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arte
Guest
Hi soulfree,
I’ve tried to send you a private message but it was blocked. If you are still on the CAF, can you please unblock your private message reception.
God bless you soulfree,
Arte
- Status
I’ve tried to send you a private message but it was blocked. If you are still on the CAF, can you please unblock your private message reception.
God bless you soulfree,
Arte
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Tomdstone
Guest
Job had his sons and daughters killed, and was struck with a very grievous ulcer, from the sole of the foot even to the top of his head. It seems odd that God would make a deal with Satan to test Job by this horrible suffering. Job’s servants didn’t do anything wrong that I can see, and yet they were killed because of a deal between God and Satan. In the best of all worlds, would God do this?
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tonyrey
Guest
Only Fundamentalists believe every interpretation of events in the Old Testament is infallible. Jesus made it quite clear that He rejected Satan. He also said “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof”, implying that misfortunes are inevitable.
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Aloysium
Guest
The OT and NT arre consistent in their revelation of God as Love. Interpretations that are not in line with this truth are wrong.
So, what about Job?:
God is Love, Truth, Beauty and Goodness.
The wages of sin is death. Separating ourselves from God has dire consequences and reparation has to be made.
Jesus has done this for all of us that we, as eternal beings, may find the fullness of life in joyous communion with Him in God.
God is the Creator of all that is, and ultimately it all belongs to Him.
Everything that Job loves is from God. Everything that Job has is transient.
Even Satan, who is anti-love and hates God, works in the service of God.
People try to convince Job that his misfortunes are a punishment, inflicted by God (not unlike assorted posters here).
Although initially self-righteous, Job does not sin.
Satan was permitted to do evil that a greater good be actualized through Job’s faith.
In spite of their speaking badly about Job and God, Job prays for his friends and offers a sacrifice for their sin, pointing to the eventual one true sacrifice of the Word himself.
Walking with God, more is given Job in this world as it will be in the next.
If you are considering the goodness of this world, remember that:
So, what about Job?:
God is Love, Truth, Beauty and Goodness.
The wages of sin is death. Separating ourselves from God has dire consequences and reparation has to be made.
Jesus has done this for all of us that we, as eternal beings, may find the fullness of life in joyous communion with Him in God.
God is the Creator of all that is, and ultimately it all belongs to Him.
Everything that Job loves is from God. Everything that Job has is transient.
Even Satan, who is anti-love and hates God, works in the service of God.
People try to convince Job that his misfortunes are a punishment, inflicted by God (not unlike assorted posters here).
Although initially self-righteous, Job does not sin.
Satan was permitted to do evil that a greater good be actualized through Job’s faith.
In spite of their speaking badly about Job and God, Job prays for his friends and offers a sacrifice for their sin, pointing to the eventual one true sacrifice of the Word himself.
Walking with God, more is given Job in this world as it will be in the next.
If you are considering the goodness of this world, remember that:
- we are free
- we can give of ourselves
- we can love, and
- in doing so, we join with all creation in praise of He who is Love Itself.
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Tomdstone
Guest
Do you believe in the Holy Scriptures and the Book of Job, or do you think it is a fairy tale? The Book of Job clearly describes a deal that God made with Satan to test Job. In the process, God has the children and servants of Job killed. I don’t see why that was fair to the children of Job or to his servants.
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Eric_Hyom
Guest
Before the creation of the universe, was it God’s plan that he should create children in his own image, and love each and every one of us as he loves himself?
Can God love us more than he loves himself?
God gave us the greatest commandment to return God’s love.
The second commandment commands us to love all of God’s children as we love ourselves, a simple and perfect plan.
Sadly we need the freedom to obey these commandments or not, sadly doing things our way gets in the way of perfection. But God has the opportunity to put all things right in a greater good life after death.
So still a perfect plan, God’s will be done.
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tonyrey
Guest
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tonyrey
Guest
An earthly Utopia is a fantasy. Only God is perfect in every respect::
CCC 385 God is infinitely good and all his works are good. Yet no one can escape the experience of suffering or the evils in nature which seem to be linked to** the limitations proper to creatures**: and above all to the question of moral evil.
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Aloysium
Guest
In determining what is fair, as a Catholic, I appeal to a system of morality based on God’s will as has been revealed. We have the ten commandments, distilled into the two given to us by Jesus, that we are to love God completely and each other as ourselves. Since justice belongs to God, who as Love alone can judge, yes it is fair. Given your question, I take it you do not approve.
Job speaks to all who suffer. It consoles and brings us closer to God. It reveals the nature of God and of our relationship with Him. Reading scripture as a dialogue between man and God, Job prepares the way for the revelation of the incarnation, sacrifice and resurrection of our Lord.
