You (NeXuS, Shafty) love your ignorance, so who am I to separate you? All I can offer is the knowledge, knowledge you apparently want to deny exists, or have already written off as a fabrication before you have considered it. All you offer in return are sound bites and appeals to pity (poor little african boy) to fuel your arguments by outrage, which are meaningless for reasons I have already explained.
If there is other life in the universe, wouldn't it be right to suppose that God is taking care of them just as He's taken care of us? I don't see why you think that the Bible insists we're the only ones out there. The Bible is just God's revelation of Himself as is pertinent to us as humankind. We have special significance to God in that we are His creation, and I imagine that if there are four-legged, blue-skinned, three-eyed people living on some planet orbiting some distant star, I am certain that God would also place the same sort of significance on them.
NeXuS, I'm sorry to rouse you from your sweet, sweet dream, but you believe in an undefined religion. Plain and simple. You like it that way, because it places you in control. (J.R.R. Tolkien said it best when he said that the race of men desires power above all else.) You get to define what is in and what is out of your personal religion based on what is comfortable and convenient to you. Try and deny it. I could shoot you down again and again. If anyone has put God inside a box it is you because you think that you can decide and define for yourself the elements of God's own nature. It's not a question of rightness but of authority: who are you to say you can know God? You say that God is incomprehensible, yet you are talking out of both sides of your mouth when you say in the same breath that your own idea of what God should be is able to stand against all others and be proven right, thus implying that it IS possible to know. However, it is you who are in the dream world. You cannot influence the reality of God and His nature (which can only offer justice for the unsaved, and that is Hell, but the saved shall recieve mercy, grace, and eternal life) any more than I can influence the chemical properties of Aluminum. If you have anything at all, it is the understanding that there are things that are beyond human comprehension. But that is all you have (having rejected every specific revelation and thus being forced to resort to your own imagination, your "internal resources" as the atheists like to call them, to define your god), and when you are judged, I am sure you will regret your selfish attitude toward God ("if I can't define Him, I will deny Him."). You have rejected all else that can convince you otherwise. I am sure you'll attack this as "the same fire and brimstone preaching [you've] come to expect, unfailingly, from Christians of all stripes" but what can a mere human such as myself do but become frustrated when society has abandoned all logical reasoning and thinking? Your head is in the sand. Admit it. That you refuse to absorb any of the knowledge I have offered is concrete proof of this fact. When will you learn that arrogance and condescension is not a substitute for rational thinking? Probably never. I have done all I can. It profits me nothing more in Heaven or on Earth to continue this argument.
That's right. I am leaving this debate. Not because my position is "irrational" or because "the cracks are starting to show" or anything of the like. I'm sure we could go on debating this until they can't mine any more coal to burn in the power plants, but I shall not let Satan trap me here and keep me from usefulness elsewhere. You may have more air in your lungs than I do but my real, defined God can beat up the imagined, fake god that your confused imagination has pieced toether. You have not necessarily won this argument. I have simply decided to stop arguing. Throughout the years, Christianity has continued to stand on its own merits even though it is persecuted and resisted from all directions. The only explanation I can offer for this persecution is that this world recognizes and accepts its own (that which has been concieved by men), and naturally rejects that which is foreign (which, in this case, is anything that is truly from God, since this world has by its own free will shut Him out). One might even be able to say that this is the significance of crucifixion as the method of Christ's execution: crucifixion was reserved for foreigners. If I must walk as a foreigner in this world of hate then I will. I can do nothing less for my Lord.
BTW: I know what I know about the person and nature of my God only because He felt that it was important that He reveal Himself to the world. Everything I have ever said about God's nature has come directly from the study of His divinely-inspired Word, by which he continues in the present day to reveal Himself to anyone willing to lend an ear for a little while. I am not making this stuff up as I go along. (This may be news to some of you.)
If there is other life in the universe, wouldn't it be right to suppose that God is taking care of them just as He's taken care of us? I don't see why you think that the Bible insists we're the only ones out there. The Bible is just God's revelation of Himself as is pertinent to us as humankind. We have special significance to God in that we are His creation, and I imagine that if there are four-legged, blue-skinned, three-eyed people living on some planet orbiting some distant star, I am certain that God would also place the same sort of significance on them.
NeXuS, I'm sorry to rouse you from your sweet, sweet dream, but you believe in an undefined religion. Plain and simple. You like it that way, because it places you in control. (J.R.R. Tolkien said it best when he said that the race of men desires power above all else.) You get to define what is in and what is out of your personal religion based on what is comfortable and convenient to you. Try and deny it. I could shoot you down again and again. If anyone has put God inside a box it is you because you think that you can decide and define for yourself the elements of God's own nature. It's not a question of rightness but of authority: who are you to say you can know God? You say that God is incomprehensible, yet you are talking out of both sides of your mouth when you say in the same breath that your own idea of what God should be is able to stand against all others and be proven right, thus implying that it IS possible to know. However, it is you who are in the dream world. You cannot influence the reality of God and His nature (which can only offer justice for the unsaved, and that is Hell, but the saved shall recieve mercy, grace, and eternal life) any more than I can influence the chemical properties of Aluminum. If you have anything at all, it is the understanding that there are things that are beyond human comprehension. But that is all you have (having rejected every specific revelation and thus being forced to resort to your own imagination, your "internal resources" as the atheists like to call them, to define your god), and when you are judged, I am sure you will regret your selfish attitude toward God ("if I can't define Him, I will deny Him."). You have rejected all else that can convince you otherwise. I am sure you'll attack this as "the same fire and brimstone preaching [you've] come to expect, unfailingly, from Christians of all stripes" but what can a mere human such as myself do but become frustrated when society has abandoned all logical reasoning and thinking? Your head is in the sand. Admit it. That you refuse to absorb any of the knowledge I have offered is concrete proof of this fact. When will you learn that arrogance and condescension is not a substitute for rational thinking? Probably never. I have done all I can. It profits me nothing more in Heaven or on Earth to continue this argument.
That's right. I am leaving this debate. Not because my position is "irrational" or because "the cracks are starting to show" or anything of the like. I'm sure we could go on debating this until they can't mine any more coal to burn in the power plants, but I shall not let Satan trap me here and keep me from usefulness elsewhere. You may have more air in your lungs than I do but my real, defined God can beat up the imagined, fake god that your confused imagination has pieced toether. You have not necessarily won this argument. I have simply decided to stop arguing. Throughout the years, Christianity has continued to stand on its own merits even though it is persecuted and resisted from all directions. The only explanation I can offer for this persecution is that this world recognizes and accepts its own (that which has been concieved by men), and naturally rejects that which is foreign (which, in this case, is anything that is truly from God, since this world has by its own free will shut Him out). One might even be able to say that this is the significance of crucifixion as the method of Christ's execution: crucifixion was reserved for foreigners. If I must walk as a foreigner in this world of hate then I will. I can do nothing less for my Lord.
BTW: I know what I know about the person and nature of my God only because He felt that it was important that He reveal Himself to the world. Everything I have ever said about God's nature has come directly from the study of His divinely-inspired Word, by which he continues in the present day to reveal Himself to anyone willing to lend an ear for a little while. I am not making this stuff up as I go along. (This may be news to some of you.)
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