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I believe God is the victim of injustice and cruelty. Yes, it's horrible, but how does God respond? He raises the victim back to life and brings justice. How exactly does that work? I don't yet fully know, but my hope and faith is in Him who died unjustly and was raised to unending life. I have no other explanation for how pure evil can be dealt with than Jesus. Do you?
Hi Chriliman,
God cannot be a victim of injustice and cruelty. That would be logically wrong. A victim is helpless. If a muscular giant is slapped by a tiny baby when he knew the baby would slap him (he's a giant with foreknowledge) and he doesn't strike back or even move away from the baby, would you call the giant a victim of the baby? Of course not. Anyone who believes that God has foreknowledge and is Almighty cannot say God is a victim.
You are of course referring to Jesus' death on the cross. Jesus was never a victim. The Bible tells us that He knew He would be crucified. He went ahead voluntarily. The Bible says He could have summoned a troop of angels to rescue him but he didn't do that because he wanted it. You can't be a victim if you want it.
You ask if I know how to deal with evil. Of course I do. So do you. So does anybody else. But you feign ignorance because you don't want to suggest a way against evil that will show how deficient God is. Because even a child knows what to do in teh face of evil. Eradicate it.
The whole story of the Garden of Eden is of course false. Many Christians don't take it to be true. Even those who think it's not a historical real story have one problem. What is the point of putting it in the Bible if it's a false story?
The story makes God out to be a bad person. He knew the serpent (which we later changed to Satan although that was not the original intent of the very primitive and nursery-like story in Gen 3) would tempt Eve and he knew they would succumb because the Bible calls the serpent wise and cunning and Adam and Eve were described as gullible - they didn't even know they were naked. Exposing such innocent guileless people to a cunning creature and then to pounce on them when they were deceived by the serpent is the height of cruelty. If you accept the story of the Garden of Eden, and if I were God (and I am Almighty and loving), I would have removed the serpent from the Garden the way a real human father would remove a venomous snake from the play pen of his young child. God, by not doing that, is culpable.
There is no excuse for God not to eradicate evil and to allow it to spread and then to say he has no choice but to redeem the world by sending his son to die and even then, he will decide who is to be saved and it's based on mere belief in the fact that his son died on the cross. All that is surely unjust to the mind of any reasonable rational man?
We see other instances of God's inability to rule justly and to eradicate evil. By causing a Flood (I'm assuming you believe in the Flood; many Christians cleverly don't) to kill all of creation except a few sample creatures, God shows a shocking lack of wisdom in dealing with evil. He killed the patient and not the cancer. He killed his own creation while letting Evil flourish. He didn't kill Satan. Instead he killed almost all humanity and the animal kingdom. And after the Flood, what did God do? He realised he had been wrong and he vowed he wouldn't do that again. But is that wise? He allowed Evil to flourish and of course everything went back to Square One but with God earning for himself the dubious honour of having committed a crime worse than any ethnic cleansing in history.
Is this wisdom? Any child can tell you that the right thing to do is to eradicate evil from the start. What we have done is to make use of a nursery story in Genesis and construct a whole theology out of it. The result is we turn God into the big bad wolf. The failure to eradicate Evil makes God guilty of every wrong that happens. He could have prevented every wrong by eradicating evil in the first place.
Think about all this as truthfully as you can and you will know that the one who has spoken the truth is none other than...
St Truth
Someone can become a martyr because they are committed to something they can't rightfully back out of but which will cost his life. Victim? Depends upon what you mean by the word, but under many understandings a martyr is a victim. Normally a victim of injustice, often of other things.
Please address every point I made in post #82. Don't just pick one point and dwell on it. You asked me if I could do better than God in handling evil and I showed you I could.
For I remain...
St Truth
You're being confusing. You seem to be saying Jesus wasn't innocent because he failed to destroy evil and instead destroyed those who were deceived by evil? That would defy many Scriptures, not least:
1 Peter 3:18
"For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit."
According to you this should read "Christ also suffered once for sins, the unrighteousness for the unrighteousness..."
I'd advise you to think about what you're saying and make sure it lines up with Scripture before you post it.
Hi Chriliman,
I'm not confused or confusing. But I think you are a little confused. I don't think you can deny that God did not destroy evil but allowed it to corrupt Adam and Eve. That's a fact you must accept. Which earthly father would let a venomous serpent lie in the play pen of his child? God did that in the Garden of Eden.
