You'd think God would have given a rule book to Adam. These are the do's and these are the don'ts. But he waits until Moses to really set it straight what he expects. Those rules. They are "good"? Then let's follow them. But no, Christians make them irrelevant. Yet, Christians still pick and choose from the Hebrew Scriptures things that they can apply. So tell me which rules are still to be followed and which ones are no longer needed?
He did. The simplest rules ever given. Do anything but X. The garden of Eden had few rules required. After the fall, expulsion, and only after God had searched and found a man who would follow him and a covenant made with his progeny were any systematic written laws necessary but from Adam to Obama he has given us all a moral conscience. The ten commandments were only the divine validation of what is in our hearts. The Levitical laws were specific to Israel and for an intended purpose. Other cultures were no held account top them specifically.
I have over and over again told you just how important moral duties are. They matter in every temporal way possible and also determine rewards in heaven. The one thing they do not determine is entrance to heaven. Christ's sacrifice is completely sufficient for that. Claiming Christians negate the need for moral law is just intellectually dishonest. Physical life and death hang in the balance of morality but not heaven.
If you see perfection in 300 years of peace out of 5000 then I can't help, if you see perfection in killing our young in the womb we are not on the same page, if you see perfection in creating enough weapons to kill all life ever known I am at a loss.
I thought Christians say his creation was perfect?
It was but that is irrelevant since the fall. God allowed nature to operate unsupervised after we rebelled in almost all cases. WE told him we had this and did not need him. He withdrew and chaos ensued to show us we were wrong.
But obviously, it isn't, because we have freewill to chose to disobey. And freewill is what... a perfection?
Perfection is the capacity to fulfill a purpose. The purpose was to allow free choice to accept or deny God. This is a necessity of true love. It is the difference between a Kiss from your spouse and a kiss from a pair of lips on an ipad. Freewill perfectly suited purpose and would have perfectly suited well being if used correctly.
But when it is applied leads to imperfection? So freewill to disobey God has torn the world apart, but if he gives us the power to have faith in him, he will overlook our imperfections and let us into heaven? Even though, we can't obey his rules, and we can't have perfect faith, because we're imperfect? Not to mention that being "saved" and going to heaven weren't part of what Jews believe. Oh well, I guess I did mention it. So why wouldn't God have told the Jews all about heaven, salvation, that he had a son. And if you pull out some obscure quote then my question is: Why didn't he tell them plainly? In King James English, instead of a language that didn't even have vowels? It would have saved a lot of confusion.
How do you get so many complaints per paragraph in question form?
1. Application does not necessitate disaster, Abuse does.
2. He overlooks nothing. Our sin could not go unpunished and God remain just. Our sin required the highest price possible. Divine suffering.
3. It requires enough faith to allow a born again experience. At that point God is the author and finisher of our faith. Once applied it can't be undone. It is never perfect but if once sufficient, it God becomes it's guarantor.
4. They most certainly did believe in resurrection, salvation, and heaven. But as their entire history suggests they misunderstood the particulars in most cases. The entire OT is failure by the Jews to get doctrine properly understood in general but a remnant getting it right.
5. They refused to believe even when he proved his existence. The matter is not clarity or evidence, it is the heart the weighs either.
So "real". Are any of the non-Christian religions real? If not, what are they? Not real, right. But people still believe them to be true. The religion has "God-given" rules and moral codes. And, explains who and what we are doing here. But, is totally, for a Bible-believing Christian, completely wrong. For them, your beliefs are necessarily real. To an atheist, your beliefs aren't real. But, to you, they are very real. But, since those other people find the exact type of comfort, same type of intuitive knowledge that their religion is the truth, than maybe, all religions are not necessarily real, but, to the believer, seems real.
1. They have truth but it is not divinely revealed truth about salvation. Mostly it's human guesses at divine truth. Occasionally it's true but the whole is not the revelation intended by God.
2. Most other faiths have incoherent doctrines and historical absurdities but some truth. Most of them can't possibly be from a God worth believing in. They are logically invalid.
3. By beliefs rely on my spiritual experience for grounding. No other faith has even a fractional amount of doctrine or claims to experiencing a deity compared with Christianity. We have a virtually monopoly of divine experience. In 20 years of debate I have (and I look hard for them) had a single person of another faith claim divine experience. Many claim they know a guy who has (but can never produce them). There might be a million born again Christians for every single enlightened guru in Hinduism and Islam is not even on the map.
4. If I had not experienced the divine I would not have a fraction of the faith in my beliefs I do. That is the experiences purpose. To prove the foundations for the rest of doctrine and to rectify unmistakably what went so horribly wrong. Other faiths only have beliefs which they cannot verify until too late to realize the mistake.
And that's part of what we are arguing. Your "mountains" of evidence aren't all that convincing. A basic problem on why the Bible can't be trusted is the flood. When does the Bible say it happened? Can it be proven? If it could, I'd believe. 4000 or so years ago, there was only Noah and his family? And all of humanity came from them? Couldn't some DNA testing or something confirm such a thing? All the animals that survived were on the ark and scattered through out the world? Their migration seems like it should be traceable. But if not, then what are those stories? Real or myth? If myth, then what is God? Real or something we hope is there?
1. I only remember answering questions. I don't remember even beginning the first foot hill of evidence.
2. There is much evidence for a literal flood. However it is not central to faith. If anyone honestly wants to verify the validity of Christian claims they would start with it's core claims and ones recent enough to have good historical evidence. The evidence for Christ is overwhelming, the flood underwhelming. Personally I don't know whether a analogy, a local flood, or a world flood is intended nor why it matters to my faith in Christ.
3. I will answer questions about the flood by pre-historical events are almost impossible to have certainty about once we have evaluated the infinitely better and more important events in Christ's ministry if you want to concentrate on evidence instead of a battery of objections in question form.
