re: Pope, we must avoid rigid ideologies

Age of accountability….

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The Pope is evil.

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Yes. At least this current Pope is.

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Catholicism is evil and a lie. It's the Great Whore of Revelations that leads many astray

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No. They have some misguided beliefs, but they aren't evil and certainly aren't the Great Whore of Babylon.

I'm going to wrap up my discussion with this. I've enjoyed going back and forth with you Foo, but there comes a time where it gets a little tedious to keep going back and forth.

My theology/philosophy of God is based on a few principles.

1) God is pure goodness, what I mean by this is that no evil can be in God. If there is evil in God, he is not God.
2) God is all powerful, meaning he can do anything that is logically possible, but it is not logically possible for God to commit evil. As I explained above.
3) God knows all things in their immediacy. Meaning he knows how we will act tomorrow before we even act in that way. Another way to explain this is God is omnipresent.

With these first three in mind, there is another principle I hold to. Mainly God gave man freedom.

If we hold to these principles then the Calvinist view cannot work. I've already explained why but I'll do it in a few words again.

1) Calvin, from my point of view, takes away man's freedom. God is ultimately the one who determines who will be and who will not be saved .
2) Again from my point of view, Calvin's version of God is not good. Let's take your example of Pharaoh, if God actively willed Pharaoh's heart to be hardened, meaning Pharaoh wouldn't have done it himself but because God "forced" him to. God is causing sin, causing an evil.
3) God desires all to be saved but he chooses not to save everyone, not based on our free response to his grace, but his own sovereignty. I just don't see how this is not a contradiction.

All of this said is why I hold to a view that God knowing how we will freely respond to his grace, predestines the elect for glory.

God wants to save everyone, but he also wants everyone to be free. Therefore in his omniscience, or he knows everything, or as I put it all things are present to them in their immediacy, past present and future are all present to him.

God is all powerful so he can do whatever he wants as I explained. He is also all good. The only way we can reconcile that with the teaching that some are condemned is by human freedom.

This can be extremely difficult to wrap our minds around. To put it simply God is God and we are not. We can't know what it is like for God to experience all things in their immediacy, we can never fully know how God can be all powerful and yet we still have freedom. There are so many other things we can't know as finite in time creatures, no matter how much we study the nature of man and God.

I know I haven't quoted scripture and I'm sure I could take the time to find things to back up what I say. However I don't feel the need to, why? Because truth in scripture cannot contradict truth in philosophy, science, theology, etc. Truth is truth.

If God is all powerful, all good, all knowing, etc. than how we interpret how the scriptures portray God must agree with those fundamental principles.

Yes scripture is the ultimate authority, but that doesn't mean it contains all truth, to say it does limits it to how ever many pages are in your bible.

I don't take Genesis to be a scientific textbook telling us precisely how the universe came to be. It just doesn't make sense that way. Instead it is more of a theological statement on God and the creation of the universe. At-least the first couple of chapters are. If Genesis 1-2 aren't meant to be scientific, than I can see how something like Pharoah's heart being hardened as not God literally hardening his heart. Just like we shouldn't literally cut off our hands if they cause us to sin.

Our discussion has helped deepen my faith in my own viewpoint, maybe it has as well for you.

I hope you have a happy new year!

Even though I see serious flaws in your theology I do pray for your salvation, or as you may put it that God has chosen you to be saved.

I look forward to the next religion thread that gets past the mods, but for now and probably the rest of the year I'm backing out

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The Pope is evil.

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Agree

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Catholicism is evil and a lie.

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Agree, but so are all other Christian, Jew, and Muslim religions.

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It's the Great Whore of Revelations that leads many astray.

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Disagree. I’ve personally gone back and forth - is it Rome, or is it the “second” temple of Jerusalem. I’m convinced it is the city of Rome.

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Revelations

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It’s Revelation. Not a plural word.

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1) God is pure goodness, what I mean by this is that no evil can be in God. If there is evil in God, he is not God.

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Isaiah 45:7

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I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.

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2) God is all powerful, meaning he can do anything that is logically possible, but it is not logically possible for God to commit evil. As I explained above.

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Just one example from Judges 1:19 when the LORD could not defeat the Canaanites specifically because they had iron chariots.

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And the LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron.

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3) God knows all things in their immediacy. Meaning he knows how we will act tomorrow before we even act in that way. Another way to explain this is God is omnipresent.

