hns64 said:
I am only saying that we should have been created with equal abilities to God and this should easily be possible as he is considered by most as being 'all-powerful'.
What abilities would those be? I propose one of our biggest
problems is that we have the abilities - gifts - of life, love, imagination, patience, virtue, morals, of being able to adapt, feel, create, reason, plan, distinguish, communicate, sacrifice; but we don't exercise the responsibility that comes with these things - the consequences of
sharing our lives with others - the application of life. The meaning of being human.
We know what God did with His abilities when He lived as a human. He demonstrated that we have everything we need to be like Him, but we don't know how to do it because
we don't know Him well enough. He humiliated Himself to humiliate everybody who ever thought they were close to being "enlightened" and "godly".
We thought what we needed was to be more like God, while what we needed was to be more like
us. For that reason, at least, God did not make us gods, or angels, or animal... He made us uniquely
human - with everything that comes with being human.
I do not believe that God would have created inferior beings... I just cannot understand His judgement on this one. And I don't believe giving is a weakness, it is simply a moral course of action.
And I agree with you. The idea that Christianity portrays humanity as a failed experiment - an inferior sample of what God
could have created - is a lie. When David asks God why He created us "a little less than heavenly beings" (Psalm 8), it wasn't an indictment, it was a realization of wonder. Our failings don't make us flawed, they make us human - but giving into them, giving ourselves over to things that are
not godly, makes a mockery of ourselves and of God.
The reason people are cynical about humanity is because they know what is possible - maybe that is even the reason some are mad at God for not "getting us there"; they expect religions should exemplify what God is capable of, and they don't. Why do we have to suffer climbing the mountain when God could have put us there? Why do we have to climb back down again, why are there mountains at all... on and on until there are two opponents left: God and you. And you know what? God stepped down. He calls His people "Israel" (meaning 'he fought with God') and lets us decide where we want to be and go. Isn't that what we wanted?
Not to live under a tyranical ruler with restrictive laws. Because God knew those laws were just a learning school - the real world demands freedom. Love demands freedom.
But love also demands love, and that is one law God will not relinquish... which brings us to the objections raised by you and
JustARide.
Sodom and Gamorrah - a nuclear explosion is usually considered the closest example of what happened here. Both of these cities were destroyed for ungodly acts which mostly seem to include homosexuality.
and....
The Tower of Babel
Genesis 18
20 Then the LORD said, "The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous 21 that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know."
Ezekiel 16
49 'Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. 50 They were haughty and did detestable things before me.'
JustARide said:
So great floods (i.e., genocide), multiple wars (i.e., ethnic cleansing), and bears ripping apart children are laughable, huh? I don't imagine they were laughable to those involved.
Death, indeed, is the shadow under which we live our lives. But I'm going to go out on a limb and say eternal torture is what people are really afraid of.
As for the argument that we are simply prejudiced and foisting our unfair, humanly values on God - what other choice to do we have? To look at things from God's perspective? We've already established that as impossible. The fact is everyone believes in God as s/he sees fit.
I don't know if it struck anybody as curious at all, but all these calamities ("evils from God" as people would have it) have one common characteristic: they were natural disasters. Listen to this description:
Genesis 19:28
He looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah, toward all the land of the plain, and he saw dense smoke rising from the land, like smoke from a furnace.
Does it sound like something beneath the cities might have had something to do with the rain of sulphur? All these disasters follow the same pattern: God warns people impending disaster and the seriousness of sin, and yet they persist. There is always a chance to escape or postpone His judgement.
But they have another thing in common - and that to me is the defining characteristic: they all concern people who had faith in God. And the accounts related in the Bible were no doubt by people of the same faith in the same God. Maybe biased, but does that mean they were wrong? The Sumerians, after all, had their own version of the great flood, and the Tower of Babel was very likely a Sumerian ziggurat. But their gods have no concept of "sin".
My point is, the evidence that "encriminates" the God of the Bible in these events are, specifically, that Israel is in some way involved, and generally that sin is in some way involved. It's easy to use these events as "proof" of God's cruel rulership, but forget that they were no worse than those we see today. The worst of them all - the flood - has left so little trace that many people doubt it even happened. And yet accounts of a great deluge is found in hundreds of cultures world-wide, all associated in some way with their cultural deity.
