mrglass08 said:
I am not offended at all, I welcome dialogue about my faith ad will attempt to answer as best as I can. Be aware that the issues you are raising are not simple issues and have been studied extensively for a long time with whole libraries devoted to their understanding and a few sentences will be very unlikely to do the topic justice, but I will try. Please not that I come from a conservative evangelical background and a lot of the topics you raised have a great deal of debate about them.
Conservative evangelical in the American sense? I ask because here in England, the word conservative has a
very different meaning to what it does in the US. For us it indicates being traditionalist and right-wing, whereas the American conservative movement seems to be dominated by extremist far-right theocrats who would consider British conservatives to be pinko commie liberals
mrglass08 said:
God is the creator and sovereign of creation.
Though it doesn't relate to our overall topic, this is something else I've never understood and that my religious friends have never been able to explain. Why is God, simply by virtue of being creator, the sovereign? My parents created me, but they do not have absolute authority nor do I feel the need to worship them. I love them, and am grateful for them because they turned me into a (fairly) normal and functional human being, but I certainly won't be building any temples in their honour. If I invent a useful object which goes on the be used by every household in the world, I may get royalties and be recognised as the creator but it would be foolish of me to think I was "ruler" and could dictate what people did with the item.
The whole thing smacks of tyranny, like the kings of old whose "right to rule" came from the fact they had the biggest army - God is the biggest and the baddest, he was here first so he has the
right to rule over our lives. From a modernised human perspective, it's a deeply troubling thought.
mrglass08 said:
He made it from nothing and he sustains it by his will to do so. Nothing is higher than God, no rules, laws or concepts define who he is or what he does. We can however see several attributes that he both displays and defines. For instance, he is love, he is justice, he is mercy, he is holy. What is a little more difficult for us to see is how these attributes fit together all of the time. Thousands of pages of been put into that topic so it gets a little difficult to come down with a firm answer of how.
OK, so accepting your logic for a moment, we define those attributes in relation to God. Are you saying that we have trapped God in a prison of our expectations? Because earlier you said that if God made sin disappear he "would not be just and then he would not be God". If our definition derives from him, and we say that if he altered those definitions he'd no longer be what we think of as God, that implies that he's stuck.
Of course, he
is God and by some schools of thought omnipotent. So technically he
can go outside of the rules he's set down for himself, and remain God. In fact, logically speaking, if we derive our definitions of such attributes from him then he gets to decide what our definition is - if he decided tomorrow that love actually involved wearing coconut shells on your feet, that would re-define what love is, no? If he defines, and he has ultimate control, then he can re-define at any moment and still remain God.
mrglass08 said:
Now sin is a few things all at once. It is a rebellion against the sovereignty of God, it is a rejection of him as the giver and sustainer of life and it is a corruption of his creation.
Rebellion requires active resistance. An atheist, for instance, is not rebelling against God's sovereignty; he simply does not believe in God, and can no more rebel against the sovereignty of what he considers an imaginary being than he could rebel against Lord Voldemort. He may hold religion and its trappings in extreme distaste, but religion is not God, merely a framework people have built as an attempt to understand him. To rebel against God's sovereignty, logically, one must first A) accept that God exists and B) actively seek to resist him.
As to "rejection of him as the giver and sustainer of life", this again requires a belief. Now despite what televangelists may say, belief is
not a choice. Whenever I've been asked why I chose not to believe in God, I respond by asking why my questioner
chooses to believe. The answer is always the same - "I do not choose to believe. I just know it's true". This is precisely the point; I have never made a conscious choice not to believe in God, I just don't, and without some kind of proof I never will. By no stretch of the imagination could that be called "rejection", could it? I'm not plugging my ears, singing a little song and just
pretending I can't hear God talking to me. To reject God and his plans, one must first believe in God and his plans, otherwise the only thing being rejected are the theological views of other humans.
mrglass08 said:
Sin and God can not coexist because they are diametrically opposed to each other.
Yet the concept of sin exists. If the two cannot coexist, then either one of them must be false or our understanding of the matter is flawed, no?
mrglass08 said:
God can not allow sin to be unpaid for because it is an outright rejection of him and his authority.
However, we're told that he is merciful and forgiving. It seems that, should someone reject his authority (which, remember, derives from nothing more than simply being "better" than us, and being able to hold a threat over our heads - much like the old parental maxim that "I gave you life, and I can take it away!") then all he has to do is forgive them. Hell, if he's all loving and all merciful then by definition he is
obliged to forgive our transgressions, whether we want him to or not. Anything else would violate the definitions of love and mercy we have derived from him.
mrglass08 said:
Whatever is sinful is in essence saying that they would be better of without God and so God is willing to grant that, and since God is both the giver and sustainer of life to reject God means that you earn death.
Except that, as I said, by the definitions of love, mercy and justice we have derived from his attributes, when we rejected him and earned death he would forgive us anyway, right?
Consider again what I mentioned above, about this fallacy that faith in God is a matter of choice. You may find some vitriolic souls who claim to hate God, rather than religion. These people are not athetists, they are theists, much as they may hate hearing it. A non-believer can no more hate God than he can hate any other fictional character. However, those who do not belief generally do so because they see no reason to believe, no convincing proof for God's existence. Isn't the burden on God to provide that proof? If he created humans, then he knows full well how our brains work, and he knows that many of us will require evidence before we believe wild claims which run contrary to our experiences of the way in which the world works. Ergo by not revealing himself to us definitively, he is not offering us choice, he is forcing us into a state where we (according to the definition above) "reject" him. For this, we earn death? Lack of belief in God, if he really does exist, is not us rejecting him; it is
him rejecting
us. Or would he rather we lie, pretend to believe in him until we even have ourselves fooled, even though he can see our hearts and knows that the only way for us to
truly believe would be for him to give us a real, obvious, unmistakable sign of his existence?
mrglass08 said:
Man has been corrupted by sin and has rejected God and therefore earns separation from God and death.
This doesn't really follow, though. It only makes sense if you assume God to be malicious and spiteful. Imagine this same sentence, but with the addition of the loving and forgiving being we like to assume God to be;
"Man has been corrupted by sin and has rejected God, and therefore earns forgiveness and everlasting life"
Remember, he's God. He can do whatever he wants to do. If he is the very source of justice, mercy etc then he has no excuse for punishing people who have never truly made the choice to turn away from him.
mrglass08 said:
God in his mercy offers a way that man can pay for their sin and be reconciled to God. He gave himself take our death that we earned and instead give us life. Christ was, and is, God in the flesh, he was not just a man possessed by God but God as a man who lived a perfect life and could be our atonement. It was not a nebulous reason, he knew what he was here to do, be our death so that we could live.
I cannot even argue against this part, because there's no logical standpoint to base my counter-arguments on. Could you try and explain this a little more clearly, please? Why would God do all of that instead of doing something so much simpler? Why would he create a race of beings which inevitably turn towards sin as a part of their nature? No man is without sin, after all. It's a rigged game, from what I've been told. Why all the jumping through hoops, the complex "explanations" for the transference of sin and the potential for forgiveness and all those other things when
he's frigging God and didn't have to bother with such insanely convulted or impractical plans?
mrglass08 said:
That was admittedly a rather poor couple of paragraphs but I am off to work. I will check back tonight to see if I can explain anything any better.
You did fine. I think you're just working with concepts that nobody has ever been able to adequately explain to a non-believer, because they have too many of what would in another body of work be called "plot holes" ;-)
