(April 7, 2014 at 5:56 pm)Lek Wrote: How can you say that God is not loving?Well, for starters, he's the guy who sets up a world where everyone suffers and then decides that's not enough, so...
Lek Wrote:The suffering God inflicted on us he also inflicted on his son.That's not very loving. Especially since he could've avoided it by simply doing something that people have learned to do and do all the time without spilling a drop of blood... forgive.
Lek Wrote:If Job is with God now in eternal bliss, do you think that he cares about how much he suffered during his time on earth?If Job was in heaven with god, he'd probably spend eternity hoping that god doesn't notice him ever again. Because the previous time he noticed him, Job was put through a wringer of emotional, mental, and physical torment and all because god decided to allow a request by Satan to turn his world upside-down.
And Job, a "blameless and upright man, who fear[ed] god and shunn[ed] evil" (god's description of Job, BTW) understandably figured that he'd get an explanation from god, seeing as god was kind and loving and just. Instead, he got bitch-slapped by an indignant deity who sarcastically wondered aloud who was this little insignificant man to dare to expect an explanation from god. Apparently god forgot the glowing recommendation that he'd given Job previously, because god sure does hate it when his servants get uppity after they've been put through hell without warning.
Christians often remind us that man is a fallen creature, absolutely incapable of redemption on our own and dependent on god's undeserved mercy. Job was reminded of this in pretty rough terms, to put it mildly. If he is in heaven with god, I wonder how many millennia it will take for him to finally stop looking over his shoulder in a cold sweat. He might even be thinking that if hell is a condition of man when he is without god, it might not be such a bad place to find himself.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould