₦airaland Forum

DeepSight:
What then about the several other verses I cited which explicitly made it clear that there was nothing like free will in the destiny of man.

Secondly a perfect creation cannot fail.

Why are you being disingenuous? Admit you misread and\or misapplied the verses from Romans. I maintain, you are hellbent on insisting on your reading of the biblical text to justify the hatred you have for Christianity. Your free choice.


TV

NerdCat:
Whatever we call the attribute in question, an omnipotent being who observes preventable child suffering and observes it anyway still has an explanation problem.

I said previously, perhaps consider your own finiteness and limited understanding. Maybe revisit your own contextualising mercy as an attribute of God.

Is mercy God's sole or primary attribute? What of Holiness, Justice and other attributes. Your wanting an explanation and your dissatisfaction with what you can fathom about how God dispenses mercy does not make you righteous, just or merciful. Nor does it legitimise how you choose to understand it and demand that God apply it.

NerdCat:
What kind of restoration plan requires centuries of children dying as operational overhead? Also, announcing consequences in advance doesn't absolve the designer who made the consequences disproportionately heritable by innocents.

As above, what makes you think you are able to perfectly take the measure of what is proportionate or not?

NerdCat:
Don't go rolling off the cliff now. Let's take it from the top once again - I charged an omnipotent deity who permits preventable suffering with moral responsibility, which is categorically not the same as blaming God for every scraped knee. Piggybacking on that, death as a natural biological phenomenon is a separate conversation entirely from a child's brain tumour.

In light of omnipotence, all suffering is preventable. Could God not have excluded death from His creation? Is death not, suffering, harm or pain? Why focus on an emotive user case. Why do you limit your demand to "suffering children"?


TV

DeepSight:
What it shows is that you can imagine and plan all you want, but the only thing that happens at the end of the day in any instance is what the Lord wills. This absolves man of any guilt. It is completely in tandem with the Islamic view that all that happens is the will of God.

Happy for you to continue to be incorrigible. The bold sums up your error. Yes, Gods will always prevails, but that is primarily at a macro-level.

God's unfolding plan and purpose cannot be thwarted by anyone or anything - that does not stop them trying. The fact that Gods will always prevails, does not mean that individual cannot act out the free choice expression of their own wills.

Peter decried and tried to stop the Lord going to the cross. Can't happen. Didn't stop Peter from trying. Individual day-to-day choices, decisions and actions remain within individual purview. Where you forced to become a lawyer Was it God that made the Nigerian authorities open fire on SARS protesters?

DeepSight:
Explain away these verses -

Ephesians 1:11: "In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will."

​Isaiah 46:10: "I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. I say, 'My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please.'"


Your scripture says so, not me.

And there are instances of it - for example, where he instigated David to conduct a census and then killed 70, 000 Israelites for the conduct of the census. How absurd is that?


Then it must be presumed that what happened (the fall of man) was designed by the designer - God.

Nothing needs "explaining away".
What happened - the fall of man - known to the omniscient God and factored into His plan. And the price for all mankind was paid in full, by God. It's certainly a legit question to ask why that way? I don't know, there are various attempts to figure it out, but scripture is not explicit.

The scripture does say this though
1 Corinthians 1 - 18 For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, And bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.” 20 Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the [h]disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? 21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe.

Your - freewill - choice.


TV

^{...ah! comparing the Everlasting God to mohammeds alter-ego. Low blow bro'}

DeepSight:
This is just lazy. Anyway fine by me cos I know it's impossible to answer those verses. They are too explicit. They say that man can do nothing but for God who directs what he does. In fact, they take away any culpability from man.

You are blinded by your own insistence on projecting your desired reading and reject unconsidered any other. I can't help that.

​Proverbs 19:21: "Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails."

Pray tell, how does a man who does not have free will plan anything? If Israel and Iran go to war, whatever their plans, what will happen will fit God's unfolding purpose - IFF it touches on it.

