When Will The End-Times Be And How Will We Know?

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The apologetic canned answers still seem to work.

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Apparently not, since all you are doing at best is avoiding the point. Maybe that counts as “working” for you.

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Choosing Jesus is the option that negates the power of evil.

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Not in any relevant sense. Indeed it seems you really mean that choosing to worship apologists negates the power of truth. Except that it doesn’t really.

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The fact that God allowed evil to exist as an "attractive nuisance" seems to be a separate issue

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If God has perfect foreknowledge that is merely a deceptive phrasing meant to cover up a massive problem in your beliefs.

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It describes a God that humans are expected to correct and discipline.

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That is not something that anyone else is suggesting, nor is it a rational inference from anything anyone else is suggesting.

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Deal with that.

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OK. It’s a stupid fabrication you invented because you can’t handle the basic reasoning involved.You have two options if you want to be honest. First you can insist that God has limits which absolve him of responsibility. Alternatively you can accept that the position you are arguing against is correct.Presenting inevitability as a mere possibility is not honest, and obviously so.

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But in the apologetic hypothetical that I have described (and which would likely be accepted by many evangelicals) it *did* happen.

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So you’re claiming that God’s foreknowledge is limited?Because you can only have “possibilities” in a meaningful way if God doesn’t know which way Lucifer will go. If God knew in advance that Lucifer would choose evil, then it’s an inevitability, not a mere possibility.

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I only argue that Lucifer *had* to become Satan to fulfill the freedom for humans to rebel.

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First, unless you argue that God did not know in advance that Satan would fall, your talk of “possibilities” is just an attempt at deception.Second, your point as quoted above doesn’t even make sense. Indeed, unless you deny God’s absolute foreknowledge there is no “freedom to rebel”. If we are locked into following God’s plan it isn’t freedom and no true rebellion is possible.

Let’s say that somebody makes a time bomb.They plant it in a railway station, set to go off at rush hour. They have planned well and know exactly how to evade security and place the bomb where it will not be found before it explodes and cause carnage.Are they responsible? Should we put blame on the bomb for detonating as it was designed and intended to do? On the travellers for being at the station? On security for not spotting the bomb in time? Perhaps the last might not be completely stupid, but even so primary responsibility has to go with the person who made and set and planted the bomb.If you’re prepared to go off into fantasy we could make the bomb have an AI - that wants to detonate when the clock says so (much like the film Dark Star. It has a choice but still it would on,y be acting as it was designed and intended to act. The responsibility, again, lies with the person who made it and set it.And this really is analogous to the situation being considered. God made Lucifer in the full knowledge that by making Lucifer as he did, Lucifer would inevitably Fall with everything that would come with that. God could have made Lucifer differently, so he would have chosen otherwise. Because God created Lucifer in the full knowledge of everything Lucifer would do God made all those choices first, Lucifer’s choices are all the choices that God chose for him. Lucifer is just God’s puppet and so God - who made all the real choices - is responsible for Lucifer’s actions. Lucifer has no more agency than the bomb.

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Argument noted. I think I will argue that in the hypothetical, at the point of the initial "war in heaven" and angelic rebellion, God would have had to have not known the outcome but rather simply had allowed the possibility. My argument may not be as definite concerning human destiny.

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I think it is very much the same situation. If God created humanity knowing in advance all the decisions each human would make then it is the same in every relevant mistake. It’s like the time bomb analogy. And that’s before we get into all the interventions God supposedly made in human history.(The “war in heaven” stuff is a bit dicey theologically since the Revelation has it occurring as part of the end-times).

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I suppose that I could agree with your overall basic argument in that GOD was the Creator of all seen and unseen, including Lucifer so in that larger context He is in fact responsible for everything that happens.

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As I have said in the past it is the combination of creation and foreknowledge that is the primary issue. If God were simply a powerless observer foreknowledge would not be an issue. If God lacked foreknowledge and things went wrong despite his best efforts then there would still be a degree of responsibility, but not a great one.

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My hypothetical assumes classic apologetic belief in a divine Jesus and a very real adversary (who tested Jesus in the wilderness). By inference, this would imply that each and every human will be similarly tested in many ways during their life. Unlike Jesus, we are not without original sin, which is essentially the storyline of apologetic thinking. You would have to argue that we are born totally and completely neutral and free to choose our own path rather than the requirement that we choose Jesus or burn eternally.

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I think you mean that you would have to argue that. Original Sin is a hugely problematic doctrine that again ends up placing much of the responsibility on God.

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You make similar assumptions that Percy made. Who are humans to define God's responsibilities, limits, and duties? I

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Nobody is defining any of these - except that you are proposing limits. (I point out that responsibility for something happening is not A responsibility - something that should be done)

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In the hypothetical, there is a spiritual explanation

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Apparently the explanation is that God is a cruel child who blames his playthings. Aside from proposing limits n God that’s pretty much all you offer.