A loving God created all of us, Job’s servants and family included. Each of us, each of them exists in relation to Him, in His love.
Eternal beings, we are here but a blink of the eye on our death bed. He will call you and me to Him; we should reflect on the extent to which we will we have grown in the Way that is Christ Himself.
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arte
Guest
It could not have been God’s plan that we would be created in His own image before the creation of the universe. Our human bodies are very fragile and normally do not last more than 100 years. If it was God’s plan to create us in His image, every human being would be physically perfect and live for eternity. I believe He does love each and every one of us as he loves himself so there must be a reason why He created an imperfect universe instead of a perfect universe.
Like a human father, God can love us more than He loves himself. I certainly love my children more than I love myself and would willingly lay down my life for them.
I totally agree with you. To date, we do not see the “perfect plan” part of this Commandment being acted upon throughout the World and you give the reason for this later –** free will.** I am a Returned Catholic and volunteered to teach Education in Faith to children who did not attend a Catholic school. For me it was a win win. I had an in depth knowledge of training people to bring to the party and in return it would bring me up to speed on my Catholic faith. I had to do a lot of studying before every weekly 2 hour lesson. I told my students at the start of the year: “If you forget everything I teach you throughout the coming year but remember this one Commandment from Jesus, the whole World will be a better place. The Commandment is: To love everyone else as you love yourself. If the whole World eventually gets this message into their hearts and acts upon it, we will see an end to war and hatred amongst our fellow man. That’s how important this Commandment is to all of us.” I repeated this before and after every lesson – and of course at the end of the year. By the way, they did very well on everything else as well.
Sadly, it is not just the freedom to obey these commandments or not. However I do agree with you that there are many people who know these commandments but do not obey them. And, there always will be. A large part of the problem is that people in the World live in different cultures and follow different religions. Without wishing to change any cultures or force Christianity upon people, hopefully we could come to some agreement on this 2nd Commandment. I believe most of the major religions have a similar “commandment” or “belief” in their religion. It would never be as perfect as God wants it but hopefully we could get close. **It’s going to take a long time (if we have it) for this to happen. **
By: “God has the opportunity to put all things right in a greater good life after death” are you referring to Heaven and hell?
I will hold my comment on: “So still a perfect plan, God’s will be done” until you answer my above question on Heaven and hell.
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Aloysium
Guest
The mystery of evil is a reality that does not go away.
Evil in life can be denied by appealing to a life after death wherein it would presumably cease to exist.
This is not the case as it has been revealed that there is a hell.
It should be noted that evil exists and not out there but within ourselves. This is truth - we are wicked.
There is a reason why in the mass we plead, “God have mercy; Christ have mercy.”
We know what justice demands.
And, we know that God has made it right, by sacrificing His only Son that we might join Him in Paradise.
The fact remains that we have free will and not all of us will choose this.
Satan certainly did not and thus Hell exists.
We did not choose to be here, but we can choose to be eternally happy; we can choose to be loving.
It seems a pretty good deal to me.
I can see where people who believe themselves to be gods would wish to have the capacity to create or not create themselves. That is not how this works.
I get the impression that the best of all possible worlds for many (unfortunately in Adam, all) of us would be one in which they themselves were god, on their own terms.
Evil in life can be denied by appealing to a life after death wherein it would presumably cease to exist.
This is not the case as it has been revealed that there is a hell.
It should be noted that evil exists and not out there but within ourselves. This is truth - we are wicked.
There is a reason why in the mass we plead, “God have mercy; Christ have mercy.”
We know what justice demands.
And, we know that God has made it right, by sacrificing His only Son that we might join Him in Paradise.
The fact remains that we have free will and not all of us will choose this.
Satan certainly did not and thus Hell exists.
We did not choose to be here, but we can choose to be eternally happy; we can choose to be loving.
It seems a pretty good deal to me.
I can see where people who believe themselves to be gods would wish to have the capacity to create or not create themselves. That is not how this works.
I get the impression that the best of all possible worlds for many (unfortunately in Adam, all) of us would be one in which they themselves were god, on their own terms.
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Eric_Hyom
Guest
If it was a terrible split second choice of risking your own life to save your child, you might well do it. But if someone stole your child’s bike, you wouldn’t risk your life to get the bike back. So what did Jesus die for, I can’t imagine it was for anything petty like the theft of bikes.
When Jesus spent his time on Earth, he would have lived by the greatest commandments; this would have been the greatest way he could respond to each and every situation in his life. But how did Jesus love all his neighbours as he loved himself, Judas who betrayed him, the soldiers who nailed him to the cross? We know that he prayed on the cross, ‘forgive them Father’
I am not sure that any of us deserve salvation by what we have done, we depend on the mercy and forgiveness of Jesus.
None of us can know what sins Jesus died for, none of us can know for sure that we are saved, we just hope and pray, and try and change our ways.
