Excellent question but the wrong place to ask it. It gets too far from the general question of evil.

One has to wonder if you have a mouse in your pocket since this is your first post to this chain. (we)

Which ONE concept of God (Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist etc) is the right one? Secondly, which SINGLE religion provides a path to eternal life?

Have at it!

GreginNY

Last year, I tended the tree, and it brought forth good fruit.

This year, I neglected the tree, and the fruit rotted on the tree, and fell to the ground.

The same tree produced good fruit, and it produced rotten fruit. But still, the tree produced fruit.

The tree is not evil; neither is it good: it just produces fruit.

Whoever, or whatever, created the tree, did not create good fruit or rotten fruit; He, or it, simply created a tree.

If we tend the tree, we get good fruit; if we neglect the tree, we get rotten fruit. We eat, or we starve.

It is up to us!

Joseph BH McMillan http://www.freedomvrights.com

In the same way, I don’t see a whole lot of difference between, say, the ‘prophecies’ alleged in the Bible and the ‘prophecies’ that Mohammed’s supposed to have made: http://www.jews-for-allah.org/Muhammad-and-Judaism/prophecies_by_mohammed.htm

People are able to rationalize amazing things. Look at, say, the Mormons. Actually, along those lines… fbaginski, how did ‘pockets of bad blood’ survive the Flood, since it was supposed to have killed everything but what was on the ark? Where’s the biblical support for the notion that the Amalekites were descended from fallen angels?

And speaking of the Bible, it’s not at all inconsistent to accept some of it as factual and some of it as myth. There probably was a Greek messenger named Pheidippides, and he probably did run a message sometime around the battle of Marathon. But he probably didn’t meet the god Pan along the way: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pheidippides

To justify slaughtering babies, you need to posit similarly improbable circumstances. I don’t see any signs in the text that such circumstances applied. Those kids could have been brought into the tribe and raised in a (putatively) moral environment. Assuming that the entire adult population of e.g. the Amalekites was utterly and irredeemably beyond salvaging (and perhaps I’m mistaken but I thought one of the tenets of Christianity was that no one alive was ever in that state), the kids weren’t, and deserved good treatment and protection. Instead, they got…

Today while driving home, I came across a little squirrel which had been partly run over by a former vehicle. It still had its legs twitching and I debated internally whether to finish the job and put it out of its misery. I couldn’t bring myself to this task and now I regret not doing that in some ways, becuase I know that it will probably experience more suffering than if I had quickly done something to end the pain. I think it was too far gone to try to help it by nursing it back, although i know there are some people who do that with wild neighborhood creatures. Anyway, maybe God’s command to quickly kill the babies in that particular passage in the Old Testament indicates that He wanted to eliminate as much suffering for ALL the people on both sides because He knew what the future would be if those babies grew up, becuase they were being brought up in an anti-God culture. I don’t know, I’m just surmising.

We don’t always know exactly why God does things the way He does things…if we did then we wouldn’t have the need to trust Him. Sometimes things that appear cruel to us might be the kindest thing in the long run. God knows us humans by the love we share with those around us; our intellectual acumen is only a tool that can be used for good or ill to that purpose, although He gives the super intelligent the pleasure of experiencing all that such a developed and exercised gift can arouse. So maybe we all need to learn more about what the facets of love are and how they are demonstrated by examining WHY God operates the way He does, but always with the humility that He is the Creator, and we the created. If anti-Christian atheists would examine the ENTIRE bible as open-mindedly as possible, then maybe they would even be able to help Christians see the truth more clearly. Mr. Duke’s writing, Mr. Ingles’ inquiries and thoughts, and other commenters posts have certainly stimulated thinking more on God’s attributes and the reasoning of what constitutes heaven and free will. I would not mind if I lose my free will in heaven, I believe, as long as there isn’t any of the awful suffering that creatures can experience here. The New Covenant, brought in by Jesus’ death and resurrection, gives one hope for something better, anyhow.

Leigh,
Job 40:15-24
Job 41:1-34

“But they laugh at the book of Job where Job lives with dinosaurs”

Where is this in the Book of Job? (out of interest)

Doesn’t the Book of Job explain evil? I always thought it did.