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God, as the all powerful creator of the universe and all its components, can never evade responsibility for what occurred. If it went wrong it rests on Him whatever the twists and turns of theological evasions try to present. Either He is God, or He isn't. It's that simple.

You're exactly right - and it did all rest on Him. That is precisely what is at the core of Christianity. God took on responsibility.

That is very true, and there are no theological evasions here. But it is also wrong to try God for the crimes He didn't commit. A parent is responsible for his children in terms of their well-being, teaching them and influencing their decisions as much as possible, and otherwise providing needs and granting requests above and beyond the child's needs when appropriate and when not in conflict with what the parent knows is best. But at a certain point the child is well-informed and independent enough to make his own decisions apart from his parents. So unless the child actively seeks his parent's advice and seeks the will and provision of the parent, he is responsible for his own actions and may be held accountable for wrongdoing. Since the child acts independently "above" the influence of the parent, it cannot be the parent who is to blame; after all, it is not the parent who committed the misdeed.

By the same principle, you cannot hold God responsible for any actions not His own. The best you can do is say you disagree with the ethics of a worldwide flood or that maybe Sodom and Gomorrah was horribly mishandled. You MIGHT place the blame on the Israelites for what amounts to genocide in Canaan, but it isn't their fault because they did what God wanted according to His directive. So in that sense the responsibility or blame game shifts to God. But it's not really God's "fault" because He was exercising discipline by displacing sinful people deserving of punishment. Not only that, but it removed a corruptive influence from the land the Israelites were given to possess, like when a parent refuses to let a child hang out with certain other kids who show a tendency for bad habits and potentially self-destructive behavior. As long as the parent is able to maintain a direct influence over his children, they can avoid corruptive influences. Therefore by using the Israelites as God's means of delivering divine vengeance, God was both punishing those living in willful disobedience to Him and protecting His own. Those people, the Canaanites, had not God to blame, but themselves for the trouble they found themselves in.

What I've noticed is common with children, or at least with my own, is the unwillingness to accept responsibility for irresponsible behavior. Sure, I recognize my oldest child is only 3 years old, but the behavioral patterns are unmistakable. We disagree with our punishment because we don't like being punished. And it's easier to pass off the blame somewhere it isn't due than accept responsibility for our own behavior.

The problem is that psychopaths lack empathy and compassion (unlike a typical person with Asperger's). Behavioral therapy hasn't been effective for any of the psychopaths (as far as I know). That's just wishful thinking on your part and on the part of those who like to believe that free will does exist.



What else can we limited beings do about them? If they can't help but be a danger to us, why should we let them roam freely and comfortably within our societies? If God exists, then He's responsible for the existence of such dangerous people. You can't put the blame on us for their existence.

By the way, our moral standards, in general, are more favorable than the standards of the Biblical Yahweh despite the existence of psychopaths and the likes. After all, Yahweh is just like them anyway.



The sun rising and setting EVERY single day is not a dream. It's something that we can easily observe any day without having to go back in time. That's why we can be sure that the sun did rise yesterday and that it will rise tomorrow (where you live).

Of course, let's not forget that the sun doesn't actually rise. It Just seems to from our perspective. But just for the sake of argument ...

As for the situation that you're talking about, it's not something that you can be sure that it wouldn't have happened if your brother were still alive ... since the only way for you to find out for sure would be to go back in time and, somehow, change reality in a way that your brother is not dead from that car accident. Unless you're able to do both, then you can never be so sure. You can only guess.



The physical safety of a child comes way before the satisfaction of an abuser. That's how we operate in today's civilized world. Yet, I wonder why God would allow such abusers to be so.



Why wouldn't I when I know that God could've prevented such predicaments from happening by creating a different reality for us without Him having to harm any of us? Don't tell me He couldn't have done it. He's easily capable of doing so!



How would you feel if someone insisted to you that your father was a very loving man who loved you so much that everything he did he did selflessly for your own good and that you should get over it and learn to accept that he's been nothing but a good father to you? Wouldn't you feel insulted?



Have you ever heard of the phrase: Actions speak louder than words?



I don't need to have the intelligence of God in order to know that creating a reality in which no sentient being suffers extreme pain and suffering is a much better reality to be in than the one that we are in. And if God disagrees with me, then He simply doesn't have as much compassion as I do for my fellow sentient beings.



