Summations Only

I thought YOU said the marble worked, the way superstitions do seem to work, and then I pointed out that the pattern is random, but the biblical examples I gave are not. Earlier on I also said that even if there is always a reason for things that happen from God's point of view, from our point of view they most often appear random. And what I said about the biblical examples was that the Bible shows instances where God answered the casting of lots and others where He didn't. God may answer our prayers or not answer them. You COULD try to follow the logic. All the stuff you keep making an issue of has already been answered.

Only according to the bias mentioned. However, your "facts of the real world" are defined by your bias so that you refuse to treat the facts that are revealed in the Bible as real facts, but of course they are. And as I've said before, if it hadn't been for biblical reasoning there would never have been true science, because the philosophy-based science you had through Aristotle and other pagans failed at recognizing actual fact, but the Bible provides the concept of a lawmaking God which led to the concept of a lawful Nature, which allowed science to develop along empirical lines.But I suppose you love your irrational idea that the Bible is irrational too much to give it up for reality.

You simply have no concept of God at all.NO roll is EVER random, but WE are not in a position to see God's intent in most cases so the apparent randomness is all we can appreciate.And it's what the roll COMMUNICATES that is the point. You could throw the coin the requisite number of times for the I Ching oracle and always get some kind of answer because each combination of coin tosses is tied to a particular message, one message out of sixty four I believe, with six submessages per message, though I may have these numbers wrong. The tosses by themselves are random, or seem to us to be random, but when you get the same message something like ten times, as I once did, from different combinations of tosses, which in themselves are the random factor, you might begin to wonder if there is an intelligence behind the result. Again, not the tosses themselves, which are clearly random as far as we could ever tell, but the meaning attached to the combination.The casting of lots is likewise attached to a meaning, for instance the assignment of a particular person to a particular result. Dice could be but usually aren't. In any case, again, the numbers always come up randomly as far as we can tell, but when there is a meaning attached to them you may suspect that God is behind them.abe: Let me correct that. Other intelligences exist that can determine the outcome. But in the casting of lots in the Bible where the true answer was given we know it was God because of the context.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Doesn't "trump" reality, IS reality, shows us what reality IS. And it's not just a book, or a particular book, it's sixty six books by forty some odd authors inspired by God, and when you know it's God's own communication to us then you know that it is a revelation of reality itself.

Yes, this makes my point better than I did. There is a history of cause and effect behind every event that occurs, a complex chain or in fact a multiplicity of chains of cause and effect, and that is what we can't see or trace, leaving us with the assumption of randomness although every single link the chain has a cause that has a cause that has a cause etc.. I assume spiritual causes at work in the chains though others may not.I remember being impressed with one description of Buddhist meditation I found many years ago, that described its goal as becoming free of karma, by learning in deep concentrated meditation how to trace the causes and effects that make you subject to karmic effects. It's a pretty esoteric idea about a terrifically laborious practice and it's hard to believe it's possible, but it supports the idea of a universe that is shot through with complex causes and effects.

There is no failure of rationality or logic in believers. What you fail to appreciate is how the belief that the Bible is the inerrant word of God requires that everything else be rejected that contradicts it. Put yourself in this position and see for yourself. Outside this context "fundies" think logically as well or better than you do.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

You remind me of my grandson who thinks we're "mean" to punish him for his misbehavior. For hitting his little brother, for refusing to obey his parents, for sassing them etc. It's "mean" to give him a time out for that.Likewise God is a meanie for punishing the idolatrous nations as reported in the Bible, even after giving them hundreds of years to repent, and for sending people to Hell who refuse to obey Him, likewise after whole lifetimes of patience to give them time to repent. Then you have to explain how some come to belief in Christ out of totally alien cultures and religions that are opposed to Christianity. (abe: And let me add, vice versa too since it's inevitable I'm going to get that back from somebody)./abe Happens all the time. And I don't think I came to belief due to my background either. I was a pretty committed atheist when the writings of some Hindu gurus convinced me they really had experienced something they called "God" and started me on my quest to learn about the true God. Started out believing all the religions teach about the same God, started out with a prejudice in favor of Eastern religion, ended up after much reading a Protestant Christian.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

