I am aware that there is currently a thread being run on the same topic, but I would like this thread to continue in a different fashion.
I would like us to discuss one alleged contradiction at a time, believers and non-believers, and when both sides have fully presented thier case, move on to the next (which I will post).
Let’s start with this one:
Does God change his mind?
Malachi 3:6 “For I am the Lord; I change not.”
Numbers 23:19 “God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent.”
Ezekiel 24:14 “I the Lord have spoken it: it shall come to pass, and I will do it; I will not go back, neither will I spare, neither will I repent.”
James 1:17 " . . . the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning."
vs.
Exodus 32:14 “And the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people.”
Genesis 6:6,7 “And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth . . . And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth . . . for it repenteth me that I have made him.”
Jonah 3:10 “. . . and God repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not.”
No need to get snippy, sir. The article which I cited provides an answer to your question, and does so more thoroughly than I would be able to, anytime soon.
I didn’t get snippy, but now I will. This is GD, there is no one answer to my question. I’m sure you can go to one of your apologetics sites and link to every alleged contradiction. That’s not debating.
The Bible is not a science book. Nor is it a logic book. It is a book of faith. Logical inconsistancies that help my mind fathom the mind of God are okay in my book.
That’s fine with me Soup_du_jour. If you find these inconsistancies logical, and they help you fathom the mind of God, knock yourself out. But let’s now stick to the OP, for those who are interested in debating the first alleged contradiction I brought up.
x-ray vision, while I’m not a believer, nor non-believer, but completely apathetic, your responses in this thread don’t indicate a desire to discuss the OP, per se, but rather you appear to be fishing for a particular answer.
I think, if you’d simply post the answer you’re looking for, we can safely let the thread go.
Panzerfaust is exactly right. The fact that you say " I really don’t care what answer any article gives!" indicates a lack of desire to truly explore the question. A genuine seeker of truth would not reject a reply simply because it appears in a previously written article.
People on the SDMB almost never object when someone responds to a question by linking to an article. In fact, when a non-trivial answer is in order, this approach is often preferred. The fact that you keep saying “Discuss it here! Discuss it here!” indicates that you are fishing for a particular answer, or set of answers.
No, I am not fishing for any set of answers. I want to debate the topic with posters, not refute or agree with links you post to. Can I be any clearer? If you don’t want to do this, please just stop posting here.
It seems to me that, apart from the subject matter, this is really more of an IMHO thread wherein the person is asking for opinions (not cites or articles) on religious matters. So maybe, instead of getting snippy when said person says “I asked for your opinion, not for an article”, you could actually oblige the person in question with your opinion (which could easily be that article’s stated POV in redux) as opposed to drawing some sort of inference about said person’s motivation(s) behind starting the thread.
And since you have no concrete evidence to suggest that this person is looking for validation in the form of “I agree with you”, maybe you should assume more benevolence on that person’s part.
The Bible, which is the agreed-upon tome with which to understand God, gives contradictory information. Thus, there really is no way to tell for certain.
Agreed upon by whom? All believers of God? I don’t think so. There is no way to tell what for certain? If you mean whether or not God exists or that all Bible stories actually happened, of course no one can prove that one way or the other.
So what? If you’re going to ask so what, it appears your not interested in debating the topic, so why are you posting?
I think the question of whether or not the Christian God can change its mind is a very valid one, because it leads to a more important question: If it changed its mind about items in the past, what is to stop it from changing its mind in the future? If you couple the idea put forth by some Christians that whatever God does is right and moral by the very fact that it was done by God with the idea that God can change its mind, then the Christians have a major problem.
The problem with all these “claims” is that God is pictured as if he is a human, by humans.
God however is uncreated, eternal, transcendent and has nothing of a “human” at all.
So contributing humanly characteristics to an uncreated, eternal and transcendent non being who created everything including humans is the summum of illogic.
This is similar to the God defines morality argument I have a problem with. If there is an absolute morality, then God is just telling us about it, and the morality is set by something else (or derivable from some prinicples without reference to god.) If god arbitrarily sets morals, then he can change them, and we abide by them only as we would abide by rules set by a very powerful dictator.
If you believe the Bible, god has indeed changed his mind about morals.
To answer the OP - the fictional god has changed his mind, as the story is written by people with different backgrounds, philosophies, and goals for writing.