Is God changing?

[_jo1952]

Frank,

I've often thought that if God is incapable of learning and change, then he must be suicidal and bored. When someone like you claims "Every question has been asked of God hundreds of billions of times", I think they should watch the Star Trek Voyager episode called "Death Wish". The Q finds existence so tedious that he wants to kill himself. Everything has been learned. Everything has been said. Every question has been answered. There is nothing new. There is nothing to learn. What an awful tedious existence!!!

Consider computer games where you get to create the avatar playing inside of it, as well as the circumstances into which the avatar is born. You also get to create the world in which the game is played. Further, it is the avatar that is given the power to make decisions while in the game; thus, it is not the creator who makes the choices once the avatar enters. In this way, as the creator, you have had the same type of control you have always had; however, you cannot know what the avatar is going to choose to do. By creating layers (estates) of existence for your creations which insulate you from them, you get to experience newness through your creations. The avatar does not know the outcome. He is not aware of what is really going on. Each estate is not aware of the estate above it. The avatar gets to experience things in earth time; while the creator watches what is happening from afar inside eternities. There is no death; it is only the mortal flesh body that dies.

With mankind's advances in technology, it is easier to imagine these things are possible. It also helps make sense out of messages that have been received from time to time from "true messengers".

[_The CCC]

God doesn't change, but our understanding of him does.

[_subgenius]

Frank,

I've often thought that if God is incapable of learning and change, then he must be suicidal and bored. When someone like you claims "Every question has been asked of God hundreds of billions of times", I think they should watch the Star Trek Voyager episode called "Death Wish". The Q finds existence so tedious that he wants to kill himself. Everything has been learned. Everything has been said. Every question has been answered. There is nothing new. There is nothing to learn. What an awful tedious existence!!!

Notwithstanding the Trek simile of the anthropomorphism of God as an ominopetent man.
The tedious quality assumes and relies upon the notion that "learning" is happiness or that learning is life. That believing in something around the corner relieves botedom. This is arguable from a God position.
A better argument exists in the satisfaction and peace one experiences upon resolving a problem of solving a problem/puzzle. This satisfaction exists without the desire for another problem...it is as lasting as it needs to be....complacency is its only undoing.

[_Tobin]

Notwithstanding the Trek simile of the anthropomorphism of God as an ominopetent man.

Notwithsanding the Mormon anthropomorphism of God as an ominopetent man.

The tedious quality assumes and relies upon the notion that "learning" is happiness or that learning is life. That believing in something around the corner relieves botedom. This is arguable from a God position.
A better argument exists in the satisfaction and peace one experiences upon resolving a problem of solving a problem/puzzle. This satisfaction exists without the desire for another problem...it is as lasting as it needs to be....complacency is its only undoing.

You've yet to explain how knowing everything isn't tedious.

[_The CCC]

Tobin:

When my kids were little I knew pretty well what they would do in any given circumstance. It wasn't tedious at all watching/helping them discover, and explore, their world.

[_Tobin]

When my kids were little I knew pretty well what they would do in any given circumstance. It wasn't tedious at all watching/helping them discover, and explore, their world.

So we are God's toys to keep him amused since he'd be bored otherwise? Is God amusing himself as children starve to death in African countries? Is he laughing his butt off as we flee from natural disasters and are killed by them? Sounds like a rather demented God you believe in there.

[_Zakuska]

In the US slavery was defended by Christians as biblical by quoting the Bible. It was chattel slavery, as was the ownership of non Jewish slaves in the Old Testament. You seem to be ignoring the bits where non Jewish and certain female slaves, were slaves for life.

The crusades also included aggressive periods by the Christians. Christians are just as guilty as anyone of growing religion at the point of a sword, and of raping. murdering, pillaging, and other horrendous acts. See the 30 year war for more examples.

Christianity is the biblical answer to Judaism for you, obviously not for the Jews, or any other non Christian people.

Colonialism was greatly influenced by religion, and again colonialism has been a vector by which Christianity was forced onto people by sword. Genocide resulted.

Christians have been responsible for atrocities just like every other religion. There are two sides to all stories. You only want to view one and then attribute the good parts to god. The attribution is less than tenuous. That you are trying to link this attribution as evidence that Christianity is true is such flimsy reasoning as to be laughable. All religions and cultures have produced both good and bad elements.

You have a very shallow understanding of Christianity. Thomas Jefferson had slaves. What exactly was his excuse? The Underground Railroad only could work if there were those in the South sympathetic with the anti-slavery movement. Actually, Bible believing Christians, once called Born Againers and now Evangelical Fundamentalists, have always been a small minority. I believe you will find that most slave owners in South were Anglican or Catholic. And I know that with a little research, you will discover that not every denomination was equally divided on the issue of slavery as you try to paint. In fact it were primarily Evangelicals and not atheists who started the Anti-Slavery Movement.

As for the rest of it, you are the one who insists Hitler was a pro Christian. The truth is far stranger!

