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From: johnr@tekmdp.UUCP (John Rutis)
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Even if I DID believe...
Message-ID: <2117@tekmdp.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 5-Aug-83 17:42:49 EDT
Article-I.D.: tekmdp.2117
Posted: Fri Aug  5 17:42:49 1983
Date-Received: Sat, 6-Aug-83 11:07:31 EDT
Lines: 350



I just have to answer this article by Tim Maroney:

       There is one fact that seems to be overlooked by many of the "I'm
   a Christian so I'm right" people on this group.  They seem to assume
   that the only reason that some of us aren't Christians is that we
   don't believe in their God.  This is, at least in my case, a
   misconception on their part.

       If I had undeniable proof of the existence of Yahweh, aka Jehovah,
   aka Adonai, aka El Shaddai, aka Yahweh Elohim, the father of Jesus and
   the ancient leader of the Semitic peoples, I still would not worship
   the bastard.  If an angel appeared to me and removed my appendectomy
   scar so I could never deny its reality, I still would not be a
   Christian.  My primary reason for not being a Christian or Jew has
   nothing to do with my lack of belief in their god.  My primary reason
   is that the Bible is a disgusting book describing the behavior of a
   god without the morality of an average high school student.

Are we reading the same book?!!  I find in my Bible that Yahweh IS Jesus; read
the first chapter of John.  Christ revealed the Father, who was unknown until
then.

I find a God of infinite compassion and mercy in both the Old and New
Testaments.  You have to understand God's reason for man's existence and God's
plan for man before you can understand why God has done some of the things He
has.

God's created man as the first step in reproducing Himself! That's what I said,
we are to become God as God is God!  In order to become God's very Sons, we
must develop righteous Godly character.  Character is something God CANNOT
creat by divine fiat; it must be developed with the willing participation of
the one developing it.  The vast majority of the human race will eventually
become the Sons of God; only a few will reject eternal life in God's family.

God gave Adam and Eve a choice: eat of the tree of life and receive God's
Spirit, eternal life, and rulership of all subsequent Sons of God, or eat of
the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and receive the rewards of sin. 
(The tree of the knowledge of good and evil does not represent the knowing of
what real good and evil are, God taught them that; it represents taking upon
themselves the deciding of what is good and evil, which is a prerogative of
God.  God tells us what is good and what is evil, our only choice is whether or
not to obey.)  You know what happened.  As soon as God was out of sight, Satan
stepped in and Adam and Eve rejected what God told them and followed Satan. 
Read on to find out why God allowed Satan to step in.  God had made Satan ruler
of the Earth before iniquity was found in him.  Even though Satan disqualified
himself as ruler of the Earth by attempting to overthrow God, God did not
remove him from his throne because no one was yet qualified to rule in his
place (Satan was the greatest being God had ever created).

Adam (with his wife Eve as his partner) was given the opportunity to replace
Satan as ruler of the Earth.  They blew it.  Therefore, another had to be found
to replace Satan.  That was Christ, the one who was the Word, the Spokesman,
before he emptied Himself to become a man.  Christ has still not taken Satan's
throne, but He will soon.  All those who are called to do God's work must (with
God's help of course) overcome Satan.  For this they will be made rulers with
Christ for all eternity.  (With God, the greater the ruler the greater the
service, the Father is the greatest Servant in the universe.)  All those down
through history who were never called and so had no chance to know God's plan
will be resurrected in the great general resurrection.  They will be taught
God's truth without Satan to influence them.  They will have 100 years to build
character and accept or reject membership in God's family.  Those who reject it
will be burned up in the lake of fire; they will NOT exist in suffering and
misery for all eternity.  (I have hardly scratched the surface of this subject,
but I don't want to write a book.  Every one of your statements in this article
would take a book to answer fully.)

Please think carefully about the implications of creating beings that are to
develop Godly character.

