And I find it very, very difficult to square the suffering others have had to endure with an omnipotent loving creator God.
But just look at how God answers this in the book of Job. On earth we see just a tiny fragment of the whole picture of creation. It is equivalent to passing judgement on the author of "Lord of the Rings" by just reading a single paragraph about Frodo and Sam in the depths of Mordor. We are unaware of the start game and the end. We just have this tiny snippet of life on earth, and the Devil will tempt us to base all our judgements on this, but God asks us to trust him, keep faith and know that all will be well.
I like your parallel with some fiction that's equally as factious as the one you believe in Alan.
ippy
I think it is generally accepted that the book of Job is a piece of divinely inspired fiction written to illustrate a very important point. It is a brilliant piece of writing which highlights the shallowness of human thinking, as shown in the advice given by Job's friends. Contrasted with this is the profound wisdom of God shown in His speech to Job at the end of the book. Two and a half thousand years on and the shallowness of human thinking is still very evident.
Thanks Alan, you have again illustrated a gulf in your understanding of those people that are not necessarily your enemies.
I'm sure and willing to accept that there many words of wisdom in your book and although you seem to think, in this case, the book of Job is generally accepted to be divinely inspired, so you say.
I would be more inclined to think you and your fellow travelers underestimate your fellow mans ability and as you know every so often great people are born where their genes, fortunately for us, all come together in the right formations and we end up with the odd genius from time to time.
In all of our past records these famous and outstanding people a large amount of them would have had religious beliefs not unusual of or for their times, where else could they go to acquire any kind of education?
We now know better about genes, genealogy to a point where we are learning something new virtually every day the gaps are closing, not just in those subjects all kinds of knowledge; how boring if we knew all of it.
So as for your reference to the divine well it's loosing chalks in lots of directions such as that particularly mind numbing where something very complicated becomes, "it must have been a goddidit", which in your case instead of goddidit we substitute divine as a stand in for goddit; not exactly a very deep expression some kind of what you think of as superior knowledge.
Your post isn't a particularly inspiring advertisement for bronze age thought although I'm sure it was state of the art thinking circa 2000 years ago; looks child like to me, honestly Alan, "divine".
ippy
