thanks, god.

[fr0d0]

I was going for the "thorough" look, not hostile. Sorry for the sharpness of the post.

okeydokely :p

If I placed a shrew and a snake, put them in a box with no food and waited for a while, upon coming back I'd likely find the snake has eaten the shrew. If I put them in that box knowing that the snake would eat the shrew and intending for this outcome to happen, I can take responsibility for this.

If I created the snake with all of its instincts and traits, and i created the shrew also and the box, the conditions inside the box, determined their actions to infinite precision and then put them in the box, I have as good as orchestrated the act myself. This is what God has done.[/quote Wrote:You're pure evil doing that!

So lets look at what God did. God put this world together where animals eat other animals and a balance is struck. Everything works together to produce an overall balance and an environment that self regulates. Then people come along and fuck it up but that's another story

What did God orchestrate here? Something evil or something, when looked
at as a whole, perfect (in our eyes at least).

[quote="fr0d0"]
You accept that the Universe is beautiful, & so do I. If God is evil how is that possible? To me we're saying the same thing.

Volcanoes are beautiful. They also kill people. Beauty and goodness are not one and the same.

From who's point of view? You're being egotistical again. In the interest of a bursting magma layer needing to move rock about it's got to be a good thing. Life is created and survives on this process. Don't you watch David Attenborough?

Allowing you to use the bible as evidence is something I can no longer do. The book holds little scientific knowledge but a lot of outdated and demonstrably wrong theories, large portions of bigotry and prejudice, a wide authorship detailing events nobody could possibly have witnessed, a whole bunch of segments removed, edited, translated and reinterpretted, so as a whole, the book is little more than ancient fiction with a few biographical jottings. The book is a bad example of morality (take out your eye, cut off your hand, hate your family- this isn't even the old testament), a bad example of science (fermement, Noah's ark tale, geocentric universe, flat earth), a bad example of biography (how could a biographer of Jesus forget to mention the virgin birth?) and as such is not worthy of being a starting point, basis or premise in any argument about the nature of supernatural deities.

That is all.

Well there we must disagree then. I totally disagree with everything you said there. I've come to the conclusions I've already stated. I'm fine that this won't hold true for you. But if you dismiss the logic then you dismiss everything I say too. I can only refer to this observation of the nature of my deity. If you want to discuss some other deity then that's fine. I don't know what I could contribute though. I thought the point was establishing if this God was good or bad. If you won't allow evidence from the only trusted source by those who believe in said deity then I can't see how that can progress.

---

Frodo, you used the s word, so SUPERSTITION in my Chambers dictionary is defined as:-

an ignorant and irrational belief in supernational agency, omens, divination, sorcery etc; a deep-rooted but unfounded general belief.

Thus the true believer thanks god for salvation.
And thus the explanation for the existence of religious faith.

Touché