He doesn't need man's f*****g evil intentions to bring about good. All your God needs is for Him to love and to show compassion. Love is not just a f*****g word.



It's clear to many that there is something wrong with your God. He doesn't sound like a real God. He sounds like a fictional character made up by narcissistic men in power in the same manner that Allah was made up by a narcissistic man in power.

And you know what's unfair? Us having to be in this reality in which we have to experience pain and suffering (and, for many of us, more pain and suffering in the afterlife). I don't think anyone of us asked for this before our creation.

In fact, this harsh reality exists either because the Creator doesn't really care about our feelings or there never was a Creator. And as ruveyn said previously, we're all in this on our own. It's up to us to figure out how to live our lives in this reality.



It's not necessarily morally wrong ... just inappropriate. I'm trying my best to point out how cruel your God is, and you respond with jokes as if you don't have any problems at all with how God kills babies, demands the Jews to kill babies, allows psychopaths to abuse babies, and has no problem having limited beings suffer forever in hell (instead of just having them annihilated for good and ridding them of their miserable existence imposed on them by Him).

Despite it all, you just don't have an issue at all with God. According to you, all the pain and suffering is because of us. God bears no responsibility at all.

And this makes me wonder why you have any issues with your father. Is your father not your father? Does he not have more wisdom and experience than you have? Who are you, puny child, to think that your father could've treated you better than he did?



Ridiculous. God didn't need to make up such a rule. He could've easily allowed humans to make choices as long as those choices didn't lead to physical pain and suffering. He could've easily done that as He's omnipotent and omniscient and is beyond time and space. But since He lacks compassion, He chose to set the narcissistic rule that demands obedience or else ... suffer!

Actually, that story in Genesis was put not because it's based on the truth ... but as a primitive attempt to explain the existence of suffering and death. As many can see from my points, it was a poor attempt. But that's understandable as the Jews didn't know how else to explain why their God would allow suffering and death.

But we should know better now.



The fact that God allowed just one child to suffer such extreme torture means that He lacked compassion for that child. He had the power to stop the abuser from harming the child, but He chose not to.

One thing about faith in God is that it is often a result of confusion and distorted perception. Ever heard of Stockholm Syndrome? It's similar to that. A person suffering in life may choose to have faith in God because he sees that God has spared him from worse things in life despite his own sufferings. But it doesn't mean that God is innocent. He's still the "Captor" of us all.



While I do enjoy the discussion, I have a more serious motive behind this. I owe deep gratitude to many of those with whom I had discussions about God when I was still a Christian because they collectively led me to contemplate what they said and eventually renounce the faith. If every post I make will make you (and other Christans reading them) think deeper about God's nature (even if you, and they, continue to persist that God is loving and compassionate), then I'm satisfied because it means there's hope that some of you will eventually denounce the faith and have a more clear minded view of matters in life, something that's needed more and more in this day and age.



The MKULTRA matter was a problem with ethics, not with science. Plus, it was a conspiracy, meant to be a secret hidden from the public (including you and I).

I don't know what led you to mention MKULTRA, but my point is that scientific arguments were one factor in leading me to renounce the Christian faith. Scientific truths hardly have anything to do with ethics. They're either true or they're not.

In short, science never claims to be loving and compassionate (unlike your God).



I don't want any Christian to die for their beliefs. I'm unlike your God.



Why, what's wrong with me not looking for the truth? It doesn't mean that I don't want the truth. It just means that I won't pretend to know that I finally know the truth after making some effort to look for it like many people of religion and faith claim to have done.



Yet, people can't help but to lust, to hate, to feel jealousy, etc.

The best one can do is control himself and not let any malicious thought of his be manifested in action.



We know that ... and we accept that (from a secular point of view). We just don't accept the idea that Yahweh, assuming He is real, did not teach them a more civilized way of handling traitors without having their families executed along with them.



Children were killed for the sake of this "lesson". And your God loved it.



Were the young children that God had the Jews kill by the sword not interested in His mercy?

Continue to contradict yourself. You will keep doing that so long as you keep defending the atrocities of Yahweh.



Your God killed their innocent children. Doesn't that bother you at all?



Ridding a soul from eternal pain and suffering is not a merciful act? Are you sure?

I'd rather not exist anymore than exist and suffer eternal pain and torment. So why doesn't your God respect that choice?



Ok, I meant children, not babies. My mistake.