They must have free moral agency; be able to do anything, right or wrong.  If
they did not have free moral agency, they would be robots; not able to do what
they want.  There are only two ways God can make a world with no suffering,
pain, sorrow, etc.  1) Force everyone to conform to the right way, whether they
like it or not, and 2) Develop character in people so that they will always
want to choose the right and then get rid of those who WILL NOT develop that
character.  God doesn't want robots in His family, so He has chosen the second
way.  We cannot always DO right because of weekness and foolishness, but we
can develop the character to always WANT to choose the right.  When God
changes us from mortal physical beings to immortal spirit beings, we will then
have the POWER to do the good we could only will to do before.

Why, then, has God hidden Himself from the vast majority of mankind down
through the ages?  Why has He not been zealously teaching man the way he should
go so that mans troubles will be minimized?

If you will look carefully through the Bible, you will find that man has always
hidden from God, not the other way around.  The first thing Adam and Eve did
after they ate of the wrong tree was hide from God.  One of the major themes of
the Bible is man's rejection of God and His way.  Man says, in effect, "Bless me
from afar God, but stay out of my life!".

Because of this attitude, God has kept hands off.  He is allowing man 6000
years to try every form of government possible.  This to prove that man CANNOT
rule himself.  Then God will rule the Earth for 1000 years to prove that
following Gods way will lead to everything man has always wanted.  Man's free
moral agency will not be taken away.  Satan will be taken away and men will not
be allowed to do things that will harm others.  They will still be able to harm
themselves by disobedience.

The whole message of the Gospel can be summed up by saying GOD'S GOVERNMENT IS
RETURNING TO THE EARTH!

       As Bob Langdon admits, that God does what he wants, when he wants,
   without even an attempt at self-justification, and all for what
   reason?  According to Bob, all for his own greater glory.  Oh, how
   charming.

Do you thing Bob has a monopoly on the knowledge of God's reasons?  But
WHAT is God's glory?  It is to create billions of sons, each with all the power
and glory of the Father and Christ.  (But forever ruled by the Father and
Christ.)

   For his own glory he condemns billions to eternal torment,

Do you think, because the benighted clerics of the middle ages created a myth
that is still believed by millions today, that God is bound to it?  If your
statement above were true, I would revile such a god too.  It's NOT true!  Only
a handfull will ultimately reject God's way.  They will be destroyed in mercy.
They will NOT burn forever in "hell-fire".  The vast majority will become God's
Sons; God as God is God!

Why will God destroy even those few?  Revenge?  Glory?  No, He will destroy
them to be mercifull to them.  Because they will reject God's way, they would
be miserable and unhappy for all eternity if they were given eternal life.
They would make all those around them miserable and unhappy.  Therefore, it is
a mercy to them and everyone else to destroy them.  Breaking God's laws brings
automatic misery, sorrow, pain, starvation, war, etc. just as jumping off a
tall building automatically brings injury and death.  God hasn't made a bunch
of difficult arbitrary laws so He can gleefully zap us when we break them.  All
His laws are for our good.  They are in perfect harmony, just as the physical
laws which God also created are.  What would happen if you went around
continually attempting to break the physical laws?

   drowns millions of innocent beasts and thousands of children,

The world had become so corrupt in Noah's time (even the animals) that it was a
great mercy to cleanse the earth.  All the people (including the children) will
rise in the resurrection to a clean, peaceful, prosperous Earth and be given a
full happy life.  That will be their next conscious moment.

   orders
   the slaughter of entire cities down to the last man, woman, and child,

Those cities also had become so corrupt that it was a great mercy to destroy
even the children.  Don't forget, their next waking moment will be in a
fabulous world without corruption, disease, war, crime, and all the other evils!

   creates a race that he knows is flawed and will hurt itself (so that
   in their pain they can worship him better),

Adam and Eve were created perfect.  They were, however, incomplete; they did
not have righteous character - that had to be developed.  God gave them free
moral agency.  They were neutral.  They were perfectly free to choose between
God and Satan.  They chose wrong.  They were equally likely to have chosen
right.  Would you have had God do it any other way?  Should He have restricted
their ability to choose?  Should He have biased them toward choosing right?
(Man doesn't worship God better through pain, that's a pagan idea, you won't
find it in the Bible.)