But what encriminates humanity in these events are just as clear: our sins. Wars were part of life, but not everybody threatened Israel. Natural disasters were as common as they are today, but not everybody were saved. Bears mauled people as often as ever, but not always in a prophets of God's presence. What these events are, is exactly what they seem to be: exceptions to God's rule - exceptions prompted by sin.
If you don't take sin seriously after hearing them, they really have no meaning to you. As isolated events they don't tell you anything more about life, God or your own situation than you are already willing to believe. If they comprise the total of what you are willing to believe about God, then as Job's wife said: just curse God and die.
On the other hand, if you are willing to pay attention to the peculiarities: from their being completely contained and controlled in a context of divine justice, to the incomprehensible form of survival they depict, you might realize that they are fearful, frustrated shouts about how important faith in God can be. Shouts with echoes in eternity. But without the ingredient of faith, they are nothing more than religious accounts of the everyday suffering we see around us every day of our lives.
hns64 said:
For me it is the other way round. I would say that every person I have ever met is better than God as I cannot see them, even with all the power in the world, killing people for sexual preferences which are fine with consenting partners or be worried if a group of their simple, weak creations began to work together for a common good.
I hope what I have said will at least make you wonder whether some avenues of life, whether they are "sexual preferences" or just human weakness, nontheless reflect upon who you are, and may have consequences that put you in harm's way. To those people who wanted Job to hand over his visitors for sex, it might have been a normal and acceptable form of initiation - how do you know how bad it was? If Job offering his daughters to them in stead was even remotely acceptable even to a "righteous" man, I'd say it was pretty bad. How threatening were the Amalekites to God's promise of delivering the Israelites into Canaan?
How did the building of a ziggurat with a "portal to heaven" at the top affect the spiritual future of humanity? Remember, this was the "world" through which God wanted to fulfil His covenant. And they considered temple prostitution as the highest form of service... the way to help men become gods. From
Enkidu and the Princess
"We've been together for six days and seven nights, Enkidu, so now you have Wisdom! Now you are as a god! But there is much, much more: I bid you to come to Uruk of the strong walls, to Inanna's [Ishtar's] Temple of Love, and to the Eanna, [the High Chamber in the ziggurat, the Holy of Holies,] where the Sky God An can be found.
Of course, just like in the case of Sodom and Gomorrah, spritual misalignment and sexual promiscuity were just a symptoms of a deeper problem. You can read
this for more indepth research about the Tower of Babel.
Different languages only forced people to put more effort into dealing with each other, rather than trying to become gods by means that would end up destroying them (imagine what effect AIDS would have had on the cradle of mankind). Language would be no great obstacle to man or God's plans with him - the disciples 'speaking in tongues' was a direct reversal of what happened at Babel.
People die, whether they are perfect, faithful, or neither... natural disasters will always claim innocent and less innocent lives. But only God can give back any of those lives. Without the promise of resurrection and eternal life, those people were just as lost as any of us, no more. Sure, object to God's punishments if you like, but make sure you do it out of faith, not out of fear.
If anything, the moral of these disasters is that people who trust God have nothing to fear - not even His judgment.
I cannot sum it up any better than these words:
Ezechiel 16
59 " 'This is what the Sovereign LORD says: I will deal with you [Jerusalem (as an allegory)] as you deserve, because you have despised my oath by breaking the covenant. 60 Yet I will remember the covenant I made with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish an everlasting covenant with you. 61 Then you will remember your ways and be ashamed when you receive your sisters [Sodom etc., (because your sins were even worse than theirs)], both those who are older than you and those who are younger. I will give them to you as daughters, but not on the basis of my covenant with you. 62 So I will establish my covenant with you, and you will know that I am the LORD.
63 Then, when I make atonement for you for all you have done, you will remember and be ashamed and never again open your mouth because of your humiliation, declares the Sovereign LORD .' "
. An all-powerful tyrant need not kill everything in sight (though he has that power), but he needs to subdue all dissent that is deemed a "threat." The notion that God has allowed us free will to deny him while on earth is not evidence that he is somehow just or democratic. The afterlife is supposedly the "final court," as it were, where we will be judged, and nothing in the Bible suggests this will be anything like what we term a "fair" trial.
