Woeler wrote:There are millions of pieces of (visible, touchable) evidence for evolution. There is no such evidence for God, and the bible is no source for legitimate information. It's not God/Evolution 50%/50%, it's God/Evolution 0.000001%/99.999999% because nothing can ultimately be disproved, but that does in no sense mean there is any truth to it.
I was and still am aware of that. It's nonsense to throw out the Bible as a legitimate source knowing there is just visible and touchable evidence as there is for evolution. For one, there is the Mesha Stele, which archives the victories King Mesha of Moab had over King Omri of Israel, and lines up with 2 Kings 3:4-8. There is also the Ebla tablets that are even older than the Torah which contain the names of the Biblical figures such as Abraham, David, and Ishmael and Biblical locations such as Sodom and Gomorrah.
Woeler wrote:This is a big lump of nonsense. The whole concept of Satan proves that God is either not all-powerful or not all-loving. God created the world, God created evil. God knew evil would come from this world. God is either a gigantic sadistic asshole, or he doesn't exist.
The existence of Satan and demons merely shows God gave them free will as he did with humans, but they chose to rebel against God's authority. And yes, God knew evil would come into this world, but he didn't create it. It came from manipulation from Satan in the Garden of Eden, and his power still corrupts the world to this day.
Woeler wrote:God created, God knew, God is a giant idiot.
Your argument doesn't hold much water. If God created rape and unlawful murder, then, why does he condemn it through the Ten Commandments and have those who commit rape condemned to death (Deuteronomy 22:25)?
Woeler wrote:Yes, 'compassion'. Totally worth thousands of lives. Totally moral.
Yes, thousands of lives are lost during a natural disaster. Loss is an essential part of the healing process, and the Bible states God will "restore everything you lost; he'll have compassion on you; he'll come back and pick up the pieces from all the places where you were scattered" in Deuteronomy 30:3.
Woeler wrote:9 million children die every year before they reach the age of five. Picture one of these Asian tsunamis that killed a quarter of a million people. One of those every ten days, killing children under five. That's 24.000 children a day, a thousand an hour, 17 every minute.
That means before you have read the end of this sentence some few children, very likely, will have died in terror and agony. Think of the parents of these children. Think of the fact that most of these men and women believe in God, and are praying at this moment for their child's life to be spared. And their prayers will not be answered.
Any God who would allow children by the millions to suffer and die in this way, and their parents to grieve in this way, either can do nothing to help them, or doesn't care to. He is therefore either impotent or evil.
Strong words, there! If you read my last post with an open mind, then, I address to you that God left man in charge to tend the Earth. God understands the parents' grieving of their dead child(ren); he himself let his own son suffer and die at the hands of the Romans. Maybe, instead of blaming God, you can blame the corrupt and lack of industrialization across the countries of the world. Look at the figures and statistics for how much corruption costs in third-world countries: source. And that's just for developing countries; developed countries can be just as bad. When a government like that mismanages money to that degree, it is bound to hurt the welfare of the population living in poverty. And the World Health Organization reports that "Most of these children are dying in developing countries from preventable causes for which there are known and cost-effective interventions. Unless efforts are increased there will be little hope of averting the additional 5.4 million child deaths per year, or a reduction of two-thirds, needed to achieve Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 4 by 2015." So, instead of blaming God, place the blame on corrupt government and the lack of massive intervention from us in developed countries, and then do something about this to help combat these problems like donating to a responsible charity organization.
Woeler wrote:So, a dictatorship. Hitler is in heaven, but Bill Gates donating millions to poor people will go to hell for not believing in God. Can anyone look me straight in the eye and say that is moral? What person with the slightest piece of braintissue can approve of this? What moral garbage is this?
Wrong again, a matter of free will left to everyone. As for Hitler, Joseph Goebbels himself wrote in The Goebbels Diaries that the "Fuhrer is deeply religious, though completely anti-Christian. He views Christianity as a symptom of decay. Rightly so. It is a branch of the Jewish race. This can be seen in the similarity of their religious rites. Both have no point of contact to the animal element, and thus, in the end they will be destroyed. The Fuhrer is a convinced vegetarian on principle." True, Hitler did give speeches emphasizing his version of Christianity, but the Nazi Party ran on a platform of "positive Christianity". According to this source, it is a similar type militant, non-denominational form of Christianity which emphasized Christ as an active preacher, organizer, and fighter who opposed the institutionalized Judaism of his time. Positive Christianity purged or de-emphasized the Jewish aspects of Christianity and was infused with aspects of nationalism and racial antisemitism.
