Can anybody refute this from Richard Dawkins?

[Bradski]

So, those whack-jobs blowing themselves up are not getting their marching orders from God. The point is to give of oneself, nsh, I think.
So, I imagine that is why you might be worried about others - people doing bad stuff thinking it is good.

And the Jews got their orders from…? God? And therefore hacking children to death becomes…good?

Well then, yes. I am worried about ‘people doing bad stuff thinking it is good’.

 

[Bradski]

I will, sometime this weekend.

Done.

I think Williams is a good speaker. No notes, well thought out, clear and unambiguous. No weasel words. No prevarication. A vey good presentation.

I made some notes as the talk went on and I’ve just read back thought them. They can be summarised in one sentence: If God says it’s OK, then it’s OK. He actually says that at one point.

‘God cannot order something that is bad, but can order something that would have been bad, if He hadn’t ordered it Himself’.

A further point was that we, as mere mortals, do not know what the implications of not killing innocent women and children would have been. It may have resulted in more deaths. So there must (surely) have been some good come out of this. The ends must have justified the means (perhaps we’ll ignore Catholic teaching on that point).

So consider, not the whole enchilada, but simply one child. A Jewish soldier bursts into a house, slashes and stabs at the child’s mother until the screaming stops, then hacks at the child as it tries to escape. And it’s not like in the movies - one stab and you’re dead. These things take time. It’s surprising how resilient the human body can be.

Williams argument was that some good will come from that act. And it was not evil because God said it was OK.

 

[benhur]

But Dawkins is asking a question by making that statement. Is this really the God in whom you want to believe?

Hi B’

As with surveys, you can ‘slant’ the answers by the way you put the question. Dawkins puts the question with little or no understanding (lack of “sophistication” on the story, or by designed intent) of the alleged fictional story and its main protagonist.

Some read the same fictional story and say God is also loving, long suffering , patient , just, holy, merciful, gracious, not willing that any perish. This from the same story !

Of course Dawkins says we are deluded, but then we quip Dawkins has selective hearing/reading. Both our natures make us biased. One nature drawn to the spiritual nature, the other repulsed by it. Unfortunately the rift is quite understandable.

Blessings

 

[benhur]

Done.

I think Williams is a good speaker. No notes, well thought out, clear and unambiguous. No weasel words. No prevarication. A vey good presentation.

I made some notes as the talk went on and I’ve just read back thought them. They can be summarised in one sentence: If God says it’s OK, then it’s OK. He actually says that at one point.

‘God cannot order something that is bad, but can order something that would have been bad, if He hadn’t ordered it Himself’.

A further point was that we, as mere mortals, do not know what the implications of not killing innocent women and children would have been. It may have resulted in more deaths. So there must (surely) have been some good come out of this. The ends must have justified the means (perhaps we’ll ignore Catholic teaching on that point).

So consider, not the whole enchilada, but simply one child. A Jewish soldier bursts into a house, slashes and stabs at the child’s mother until the screaming stops, then hacks at the child as it tries to escape. And it’s not like in the movies - one stab and you’re dead. These things take time. It’s surprising how resilient the human body can be.

Williams argument was that some good will come from that act. And it was not evil because God said it was OK.

Glad you had time.

That is partly what he said. One needs authority yes and proper context. The law authorizes one to kill in self defense, or in protecting others(police) or in combat(military). So now the killing , which in general is bad/evil/against the law, is not .Remember also he points out God gave ample warnings, over a long period of time, with signs and wonders, and He did save some (they had a choice, to heed the warnings). Also, in the story, if people are really innocent, even children, God judges them justly in the afterlife, and have eternity to be in paradise. No “energy/matter” is “lost” or wasted, a ‘happy ending/beginning’ for them.

Glad you had time to watch and had charitable words on the presentation.

Blessings

 

[Frankenfurter]

Ye gods and little fishes. Isn’t this what I’ve already said? Isn’t this what Dawkins is implying? Dawkins knows it didn’t happen. And yes, as far as I am concerned it is exactly as you said: a story meant to put the fear of God into people. Literally.

But Dawkins is asking a question by making that statement. Is this really the God in whom you want to believe? And he is horrified that a lot of people say: Yes.

