?

Checkmate.

so deep
so insightful....

rather than troll start to accept difference in peoples choices....that step number 1 in growing up....

reply to post by 297GT


I agree, why do people care what others believe? The OP didn't come here for debate, he has his conclusion and nothing will change it, I think putting others down makes him feel smarter. The fact that you don't believe in god does not make you any less responsible for the starving people in this world. We are all guilty of letting our fellow humans suffer in the name of profit.

reply to post by rbilly001


dito
star for you

reply to post by jmdewey60


No, I don't. No one can be sure of anything past death and to assume otherwise is folly. Be as good and as virtuous as you can be, I suppose.

The whole of christianity revolves around two things: The existance of Jesus and that the bible is complete, absolute fact.

For a start, I think christianity would be better off without the bible. It's full of insane gibberish which only confuses people and incites hatred. I might actually take them seriously if they didn't constantly spout so much trash from some guys warped mind about 1900 years ago, which was then included against other writings for whatever reason by a council of men interested only in their own politics.

As for the existance of Jesus - it's entirely possible and one really can't go much further than that.

EDIT: I didn't address the topic, apologies. How about all christians put their money where their mouths are and do something? If their god works in such mysterious ways, perhaps it wants them to actually, you know...be charitable? Or...like I posted initially, their god likes it when babies die of starvation. It can stop this, but it chooses not to.

Originally posted by xxblackoctoberxx
reply to post by lonewolf19792000

 

but god already knows everything thats going to happen so he could have prevented it.

check mate

Again, the free will covenant. God cannot "prevent" or interfere in anyway or he violates his free will covenant he established with our father and mother when he created them. There will come a day when he breaks that covenant when he is tired of man destroying himself. That time is coming very soon, but it is no there yet.

Originally posted by TupacShakur
reply to post by RevelationGeneration

 

How can Jesus be a Jewish zombie if he's alive? I thought zombies were dead and eat flesh.

Oh I'm sorry. Jesus just died, was placed in a tomb, emerged from that tomb reanimated, and floated up into the sky in plain sight of several people. That's much more realistic, sorry for misinterpreting the 'historical record'.

2 Peter 3:3-4 "Knowing this first of all, that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires. They will say, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.”

1 Timothy 6:20 "O Timothy, guard the deposit entrusted to you. Avoid the irreverent babble and contradictions of what is falsely called “knowledge,”"

Acts 13:41 “‘Look, you scoffers, be astounded and perish; for I am doing a work in your days, a work that you will not believe, even if one tells it to you.’”

Jude 1:18 "They said to you, “In the last time there will be scoffers, following their own ungodly passions.”

Scoff and mock on, in the end you will be irrelevant.

For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him?" But we have the mind of Christ.
1 Corinthians 2:16

i cannot explain why there is starvation in the world and God lets that happen... but this is my speculation:
Man, because of free will, has let this happen. Starvation in the world is a product of man's sins. He tells us that we cannot understand his infinite wisdom, but we have the teachings of Christ to help with the cleansing of yourself and of the world... and that is of Hope, Faith, and Love, with Love being the most important. If we truly loved one another, there would be NO starvation in this world, cause if we truly loved, we would take care of our neighbors and love them as ourselves...

reply to post by Nosred


Checkmate? Really? You act as if you are the first person to pose this question, as if you were sitting around and had some magical, intellectual epiphany and just had to share it with the rest of us. The reason there are starving children is because of mankind's sinful and imperfect nature. God does not protect the body, he protects the soul.

Originally posted by OptimusSubprime
reply to post by Nosred

 

Checkmate? Really? You act as if you are the first person to pose this question, as if you were sitting around and had some magical, intellectual epiphany and just had to share it with the rest of us. The reason there are starving children is because of mankind's sinful and imperfect nature. God does not protect the body, he protects the soul.

Gregory Paul recently undertook a statistical study on Natural Suffering / Evil
(He is on wikipedia)

Here is the abstract:

The full extent of the anguish and death suffered by immature humans is scientifically and statistically documented for the first time.

Probably hundreds of billions of human conceptions and at least fifty billion children have died, the great majority from non-human causes, before reaching the age of mature consent.

Adults who have heard the word of Christ number in the lower billions.

Because this 'Holocaust of the Children' bars an enormous portion of humans from making a decision about their eternal fate while maximizing the suffering of children, the classic Christian “free will” and “best of all possible worlds” hypotheses are falsified.

Think about it a little while.

reply to post by Ersatz

Think about it a little while.

How long are we supposed to do that?
What's your point, there is no free will?
Obviously not, for those "hundreds of billions".
So, what theory do you propose to explain why the world is the way it is?

reply to post by Garfee

No one can be sure of anything past death and to assume otherwise is folly. Be as good and as virtuous as you can be, I suppose.

These are safe statements.
What about what you can speculate from observation in this life?
Or is that the extent of it already, just be good, and don't make up fake explanations because it just ends up making things worse in the end?
I think dogmatic religion in any form is harmful.
Jesus was a philosopher and took the view that bad things are inevitable but don't be responsible for any of it yourself because the unavoidable consequences will come back to you.
People have spent 1900 years in Christianity trying to make that go away, but are only fooling themselves.

Let's look at the argument like this. God is usually defined in classical theism as all-good, omnipotent and the source of all morality. These attributes that are usually ascribed to God cannot be apt if we do not reliably observe evidence that is consistent with said attributes. In other words, do we see God (presupposing that He does exist) behaving in a manner that is consistent and reasonably expected of Him given these characteristics? Even more critically, His behaviour cannot be trivially consistent with these characteristics. So, He cannot be all-good or omnipotent some of the time. The evidence concerning His behaviour must always lead us to a logical conclusion that He is indeed all-good or all powerful or whatever the case may be.

I read a little statistic a couple weeks ago about the number of persons who perish daily from starvation. It was in the region of about 25,000. That is a staggering figure. Irrespective of the reasons(s) that contribute to such a statistic (sin or free will or whatever wishful thinking you come up with), the question has to be asked. Why would God in His all-goodness allow such a thing? Or why does God not help? Is it unreasonable of us to expect God to help the situation given his alleged omnibenevolent nature? Is the will to help a necessary consequence of being good, much more, all-good? And of course, if He were to help, it would have have to be in an obvious and unmistakable way else we would have no grounds to conclude that He is indeed all-good. And bear in mind, this is a being who is supposedly omnipotent. This means He could alleviate the situation at virtually no cost to Himself.

If we as fellow humans are expected to help and this is viewed as an exercise in being good, how is God absolved of helping? Yet, He is supposedly more moral and exceedingly good than us. We can't logically conclude that given that God appears to be M.I.A. in relation to this matter.

This is not an argument against God's existence. It's an argument against His alleged attributes of being all-good and maximally moral as we do not observe Him behaving in a manner that is in keeping with these attributes.