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If he knew how his creations would react, then he should have known not to put them next to a tree of forbidden fruit. Maybe he’d have done things differently so that he wouldn’t have had to wipe out the human race and start over. His plan wasn’t perfect and he couldn’t see the future. If he did know the future, we’d have no free will. And he certainly isn’t omnipresent. He didn’t know how many if any righteous people were in Sodom when the LORD was arguing with Abraham. Then, he had to send two angels to Sodom to check it out because he didn’t know what was going on there.

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My theology/philosophy of God is based on a few principles.

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You might want to get some new ones.

Squirrel do you listen to Alex O’Connor? This kid is blowing my mind lately.

1) God is pure goodness
I don’t get this, like you posted, you can easily find examples of evilness, at least by man’s standards. I’m not sure why they have to say that God is all good, why can’t God be imperfect?

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Because then He would cease to be God.

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Why? God’s only real requirement is that he created you.

So you backdated the ten commandment another thousand years to the time of Hammurabi . How does that make them less useful to society????

and you ignore Jesus bringing in the two new requirements to "love your neighbor and forgive when they screw up"

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saiah 45:7

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While the Hebrew word for evil is used there, the word also means things like trouble or calamity, which is why other translations use those. The word is contrasted with the word "shalom", which we all know means "peace". The ESV translates that verse as "I make well-being and create calamity".

But even if we were to assume the correct word used was 'evil', it doesn't mean God commits evil or is the author of sin (He cannot be). It means that He is sovereign over all things, including evil, and He allows evil within His sovereign decree for the greater good that He brings about.

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Just one example from Judges 1:19 when the LORD could not defeat the Canaanites specifically because they had iron chariots.

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You should pick another example. The meaning of this verse isn't that God is incapable of stopping chariots (He destroyed the chariots of Pharoah in the Red Sea by a miracle and He drove out Sisera and his chariots of Iron just a few chapters later in Judges 4:13-15), but that God did not because of the faithlessness of the people.

In Deut. 20:1, the people were commanded to not be afraid of large armies and chariots because God is more powerful, yet in Joshua 17:16, the people disobeyed and were afraid of those chariots of iron, not trusting in God's power and ability to overcome them, so God did not bless them. The "could not" was not a statement of power but a statement of will. God would not because the people were not trusting in Him as they should have, therefore He "could not" bless them until they trusted Him.

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If he knew how his creations would react, then he should have known not to put them next to a tree of forbidden fruit. Maybe he’d have done things differently so that he wouldn’t have had to wipe out the human race and start over. His plan wasn’t perfect and he couldn’t see the future.

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Maybe you should consider that the reason why things happened the way they did is because God did plan it that way. He entered into a covenant with the Son from eternity past to save a people for Himself and the fall was necessary for the redemption that would follow to most glorify God in it.

He knew that Satan's temptation would work and that man would fall, and that God would show mercy and forgiveness through the promise of the future Messiah, and that all of history was leading up to that point when the Father would send the Son into creation to bear our sins and take away our guilt, all for the glory of God.

God allows evil so that He would bring about a greater good.

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If he did know the future, we’d have no free will.

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We don't. We have the freedom of choice, but our choices are always the result of what we want/desire the most, which is based on our wills that are in bondage to sin apart from the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit.

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And he certainly isn’t omnipresent.

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Yes, He is.

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He didn’t know how many if any righteous people were in Sodom when the LORD was arguing with Abraham. Then, he had to send two angels to Sodom to check it out because he didn’t know what was going on there.

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That's your take? Perhaps God interacts the way He does for the sake of His people, not Himself. Likewise in the Garden of Eden, God calling out to Adam wasn't an example of God not really knowing where Adam was, but it was meant for Adam's sake. God knew how many righteous people there were in Sodom, yet agreed to barter with Lot to prove a point. God would certainly relent from His judgement if there were sufficient righteous men there, but God knew there weren't (though Lot didn't know that).

And the angels were sent to destroy the city and to get Lot out of the city so he would be saved from destruction (Gen. 19:13). They weren't sent on a fact finding mission.

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You might want to get some new ones.

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The principles he listed are good, just misapplied. You are the one who should get some new ones, because you are in rebellion against God. You break His holy law and are guilty before Him. You need to put your trust in Jesus Christ, that He paid for your sins on the cross, before you have to pay for them yourself in Hell for eternity.

Looks like Pope is looking fewer attendees