You need to study your history son.

The slave issue was mostly championed by the Baptists. The issue split the church in-two and is the reason there is a "Southern Baptist" convention to this day.

Divisions over slavery Edit
Slavery in the 19th century became the most critical moral issue dividing Baptists in the United States. Struggling to gain a foothold in the South, after the American Revolution, the next generation of Baptist preachers accommodated themselves to the leadership of southern society. Rather than challenging the gentry on slavery and urging manumission (as did the Quakers and Methodists), they began to interpret the Bible as supporting the practice of slavery (see Slavery in the Bible) and encouraged good paternalistic practices by slaveholders. They preached to slaves to accept their places and obey their masters. In the two decades after the Revolution during the Second Great Awakening, Baptist preachers abandoned their pleas that slaves be manumitted.[20]

After first attracting yeomen farmers and common planters, in the nineteenth century, the Baptists began to attract major planters among the elite.[20] While the Baptists welcomed slaves and free blacks as members, whites controlled leadership of the churches, their preaching supported slavery, and blacks were usually segregated in seating.[20]

Black congregations were sometimes the largest of their regions. For instance, by 1821 Gillfield Baptist in Petersburg, Virginia, had the largest congregation within the Portsmouth Association. At 441 members, it was more than twice as large as the next ranking church. Before the Nat Turner slave rebellion of 1831, Gillfield had a black preacher. Afterward, it could not call a black preacher until after the American Civil War and emancipation.[21] After Turner's slave rebellion, whites worked to exert more control over black congregations and passed laws requiring white ministers to lead or be present at religious meetings (many slaves evaded these restrictions).

In addition, from the early decades of the nineteenth century, many Baptist preachers in the South argued in favor of preserving the right of ministers to be slaveholders (which they had earlier prohibited), a class that included prominent Baptist Southerners and planters.[22]

The Triennial Convention and the Home Mission Society adopted a kind of neutrality concerning slavery, neither condoning nor condemning it. During the "Georgia Test Case" of 1844, the Georgia State Convention proposed that the slaveholder Elder James E. Reeve be appointed as a missionary. The Foreign Mission Board refused to approve his appointment, recognizing the case as a challenge and not wanting to overturn their policy of neutrality on the slavery issue. They stated that slavery should not be introduced as a factor into deliberations about missionary appointments.[23]

In 1844, Basil Manly, Sr., president of the University of Alabama, a prominent preacher and a major planter who owned 40 slaves, drafted the "Alabama Resolutions" and presented them to the Triennial Convention. These included the demand that slaveholders be eligible for denominational offices to which the Southern associations contributed financially. These resolutions failed to be adopted. Georgia Baptists decided to test the claimed neutrality by recommending a slaveholder to the Home Mission Society as a missionary. The Home Mission Society's board refused to appoint him, noting that missionaries were not allowed to take servants with them (so he clearly could not take slaves) and that they would not make a decision that appeared to endorse slavery. Southern Baptists considered this an infringement of their right to determine their own candidates.[24] From the Southern perspective, the Northern position that "slaveholding brethren were less than followers of Jesus" effectively obliged slaveholding Southerners out of the fellowship.[25]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Souther ... Convention

[_Franktalk]

When my kids were little I knew pretty well what they would do in any given circumstance. It wasn't tedious at all watching/helping them discover, and explore, their world.

So we are God's toys to keep him amused since he'd be bored otherwise? Is God amusing himself as children starve to death in African countries? Is he laughing his butt off as we flee from natural disasters and are killed by them? Sounds like a rather demented God you believe in there.

I refused to accept a God who treated us as ants in an ant farm. Someone who would stand by and watch suffering. So I searched the scriptures until I found what I now believe is the true reality. We in essence all come here by choice and know in our greater self that there is no death. But we come here and take part in the mortal experience where we are fooled by this world. A place that we can make heaven or we can make it hell. The choice is ours to make.

[_The CCC]

When my kids were little I knew pretty well what they would do in any given circumstance. It wasn't tedious at all watching/helping them discover, and explore, their world.

So we are God's toys to keep him amused since he'd be bored otherwise? Is God amusing himself as children starve to death in African countries? Is he laughing his butt off as we flee from natural disasters and are killed by them? Sounds like a rather demented God you believe in there.

Toys? No beloved children. Not amused, kinda sad, really, watching his children die in this world from their own, or other mortals actions, and inaction's. God gives us back their lives in the next world. So we have lost nothing permanently.

[_Tobin]

Toys? No beloved children. Not amused, kinda sad, really, watching his children die in this world from their own, or other mortals actions, and inaction's. God gives us back their lives in the next world. So we have lost nothing permanently.

Beloved children!?! Really? I don't know one parent that would let their child suffer horribly and starve to death or would want to see them die horribly in a natural disaster. Is that your idea of a loving Father in Heaven? So why does such a loving God allow his beloved children suffer horribly and die? Why doesn't he do anything about it?