I don’t expect someone not of the faith to understand what I am going to say next, but I will say it anyway. Scripture cannot be interpreted one piece at a time. It must be looked at in its whole at all times. This takes a long time and patience, and many not of the faith have never spent the time since they dismiss it too soon. One of the key Catholic concepts of interpreting scripture is that you cannot look at the Old Testament without also the New at the same time. We know that God is a person. A person who loves peace, a person who is love and truth itself and a person who loves his children and who loves our children, a person who would sacrifice himself for his children. To cast God as a child killing monster is to ignore the direct interaction and knowledge of God that we have. So we already know that God is NOT this monster. When we go back to interpret OT, we look at it while still knowing what we do from the NT.

One of the hardest things for folks outside the faith to understand when they look at Scripture is the thousands of years in between the OT and the NT. The OT is in the Bronze age. You have to get your Bronze age hat on and try to understand how life was like back then. Being smoted by the sword, and being enslaved, being chopped up, living in fear, hey man, that was life back then. That is no easy jump to make and requires significant effort for us to comprehend from today’s standard. For most, it is better to stick with the NT which is not so distant and is harder to misinterpret.

Our barbaric and tribal ancestors were living the best they knew how and trying with what they had. There were man-made Gods all over the place ordering one tribe to kill another because we had yet to know the one God. We were making up Gods all over the place just to have more violence and orgies and war and genocide. We were paranoid and lived in fear.

God knew that he needed to show us that there was only one God and that he was to bring us out of a culture of fear, retaliation and revenge, into a culture of truth, love and peace. How he chose to do that was his choice. Perhaps there was no other way.

 

[Bradski]

The law authorizes one to kill in self defense, or in protecting others(police) or in combat(military). So now the killing , which in general is bad/evil/against the law, is not .Remember also he points out God gave ample warnings, over a long period of time, with signs and wonders, and He did save some…

God orders genocide to protect someone? He needs women and children killed ‘in self defence’? Are we talking about the same omnipotent God? Seriously?

And He gave ample warnings over a long period of time? Maybe you (and Williams) have forgotten that God is omniscient. He KNEW that warnings would do no good. He KNEW what the outcome would be. What on earth is the point of issuing a warning if you KNOW it’s going to be ignored?

Like hacking children to death is the best way to solve a problem for someone who is omnipotent. It makes zero sense whether you are a Christian or an atheist. None. Dawkins doesn’t believe it. Neither do I. But some people do.

 

[Bobby_Jim]

This line of reasoning reflects a couple of possible assumptions

1. Religious people have never read the Bible carefully and don’t know that stuff is there, and will be shocked
2. Religious people have read the Bible carefully and are not bothered by it, and thus must themselves be horrible people and/or the God they worship is really horrible

#1 reminds me of a teenager thinking they’ve discovered some profound truth and they’re really gonna stick it to their parents or teachers with it - like the kiddies reading Ayn Rand or Nietzsche.

as for #2, if religious people DO believe there’s nothing shocking or wrong with the killing and the violence and all, then what is the point of making this argument? All it does is allow the anti-religious person to feel all puffed up and morally superior. Which I guess has its value to some people, but is rather in contrast to the values of my religion, as well as what I take as the general themes of both the Old and New Testaments.

Anyhow, I think it is all a product of crass literalism by self-appointed critics who have no particular understanding of the cultures or literary genres to which these works belong. Dawkins and the modern snarky new-atheists commenting on scripture carries about as much weight as me commenting on Dawkins’ brand of evolutionary psychology (which to me sounds like just-so stories, but hey my PhD is in a different field).

It’s one thing to read the text and project your own culture and values on it - anyone can do that. The value that scholars of ancient literature bring is that they become intimately familiar with the ancient cultures through reading a variety of the other contemporary texts in the original languages. And the culture of the ancient Near East is as foreign to us as if it were Klingon. The exegeses that we have of scripture come from centuries of critical scholarship, including ancient exegeses from scholars who were much closer, culturally, to the ancient Near East. The challenge however is that exegesis doesn’t fit our increasingly sound-bite mentality. The age of Twitter is much more suitable for pithy 140-character zingers, than for anything that takes some careful thought and consideration.

 

[Bradski]

The exegeses that we have of scripture come from centuries of critical scholarship, including ancient exegeses from scholars who were much closer, culturally, to the ancient Near East.

Let me get this right. You are saying it was OK back then. Maybe not today, but, hey, ancient cultures and all. Who are we to say, with our oh-so-modern sensibilities, that putting women and children to the sword was evil a couple of thousand years ago.