I choose to eat healthily - am I predestined not to eat junk food. Are thieves predestined to steal? So yu rclaim is that God predestines people to sin, then punishes them for it?

DeepSight:
A perfect creator cannot make an imperfect creation. That's illogical.

Only God is perfect. Making man, even in God's image, does not make man God The creation was perfectly fit for purpose at the point of creation.


TV

DeepSight:
What then about the several other verses I cited which explicitly made it clear that there was nothing like free will in the destiny of man.

In your eyes, predestination is there, and you will refuse any other explanation. Why sould I even bother? If you claim all 250m odd Nigerians are as pure as the driven snow and I find one, just one, who isn't, job done. The other 249,999,999 do not matter

DeepSight:
Secondly a perfect creation cannot fail.

Only the Creator is perfect.


TV

DeepSight:
How did you falsify the verses. I set out about eight verses. You simply put the Romans one in bold, said nothing about it and ignored the rest.

Please read my response again. I added v28 (in bold) to be read in conjunction with the verses you posted (29-30), to show your cropping of the scriptures was misleading. Your hatred is blinding you . "Those who love God". Love can never be anything other than by freewill. God knows all, including those who will requite His offer of love and then predestines them.
https://www.nairaland.com/8659388/old-age-god/2#139238791

DeepSight:
Is this the intellectual rigor you have been claiming for yourself. Disappointing.

You are not even properly reading or comprehending responses. You do actually sound like one who is just regurgitating - i.e. lacking freewill .

DeepSight:
As to your claim. Do I understand you to be summarizing Christianity by saying that God created a flawed mankind and then decided to save that mankind from his error by becoming a man then killing himself to appease himself over his flawed creation? Is that it?

No, mankind was created perfectly for their purpose. Mankind chose to ski off-piste with devastating consequences.


TV

DeepSight:
Not according to your scripture.
BTW, can you clue me in on this wonderful ability to blatantly ignore verses in a document I swear by? Such a skill should come in handy.

I didn't feel the need , or have the time to debunk your position on predestination\freewill. I falsified your reading of Romans 8:28-29 to show your error.

I have provided a short précis on how to approach Christianity, but you insist on your own distorted reading. Love demands freewill. Which is why God in love went ahead with His plan to create man (the apex of His creation). Knowing at once that man would get it wrong, God also made a way to restore all things through the giving of Himself, when He could have just chosen to start over. The only choice now is ours. Choose wisely sir.


TV

NerdCat:
So mercy means nothing, explains nothing, and guarantees nothing - correct?

Perhaps your insistence of what mercy means, explains and guarantees is what requires re-visiting?

NerdCat:
Note that inherited corruption still requires an architect who designed the inheritance mechanism, approved the terms, and chose not to revise them.

And who clearly stated what the consequences for mis-use would be. And who has an unfolding plan to restore all things to plan.

NerdCat:
l'll oblige your deflection for now. In my worldview, suffering is bad because conscious beings experience it as bad, report it as bad, are affected by it and are subsequently destroyed by it - which is rather the point of the word "suffering." I quantify it the way any non-lobotomised observer does: by its effects on actual persons.

So if there is any pain, harm or suffering by conscious beings, God is at fault? So death itself falls into that category. Are you charging that to God as well?


TV

DeepSight:
How so. Whatever I am is a consequence of the work of the creator.

...and your own free-will choices and actions .


TV

DeepSight:
Does watching the many extreme infirmities, indignities and vulnerabilities of old age not take away in many cases the joy of living a long and ripe life and lead many to question the mercies and intentions of our creator?

Probably to some degree, so what? It's all explained.

Mostly here

MaxInDHouse:
Old age wasn't part of God's purpose for us {Job 33:25} it came along with sin {Romans 3:23} so long or short life means nothing to the true God {Genesis 5:23-24} because this is not what real life means to Him! 1Timothy 6:19
What God promised His worshipers is everlasting life! Psalms 37:29; John 3:16

TV

DeepSight:
Nothing can justify the sadistic barbarity and immorality of the book of Job. It is a book that reveals the stark cold immorality and dark evil of the pagan mountain deity of the Jews.

