I think my mind kinda jumped to “but we can sustain ourselves just fine with food, water, and air;” a literal sense. I think I overlook the moral need the humans also need to sustain.
Oh, he’s going deeper than that, to the idea that the very quarks and photons and electrons the universe is made up of (as well as the quantum vacuum) are each and every one maintained in existence moment by moment; as it says, “In Him all things hold together”.
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Okay. That makes a lot of sense, thank you!
St.Roymond has already said what I would have said in reply. Since that is part of the Christian faith one could question its veracity. However, Physics, experimental not just theoretical (which can easily be dismissed), demonstrates that matter is merely organized energy, waves in the fabric of space. It makes one wonder what is this reality in which we exist? I think it is an elaborate testing ground for us as fundamentally spiritual beings interfacing with this reality through our physical bodies. I wish there was a mid-term exam to know how well I’m doing.
Marco
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Or annual quizzes.
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…annual quizzes…a great idea. One could learn from one’s mistakes.
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It’s not so much the problem of evil for me as the problem of willful misinterpretation of the communicative intent of an ancient text. In many ways the internet anti-theists of the world wield the OT “texts of terror” with just as much irrational literalism as the fundamentalists, just with different motivations. Both tell you how you have to understand the texts, and both are ignorant.
It doesn’t hurt me one bit to say that a nomadic tribe in the Levant in 1200 BC interpreted their experiences with God and fit them into their worldview and narratives in a way that was not totally congruent with the way Jews and Gentiles of the first century AD experienced Jesus, or the way modern Christians experience the work of the Holy Spirit through the church in 2026. Duh. We don’t worship the Bible, we worship the God the accounts in the Bible reveal. There is a lot of interpretation that goes into understanding what exactly is being revealed by the accounts, and the accounts aren’t the only thing we have that reveals truth about God to us.
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I think it is like condemning Schindler (“Shindler’s List”) for enslaving Jews – it is frankly just out of touch with reality. The simple fact is that moral dilemmas especially in the morally depraved history of humanity can be far more complicated than the absurd characterizations people can make of them.
But my ultimate answer is the simple fact of evolution – life simply cannot exist without harsh realities and thus making some impossible dream world the measure of what is good and a judge for all things is simply downright stupid.
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here are two perspective I have on some of those of those question:
#1…if God only allowed the perfect to exist…then he would duplicate himself to the 2^infinity power; but this would be purposelessness to the meaning of life, as a bunch of gods would be standing around starring at each other.. But God allows the imperfect to exist with all its consequences; giving a purpose to life through divine salvation.
#2..If God does not exist…then the cruelty of war is squarely the blame of man’s own free will…but if God does exist…then why would that blame shift to God fault if man has free will? The history of mankind is the history of war…and Bible passages are full of that History.
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the question “why is there evil if God exist” is not new…be it the Age of Faith, or the Age of Reason, or as of today the Age of Feelings. We must not read only what reinforces are ideas…but find sources that contradict our ideas…have you every read the Bible from front to back?
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