At 04:52 PM 9/16/01 -0400, you wrote:
>Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2001 19:53:44 +0100
>From: Bob Walkden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: Re[2]: OT: America's suffering
>
>Hi,
>
>people like Falwell put themselves into impossible positions with this
>sort of opinion.
Only if you understand the position and represent it fairly.
> If disasters like this are their god's punishment of a
>sinful society then either everybody who suffers in this way is among
>the "liberal civil liberties groups, feminists, homosexuals and abortion
>rights supporters" or their god is highly unjust and arbitrary in his
>punishments. He hasn't for instance, punished me (a civil libertarian,
>feminist, supporter of gay and abortion rights) in any way that I can
>discern, but he almost certainly has punished people who share the views
>of Falwell et al. You'd think after an eternity this god would by now
>have devised a rather better instrument than this unsubtle and
>indiscriminate brutality.
If you read God's punishment of Israel for its sin, there's nothing direct
from heaven. There's Babylon and Assyria and Greece and Rome.
Some punishments are corporate, some are individual.
>Furthermore, these people seem to ignore their own Bible in several
>ways. Didn't god promise to show mercy even to the inhabitants of Sodom
>if there were any righteous people in the city?
To the repentant. Read of Johah. Read the message of the NT. God forgives
the repentant person.
>Do Falwell and his supporters take it upon themselves to be less forgiving
>than their own
>God, and condemn the innocent?
Innocent? We all normally stand guilty before God. That's why we need
forgiveness.
>Perhaps the biggest mistake that these
>'Christians' seem to make is to imagine that their god is still the angry
>old guy of the Old Testament.
No. Just a consistent justice. The OT gave us much of God's dealings
corporately
with a nation as well as individual faith and repentance. Our message is
simple:
God forgives the repentant. One must recognize sin in order to repent of it.
>They seem to have forgotten that the New
>Testament has precedence over the Old, and the message of the New Testament
>is one of love and forgiveness.
God hasn't changed. His standards of righteousness haven't changed.
>Neither of these qualities seems particularly
>evident in the fundamentalist world view.
Unless, of course, you don't have a good understanding of what it is.
>- ---
>
> Bob
Collin
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