   refuses to deal with any other god on a friendly basis,

There is no other god that God can be on a friendly basis with.  Satan is the
god of this world, but he is a being God created.  Satan rebelled against God,
was thrown down, and has been trying to ruin God's plan ever since.  The only
other "gods" are non-living idols.

   restricts the normal expression of the sexual function,

Not at all!  God made sex, and proclaimed it "very good".  God does restrict
sex to marriage, but that is for man's good, not to chain him for no reason.
For example, one of God's laws is: If a man marries, he is not to be
conscripted fo military service or civil labor for one year; he is to spend
that year to "cheer up" his wife.  How do you think he is supposed to cheer her
up; by telling her jokes from net.jokes?

   rains doom on those who dare to try to be as
   knowledgable as he is, and so on.

No one can even conceive of how knowledgable God is, but He does NOT restrict
us - He encourages us to learn all we can.

   Jesus preaching love in no way
   atones for these many hideous crimes; lest we forget, it was at this
   time that he created Hell.  Please don't embarrass yourself by claiming
   otherwise; it is at no time mentioned in the Old Testament, and the
   wrathful and threatening god of the Old Testament would hardly omit
   any chance to terrify his worshippers.

I'm not embarrassed to proclaim that there is no everburning hell as many
"christians" picture.  No such thing is mentioned in the New Testament either.
The "gehenna" fire doesn't cause eternal torment, it burns up.  Those burned
in it will be dead!  (Again, Christ IS the God of the Old Testament!)

       The simple fact is that most of us, given omnipotence, would be
   able to do a far better job.  What would you do if given omnipotence?
   If your answer is anything other than "abolish world hunger", there's
   something a little skewed in your perception of mankind.  There is no
   question that this is the greatest evil in the world today.  The
   second thing would be to abolish disease, right?  This doesn't take
   "infinite mercy", just normal compassion.  God's supposedly infinite
   mercy is apparently the same thing as no mercy at all.

I hope I would be wise enough to do the same thing God is doing.  The
temptation would be great to relieve the suffering.  However, what if, in
relieving the temporary physical suffering, a million more potential Sons
of God had to be burned up in the lake of fire and not exist for all
eternity?  God's purpose is to maximize the size of His future family while
minimizing the number who have to be destroyed, even if it requires some
temporary physical suffering, even for innocent children.

       Suppose you were a god and there were other gods.  What would you
   do?  What I would try to do is the same thing I do as a person among
   other people -- try to make friends or at least truce with as many of
   them as possible.  The Judeo-Christian god does rather the opposite.

There are NO other gods the equivalent of God, so the rest of the statements
are irrelevant.

   Or suppose you were a god and there were no others.  What would you
   do?  Perform a continual sequence of verifiable miracles to keep
   people from delusion.  No such luck in the case of Jehovah.  He
   demands absolute fidelity without any demonstration of his existence
   beyond, perhaps, some manifestations of the sort that you can get
   from any religion.

A continuous sequence of miracles would become commonplace and make scientific
discovery almost impossible.  If you think God does not want us to make
scientific progress, you're wrong. 

       What would you think of a man who saw that a deadly mission needed
   to be done, that this mission would require suffering beyond endurance
   and a hideous death, and decided to send his son on the mission
   instead of going himself, when he was just as fit?  I doubt that you
   would think very highly of him.  Enough said on this point.

Christ was the God of the Old Testament.  The One who formed man with His own
hands.  He volunteered.  If the other member of the Godhead had been the one to
come, then the one who became Christ would have been the Father and you could
have said the same thing.  One of them had to do it.  Was it any easier for
the Father to see His beloved Son vilely butchered than for his Son to be
butchered.  What loving father would not give his life for his son?  I would.
The point is, neither was father or son until Christ was born.  When Christ was
born, He became the Son and the other member of the Godhead became the Father.

       One thing in particular woud keep me from worshipping this god.
   That is the fact that he desires worship.  The only reason why this
   would be is that he gets something out of worship, perhaps power,
   perhaps just pleasure.  In the former case, it would be totally
   unjustifiable for me to increase the power of this hugely arrogant and
   malefic being.  In the latter, well, I don't LIKE this deity, and I
   don't think it deserves such a reward for its heinous career.