Let's assume your explanation is valid. So what? Your God is still a barbaric monster for such instructions. What if two or three Jews witnessed a child in distress curse his parents because they were abusing him and the witnesses did not see the abuse? What then?



Very disturbing to hear that from your supposedly loving God.

By the way, I just realized that you tend to make it sound like stoning someone to death is not a big deal. But the fact that all men in the city were to stone the rebellious son to death (in the passage above) means that it was meant to be a slow and painful death. Otherwise, one person with a large rock would have been needed to kill the poor guy.



So why not just put him in some ancient form of jail (divinely guarded by Yahweh)?



Does the Bible teach parents how to discipline their children and show them love and compassion?



So what does all this have to do with the ancient adult Jews having enough time to learn some effective disciplinary methods from Yahweh?



Suit yourself. To me and many others, a loving and compassionate God is not compatible with this reality. It just simply doesn't make sense.



As you wish.



First of all, the adult Jews were not 3-year-old children.

Secondly, all God needed to do was describe autism and explain what it's like to be autistic. Nothing too advanced for the ancient Jews to comprehend.

But if Yahweh wasn't willing to reveal such knowledge to the Jews, then on what basis do we trust that He is God?

If I don't see advanced psychological knowledge in the Bible ... nor advanced scientific knowledge ... but simply primitive knowledge in all aspects of science, logic, and mathematics ... then why should I trust that Yahweh is the God that knows all? How can I know that Yahweh is not a fictional characters made up by the ancient Jews who were in power?



According to the DSM, Yahweh could easily come off as someone with NPD. I don't know how more objective I can get.



But your God allowed humans to f**k up and cause each other pain. Why doesn't He bear some responsibility?



Where is God to explain to us why He allows babies to suffer pain and torture, why He's killed babies Himself, why He commanded the Jews to kill babies themselves, and why an eternal hell of eternal suffering exists?



Actions speak louder than words, my friend.



Was it an act of mercy that God had Achan's children executed in such a painful manner?



Why, isn't God out there to protect you?



God wanted the poor Iraqis to submit to the tyrannical Saddam Hussein, didn't He?



You know very well what I'm arguing about.

Your God is supposed to be the omnipotent Sovereign God. He should be fully responsible for the crimes and mistakes done by humans as He alone holds the key to stop all harm and evil.

What I find interesting is that you're willing to psychoanalyze someone like me by your limited knowledge of my experiences with my father, but you don't do the same for your God based on His words and actions in the Bible.

You are clearly an enabler that needs a big wake up call.

Amen!

I've spent some good time studying psychology, as has my wife. It's foolish to think in any scientific inquiry that we've learned all there is. BT has shown some promise for AS and meth addicts. There's no reason to think that there is NO promise whatsoever for treating psychopathy, nor is there reason to think that there are no potential solutions at all. Give it time.


Yes I can. God set everything right from the beginning. We messed it up. End of story.


Not really. It just means you like your inferior standards more.


I understand that. But from any land-based perspective, how do you know the earth isn't flat? Do you just assume that it rotates because that's what you've been told all your life? How do you know that's accurate? You just take it on faith, or something?


The point is that it's a matter of cause and effect. Because my brother was the firstborn and so revered, and because my parents didn't really plan on me, I'd have been largely ignored while my brother would have taken priority. It's obvious because I'm just a different kind of person than that, don't fit the norm, never made the top grades, etc. I also knew their limits. We never had very much money, dad was sick all the time, and so on. They had to bum money from relatives some months to pay for private school for me. Things would have been a LOT different if my brother had lived.


But why should it? Isn't that just YOUR moral standard? Why wouldn't God equally allow for the satisfaction of an abuser? The truth is, we all have choices to make, and if we want anything in the world to be better, we have to choose it to be so. God is good not to interfere in that order.


Blaming God again. God did not commit the crimes. We're perfectly capable of preventing such predicaments. Why don't we?


No, not really. I'm long past over much of it and only a tinge of bitterness remains. I can retell the story or relive it in nightmares, but it doesn't impair my ability to function in day-to-day life. I'd be a bit more understanding than that. If you weren't there, you wouldn't know what it was like. I suppose I should be thankful. There are MUCH worse situations than mine.


It seems to me the actions in question prove a loving God who cares for His creation giving discipline when needed, and providing mercy when it is asked for. You are right. Actions do speak louder.