So God could have ordered it then, but times change. He wouldn’t do it now (as if God adjusts His plans according to contemporary mores). So now, as well as the ends justifying the means we also have a cultural, temporal and moral relativism.

 

[Bobby_Jim]

Let me get this right. You are saying it was OK back then. Maybe not today, but, hey, ancient cultures and all. Who are we to say, with our oh-so-modern sensibilities, that putting women and children to the sword was evil a couple of thousand years ago.

So God could have ordered it then, but times change. He wouldn’t do it now (as if God adjusts His plans according to contemporary mores). So now, as well as the ends justifying the means we also have a cultural, temporal and moral relativism.

No, that’s not what I’m saying.

 

[Bradski]

No, that’s not what I’m saying.

There’s something of a pregnant pause here while we wait for you to clarify what you did say. Or at least what you meant to say.

We can cut to the quick if you like. I can simply ask you if the killing of women and children is evil or not. Williams thinks it is. Unless God commands it. In which case, hacking children to death is…good?

I see no other options.

 

[Bobby_Jim]

There’s something of a pregnant pause here while we wait for you to clarify what you did say. Or at least what you meant to say.

We can cut to the quick if you like. I can simply ask you if the killing of women and children is evil or not. Williams thinks it is. Unless God commands it. In which case, hacking children to death is…good?

I see no other options.

What I have written, I have written. If you put words into my mouth, why is it my job to respond. I have no idea who William is, nor am I going to read the thread to find out what your conversation is with him. However, you make my point very well, if inadvertently. If you, who speak the same language as I, living in the same era, fail to understand the point I was trying to convey, and instead claim I said a bunch of distorted rubbish about how killing is ok, then how much easier is it to project distorted rubbish onto another culture from 2500 years ago.

I will say however, for those of us who think we are so far beyond that mentality, that the kings and generals of this age have now the capability to slaughter hundreds of millions of innocents in a matter of minutes, and detailed strategies for putting that into action should they feel the need arise. We have evolved beyond the sword, but not beyond the human instincts that lead to wars and mass slaughter of innocents. There are those who would say that our own actions 70 years ago this August in which greater than a hundred thousand non-combatants were killed were justifiable in the eyes of man. There are some who would even say it was justifiable in the eyes of God. 2500 years hence, when our descendants read the history of our wars, are they going to believe that our God compelled us to slaughter those innocents? If we must project our culture on the Bible, try not just projecting our white-washed versions of how gentle and advanced we think we are, but how we really are.

In fact I would guess the wars and killing in the ancient world were in fact complex historical events, much as our wars and killing are complex historical events. Scribes and writers in a later age, much beyond the actual events, wrote versions in which they ascribed actions and motives within these events to God, to make a theological point to their audience. It’s not to say the point is unknowable to us, nor am I going to spell it out here. But it takes some understanding of the life and times and attitudes of those people. Which by and large you don’t know if you’re just a casual reader who picks up the Bible and reads it cover to cover as if it were Harry Potter. Heck, the casual reader who picks up Moby Dick doesn’t even get most of what it’s really about, and that was written in modern English less than 200 years ago.

 

[benhur]

God orders genocide to protect someone? He needs women and children killed ‘in self defence’?

I gave three contexts/scenarios as an example of how context is everything. Not sure why you got hung up on "self defense’’. The context of the Amalekites has its own story. If you leave out the story the claim that God was "bad 'in it is easy. Just like leave out the story behind Hiroshima so one can just say America was evil, killing innocent women and children, then doing it again at Nagasaki. Why would anyone want to give allegiance to an evil America ? Cherry picking the story is anyone’s choice.

And He gave ample warnings over a long period of time? Maybe you (and Williams) have forgotten that God is omniscient. He KNEW that warnings would do no good.

You remind me of my wife when "tired’ from kids would say what good does it do to warn kids ,correct them, punish them, for they are not going to listen, and does no good. You miss the point of the warning, that there are consequences to breaking ‘laws’. You are really asking that there be none. its all in the ‘story’.

What on earth is the point of issuing a warning if you KNOW it’s going to be ignored?

So why have any laws, police, courts, jails, because for sure the bad guys, the fools , heed no consequence/warnings? So when people offer their own children in sacrifice and promote other evils, let them be ? Again would you live next to an ‘evil’ neighbor(s),community, by choice ? Should the lion ignore the law and kill only the strong ? Would there not be consequences of going against the law (of natural selection,survival of the fittest, killing the weak and sick first) ?

