My honest review of Christianity

[Jenny A]

Yeah, interpret away all that active language: "I will bring," "I will take," "I will give," and "I will bring down," and call it "allow." Why not? I'm sure all God meant was I'll let people have free will to hurt you.

Did he also just let David and Bathsheba's son die, or did he mean it when he said: "The Lord has remitted your sin, you shall not die. However since you have spurned the enemies of the Lord by this deed, even the child about to be born to you shall die."

So David's sin is remitted in return for the life of an innocent child. God's justice. Gotta love it.

Do you think that Pharaoh in the Exodus account was really a nice guy and would have let the Israelites go if God would not have hardened his heart? God was allowing the evil in Pharaoh to harden him to the demands of Moses. We won't agree on the taking of the life of David's child either, since you don't believe that the baby went to an eternity of happiness, but that's the biblical outlook concerning that child and all the innocent children killed in the bible. Maybe it would be better if they had lived longer and died some other horrible, more painful death. Maybe by then they would have reached the age of reason and died rejecting God. If you don't believe that there is an afterlife, then you'll interpret the bible differently than if you do. If I believed we weren't guilty of turning against God and that there was no life after this one, then I might agree with you, but that's not the perspective of the scriptures.

Exodus is a little different . The Bible says god hardened pharaoh's heart. It does not say and god said I will harden pharaoh's heart because you Jews have been misbehaving. You do see the difference. One is a metaphor, the other a promise of punishment.

We could discuss the Jewish view of heaven all day, but fact remains that according to the Bible, god punished a man by killing a child.