Well first of all you shouldnt call yourself stupid even if everyone seems to agree with you.

Secondly there seems to be a lot of things taken out of context and distorted, but thats ok. In the spirit of "assuming an opposite viewpoint is true.." I will say that lets assume that you are right and there is little difference from punishment and mass-murder, lets look at your example:

Hitler wanted a new race and to annihilate all of his enemies and believed that the 3rd reich would be a 1000 year reign.

Jesus wants a new race (the Christians) and wants to annihilate all His enemies and wants to set up an eternal reign over all peoples.

The enemies and victims in both cases do not have much of a choice, one cannot help being born a enemy of the 3rd reich, and I suppose that in a sort of way one cannot help not believing in the God of the Bible.

So, following your line of reasoning, where does that leave everyone?

I dont understand the conclusions we are supposed to make: Is God evil or is Hitler good?

But I am only following your reasoning, I am only assuming that your right in the same way you have 'assumed that God exists'

if your right I still dont see any reason to reject God. If I was a Jew in Nazi Germany I could try to escape, but if I am a sinner in the hands of an angry God there IS_NO_ESCAPE, I must repent or die, there are no other options.

Thanks for the explanation. I did not want you to conclude that the god JHWH, who killed the Egyptian children, must be rejected. To the contrary, if you really believe that, better continue to worship him - otherwise he'll punish you too!

No, this was just about the formulation of the answer to the last poll question. I just didn't understand the argument that burning unbelievers is bad when done by some humans, but ok when done by some god.

I'm sure we all agree that Hitler was not good.

I'm also sure we can't convince you of how God may be just or fair on one hand, but evil at the same time. After all, if free will-choices gets punished anyways... then what's the sense of having all that in the first place?

I don't think a God killing millions or sending people to hell makes it a good God. Perhaps I'm biased here, but it's like voluntary slavery if you accept such things,

Cheers

No. Its not good for those people, but heaven is good for those who choose it.

All people have a choice, one might think the Pharoah would have made a logical choice after the first nine plagues, but because he was hardheaded he finally lost the thing dearest to him.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagues_of_Egypt


And also if you have ever read the story you know that the Israelites were also not exempt from the death angel, but only those who spread lambs blood on their door frames were spared.

So there were also those choices.

As far as hell goes, we all have a choice. I choose to believe so I will go to heaven. There is no evil in that, there is only happiness for me. If someone else chooses not to then I am very sorry but there is nothing I can do.

There is something even worst than hell in Christian religion, at least in the protestant version
It is predestination
I can not really understand how people can believe in such a mostruosity
And please Catholic friends dont tell me that protestants are wrong
They are right, their interpretation of the Bible is right
Read the letter exchange between Luter and Erasmus

IMO the poll makes no sense because God, or a god, has to be 'unfathomable' - otherwise one had principles and morals which are independent of God, and one never can say _a_ God as long as someone is a believer. He has to be somehow beyond good and evil, beyond explanations, beyond sense and nonsense.
The base of believing is at least a rest of enigma. The other part of him has to be within good and evil - as part of the good side - etc. He has to be both, beyond and within - that's a rest that noon can solve. But, if a god, his enigma, could be solved, or his will could be known in details, he wouldn't remain a god.

I'm not believing in any god, I believe that one has to consider each human as eventually 'unfathomable', that's the common interest or 'faith' that I share with those of my friends who are Christians.

I like to think that the other, that one that I look at and who looks at me, that he is somehow beyond me and within me(in my thoughts and my feelings).

At Nitro:


I wonder what the questions of such poll will be!

@AlbertoT:
predestination is a no-brainer if you believe in causal determinism and God being all-knowing and all-powerful.

@PHeMoX:
He's not punishing free-will itself. if your kid is grounded and you leave them home-alone, it is their free-will whether or not to honour your commands. if they don't and you find out, aren't you going to punish them? are you punishing their free-will or their abuse of free-will?

ultimately, i believe Christianity is the only path we can choose to take for salvation (don't try dispute that with a "predestination -- Christians believe they don't have a choice" thing, cos that's rubbish; our choice and God's sovereign choice are compatible), but God will be fair to those who never get a chance to hear of Christianity.

for those who reject; that's their choice but it doesn't make it a good choice. for those who reject blindly without giving it a second thought (not pointing fingers; a lot of people here show interest in learning from these discussions) that's their stupid choice. -- look up Pascal's Wager. anyone who then says "but being a Christian would detract from my life" doesn't understand that Christianity is simply believing. no rules. we who follow "rules" do so out of a love for God and the understanding that doing otherwise isn't exactly good for our lives, or the faith of those around us.

@jcl: sorry for contributing to this thread's devolution into just another Christianity thread.

julz

Let's see it

God knows that some people will go to hell, whatever they do..
Not just a few of them, most of them...it is clearly written in the Bible...
Nevertheless He creates them....

Catholics were of course horrified about this litteral interpretation of the Bible thus they tried to release a..patch
But the purist protestants said :

No my friends you must stick to the Bible, this is what the Bible claim

The point is that they are right

I wonder wether people who declared to be Christian have ever read the Bible

"no-brainer" means "requires little thought". i'm saying "of course there's predestination! we don't even need the Bible to tell us that. if you agree (i know you don't) that God is all-knowing and all-powerful, and you agree (perhaps you do) with causal determinism, then predestination is required!"

think of it this way:
God in His all-knowingness knew He was creating a world and universe such that everything that happened would happen. He also knew that by interfering with it in x, y, and z ways l, m, n, o, and p would happen differently. so God knew how everything would work out and determined how He would interfere with it from the get go, hence the concept of God's divine plan. which the bible tells us exists anyway.

still, by making the world and choosing to intervene such that everything that actually did happen would, he doesn't take away our freedom of thought (at least, as much as causal determinism doesn't take it away from us without a God).

if God didn't make the world such that people didn't choose Him, who's to say we actually have free-will?

of course, as Pappenheimer said, who can presume to know the mind of the unfathomable God (even if Pappenheimer is an atheist)? i can't tell you for sure why God predestined many for destruction. however, wouldn't you much rather be on His good side than His bad? Pascal's Wager, again.

why?

julz

There are two logical problems with Pascals Wager, which was anyway meant as a joke and not to be really taken seriously.

The first problem is that you can not choose to believe in God or not, you can only choose to pretend to believe in God. But if you pretend to believe in God because of Pascal's Wager, you are a hypocrite and probably end up in hell.

The second problem is that its not sufficient to believe in some God, you must also believe in the real God, and not in a false God. I think its clear from the Bible that worshipping a false God is wrong, and even worse than not worshipping God at all. So by worshipping a false idea of God, you'll end up in hell even more likely than if you were an atheist. Especially, I think if you worship a god that kills innocent children, you're having a false idea of God, and sorry, that means hell.

However if you now worry that you will go to hell, you can put your mind at rest because only sinners go to hell, and not believing in God or believing in a false God is no sin. Sin requires that you have a choice but believing is not based on a choice.