Is God a kind, loving God or a mean, vengeful God?

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Your question presupposes our power to decide for ourselves what to believe and how to live…
 
My question doesn’t presuppose anything. It is a simple, straightforward question as to the nature of God.

Care to answer the question?
 
1 John 4:7-8
7Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. 8He who does not love does not know God; for God is love.

Peace
James
 
Floyd_Lawson said:
My question doesn’t presuppose anything. It is a simple, straightforward question as to the nature of God.

Care to answer the question?
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Your question presupposes **our power to choose **what we believe is the correct answer. It does answer your question - even though you may be unaware of the fact…
 
As a Catholic, you surely know that our God is the God of Love. You don’t have to ask that.

So I take it you are starting a dialogue and you want those who think of God as mean and vengeful to weigh in.

Is that the point of this thread?
 
Emily2014 said:
God is LOVE.👍🙂
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God is Love …but God is not mocked. :nope: When the Egyptians pursued Moses & the Israelites, they were swallowed in the Red Sea. Jesus also had righteous anger when he threw the money changers out of the Temple. :ouch:
 
Did you really just use the words God and mean in the same sentence? The same God who sent His only Son to die for your sins? Really?
 
God has killed a lot of people, directly and personally, as recorded in the Bible. What do you think the answer is? If you judge God by human standards, you’d say ‘egotistical, murdering psychopath’. So, obviously, we don’t use human standards. The only problem is that very few Catholics are capable of articulating why.

Btw, this makes a fine meditation on the ‘Good News’ - part of the good news is ‘oh, thank goodness God doesn’t hate us and isn’t planning to destroy us all or let someone carry us off or send a plague on us’.

Ever seen ‘Dogville’? It’s a weird movie in which the Christ figure, in return for being crucified, kills everybody.
 
I’m glad you told us about it, TankGirl :tiphat:…I won’t waste my time watching it!
 
I’m glad you told us about it, TankGirl …I won’t waste my time watching it!
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Oh, I don’t think it’s a waste of time at all to consider what the world would be like if God was purely just, instead of also merciful. Do you?
 
TankGirl said:
Oh, I don’t think it’s a waste of time at all to consider what the world would be like if God was purely just, instead of also merciful. Do you?
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Yep! I get the point. He kills everyone …you said it was a weird movie. No need to watch it.
 
As a Catholic, you surely know that our God is the God of Love. You don’t have to ask that.
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So I take it you are starting a dialogue and you want those who think of God as mean and vengeful to weigh in.
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Is that the point of this thread?
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College campuses all over the world are full of people who think God, as understood by Christians, is mean and vengeful. England, Canada, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium all have substantially the same opinion. So do New York and Los Angeles and Seattle and a lot of other places.
Did you really just use the words God and mean in the same sentence? The same God who sent His only Son to die for your sins? Really?
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This sort of refusal to discuss God rationally and critically is, I think, a lot of the reason.
 
TankGirl said:
College campuses all over the world are full of people who think God, as understood by Christians, is mean and vengeful. England, Canada, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium all have substantially the same opinion. So do New York and Los Angeles and Seattle and a lot of other places.
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Yes, the ignorance of the pagans is well known. And also the ignorance of their professors. 🤷
 
Yes, the ignorance of the pagans is well known. And also the ignorance of their professors.
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I think this attitude is what will contribute greatly to the fall of Christianity.
 
TankGirl said:
College campuses all over the world are full of people who think God, as understood by Christians, is mean and vengeful. England, Canada, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium all have substantially the same opinion. So do New York and Los Angeles and Seattle and a lot of other places.
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I agree, and in fact a priest once told us, “If a person see Jesus as mean and vengeful (not exact wording) they are better off rejecting Jesus.” (Rejecting this depiction of Jesus)

Did you see the thread “Why does anyone knowingly and willingly reject God?”. In my observations, people do a lot of knowing-and-willing rejection of false images, but not God.

Yes, it does some good to talk about it, but the OP of this thread is a bit “loaded”, no?😃

Oh, and Christianity fall? Do you see a problem in Christianity? Well, so do I. Someone told me a long time ago, “If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.” Join us, TankGirl, in being part of the solution!👍
 
truetofaith said:
God is Love …but God is not mocked. :nope: When the Egyptians pursued Moses & the Israelites, they were swallowed in the Red Sea. Jesus also had righteous anger when he threw the money changers out of the Temple. :ouch:
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I can only repeat that GOD IS LOVE. How could you possibly interpret those words as mockery. However bad I may be, I could never mock GOD, who IS LOVE.
 
Do you see a problem in Christianity? Well, so do I.
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Yes, I do. Essentially, it is one of dishonesty. Speaking of Catholics, Catholics want to talk a good game about preaching a loving God, but then fail to actually back this up when challenged about God’s real attributes. Certain Catholic apologists fail so hard when taken to task about God commanding the death of people in the Bible, and retreat into vague platitudes like “You have to be sensitive to genre”. Genre includes the categories “Fiction” and “Non-Fiction”, and the world understands genre in this way.

Pressed, Catholics will never give a straight answer to the world, and this makes the world angry, because ultimately the world knows that either historical events occurred, or they did not. Catholics have to get a lot better, a lot more consistent, and at least agree among themselves about the way God’s vengeance is to be understood. If you’re going to be ‘sensitive to genre’ then you have to be willing to commit to assigning a genre to the text in question. If you refuse to do what you are demanding others do, people immediately smell a rat and leave.

The world is demanding that the stories of God’s vengeance either be pure myth, or that they are literal history of humans acting unilaterally without God’s sanction. That’s the only aspect of ‘genre’ that matters. If a skeptic demands to know whether God killed someone out of vengeance, and a Catholic says “Well, you have to be sensitive to genre” then the skeptic knows what is being proposed - the passage is not literally true. So, the skeptic says “So, this did not happen?” and if the Catholics agrees, the rest of the Church calls them a modernist and burns them in effigy.

Meanwhile, other people self-identifying as Christians revel in God’s vengeance. The world rightly rejects this, as you note.

How can anyone blame to the world for not wanting this ‘good news’?
 
TankGirl said:
I think this attitude is what will contribute greatly to the fall of Christianity.
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The truth will never contribute to the fall of Christianity.

Never knowing the truth will contribute to the fall of paganism.

“the truth will set you free” did not originate in academia; Jesus said it in John 8:32.

The devil has American academia by the throat.

That is why academia is full of lies and slanders against Christianity.
 
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