StarWarsStarTrek wrote:Which is an inconsistency in the Bible. Your justification is assuming that God applies His omniscience to good use. Yet in other parts of the Bible, God "tests" people and puts people in situations when He knows they will do bad, despite His Omniscience.
I don't see an inconsistency. That's what's called "grace" in the Christian faith. Instead of delivering punishment right away, God withholds it. The Bible records that after the Flood, God promised that it wouldn't be repeated, even if the modern world might deserve it just as much as the antediluvians did.
Testing, as far as I can tell, is not for God's benefit, but for ours. By probing the limits of our faith and human ability, we emerge as stronger people.
I keep trying to capitalize "H" out of respect, however egotistical requiring it seems.
By the way, when I'm "celebrating" Good Friday with some of my Christian relatives, I don't eat meat out of respect. Actually, I try not to eat meat; sometimes I just forget.
How considerate of you.
That's OK Donner, but I could use the same logic to justify worshiping the Flying Spaghetti Monster; attribute all miracles to him and then justify the illogical nature of Him by claiming that He acts in mysterious ways.
Feel free to.
You mean the best explanation that has been published in various languages and has sold countless billions of copies. With the time and motivation, I could publish a book that far more plausibly "explains" creation without the silly stories (Tower of Babel comes to mind), rape, genocide, scientific inaccuracies and logical inaccuracies.
In fact, there already are thousands of these on the market. Go read A Brief History of Time. It provides an explanation for X and Y better than the Bible.
I already have. But generally, if I'm going to read pop science, I prefer stuff with a little more numbers in it than Hawking. Books on that level don't really explain anything -- they just pontificate, tell me "this is how it is" (or more often, "this is kind of like how it is if I dumb it down for you plebes") without actually showing the work or evidence behind it. Asimov's a little better for a beginner, but even he's a little light on the actual science for my taste.
If I get to pick my choice of books for physics, cosmology, biology etc, I'll generally take a high school or low level college textbook over pop science. They've got much more "meat" in them. But I digress.
Maybe I phrased myself poorly. When I said "the facts of human existence" I meant something more like, I don't know, "the human condition"? (I believe I already said English isn't my first language, so bear with me if I get stuff wrong or imprecise.) I don't look for equations, general relativities and gravitational constants in the Bible. Rather, stuff on us humans -- people. How we work, where we're going, all those old quandaries that "science" can't answer any more today than in Sargon II's time.
Ah, my bad. There are many people that pray to God for petty things such as a job raise or a better parking seat, which seems to confuse me. Funny; or not, that God would listen to such prayers while not hearing the collective World Peace prayers and "Help us! We're starving in Africa!" prayers around the world.
If there are any human-controlled factors weighing in on whether prayers are actually answered, that'd depend primarily on faith, according to the Bible. So it might well be possible that a devout man praying for himself and for a comparatively petty favor would be answered, while a shallow believer (or nonbeliever/non-Christian/Christian heretic) praying for a greater good would be ignored.
Then again, any prayer answered (or divine intervention without prayer) is an undeserved act of God's grace on our behalf, given not for anything we do or think, but because of the good God's mercy. Just like our Salvation in Christ. We can never
expect, much less
demand, anything from God.