Like hacking children to death is the best way to solve a problem for someone who is omnipotent. It makes zero sense whether you are a Christian or an atheist. None. Dawkins doesn’t believe it. Neither do I. But some people do.

Again you have limited knowledge of their existence, of what would have happened otherwise ,and what happened because of, and thereafter . Limited, by choice. The protagonist of the bible is "bad’ by your count, as cruel as mother nature herself, and her natural selection. But then to many (well maybe some Christians) God invented/uses such cruel mother nature/evolution/natural selection. Fits, a cruel fictional God invents the real, cruel natural selection.

Blessings

 

[Bradski]

But it takes some understanding of the life and times and attitudes of those people.

It seems you and Ben are talking about something completely different to me. This wasn’t a war, one nation against another. This was, specifically, God ordering the slaughter of women and children.

You have two choices as I see it. Firstly you say that this didn’t happen. Just a story to make people fear God. It can’t have happened because it is evil. And an omnipotent God wouldn’t have to get someone else to punish anyone. Let alone innocent children. At worst, the Jews did massacre women and children and someone wrote that it was ordered by God. The old ‘I was only following orders’ excuse. Waaaay too easy seeing that happening.

Secondly, and this one is a problem, you admit that it did happen on God’s command and for whatever reason God had, hacking women and children was a good thing to do. It cannot have been anything else because God cannot command something evil. God is not likely to come up with a second best option, so this was the best one.

I can’t believe that you are going for option 2. I really can’t.

 

[Peter_Plato]

God orders genocide to protect someone? He needs women and children killed ‘in self defence’? Are we talking about the same omnipotent God? Seriously?

And He gave ample warnings over a long period of time? Maybe you (and Williams) have forgotten that God is omniscient. He KNEW that warnings would do no good. He KNEW what the outcome would be. What on earth is the point of issuing a warning if you KNOW it’s going to be ignored?

Like hacking children to death is the best way to solve a problem for someone who is omnipotent. It makes zero sense whether you are a Christian or an atheist. None. Dawkins doesn’t believe it. Neither do I. But some people do.

I think you are completely missing the argument that Williams proposed. I have watched several of his presentations so perhaps just the correct amount of emphasis may not have been put into this one.

He does, in another talk, place more emphasis on the situation of the two jet fighter pilots who were scrambled after the first two planes hit the Twin Towers on 9/11. Those two pilots had made up their minds that should another airliner have been hijacked (the fourth one that crashed) they would have flown their own jets into the airliner – one taking the nose, the other the tail. Their own fighter jets were not armed with air to air missiles, which necessitated using their own planes as missiles.

Now their intention was to take out the airliner so it couldn’t be flown into another building. Clearly, there were innocent men, women and children on board but the intention of the pilots was not to kill them but to prevent greater numbers of deaths had the plane been flown into another building.

Now you might argue, as you do in post #62, that the argument is merely one of ends justifying any means, but the argument could really be one of choosing the lesser of two evils – the principle of double effect.

The two fighter pilots, at some point, would have been placed into the position of having to act and if they didn’t take a specific action the consequences of not doing so would have been, as far as they could ascertain, worse than not acting. They would have been compelled to act by the situation and because of the constraints of the situation since not taking direct action would reasonably have been expected to bring about a much worse result.

Now, I am taking WIlliam’s argument to be as follows…

If the two fighter pilots – given the limitations of human knowledge and foresight – could reasonably be said to have acted morally if they had chosen to destroy the plane and kill innocents on board in order to save a larger number of innocents on the ground, then a fortiori, God with perfect knowledge of the future would be in a much stronger position to determine when direct action was required to stave off a much greater evil by ordering the commission of an interceding lesser evil. So, your portraying the argument as merely one of the ends justifying the means is incorrect.

Williams is arguing that the salient feature that CANNOT simply be dismissed in the assessment of the moral rightness of God-commanded acts in the OT is that the character of God in the OT is as the omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent Creator of the universe, NOT merely some human-like and fallible moral agent. This is what Dawkins conveniently forgets when he launches his critique as if the God who ordered the actions is not any more competent, moral or knowing than any other human moral agent. This is why his argument fails, actually.

God would have – given his omniscience, omnipotence and omnibenevolence – perfect knowledge of the consequences of all human actions from that point in history forward through all time. Given also that God respects the moral autonomy of human agency, there could very well be times when certain specific actions must be carried out by human agents to prevent the fallout of the resulting series of consequent effects. God would be perfectly within his rights as the supreme moral authority to command certain acts because he and he alone is in the required position to make such decisions – humans are not.

