I think you answer this yourself. Satan was reported to be a “glorious being”, free from sin and perfect, and yet he chose to rebel. Similarly, Adam & Eve were born sinless, with no expectation of death. They too chose to rebel. There is ample example of sinless beings, both human and angelic, that remained free to choose.
So yes, salvation is eternal. There is never an indication, however, that it is unconditional.
bolding mine. The bible record doesn’t indicate that “it must follow…”
In the biblical record Adam and Eve were made perfect, sinless and in perfect health. There is no indication they were to die, ever. This promise was conditional however; they could expect endless life as long as they remained obedient.
Yet, with Satan’s help (another perfect being free to choose), they chose to rebel. At the time of their rebellion, Satan challenged the notion that humans needed to be “selfless” and obedient to God as a necessary part of their own existence and continued prosperity. In his reasoning, God was lying to Adam, and if Adam chose a course of self will Adam would not only profit—independent of God—but he would be “like God, knowing good and bad.”
The human experience in the wake of Adam’s actions is an answer to that question. Can humans govern themselves successfully without God? Can any being live successfuly being self directed or self willed?
So the purpose of “salvation” isn’t to remove free will, but to distinguish between those who subject or dedicate “self” to God, and those would choose a course of self will. (Like Adam and Satan)
There is no indication that perfect beings can’t sin, or rather, choose to sin. Satan’s “sin” must have pre-dated Adam’s creation. Had he not sinned, he would not be in need of saving. A perfect being, predisposed towards not sinning, must learn from the example of Adam—and the millions of his offspring—that a course of self will----a life independent of God----is a life that will not prosper. (and will end in death)
The “end game” has as it’s shining example the human experience estranged from God. It indicates that no suffering is needed, if one uses free will to reject self will.
I’m saying that the bible record shows that we can ‘reject God and get booted out of heaven.’ Salvation is eternal, however it has—according to biblical text----always been conditional.
Eternal salvation, and free will (and more aptly, the use of free will that might forfeit eternal salvation) are not mutually exclusive. It doesn’t diminish the reality and value of eternal salvation for those experience it because some will reject it through their choices.
Satan was right about at least a good portion of that; and would have been dead-on correct all in all if A&E had been a little faster at eating forbidden fruits:
::sends ol’ Mikey with the sword to chase them out of the place before they can eat the second fruit::
Y’know, this whole complex mess results from a couple of misapprehensions: one, that the Divine Throne of Judgment is a criminal court, and two, that there’s some sort of entitlement present in being human.
If the Old Testament is any guide, what the supposedly-righteous Jew expected was to be vindicated by his Go’el in a civil case. God would judge in favor of his cause – not God would judge him himself as worthy of eternal life or not.
And, quite simply, I don’t believe there is one person arguing here who seriously thinks that all human beings are in fact entitled to postmortem survival and happiness of which God deprives them.
Most people who don’t believe in Him – meaning trust Him, are committed to Him, not “have an irrational intellectual assent to the proposition that He exists” – are convinced that “when we die, we die dead, dead all over.” There is no soul, no surviving entity that exists for any serious time following the process of dying. (Phrasing to allow for the fact that death is not a single-event shutdown and that people, including some apparently brain-dead, have in fact been revivified by medical means.)
So my first proposition is this: (1) In the natural course of events, humans are mortal, in the strict sense. Anything that survives bodily death is essentially a frozen pattern of the last pain-filled moment of life, and that apparently not for long. When the wetware suffers a fatal error, the spiritware running on it crashes and in general cannot be rebooted.
Now, if action can be taken prior to death to “save” that self-aware program, that ego running on a brain, using “save” not yet in a theological sense but in an IP sense, this may change things. This would permit the ego to survive past the mortality of the body on which it runs. Think that through for a moment, without preconceptions. We are not talking theology here (yet) but simply an analogy to computer science – information technology in the strict sense.
It would be my proposition (2) that what God does, by grace, in salvation, is very much akin to what one does with programs, data, and documents on a computer.
Okay, continuing this process: “Salvation” as understood by most branches of Christianity is not an event but a process – a rewriting of the “human program” by the Holy Spirit working in and with it in the interests of conforming it more closely to His will – in essence, optimizing it for maximum performance in the world as He intends it to be.
If there is in fact a mode in which the “human program” can be preserved and survive bodily death, it is something that must be accomplished by an outside agency, i.e., God, and is clearly something that does not occur functionally within the matter-energy-space-time continuum that is readily available to our senses. In short, outside books and movies and the occasional account of a supernatural apparition, human beings do not as a general rule manifest themselves as having survived bodily death in the world in which we live and with which we can review and manipulate data.
I want to go in two directions here: one, the whole “evidence for God” question, and two, the “moral effects of salvation” bit. Let’s take them one at a time.
First, it is argued by many that the evidence for God is largely founded in superstition, Biblical accounts that do not stand up to skeptical analysis [“skeptical” used here in the sense of “doubtful but theoretically susceptible of proof” with apologies to Lib], and that neurological phenomena can explain most of what is classed as “religious experience.”
To that, I say, “True, but so what?” Most herbal and folk remedies are BS, but foxglove tea does alleviate cardiac hypertension, willowbark tea does induce analgesia, and so on. The prevalence of false data obscures but does not contradict the occasional valid datum. Only one school of people desperate for absolute assurance hold the Bible to be anything than a collection of writings accumulated over a thousand-year history that purport to report, in various genres, people’s experiences of God. Except to those who engage in the fallacy of the excluded middle, it is not true that one error somewhere in the Bible discounts any truth value in the entire book.
