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God's grace. Your "good works" can never make your bad works disappear. Imagine if a prosecutor in the end showed full coverage of every bad thought and bad thing you ever did. What would be your comeback? Look at my good works?
If a man slaughtered Christians by the thousands (Paul), what would be his excuse to God? Look at my good works?
What would be your comeback? Look at my good works?
Nothing, really. If someone can read my thoughts so well, a comeback is redundant.
If a man slaughtered Christians by the thousands (Paul), what would be his excuse to God? Look at my good works?
If that prosecutor is God himself, then I doubt excuses would matter much, for he must already know of the reasons and good things (according to the Christian fantasies).
"Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.
The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: 'God, I thank you that I am not like other people--robbers, evildoers, adulterers--or even like this tax collector.
I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.'
"But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, 'God, have mercy on me, a sinner.'
"I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted."
It logically really doesn't matter what you randomly call it. To oppose an un-opposable force is lacking in common sense and survival instincts. You'd run from an angry bear but shake your fist at someone much stronger than the bear. Darwin must have been wrong... or... maybe he was right.
Nevertheless, if God is the strongest force and is willing to die for you for any reason, I think I'd take it. God could have been way worse than that.
To oppose an un-opposable force is lacking in common sense and survival instincts.
questioning isn't opposing, even looking through your p.o.v, doesn't "god" need to answer?
and if he is the "strongest" un-opposable force, he wouldn't need us to clarify that, so calling questioning a "sin" does make the idea of god absurd, even worse, it makes me believe that was said by some man who didn't want his beliefs shattered.
Questioning isn't a sin. David did it. Abraham did it. The Psalmist did it. Even Christ did it. Atheists love to assume concepts that aren't in the Bible as if they are in the Bible.
calling questioning a "sin" does make the idea of god absurd, even worse, it makes me believe that was said by some man who didn't want his beliefs shattered.
Nobody said that. I didn't say that. You just made up a random concept that isn't in the Bible nor in my dialogue.
8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9 not by works, so that no one can boast.
But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me.
The point. Self righteousness is the quickest and easiest path to piss God off in the Bible. Admitting your filth and your imperfection is the quickest way to God's grace and eternal life. Now look at unbelivers and what they say in real life. They say things like "I do good things". "I donate to the poor. I work at soup kitchens."
truly god's grace is the deciding factor. you can't erase the bad deeds you've done no matter how good you do later on. so when the moment of judgment does arrive, it'd be god who decides if, even after all the things you've done, good and bad both included, whether you've changed. it's with his decision that you are allowed to go to heaven not with your good to bad ratios.
If it is by works, then it was unfair for the criminal(you know the works of a criminal right?) beside jesus on the cross to have gained a pass to paradise.
That is why some people get it twisted.They claim they served God for 30years and then became A.....t.
Because they thought it was their right from a hard work labouring.
I still wonder how they worked...you know; a bad worker is always looking for an excuse.... to quit
Obviously, one goes to Heaven exclusively through God's grace alone, as it clearly states in the Bible.
And, of course, faith without good works is dead, as it says in the Bible.
The Bible seems to give both answers on this issue, as it does on a lot of other ones as well. And when a book gives two mutually exclusive answers to a question at once, you tend to begin to lose your trust in it.
And begin to trust in yourself and worship your own intellect, which is the greatest sin of all because the human heart isn't trustworthy in the first place. It's Satan's sin. it's the tree of death. The tree of "knowledge". No one said it was FULLY correct or good knowledge. The forbidden fruit was worship of self. Worship of flawed and evil self intellectualism, which isn't real intellectualism at all, but a deception.
If you have faith, you will have works, but the works will not save you. The works are simply a manifestation of having faith. But works do not equal faith. This is the devil twisting conceptualizations. The enemy declares "If you do not work you are not saved", but that's not what God said. What God said was "faith without works is dead", meaning? Faith will get works out of it. Satan twisted this to "work to say you have faith". Clever, but wrong. He's always clever. He's always close to the truth. He's always one lie... away...from the truth.
Odd how in so many systems of religion and mythology the desire for knowledge and for independent thought is punished, huh? Hey, it's almost as if these things just might have been ultimately formulated and promulgated by humans who wanted to keep the people ignorant. But then again, this would be quite a sacrilegious thing indeed to imply, so I won't.
And stop trying to blame people who disagree with you on Satan. This is a serious debating website.
Hey, it's almost as if these things just might have been ultimately formulated and promulgated by humans who wanted to keep the people ignorant.
That's an odd argument, considering that the leaders themselves had every reason to believe in god/gods and that they had no way to conspire and communicate with each other thousands of years ago.
And stop trying to blame people who disagree with you on Satan. This is a serious debating website.
I don't blame it on anything. This is God's equation. The variables are incalculable. You are obsessed with figuring out what you are never going to be smart enough to figure out.
This site has less than 10 consistent members that post regularly. Don't be a clown.
In future, please try and calm down and condense your points into a single post. It not only makes it easier for me to respond but also has the advantage of making you seem slightly less like a raving lunatic.
Firstly, I have no clue what "Satan is the great emulator" could possibly mean in this context, and I will not seek to respond to points which I frankly cannot comprehend.
