God doesn't seem to really care.
- Thread starter Arcynaculr
- Start date
-
Christian Chat is a moderated online Christian community allowing Christians around the world to fellowship with each other in real time chat via webcam, voice, and text, with the Christian Chat app. You can also start or participate in a Bible-based discussion here in the Christian Chat Forums, where members can also share with each other their own videos, pictures, or favorite Christian music.
If you are a Christian and need encouragement and fellowship, we're here for you! If you are not a Christian but interested in knowing more about Jesus our Lord, you're also welcome! Want to know what the Bible says, and how you can apply it to your life? Join us!
To make new Christian friends now around the world, click here to join Christian Chat.
who said "don't even try to" ?
you jumped to a conclusion, as though you are reading a script. i've seen these scripts on a thousand atheist websites - but listen, i'm not reading a script to you and playing out a standard debate. i'm a real living person who thinks and feels this way. i fear a living God and believe it is foolish and arrogant to think that my judgement supercedes His.
i never said "don't even try" to understand Him. in fact, trying to understand Him comprises my entire life.
what i'm suggesting is that instead of taking my own low thoughts of right and wrong and love and sympathy, and assuming that my thinking is on par with or even greater than an almighty God's, so that i could judge His worth, i instead assume that God is who He says He is, and that it's my own thinking about these things that isn't accurate.
to do otherwise is like saying "i live in Atlanta therefore it is warm and does not snow," and trying to drive home last week you encounter all that weather they actually had. instead of changing your mind about what kind of weather is possible in the south, you say "my position on what temperature it should be in the south is unquestionable, therefore there is no such thing as weather"
or you want to learn Chinese, but you refuse to accept what the teacher tells you that the characters mean and imagine your own interpretation of them. then when you try to translate a text, it makes no sense, so you say "there is no such thing as the Chinese language"
God says that mankind is poisoned by sin and darkened in their understanding. He says to know Him we have to be like children, trusting before comprehending. He is like a teacher and a father, a shepherd and master designer. how is it for us to say "i won't take the class until i'm smarter than the teacher" or "i'm not going to listen to my parents until i am an adult and can decide for myself if what they say is right" ? what kind of sheep say "i know where the best pastures are and will find my own way to the pen at night"? i'll tell you; those are the kind of sheep that get eaten by wolves.
pure gold is not found in nature. it is full of varying amounts of impurities when it comes out of the ground.
in order to refine gold, one burns it at very high temperatures so the dross can be poured off. i imagine this is very uncomfortable, unsettling and incomprehensible to a piece of ore.
crystals are formed under intense heat and pressure that break and rearrange the original structure of the material. a brilliant ruby or sapphire attains its color because of impurities in the makeup.
the sky appears blue because light rays are diffracted and scattered at particular angles by the composition of the atmosphere. if light from the sun were to strike the earth unmitigated by the atmosphere and the magnetic field of the earth, it would destroy living things.
when an artist makes a sculpture of silver or brass or some other precious metal, he first makes a mold of clay to receive it. after he has refined and poured the metal into the mold and it has cooled, he destroys the cast and throws it away. if he has not made a mold like this, which was purposed to be destroyed from the beginning, what will he pour the silver into? all he will make are puddles of pretty metal, of no use.
cancer is treated by radiation and surgery that destroy the body's tissue. unless this harm is done to the body, the cancer will inflict a greater harm.
you can't eat an egg without breaking its shell. no one opens a gift without tearing open it's wrapping and no one is born out of their mother's womb unless the amniotic sac is burst.
every element in the universe heavier and more complex than hydrogen and helium was formed in the violent destruction of a beautiful star.
no seed grows into a plant unless its anil is burst.
we understand these things, and we understand that the universe is vast and works on a time scale countless orders of magnitude beyond ordinary human experience. how do we feign to think that our moments of suffering are some proof that the universe itself is hopelessly unjust, cruel and incomprehensible?
in order to refine gold, one burns it at very high temperatures so the dross can be poured off. i imagine this is very uncomfortable, unsettling and incomprehensible to a piece of ore.
