The power of prayer: in action

The benefit of, say, going to heaven? Isn't that why Christians evangelize in the first place? To get people to go to heaven?What's the point, otherwise? You can't grow and mature if you're dead. That is, after all, what we're talking about - not stupid stuff like God not making sure you have change for the parking meter this morning, but floods and war and famine and disease and crime - real problems that cause real death.

No, of course we're not. You took "something bad" in its lightest sense. I took it in it's most realistic sense.This isn't a world of "challenges". This is a world where bad things sometimes kill people. What kind of challenge is that supposed to be?See, you're just blaming the victims. As though it's the fault of, say, a passenger on 9/11 that they were killed in that tragedy - as though a "challenge" was set before them, but they failed.How disgusting.This message has been edited by crashfrog, 10-28-2004 04:51 PM

Don't mischaracterize the debate. You responded to the existence of bad things happening with your statements on "challenges." Since everybody knew we were talking about, among other things, tragedies where people die, that must mean you meant that tragic death constituted a "challenge."That, or you were trying to equivocate on what "something bad" means. Either way, you're not responding to the question.This message has been edited by crashfrog, 10-28-2004 05:42 PM

We make laws and mete out punishment to influence behavior, and somehow free will survives just fine. Moreover, there's things I simply can't chose to do, because of the laws of physics. Somehow, restraints on our behavior don't mean we don't have free will, so why would this be any different? Free will means choice. It doesn't mean that the outcome you chose must be guaranteed. Guns misfire and knives break, but it doesn't affect your choice to have committed violence.At any rate, it doesn't matter. If we needed the capability to be bad in order to have free will, God would have created us that way. But according to your Bible, that's not how it went down.Even in the Garden, without the capability to know wrong, Adam and Eve had free will. There's an infinite number of ways to do the right thing. You don't need the choice to be bad to still have choice.

Well, they don't have an affinity for a "certain" path; they seem to have an affinity for about 200 different paths, in American alone. That you're talking to yourself.