vision2020
Re: your mail
> For my two cents on Debi's post, just one comment. Lev. 25:44 does apply
> to Canadians. Once you grasp that, the rest of biblical law makes perfect
> sense.
What?
> And in response to Daniel's question, the "meat grinder" of natural
> selection cannot work without nature being "red in tooth and claw."
> Death, disease, suffering, pain -- in short, the problem of evil --
> cannot be God's method, unless we are prepared to say that something like
> cancer is a positive good like food, air, and sunshine. Given what the
> Scriptures reveal about the goodness of God, I am not prepared to do
> that.
Well I would argue that the scuplting forces of evolution are not death,
disease, suffering, or pain. In fact, I argue that as evolution progress
it helps an organism to cope with these problems. Evolution is something
that would help organisms develop ways to combat cancer, not cause it.
And cancer cannot be described as good or bad. You can't attribute
morality to it or place a value on it. Saying cancer is bad would have to
be preceded by the premise that human life and the promoting of human life
is good. This makes cancer bad because it does not further human life.
However if you say human life is bad then cancer is good.
So are people who die, ill, suffer or in pain evil? Why is it impossible
that the "Scriptures" are flawed in places?
> It is not illegitimate "polarizing" to point out what a position entails.
> If evolution were God's good method of creating all living things, a more
> wasteful process for an omnipotent being can hardly be imagined.
And who are you to judge evolution as wasteful? Wouldn't that be for God
to decide to use evolution or not? It make seem wasteful from your human
perspective but does God not "work in mysterious ways?" I don't see how
you necessitate what you see as pleasant as "good" and what doesn't appeal
to you as "bad" and absolutely so. You and other fundamentalists (you
used this term to describe yourself before) seem to have a very limited
view of God. That he only works in pleasant ways. That you can
understand and know God completely by knowing any reason why He would do
anything. Unless of course you were God. Couldn't he have any reason for
doing something you did not understand? Why would God be obligated to
only do things we understand the reason for?
> But if evolution is occurring in an atheistic universe, then we do not
> have this problem with evil, because there is no such thing as evil.
> But then we have the enormous problem of explaining the mechanics of
> how matter can organize itself into higher and higher degrees of
> engineered complexity. All that engineering, and no engineer. Just
> like magic.
I don't think you understand atheism. Atheism does not deny the existance
(necessarily) of good and evil and all the in between, but denies any
single entity, with an intelligence as we understand intelligence to be,
that controls this good, evil and all in between. Atheism denies the
existance of a God, but not of things we can't understand (at least not
necessarily). To use your metaphor, they don't deny engineering, but they
deny the existance of one single understandable engineer in control as we
would precieve any sort of this kind of engineer would exist. Could God,
maybe, be totally beyond your understanding of what existance is?
> Anyway, to keep us on the point of the larger discussion, multitudes of
> Christian parents have decided it is far easier to start private schools
> or educate their children at home than to try to explain basic worldview
> concepts to those who run the government schools. People actually say
> things like, "There is no such thing as modernity." So to tie this in
> with the "rumor" thread, we are not interested in taking over your
> institutions. You, however, seem bent on not understanding your own
> institutions, chasing your best people out of them, downgrading them,
> abandoning them, and not defending them. But intellectual apathy
> preserves nothing.
So your solution to an ailing and imperfect system would be to kill it?
Starve it? George Bush just gave a huge tax cut at the expense of
education. Not sure how he thought this would work. And how do you offer
your education to Christians who can't afford to pay your price? Public
schools don't keep God out of the school but they should keep any one
dominant view of God out of the school and include everyones ideas. I'm
sorry if you can't live with that. But you don't have the right to
exclude anyone. That is what pulling money out of the school system does,
especially one that is far from perfect.
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