Victor long time no hear. First I'm not trying to use a scare tactic. When I say that God judges based on His standard, it's not to scare you, so much as to inform you. Think of it this way if God does exist and He created everything like I believe, then why would He stoop to our standards? It would be like allowing your children to make the rules in your house. Rules that you don't agree with, and certainly don't want your kids following.

Why would God allow His creation to dictate morality when He has given His creation His own moral code to follow?

Now to address your belief that this was taught to me or that I was raised with the belief that I wasn't good. No my parents raised me in a loving nurturing home, and to this day tell me I'm a good son. I still get told "I love you" sometimes on a daily basis, I still get hugs and kisses from both sets of parents, and yes I have been told several times that they're proud of the man I've become.

So if I was raised in a normal home where does this come from? Simple, I read. The Bible teaches that we, humanity in general, are all sinners and fall short of God's glory. What does that mean? If God is a 10 even the best of us is at best a 6. My pastor used to have a saying "Even the best man is only man at best".

When I look around and compare myself to those around me, yeah I'm a good person. I try to help people whenever I can, I've never physically killed anyone, never raped anyone, I try my best to be a good husband and a good dad. Pretty much everyone I know will tell you, "Mike's a great guy, nice, caring, helpful..."

But again those comments are made by people who use their own guidelines to compare me to others. God's standard is, in truth, unattainable, so yes I fall short. I still occasionally lie, I still check out beautiful women, I still do all those things that I know are wrong because my inner desires sometimes cloud my moral code. Do Christians hold the monopoly on morality? Nope we sure don't. We can be just as mean and nasty as the rest of the world we live in. That's the whole point. We are part of this world, and are subject to desires that are sinful in God's eyes.

So then what's the difference? Simple, I attempt to live by God's moral code, but recognize that I cannot do so, even on my best day. It is because of this that I need "Grace". God's forgiveness without my merrit for forgiveness. In other words I can't earn my way to heaven because I can never ever be good enough to get in.

Does this mean that I can keep sinning and se la vi? No we don't sin for sin's sake we sin because it's in our nature to sin. We confess and ask forgiveness because it's also in our Christian nature to recognize when we've offended God.

You see all sin is an offense against God first and each other next. When King David killed Uriah to sleep with Bathsheba he pleaded with God first. Why? Because he recognized that the offense of shedding blood was against God's law. When I sin I appologize to God first and then those I've sinned against, because the same is true. When I sin my sin is against God's law first and then if applicable the person I sinned against.

Good point. When we were created we were created in our creator's image. The initial creation was perfect, and God did know that we would sin. You see it was always His plan to have to save us from death. If you knew that your children would turn out bad, would you still have them? Maybe not. But if you knew they'd turn out bad and that you would someday have the opportunity to change them and help them to be good, would that change the outcome?

Parents everywhere hurt because of decisions made by their children. That doesn't cause us to love them less. We still try to mold them and raise them to be better than they are. God has done the exact same thing. He created us knowing we'd need Him to bail us out of debt to sin. He provided that relief Himself in Jesus. All we have to do is turn from our ways and trust in Him to save us.

Nice to see you too, Believer (may I call you Mike?)
Just whenever you start to really frustrate me, you some how disarm me and make me like you again.
I respect your convictions. And I respect that you try to live by your code. I just have not been swayed - I see how you view it - but ultimately, it is a leap of faith - and one that I inherently am not able (nor do I desire) to make.

Believer, you have erxplained your stance on human imperfection before, can I hear your thoughts on the imperfection of God, as described in the Bible, please?

This is a God who made a 'good' creation which turned out 'bad'.

You say:
'The initial creation was perfect, and God did know that we would sin. '

How could a perfect creation be sinful?

Why would God make a sinful creation?

Why would God reward Lot and punish Job?

Why would he slaughter the Amalekites, including the innocents?

Why would he encourage rape & murder?

This is not a description of a perfect, all-knowing superbeing.

So, either the Bible is telling us untruths, or God is not perfect ~ which kind of means that 'he' isn't God (or, at least, isn't a good God) & shouldn't be worshipped, or God is perfect, but is not the being described in the Bible, or 'he' doesn't exist at all.

Any other explanation is not logical.

why allow a snake in his garden?

The Lord is the writer of the constitution and He knows whom to punish. Some times you see punishment of innocent person. You think that the injustice is ruling. In the kingdom of God only the justice is the ruler by the grace of God. When the innocent is punished, the punishment was of some bad deed done by him previously and the date of the punishment coincided with the present incident accidentally.

Lord is like a teacher, and this world is a class room for all the souls. The ultimate aim of these classes is to please Lord nothing else.

But the students (souls) forget their original aim (pleasing Lord through selfless service) and involve in side activity (indulging in blind family bonds selfishness etc) and destroy the time.

In this persuit they do many sins. Initially Lord will wait and see whether a particular soul will change his attitude and stop sinning. When the soul repeats the same sin many times and stregthening the false bonds, Lord will start punishing the soul. Here, remember that the sin itself punishes the soul, means the fruits of sins are utilised for the punishment. The responsiblity of the punishment is only the soul, because soul is receiving the fruit of his previous sins. Lord is not to be blamed for that.

But if one repent and decide not to repeat the sin then the punishment will be cancelled.

Here you should not that Lord punishes with impartiality and He sees the welfare of the soul. The punishment is for the upliftment of soul through the introspection. WHEN somebody is suffereing definitely he will introspect and turn slowly towards Lord from these false bonds.

Thus punishment has got its noble end also.

See the loving nature of Lord, He always looks for the upliftment of soul. Lord is a teacher!

Thank you, Anil, for joining in with this discussion, rather than starting threads for copy & paste articles.

You say:

'The Lord is the writer of the constitution and He knows whom to punish.'

