Hello JapaneseKappa.
… if God loved us he would not bother to create people who he would not ultimately save…There is no reason I can think of that an omnipotent benevolent being would need to create human beings for the sole purpose of killing them later as a demonstration. In fact, there is no reason I can think of that an omnipotent benevolent being would allow his beloved humans suffer from random natural disasters either…Imagine yourself in a world without natural suffering, if you looked around yourself and saw that lack of suffering, would you conclude to yourself “This lack of suffering is evidence against the existence of God! If God loved us, he would cause us to suffer in this life.”… “It is thanks to God that we live without natural suffering. Clearly God is benevolent.”…Its one thing to argue that a book has spiritual truth, and another to argue that it has historical truth… I don’t take the historical claims of young earth creationists seriously at all because they don’t stand up to even the most basic investigation…and I see no reason to engage in the mental gymnastics that would be required to salvage the possibility of an “exodus.”
Your if/then thinking is what is getting you in trouble. God is. He has nothing at all to prove to anyone. You continue to expect Him to prove Himself to you. Did it ever occur to you that those Egyptians that lived with the Jews in their midst may have been converted to Judaism way back then much the same way those who live and work with us Christians these days were? By knowing the Jews they became familiar with God. If they didn’t have the Israelites in their midst they wouldn’t have come to know God and make the choice everyone has to make, either for Him or against Him, the very same choice you face these days. Even if born in the Church and raised in the Church and taught everything one is to know to be a good Catholic, at some point in time, each person is asked to go deeper into a relationship with God. We are all called to be Saints and some respond to that call and try to convert on a deeper level. Some even get there in this life. So, the Jews were about this very same business as we are today of evangelization in Egypt. By sending the Jews to Egypt God was demonstrating His merciful love in that the Egyptians who had their own religion made up of their whimsies and fantasies, could now come to know the One true God of the Israelites and ultimately be saved when Jesus Redeemed the souls of the dead when He went down to Sheol that very first Easter. It was the land of the dead where all Israel awaited His ascending to the nether world. Any soul who had passed on and could enter Heaven had to wait.
The idea of a god who is as you say, made to order with your characteristics of benevolence and omnipotent who only makes people so as to kill them, is silly. I suppose I could extend that to say in you limiting way you create a god who for his or her amusement creates people, or being conceited makes people so as to have someone to worship him or because he has some other need. The god you need to have personified in various ways is still an extension of your own limited thinking. God is Who He is, not who you think He should be. It is incumbent on us to get to know Him. I can see by the things you’ve written that you will have a hard time reconciling your thinking to a God Who became Man and lived a human life from conception to death, eating and drinking and laughing and crying and loving and working just like us. But get past it. Jesus is God in the 2nd person of the Trinity and it is through Him you come to the Father and without Him you can do nothing.
You instance of a imaginary world without suffering brings to mind to things you just don’t get - Jesus died a death that was necessary in great suffering. This is a hard thing for some to get. Death and suffering are part of life. No one gets through life without it. To run from it is folly and causes more suffering. Jesus suffering was Redemptive. By His stripes we are healed. We follow Him. Right now as I type this there are thousands of Christians in Muslim lands who have accepted this in the fullest sense, both by Martyrdoms and persecution that will for years be very real and very hard and very painful. They are burning and pillaging our Churches and confiscating all properties and killing and raping and burning everyone in their path. We are fleeing for the mountains and trying to become citizens in other countries so as to escape all the carnage. This is very real, very hard and a great deal of suffering embraced for Christ by Christians willingly. What can you say about this JapaneseKappa? Is their suffering a sign of a hateful god or a hateful people inflamed with a false religion?
I won’t take up your arguments about the historicity of the Bible or the I.D. creationist vs. evolutionists stuff here. Too much for one thread. Ask those questions separately in other threads if you’d like. I’m sure there is more than one person here who’d engage with you in dialog.
I still say your greatest stumbling block is your need to have God prove Himself to you. I think that is part of your own spiritual makeup and finding the answers you seek internally will take time and an openness to the truth from you. It is part of you own spiritual journey. I can respect that. I have mine. It lead me to Christ and His church. I wish that for you too. God bless you with His peace. Those who seek him find.
Glenda
