Letters to the Editor
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JimC
I can see from your posts you think you're bringing the truth to the unenlightened living here in this left-wing darkness, but the fact is I've heard everything you say many times from many people, as have probably most here. I was brought up as a Christrian, and for me it lasted right up to the point where I was able to appraise the sense of it. You sound like a very typical evangelical, and your great wisdom is the stuff of average fantasy.
The notion that there is an all-powerful, all-knowing God, who made us (and the rest of the universe) exactly the way he wanted and who knows every single thing there is to know about us (and everything else in the universe,) fails as soon as you introduce the concept of sin and punishment. Something doesn't add up. Either God isn't as all-powerfull and all-knowing as you folks like to believe, or God is like a giant mean-spirited 3 year old, who makes us a certain way and then punishes us (or rewards us) based on whether we perform. Which we do or not based on how he made us and which he knows ahead of time whether we're going to be able to do or not.
When I bring this up to folks like yourself I always hear about "free will," and that this puts the onus on us, and God is out there hoping and praying that we'll do the right thing and make it to heaven, but for some reason he's decided to leave the door open to the possibility that he might have to punish us for all eternity if we don't manage to get things right.
So God is either a tyrannical 3-year old, or a fairly powerful, fairly smart being who doesn't quite have the power to make things happen that he really and truly hopes and prays will happen.
When you add in the part about having to turn your life over to jesus to get to heaven, you create a whole world of people God chose to have born in areas that have the wrong religion, so those poor Chinese are going to have to work extyra hard to make it to heaven. Of course to most of you that's just part of the beauty of it, and confirms that God, like you, prefers his brown people to be of the token variety. There'll be just enough heathen make it through the door to prove God isn't prejudice, buit not so many as to lower property values in heaven.
I don't expact you to get this, as you've dedicated your life to maintaining a fantasy that requires you to suspend logic, but just to let you know you're not telling us all things we haven't been hearing all our lives.
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Jonathan Hoag , the truth comes out
So you are an atheist. I see also you've decided to move into the phase of discrediting the Bible by finding "errors". You no doubt googled or looked up in some way this list of "objections" then so to look up the answers and there are answers but I will not waste my time defendng a text in which you do not believe in anyway...
I suggest the following http://www.livingwaters.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=104
A quote...
The professing atheist is what is commonly known as an "agnostic"--one who claims he "doesn't know" if God exists. It is interesting to note that the Latin equivalent for the Greek word is "ignoramus." The Bible tells us that this ignorance is "willful" (Psalm 10:4). It's not that a person can't find God, but that he won't. It has been rightly said that the "atheist" can't find God for the same reason a thief can't find a policeman. He knows that if he admits that there is a God, he is admitting that he is ultimately responsible to Him. This is not a pleasant thought for some.
It is said that Mussolini (the Italian dictator), once stood on a pinnacle and cried, "'God, if you are there, strike me dead!" When God didn't immediately bow to his dictates, Mussolini then concluded that there was no God. However, his prayer was answered some time later.
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And Jimbo
You're correct that you're different from the Taliban folks who would force me to accept their religion at the point of a sword. You're just like the ones who don't want to foce me to accept their religion but who work to persuade me to accept their religion based on their belief that theirs is the only one and true religion. They, like you, don't feel they can raise their children freely in a world with people in it like me who don't accept that their way if God's way, so they dedicate themselves to trying to convert everybody to their way. You're like those Taliban.
Also, you say it's a choice to be homosexual or not, and you just have to ignore your sexual attraction for other men and accept that you have to only have sex with women. I assume that's how it is for you then, and you've just overcome your homosexaul tendencies and stayed away from sex with men by the power of your will. It's hard for you to avoid gay sex but you do it for God.
Is that how it is for you?
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sorry about the typos but i'm typing in the dark
just that. and now everybody knows i hunt and peck.
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more great ABC reporting
Thefunny part of the ABC story is that St. Thomas is in the American Virgin Islands, not the British Virgin Islands. If the ABC "reporter" can't get a simple geographical fact correct, what else did she misstate? (Don't answer that.)
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Armagednoutahere RE: Is God a 3 yar old with a temper?
Armagednoutahere, I claimed to be an atheist up until about 7 years ago. I had these same questions. I was a believer in science and evolution, etc etc. Until I came to a realization that I do not know if God exists or not, agnosticism, then I wondered why would God create a flawed creation that He knew would sin against him. Well, that’s a tough question and is not Christianity 101. The answer once you accept God omnipotence/omniscience/omnipresence, is actually quite simple and is in the Bible! God created us to love Him. He could have created us to love Him without question but then we wouldn’t truly “love” Him. He didn’t want automatons, He wanted us to love Him by choice, hence the free will. To get this love by choice He had to also give us the choice to disobey and ultimately to reject Him totally. Once you understand this, then the rest is easy. God isn’t a vengeful 3 year old but He is all powerful and all knowing. It is our limited humanistic view and pride that gets in the way of our understanding that principle. How can God allow us to sin and possibly perish? Because He wants us to chose to love Him. It is much like how we want our children to love us implicitly and while they are yet babes, they generally do, this was us at the Creation. But we also do not want to force an artificial love out of them, because it is not real love. Then as our children get older they begin to question us and they reach the age that they can chose to love us and honor us or they can chose to rebel and to reject us. This is how God created us, to love Him or to reject Him.
God desires all to go to heaven and gives us the choice to be redeemed, freely, simply. Yet we reject Him still and in growing numbers.
The question of why people who were born in areas where the Gospel has hard to get to, what about those people? Why should they perish in Hell? Same reason people who hear the Gospel and reject it, because of their sins. God wrote His Law on our hearts, our conscience, so we know sin and can seek God’s redemption. These people need to hear the Gospel just like people in the United States need to hear it. You may think this is cruel but from God’s perspective, we are sinful and He has provided a way to be redeemed, and those who are saved should seek out to spread the all the World.