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(November 6, 2010 at 4:51 am)Captain Scarlet Wrote:
(November 5, 2010 at 10:54 pm)Godschild Wrote:
@ Tiberius if the Jewish people and christians were making up their religions then why is it we would include satan, it would be much easier without him. Why after these thousands of years would we not have developed answers to questions like why does God allow bad things to happen to good people and ect. I know we have answers to a lot of questions like this but these answers basicly find no acceptance from nonbelivers and if we were just looking to control people as many of you have said, then don't you think we would have come up with more acceptable answers to draw nonbelievers in. As I said above faith is all we have and as long as we are honest in our faith we have something greater than proof. This is what Jesus told Thomas.The Satan question rather answers itself. Something has to be invented in Christianity to mask the problem of evil so you can attribute bad things to Satan and good things to God. As for the Jews they didn't care too much for the problem of evil, their god used the satan character as a pawn; asking satan to do his own evil for him apart from when he was feeling capricious that is eg Lot.
Faith is greater than proof is it? Do you apply this to medical science, civil engineering, pharmaceuticals, food industry, construction, national electricity grids, maybe your drive to work in the morning? Where exactly do you apply this maxim, apart from in your church or the privacy of your own home? My guess nowhere and that you take sick kids to hospitals not to faith healers, you take aspirins and don't use crystals, you switch lights on in your home you don't pray for the lights to come on, you trust to the qualities of suspension bridges and don't drive over cliffs hoping winged angels will hold up your car as you believe in the right god and the 1000s of others both dead and alive are wrong. Your faith argument belies the extreme weakness of your position and the intellectual price you have to pay to believe in something like a god, gods, man-gods or whatever.
Other religious faiths have no satan, with them you only have to over come self, in the christian faith one must trust in God to over come the temptations of a being that has great powers than mankind. Satan knows each of our weaknesses and preys on them. He does not make us sin,that is our choice (freewill). Just as it is our choice to rely on God to over come the temptations put before us. Now please do not misunderstand me, Satan is often used as a scape goat for our on personal failures, when the blame falls squarely on our shoulders for not trusting God to help us, the sin is ours not satan's. As Jesus says satan has already had his judgement and found guilty before God.
As tack says not blind faith and I believe that he understands that I was not talking about blind faith. The faith that I am talking about and the faith that Jesus told Thomas about was not a blind faith. Jesus said do not tempt the Lord thy God, this is blind faith, God has given us the doctors, engineers, builders and ect. to be of assistance to the human race and not to take advantage of them would be foolish. Some of the examples you mentioned are faith based, when you drive over a bridge of any kind you are placing your faith (trust) in the designers, safety inspectors, construction company and ect. to do their jobs well, so that your trip over the bridge is safe and some of the other things you mentioned would have the same faith applied to them. This faith is not a blind faith either you trust others to do what is right, just as I trust God to do what He has promised. I do pray for many things as part of my faith in God and that does included my own personal safety.
God loves those who believe and those who do not and the same goes for me, you have no choice in this matter. That puts the matter of total free will to rest.
