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Old 09-09-04, 05:59 PM   #19
Mazer
Earthbound misfit
 
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Join Date: May 2001
Location: Moses Lake, Washington
Posts: 2,563
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Being just and being nice aren't necessarily the same thing, toy boy, though injustice is never nice. Those biblical examples you pointed out lead me to believe that God has to be fair but he doesn't need to be merciful. From an ethical standpoint I think fairness and mercy sometimes oppose each other, but that may depend on which side of the conflict your on, who the benefactor of justice is. These happen to be non-religious themes, cropping up throughout history without the benefit of devine revelation, but the fact that God subscirbes to these philosophies neither discredits nor adds weight to them. The bible is simply one source of wisdom.

Albed, I'm not assigning blame to people for getting themselves killed just like I know you're not blaming God for doing nothing to save them. My point is that people who think God should save the world completly misunderstand his reason for putting us in harm's way to begin with. We live so that we can die someday, and there are lessons to be learned in that process. If we never experienced pain and loss then we'd be pretty dumb, defenseless creatures. God has no use for such a being, so we're given free will and then subject to mortality. "Thou shall not murder" he said, but even if he hadn't we would have learned it eventually because murder is a crime against man as well as God.
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