Why? Jesus is not killing anybody or aspiring to political power. He's saving people. (at least, that's what I think he does in the Second Coming) It seemed likely that if he came, having no way to stop the son of God what else would people who are against what he stands for and possibly could be punished at the end of the world do but fall down and worship?
There is most definitely carnage associated with the second coming of Jesus. The Battle of Armegeddon is described as being a blood bath so intense that it pools as high as the knees of the horses/horsemen (horse something).
The antichrist of the end of days is a deceiver. The masses accept him as the returning Christ, and he appears to meet their needs while in fact ruining their chances at salvation. Presumably he works seeming miracles to gain acceptance. Disclaimer: I am an atheist. I was raised Christian, so I have more than a passing familiarity with the teachings and stories. But I am not promoting any of it, merely reporting the beliefs.
I wouldn't mind Revelations so much if fundamentalists didn't use it as a basis for some really terrifying ideas. Like the keeping of nuclear weapons for instance. Surely Jesus wouldn't want to return to a planet that has been bathed in radiation and wiped clean of life.
I don't know. If god is all powerful, omniscient, and interactive, then isn't anything that happens what god wants? I suppose, alternatively, he could just be apathetic.
I honestly don't know how to respond to that other than saying 'I'm an atheist, it's not my problem'.
Haha. Honestly though. I wasn't sure how to respond to that. I guess though, that the idea of anything happening being under God's desire would mean that humans have no free will. Which is not something I can personally accept.
Well, predestination eliminates free will already, so if you go in for that you've already got a free will issue. If you don't throw in predestination, you could address the issue you raise by simply saying that everything that happens is either something god actively wants and causes to happen, or that god allows to occur through inaction. Both are fairly damning when you look at the world.
Do we really have free will under earth governments? Aren't we forced to live under rules and regulations that these governments impose? If we don't then we are imprisoned, or executed or fined or otherwise punished. So what really is the difference between our living under human governments and living under one that would have an almighty allwise God as its chief executive?
Living under rules doesn't really eliminate free will, even if it constrains choices. Predestination eliminates free will. If god knows today that you are going to do a certain thing on December 1, 2011, then you're going to do it no matter what (or else god will end up being wrong, which doesn't fit with an omniscient god who knows everything that will ever happen.
I have lost much sleep over the idea (and the idea of forever, which is very different). It really has two points: Religion: God created us and gave us free will, why would he take it away. Free will means we do whatever we wish. Science: If a time machine was created, this eliminates free will. The idea that something has already happened means we can do nothing about that. This is something I don't like to believe, as I am a strong supporter of free will. But in both cases, weather it is us seeing the future or God or gods, prophets or whatever is in context. Assuming they can indeed do this. We still made that future, they are seeing the actions we made. So in a sense we have free-will, we have simply already decided what we plan to do. It is a dark thought, that we will probably never get answered. But we all must realize there are scientists who are also religious scholars, and vice-versa. On a side note, why would God have to be all-knowing? Who started this idea?
Sorry but that statement is not true. It is not a christian God, the same God governs much of the world among many different religions.
Or so the Christian faith says. You have to remember that some of us on here are not Christians. Depends really. Apparently Time can only go forward. It is theoretically possible to enlarge a wormhole but it wouldn't be practical for any serious amount of time. But Travelling through Time would involve flying around an object of super-high density. Like a Blackhole. This would make us travel forward in time, and then I see no reason why we can't have that form of Time Travel and freewill. There are Christian fundamentalists. I'd name some names but I can see where that will go. And it's almost regardless that they are 'in full harmony with Jesus'. There are people who, just because of Revelations, wish to keep deploy and actually use atomic weaponry. That thought honestly terrifies me.
God's omniscience and foreknowledge was reconciled with free will a long, long time ago. I will quote from Boethius, c.500AD, since there the case is put most delightfully: That is to say, God is eternal and his 'now' is the present, the future and the past. As a general rule, you may be certain that all of the common (intellectual) objections to god's existence were swatted away hundreds of years ago by folk so smart it'll make your head spin.
Why does this remind me of the line from H.P. Lovecraft: 'Past, present, future. All are one in Yog-Sothoth'. If what Boethius wrote were true then god is literally everything; matter and energy. Very different from the idea of a big guy on a cloud throwing lightning.
That argument does not necessarily assume god is literally everything but many have thought of god in those terms and, yes, of course, there are many conceptions of god, some narrow, some not.
Yes, I've heard this argument. I came up with what I perceive to be a variation of this argument back in college, which is this: modern physics tells us space and time are interrelated. Time comes about with the "creation" of space. If you consider god the creator of space, then god is necessarily outside of space, and that also puts god outside of time. I wouldn't go so far as to say that his "now" is the past, present, and future, because the word "now" puts god back within the context of time, but you could say that being outside of time he perceives all of it at once, or at the very least is able to perceive any aspect of it that he wishes.
of course the purported father of jesus christ is a 'christian god'!... muslims, hindus, buddhists, and members of many other religions do not consider christ to be the actual son of the god/s they worship, as christians do...
You might if you had placed inverted commas about it and knew, at bottom, that the words of mortals are hopelessly insufficient for certain things anyhow.