You still aren't God, though, so you can't possibly understand. You refuse to think that, all things considered, the way things are may be so only because it is either the best or it is the only way. You don't know that you'd choose differently if you knew everything God knew.


Wow... Such emotion... So much for objectivity!


No. I agree here. But it still doesn't put God at fault for the world our forebears created.


False dichotomy.


If it's simply inappropriate, you have no reason to be offended.


God is in charge, just like parents are in charge. But when an adult child is knowledgable enough to separate from his parents, he in a way ties their hands. There is nothing they can do that doesn't somehow violate their nature in the order of things, basically becoming MORE or something other than a parent. The only solution is that an adult child can voluntarily return to the care of his parents and give up his own will to act and make choices. But beyond their care, he is responsible for his own actions. Same thing with God. If we are capable of making our own choices and act inconsistent with what is right, we have sinned, not God.


I had issues with my father because he was a fallible human being, less than perfect, never learned to control his temper, all "tempered" with the unpredictability of diabetes. Now, to a degree I understand why my father was the way he was. But that's no excuse for bad decisions.

On the other hand, let's say for the sake of argument that everything my dad did was good and holy and perfect. My experience as a child, then, would have been colored by the fact I merely disliked how dad handled things. If so, there is no reason to think, had my dad lived, that we couldn't possibly come to some sort of reconciliation and acceptance. But we'll never know. However, it's not unlike your attitude towards God. You don't understand how a good God can (fill in the blank). Because God IS living, you may still make the decision to seek a reconciliation and, for what you understand and for what you do not, accept that those things don't really matter in your relationship with Him.


False assumption that the Bible cannot be taken and understood literally.

And even if you're right, you're still placing blame on God for the decisions of man. God didn't shove forbidden knowledge down Adam's throat.


You'd think. Yet we still go on making foolish decisions.


It's more important that WE are the ones making the decisions, though.


Christians don't have a problem being "captured" by God. We're thankful that we are spiritually being held captive because we could be spiritually captive in much worse ways. But there is a certain "freedom from" that we gain being God's captives. That being a spiritual state, we understand that the present physical world is not all that there is nor even important in the grand scheme of things. Physical suffering is only physical, not eternal.

Thank you for that. It's always good to have a reminder of what's really important. The whole time you've been placing an undue importance on and reliance on physical existence. And as long as temporary physical existence is all that is in question, the perception IS confused and distorted. If you can't see past what is temporary and fleeting, you don't have a clear perception of who God is and what He wants. Metaphorically speaking, as a land-based observer, you only see the rising and the setting sun and, as far as you can tell, the earth is flat. You can't see beyond yourself what actually causes the appearance of celestial bodies to do what they do, that it is the earth that is round and rotates. It is, in part, the air you breathe that continues to reflect light and make even our clearest night-time vision appear fuzzy. It is your strict reliance on the physical, temporary problems of pain and suffering that keep you from catching a glimpse of who God is and why things really are the way they are.


Oh, I get it. You're a proselytizer. The problem is that you've accepted something that is inherently biased against God rather than putting it into proper perspective. Believing Christians who have had a genuine experience of God and have seen the work of Christ in their own lives already have the evidence they need to believe. For them, these experiences are very strong pieces of evidence. They cannot explain these things as anything except what they are, and no amount of faulty secular reason can change that. If you are a "slave" in God's care, you have already given up your will to God's will and thus have no choice but to remain in His care.

I see two paths here. On one side, you have a Christian who renounces his faith because he's never had that experience, never came to a genuine acceptance of God. There is no real eternal consequence because that person may eventually come to a new understanding of God that draws him back to the faith he abandoned. On the other side, you have a Christian who renounces his faith for whatever reason in SPITE of the fact that he has been witness to God at work--sort of like if Paul had simply waved away the Damascus road experience as a frightful mini-stroke. That is a difficult sin to commit and, I think for the most part, something that most only commit after a lifetime of insistence that God, for them, doesn't exist in any meaningful way. By that I mean simply believing that God exists but not accepting God and His plan of salvation. Of that there are perhaps infinite variations, but the principle is still the same. Rejecting God of your own free will leads to spiritual death as well as physical death. The point is the first road allows you to turn back, while the second does not. It seems to me your faith was on shaky ground to begin with, so it's no surprise to me you'd allow yourself to become swayed by a secular understanding. But that doesn't mean you have to stay there.


