Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Sunday's religious debate....death....

God is bound, in a very real respect, to the laws of justice, even though he is their author. That's because he may not contradict himself, and at the same time he must be perfectly just. Therefore it is possible for creations which he loves, due to their having free will, to fall afoul of those laws and to reap the consequences of doing so. The debt to the king represents the justice which is due to sinners. The payment of the debt represents God giving his only begotten son over to torturers and executioners in exchange for your being loosed from the trouble you've gotten yourself into vis-a-vis God's just laws. He cannot simply say that in this case, because he loves you, he will disregard his own just laws. Someone must pay the debt that has been incurred. And the debt is so great that only the ignominious death of the man/God on the cross will suffice.

Like a person like me - can believe in a world where nothing ever died, where every animal ate vegitables, where the world was created in six days, where the fossil record is meaningless, where a guy built a boat and put every earthly species on it etc. etc. etc.

I can't do it!

I tried, for decades to believe - it just won't happen.

I can't suspend my logical mind - and the answers I get, from even the best intentioned people - don't come close to allowing me to believe.

A man like you? We are both certified public school social studies teachers. Are you that much smarter than I am?

PS I find no contradiction between evolution, the fossil record, etc., and the truths revealed in sacred scripture.

Before you had watched a television or used electricity to turn on your lights, would you have believed that such things could ever be possible? Or believe that man could build a contraption that could fly like a bird? Or send men to and from the moon? Or come up with a device that would restore a mans' hearing? How about mahing a bomb from hydrogen? Or splitting atoms, so tiny that they can not be seen?

Believing God is easy; it's man that I have trouble with.

I'm not saying I'm smarter than any other man - BUT, I'm a man who NEEDS observable truth, logic, deductive reasoning and most of all - proof - or something close to it - before I can believe in ANYTHING.

The onus of proof, to me, is in the hands of the believers - to prove there IS a God.

I can't prove there ISN'T one, but I can't - nor can anyone else - prove there is no Jupiter, no Mars, no Venus, no Aphrodite, no Poseidon, no Ra, No Woden, no Thor, no Frigg, no Shiva, no Vishnu, no Krishna, no Manitou, No Jaguar-God no "Creator", and no "God".

What do all these names have in common?

Generations upon generations of people, by the MILLIONS - didn't just "believe" in these Gods - but as Barak would say -they "KNEW" these Gods existed!

So - to me, to my mind, absent proof - that any one of these beings is MORE believable than any of the others - I choose to reject them ALL.

In truth - I'm only rejecting ONE more - than most people on this list. EVERYONE is an atheist - when it comes to OTHER man's religions - if it's different from their own!

All faiths KNOW that theirs is the "ONE TRUTH" - and all the other religions in the world - are FALSE.

I reject them, along with leprechauns, fairies, ghosts, demons, angels, spirits, devils, poltergists, doppelgangers, Santa Claus, trolls, gremlins, pixies and the like.

I submit that the proof of the existence of ANY of the gods or supernatural beings I mentioned - is EXACTLY the same.

In other words - ZERO!

Unless some one can demonstrate a LOGICAL reason to believe in one over the other - I'll put "God" "Thor" "Shiva" and the "Tooth Fairy" in the same category.

Some people - can believe in - what they WANT to be true.

I can not.


PS - Hawkeye - Why would a lion evolve looking the way it did - if it ate only plants - as the Bible says is true? Please!Secondly - for evolution to happen - you need death - something the Bible says didn't exist until Adam.Please! The Bible is in TOTAL contradiction to the fossil record - look up the order of events outlined in the book of Genesis.

With respect back at ya, , No Sir. My faith is based on a written document which I can see quite clearly and that document is truth. Christ said for God to sanctify us through his truth, and that his word is truth. I take that as fact because he said so. Nothing blind about believing the Bible. They even have the Bible in Braille.

BCBrian makes a good point. Why the Bible rather than the Koran or any other form of scripture? After all, even the bible lifts whole cloth from other religious texts.

http://www.pocm.info/

You believe the Bible is the One True Book. Based on reading the Bible.

In the same manner that an Muslim believes in Allah and Islam, from reading the Koran. What's the difference?

Good question, ... and what's the deal with these bears??

Ridiculous!

It would help if you'd provide citations. Hard to refute something if you don't provide your source, chapter/verse.

Any UFO (unidentified flying object) can't be explained, once it is, it becomes an IFO (identified flying object).

Because the Koran turns people into murderous fanatics, and the Bible has changed my life in ways only God and I know. (and even I only know what he has revealed to me.) The apostle Paul nailed it pretty good when he said this, "Who was before a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious:" (1Tim 1:13)

Coupled with, "Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new." (2Cor 5:17)

By their fruits, ye shall know them. The Bible bears good fruit in men's lives as they yield to the Lord. The Koran bears rotten fruit.

And the Bible doesn't have it's own fair share of murderous fanatics?

Oh boy, here we go..........

Maybe the fossil record is wrong. It was put together by a man.

Such as?

Yep, man laid all those myriad layers of sediment over billions of years..... oh, wait.....

Rwandan Hutus, for starters.....

Who said it was over billions of years? Maybe it was as a result of a monsterous universal flood, and the sediment that settled as a reult of that cataclismic event. You don't know, and neither do the scientists. All they can do is speculate.

Right.... 'cause radio carbon dating is completely false, evidence of pollen records are wrong, the absolute LACK of evidence of any cataclysmic global flood is not glaring, the LACK of water available to create such an event is not glaring......

Yep, all that just isn't there.....

Just like the history of the flood parable didn't pre-exist the Old Testament by at least a thousand years and hasn't been tied directly to a Black Sea flood that did destroy an entire culture...... and from which flowed the parable as a record of THEIR "world" being destroyed.....

Right......

So the Bible told the government in Rwanda to kill the Hutus. The Bible doesn't sanction that. Sure in the Old Testament, God had the nation of Israel go into the land of Canaan and lay waste, but that land belonged to THEM.

Islam commands and condones the mass killing of Jews and Christians. The Bible does NOT condone the killing of Muslims. The Bible says we preach to them, and if they turn, good. And if they don't, God will deal with them in his time.

And all that passes as "Christianity" in this world is certainly not Christian, by any stretch of the imagination.