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 Textbook wrote:

Rob: Well actually if you're saying "sometimes god is horrible to people" then a lot of problems disappear. Many religious people refuse to say this, which puzzles me because it makes reality so hard to explain. Saying "sometimes god does things which are (or seem) really awful" is *not* incompatible with belief, but a lot of people act like it is. Where it gets tricky is if you say "well sometimes he's really awful to people BUT he's all-loving" and then you get right back in the quagmire.

I never say God is "all-loving" in the sense that God loves each individual.  The people of the Bible were not individualists.  That understanding is important when trying to read the Bible.

But regarding the God of the Bible, here is Paul, a Hebrew and former Pharisee in the ninth chapter to his letter to the Romans:

 ⁶ It is not as though God’s word had failed. For not all who are descended from Israel are Israel. ⁷
Nor because they are his descendants are they all Abraham’s children.
On the contrary, “It is through Isaac that your offspring will be
reckoned.”[b] ⁸
In other words, it is not the children by physical descent who are
God’s children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded
as Abraham’s offspring. ⁹ For this was how the promise was stated: “At the appointed time I will return, and Sarah will have a son.”[c]  ¹⁰ Not only that, but Rebekah’s children were conceived at the same time by our father Isaac. ¹¹ Yet, before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad—in order that God’s purpose in election might stand: ¹² not by works but by him who calls—she was told, “The older will serve the younger.”[d] ¹³ Just as it is written: “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”[e] 
 ¹⁴ What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Not at all! ¹⁵ For he says to Moses, 
   “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, 
   and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”[f] 
 ¹⁶ It does not, therefore, depend on human desire or effort, but on God’s mercy. ¹⁷
For Scripture says to Pharaoh: “I raised you up for this very purpose,
that I might display my power in you and that my name might be
proclaimed in all the earth.”[g] ¹⁸ Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden. 
 ¹⁹ One of you will say to me: “Then why does God still blame us? For who is able to resist his will?” ²⁰
But who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? “Shall what is
formed say to the one who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’”[h] ²¹
Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay
some pottery for special purposes and some for common use? 
 ²²
What if God, although choosing to show his wrath and make his power
known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath—prepared for
destruction? ²³ What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory— ²⁴ even us, whom he also called, not only from the Jews but also from the Gentiles?

Edited by Epignosis - February 29 2012 at 20:50

The Christian Thread

God's Everlasting Love