I could have picked a number of examples--that immediately came to mind. I find it to be in poor taste to bring up Hitler and the Nazis for every single case of comparisons of extremes. I could have used Nazi eugenics and live human experimentation. It's still all science, and what is found in science is used for whatever purpose fallible people want to use it for. Now, scientific truths are, as you put it, either true or they're not. Here we agree. But as to what those truths mean in any practical way is a matter of interpretation. They don't "mean," but we have a quick tendency to attach meaning to them, especially when we want something. Why should I, for example, choose Advil over Motrin for a headache?


No one ever said God WANTED us to die for Him. That some of us will die for the sake of the message is a choice for other human beings to make. That I cannot readily explain. Perhaps they mistakenly see us as a threat. Perhaps certain governments want to maintain control through all available channels, including a state-supported church/religion that promotes their interests and no meaningful providence for spiritual needs. I don't know. But any time someone thinks we're up to no good, we risk persecution. We've always had to be really careful about that, SOMETIMES even within our own ranks (I can't even begin to imagine what it was like from Constantine to the Protestant Reformation, but I wonder if I'd have really been happy or could really have grasped my faith in the way I do. It's quite possible with the ideas I have or just being the type of person I am that I'd have been subjected to persecution by the RC Church. And I know not all Christians are warm and fuzzy people--even at the church I now attend we had a very brief period when we WERE being persecuted. Within a year's time, nearly all the people who tried to cause us harm were gone). So there are people who don't like us or agree with what we believe. If we're doing what we're supposed to be doing, we're treating all people the way Jesus instructed us to treat them. If we're not, we're making poor choices. If we suffer and/or are put to death for that faith, it is because the people among whom we live reject God and us. God does not put us to death. We recognize that we were dead to begin with and only through Jesus do we have life at all. If we die a physical death, it is no great loss.


If you wanted the truth, you'd look for it.


Merely fallen human nature. Even I have my failures. And so does every Christian.


Or ask that God guide him in self-control and in his thoughts. That's part of the reason I enjoy reading the Bible so much.


Your prerogative, of course. But in order to assert that you have to ignore the possibility that what happened was necessary, with good reasons as to why. In an ancient context, it would have made more sense. You've accused me of watering things down, but I can merely think of ways in which certain actions made sense whereas they wouldn't make sense in a contemporary context.


Where is it written that He did?


There's no contradiction here. Young children are dependent upon their parents. God wanted those people (the Israelites) alone to inhabit Canaan without the negative influence of the people already living there. If the children were spared, who would have taken care of them? The Israelites? No, because it would be unfair to expect them to clean up someone else's mess. The parents were the ones responsible for getting out of Canaan in advance of the Israelites. That they failed had dire consequences not just for themselves, but for their children. THEY were responsible, and their children only have their parents to blame.

The Israelites would not have wanted those children, nor should they have HAD to take care of them. And, it wasn't the children's fault that their parents didn't do what they were supposed to do. Killing the parents was divine vengeance. Killing the children was merciful given the circumstances.


Only in the sense that people would make poor decisions that would lead to God punishing them in that way.


That only makes sense if God places no value on the human soul. If God makes the soul valuable, whether believing or unbelieving, then it is wrong for God to destroy it. The soul, by nature of what God created it to be, must go on existing. It grieves God that it must go on existing in torment, but God cannot still be God respecting the decisions WE make knowing the consequences of our decisions AND remove those consequences.


I've already said I do not know what Biblical definitions of child abuse are and how that would be enforced. But it seems to me if an incorrigible child is brought before the elders of his own city, knowing how the parents are and how they treat their children, that they'd say, "Well, we know the parents and how they've always been trouble. Take the kid away from them." You don't JUST KILL a child because you see something funny and feel like killing the child. And like I've already said, cursing has to do with altering the public's perception of parents. Anyone younger than a teenager isn't going to be taken very seriously because people do understand that children can display tempers sometimes. That's just a part of growing up. And besides, if a child showed himself incapable of acting properly in public, why would a parent let that child away from the home? Keep the child out of public view, handle the matter quietly, and the Leviticus law never even has to enter the discussion.

And it's not barbaric. It's justice. A teenager or young adult who so abuses his parents should just be allowed to get away with it? No consequences? While losing a child is always tragic, no matter what, a friend to those parents is helping them find relief from an abusive child.


