Category: Faith

What If God Is Cruel

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In light of recent events and the difficulty, pain and suffering in the world, here is a thought experiment that might offer some perspective.

kevingdrendel's avatarNavigating by Faith

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Take a moment with me and consider: what if God was cruel? What if God was completely unpredictable and wholly uncaring towards us? What if God was arbitrary, uninterested and unkind?

Some might say that God seems to be that way… if there is a God… pointing to passages in the Old Testament that portray God as angry, wrathful, retributive and seemingly callous about human life and suffering. Some say that they cannot believe in a God like that.

But, hold on a second. Why should God be the way we think He should be? Why should God be the way we want Him to be?

If God is God, and there is no higher authority, who are we to demand God be anything other than whoever He is and wants to be?

Indulge me a little here.

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Should the Bible Be Taken Literally?

When demand that the Bible be taken literally in all respects, we are imposing our own standard on the Bible and insisting that it talk to us in that way.

kevingdrendel3 Comments
ChristianPics.co

Whether the Bible should be read and interpreted literally seems to be an open question in the 21st Century. Some Christians, and many people who criticize Christians, seem to think the Bible must be read in a literal, wooden fashion, and it must stand or fall based on what people say is “the literal interpretation” – the Bible is either literally true or literally false, and there is no third position.

So, let me put this out there – do we approach other literature that way?

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Living Like An Atheist?

If God created the universe, created you and me and everything we know, doesn’t He deserves more of us?

kevingdrendel5 Comments
ChristianPics.co

Ravi Zacharias is a well-known speaker on faith, culture and philosophy. He travels around the world, rubbing shoulders with the intellectual elite. He wasn’t always the intellectual sort. He wasn’t always a man faith. He called himself an atheist growing up.

In an interview, when he was pressed on that point, he said, “Atheism is a strong word. I was living like an atheist.”

 How many of us live like an atheist?

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Darwin’s Faith: The Religion of the New Atheism

kevingdrendel5 Comments

New Atheists, like Richard Dawkins, deny that they have faith, but it is all in the way they define faith. Even so, they do have faith. Their faith is in the human intellect and capacity to reason, and this is their religion.

kevingdrendel's avatarPerspective

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The New Atheists today scoff at people of faith. Richard Dawkins has even urged his followers to mock people of faith. The same people bristle at the suggestion that they, themselves, have faith.

Yet they do have faith, and they are apparently too blind to see it. As intelligent as they are in the field of science and their philosophical naturalism, they are ignorant of the true meaning of faith and not self-aware enough to know that they have it.

In fact, the faith they have might even be characterized as the kind of faith Dawkins urges people to mock. Let me explain.

To begin with, I need to identify how Dawkins has defined faith. In a debate with John Lennox, and in other contexts, Dawkins defines faith as belief without evidence or even belief “in the teeth of the evidence”. Dawkins limits faith…

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Perspective

We live in a self-centered, me-focused world that is continually sending us the message that no one matters more than me.

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“Know that the Lord Himself is God; it is He who made us, and not we ourselves.” Psalm 100:3

Such a simple, seemingly self-evident statement, but some people do not believe God exists, and the rest of us (me included) act sometimes as if God does not exist.

When we myopically go about our days focused on ourselves and our surroundings, good or bad, we tend to forget that we did not make ourselves. We act as if we are the be all, end all of our own lives. We act as if the moment and momentary pleasures and pursuits of our lives are more important than an eternal relationship with our Creator.

We are told that we have rights, and we have a right to demand things for ourselves. We live in a self-centered, me-focused world that is continually sending us the message that no one matters more than me.

Continue reading “Perspective” →