crystals are formed under intense heat and pressure that break and rearrange the original structure of the material. a brilliant ruby or sapphire attains its color because of impurities in the makeup.
the sky appears blue because light rays are diffracted and scattered at particular angles by the composition of the atmosphere. if light from the sun were to strike the earth unmitigated by the atmosphere and the magnetic field of the earth, it would destroy living things.
when an artist makes a sculpture of silver or brass or some other precious metal, he first makes a mold of clay to receive it. after he has refined and poured the metal into the mold and it has cooled, he destroys the cast and throws it away. if he has not made a mold like this, which was purposed to be destroyed from the beginning, what will he pour the silver into? all he will make are puddles of pretty metal, of no use.
cancer is treated by radiation and surgery that destroy the body's tissue. unless this harm is done to the body, the cancer will inflict a greater harm.
you can't eat an egg without breaking its shell. no one opens a gift without tearing open it's wrapping and no one is born out of their mother's womb unless the amniotic sac is burst.
every element in the universe heavier and more complex than hydrogen and helium was formed in the violent destruction of a beautiful star.
no seed grows into a plant unless its anil is burst.
we understand these things, and we understand that the universe is vast and works on a time scale countless orders of magnitude beyond ordinary human experience. how do we feign to think that our moments of suffering are some proof that the universe itself is hopelessly unjust, cruel and incomprehensible?
But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.
But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man.
For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.
(1 Corinthians 2:14-16)
But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man.
For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.
(1 Corinthians 2:14-16)
Know ye not that we shall judge angels?
(1 Corinthians 6:3)
no one appoints a man as a judge that has not first been a lawyer, and a lawyer who has tried a hundred cases is always more prudent than one who is stepping into a courtroom for the first time.
no one hires as a coach for a football team a man who has not ever played football, and it is always said of a rookie that in a few seasons he will mature into an even better player.
the best way to learn to drive on icy roads is to take a car into an empty lot and lose control of it in the snow, so that you see firsthand for yourself how the car reacts. we put air force pilots in flight simulators for a hundred hours before we trust them in a real plane.
there is an old addage concerning education:
tell me and i'll forget
show me and i may remember
involve me and i'll understand
we learn best by doing. i can give a child a book describing how to balance on a bicycle. i can ride a bicycle around to show him what it looks like when someone rides. i can give him training wheels so the bike cannot fall over. but the only way a child will ever actually learn to ride is by hopping on it himself, and the scabs and bruises from his first failed attempts instruct him better than any pamphlet or rote-memorized instruction.
(1 Corinthians 6:3)
no one appoints a man as a judge that has not first been a lawyer, and a lawyer who has tried a hundred cases is always more prudent than one who is stepping into a courtroom for the first time.
no one hires as a coach for a football team a man who has not ever played football, and it is always said of a rookie that in a few seasons he will mature into an even better player.
the best way to learn to drive on icy roads is to take a car into an empty lot and lose control of it in the snow, so that you see firsthand for yourself how the car reacts. we put air force pilots in flight simulators for a hundred hours before we trust them in a real plane.
there is an old addage concerning education:
tell me and i'll forget
show me and i may remember
involve me and i'll understand
we learn best by doing. i can give a child a book describing how to balance on a bicycle. i can ride a bicycle around to show him what it looks like when someone rides. i can give him training wheels so the bike cannot fall over. but the only way a child will ever actually learn to ride is by hopping on it himself, and the scabs and bruises from his first failed attempts instruct him better than any pamphlet or rote-memorized instruction.
if i am at a casino and dealt a mixed hand of low cards, it won't do me any good to assume that i should have a winning hand, make up my own rules about what each card is worth and argue with the dealer that all the chips should be mine.
i play by the house rules.
you may think that the argument that God is sovereign is weak and doesn't satisfy your reasoning. but this is that Job received; this is the answer that Jonah received, and that Jeremiah received, and others: the potter is free to make the clay into whatever sort of vessel he likes, and clay that will not form to the potters intention is thrown away or melted down in the slop bucket until it can be remade.