The way I see it, it is an outline for legal procedures in order to effect a desired outcome. The underlying theme of all law is equivalency, that the punishment fit the crime. A child who has shown himself to be completely and utterly useless in society, totally unresponsive to parental discipline, is deserving of death. You don't, for example, accuse an 8-year-old of being a glutton and a drunkard! If he eats too much, restrict his diet. Parents have the authority to do that. And what is he doing drinking anyway? That's just parental neglect, NOT a disrespectful child. It means that the parents haven't done all they can do to correct the behavior. But if he's, say, 17 or 18, is lazy, stays drunk all the time and brings home prostitutes and you've done all you possibly can to correct the behavior, it's not unreasonable to ask for intervention somehow. The law procedurally allows for the parents to have relief.

Now, procedurally, stoning is ONE method of execution. There's no reason why hanging couldn't have been substituted. I'm not totally familiar with Hebrew customs, but another quick possibility might have been beheading. The only thing remotely appealing about stoning, assuming it to be slow and painful, is that the person stoned to death is made to physically feel the anguish that he has caused his parents on an emotional level. Barbaric? Maybe. But the son's actions were also barbaric and traumatizing for the parents. While there COULD be merciful alternatives, a slow an painful death is not altogether inappropriate given the context.


Because Yahweh's intent was to hold people accountable for each other in order to prevent them from incurring His wrath. That means that they have to take care of their own and whether they follow Yahweh is a decision they have to make for themselves. The Exodus made the tribes nomadic, not unlike the early patriarchal period before coming to Egypt. And even when they returned and settled the abandoned cities, they still were able to move about within their territories and throughout the entire area, continuing a nomadic lifestyle within their borders because, in effect, no one really "owned" the land. When you have that kind of movement, jails aren't really possible because jails are permanent structures. Incarceration still isn't really the best alternative because it requires the care of the prisoner, which, as we know, is economically draining. There ARE crimes which are punishable by involuntary servitude for specified periods of time. I suppose if a parent didn't wish the child put to death he could sell the child into slavery and make the child someone else's problem. But there are prohibitions against Israel taking each other as slaves, so I don't know how that would have worked out.


It does. Much of what we've been discussing has to do with extremes in unrepentant behavior for which death would be appropriate if all possible alternatives had been exhausted.

Keep in perspective what the Bible is and what it isn't. It is not an exhaustive text on parenting. It lays down some ground rules, but that's where it ends. We can live by Biblical principles while at the same time praying for God's guidance, learning from the experience of experts (child psychologists, family counselors, etc.), employing Christian counselors, or even going to neurologists to help us understand aberrant behavior as a symptom of a physiological condition. Because God has allowed us to seek that kind of understanding for ourselves, we have more alternatives than strictly the extreme measures the Bible authorizes.

Now, a fundamentalist won't read it that way. But modern fundamentalism shows an extreme misunderstanding of the text if not an outright refusal to understand. God's wrath has always been tempered with compassion, as Jesus' teachings show us.


Who says they DIDN'T learn some effective disciplinary methods? The Law only shows what can be done when things get out of control. It doesn't assume that every child is a bad child, that no parents are abusive parents, and so on. If you need help, you have people willing to understand and help you. That's it.

With human growth over time comes increased and better human understanding. Volumes have been written on child discipline--mostly, it seems, by "expert" psychologists with Ph.D's and no children of their own, thus the "infallible" science doesn't seem to be rooted in reality. (That's a joke, you can laugh). As we understand each other and the world around us more, we have more options available to us. That is something that has taken time to develop and, in probably most cases, something each parent just has to figure out on their own. God can guide you in those decisions, but ultimately you are the one responsible for making parenting decisions with your own children. Our knowledge and understanding is the culmination of thousands of years of experience. That it has taken that long for such an influence to take such a hold on society at large is not an understanding of God's failure to teach, but the time it has taken for us to understand what it is God is teaching.


But it does make sense. Suffering exists because of the choices people make. A loving and compassionate God allows human beings to make choices, whether for good or for evil. Because we inherit a sinful human nature, we are prone to making mistakes in our decisions. While those decisions lead to suffering, other decisions may be made to ease or end suffering, or even to prevent it from happening at all. We are allowed to choose good for ourselves over evil, and it is a compassionate God that allows that--to show compassion when returning evil for evil might be what is actually deserved. That IS compatible with this reality, and it does make sense.