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arte
Guest
An earthly Utopia is not a fantasy but a goal to aim for. Whilst mankind will never be absolutely perfect like God, it is feasible that mankind could get reasonably close to a state of Utopia. If mankind survives say 10 million years or more from now, who knows what kind of life humans will have? I believe God wants us to become as advanced as possible and I do not just mean in technology but also more importantly in morals as well.
I totally agree that God is infinitely good and all his works are good. God created this imperfect universe and us imperfect beings for a good reason. I agree we cannot entirely escape the suffering in nature. This is because our universe is imperfect and we are imperfect. Galaxies collide, stars and planets die and that is just the nature of the imperfect universe we live in. I wouldn’t say it SEEMS to be linked to the limitations proper to creatures as in CCC 385. I would say IT IS linked to the limitations proper to creatures. I disagree that it is linked ABOVE ALL to moral evil. Yes, evil will likely continue to exist even into the far future but I believe it will be very limited by the huge rise in moral good. For us to survive as a species into the far future, we will have had to mitigate to a very large degree the evil that is inherent to our imperfect human nature.
Going back on track to the title of this thread, there must be a reason why God created an imperfect reason. We can only speculate on what that reason is but we will find out for definite when we die. I speculate that the reason why God wants us to experience this imperfect universe is so that we will more fully enjoy the paradise of Heaven. For some reason, living in this imperfect universe is an essential part of our journey to and enjoyment of Heaven.
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Tomdstone
Guest
But you don’t need to have a utopia to prevent a Puerto Rican single mother with four children from being brutally murdered by a drug addict in NYC on her way to one of her three jobs. She was working three jobs to support her four children on her own. Why couldn’t God, who is all Powerful, have restrained or at least deflected the arm of this deranged creep from plunging his knife into this heroic mother and killing her since he needed a few bucks for his fix? Is the brutal murder of this single mother with four children reflective of the best possible situation we can have on earth?
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Eric_Hyom
Guest
Exactly how much would God have to intervene to put all things right, you overlooked the needs of the drug addict. At one time he was a mothers innocent child, possibly with a horrible upbringing, possibly his parents suffered.
The four orphans of this single mother, might well grow up angry and disturbed, suffer depression and turn to drugs and alcohol and crime, that’s what poverty does.
Twenty thousand children die as a result of grinding poverty and preventable disease every single day.
Our idea of justice is horrible, terrorists cause 9.11, our response caused the death of tens of thousands of innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan who had nothing to do with 9.11. Two million people fled from Iraq as refugees, loosing everything they have, we have now caused two million angry people to look for justice, which they will never receive.
God would have to intervene in just about everything we do, in order to put this world right.
Where is our responsibility in all this?
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tonyrey
Guest
Your argument could be made for countless people on this planet. Can you explain how all their suffering and untimely deaths could be prevented?
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Aloysium
Guest
We look at the world and see different things.
Within the context of eternity, we see a disadvantaged mother out of love sacrificing and facing the challenges of uncaring society, that includes all of us folks, to do the best for her kids. Evil comes and steals her life from her and those who love her.
The universe that produced the goodness that shines from her being is possible only if the reality of the evil that took her from us exists as a possibility. That it could and does was made right by God at the foundation of creation. We live in the hope that we will all meet in paradise.
BTW - When you praise her actions and her life, you are loving love.- the first of two commandments given to us by the Word.
Within the context of eternity, we see a disadvantaged mother out of love sacrificing and facing the challenges of uncaring society, that includes all of us folks, to do the best for her kids. Evil comes and steals her life from her and those who love her.
The universe that produced the goodness that shines from her being is possible only if the reality of the evil that took her from us exists as a possibility. That it could and does was made right by God at the foundation of creation. We live in the hope that we will all meet in paradise.
BTW - When you praise her actions and her life, you are loving love.- the first of two commandments given to us by the Word.
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tonyrey
Guest
Jesus certainly told us to become perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect but many people reject His teaching. There is no final answer to evil in this world and there will always be injustice:
Mark 14:7
Free will implies there is a limit to the extent to which evil can be mitigated. That is where the element of fantasy comes in. Otherwise Jesus wouldn’t have distinguished the sheep from the goats and warned us about hell.
I don’t believe God creates imperfect reasons! Physical imperfection is inevitable because the laws of nature cannot cater for every situation. In an immensely complex system there are bound to be misfortunes for which no one is responsible.That is another reason why there cannot be an earthly paradise. Perfection is the monopoly of Heaven.
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tonyrey
Guest
Right at the core of “humanity”.
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tonyrey
Guest
Collective guilt is not an illusion but an inescapable fact. In a secular society many people refuse to acknowledge the reality of evil.- Status