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  1. J

    Slavery in the OT

    I just thought I'd mention an interesting verse from Deuteronomy (analysis here): If a slave has taken refuge with you, do not hand him over to his master. 16 Let him live among you wherever he likes and in whatever town he chooses. Do not oppress him. (Deut 23.15) It's ambiguous as to whether...
  2. J

    Why did God show His love with death?

    I think an interesting analogy for why Jesus decided to die for us (and how that actually helps anything) comes from an episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch I watched a while ago. Basically, if I recall correctly, Sabrina performs a spell which switches her nice personality with the...
  3. J

    Why is there a hell?

    Hey RuthJoseph, A thought I have on this issue is that there's something subtly wrong with the idea that God makes people so that they never choose to reject Him or sin. Imagine that God is planning to make 100 people, and He foreknows that 60 of them will follow Him and 40 won't, so He only...
  4. J

    Forgiveness is one sided. Why does it have to be accepted.

    A relevant question is: is heaven a place? So if God let someone into heaven who was a very bad person, then would they enjoy eternal life? Or is heaven something else? I believe that heaven is not really a place per se but part of what makes heaven heaven is being connected to God...
  5. J

    Trying to accept that God is loving

    With regard to hell, there are other passages in the Bible that paint a somewhat different story: 2 Thes 1:9 "They will pay the penalty by being destroyed forever, by being separated from the Lord's presence and from his glorious power." (How are people punished in hell according to the...
  6. J

    Never heard one Christian answer this successfully...

    One way of answering this I would use is: what does it mean for someone to be perfect? In a practical sense, what's it like to be perfect? Well, if you assume that evil is not treating other people the way that you would like to be treated, then evil is not following your own principles...
  7. J

    I'm a Hedonist, but aren't we all?

    I would say (maybe in addition) that if we have free will, then we can choose what we find pleasurable. So one person can choose to find murder or torture pleasurable, and another person can choose to find volunteering and caring for people pleasurable. So goodness is not about avoiding...
  8. J

    Is heaven in or outside time?

    Because the Bible teaches we will be resurrected with bodies in a New Earth (Rev 21:1), I believe there will be an eternity of successive moments. Your query about whether it could ever be fun to have an eternity of successive moments is a very common thought... but I would say that there is...
  9. J

    Justified Belief

    I think there's a really good article, from Discover Magazine, on the idea of the multiverse from the point of view of modern physics, here. Here's some key quotes about the issue: ...Call it a fluke, a mystery, a miracle. Or call it the biggest problem in physics. Short of invoking a...
  10. J

    Justified Belief

    I'll mention an argument for belief in God which I find quite convincing, an argument for the design of the laws of physics. General arguments for God are important because if God exists, then it's not a big step to Christianity out of other religions, especially with arguments like the one...
  11. J

    Christians, can you answer these questions?

    There seems to be two possibilities on the 'who caused what' thing. 1. There's a timeless thing that caused everything else, either God or a timeless physical object. It doesn't need a cause. 2. You can go infinitely far back into the past, into cause and effect, and it doesn't stop...
  12. J

    Why Should I Want To Go To Heaven?

    Hi ericlawrence, here are my two cents: Something interesting about our happiness in this life is that it is very, you could say, 'temporal'. That is, people's happiness experiences a huge issue with boredom. Some people would be happy to live forever as long as they could keep...
  13. J

    Make me believe this is a loving God

    Well, there is the doctrine of the age of accountability, that is, when people are too young to really decide for themselves whether to accept God's grace they automatically go to heaven. So babies and young children would not be in trouble, along with those who have a mental disability. The...
  14. J

    Make me believe this is a loving God

    Hi Rasa, Some verses on this topic I find helpful are: 2 Thes 1:9 "They will pay the penalty by being destroyed forever, by being separated from the Lord's presence and from his glorious power." 2 Tim 4:8b: "And the prize [of heaven] is not just for me but for all who eagerly look...
  15. J

    Heaven?

    I think living forever does sound like it would get boring, and actually it might even be a fate like being in hell, if there was really nothing to do forever and ever but you had to exist. (I am thinking that that's what hell is, but that's a topic for another thread). I think that boredom...
  16. J

    Why is faith considered a virtue?

    One mention of faith in the Bible is from 2 Corinthians 5:7: "We live by faith, not by sight." The interesting thing about this definition is that sight is an unusual type of evidence. Sight is the most direct form of evidence that we have. There are many other forms of evidence that are not...
  17. J

    New to CF, looking for answers.

    Hi beofthesamemind, I think one of the Bible's answers to suffering is that God, even though He is all powerful, cannot get rid of suffering as long as there is wrongdoing (sin) in the world: Rom 5:12: When Adam sinned, sin entered the world. Adam's sin brought death, so death spread to...
  18. J

    You say you love God, but why?

    Hey DarkProphet, I thought I might add my 2 cents... Although, it might be that God can't make or not make someone on the basis of how they're going to choose. For reasons we don't know it could imply a logical paradox. Also, if there were 50 people who were going to like XYZ, and 20 who...
  19. J

    I want to believe...

    Is that really the universe starting from nothing, though? For instance, if I have a bank account with no money in it, then I have 'nothing'. And if I have no bank account, then I also have 'nothing'. But they're not the same 'nothing', of course. So by analogy, if quantum fluctuations can...
  20. J

    I want to believe...

    A lot of it depends on whether someone sees it as possible for God to exist versus God's existence is unnecessary when there's another explanation. What I mean is, if you look at the beginning of the universe in the Big Bang, a huge explosion, then it is easy to think, in an intuitive way, that...