[littlemanpoet]

Originally Posted by davem

The idea of just going on & on & on, for ever & ever & ever would seem equally 'hellish'.

Thinking on this was a way I could drive myself insane. .... until a certain experience that changed everything. My sense of continuous serial longevity (remember that?) was a feeling of the Void; just me and foreverness. I could imagine God there, but could never really connect. Until a certain experience. It can still sometimes still give me the heeby jeebies, but not for long.

Originally Posted by davem

It would require God to just shrug His shoulders at the suffering of His children.

No. God wants every last one of his children to experience eternal life to its fullest, but he wants relationships. That necessitates free choice. Free choice requires that his children must be allowed to choose against Him. It's the nature of reality. There is love, and the absence of love. There is God, and the absence of God. It had to be that way.

I find Meister Eckhart's thought to be too divorced from reality. It doesn't present God the way the Bible presents God. The Bible's God is more real, more emotional, more personal.

Originally Posted by Mithalwen

I am so much happier now I no longer beat myself up for my failure to be perfect.

I understand the sense of relief you feel; however, relief is not the same as joy.

As to the existence of a Satan, the gospels record Jesus as having spoken of a real being whom he called Satan.

Originally Posted by Formendacil

Religion, particularly Christianity, it is true, has always been somewhat reactionary. Since Science, of its very nature, is forward-looking, changing its appearance with the emergence of every new theory, it was natural the Religion and Science should collide, with Science tugging inexorably towards the future, while Religion moves more slowly, with a much greater trend towards keeping the valued things of the past.

But it doesn't have to be this way. Christianity is not first of all a religion. It has taken that shape, and more's the pity. The Church, which is what Christ instituted, is a living, breathing organism ..... which also has gotten confused with the organized thing that works sometimes better, sometimes heinously .... but the Church that Christ instituted, the real one, is where the Faith of Jesus Christ really resides. Quite often that merges and overlaps with the various organized religious bodies professing to be Christianity, but not necessarily.

Science deals in the natural world, that which is repeatably provable in terms of controlled tests verified by the five senses. It cannot prove anything in terms of Christianity. Nor need the Church bother itself with railing against the theories currently in vogue in Science. The two realms do not overlap. I read in my newspaper how a scientific experiment was done to determine the benefit of prayer for surgery patients, with a control group and all. The experiment showed that those who knew they were being prayed for had more problems than those who didn't know. Does this prove that prayer doesn't work? It doesn't prove that it doesn't work, nor that it does, because prayer is a thing directly connected with God. God cannot be made the subject of scientific experiments. It just doesn't work that way.

I have a lot more to catch up on, it seems. I shall return. (up to 113)