The power of Christ...

[Anomalocaris]

It's quite tragic, really.

Many people want to believe in magic, they want their irrevocable problems to be fixable and fixed.  And religion makes all kinds of outrageous promises.

It's painful to go through that.  It's hard enough to have problems to begin with.  To then be given false hope and slowly have it dawn on you that you've been sold a pup, and often be told its your fault in some way when their promises don't come true, is abusive.

Here's the killer question. There seems to be a story here, which has been dealt with badly by the church. Perhaps they made promises they should never have made. Perhaps they failed to provide proper ordinary human support.

I don't have a theory as to why one is helped, one is not. It's much the same question as the problem of evil. Why we have to go through this world to get to the next. Maybe it's something to do with free will, or our response to suffering.

If one could understand evil, if one could find a framework within which it made sense, it would no longer be the radical, anti-creation, anti-God force it actually is. Evil derives much of its power from not being understood.

When I said that God usually uses unremarkable means to advance His Kingdom, I'm including ordinary people doing ordinary things like just being a good friend.

You do have a theory, you just can’t admit to yourself much less others about having one because such an admission, whether to yourself or any others, is tantamount to an admission that you’ve quite possibly been a self-deceiving idiot and moral coward who also undertook to aggressively deceive others in order to better maintain your own self deception, and that a really honest person would have given that possibility at least equal billing to your elaborate but borrowed self-deception when communicating with others.

The theory is there is no help, there is only chance and very superficial appearance of help  resulting from unrelated contingent circumstances that dovetails fatally with cognitive defects of those who craving to discern help.   There is no help because the made up agent that is claimed to provide the help does not exist.