Thanks for the skewed link. I mean the link to the skewed video.

The person who posted this video says "BELIEVE EVERY WORD OF THE BIBLE" in their description.

Viewer rebelstang had this enlightening comment as well:

"TD) Ofcorse Hebrew or Latin/
Jewish or Roman,Would be Closer Translations.
I, Speak & Write English. That is why Only Bible I Trust is, King James (HOLY BIBLE) Never Heard of Thomas.
If this was true, Then The Pope, Hale Lindsey & Other Christian Leaders Would Say
or Preach it. Not collage professors!"

Alright rebelstang. Yeah, I prefer to read my scriptures in Roman, as well. rebelstang speak and write English. Good rebelstang. Good.

Never heard of Thomas? I think you'll find him in your King James bible. Somewhere around the New Testament area.

No further comment.

Does Bishop Spong know what you are up to?
http://www.hopeofisrael.net/index.php?option=com_conten...iew&id=113&Itemid=58

I doubt it.

Doug Spaulding. You are a man of much varied talent. How do you do it? Do you mind to explain your sculpture. Looks very interesting.

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.focus...2%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG

"Collage professors" ?

quote:

Originally posted by Phil Knox:
Doug Spaulding. You are a man of much varied talent. How do you do it? Do you mind to explain your sculpture. Looks very interesting.

You've been googling my name!

quote:

Originally posted by Braling II:
"Collage professors"?

There you go!

I didn't even know collage professors got into theology - I thought they pretty much stuck to (no pun intended) gluing, well, collages.

Doug Spaulding~ You are not the only one who has a varied career.

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dir/Phil/Knox?trk=ppro_find_others

You've been googling your name.

I tried that. I had 230,000 possibilities.

Ask the Bishop:


Q: I find it difficult, very difficult, to participate in the life of the Church because of its negativity and distance from contemporary scientific knowledge. What can I do? Where can I go? Is there any hope for a revolution within the Church?

A: The Church is a complex organism. Many seek in it security from all questioning. A few seek to move beyond its understanding into the world of the 21st century. The tension between the two groups is palpable. Recall that Galileo was condemned and forced to recant from his idea that the earth rotated around the sun and therefore was not the center of a three-tiered universe. Both Galileo and the Pope were members of the Christian Church. The Pope was seeking religious security; Galileo was seeking truth.

The same could be said for Isaac Newton, whose work made both miracle and magic unbelievable. Newton covered his vulnerability by stating that there were two books that revealed the Truth of God. One was the Bible. This, Newton stated, was the book the church and the theologians were meant to interpret and to determine what it says and what it means. The other book, said Newton, was the "Book of Nature," which, he stated, was the domain for the scientists to explore and to interpret. Thus their truths did not overlap. Newton got away with that simplistic distinction, but only because most people did not know much about either book. If one treats the Bible literally, it does proclaim a three-tiered universe, a seven day creation, God's ability to stop the sun in the sky to provide Joshua with more daylight, and the ability for a virgin to conceive and for a deceased person to be called back to life. None of these things is possible in the world we inhabit today.

When the Bible and empirical or scientific truth are in conflict, I think we need to recognize that the Bible is probably the one that is wrong. That is not a problem unless you think that God wrote the Bible, because that would mean that God had to be wrong. The gods of human beings are frequently wrong, just as they are frequently inadequate and frequently evil. Why is it that we do not recognize that no human being and no religious system can finally capture the truth of God?

The Bible was written between 2000 and 3000 years ago. Do you know anyone who would think that absolute truth has been captured in a 2000- to 3000-year-old textbook on any subject? Would you go to a doctor who practiced medicine out of a 2000- to 3000-year-old medical textbook? Would you study astronomy, geography, chemistry or biology out of a book that old? Religious claims for the literal accuracy of the Bible are nothing more than the conclusions of frightened people who cannot deal with the world of today and so they hide in irrational conclusions.

There have always been voices in the Church that force the Christian faith to face reality. I hope you might be willing to become one of them.

- John Shelby Spong

Sign me up.

By the way here is another view of the good vs evil angle:

Did Man Create God? The Blog for Science and Religion published a new entry entitled "Why God Allows Evil to Occur: The Simple Answer" on 8/20/2008 10:52:51 AM, written by David Comings.