that's the house rules.
if some mud wants to understand the potters intention, it must suffer through having its air bubbles kneaded out, being spun around on a wheel, pushed into shapes it doesn't understand, having bits of it cut away, and dried out completely, covered in glaze and baked in the hot kiln for a long time, where its internal structure is changed and it becomes hardened and strong. funny thing about glaze; it almost always looks like some muddy taupe color before it is fired, no matter what kind it is - you never see the beautiful color it becomes until it's been changed by the fire.
if i want to make a cup, the clay will never know what sort of wine or water i want it to hold until it has 'suffered' all these things.
what the clay calls suffering, the potter calls the process of creation.
if the clay won't accept my kneading, and keeps an air bubble, when it comes time for it to be completed in the kiln, it will be destroyed, and anything else around it in the kiln will also be ruined.
i play by the house rules.
you may think that the argument that God is sovereign is weak and doesn't satisfy your reasoning. but this is that Job received; this is the answer that Jonah received, and that Jeremiah received, and others: the potter is free to make the clay into whatever sort of vessel he likes, and clay that will not form to the potters intention is thrown away or melted down in the slop bucket until it can be remade.
that's the house rules.
if some mud wants to understand the potters intention, it must suffer through having its air bubbles kneaded out, being spun around on a wheel, pushed into shapes it doesn't understand, having bits of it cut away, and dried out completely, covered in glaze and baked in the hot kiln for a long time, where its internal structure is changed and it becomes hardened and strong. funny thing about glaze; it almost always looks like some muddy taupe color before it is fired, no matter what kind it is - you never see the beautiful color it becomes until it's been changed by the fire.
if i want to make a cup, the clay will never know what sort of wine or water i want it to hold until it has 'suffered' all these things.
what the clay calls suffering, the potter calls the process of creation.
if the clay won't accept my kneading, and keeps an air bubble, when it comes time for it to be completed in the kiln, it will be destroyed, and anything else around it in the kiln will also be ruined.
[HR][/HR]
Sorry, peoples' general attitude on here seemed to be i should just shut up. even if they didn't say it, it just seemed to be in their attitude but maybe i was only imagining it...
And your examples seem to portray soneone who claims to be sure there is no god of the bible. Im not sure there isnt. It just seems unlikely that there is...
And there is a diffetence between learning about things that are proven to exist and learning about ones that probably do not even exist. To use your language example, it would be like if someone came to teach you a language that is not proven to exist... what would be the use in learning and accepting it if you cant even use it cuz it does not exist... would you not be skeptical if someone wanted to teach you "the language of pokemon" ...or "the language of trees" Um... ok...
And your examples seem to portray soneone who claims to be sure there is no god of the bible. Im not sure there isnt. It just seems unlikely that there is...
And there is a diffetence between learning about things that are proven to exist and learning about ones that probably do not even exist. To use your language example, it would be like if someone came to teach you a language that is not proven to exist... what would be the use in learning and accepting it if you cant even use it cuz it does not exist... would you not be skeptical if someone wanted to teach you "the language of pokemon" ...or "the language of trees" Um... ok...
S
Did you sincerely ask Him to come into your life? Words mean nothing if you don't put your whole heart into it. I can testify because when I put my whole heart into it, He made himself known to me, and it changed me and my life forever, and I never want my old life back. It also takes patience, because God works on His time, not yours, or mine. You will seek Me and find Me when you seek Me with all your heart. -Jeremiah 29:13
Patience, my friend! For me, He answered right away. He made Himself known to me the next morning. For others it takes time.
I will pray for you, and I wish you luck
if you accept that your personal experience isn't sufficient to judge God, you should also accept that your personal thinking isn't sufficient to judge God either.
