Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Do You Believe In God ?

What region of the country are you from? Just curious.

He loved me first.

Why, God?

"The first part of this question is based on a false premise. People who express those words are essentially suggesting (or saying outright) that God must meet their own criteria of goodness. But who are they to set standards for God? When did they become the moral center of the universe?"

https://outreachmagazine.com/features/25080-god-prevent-suffering.html

Stuart Hamblin, "How Big Is God."

West

Surely, we are not that hopeless that we can't have a framework of what constitutes goodness and what constitutes badness or what's right and what's wrong. We are not that incapable and submissive.

You can always find somebody with some credentials that have some crazy ideas.

We are told that it is an all loving God, yet we see from those same people the constantly begging and pleading for his mercy.

And is good an absolute or is it subjective? To be clear I mean as an idea not circumstantially.

More than one family has lost a child, and found Faith.

He works in strange, and mysterious ways.

Me too, but something created that.

I once knew a woman who's boyfriend was abusing her. I mean serious mental and physical abuse. I asked here why she didn't leave him. She said, "Because he loves me. And I'm also afraid of what he might do to me if I leave."

That is pretty much the relationship Christianity sets up between God and Man.

Fortunately, there is Good News. God doesn't really exist and you can just stop believing and that abusive relationship with your imaginary monster in the sky. I was raised to believe, but when I got older I put away such childish beliefs and have never been happier.

Ok so lets forget the doc. Look at your hand as it moves or your feet, knee or pretty much any part of your body. Now open a book and check out how a digestive system or reproductive system works, lungs that take in oxygen and deliver it to the blood so it can travel to the muscles, brain and every part of the body. Vision, hearing, taste, smell and I could go on and on. So I'll ask you is there a design?
Seriously, IS THERE A DESIGN? Answer that one question and we can talk.

Not quite sure on that one. I do think that a society can learn and over time establish a set of values, perhaps those values need to be "tweaked" occasionally. I certainly don't think that we should adopt an attitude that we are incapable of developing a framework of what's right and wrong...even if we have to draw on some principles laid down in the Bible to do that.

Hank, "I saw the Light."

Pain and suffering and injustice in the world is an emotional and powerful and moving argument, especially, when you hear people make it based upon their own personal experience. I get it. I understand...the best I can...the emotions and the questions in light of the awfulness of their circumstances.

Pain and suffering and injustice in the world has been a problem for many in having and/or maintaining faith in God. Many people have stepped back from God because of their inability to reconcile a good and loving God with the pain and suffering and injustice in the world.

Some people leverage their own pain and suffering and injustice in the world to argue against the existence of a good and loving God. Again, I get it ~ I understand...the best I can...the emotions and the questions in light of the awfulness of their circumstances. But some people commandeer other people’s pain and suffering and injustice to build their own case against a good and loving God. Even though pain and suffering and injustice in the world...for many people...actually ends up being a path which leads to God. Extraordinary pain and suffering and injustice in the world often leads to extraordinary trust and confidence in God.

If anyone had a reason to stop believing in a good and loving God because of pain and suffering and injustice in the world, it was Jesus. And His early followers were treated incredibly unjustly…they were persecuted for believing something, many were tortured and killed…and yet they embraced God. For those who struggle with a good and loving God based upon the pain and suffering and injustice in the world, especially those who commandeer other people’s pain and suffering and injustice to build their own case against a good and loving God, realize the men and women who bring us the story of Jesus saw pain and suffering that most of us can’t imagine, and many of them experienced pain and suffering that most of us can’t imagine, and yet they embraced God. And Jesus knows firsthand about pain and suffering and injustice in the world by coming here in the flesh and being on the receiving end of it Himself.

When sin entered the world, it held the door open for sorrow, death, illness, despair, and every other awful thing. They snuck in right behind sin. And sin wreaks havoc in the world. Pain and suffering and injustice in the world are part of the global consequences of sin in the world. That is the brutal fact. The presence of sin in the world is why these things happen. It’s not fair, and it takes things out of our control. I understand why you, or anybody else struggles with it. I struggle with it. But there it is.

Don, I don't think you can look at a hand and foot and say there was definitely a design. You might look at it and say that it is so complex and draw an inference that it must have been designed. But we must also determine whether there is evidence with archaeology of a gradual refining of the complexity of the hand and foot. If there is, we must determine if there is a theory for that gradual refining. We then try to disprove that theory of the gradual refining, if we can.

The nerve that controls your larynx goes all the way down to your heart and then back up to your neck. Does the same in a Giraffe. Inexplicable if it was "intelligently" designed. But evolution explains it as modification from previous creatures where that made sense.

Humans teeth are typically too big for their jaws. This is why so many people have crooked teeth, get braces and have their wisdom teeth pulled out. Inexplicable if it was "intelligently" designed. But it is explained by evolution that when the genes that controlled our jaw size and our teeth size are different and they didn't quite evolve perfectly together when our jaw size diminished.

Humans have poor sinus drainage. That is why we always get so stuffed up when we have a cold. Animals with snouts don't have this problem, their sinus cavities drain just fine. Bad design for Humans. But this is explained by evolution that when we (or our ancestors) lost our snouts the sinuses repositioned themselves, but didn't really reconfigure themselves, in a way where they would drain well. If this was designed, it certainly wasn't from an "intelligent" designer.