This is not to say – anticipating your objection – that anytime some individual or group presumes to be carrying out the command of God that they are legitimately doing so; what it does mean is that if God truly did issue a certain command, human agents do not have access to the kind of privileged knowledge required to make an adequate moral assessment with regard to the correctness of the command.

We do not have perfect knowledge of the future, nor do we have any certain sense of ultimate moral goods nor about which actions will guarantee or forever defeat the realization of crucial moral outcomes. God would, however.

That means that if God really did issue the commands in the Old Testament, Dawkins is in no position to question their morality. He can’t even claim that the apparent immorality of the commands necessarily entails that they are immoral because if they were, indeed, issued by the omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent God of the universe he would be in a far better position to decide upon their moral rightness than Dawkins could ever possibly be.

Neither can he argue that the acts were immoral and therefore they could not have been commanded by God because he is not in the position to know whether or not they were immoral to begin with – if they were, indeed, commanded by the omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God.

Oh, sure, Dawkins can go on about the “appearance” of immorality, just as he can go on about the “appearance” of design, but that is as far as he can logically go.

 

[Bradski]

I did watch the jets v airliner segment.

Firstly, it is a means to an end. On the assumption that killing someone will prevent greater evil, it is the very definition of a means to an end.

Secondly, the analogy is not apt. It was take the plane out or nothing. A more accurate analogy would be to force the plane to land, then hack everyone to death as a punishment for things that a handful of passengers might have been going to do.

Thirdly, God cannot order something evil. People are therefore arguing that hacking women and children to death was a good thing.

Fourth, God is omnipotent. People are arguing that He decided that this specific punishment was the best option. Really?

Fifth, God is omniscient. He always knew what the outcome was going to be. But He warned them? Really? Diddn’t the children listen to Him? Didn’t they heed the warnings? Seems like the sins of the father were visited upon them. People are arguing that that is justice.

Looks like you’re an Option 2 sort of guy as well. Well, so be it…

 

[Peter_Plato]

I did watch the jets v airliner segment.

Firstly, it is a means to an end. On the assumption that killing someone will prevent greater evil, it is the very definition of a means to an end.

Well, every choice we could ever possibly make is a “means to an end.” When do you ever act without some end in mind?

The point here is that when only two possible outcomes exist there may, in the end, be no choice but to choose the least evil one.

The problem with our position within time is that we do not have access to where things will end up in the future. If God is eternal and omniscient then his view of things is not limited by the constraints which inevitably make our choices short-sighted.

Now, given the existence of God and the truth of Judeo-Christianity, God’s intervening in history to the level exhibited by events in the Testaments shows that God is much more prone to permitting human choices to play out in history, but that does not preclude him from intervening at critical junctures, if huge implications down through all human history are at stake.

Can we, from our perspective within the narrative, have any certainty whatsoever with regard to assessing when some definitive action needs to be taken?

That difference in perspective is of enormous significance with regard to moral decisions.

William’s example of a driver choosing to pass another vehicle near the crest of a hill makes this point. If you are the driver of the vehicle making the decision to pass you have no way of knowing for certain what is coming at you from over the hill, so making a choice to pass, for you, is unnecessary and potentially tragic. However, if a trusty observer in a helicopter above you reports that there is no oncoming vehicle and it is safe to pass, that knowledge makes all the difference.

WIth God, given his omniscience and eternality, the decision to carry out any specific action would necessarily be better made from his perspective. You could not possibly know the best option nor all the potential outcomes.

 

[Bradski]

So to punish a people, or simply to remove them from the scene, of all the options available to an omnipotent being, it is being argued that the best one i(God wouldn’t got for the second best) included hacking to death women and children.

We can talk of cars passing and means to an end and Hiroshima and cultural blinkers and 9/11 and all of the rest of it, but that statement above, in a lot of people’s opinion, including yours, is correct.

So be it. I’ve said my piece.

 

[Peter_Plato]

Secondly, the analogy is not apt. It was take the plane out or nothing. A more accurate analogy would be to force the plane to land, then hack everyone to death as a punishment for things that a handful of passengers might have been going to do.

Here, you are just begging the question. From your perspective the analogy is not apt, but you were not the one making the call. If the analogy was apt from God’s perspective – and it was his command that is in question, not yours – then whether or not you decide the analogy is apt is quite irrelevant.

