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I don't quite understand this line, because a.) we should take responsibility for our own sins and most of the time people will regret them anyways (= hence they will feel the full consequences of their sins) ánd b.) wé are the ones ignoring or 'hiding' our sins, there's no intervention of God needed for that.

Infact, these kind of ideological points of view make religious people hide behind the bible if they've done something wrong. Together with the whole 'confession' thing in churches. Some might not understand my point of view, but I actually think confessing in all anonimity is a bad thing, because it doesn't solve or change anything. Confessing publically would be better, thát's when you take full responsibility for your sins. Confession is something strange anyways, since you can sort of wave away your sins, anyways I'm going off topic I guess.



I don't think I was communicating very clearly here.

I was referring to the suffering of this world being a consequence of sin. What I'm saying is that God might be preventing it from becoming worse than it is right now, even if we justly deserve otherwise.


I guess, confession is kind of unrelated to what I meant, but I'll refrain from commenting further on that because I'm not very fond of catholicism.

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I don't quite understand this line, because a.) we should take responsibility for our own sins and most of the time people will regret them anyways (= hence they will feel the full consequences of their sins) ánd b.) wé are the ones ignoring or 'hiding' our sins, there's no intervention of God needed for that.

Infact, these kind of ideological points of view make religious people hide behind the bible if they've done something wrong. Together with the whole 'confession' thing in churches. Some might not understand my point of view, but I actually think confessing in all anonimity is a bad thing, because it doesn't solve or change anything. Confessing publically would be better, thát's when you take full responsibility for your sins. Confession is something strange anyways, since you can sort of wave away your sins, anyways I'm going off topic I guess.



Well...in a case like this where the guilt is clear cut, and people like him need to made an example of, I think the death penalty is justified. I don't like it, but I can't really say that it was the wrong thing to do.

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However I am not sure that I understand the "I have actually been pretty nice and benevolent" defense. Does this mean that God takes responsibility for the killing, but considers it nice and benevolent? And what exactly are those "sins" that would justify mass murder? As the ICC is located in Europe, the judges are not likely to be impressed by justifying killing with religious reasons.



Let me try and state it another way (similar to how I put it above). Let's say that disasters, suffering, disease, death and so forth are a consequence of our sins. If so, they're all basically our fault when you break it down. Now there are two possibilities, perhaps more. One, God doesn't directly cause the disasters, but allows them to happen because we rebel against Him. Or, He does purposely cause the disasters, but with the (ultimately benevolent) intention of allowing us to understand what our sin does to us. That would be benevolent in the sense that allowing us to simply destroy our eternal souls is worse in the long run; letting us taste a bit of suffering in order to understand the greater good is for the best (similar to allowing your child to suffer through a vaccination because...well you know why). In other words, the destruction in this world serves as a powerful reminder of the destruction reserved for unrepentant people so that ultimately they might know that they need to be saved.

Based on what I've been studying lately in the bible, it seems to be the former rather than the latter. I could be wrong, and I'd be willing to admit as much but it seems more like God gives His blessing for those who don't 'turn away' from Him, and then simply allows suffering when people don't take the much more obvious good path, if you will.

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Okey, but what if we are exactly the way this 'God' wanted us to be?



Then we can be pretty sure that it wouldn't be the Judeo-Christian God.

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'God has a plan and that's the way it's going to be'



I think that's kind of a shallow answer. I hope I've provided, for better or worse, an answer that has a bit more depth to it.

I think God does use bad things for the greater good, but that sort of an answer used to explain the origin of suffering kind of takes sin (and our responsibility) out of the picture and just makes it seem like its in God's nature to make us suffer.

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But still if there's a being that's almighty and stuff, it would definately have predicted how we were going to turn out.



Yeah, that's the interesting part. God, by His nature, would have had to of known about the fall, sin, and whatnot ahead of time. Yet decided to go ahead anyway. There's a lot of discussion on this in the christian community, which is something I've been meaning to catch up on.

Last edited by Irish_Farmer; 01/10/07 23:43.
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