Hello Cris, I must say that I find your response to Christian to be quite interesting... Almost charismatic, appealing, deceitful, persuasive of possibly the ignorant... You remind me of someone who Flash has been in contact with recently. Do you know Flash? I can tell you that it is easy to discern that you are both driven by the same spirit... And what do you call your spirit, Cris, if anything? Perhaps it was the thread which I intiated... "God Loves Us All" which caught your attention? [This message has been edited by truestory (edited January 12, 2000).]
TS, LOL...if you are trying to imply that Cris and I are the same person you are wrong. I do not even know who this person is..but I like their style Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Cris, Have you read the posts under the string about killing and murder? God's good will can't be stopped, ISDAMan
To me, Cris answered Christian's simplistically predictable reasoning and patronising manner very intelligently and with commendable restraint, in fact I could use TS' own quoted words to the letter, apart from 'deceitful' which is sadly so defensive and unnecessary in this context. TS, instead of answering to his(?)reasonable questions in a way that makes logical or spiritual sense, you ask him if he has a connection with Flash and and then go on to accuse him of sharing the spirit of the Antichrist with her. This is a bizzare reaction, displaying an irrational assumption on your part! please try to understand that the secular mind does not automatically assume spiritual double meanings for the things it perceives as hypocrisy, inconsistency and vindictiveness, in a naturally logical way. Christians, according to your faith, didn't God cast down the Devil and his Demons into the World? this concept of Evil? so why allow such an addictive, incurable and contagious disease such as evil to come even remotely close to his children? why not give them free will without the burden of sin? Presumably for the lucky few that will end up in heaven, there will continue to be freewill but there won't be any evil and therefore no sins, so why didn't he simply arrange it like this from the beginning ? Instead of condemning mankind and all the other creatures to an eternity of suffering and instead of having to sacrifice himself/his son and well, you know generally making everything so difficult for everybody, why didn't he just simply annihilate the devil in the first place? Isn't this like the kind of ultimate question one could ask of God? Don't we have a right to ask it? Don't we have a right to a rational explanation, if there is one? Why did God give us a thinking, questioning and free willed mind if he didn't expect us to ask awkward questions that demand reasonably intelligent answers? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
tab' Suffice it to say that I, too, saw things which were posted by Cris which most did not see. Most do not know what this person is really like because the cowardly spirit caused Cris to delete the thread as I was preparing a response (not because I was preparing a response, of course). Given what I observed, I see great deceit in the change of presentation of this person's ideas and deceit in the reason given for the deletion. I have seen this person's true spirit. [This message has been edited by truestory (edited January 12, 2000).]
Cris, You know what? I don't believe you. You know why? Because I read the personal and offensive insults which you posted to me. I do not mistake you. Consider this: In the Old Testament men were just getting introduced to God's personality. When men were first getting to know God they understood the main message about salvation. They learned that evil is not acceptable to God and will be cast out by God. They presented this message in figurative human terms. When Jesus who is God arrived in the flesh men got to know God better. God has prepared the way to the kingdom of heaven. It is all good and there is no room for evil there. God casting out evil is a good thing.
Hi truestory, Thanks for reading my post, sorry it was so long. No I don't know flash. And I don't like alcohol, but thanks for offering.
Ok guys, I don't know where this deceit thing comes in or what personal and offensive insults Christian is talking about. I'll try to explain what I was trying to do when I found my mistake. I tried to use pure logic to make a point. The idea was to show that if GOD is A then he can't be NOT A, and hence show a logical impossibility. I tried to use the God loves us all as the A component and to use God hates us all as the NOT A part. Hate is the opposite of Love but is not the same as NOT Love. That was my fundamental error. The logic was nonsense and hence the entire topic was nonsense as Christian pointed out. It might have worked had I used a noun (e.g. God is 'noun'), but the verb to love also doesn't make sense here. It seemed to me pointless to continue with a topic that no longer had any meaning and as it had only existed a few minutes, I deleted the topic. I would have liked to have corrected the error but that was going to take too long. The change in style is pretty obvious, if I can tie myself up in knots with my own logic, what chance is there for those that read it. I'm clearly not very clever. So when in doubt keep it simple - hence the long dissertation and the very simple question and conclusion at the end. I made a mistake. Truestory - is that accurate? Is there any further explanation or apology that I could make to satisfy you? I also have a personal rule in such discussions - never criticize other people. My arguments here are targeted strictly at the Christian religion and not at individual Christians many of whom I have as close friends. If I offend anyone then it is by accident and I will apologize without exception.