He asks us after all to believe, not to understand. this doesn't mean that no one can understand or that no one should try to understand - the nature of the God-man relationship is such that God himself is the only one qualified to teach you who God is and what are the qualities of His character. in order for Him to teach you, you first have to trust Him and put away your own ideas.
isn't this also how a Kung-fu master teaches a student? first the apprentice has to accept his senshiaj's word is greater than his own, then his body has to be taught to forget its old way of moving, and only then can the master train him in his art. the first step is the responsibility of the student: to agree to the senshiaj's training and accept his will and wisdom over his own. then the senshiaj removes his false motions and teaches him to move in the correct way. after his training is complete, he understands the master's ways. before his training, he doesn't, and he cannot be taught if he argues with the senshiaj at every step; the master will not take such a boy as a student.
the only way science has been able to understand the spectrum of hydrogen was to discard the bohr model of the atom. men didn't believe the first results but repeating the experiment showed the same lines over and over. it was our understanding of physics that had to change, not the universe.
He asks us after all to believe, not to understand. this doesn't mean that no one can understand or that no one should try to understand - the nature of the God-man relationship is such that God himself is the only one qualified to teach you who God is and what are the qualities of His character. in order for Him to teach you, you first have to trust Him and put away your own ideas.
isn't this also how a Kung-fu master teaches a student? first the apprentice has to accept his senshiaj's word is greater than his own, then his body has to be taught to forget its old way of moving, and only then can the master train him in his art. the first step is the responsibility of the student: to agree to the senshiaj's training and accept his will and wisdom over his own. then the senshiaj removes his false motions and teaches him to move in the correct way. after his training is complete, he understands the master's ways. before his training, he doesn't, and he cannot be taught if he argues with the senshiaj at every step; the master will not take such a boy as a student.
the only way science has been able to understand the spectrum of hydrogen was to discard the bohr model of the atom. men didn't believe the first results but repeating the experiment showed the same lines over and over. it was our understanding of physics that had to change, not the universe.
We are not talking about the state of the universe when it comes to hopeless (at least i was not) i dont know if the whole universe is hopeless or not. I was talking about our personal lives cuz frankly, the rest of the universe does not matter to our personal lives. The way this god of the bible apparantly does things it would seem our personal lives are hopeless, in the sense that there is no higher meaning to our lives, no afterlife or anything. no hope of that stuff, if the god who said it all does not even exist or is not who he makes himself out to be.
I think it wise to understand a process and the end result of something someone wants to do to you... for example: a doctor, what if he told you he wants to do this crazy operation but it has not been proven to work... and he can't explain it to you or show proof of its success... do you just let this random (possibly crazy) doctor start this kind of operation on you... do you just trust him because you can't understand the complicated surgery process? I mean,hes a doctor so he must be trustable... um, no. I mean, hes a god so he must be trustable... um, no.
Did you sincerely ask Him to come into your life? Words mean nothing if you don't put your whole heart into it. I can testify because when I put my whole heart into it, He made himself known to me, and it changed me and my life forever, and I never want my old life back. It also takes patience, because God works on His time, not yours, or mine. You will seek Me and find Me when you seek Me with all your heart. -Jeremiah 29:13
Patience, my friend! For me, He answered right away. He made Himself known to me the next morning. For others it takes time.
I will pray for you, and I wish you luck
Patience, my friend! For me, He answered right away. He made Himself known to me the next morning. For others it takes time.
I will pray for you, and I wish you luck
i'm sorry about that. to be honest this thread grew pretty long while i was sleeping and there are a lot of pages of it i haven't read yet.
i'm not telling you to go away - what i'm trying to tell you is that we have to get rid of some preconceptions and approach God with humility in order to understand Him. i may come off as trying to get rid of 'you' but what i'm hoping to get rid of is the idea that proof and complete understanding must come before faith -- my experience is that it is the other way around, both in the corporeal, natural world, and with regards to the spiritual world: we first believe, and then we comprehend.
at heart, i don't think God and good and evil can be understood from the perspective that mankind knows perfectly what is right and what is wrong; we have to a-priori recognize 'god' as GOD and work out His nature from what He claims about Himself as being axioms, not hypotheses. it's funny to me how science can take this approach with the physical world but philosophy always turns it upside-down in relation to the spiritual.