This is in line with the comments of some of the Christians on the board.

Where you differ, I think, is that you consider that the punishment might be the result of actions in different lives. I presume this means that you consider babies not to be born innocent. (Is this the idea of Karma?) I can see some logic in this. I do think that re-incarnation is a possibility.

If you believe in this, then that is understandable, to a degree, but Christians tend not to believe in re-incarnation & karma, so the slaughter of innocents, by God, become less understandable.

Personally, though, I cannot understand how a perfect God could even have it in him to create imperfect souls.

I cannot see why he would allow babies to be born, or even re-born (re-incarnated), only to slaughter them. They are not given a chance.

The Commandments say though shalt not kill / murder. Any human who killed a child would be considered a murderer of the worst kind; any leader who slaughtered every baby, along with all its relatives, in a 'tribe' would be arrested, if found, for genocide ~ mass murder.

Any leader, who ordered his men to kill everyone except the young virgins, whom they could keep as booty, would be considered a vile creature, inciting & encouraging crimes against humanity, I should imagine.

So...

If God did / does these things, then God can and did do 'wrong'.

If God does not do wrong, then our beliefs about 'him' are mistaken.

If 'we' believe in the perfection of God, why do 'we' also believe in this imperfect idea of God?

Yes we do it every day it's called having children. As children of our parents we have the moral guidelines that they give us. But how many of these children follow those guidelines? Several children are born daily, some of which will be generally good, and some of which might become the next Bundy or Manson. It's their choice not ours as parents.

Same goes for God. He creates us, gives us free will, and we have a choice follow His rules or stray from them.

While our bodies were perfect and without death or sin, we were also given the freedom to choose. Adam & Eve choose incorrectly, and opened the door for sin and death to enter into this world.

He didn't we didn't know sin until the fall.

God's "reward" of Lot was at the request of Abraham Lot's cousin. God was ready to destroy all of Sodom & Gomorah.

Ok in order to understand this you have to know something about the holiness of God, and how He treats or deals with sin. Without understanding that you'll never be able to grasp the why of it.
Let's look at God's treatment of sin and His attitude towards it. The second commandment talks of bowing down to idols, but in Exodus 20:5 God says something pretty strang in our modern view. "I am Jehova your God, a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of fathers on sons, on the third and fourth generation, to those that hate Me."

So what does this tell us about God? Simple He views the sins of the father as future sins of the sons, and will carry out punishment accordingly. This is how serious sin is to God. For Israel to leave the Amalekites alive would have meant that their decendants would have had 2 opportunities to ruin what God had put in place for Israel.

1. Retribution for murdering their entire family, as was later seen when Israel was taken to Babylon. The guy who asks the king of Babylon to wipe out the Jews was a decendant of Amalek.

2. Corruption of the Holy, line of Jews. Keep in mind that the promise to Abraham was two fold. God would bless him and make his children great, and through them God would bless all other nations. The intent was for them to be the beacon that made all others look to Israel and want to serve their God.

So why kill them? First the Amalekites, Canannites and Midianites were evil in God's eyes. Why? Most of them worshipped Baal or Marduk, or any of the other pantheon of gods in the area. Some of this involved child and human sacrifice. In addition the Amalekites had tried to kill the Israelites on their journey from Egypt, by setting traps for them and pretty much running a guerilla warfare tactic on them.

Again this land had been promised to Abraham's decendants for Abraham's faithfulness. The people of the land were exceedingly sinful and God wanted to clear the land of sin to institute His Holy people. Now keeping in mind that we're all born with original sin, but that children who are too young to understand their choices are not held accountable for that sin. So in wiping them out before they were able to continue in the ways of their parents God was allowing them to live an eternal life in heaven as opposed to an eternal life in hell.

Again I asked you to get that book "Show them no mercey" which explains it much better than I ever could. It will not only give you 4 different viewpoints, but will also answer quite a few questions on God's treatment of sin.

Ahh yes MBAS' famous quote. Well what his quote doesn't say is that when Israel did that they were going against God's explicit commands to wipe out all of Midian. Those words MBAS attributes to God were actually spoken by Moses to Israel. Read 31:14-15 where it plainly states that Moses was angry because they hadn't obeyed the command from God to wipe them all out.

Now read verse 16 where it says that these people left alive became a plague on Israel through the councel of Balaam(Baal).

While genocide is a cruel thing, you have to keep in mind two things. First sin is like a cancer which spreads, and God's commandment was to cut it off and keep His people holy, but it wasn't obeyed. Second from God's point of view this life is not all there is, and it would be far better to live an eternal life in heaven than one in hell. God had already judged the people He sent Israel to wipe out, and their job was to complete the task to the letter. They failed to do so, which led to them being led astray, and ultimatly their captivity and disfavor with God.

Again it all depends on your point of view. If you had two children and you knew that one would go on to do unspeakable things which would in the long run cause harm to millions, would you sacrifice him/her for the greater good of humanity?

One of the best illustrations of this was a movie called "The Good Son" a mom has 2 kids a boy and a girl, her nephew(Isaiah Woods) comes to stay with her and her husband, and starts to see that his male cousin(Mcully Culkin) is just plain evil. The boy ends up trying to kill his sister, and does a bunch of other stuff. The movie ends with both boys hanging over a cliff, and the mother must decide who to save.

She realizes that while this kid may be her son, he's evil to the core, and has already tried to kill her daughter. She ends up letting her son drop and saves her nephew. Sad I know, but I feel it illustrates the choice rather well. Knowing everything God knew that if the people of Amalek, Midian, Cannan were allowed to live they would eventually come back to hurt the people of Israel.

Reminds me of what Christ said "If your eye causes you to sin pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of heaven blind than die in your sin".