God's Not Dead

You posit that ""imagine God as a cruel dictator." I don"t. While at times, I wish I could find comfort in the idea of some benevolent, spiritual greater power guiding from above, the reality is I have yet to see any evidence that would lead me to believe in God"s existence or the fact that this all-knowing, omniscient is still alive even if he once did exist. You cite C.S. Lewis for the proposition that we have free will. But tell me and you have failed to address this issue, what purpose is allowed by letting children die before they are old enough to form an opinion about God"s existence? If a fetus or even a toddler is not a human being and does not have a soul and cannot experience pain, then I suppose there is no ethical dilemma posed by God setting up a system where children die before they can accept Jesus into their heart. If however, a fetus or toddler is human, does feel pain, and does have a soul, then what happens to that soul upon a death before they can "come to Jesus?" Do they go directly to hell? Not exactly ethical. Do they get a free pass to heaven? Not exactly fair. Do they cease to exist upon death? Not a winning argument either. The relevance of the "evil exists" argument is that you have argued only God can provide an immutable, constituent and valid set of moral and ethical rules for living. Murder is wrong. Don"t take the Lord"s name in vain, etc. But if this is true, if God does actually exist, wouldn"t the rules then necessarily be consistent for everyone regardless of time or place? So let me ask this, why one set of rules for pre-Jesus people and a second set of rules for people born after the death of Jesus? Why one set of rules in the Old Testament, but a new covenant in the New Testament? For example, a 16-year-old girl sleeps with a boy in Old Testament times. She"s found out and knowing that it is wrong to lie, she tells the truth about her sexual transgression. In Old Testament times according to Deuteronomy 22:13-21, the men of the city are supposed to bring the girl out to the doorway of her father"s house, and stone her to death because she played the harlot in her father"s house." Is this the absolute morals/real values that you are talking about when you argue that God must exist or the morality of man will be subjective? And if Deuteronomy was right back then regarding what should happen to a girl who slept with a boy outside of marriage, have the rules changed? Or does she get a chance to repent now? Returning to the idea of free will, which you have argued justified the natural and man-made evil that exists in the world (which I have argued cuts against the idea that some sort of benevolent all-powerful God exists), you haven"t answered or explained then why God "hardened Pharaoh"s heart." Isn"t that the opposite of free will? And if people have free will, didn"t God stack the debt against the non-chosen people initially? Does it make sense for God to play favorites? So let"s look closer at your three points that you use to sum up your argument: 1)No Free-Will/Choices; Automated (Robotic) Programmed Goodness (like when God hardened Pharaoh"s heart or when God put fear in the hearts of the Cannanites so they would be destroyed or when he stirred Cyrus"s heart so that he would release the Israelites from captivity or when God turned Nebuchadnezzar"s mind into that of an animal). 2)No Divine Intervention; Let Creation Take Its Own Course; No Natural Consequences; Survival-of-the-Fittest (like we have now in the post-active God period when he no longer audibly appears before people and talk to them in the form of a burning bush or sends down direct plagues or grants big fireworks style miracles; e.g., the post Jesus time frame when God stopped actively interfering in the world and essentially became like one dead). 3) Free-Will; Real Choices; God Enters People's Lives With Permission // Forms Personal-Intimate Relationship W/ Humans (in other words, we have free will to do what God says or burn in eternal hell and if he wants to send us to hell, he"s free to reach down and harden or heart or put thoughts in our head so we toe the line?) Again, you point out that "there could be no knowledge of what good is without the contrast of evil." But how does a person get to know light from darkness or hot from cold when God sends down a flood and cleanse the earth of the non-chosen children and babies? Oh yeas, but as you point out the children and babies at that time were all whacked out and crazy and evil and deserved their fates, so God was free to exterminate every living thing on earth except for Noah, his family, and the 2x2 crowd. What happened to forgiveness and love they neighbor and second and third and seventy times seven chances to be forgiven? Oh yeah, they were born at the wrong time. What did they really learn from their short, all-too brief life on earth? What chance did they have to exercise free will? And what about the pain and suffering of animals? What purposes does their suffering serve if we are to believe in this benevolent just God? To sum up my point, the random, chaotic nature of the world negates the idea that there is some objective just and fair moral code imposed by a supreme being. If there is such a God, then he"s the of the select and chosen. Don"t apply if you were born with homosexual tendencies or are destined to get squashed like a bug before your old enough to decide whether or not you believe in God or if you were born before Jesus died and lifted the cruel, unreasonable and illogical rules of the Old Testament or were born into a section of the world that is too dangerous for missionaries to venture and end up as a child warrior in some dictator"s army and die "unsaved," etc.