God has many methods of disciplining or punishing nations, check out Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 9 for some examples of the blessings and cursings He said would come upon Israel for obedience or disobedience. Economic collapse, famine, invasion by enemies, etc. etc. Most of these happened during OT times and were reported there, due to Israel's sins.The slaughter of a whole nation has to be seen as the ultimate punishment, certainly it is meant to be a picture or type of Hell or the ultimate punishment of all incorrigible sinners, and if you love and respect the God of the Bible you have to accept that it is just. You don't, of course, you prefer your own ideas of justice. I'm sure God will correct you eventually. I've wondered that myself at times, but God DOES use enemies to invade nations as one form of judgment against them. I regard 9/11 as a small version of that sort of judgment, perhaps a hint at more to come if we don't shape up.Why God's own people? The best I can do with this is consider that since a great deal of the Bible is a picture of future things or heavenly things, and there are other hints along these lines, that it may be a picture of how God's people will defeat the forces of Satan in the heavenlies in the end and supplant them in their current positions of power, as the Israelites were to supplant the Canaanites. "Don't you know we will judge angels" is one way this is hinted at in the NT, and there's another scripture I'm trying to remember that isn't coming to mind yet. Yes, I've very often referred to disasters both natural and human-caused as God's judgments against nations, and quoted scripture as support. Scripture says very clearly that the Flood was punishment for the rampant sins on the earth. I did my best to make sense of this above. Well, clearly the intent is to impress upon them the heinousness of the sins being punished, which are often trivialized today, abe: as you are doing when you refer to them as "minor offenses." /abe He wanted to impress on them how excruciatingly important respecting the law of the Sabbath is to Him (which is now fulfilled in Christ as prophesied), and how excruciatingly important it is that the authority of parents be obeyed. But all commentaries I've seen on that one make it clear this is not about small children but about older children, even young adults, who are incorrigibly disobedient and disrespectful to authorities, who have been given many warnings but continue to disobey. The commandment to honor father and mother, like all the commandments, has much broader application than just children to parents, including all authorities over all of us. God held Eli accountable for the egregious misbehavior of his two grown sons and since Eli wouldn't discipline them God took the lives of all of them.I agree that stoning is incredibly harsh and hard for us to think about without cringing. One thing it accomplishes however is the involvement of the entire community in the act of punishment so that it can't be lightly avoided. When a criminal is punished in our day we don't have to notice, but they certainly had to notice, they had to actually DO it and agree with the justice of it. You have a lot of trouble with this but I don't. Jesus IS God, Jesus IS "The LORD our Righteousness" and "The Mighty God, the Everlasting Father" which are names for the Messiah prophesied in Jeremiah and Isaiah. God is merciful and longsuffering but God is also eventually an avenger of wrongdoing. Jesus came as the Suffering Servant the first time, to bring salvation to all who repent and believe, but He is coming again to avenge take vengeance on His enemies at the end. There is really no contradiction except in your own mind. Billions, if you count all the fallen angels. We have one and only one true revelation of the true God and that is the sixty six books of the Bible. All other religions have bits and pieces of memory of the true God distorted by their own fallen nature and the teachings of demons who have usurped God's place. Scripture tells us that the heathen worship demons. When our first parents sinned through the craftiness of Satan, and bequeathed to us the fallen nature, Satan became "the prince of this world" who lorded it over humanity until Christ came, the Messiah promised from that very time of the first sin to save us from its consequences.All through scripture we can trace that promise that God would eventually send a Savior who would right the effects of that disastrous Fall, and He finally came. Jesus calls all us fallen sinners to salvation and fits us for it supernaturally when we repent and believe.The true God was worshiped rightly by the true believers up through Noah and Shem at least, and then God called Abraham to be the carrier of His revelation to a chosen people so that the truth could become preserved in writing all the way down to us as the peoples were more and more losing their memory of the truth and the demons were gaining more and more of a hold over them. Now, only true Biblical Christianity worships the true God, all the others worship a false idea of God, Judaism too, since Christ is the embodiment of the true God and they deny Him. Quite true. We do worship different Gods. Statistically, sure, but God doesn't choose us statistically.I just read that there are about a hundred million Christians in China now, a few million more than there are Communists. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I don't draw any distinctions that the text itself doesn't draw. Where it's historical I read it as history, where it is figurative, and it's not at all hard to tell, I read it as figurative, and so on, and in this I am with the whole orthodox Protestant tradition, unlike GDR who favors a self-inspired guru of some sort with a very limited following.If I don't understand a passage I either take a guess or leave it alone. There are passages that I may never understand until a few billion years into eternity. I don't judge ANYTHING by how it "FEELS" to me. GDR may since he makes up his whole religion anyway. That is, he denies the Biblical revelation out of hand based on his own subjectivity. You wouldn't know reality if it bit you in the butt and you certainly wouldn't know anything about the Bible since you belong to a heretical cult that rejects it in favor of worldly "reality," and boy is that a joke. You have a screwy idea of "objectivity." You can't find sense in the Bible because you've been indoctrinated against it by your cult. And Faith is right about faith. Sometimes even GDR is right in spite of himself. You on the other hand ...Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I didn't say a mere compendium would make it special, the compendium makes it not "A book" but many books by many authors over a millennium and a half, and the significance of this fact, for the mentally deficient, is that their agreement and continuity of revelation, and especially continuity of prophecy, DO add up to evidence that this book IS special. For prophets who often did not even fully understand their own message to be in agreement with each other is indeed special and evidence that there is an intelligence overseeing the whole production quite apart from the individual authors. The Bible alone proves He exists and that it contains His words, for those who aren't shackled to a false opinion.

What blasphemous effrontery to pretend you are a Christian. I already answered your absolutely idiotic bleating about the numbers of animals, jar: the first is a general list, the second more specific about the clean animals. This is very similar to the pattern that is found in Genesis 1 and 2 you also don't understand: First a general statement is made and then it is elaborated more specifically in the next chapter. There is nothing contradictory about saying all the animals were taken by twos, and then in the next chapter adding the fact that the clean animals would be taken in larger numbers.But nothing will satisfy you since you are determined to put yourself up as the final arbiter of what God means no matter that millions of believers disagree with you, and I fully expect you to continue your utterly ridiculous rant.God will of course eventually straighten you out. Too bad in the meantime you make so many false statements you mislead people.

May God show you the truth since you won't listen to anybody else.

Sigh. Context-challenged as usual, the lot of you. The reason I mentioned the millions was to contrast with jar's single lone wolf reading of the Bible. Why can't you people read?

Insanely false history. What can one do when people think such crazy things.

Jar's views are certainly not shared by the billions either.