At a speech in Nuremberg on 6 September 1938, Hitler confirmed what positive Christianity worships:
Adolf Hitler wrote:National Socialism is not a cult-movement-- a movement for worship; it is exclusively a 'volkic' political doctrine based upon racial principles. In its purpose there is no mystic cult, only the care and leadership of a people defined by a common blood-relationship.... We will not allow mystically-minded occult folk with a passion for exploring the secrets of the world beyond to steal into our Movement. Such folk are not National Socialists, but something else-- in any case something which has nothing to do with us. At the head of our programme there stand no secret surmisings but clear-cut perception and straightforward profession of belief. But since we set as the central point of this perception and of this profession of belief the maintenance and hence the security for the future of a being formed by God, we thus serve the maintenance of a divine work and fulfill a divine will-- not in the secret twilight of a new house of worship, but openly before the face of the Lord.... Our worship is exclusively the cultivation of the natural, and for that reason, because natural, therefore God-willed. Our humility is the unconditional submission before the divine laws of existence so far as they are known to us men.
Since positive Christianity does away with the belief in Jesus as the Son of God in favor of nationalism socialism and social Darwinism, according to Hitler's words, he is not a Bible-believing Christian. He viewed Jesus as an Aryan opposing Jews, and according to his writings in Mein Krampft, it is the Lord's work for him to "fight off the Jews". Positive Christianity is a mere distortion of the original Judeo-Christian religion, and it is highly likely that Hitler is in hell for believing this given the Jews are God's chosen people.
As for Bill Gates's atheism, the Bible strictly states that earthly works does not guarantee salvation. In the Book of Isaiah, it states our righteousness is "filthy rags"; in Titus 3:5-6, it states "Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Spirit; which he shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior."
Woeler wrote:There are 1.2 billion people in India at this moment. Most of them are Hindu, polytheists. no matter how good these people are, they are doomed. If you are praying to the monkey-god Hanuman, you are doomed. You'll be tortured in Hell for eternity. Now is there the slightest evidence for this? No. It just says so in Mark 9, Matthew 13 and Revelation 14.
Calm down, Woeler, calm down. My church has a global outreach program called the Surge Project. Under their South Asia jurisdiction, they report that in the past five years, they have planted 549 Christian churches in south Asia. Of that number, 390 are in India, 81 in Nepal, 35 in Sri Lanka, 24 in Pakistan, and 19 in Bangladesh. The same site states a pastor named "Victor Nazareth in Delhi, India, now has 21 churches under his supervision and over 900 people" are in attendance.
This is just the beginning, and there's still more work to do. Eventually, all of India and Hindu-believing countries will hear of the Gospel, and the choice to believe in Jesus will be left to them. But please do not delude into believing Christianity is not making progress into these countries.
Woeler wrote:If God is good and loving and just and kind, and he wanted to guide us morally with a book, why give us a book that supports slavery?
If God supports slavery, then why did he collapse the kingdom of Egypt for practicing the same economic philosophy? If I am not mistaken, the slavery mentioned in the New Testament was meant to be interpreted as debt slavery, or debt bondage. It was very common during ancient Rome, where the events of the New Testament occur in. Basically, if one person couldn't pay back a borrowed loan from a banker, then, they ordered by law to serve the banker in order to pay it off.
Woeler wrote:So when he commands the Israelites to slaughter the Amalekites, that behavior becomes intrinsically good because he commanded it. Ok, well here we’re being offered a psychopathic and psychotic moral attitude. It’s psychotic because this is completely delusional. There’s no reason to believe that we live in a universe ruled by an invisible monster Yahweh. But it is psychopathic because this is a total detachment from the well-being of human beings.
Well, you do have to remember the Amalekites attacked the Hebrews first on their journey from Egypt as recorded in Exodus 17:8-10. Israel's only justification for slaughtering the entire Amalekite civilization was an act of self-defense given these feud lasted with no end from the days of Moses to the kingdom under David. Yes, war and genocide is morally wrong, but it calls for decisions that may be unpopular in our eyesight. If King Saul hadn't killed all of the Amalekites, it's only evident that the Amalekites will resurface again as they did in Judges, and lead to more violence, war, and suffering. If anything, this shows us how the world operates: we make morally wrong short-term decisions but it leads to long-term benefits such as peace and prosperity.
Woeler wrote:If you start a sentence with 'when Noah was 600 years old' you cannot prove to me that the rest of the sentence is less nonsense than the beginning of it.
Back to the ages, again, are we? I really didn't want to resort to this, but you leave no choice. There was an ancient manuscript called the Sumerian King List, which lists antediluvian kings with extended lifespans, and a noticeable gradual decline in lifespans after the Flood.
Why I didn't want to bring this before was because the problem with the Sumerian Kings list is that it records ages of tens of thousands of years for some kings whereas the Biblical account only records several hundred years for the patriarchs. The kings may be mythologized versions of actual historical figures, but it seems to verify what the Bible claims that some ancient people did indeed live to be very old, and some of the kings listed also appear in the pre-flood genealogies of the Bible. The Weld-Blundell prism is evidence of that as well.
Woeler wrote:Give me one example in the history of the world of a single spiritual person who has been able to show either empirically or logically the existence of a higher power with any consciousness or interest in the human race or ability to punish or reward humans for their moral choices or that there is any reason other than fear to believe in any version of an afterlife.
Well, the existence of God defies logic, but maybe Kurt Gödel, perhaps?