Oga, it's not God that needs justification, it's you!


TV

DeepSight:
TcTrills, TV01, a delicious snack from the inimitable Christopher Hitchens -

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/irUsUiVDbY4

cc LordRreed

I have seen this before - watched it again
Hitch starts wrong by the number of years 1/4 million to 100,000.
He then proceeds to ramble, mostly spewing his hate for Christianity and God.
Christianity is evidenced. And testified of, even by his own brother .


TV

DeepSight:
Oh like it was eventually set right for Job by ensuring that he had fresh children as though that would wipe away the grief over those who were lost in what was a mischievous and sadistic gambling game between Yahweh and the Devil?

Again, your limited take and desire to cast God of evil. In what sense where they lost. As far as you can tell, only in a temporal sense. Omnipotence doesn't gamble .


TV

NerdCat:
I don't need omnipotence to identify a logical contradiction. Beyond your suspiciously breezy "nope," you've essentially agreed that suffering exists and mercy doesn't explain it. It is what it is.

Why would I deny suffering exists? Your understanding and expectations are yours. I dont see mercy as having to explain in the way you do, or suppoe that any suffering means an absenc eor failing of mercy.

NerdCat:
Allow me to stress-test that thesis with a child's brain tumor, thank you very much. Now, you tell me, whose actions specifically caused that one? Harm and suffering from purely human conduct is one conversation, but metastatic cancer in a seven-year-old is structurally another one entirely. Keep in mind - an omnipotent deity who permits the latter while possessing the power to prevent it is morally indistinguishable from its architect.

Sin and corruption are with us. Literally our inheritance through our first father Adam. That God does not del with things in a manner not to your liking or understanding means nothing. You are literally setting your expectations (based on literally nothing) for Omnipotence that you have no regard for and at once shaking your fist when they are not met.

Why in your worldview is is suffering bad - how do your quantify it?


TV

DeepSight:
Let me confess something. There was a post which TV01 made on a thread long ago that I read, which was so balanced and sensible that i really thought here was a sound mind.

This your unrequited love for me is becoming uncomfortable . Not helped by your positioning and love of canned ideology. Join the queue of my simps and stans - right behind Lord Reed .

DeepSight:
I have since been relieved of that delusion. It reaffirmed my longstanding thought that one should not hastily conclude on anyone no matter how much one may agree or disagree with them in the early stages of an interaction. The seeming devil could be an angel and vice versa.

At all, your broader delusion is still objectly manifest. I have the remedy .

DeepSight:
I thought TV01 would be a knowledgeable chap but it turns out he isnt and makes the most elementary gaffes which tell one he knows very little to start with.

Ey yah, not rcovered from my debunking all your anti-semitic slurs.

DeepSight:
But you see, no one knows it all and we learn everyday so I have no issues with that. What I have issues with is stark irrationality.

Kpele!


TV

^{ps - balanced and sensible is the hallmark of all my posts. Unlike some, if I don't know I listen and learn or go and read. You should try it. You too can be like me when you grow up .}

NerdCat:
...therefore your God is essentially an omnipotent showman who engineered the entire catastrophe of human suffering as an exhibition piece for the heavenly cheap seats, which proves that he is NOT merciful in any definition that humans actually recognise.

Nope. But I don't gainsay your right to position it as you see fit. I'm happy to see you ascribe omnipotence to God. Unless you possess that attribute yourself, you can prove nothing.

NerdCat:
And I don't suppose Ephesians 3:10 lands quite as reassuringly in a hospice ward, or at a child's funeral, or in the mind of someone whose dementia has stolen every dignified thing they ever were - quite the puzzler, isn't it?

