It weird how as our knowledge and scientific skills increase the odds of miracles seems to go down proportionally. 
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Source? Why canāt it be that miracles are extremely common now? God can change the rules at any moment, after all, without telling us.
This is the reason why people kill in the name of God without any remorse.
But Iām glad you think this type of mentality needs to be fostered.
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Of course itās dangerous. But, if you accept the Bible literally, then you know that God ordered the Israelites to commit genocide. And, they did (or tried to, I donāt recall). And, to the extent they succeeded, that was God pleasing (just like killing all those people with the flood). Some people simply deserve to die, and God knows which ones.
The Christians I know will say that itās been a very long time since anyone got direct orders like that from God. We donāt need to worry about it today. We just accept it was Godās will in a different world.
OTOH, weāve got plenty of recent history of wars that were at least nominally about religion, where religion added to the ferocity. Thatās one reason why I think we need to keep government (which has the armies) and religion separate. This is really dangerous stuff.
Why would we want to accept this? If God defines logic and morality, then we should celebrate genocides by the command of God. In fact, we should hope that there are more genocides, as thatās very obviously a moral act approved by God.
What makes you think refraining from genocide would please God?
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@Lucy or some Mod, please move these Theology posts out of here!
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This is one of the big reasons I left Christianity. The āmoralityā of God was so horrific to me that even if he existed I donāt respect his morality.
Why? Why canāt got be still talking to people? Maybe the mother who said God told her to kill her kids was doing his will. Those kids deserved to die.
If you believe the Christian mythology, then you believe that God uses governments to exert his will. Why would you go against Gods will and separate out these things?
Itās always strangely convenient to me how people find ways to fold in modern philosophies into their religious beliefs. Thereās no biblical justification for this but it prevents people from looking crazy so they embrace it.
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Only an actuary. No, Iām not pricing a product and claiming a variance of confidence level of ___ that we wonāt lose money on it.
Iām saying that the Hebrews saw this event as extremely rare, certainly so rare that they could go about their daily lives without worrying about about another similar miracle.
(Though, religious people who say āWeāll see you again at Christmasā are more likely to add āGod willingā, in my experience.)
Yeah, logically Iād say that may not be a matter of chance.
Though religious people will say itās Godās will and we shouldnāt question it.
so you agree that miracles can be extremely common. God can change his ways without justification easily after all.
This. 100%.
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We should āacceptā the ones God commanded. I donāt think ācelebrateā is the right word. Itās a tragedy that so many people were so evil that they had do die.
We should hope that in our time, people accept God and live full and God pleasing lives. In fact, Christians should do the little they can to make that more likely. The instructions to love are far more common and universal than the narrow instructions to kill.
Why is that a tragedy? Godās morality is the only morality.
What if the way to do this is to kill as many people as you can in your life? What if thatās exactly what some people believe? They donāt need proof after all, because they operate on faith, just like you.
And Godās morality canāt be reasoned by human standards, so you canāt say that killing is wrong either.
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It looks like we have something in common, we were both raised in Christian households and eventually found one too many things that we couldnāt accept.
For a long time āGod created our minds. We shouldnāt expect God to accept our ālogicā because we canāt possibly understand His infinitely greater wisdom. For us to question God is like the clay questioning the potter. The gap is that great.ā works.
Eventually, we just canāt get over the next hill. For me, that hill wasnāt āThe earth looks to be billions of years old, but the Bible has a genealogy that says more like 6,000ā. I can explain that like Iāve done in this thread. The rocks that look like dinosaur bones were in the ground when Adam walked the earth. That seems odd to us, but itās a lot less odd than saying āI am with you alwaysā when we look around and canāt see any physical evidence of that. I am surprised that Christian apologists deal with the Flood by making it seem smaller, instead of just going with āGod works miraclesā. (Thatās how I got started in this tangent.)
My hill was putting together āGod would that all men to be savedā and āhe died once for allā and āno man comes to the Father but by meā with the evidence that there were millions of people alive when those things were written who didnāt have an iota of a chance of hearing about Jesus. Your hill was different.
Yep, I understand that Iām āputting God into a box that I madeā. Iām guilty of saying āIām not willing to believe in a god that doesnāt act according to rules that I makeā in spite of the fact that any God worth the name would make rules that I donāt understand.
But, :shrug: The first sin in the Bible was human ego. Still true, I guess.
Maybe the core mystery of Christianity is that God is both loving and just. Because he is just, he condemns evil people. Because he is loving, he forgives evil people.
How can that be? The human suffering of Christ on the cross is maybe an attempt by God to show humans how painful and difficult it is for Him to put aside His just side so we can experience his loving side.
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Thatās human logic. Per Godās morality, loving can easily be the same as killing, forgiving can easily be the same as hating, evil can easily be the same as good, condemning can easily be the same as rewarding.
Youāre the one that said God created logic, so itās weird that youāre still using human logic to figure out what is or isnāt allowed by God. Pick a lane.
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I think the question is whether any single action can, like a Roman Catholic baptism, erase the USās collective guilt about racism. To your point, some people like to believe slavery did it. Others turn to the end of Jim Crow and similar efforts in the 60s.
We also have our Calvinists preaching total depravity. The US is racist through and through; so is the Enlightenment. Every white person is racist by virtue of participating in racist systems. We canāt change it. We can only try to change it, and hope for forgiveness.
It seems very hard to stand outside this narrative. I have read in some places that Critical Race Theory tries. At least in popular culture as judged by the straw man being built to rally college graduates to back to the republican party, it is failng.
We can use this line of reasoning for anything, weāve just assumed the premise.
Under modern physics, the basic building blocks of the universe have no age. They do not change with time, and in fact are fundamentally indistinguishable from each other. In a profound sense, there is only 1 way for 2 electrons to sit in two chairs, so to speak, because they are truly identical.
Relativity tells us a personās age isnāt unique. It is simply how much time a clock measures from when they were born to that moment. And different clocks will give different measurements depending on how fast they are moving and if they are in gravity. This is verified; GPS satellites must make relativistic corrections to calculate your position correctly. By āageā, we usually mean what a clock attached to you your entire life would read.
This is also why the second is defined as ā the time duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the fundamental unperturbed ground-state of the caesium-133 atomā In other words, it is defined in terms of physical processes. If those physical processes donāt happen because God intervenes, then time does not pass.
So if God were to put you in suspended animation for 100 years, where nothing about you changed (you would not be conscious since your brain would not function), then our clocks would measure you as being 100 years older. And somebody else who went on a very fast spaceship might measure that 50 years had passed. But for you, no time would have passed, and your āageā would have stayed the same. The time that passes is simply what clocks read.
So the Holocaustā¦ was all A-OKā¦ I think Iām good concluding god is about as evil as they come then