Now, if someone is self-centered to the point that they can only understand returning evil for evil, then a loving and compassionate God IS difficult to understand because a loving and compassionate God does not suit that person's will or interests.



In terms of spiritual maturity and in comparison with how people live now, they might as well have been 3-year-old children.

Autism is something we've come to understand on our own and put a label on. We can pinpoint what this specific form of "retardation" (to put it in less sophisticated terms--I'm not insulting anyone) is and how to deal with it. How do we know that people of the ancient world could really have understood that what we are is somehow different than other behaviors? Now, by the time of Jesus, people DID understand the difference between someone who was possessed by demons and someone who had just lost their mind. They understood that there were reasons that distinguished one person's behavior from another and could respond to those behaviors. They knew what "crazy" was, which what we now call autism might have been in certain forms. They just lacked the means to figure out why we are a different kind of crazy from another kind of crazy.

But this is another one of those "who says God didn't...?" kinds of things. All we have is the Biblical text, which is not to be taken as some kind of DSM Beta edition. The Bible isn't a psychological text or psychiatric text or neurology text. It's primarily a religious text, and the earliest Law describes how God wanted His theocracy set up on earth. That was what was most relevant as far as the Bible is concerned. God left the natural world to us to figure out, and hence there is no need for a divinely inspired instruction or text on why people behave the way they do! Fundamentally, you have all you really need: We act the way we do because we inherit a sinful nature. Now, if you want to get to the bottom of temporal behavioral patterns and motivations behind those patterns beyond original sin, you only need to watch people, observe what they do, ask questions, and compare results of your observations. You don't need God for that, nor need you the Bible to tell you something that it's not written to tell you about.


The most simplistic answer is that it's a matter of faith.

Take science, for example. All science can give you is data on what happens "out there." It can't attach meaning to it or tell you how to take it. It also can't make you believe that it tells you what it tells you. You have to make up your own mind. Science tells us that cigarette smoking is bad. Well, ok, not bad... But that it causes health problems and can cause death. Yet we observe people smoking all the time. Why don't they just drop dead? And there are people who are lifelong smokers who die from causes completely unrelated to smoking. So why should I believe science which tells me that smoking is bad and I don't see any obvious problems with smoking?

And that's the thing. All science can tell you is that smoking generally poses certain risks, of which death is a possible outcome of smoking. You have to make the decision to decide whether that is a risk you want to take, and likely that decision is based on your concern as to whether the "problems" of smoking are really problems at all. If you choose to take up smoking, it is a step of informed faith that you do so, knowing full well what could happen and accepting the responsibility yourself for what may (or may not) happen to you. If you choose not to smoke, then you decide that the risks aren't worth it, that you don't think you'd like smoking, you don't want to become dependent on an addictive substance, and so on. You take the evidence that science gives you, interpret that evidence, and make a decision based on the evidence together with your interpretation of it.

Now, how can you know? Well, the key evidence we have (beyond our own experiences, of course) is the Bible itself. Either what happened in the Bible happened or it didn't. You can examine the evidence for yourself and decide that it's reliable where it counts, where we can test it for ourselves. IF one can determine that the evidence thus far is reliable, that the source is reliable or trustworthy, one can also determine whether the rest of it, what we CAN'T see or prove, is reliable. If the evidence is reliable, there is grounds for faith. People don't just drop dead from smoking. So why believe the evidence is reliable? There are other reasons to believe it's true, such as long-term health consequences, the effects of additives, economic consequences of an addictive substance, or the unpleasantness of tobacco use (though I do love the smell of cigars and pipe tobacco, I myself have never smoked).

Thus the role of experience in affirming Biblical truth. It's not simply true just because I say it's true. If anything is true, it is because it is by nature true. A=A. I personally find smoking to be revolting because my childhood was spent surrounded by long-term smokers, not just my dad, but others who suffered from emphysema/COPD, high blood pressure, and smoking-related cancer. Watching people fall apart and still insist on holding to the cause of their illness was enough to affirm to me that the danger of smoking is real. I have faith that smoking is bad. But not because I don't have good reason to believe.

If I can determine that certain spiritual truths of the Bible are true, I can determine that other things are true as well because I have experienced for myself these things are true. Moreover, I actually BELIEVE it.

I would go so far as to assert that something that holds you back from maintaining any kind of Christian faith is you can't know anything about it because you don't believe it.

