Patg:
Your choice, of course, but very confusing to me.As St. Paul says, the Law is a teacher. It is only by God’s grace that we can go beyond the Law and fulfill its precepts. The pagan can be modest, but he cannot be humble, and most of us are not better than good pagans. Love your enemies. How impossible. Yet with God all things are possible.
Wondering about the mysteries of God is called theology and it is not all that bad. It can be confusing though.Patg:
Your profile shows you as being Catholic, but here you are agreeing against God with a self proclaimed “agnostic athiest”.
Really? I think mankind has been struggling with the nature and mysteries of God since the beginning of time.
I don’t think any of us really do
No, probably not (except for all the rules in Leviticus which we totally ignore). But the humans left in charge of the Church do quite well at threatnening etenal torture for an endless array of things.
I doubt the innocent Egyptian children would agree.
But then the ants weren’t made in God’s image and likeness. We don’t “know” that God is Love, all we know for sure is that God is infinitely more powerful than us and that doesn’t necessarily make God all loving. Again, ask the Egyptians, or the innocent victims of the flood, or the Jews in the holocaust…
You claim to be Catholic but clearly you do not belong to the same Church I do. A random transgression does not land you in hell. Willful sin will result one’s damnation, but you make it sound like any accidental infraction will do the job.
Then they would be wrong.
We’re not worthy to judge God. We are God’s creation and he has a reason for doing everything that he does. When evil is spread from generation to generation, this is God’s way of taking care of it. There wasn’t any righteousness left in Sodom and Gomorrah besides Lot and his family and God destroyed the two cities. God promised he would not destroy the cities if 10 righteous people could were living in the cities. There wasn’t even 10 people. Jericho should have learned from this but its inhabitants continued to live in sin. Again, God took care of the problem.
First of all, God gave the Egyptians several chances to let the Hebrews go. Pharaoh had nine chances before God killed the first born sons. Therefore the last plague was really brought on by Pharaoh because he would have in turned retaliated against the Hebrews and killed their children. You can look at it as more of God defending the Hebrews. As far as the innocent victims of the flood goes, God had his reasons again. He was sad at how evil the world had become and this was his way of taking care of it.
We are humans, and humans continually deem something right or wrong. How do we not determine if something/someone is right or wrong if we do not judge it/them by their actions?
Isn’t there a biblical quote that says God is love? So in a sense you can proclaim this to be true in the sense that your first like indicated that we are made in the image and likeness of god? I have asked this in a response to another of your posts but in a different way.
You should study for yourself what the OT says about slavery. First off it was a temporary situation, not a life long condition. Every seven years they were freed during the jubilee. Second, they could redeem themselves. There was even rules about what to do if a slave’s service came to an end but he/she did not want to leave their master. So you cannot equate being a slave in Israel with being a slave in Alabama.
Isn’t that called terrorism?
Have you read Exodus? The Egyptians enslaved the Hebrews for 400 years. The Egyptians were the ones using Genocide. Pharaoh didn’t want the Hebrews “over-populating” so he worked them extremely hard to kill them off. That didn’t work. He then decided to kill all the newborn hebrew males by drowning them in the Nile. God heard the crys of Israel for over 400 years. It was time to free them from bondage.
Like I said, for God it appears that the end always justifies the means.
God cannot do evil, so why do the means need justifying?
I don’t have an answer for that but I do find it untenable to believe that not one of the hundreds of writers and copiers adjusted events a little to make their side look better. Maybe that was God’s inspiration and maybe it wasn’t. The theism of the Jews showed God’s direct involvement in everything and that belief is reflected in their writings.
Now that is an interesting conundrum.
The theism of Catholics also shows God’s direct involvement in everything.
We only have faith to allow us to believe any of that is true. There are plenty of examples which lead one to question it. Even the bible questions it, such as the book of Job.
Purely faith.
Once it did. Now the Church recognizes that there are many natural explanations for all the things that were once thought of as direct interventions of God.