No, that's not what I said. The Bible obviously defines 'righteousness' to include God who left evil intact and punished those deceived and corrupted by evil. But the fact is, and every Christian from a child to the Archbishop of Canterbury will say that God did not destroy evil but he allowed it to corrupt innocent Adam and innocent Eve. The Bible says they were innocent and they were DECEIVED by the serpent. You failed to address this fact. That God allowed evil to proliferate and then he pounced on the victims who fell prey to evil and were corrupted by it. I spoke about this in reply to your question if I knew how to deal with evil better than God and I said yes, I would simply destroy evil from the start.
Have I written anything that is not in line with Scriptures? Isn't it true that God didn't destroy evil but allowed it to deceive his innocent creature who knew no good and evil at that time?
Whatever I say, I am truthful for I am none other than...
St Truth
Someone can become a martyr because they are committed to something they can't rightfully back out of but which will cost his life. Victim? Depends upon what you mean by the word, but under many understandings a martyr is a victim. Normally a victim of injustice, often of other things.
If we take Genesis for what it actually says then we must acknowledge that God became aware of the deception and Adam and Eves sin, so we can't exactly accuse him of allowing something that he wasn't aware of. It was after he became aware that he immediately rebuked the evil, as expected. Interesting to consider the implications of this that suggest God hasn't always been all knowing, but rather becomes all knowing.
I don't think many Christians will agree with that assessment. God's omniscience is universally accepted. He's either omniscient or all-knowing or he is not. You can't say 'God hasn't always been all knowing, but rather becomes all knowing'. That would mean he is not all-knowing. If he has to be told before he knew that man had fallen, it would mean he's not all-knowing. You can't say after God was told, then he became all-knowing. That's not the definition of 'all-knowing'.
Cheers,
St Truth
Well, either the text accurately portrays God as becoming aware of evil and therefore not always all knowing or the text falsely portays God as becoming aware of something that he previously didn't know.
I lean towards trusting what Scripture actually says vs putting my own wishful thinking into it.
In the earliest and most reliable copies of mark, there is no mention of the virgin birth of jesus or any birth of jesus. It also has no appearances of jesus after his death and it ends much more abruptly compared to matthew, luke and john. This is likely why mark was placed 2nd in order, even though there is little question it was penned first. And mark 16: 9-19 are widely accepted by scholars, as late editions, so mark would mirror the other gospels.
Fine, let's go on. So God didn't know mankind would be tempted and would fall. Do you accept that the serpent was Satan? So God didn't know that Satan would tempt Eve. God innocently was misled by the seeming innocence of Satan?
Did God know Satan was evil and was CAPABLE of corrupting people? If he did, why didn't he destroy Satan?
Or are you saying God didn't know that?
One more thing. All the bad things that happened and God did nothing. The baby that drowns in a pail of water and the boy I saw in the video who was slowly burnt to death and he was screaming the name of Jesus. Are you also saying that God didn't know he was being tortured and so God didn't rescue him?
I believe God is the victim of injustice and cruelty. Yes, it's horrible, but how does God respond? He raises the victim back to life and brings justice. How exactly does that work? I don't yet fully know, but my hope and faith is in Him who died unjustly and was raised to unending life. I have no other explanation for how pure evil can be dealt with than Jesus. Do you?
Is this wisdom? Any child can tell you that the right thing to do is to eradicate evil from the start. What we have done is to make use of a nursery story in Genesis and construct a whole theology out of it. The result is we turn God into the big bad wolf. The failure to eradicate Evil makes God guilty of every wrong that happens. He could have prevented every wrong by eradicating evil in the first place.
In reality, so called martyrs are a dime a dozen in history and one can call themselves a martyr, for any self defined cause. Whether these causes relate to well evidenced reality, is another question altogether. Personal psychology, plays a huge role in this phenomonon.
Martyrdom is part of a serious testimony/witnessing.
What you just did yesterday can hardly be evidenced on a 24 hour basis. We can get to know what you did yesterday (or a year before) if you or someone as witness wrote down what you did for us to believe with faith. The witness can put what you did in a video to make his testimony more believable. However others still need faith to believe that the witness didn't fake the video, say, by using a video cam with a wrong date-time stamp.
In effect, the video strengthens the believability of the witness' testimony about what you did yesterday. If he chooses to martyr himself to back up his claims about what you did, it's another way of strengthen the believability of his testimony. If 10 out of 12 such witnesses all are willing to martyr themselves to back up the claims (about what you did), there's no reason for a sane person to reject what is said, because it doesn't make any sense for a person to kill himself in order to tell a lie.
In ancient times we don't have videos. Martyrdom thus plays the role.
The testimony is serious to the person that martyrs themself, but may have zero to do with reality. People have martyred themselves for too many reasons to count and is more a personal psychological phenomonon, then anything else.
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