Yes. There is certainly overlap with this topic. The OT and NT have very different styles, how much is believable in each? The enormous cruelty and evil in the OT seems difficult to believe. Are we really expected to believe that God did all those things? If your God realy does exist then as Christians you have a big problem with the OT. I believe many leading theologians freely admit that. There is no real satisfactory Christian answer to the question I posed. If I were to push the topic harder then I can point out that while in the OT God seemed to restrict his cruelty to this life, in the NT Jesus repeatedly threatens disbelievers with eternal torment. In many ways such a terrifying threat is far worse than the OT. Now as for; God's good will can't be stopped. What is your evidence?
Cris, Let me put it this way... this is real life where the truth counts. You are not Eddie Haskell and I am not June Cleaver. (Oh, the close friend theory lends such credibility!) Well, you certainly didn't follow your personal rule when Christian blew your hate-filled theory about God out of the water. Rather, it took you a while, and at least a couple of viscious personal attacks (which I saw you made) against someone else to later decide that you'd better delete the entire thread before others saw it. If your theory was incorrect, and you lashed out at someone else because of your anger at yourself over your own mistake, another benevolent option you had at the time was to admit that you were wrong about your theory that God hates us all and to apologize to the individual who you attacked. Instead, you skipped the apologies and decided to erase all evidence of your wrong-doing. THAT, my friend, is deceitful. I do not have the need for you to satisfy me, Cris. However, I am not going to sit back and watch your spirit of un-truth play mind games with people which just adds insult to injury and compounds the deceit, when I have seen the TRUTH for myself. If you cannot admit to the hateful tone of your original God Hates Us All post and if you cannot admit to having made subsequent posts which attacked another individual, then you are deceiving yourself. You might even be able to deceive others who did not see what really happened. However, you cannot deceive those who saw and you cannot deceive God. Good news, though. Even though God might despise your spirit of un-truth, God loves you anyway! Oh, and so do I! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! [This message has been edited by truestory (edited January 12, 2000).]
In the best interests of others who want to continue with the real debate, I will withdraw, given the attacks being directed at me. I have not made any personal attacks on anyone at anytime and for the record none of my visible postings include any such personal attacks. Neither will I make any such criticisms of my attackers now. I have requested the moderator to restore the offending deleted topic to show that no such remarks were made. But I doubt whether that can be done. But that is my only proof. If that can be done then I will return to the debate. I am both upset and frightended at the attacks made on me.
tab' This is reality, in which, everything exists, including both good and evil. Would you prefer an unreal world? We were created in the spiritual image of God. As such, like God, we have the free-will to choose among everything, including those things which are good and those which are evil. Free-will without the existence of "everything" would not be free-will, now, would it? Evil will continue to exist, it just won't be dwelling with God and those who choose to dwell in goodness. There won't be any evil in heaven, because heaven will be populated by God, who chooses good, and by those who have chosen goodness. It was arranged in this manner so that only those who choose to be there will be there of their own free-will, not as involuntary penitents. First of all, all of mankind is not condemned. To the contrary, all of mankind has been given God's great gift of salvation. It is up to each of us to either accept or reject God's gift. Accepting God's gift of salvation is not that difficult. God did the difficult part for each of us by coming to us and sacrificing Himself in the flesh to make it easy for us. If we accept God's gift of salvation by accepting Jesus Christ into our lives, our lives become easier. When we walk with Jesus Christ in this world, we are lead away from even the temptation to sin. If we find ourselves "tempted" by evil, it is a sure sign that we have either walked ahead of or dropped behind Jesus Christ. Any time this happens, all we have to do is either ask for Jesus to catch up with us or ask Jesus to wait until we catch up with Him. God did not annihilate the devil, or evil, because this is the real world where evil is as much a part of reality as is goodness. To eliminate the existence of evil, would be to create an unreal world. As creatures created in the spiritual image of God, we have the ability to accept within this life either goodness or evil. Those who choose evil in this world have chosen to dwell as, and with, evil for all eternity. Those who choose goodness in this world have chosen to dwell as, and with, goodness for all eternity. We can, and have, asked God anything we'd like an answer to. God does not mind. God loves us, serves us and desires to live everlasing life with us. The real QUESTION is... are we going to listen to God's answer or are we going to continue to believe that we know better than God? If so, why even bother asking God in the first place? [This message has been edited by truestory (edited January 12, 2000).]