Thirdly, God cannot order something evil. People are therefore arguing that hacking women and children to death was a good thing.

“Good,” when faced with a choice of the lesser of two evils is a relative thing. That was another of Williams’ points. When a crazed masochist cuts off the leg of a victim that is not “good.” When a skilled surgeon cuts off the leg of a cancer patient to save that person’s life, the same act is “good” in a qualified sense.

Only God would be in the position to judge whether the deaths of those women and children at that moment was “evil” in the sense of the masochist cutting the leg off an innocent victim was, or “necessary” in the sense of a surgeon doing so.

Your point begs the question again, because if it truly was the omniscient, omnibenevolent, eternal God who issued the command then his reasons for doing so would far, far exceed any objections you, a limited, shortsighted human being could possibly come up with.

Fourth, God is omnipotent. People are arguing that He decided that this specific punishment was the best option. Really?

Again, if the omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God issued the command, then your “Really?” is simply empty rhetoric since it is basically asking your fellow human beings with little in the way of insight as to why God would issue such a command to justify his command. I freely admit I have no special insight into why he would do so, but the point isn’t whether WE can justify what God did, but whether God can.

Fifth, God is omniscient. He always knew what the outcome was going to be. But He warned them? Really? Diddn’t the children listen to Him? Didn’t they heed the warnings? Seems like the sins of the father were visited upon them. People are arguing that that is justice.

Looks like you’re an Option 2 sort of guy as well. Well, so be it…

Yes, he knew what the outcome was going to be and was fully in control of all the repercussions of that outcome, which is to say God is omniscient and omnipotent. If he has the ways and means to create a universe ex nihilo and raise children of Abraham from stones, then he has the ways and means to fully control what the outcome of the command was going to be.

Whether “the sins of the father” were visited upon them is not out of line with the entire OT narrative since the sin of Adam was “visited” upon all of humanity.

Of course, you don’t see that as justice, either; but then you don’t know fully what the effects of evil choices really are AND, in fact, you probably deny that evil has very much of an impact at all beyond immediate physical or emotional suffering.

Which brings the issue back to why God would issue such a command in the first place. Answering that question with the presumption that it was necessarily just a bad command that he shouldn’t have issued in the first place doesn’t get us any closer to understanding why God might have done so to begin with, does it?

Clearly, the lives of seemingly insignificant – at the time – persons, have made huge differences down through history. I am thinking of Muhammad, Genghis Khan, Hitler and Stalin, to note just a few. Now, also recall that a very critical aspect of Judaism was the promise to Abraham and to the Israelites of a future king, a son of David whose reign would be an eternal one. Since the people of Israel were destined to be the people in whose midst Christ was to be born and the eternal destinies of many would hang in the balance, I would suggest that the real reason for the command of God regarding the Canaanites was ultimately the protection of the mission of the most significant person in history, Jesus Christ which – given how tenuous was the survival of the Israelites in Canaan – was just barely safeguarded.

Grasping this connection at all is tied to a number of much deeper and more profound questions –impinging on the nature of what it means to be human, of the relationship of human beings to the divine, the nature of good and evil and a number of other very important questions – which may not appear to be at all very significant to those who see human beings as just trousered apes and history as so much sound and fury signifying nothing.

 

[Aloysium]

. . . So be it. I’ve said my piece.

Noted.

The context in which I consider your opinion includes certain obvious realities of our human nature:

• We do not even understand ourselves, let alone the hearts of all men.
• Planning a course of action in the human sphere is most difficult, even when we attempt to foreseeing the simplest short-term consequences of our decisions.
• We are not motivated by infinite love.

Human existence is what it is.
There are various ways in which it has been understood, reflected in the major religions of the world.
It may sound offensve, but the truth is that secularism offers us ignorance as the answer and solution.

Sin is a horror that has brought death into the world.
The cure lies in the sacrifice of the Son of God.

This could have been all over and done with in the flood, thereby avoiding all future suffering.
But then, none of all this would exist; how precious are your kids and loved ones.

We can overcome this, and it has been made very simple.

 

[eddie_too]

atheists cannot understand the Will or the Word of God.

faith is a pre-requisite for the gaining of knowledge and understanding of the Divine Mysteries.

for a rather poor analogy, explaining God, His Will or His Word to an atheist is like trying to explain color or a definite color, for example red, to a person born blind.

imagine trying to explain the difference between red and blue to a person born blind.