If there was really a God, bad things wouldn't happen.

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But someone who was born in Asia or the Americas or the Islands knew absolutely nothing about Jesus. There were no telephones or mail. Yet these people were doomed to die and go to Hell because they did not know Jesus and no one ever told them about Jesus. There was no way for them to know. Yet they were punished anyway.

God himself did the judging. And judged his own creation flawed.
Are you questioning God's judgment?

Not at the time of creation.


I highly doubt that is true, just some typical rhetoric from the pulpit.

highly doubt that what is true?

So God didnt realize that what he created was flawed by his own standards until the thing that he made (humans) failed to perform to his standards a fortnight later?

So God is too flawed to have known that what he made was also flawed?

That "someone who was born in Asia or the Americas or the Islands knew absolutely nothing about Jesus...were doomed to die and go to Hell because they did not know Jesus..."


You will never be able to engage me in discussion over that kind of rhetoric. I typically begin at basic truths and move forward rather than at something problematic moving backward.

Atleast they will have an excuse on Judgmentday. You however wont.

Which thing do you mean?

Are you saying (A)that at the moment Jesus was born everyone on the planet instantly magically knew he existed?

Or are you saying (B) that "yes...for a long time there were (and may still be) millions of folks who dont know about Jesus, but despite that (in your opinion) those folks do not go to Hell?


B would make sense, but A would not make sense.

I don't believe they were punished, and I believe this verse confirms that:

The Law brings about wrath, but where there is no Law, there also is no violation. (Romans 4:15)

Last edited by Campin_Cat on 19 Jan 2017, 9:54 am, edited 1 time in total.

Close, but I am not trying to say specifically who either does or does not "go to hell". I am only saying what I have said: I highly doubt that someone who never knew anything about the "Jesus" of sectarian religion is automatically doomed to ultimately land in eternal damnation. Or to say that a bit differently: "Salvation" was available before "Jesus" had ever come onto the scene...but all of that is actually off-topic here in this thread.

I, TOO, believe humans were perfect, at the time of creation----and, I believe that when they chose to NOT follow God's Law, that THAT is what made them what God called, "flawed".

Who left them alone with the Serpent in the garden? How could they know that they should not do something if they had no knowledge of good or evil?

They were naked and not ashamed, because they did not know to be ashamed... Then they must not have been capable of understanding that it would be "wrong" and "not good" to disobey God.

I don't think there is any way around making God responsible for the existence of evil in creation. The stories in Genesis are more like a prestidigitator's misdirection than an actual denial of God's authorship of evil. Even if you take the more complicated idea that Lucifer was always at work, God created angels. Why did some of them rebel? Did God make them incompetently or could God not foresee that they would turn that way?

And then there is that idea in Genesis 6 after the notorious Nephilim passage:
NRSV (Oremus Bibile Browser)


Or if you are a KJVophile


Sounds like the Lord is recognizing that He made a mistake, doesn't it? "I did a bad thing making these little horrors, and now I have to fix it by killing almost everybody."

It "repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth."

Maybe it should have repented him that he allowed the sons of God to go into the comely daughters of men... but the story originates with ancient desert nomads and they had some very different moral ideas.

There are certainly many ideas to mull over there, but the "man went wrong when Eve listened to the Snake against the will of God" version doesn't quite stand up to close scrutiny, I think.

The deeper meaning must be that God intended that man should struggle with ethical reasoning, or He would have provided simpler and less conflicted explanations.

Side note: This hasn't been a special interest for several years, but it flares up every now and again. It's odd how those things can go dormant but never really die, at least, not in my experience.

Depends on how you read the text, really.

Also: there was once in Christendom a widely held belief in the "harrowing of hell," an idea that many modern mainline protestant Christians (e.g., Methodists) visit when they use the Apostles Creed: He descended into Hell. On the third day, He rose again.

The once-widespread doctrine was that all the righteous among those who had never had a chance to hear the Gospel were saved by the direct intervention of Christ during his sojourn in hell/sheol.

This is a bit complicated by ongoing confusion over what is meant by sheol, hell and hades, but that seldom stops people from getting passionately certain about these things.

Ofcourse but thats just a doctrine. We should be carefull about the things we say concerning these kind of events. The Bible never mentions it so it's merely speculation.

That knowledge was the fruit of the tree, and they had been told to not eat of the tree lest they die. One might speculate they had been set up to fail -- Who can know the mind of God? -- but even that would not change the fact they had willfully disobeyed in spite of having been forewarned of the consequence.


Who has said it is wrong or even just a bad idea to disobey God? As best I can tell, each man or woman is free to decide that matter for himself or herself.


Agreed.


No, just grieved over what was going on and His apparent need to "repent" (turn away).


I would find it difficult to doubt He knew man would, but I would not want to speculate as to His intent.

Whenever I'm trying to understand God's intentions----and, because God is referred to as "God the Father----I equate Him to an "earthly father".....

They didn't have to have knowledge of good and evil, they needed only to obey the Father----IMO, it would be no different than an earthly father telling his kid not to go play wherever, and the kid disobeyed and got hurt. Should, then, the father be said to be a bad father?

I don't think they were left-alone with the serpent. When God created Man, he felt that it wasn't right for Man to be alone, and made every kind of animal, from the soil, and brought them to Adam, to name. There doesn't seem to be a passage-of-time indicator, between when God created the animals, and then Eve, and then the serpent spoke to them.

Also, alot of people think the serpent is an incarnation of the devil----I'm thinking that it's possible that that's not so, at least, at the time (one of my Bibles describes the serpent as "crafty", not "evil"), because serpents were only "made" bad AFTER that incident. God told the serpent that, for his punishment for making Eve do what God had told her NOT to do, the serpent would be singled-out from the rest of the "animals" and cursed, and henceforth crawl on his belly (snake), and Eve's offspring and the snake's offspring would, forever, be enemies.

As for them not being capable of understanding that it was wrong to disobey God, and being ashamed to be naked----again, I equate it to an earthly father..... A child KNOWS, instinctively, IMO, not to disobey their father----but, a child learns that they should be ashamed to be naked.

As for God taking responsibility for the creation of evil, we weren't talking about that----we were simply talking-about people being "flawed" (I, for instance, certainly am "flawed"----but, I ain't never shot-up a movie-house, which, to me, seems evil)----so, I'm not going to address that last paragraph (or, the rest of your post), right now, to keep my focus on what we were discussing: "flawed".