Secondly, these myths surely must have come into being at some point in time, and given that a remarkable number of them seem to assign some punishment to the attainment of knowledge, it seemed like quite a logical inference to make that the people who formulated them were interested in extinguishing a desire for knowledge in those that heard them.
And thirdly, all this nonsense about me being " obsessed with figuring out what you are never going to be smart enough to figure out" is just another version of the tired "atheists are arrogant and think they know everything" canard, as far as I can see, which is rather hypocritical coming from someone who claims to "know" that a God created the universe and that that God has a personal plan for them.
In future, please try and calm down and condense your points into a single post
WTF for? Because you want a specific model? Go fuck yourself. And then put your arguments into multiple posts to make it clearer. Then go fuck yourself again.
Secondly, these myths surely must have come into being at some point in time
Atheism is the new myth. It came into power during your lifetime. 99.99% of human history who had to think with their brains, said atheism made no sense. Why? Because it doesn't. Human historical accounts go back 5,000-6,000 years, then notta. That must be when the apes shedded their fur, lost their tails, lost thousands of pounds of power, and lost hundreds of pounds of body weight as if by fucking magic.
I never claimed that I knew God existed. Lying will get you nowhere in this debate. What I do know is that trucks don't just appear. Someone makes them. And you are less likely to manifest than a truck without a creator. I also can put together a very convincing argument concerning prophecy of which you will ignore because the truth doesn't make a shit to you.
Funny, these two statements seem to contradict each other somewhat. And five whole posts in response to my comment of about 204 words? Try to relax; you won't have so much spittle to clean off the keyboard if you do.
And saying that you find it "unlikely" that life emerged without a creator, or that humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor, is irrelevant. Anybody's personal sense of "unlikeliness" doesn't come into the argument: what matters is that life is here, and that the evidence suggests that it came about here by a process of natural selection. And in any case, this idea of a truck or a human simply "manifesting" out of random chance has nothing to do with how the world really works or what atheists think: evolution, as people have no doubt tried to explain to you a thousand times before, works according to not chance, but the fixed law of natural selection.
And so what if "99.99% of people who had to think" were not atheists? There was a time when 99.99% of people believed that heaver-than-air aircraft were impossible. This is just another useless appeal to authority.
and that the evidence suggests that it came about here by a process of natural selection.
They can't find all of the needed intermediaries because getting fossilized is an almost impossible and rare process. There are creatures found in amber that are "hundreds of millions of years old" that haven't changed one iota. None.
evolution, as people have no doubt tried to explain to you a thousand times before, works according to not chance, but the fixed law of natural selection.
1)Even if Darwinism was factually correct, finding the mode that God did something doesn't magically nullify his existence.
2)Simply from a scientific perspective, I can give you a lengthy rebuttal as to why Darwinism is a pipedream using only the words and findings of secular scientists.
And so what if "99.99% of people who had to think" were not atheists? There was a time when 99.99% of people believed that heaver-than-air aircraft were impossible. This is just another useless appeal to authority.
My generation had all the scientific knowledge of this generation and was very Theist. This generation, with the same knowledge, was brainwashed to gravitate towards atheism. Statistically, if you had been born in say 1978, you'd be a theist, not because of any lack of knowledge, but because of culture and lack of dogmatic atheist teaching rammed into your skull from birth.
Why are you still presenting this amber nonsense as if it were some kind of smoking gun? You've had it explained to you plenty of times why it doesn't prove anything whatsoever.
I perfectly agree with you that whether or not evolution is true is irrelevant to the issue of whether or not God exists. God's existence is an entirely different claim which requires its own extraordinary evidence to be proven, none of which has been forthcoming so far.
There is absolutely no point in engaging any creationist on the intermediaries issue because once it is explained to them why they are wrong they simply claim "Well you can't identify intermediary X" as if that were enough to undermine the whole edifice of evolution, whilst they provide no evidence whatsoever for their ludicrous beliefs.
And why do you guys always insist on calling it "Darwinism" as if it were just one man's thoughts set totally in stone and not updated at all in 150 or so years? I realise that you guys operate on revealed and unquestionable authority, but that quite rightly isn't how science works.
And aside from the fact that the idea that your generation "had all the scientific knowledge of this generation" is laughable (and leaving aside your unwarranted assumption that I must be from some generation below you, despite the fact that neither my profile nor the corpus or my arguments say anything about my age), what anybody's "generation" thinks about it is irrelevant. What matters is the evidence and what is true, not these baseless appeals to authority. And given that most people are still religious in some way, who on earth could marshal the power needed to indoctrinate everybody with atheism?
A heaven achieved despite not being a good person is not a heaven worth achieving.
Also the verses quoted which Evangelicals insist means you just need to believe in God's grace depend on:
1) Taking the Bible literally word for word. I still believe the Bible has many authors, over long spans of time, who were human and were influenced by their cultures and by life events like imprisonment, and who had a common goal of promoting their brand of religion. The Bible is not literally the word of God. And
2) Elevating those particular verses as more important than all the other references in the Bible to doing good deeds and turning the other cheek, etc.
