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Pastimes : Ask God -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (27374)	10/1/1999 2:48:00 PM
From: mark silvers	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 39621

Brumar, Evil exists for many reasons. Humans are born with free will. It is a great gift, but is a two edged sword. We have free will to commit horrific acts of violence and evil, and we have free will to love unconditionally. If God "waved a wand", taking all violence and horror from our lives and turned eternity into an everlasting moment of bliss, we would soon lose appreciation for perfection. Even an eternal organism would, at some point, become boring and irritating(although possibly an experiment worth trying:-) ) To fully experience anything, to know it fully, you must also know it's opposite. To know heat, you must have some knowledge of cold. To know near, you must understand far. To know love fully, you must also know fear. Otherwise it is all shades of gray. Mark

To: Brumar89 who wrote (27374)	10/2/1999 5:00:00 AM
From: Andy Thomas	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 39621

Hi Brumar, On the question of good and evil, people might ask, "If God is good and made everything, he must have made evil too. How can an all-good God have created evil as well?" This is a tough question but it probably does demand examination. A Judeo-Christian apologist might convince someone to look at it this way: God is good. God made all things. All things are good. In this theory evil isn't "a thing," so God didn't make/create evil. In this theory evil is actually "nothing" - literally outside of God and his creation. The paths away from God lead to evil - literally "nothing." If the above theory is plausible, how did one of God's creatures get cast from the world of existence into the world of non-existence, or "nothing?" Satan is cast as a destroyer - his main goal for every individual being their destruction. Satan is the great bait-and-switch artist; the drug or the sex always seems better before you do or have it. The more you indulge in some vice the less you enjoy it. Does Satan then reach from this world of nothingness and offer people these bits of "cubic zirconium" in lieu of "the truly good life?" To be honest, one of the things that bothers me about the Old Testament was the way Isaac and David and Solomon and guys like that always seemed to have tons of women. Under Christianity, you're limited to one for life. So in OT times were there just many more women - like a 5:1 ratio or something - or for every Solomon with his 200 wives, 199 guys went without? If the answer is that there was a 5:1 ratio (or something like that) of women to men, I guess those guys just lucked out being able to live in those days. Seriously though, I think you could make an apology for every strange passage in the OT. While that would border on speculation and probably not bring comfort to the logical mind, it would enable a believer to at least tie the entire work (the Bible) together in some cohesive manner. For instance, explanations need to be made for where those people in "the land of Nod" came from, or just how Noah did get all of those animals together, and so forth. It would be a good challenge for a Christian writer to come up with plausible explanations for every nook and cranny of scripture. In the case of the Israelites being given an extra day to fight, I've come up with another theory: God put some kind of sattelite over the battlefield, like a giant halogen light, so while it looked like day in the vicinity of the battlefield, no one else on earth noticed the phenomenon. It certainly does seem like the archetypical miracles described in the bible aren't happening today, unless you look at technology/science as sort of a miracle in and of itself. FWIW Andy FWIW Andy