God

[zghorner]

"O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended you and I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of Heaven and the pains of Hell. But most of all because I have offended you, my God, who are all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve with the help of your grace, to confess my sins, to do penance and to amend my life. Amen."

Thats beautiful man. I admire you.

 

[Cavedweller]

I always thought this forum was 99% Christian faith. Kinda cool knowing that isn't the case, but whatever religion you are keep the faith. Do what you do, I'm gonna do what I do.

 

[JD8]

Can you explain how on a lot of occasions that you escaped injury-or worse. Or maybe an accident? T'wasn't fate my friend-it was something else. You see, sometimes God works in ways we don't understand and sort of prepares you for something....

Was it "something else" when a 2 year old was raped and murdered here in Tulsa? Cause "mysterious ways?"

This is the line that is fed that has no logic to it whatsoever.


Edit: German beat me to it.

 

[Dale00]

"How can a good, all powerful, all knowing God permit suffering?"

...C. S. Lewis in his celebrated book The Problem of Pain. Lewis begins by stating the problem as follows:

'If God were good, he would wish to make his creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty he would be able to do what he wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either the goodness, or power, or both.' This is the problem of pain, in its simplest form. [21]

But Lewis is not content to leave the critic of Christianity holding the moral high ground. He demands that this critic clarify what is meant by those terms 'omnipotence' and 'goodness'. Too often, Lewis argues, such critics bandy these terms about without really engaging with them.

So what does it mean to say that God is omnipotent? Lewis argues, with considerable skill, that it does not mean that God can do anything he likes. Once God has opted to do certain things, or to behave in a certain manner, then other possibilities are excluded.

If you choose to say 'God can give a creature free-will and at the same time withhold free-will from it', you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire a meaning because we prefix to them the two other words: 'God can'. It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but non-entities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of his creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives not because his power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense, even when we talk it about God.[22]

Lewis then argues that suffering cannot be regarded as arising from a lack of divine omnipotence. Far from it. If God creates a material universe, and gives creatures freedom of action, suffering follows on as a matter of course. Having exercised his omnipotence in creating the universe and endowing his creature *with freedom, he cannot block the outcome of that free universe – suffering. ‘Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you will find that you have excluded life itself.’ [23]

Lewis then moves on to consider the implications of that deceptively simple word 'goodness'. Too often, Lewis insists, the *meaning of that word is assumed to be self-evident, when in fact it requires considerable thought. For Lewis, goodness is the natural outcome and expression of the love of God. Is suffering inconsistent with a loving God? Lewis insists that we pay attention to the term 'love', and avoid reading into it trivial and sentimental human parodies of the divine reality. We must learn to discover and appreciate divine love as it really is, instead of confusing or identifying it with our own ideas on the matter. God tells us what his love is like. There is no need for us to guess about it. The love of God, Lewis thus argues,

... is not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels himself responsible for the comfort of his guest, but the consuming fire itself, the love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and vener*able as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. [24]

The love of God, then, is not some happy-go-lucky outlook on life, which makes hedonism its goal. It is a divine love, which proceeds from God and leads back to God, which embraces suffering as a consequence of the greater gifts of life and freedom. Real life implies suffering. Were God to take suffering away from us, he would take away that precious gift of life itself. 'The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves is insoluble only so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word "love", and look on things as if man was the centre of them.’ [25]

http://www.bethinking.org/suffering/suffering-problem

 

[120 Acres]

"How can a good, all powerful, all knowing God permit suffering?"

http://www.bethinking.org/suffering/suffering-problem

Pretty good Dale.
Ok, so he set the table and he's sitting back watching us eat. Why do people pray if he is just watching?

 

[Dale00]

God is not just watching. He is actively engaged and accessible to anyone through prayer.

 

[The German]

You found an internet site, yup, must be true then.

 

[The German]

God is not just watching. He is actively engaged and accessible to anyone through prayer.

Sounds just like Santa Clause, at least you can see him every December in every mall in America.

 

[Dale00]

You found an internet site, yup, must be true then.

Actually C.S. Lewis was a Oxford professor and he is being quoted in the article by another Oxford professor.

 

[Raoul Duke]