How could the God who died for us judge people? Doesn’t He love us unconditionally? What about the judgements of flood, sword, plague, and famine: how does the God of love order these things? How could He be justified in wiping out civilizations, groups of people with children in it? I am planning to discuss these hard things in my blog. May the Lord assist me in this. I am choosing the particular theme because one of my daughters, that I love so very much, has asked me these questions through the years. I would like to give an answer,even if my daughter never sees what I do, and remains antagonistic to God. The Lord is my passion, my life, and my hope. Jesus is not a dogma. He is a person. He is The Person. Writing about the answers to these questions could become my life’s work. I would love to do this because I love to write, I love the Lord, and I love my daughter.
Life in the Word 
Wow, Kari, you’re certainly meeting the challenge head on! Great subject. I loo forward to following your blog.
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Dear Mom,
I love you too. I will read what you write, but I will also challenge you.. . . as always 🙂
For example, its not just the judgement and actions of the God in the Hebrew Bible that are problematic for people like me. At the heart of the problem are basic assumptions and claims made by most Christians about God. It makes sense, possibly, to accept some but not all of the claims together.
Here are the claims that combined I object to:
God is the beginning, the source, all that is stems from God.
(If this is not so, than God must have a source beyond himself, and then what, exactly does the word God even mean?)
God is all powerful, there is nothing that God cannot do.
(It follows that God could have created any kind of world he wanted and can intervene at anytime in this one)
God is all knowing, he knows everything that has or will ever happen, including the minds of men.
(It follows that God cannot be surprised and therefor disappointed in anything that happens since he’d be expecting it)
God is all good, completely and utterly good.
(It follows that nothing cruel or unjust should be able to come from God either, if he is really so good.)
God is perfect, he doesn’t make mistakes.
(It follows that everything that is, is exactly as intended from the very beginning.)
Observations of life make these combined claims seriously problematic. So do the accounts in the biblical texts, if one is to take them as the word of God.
In my experience, when Christians try to justify these things they claim as “facts” as being harmonious, they like to say things like, “we are imperfect so we just can’t understand the mind of God” or “God works in mysterious ways” or “who are you to judge God?” or “Its true because God said it is” or “its good because God says it is” or “You just have to have faith.”
These are the kinds of replies that can never make headway in the mind of a critical thinker. These types of responses do not satisfy or resolve the cognitive dissonance that is created when one thinks deeply about these things.
Most vocal atheists have become atheists because they care deeply about the truth and have studied various faiths passionately and found them contradictory, distasteful and/or lacking. This doesn’t mean that atheists deny all mysteries or a level of reality beyond the senses or that might not be able to be understood by our limited psyche. Many atheists are open to other levels of reality, its just that they have just rejected the proposed versions after deep analysis. They are more comfortable with not having all the answers than they are with accepting the Christian or other accounts. Their lack of belief in the Christian version of God is similar to your lack of belief in Krishna. The bible is seen as many texts written by many people over a long time and combined hundreds of years after their writings into a single volume eventually labeled as the word of God. Nonbelievers don’t necessarily think that the authors were lying, just that they were human and recording their observations and ideas from their own perspectives which were not divine or infallible. Sometimes they were not even recording their own experiences, but rather stories passed down to them. Many atheists even accept that these men may have had the more fantastical sounding experiences they claimed, but do not necessarily accept their explanations of these experiences and see other possible explanations of what they observed as equally possible and likely. So, when a non-believer objects to things in the bible, it is an objection to another human’s experience and judgement and we are choosing to believe in the validity of our own experiences rather than those of long dead men we never knew. We do not see it as a denial of God, as you do. It is not a given that the bible is the word of God to us.
If we are to converse meaningfully on this subject, or if you hope to sway the minds of other nonbelievers, these are mindsets that you will need to speak to, even if you disagree with them.
I love you.
Katherine
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I am now retired and have some time to pursue these matters further. I hope to continue to keep writing on these topics. May the Lord give me His grace to do this.
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