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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If there were a god children would not die or suffer.

If there were a god, there would be no child molesters in church, which by the way is the number one place that heinous act happens.[/quote]

Two responses:

First, really on the first example, just because we can’t think of the reason doesn’t mean there isn’t one.   My dog doesn’t understand 95% of the things that I do during the day — and yet there is a perfectly rationale reason for why that’s the case.   The dog just can’t see it. I believe that we relate to God in a similar way.

On the second example — we live in a fallen world where there is sin and evil.  The fact that people do horrible things doesn’t disprove the existence of God — in fact the entire Bible is premised on the fact that sin has corrupted the world; that because of this separation between man and God everyone needs a savior; that the gulf is so wide between us and God that we cannot bridge it ourselves no matter how “good” we are; that rather than destroy the ugliness of humanity, God sent his own Son into the world to pay the ultimate price for all of our sin; that He did so on the cross, which was the most humiliating way for anyone to die at that time; and that he was then resurrected to prove that he was the Son of God; and we are all saved not because of what we do but because of our faith in Him.  Because he was the perfect substitute, through faith, you get the perfect record of Jesus and are reunited with God.

I know lots of people don’t believe that.  OK.   But it is at least a system of belief that absolutely acknlowdges the premise of evil, explains why people do truly evil things, and yet also offers a path of redemption for everyone who engages in evil.  It certainly makes more sense to me than the world is just a random place and bad things apparently happen for no reason at all.  It also makes a lot more sense to me than the traditional view of every other world religion — be good, do good, follow the rules, maybe it balances in the end and you make it to heaven (sadly, this is what many Christians think too).

You can say — well, I’m not a child molester, I’m not truly evil.  But if you take an honest inventory of your life, there are all kinds of ugly things you have done.  Everyone has.  All of us are a hot mess.  There is very little that separates priests from prostitutes when it comes to the motivation of the heart.

I say this as someone who was in fact the subject of highly inappropriate sexual contact when I was in high school through the husband of a trusted teacher.  Despite a surface that looked highly successful, the incident left me very confused, hurt, and angry for a long time.  It was also a contributing factor to my own behavior that hurt other people as an adult — an affair in my first marriage, a tendency to lie out of shame, a draw to addictive behaviors and compulsions to escape uncomfortable emotions including the trauma from high school.

It was only as my second marriage was on the verge of collapse and I realized that my successful career was not going to change my heart that I started to look into deeper places for real answers.

And it was only after I became a Christian and accepted the above as truth that I saw a path for change, growth, and redemption — that was the moment when I actually began to get over what happened to me and became a new person.  Not in therapy, not through reading self help books, not through sitting aimlessly in church services over the years.   I did all of those for years to no no avail.

It was only when I truly studied Christianity (and NOT the messed up MAGA version that dominates today unfortunately in many churches) — and became a real Christian — that I discovered a transformed heart.

[/quote]

Yeah we’re in the fallen world and people are corrupt, but why would God send a bear to maul 42 children just because two kids happened to mock a bald man? [/quote]

People have a right to have faith without anyone else’s permission.

It is not a good-faith question.

This is exactly the kind of comment that pretends to be a question but is actually a provocation.

That “bear mauling 42 children” line is a gotcha trope. It’s commonly used to: Shock people and force them into defending scripture. It puts people on moral defensive. It is a trope to try to assert intellectual dominance.

brief: the prophet Elisha is mocked by a group, he pronounces a curse, and bears maul 42 of them.

On the surface, it sounds horrific and arbitrary. But the meaning hinges on several things that don’t come through in modern English or modern cultural assumptions.

Children is a misleading translation
The Hebrew word naʿarim does not mean small children.
It usually means adolescents or young men — think teens to young adults.
This was likely a group, not two little kids teasing someone.

This was not playground mockery

“Go up, baldhead” is not about hair. “Go up” is almost certainly a reference to Elijah’s ascent just before this (2 Kings 2). It’s a way of saying: “Get lost”, “Go die”, or “We reject you and your God.”

In the ancient Near East, publicly rejecting a prophet was equivalent to rejecting God’s authority — especially in a city known for idol worship.

This was a hostile act, not childish teasing.

The setting matters (Bethel)

This happens near Bethel, which at the time was a center of apostate worship (golden calves, rejection of Yahweh).

So the story functions as a warning narrative:
-Rejecting God’s authority → real consequences
-Prophets are not self-appointed cranks; they represent divine covenant authority

That doesn’t make it comfortable — but it explains the point of the story.

Elisha does not “sic bears on them”

He pronounces a curse “in the name of the Lord.”

The text is descriptive, not prescriptive:
It is not saying “this is what believers should do,” not teaching a moral rule. It is recording an event meant to signal seriousness, not to illustrate model behavior or instructions for people to act in this manner.

The Bible often reports events without endorsing them as ethical templates.

Ancient audiences understood something modern readers often miss: God is not tame, and covenant rejection is not trivial.

This story isn’t about baldness, insults, or vengeance. It’s about authority, boundaries, and the cost of contempt in a theocratic society.

That doesn’t mean Christians like the story, and the story doesn’t fit moral modern instincts whatsoever.

Many faithful people still wrestle with it openly.

It cannot be reduced to “God murders kids for teasing” without distorting the text, and it’s not meant to be a standalone proof of anything

Reasonable Christians know this is troubling, and don’t have a neat answer.
That’s not intellectual failure — that’s honesty.[/quote]

I’m the PP. it’s not such bad faith as you imply. It is an extreme story, but one that represents a consistent type of story in the Bible (which I’ve read a lot of btw) that keeps me from being able to experience the Bible as the source of light and truth that others experience. Yes, it’s an extreme example, but it’s not really a thematic outlier.

Can we find an interpretation that points us toward the sacred? Sure, but I experience that “finding” as drawing a picture from isolated dots. There are other pictures that can be drawn from those same dots. I’m consistently wondering “why is this dot-to-dot more true than others?” The Bible has some beautiful and wise passages. So does Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

I grew up inside faith, and one of my pastors/priests was always very good about going back to the original texts and translations. So I always try to investigate the original language used. I do know that the Hebrew term can mean “young men.” But the sane words were used to describe Baby Moses. So which picture do we draw? Why? Similarly “cursed.” The word does not mean “cursed at.” It is used elsewhere in the Bible to mean different levels of “cursing/reducing/making small.” But here we have one of God’s prophets doing it in God’s name. So which dots should we connect. And are we to presume the bears just happened to show up and start mauling, and this had nothing to do with the youths having been cursed? Then why are these events told as one story? And how is mauling 42 for the words of 2 justified?

It’s a head scratcher, this one. And it’s not the only head scratcher. Yes, we can find answers but are they the only answers? Why?

Call me bad faith if you like. I’m glad you found peace. I wish I could be as confident as you — truly. It sounds nice. [/quote]

To me, it sounds weird that anyone would be confident in what is, after all, a story.[/quote]

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