Do you know what worship is?  It's NOT a bunch of ritual mumbo-jumbo.  It's
simply love and respect.  It does nothing for God in itself beyond what someone
elses love and respect does for you.  It is good for the worshipper.

       I can see the responses to this now.  "You can't judge God by the
   same standards as man." In that case, why is it that I keep getting
   told that God is good?

I would never say that.  God doesn't require of us anything He was not willing
to come down to Earth as a man and do or endure Himself!

   Are there two meanings of the word "good", one
   of which forbids murder, deliberate starvation, infecting people with
   disease, and so on, and another which allows these things?  I suggest
   that there is already a word for the second meaning.  That word is
   "evil".  If you think that it's OK to worship an evil god, that's your
   business, but you can't expect me to do the same.

Starvation and disease and all the other evils of the world come from breaking
God's laws.

       "Everything God does is really good, even though we can't always
   see that it is." Well, you'd have to do an awful lot of good to
   counterbalance the perpetual starvation of the human race.

I think bringing most of mankind into His family is an awful lot of good.

   Maybe we
   Americans have it so good that we can't see this, but most of the
   people in the world are starving.  Children are dying by the
   truckload, not for any sin, but just because there isn't enough food
   for them.  If you could see these children, and you had food, you
   would give food to them.  (Either that, or you are an unfeeling
   monster.)  Not so with the god you worship.  He sees their bellies
   bloat, sees them run out of nutrients and rot alive, sees their brains
   dying, and doesn't do a single thing, despite the fact that he has an
   unlimited supply of food to give.  Another example of his mercy.

Children are dying by the truckload precisely BECAUSE of sin!  Not their
own, of course, but someones.  Can you imangine what this world would be
like if God had provided unlimited food for everyone throughout history?

I can't help all of these children myself, but I do help one, do you?

I can't express in words how the plight of these children makes me feel;
God must feel it to an infinitely greater degree.  But I can thank God
that when these poor children do die, their next waking moment will be
in the resurrection in a world of peace, prosperity, and happiness, where
they will be healed of all mental and physical disease and live a full
life with no threat of war, hunger, brutality, disease or any other evil!
God's mercy will be apparent in the very near future, when Christ returns.
(Before 2000 AD, I think - probably before 1990.)

       "Don't ask such questions." People who say this are cowering
   slaves, beneath my notice.  They would as soon serve the devil as god
   in their blindness and faith.  No amount of evidence could convince
   them that the devil was bad; their basic assumption is that they are
   correct, so they are untouchable by any rationality.

The vast majority do now serve Satan, that's why all the misery.

       I do not believe in the reality of Jehovah, except as a
   psychological phenomenon, but if I did believe I would not worship
   that horror.  It could send me to the Hell it's made for those it
   dislikes, and I would walk in proudly, knowing that I was no slave to
   be broken down by force.

This is exactly the attitude that has caused God to choose to keep hands off
for 6000 years.  As soon as man took to himself the choosing of what is good
and what is evil, and ignored God's definition of good and evil, he told God
"keep out of my life."  Soon Christ will return and FORCE man to live in peace,
prosperity, happiness, abundance.  This will probably make some people furious,
but the vast majority will be very happy.

As I said, each of these answers would take a book to answer properly.  I've
already spent too much time in them.  That's why my answers get shorter toward
the bottom.  If you are really interested, I'm willing to explain in much more
detail, give scriptural references, etc.  However, I won't claim I can do it
quickly.  My keyboard is overworked too, writing manuals.

One last thought: most "christians" believe little of what I've said above.
The time will soon be here when we will all find out who is right.  There are
three major possibilities:

  1) Man will destroy the face of the Earth and himself with it. (no God)

  2) The traditional "christian" teachings are right and things will go on
     as they have been, manufacturing souls to be sent to Heaven or Hell.
     (no god worthy of worship)

  3) My statements above are true and Christ will return soon and restore His
     government. (a God worthy of worship)

I know #3 is true; we will see soon.

John Rutis