| IIIIITHE1IIIII said: 1. So, basically, God wanted to punish the humans for not listening to him, and for trusting the snake who made them choose to eat the fruit. Even after they were in great shame. Looks like this God is not a huge fan of human nature. I, myself, would not blame my kids if they started to trust a complete stranger who happened to eventually hurt them. I would feel sorry for my kids, not call them sinners or anything similar. 2. I wouldn't blame my hypothetical wife for doing something that Eve has done. In my eyes, she is the last person to even consider hurting others. And I don't buy that she died for decisions made by someone else. If she did some horrible things it would be (at least more) understandable if God wanted to punish her, but she was a way better human than any other living being in the neighborhood who still happens to be alive. It is not fair. 3. God loves us so much that he let's us choose paths which will hurt us? (see:drug addicts, alcoholics). He also let's us be seduced by the Devil and other evil entities surrounding us? He let our trust (which we all are born with) betray us? After all, we don't ever choose who to trust. We automatically draws conclusions based on what we know and have experienced. 4. I didn't ask for the results of other people's actions, but I am forced to live in the hypothetical shit that they have caused. As a result, my actions may also become "shitty" since I have been skewed by my environment. Again, this is not fair. 5. I suppose the question "Who do you owe?" was not the right question in that context. But rather: "Who would you say "Thank you" to?" For instance, if someone fixed my roof I don't thank the creator of the hammer or nails. I thank the person who fixed my roof. [...] 6. The only way of saving yourself is to say no to scientific knowledge (considering that you can't die and then respawn) and to trust a potentially skewed and biased source (the Bible, and all who claims/claimed to carry Jesus' message)? Surely, a God would not force us to say no to what basically is common sense for us to be saved? That's inhumane. He should give us more compelling evidence and then ask us whether we want to be saved by him or not. Otherwise our decision would be more affected by our surroundings. 7. I can see you are doing a great job :) I never would have thought you were not a convinced believer. |
1. No, it wasn't out of anger that he did it. It was to keep Adam and Eve from eating from the Tree of Life. Genesis 3:22 says And the Lord God said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever." Again, the reason for this is so that humanity does not live in eternal sin.
You could say that it was punishment, I suppose, in the sense that Adam and Even did something they were told not to. They betrayed God's trust, in a way, because he gave them a perfect world; all they had to do was take care of it and not eat from the Tree of Knowledge. But as I said, he cast them out of the garden to give humanity a second chance. Adam and Eve are the ones who brought sin upon humanity, and God did what he did to save them from it.
2. It's not that she died because Eve was a sinner. Yes, Eve was the first one to sin, and it is from there (technically Satan, which is why he's called the father of lies) that all sin has originated in the world. Because of that, all of us are sinners. Humans are sinners, and imperfect beings. We can't ever be better in this life, because we have sin. And so that first death is when we go before God, and we are judged worthy or not worthy (do you or do you not accept Jesus' sacrifice to cleanse you of sin?) of eternal life. So this physical death is unavoidable. I'm not sure if that actually makes more sense or not.
And no matter how great your hypothetical wife was, she was still a sinner. The only person who was ever without sin was Jesus. So your wife was guilty just like we all are. I hate to say this as such an absolute statement, but I don't think it's possible for anyone not to be a sinner according to what's in the Bible. Not because it says so, but because the standards are so insanely high, and there's so much sin all around you (and the Bible does tell us that sin likes to spread...) that it's virtually impossible to stay away from.
3. God gave us free will. He wanted us to choose to love him. If you force someone to love you, then it's not really love. God wanted us to choose him. In order to do so, there had to be an option to choose something that was not God. Thus, the Tree of Knowledge. Every choice you make that is not condoned by the Bible is a choice against God. God loves us, but he won't force us to love him. He will let us do as we will with our lives, and he will hope that we find him. He many offer a bit of help, if you ask for it, but he won't force you to love him.
4. You're right. It's not fair. But it's not God who caused it. It's humanity that caused it. We just have to make do with the live we are given.
5. Ah. Well, I don't know that either are more important. Both are equally important, as you need the nails and hammer to fix the roof, but you also need the laborer who used those tools to fix the roof. In this case, the tool is something that can't be replaced with something else; you can't go down to the hardware store and buy a different love and happiness fertilizer tool. All of that comes from God. You may not thank him for it, but it does come from him.
6. Okay, I might lose you here; this is something that I have and still struggle with. I like science a lot, and I think that a lot of it is pretty darn accurate. But they are not mutually exclusive. You can have both Christianity and science. The most glaringly obvious (seeming) contradiction is evolution, in which species slowly evolve over time and new species eventually appear as a result. There are many ways that Christians deal with this, but the most reasonable explanation is the unexplained explosion of life. If evolution only occurs slowly, how did this massive explosion happen? And so if there was an explosion of life that just happened... that lines up fairly well with Genesis 1, in which God creates the many different species. Some Christians also say that God could have caused evolution... but that always bothered me for some reason.
If that's true though, Genesis 1 and 2 still seem to contradict each other. This is refuted by Christians, as Genesis 1 is sort of the grand overview, while Genesis 2 is meant to focus on humanity. I still have problems with this, but... I guess it makes sense. It still seems like the order should be consistent though.
Another problem I still have is the currently accepted theory on how the moon was created. It doesn't seem to match up with Genesis 1. Genesis 1 has the moon showing up after plants had already started to appear on Earth, but this theory would have incinerated everything on the planet surface. The theory has plenty of holes though; there's no evidence that such an event happened... so I guess science can't answer this nearly as accurately as it can for other things, and we have this inconsistency that we can't really resolve until we understand this better.
The idea of a Creator isn't really anti science either. We know that the universe started with the Big Bang, but we don't know what happened before that. There are theories out there, like multiple universes, but... where did all of those come from? The idea of an intelligent creator isn't unreasonable, because anything about what happened before the Big Bang is probably just always going to be a theory. I'm not sure how you can prove or disprove any of them, because we can't "see" anything before the Big Bang.
Lastly, and this is something that a Christian asked me... do you really think that a God powerful enough to create the entire universe and everything in it wouldn't be able to write his own book the way he wanted it? That was a slap across the face to me. I suppose that I can't really refute that, and so the only thing I'm left with is to study the Bible itself and see if something in there is contradictory.
7. Thanks. I've been trying to put myself in the position of a Christian, because it helps a ton when you're trying to actually study the BIble and not just laugh at the whole thing. It at least helped me to take it seriously. This is something I've been trying to apply to all areas of life too; especially politics. It's a lot less frustrating when you can understand the other point of view.