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Do you have any idea how the spiritual world is presupposed to work?

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However God wants it to work - if God exists and is all Christians commonly claim. Which is all we need to know for this discussion.

Congratulations. You’ve just discovered that it isn’t easy to actually follow Jesus. Which says a lot about Christianity.

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What does it say about Christianity?

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That is isn’t about following Jesus. If it was, you’d know this stuff already.

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It is my belief that no one can do what is required. We need God's grace to do what is required.

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That is no excuse for not trying. And if you were saved, shouldn’t you have God’s grace?

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It is not normal human nature to give up everything that one has simply to do the right thing. What I mean is that it is one thing to do as jar does and help the neighbor or the local grocery store. It is quite another to give up every material thing that you have or sacrifice your time when you too have a life.

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And you complain about a lot less than that. Blows to national pride come hard to you.

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Especially when you are actually convinced that He is real.

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That should make it easier, not harder.

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To be honest, I know that ringos argument is basically correct. Though I would argue that Jesus told the rich young ruler something specific to his problem with priorities, I can't argue against the basic charge that we all should consider others better than ourselves.

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I think that your priorities are even more focussed on money. And the last sentence is badly written and wrong. You should consider others as much as you do yourself - and remember that there are those who are worse off than you.

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My gripe with ringo is that he exempts himself from the charge that he claims I should follow.

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If he doesn’t claim to be a Christian he is exempt - in the sense that he does not believe that he is a follower of Jesus.

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If Jesus is real and is who the apologists say He is, everyone should follow His commands...not just believers.

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In practical terms everyone who believes that Jesus is real (and not just in the sense that there was a person behind the stories) should follow him. Just as those who believe that Mohammed or Joseph Smith were genuine prophets should follow their teachings. Those that believe otherwise may be wrong and may regret it, but they are not being untrue to their professed belief.

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Granted it seems arrogant and exclusivist to believe that the religion I happened to be raised with and was taught is the closest path to absolute truth…

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And it is even more arrogant to expect everyone to act as if your beliefs were true. And yet that’s what you do. You don’t recognise that you should follow your beliefs and other people should follow theirs.

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Some amount of inflation is unavoidable.

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That’s not entirely true - deflation is possible, at least in the short term.What is true is that economists think that a small amount of inflation is desirable

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And is it any coincidence that COVID happened shortly after Trump initiated a Trade War against China?

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The sane answer is “yes”. Releasing a virus on their own population is hardly a sensible way of attacking the US. America wasn’t even the first country outside Asia to be badly affected. The idea that it’s somehow a response to Trump’s silly trade war makes no sense at all.I don’t know who you got that idea from, but they’re obviously a conspiracy nut.

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The Bible contains many prophecies; some have
already been fulfilled, others will soon be fulfilled.

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Some have certainly failed. For instance the end times did not arrive on the schedule of Daniel 8.

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There are more than 50 specific OT prophecies
about Jesus that have been fulfilled in the NT.
Some Biblical scholars insist that the actual
number is better than 300.

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That sort of so-called “Biblical scholar” often says things that aren’t true.

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For the sake of brevity, I will mention just eight.

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Let’s see how far you can go before getting one wrong.

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Isaiah 7:14 born of a virgin Luke 1:35.

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Oh dear, the first one is an obvious error. The child born in Isaiah 7 is not the main prophecy but a sign that the main prophecy will shortly be fulfilled. That prophecy being that the attacks from Aram and Israel will soon be brought to an end by the Assyrians.Unless Jesus was born in the reign of Ahaz, he has nothing to do with this prophecy.

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Just now watching Viced Rhino's new video ( Atheists Admit Secrets That Atheists Never Admit!!! -- video refused to embed). Circa 36:00 he mentions that there are books of prophecy in the Bible that we can date by when the prophecies go from being accurate to being wrong. That would mean that the book was written around the time that it went from being accurate to being wrong. No, he didn't give examples here because that was an aside from critiquing a fundamentalist video misrepresenting atheists.

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Daniel is an example. There’s some amazingly accurate stuff - but it goes off the rails later. Christians generally try to reinterpret it anyway to fit their beliefs, so it gets complicated when dealing with Fundamentalists who have no respect for actual scholarship.

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"This generation" is the people who were standing in front of Jesus at the time, the people who were alive in c. 30 CE. Jesus was that predicting "these things" would happen within a few decades - i.e. in the 1st century CE.

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Of course he was wrong. Daniel 8 tells us that the End Times will be in the latter days of the Diadochi kingdoms. Battle of Actium, 31 BC and that’s IT. The Bible says so.