Harm and suffering are not from God. They are as a result of the actions of others. Ultimately, everything will be set right for those that put their trust in Him and His salvational work - even if temporal suffering persists for a time.


TV

DeepSight:
This is laughably escapist. The same God that blocked access to the Tree of Life from fear that man would eat of it and become "as one of us?"

The same God that expressed regret and repentance over his decisions several times? An omniscient God cannot do that. That is logically impossible.

Like those He created in His image, God has feelings. Otherwise how would He be capable of Love? If He regreetted\repented as you read, He could have simply uncreated and recreated. Love reigned. . DeepSight, lose your pretensions and vain babbling. Come to Christ. I can't have too many brothers - even spiritually challenged ones .


TV

DeepSight:
I knew it will end with so called free will. But let us examine this.

Ok den

DeepSight:
1. Your God is said to be all powerful.

Yah !

DeepSight:
2. Your God, being an all powerful creator has created a world and life with set choices. In other words, the spectrum of possible choices is determined by your God. To break that down for you, you cannot, for example, choose to be a rabbit today, or choose to stop breathing and still live. The choices you have are limited to a framework and a world- scenario determined by your God.

Yes there are limits for created beings.

DeepSight:
3. Given (2) above your God could always have created a world scenario with a framework and set choices which preclude the death, disease, natural disasters and evil inherent in his creation.

He could have - if He had taken counsel from god DeepSight - but for some reason He chose not too

DeepSight:
4. But going even beyond all this, your God preaches predestination and says that he in fact determines everything that happens. Do you need me to produce the verses?

Predestination for those who choose Him. Try reading from v28 in Romans 8 for example. 28 And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.

DeepSight:
​Ephesians 1:11: "In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will."

​Romans 8:29-30: "For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son... And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified."

​Isaiah 46:10: "I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. I say, 'My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please.'"

Proverbs 16:9: "In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps."

​Proverbs 20:24: "A person’s steps are directed by the Lord. How then can anyone understand their own way?"

​Psalm 37:23: "The Lord makes firm the steps of the one who delights in him."

​Proverbs 19:21: "Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails."

There you go. Predestination is clear.
So your argument is thoroughly defeated.

But knowing you, you will pretend not to see these crystal clear verses just as you pretend not to see those on slavery and witches.

DeepSight the blowhard .

I have schooled you tire on slavery - will continue tirelessly .

In a closed theocracy with God as ruler, rebellion by consulting fallen spirits, demons or the devil will be rightfully punished by death. As the Israelites agreed too.

Ultimately all unrepented\uncovered sin will bring a punishment of eternal death - the wages of sin is death. There is still time. Join us. Will continue our discussion in the hereafter. I will smash you there too . All welcome.


TV

NerdCat:
Was this corruption foreseeable to an omniscient God? If yes, then why was the door left open?

Foreseeable and foreseen. Planned for and ultimately dealt with.


TV

LordReed:
LoLz! Secularist thinking had no hand in the formation of ToE. Darwin was a Christian when he put ToE together.

Tell us when secular thinking led to slavery.

Keep up - read and reread if you have too.


TV

NerdCat:
The interesting thing about claiming no errors is that it actually makes God even more responsible for the existence of sin and the fall of man. If there were no errors in the creation of mankind, then the fall of man wasn't just a slip-up, but the intended design all along.
...which, you have to admit, raises considerably darker questions than mere human imperfection would.

Nice line of thinking...although ultimately incorrect.
The fall of man wasn't a slip-up by God, neither was it by His design. But, He knew it would happen, and it is dealt with as part of His unfolding plan
Ephesians 3:10
to the intent that now the manifold wisdom of God might be made known by the church to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places,


TV

NerdCat:
Was this corruption foreseeable to an omniscient God? If yes, then why was the door left open?

Yes.

To ultimately demonstrate His power and wisdom. To show forth His glory. It's not just about mankind.

