Response 3:

blacknad ... reread what I said about the 4 quotes ... you misunderstood my intent.

and to continue you write:
"We are here to choose whether we want to co-exist with God or whether we want to reject him."

You can't have it both ways blacknad. If we go with the Christian understanding it does, by definition, support the Christian belief system. Why is that any more credible than the Alawite belief system or the Jewish belief system or the Arapahoe belief system?

Is it believable that a god, a REAL god, would be so hopelessly muddled and incompetent that the best he could do is ambiguity and that the souls of those who "should believe" are left to the happenstance of which fallible human preacher shows up on their little island in Indonesia and tells them to change their belief system? That's a joke: Right? They go to hell because the nutcase that showed up to show them the way to redemption was unable to speak their language.

Do you truly believe that an entity ultimately able to create the entire universe couldn't have his son born, simultaneously, in every nation, town, and village, a member of every race, and speaking every language to spread what you believe is the single most important fact there is? Preposterous. Winston Churchill knew how to disseminate important information to his people. The Christian god, instead, chooses a one-shot approach in a country with a small and largely uneducated population. Even with a bottle of scotch in you you could do better.

I'm calling rotten on this one blacknad. You write:
"You have asked many times why God never revealed penicillin. The above hints at the answer. Christians believe that God expects a choice while we are on this earth."

Penicillin is most valuable in saving the lives of newborn infants and children. You are saying that your benevolent god put the cure to the suffering and death of innocent children out there where it would be hard to find and said ... "my children have been bad so their children can suffer horrible painful deaths for milleniums until they figure it out themselves."

Nonsense unless your god is a monster. Which brings us full circle. If your god is a monster ... then so be it. It explains why the Jews have been so blessed and penicillin was hidden from children. If your god is a loving, benevolent, and forgiving entity then you have painted yourself into a corner from which there is no escape. You can not claim to be nice and deny children penicillin because of the sins of their parents.

And Christians don't have an answer for that any more than do Jews or Moslems or anybody else. They just ... hey how about Manchester United. <g>


DA Morgan