A scientist, likewise, cannot say he "knows" certain results or observations to be true if he doesn't believe them. Belief is a key part of knowing anything with any degree of certainty. If a scientist doesn't trust the results of his observations, he has a duty to figure out what it is he dislikes about the results and adjust his methodology to gain better accuracy. What a scientist does NOT do is merely dismiss the results, even flawed results, because he must first determine that something was flawed to begin with. If, however, he CAN determine that there was no flaw, then he must accept that the results, even results he didn't like, were indeed the best results possible.

For me, it has meant coming to terms with the fact not everything I was taught or grew up believing really was Biblically true. But neither were those things significant in terms of how they relate to the most important core beliefs, which is that Jesus died for our sins. In that sense they are irrelevant. But gaining a deeper understanding of God's will and purpose for humanity is never irrelevant, and the Bible is a wonderful starting point for gaining that understanding. I'm not "more saved" just because I'm committed to reading the Bible every day. I'm just more aware of the evidence that supports my faith than your typical pew-occupier. I mean, face it, it's not an every-day Christian that even really makes an effort to think about and attempt to explain the whats and whys of his faith.

If there is no evidence, there is no foundation for belief or knowledge. And that's just the thing. You don't know that the Bible is more than fairy tales. But what you also cannot determine with absolute certainty is that it is not evidence for Christian faith. There were a number of claims, in fact, even accepted by Christians themselves, back in the 19th Century that certain places in the Bible did not exist simply because there was no evidence that they ever did. Archeology has turned up evidence that these places did, in fact exist. Moreover, some facts in the Bible thought to be fiction has actually been corroborated from extra-Biblical sources.

I mean, you can't say there ISN'T evidence when there IS. All you can say is that, for your own reasons and your own interpretations, that you don't believe that it says what it says.


One problem with DSM is how often symptoms of NPD overlap with others (co-morbidities). If you're really looking closely at individual symptoms, you could label God with any number of "illnesses." But you could do the same with any person on the whole planet. That is no sure indication that anything is wrong. If God administers justice, then you'd have to lay the same label on every police officer and judge. The DSM can determine that those people, in fact, do NOT have NPD (unless they really do). Something you're missing is that DSM diagnoses are conditional on whether there is an explanation for the behavior. In the case of God, it might be said that His actions are justified. DSM was written to diagnose humans, not deities.


Highly emotional response here. I won't respond to those kinds of outbursts.


Who says that the provision of law ISN'T God's way of protecting us?


Stop right there. It is not justice to punish someone for the crimes of others.

I'm not saying our methods of procedural justice are perfect, either. People get convicted for crimes they didn't commit based on evidence that cannot be interpreted any other way at the time, and these are typically extremely difficult, "perfect-crime" kinds of trials. What I'm talking about is when the evidence is so overwhelming, when a multitude of witnesses experience what happened, and the criminal himself even proudly admits that he is responsible. I mean caught-on-camera-in-broad-daylight kinds of things in which trials are a mere formality. Why punish the victims of the crime by imposing the sentence on them? Let's say my neighbor came to my house, held us hostage at gunpoint, raped my daughter, killed us when we tried to intervene, and the police arrived just in time to see it all go down? Would they take my daughter into custody, put her in jail for her own rape, and sentence her to death for our murder? And just let the other guy go free, even when they had him in custody, had a trial to satisfy due process, and found him undeniably guilty by unanimous vote of a jury?

That's absurd. That's not how justice works. Even people in hard-line theocratic nations have SOME sense of justice in which guilt must somehow be determined, EVEN IF guilt is assumed from the outset. Girl was raped. Why? She dressed like a whore and she had it coming, therefore the racist couldn't help it. Let the guy go and put the whore in prison. I'm not saying I agree with that kind of justice--it ignores the man's guilt in willfully committing an act of violence. She didn't ask to be raped, and even if she had, it's irrelevant. I'm just saying that justice demands that the guilty be determined to be guilty and appropriately punished.

You can't punish God for the evil man commits. It doesn't work that way. You punish the evildoer. If God didn't commit the crime, He doesn't deserve to be punished.


OK, fair enough.


But now YOU are the one psychoanalyzing God based on your limited experience. You are not omniscient; you are not God, and you aren't even A god. You don't know that things really could have been any other way given the circumstances. You aren't examining the reasons to find whether those words and actions were justified. They might have been, for all you or I really know. I have no problem understanding that they were.