Ephesians 3:10 - to the intent that now the manifold wisdom of God might be made known by the church to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places,


TV

LordReed:
LoLz! Secularist thinking had no hand in the formation of ToE. Darwin was a Christian when he put ToE together.

Tell us when secular thinking led to slavery.

Oga make sense. Darwin was not a Christian. Which is besides the point anyway, as calling oneself Christian does not mean you cannot have thoughts or positions that are unChristian.


TV

LordReed:
If train makers could stop people from being hurt by trains and did nothing then yeah train makers would be bad. Is your god a frail human or the all powerful? Why are you using human frailties to excuse your god? It's because your god is a human invention and cannot but have those limitations as well. LoLz.

Are train makers responsible for the free will decisions of people who throw themselves under trains?


TV

DeepSight:
Are you saying that Darwin came up with the ToE because he was an atheist or humanist?

I hope you know of Alfred Russel Wallace who simultaneously came up with the same theory.

He was a spiritualist and argued that natural selection alone could not account for higher human faculties like artistic talent, mathematical ability, or moral sense. He believed a "Higher Intelligence" must have guided the evolution of the human spirit

I am not saying anything about Darwin. About the historical thinking and notions that informed his position.
Are you trying to make a point about ARW? 'Cos I don't get it Probably me - I am not evolved enough


TV

DeepSight:
Animals are not robots that have no sense of pain. It is wrong to make them suffer for what they have no part in.

Are you a veggie . If so know that plants also feel pain.

DeepSight:
1. Are you sure you can sustain the idea that death was only the consequence of sin? Because to do so, remember you will have to say that man was intended to live in the physical world forever. Do you wish to say that?

Death and corruption. Corruption leading to death for living things.

DeepSight:
2. The spectrum of diseases in the world is such that no one can attribute to sin. Did mosquitoes for example only begin to exist because of sin? Add to them the entire line of viruses, bacteria etc which are themselves also critical and cardinal to the existence of life!

Think more broadly mister. Not begin to exist, but begin to be harmful - corruption! Naija boy you should be fully ware of the effects of corruption .

Keep on making stuff up in your head!


TV

DeepSight:
SHATTTAP!

Atheism / humanism are NOT the wellspring of the ToE.

You are pained abi .
Atheism\Humanism\Materialism, all join. Whatever shakes the fist at God.


TV

DeepSight:
How come animals are affected by death, disease, old age, etc if they didnt participate in sin, or is that just your Yahweh's usual habit of punishing the innocent for the sins of the guilty.

The entry of sin corrupted the creation - specifically the domain of man.


TV

NerdCat:
We will, after you explain how a perfect being can produce such flawed products, and then blame said products for their own malfunction rather than checking the original blueprints for glaring errors.

What was flawed about the creation or mankind in particular? A malfunction? Like in machinery . God is perfect in all His ways - no errors!


TV

LordReed:
Eh no thanks.

Who made it possible for senescence to occur if not the god according to your tales?

Yes now, and trains are bad because some people unfortunately throw themselves under them?


TV

LordReed:
LoLz. BRO! When did Darwin propose ToE?

Oga, learn to read and understand.

I said the wellspring - those same notions also helped form Darwinian thinking. Was also the fount of Nazi thinking. Not even sure why you have a problem with slavery as that is a logical inference if one subscribes to such ideas.


TV

LordReed:
Bro how did secular humanist morality give us slave trade when your Bible tells you to buy slaves? Is the Bible secularist morality?

Atheistic\humanist\materialist thinking reintroduced old notions of natural hierarchy (read racial categorisation), which drove the thinking and justification for the slave trade. The wellspring of Darwinism and the whole TOE nonsense.

This happened as Christian principles of universal human dignity were weakened. This helped drive the re-introduction of slavery, particularly the TAST between the 15th\19th centuries. Christianity had repeatedly made inroads into abolishing slavery from the 11th century, until it finally succeeded.


TV