lain: Reality is cut and dry....the problem is that our eysight is so clouded by the Sin which pervades this world that we have a hard time seeing anything but shades of grey by ourselves.
:think: It most certainly does contain all possible situations.....we are indeed responsible for our actions and will be judged according to them (unless another has already taken our penalty; therein lies another Judgement).
Where you run afoul and stumble is in that you are not taking into account that the Righteous Judge takes
all circumstances into account.....including the very depths of our own hearts.
You state you are a Christian, and I have no reason to doubt this; but I ask you: How can you Trust HIS Salvation if you will not Trust HIS Judgement?
I trust His judgment, but the God I worship is not the one Knight and co. seem to worship.
Knight, etc. seem to worship a giant talking rulebook, a set of prescriptive laws blind to the actual lives we live, to our actual circumstances, to the struggles we actually face.
Their god seems to say "I don't care what you're going through, it's still all your fault if you can't handle it."
Arthur Brain said:
No I would say not. Plenty will say otherwise or maintain that she 'chose' to go to hell but that's as callous as it is illogical. People who reach the brink of suicide are so emotionally and mentally damaged for a myriad reasons and factors so it's not 'clear cut'.
Yep.
C.S. Lewis said we search for a higher reality that is simple, and don't find it because we have a flawed concept of a simple lower reality.
I think he used the example of the act of looking at a table.
On the surface, we simply look at the table and see it.
But science is able to show us how complex an action it really is, light hitting the table's surface, being reflected along a particular wavelength to our eye, reacting with the nerves in our eyes as they transmit to the brain, and somewhere in there link with our mental definition of "table," "brown," etc. in order to allow the mind to understand "I am looking at a table."
Even that seemingly simple, mundane action is revealed to be incredibly complex.
Why, then, do we expect a God who is higher in nature than our complex reality to be simple?
If His ways are far beyond ours, then they're ANYTHING but simple.
I've found blame to be a fruitless endeavor. When you start looking for people to place blame upon, your list grows and grows... as does anger, a feeling of injustice, self-pity etc etc. A self perpetuating cycle that leads nowhere.
Exactly. Thank you.
Christianity is not about blame.
It is about being changed into a mirror of Christ's example, in how we relate to ourselves, to each other, to God, and to God's created universe.