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Why God Allows Evil to Occur: The Simple Answer
For centuries priests, ministers, and theologians have struggled to answer the mystery of why a kind, compassionate, personal God that answers prayers and looks out for our personal welfare, would allow so much evil to occur in the world? This is referred to as “the problem of evil.” In the fourth century BCE, Epicurus addressed this question by pointing out that it was hard to get God off the hook. “Either God wants to abolish evil and cannot; or he can, but does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot he is impotent. If he can but does not want to, he is wicked.”
Several thousand years ago the Gnostics, a group of quasi-Christian mystics proposed there really was no problem because they viewed God as so inherently evil that he would have no interest in preventing evil. They called this demonic God the Demiurge, taken from a term Plato used to denote the creator of the base world. The Demiurge was the God that interacted with man. The real God or “true Father” represented the less flawed world and could not be held responsible for the actions of the Demiurge.
The deists propose a solution that still leaves God blameless but judgment of him is less harsh. They propose that God did indeed create the early universe but when this job was completed he was no longer involved. This approach has the advantage that it allows those who believe in this type of God to also believe in Darwinian evolution as the mechanism by which all life including man himself was created. This is far more satisfactory to the rational brain than the proposals of the young earth creationists who believe the Bible is literally true and that the world is less than 6,000 years old, and that Darwinism is baloney. The deist solution is not very satisfactory to the majority of people in the world who believe in a personal God that guided the evolution of man and watches over us on a minute-to-minute basis. These are called theists and they have proposed a number of solutions to the “problem of evil.”
The most popular solution is that God endowed man with free will. This relieved God from the onerous duty of being responsible for all the minute detailed decisions that billions of humans make everyday. God could not be responsible if it was a person’s individual decision to do evil things. This, however, did not explain the evil done by nature in the form of hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural disasters. Some have suggested that nature also has its own free will.
Another creative answer to the problem of evil is the yin and jang solution. This says we cannot have good in the world if the opposite, evil, is not around to compare it to. We cannot have hot without cold, love without hate, or good without evil. Another explanation is that evil is part of God’s mysterious plan. This is especially evoked when a child dies or is killed. Somehow the pain is supposed to be lessened if this event is all part of God’s mysterious plan. A further solution, popular with several fundamentalist religions is that “people get what they deserve.” This was especially popular during the 2004 tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands of people in the orient. Some ministers proclaimed that was God’s pay back for abortions, liberal sex, homosexuality, failure to pray to God in public school, and many other supposed transgressions against God’s laws. The problem is, none of these answers is truly satisfying if your child is killed, your spouse dies at a young age, or thousands or even millions of people are killed in natural disasters, purges, genocides, wars, epidemics or other horrors humans have been subjected to.
There is however, one simple solution to the problem of evil, one answer, one explanation that does not require any of the above circuitous stretches of logic. That is a simple reversal of the assumption made by most people that God created man – to man created God. This proposes that man created the theory of a personal God who created the world, who answers prayers, and who attends to our minute-by-minute needs. In pre-modern times this theory was the best possible solution for the unknown questions – Where did we come from? Where are we going? When I die am I gone forever? Is there life after death? In modern times with remarkable advances in biology, physics, and the neurosciences, these questions now have answers that do not require the ancient theory of a personal God. This takes God out of the issue entirely. The most simple and satisfactory answer to the “problem of evil” is to realize that man created God.



Permalink: blog.didmancreategod.com/2008/08/20/why-god-allows-evil-to-occur-the-simple-answer.aspx


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quote:

Originally posted by patrask:
Sign me up.

We have a convert!

See, if you spread the real gospel, and not that mish-mash that the modern church pushes, you will reach heathens with an ear for the truth.

(Disclaimer: I was not insulting patrask by calling him a heathen: For one thing, it simply means "of the heath", and for another, he recently referred to himself by that term.)

Somehow I guess this issue of "evil" got posted in the wrong topic.

Phil (patrask)...here's the link to answering your question on why God permits evil...

https://raybradburyboard.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/1001093901/m/2211045873/p/11

Ol' C.S. Lewis addressed it; but it seems he's only read now by what we would, in our feelings-over-thought-dumbed-down culture, refer to as intellectuals.