sure, but the same is said of whalesong. the first people to hear it thought it was random noise and that a mere animal couldn't possibly have anything like a language. these days after much study by people who were first open to the possibility, we believe they do have some sort of language, but we still don't understand it. it took people willing to believe that whales could be more intelligent than prevailing wisdom gave them credit for before any discoveries about the patterns in their songs could be made.
i'll never know if i can speak to a tree until i've accepted first that it's possible. if i don't get a response when i try, what's proven is that my approach wasn't right; not that it's impossible. so too if human reasoning fails at comprehending the divine, it isn't shown that the divine is vulgar. what's shown is that the line of reasoning is insufficient.
i'm not telling you to go away - what i'm trying to tell you is that we have to get rid of some preconceptions and approach God with humility in order to understand Him. i may come off as trying to get rid of 'you' but what i'm hoping to get rid of is the idea that proof and complete understanding must come before faith -- my experience is that it is the other way around, both in the corporeal, natural world, and with regards to the spiritual world: we first believe, and then we comprehend.
at heart, i don't think God and good and evil can be understood from the perspective that mankind knows perfectly what is right and what is wrong; we have to a-priori recognize 'god' as GOD and work out His nature from what He claims about Himself as being axioms, not hypotheses. it's funny to me how science can take this approach with the physical world but philosophy always turns it upside-down in relation to the spiritual.
sure, but the same is said of whalesong. the first people to hear it thought it was random noise and that a mere animal couldn't possibly have anything like a language. these days after much study by people who were first open to the possibility, we believe they do have some sort of language, but we still don't understand it. it took people willing to believe that whales could be more intelligent than prevailing wisdom gave them credit for before any discoveries about the patterns in their songs could be made.
i'll never know if i can speak to a tree until i've accepted first that it's possible. if i don't get a response when i try, what's proven is that my approach wasn't right; not that it's impossible. so too if human reasoning fails at comprehending the divine, it isn't shown that the divine is vulgar. what's shown is that the line of reasoning is insufficient.
i'm sorry about that. to be honest this thread grew pretty long while i was sleeping and there are a lot of pages of it i haven't read yet. i'm not telling you to go away - what i'm trying to tell you is that we have to get rid of some preconceptions and approach God with humility in order to understand Him. i may come off as trying to get rid of 'you' but what i'm hoping to get rid of is the idea that proof and complete understanding must come before faith -- my experience is that it is the other way around, both in the corporeal, natural world, and with regards to the spiritual world: we first believe, and then we comprehend. at heart, i don't think God and good and evil can be understood from the perspective that mankind knows perfectly what is right and what is wrong; we have to a-priori recognize 'god' as GOD and work out His nature from what He claims about Himself as being axioms, not hypotheses. it's funny to me how science can take this approach with the physical world but philosophy always turns it upside-down in relation to the spiritual. sure, but the same is said of whalesong. the first people to hear it thought it was random noise and that a mere animal couldn't possibly have anything like a language. these days after much study by people who were first open to the possibility, we believe they do have some sort of language, but we still don't understand it. it took people willing to believe that whales could be more intelligent than prevailing wisdom gave them credit for before any discoveries about the patterns in their songs could be made. i'll never know if i can speak to a tree until i've accepted first that it's possible. if i don't get a response when i try, what's proven is that my approach wasn't right; not that it's impossible. so too if human reasoning fails at comprehending the divine, it isn't shown that the divine is vulgar. what's shown is that the line of reasoning is insufficient.
sure, but the same is said of whalesong. the first people to hear it thought it was random noise and that a mere animal couldn't possibly have anything like a language. these days after much study by people who were first open to the possibility, we believe they do have some sort of language, but we still don't understand it. it took people willing to believe that whales could be more intelligent than prevailing wisdom gave them credit for before any discoveries about the patterns in their songs could be made. i'll never know if i can speak to a tree until i've accepted first that it's possible. if i don't get a response when i try, what's proven is that my approach wasn't right; not that it's impossible. so too if human reasoning fails at comprehending the divine, it isn't shown that the divine is vulgar. what's shown is that the line of reasoning is insufficient.