The mechanism for studying whether or not there is a God conceived of as a supernatural entitty influencing but not residing in our present Universe is not and cannot be the province of the natural sciences – any more than Newtonian physics can deal with general relativity or quantum mechanics.
And human neurology can explain religious experiences either because the experiences result from coincidental discharges of neurons, or because the neurological phenomena map “real” events in the brain – that the religious experiences are “real” in some objective sense, and processed by the brain using the neurological phenomena identified by the neurologists and philosophers reviewing that rather arcane branch of knowledge.
In short, the reality of some religious beliefs, events, and phenomena is not dependent for its existence on whether we can map it to rational physical and physiological phenomena.
Getting back, however, to the moral side of the issue:
The entire question appears to me to be one where a criminal metaphor, sin as equal to crime and God as judge in a criminal court, with issues of cruel and unusual punishment and incommensurate rewards and punishents, etc., prevail. And I think that is the veriest bullshit.
We live in a sin-filled world, one in which people try to do the right thing but often fail, where people are and have to be selfish at least some of the time. Attributing this to a mythological Fall etc. is etiological and irrelevant. The fact of the matter is that, in Paul’s words, “the good that I would [i.e., want to] do, I do not do, but the evil that I would not [i.e. would chose not to] do, that I do do.” And that’s true for most people being honest with themselves. The ideal one strives for, one fails to meet. One may bring one’s best efforts to achieving it, but one inevitably fails at doing so.
That’s a problem not based in us as individuals but in the world we live in, the environment and social structure we have evolved. Sin is rampant – not because people prefer it, but because they’re stuck in a world where it’s become necessary.
Please note that in my usage, “sin” is not the taking of pleasure in some human activity frowned on by Mrs. Grundy, but the actual harm caused to another or to God or oneself by one’s actions. For every virtue, there is an equal and opposite vice, which is a corruption or perversion of that virtue. For self-assurance, there is pride. For the need for rest and relaxation, there is sloth. For a healthy sex drive leading to pair-bonding and procreation and for mutual pleasure in a committed sexual relationship, there is lust. For the glass of beer or wine for relaxation, there is drunkenness and alcoholism. And so on. The meaning of salvatio in Latin was not, generally, a theological question but rather a medical one – what actions will make one salvus – “saved” in the sense of “whole, healthy.” That’s what I see the Great Physician as being out to do.
It is not God’s purpose to turn everyone into dour mutually-judgmental Puritans; that’s the purpose of the dour mutually-judgmental Puritans, attributed to Him in just the manner that the genocidal maniacs of the days of the Judges blamed God for commanding their own genocides. What He seeks to do is to “rewiite our code” into a manner in which we interface with Him and each other in the most effective, mutually supportive, optimized way – that of practical love. This is why Jesus is so forgiving of sexual peccadilloes and so condemnatory of the Pharisees who sit in judgment over others’ sins while excusing away their own.
Now, that is my own soteriology. It’s what I believe to be an accurate portrait of what goes on in salvation theology. I’m sure that there are holes in it that badchad and others can drive a big rig through – and I’ll try to address them if we can deal with those issues with mutual respect rather than sardonic putdowns.
Still no good. Have you seen the latest contract demands from the APT&IHLAU[sup]1, 3[/sup]?
The Amalgamated Pan-Transylvanian and International Hunchbacked Laboratory Assistants Union[sup]2[/sup]
Why yes, I do enjoy Terry Pratchett novels. However did you guess?
And the quality of their work is declining, too. Just the other day one was sent out for a decent brain for transplanting and instead came back with Mary Gray Black’s brain[sup]4[/sup]
Though in amelioration of the offense, it should be noted that he also got a future option on Steve Stanton’s male genitalia.
That’s true. For situation one; at least you get to say your peace and you are innocent until proven guilty. With Jesus you are guilty until he arbitrarily lends his grace. For situation two; entitlement of happiness or everlasting life for being human would require that the universe were created by a genuinely benevolent and powerful being, which clearly isn’t the case.
I’m not exactly sure what you are talking about, but what I recall from the OT was that if god didn’t like you, he plagued you, drowned you, smote you, let Satan bombard you with meteors, etc. Your wording is unclear but if you are trying to say that there was little to no mention of eternal life in the OT I would tend to agree with you.
I’m not sure what you are getting at here, but I think Der Trihs is every bit as deserving of post mortem survival and happiness as you and Siege are. Do you disagree Polycarp?
Actually I think historically, most people who don’t believe, trust or whatever in Jesus or his father still believe in some afterlife scenario. There are a lot of Buddhists and Hindus out there, and there used to be a lot of other religions that believed in an afterlife, for which Christianity hijacked their beliefs and stuck them atop Judaism. But as for atheists, I would agree that most think it’s “lights out” when we die.
Cool, now cite for us any reason to believe that this takes place. I’ll give you extra points if you can do so without appealing to any magical powers.
First, how does god do this? Second, who does he do this too, and who does he not do it too? Third, what do you think god does he do to people he does not like, or to people who don’t like him? Please cite your sources.
You would then agree that the presence of evil in the world indicates that god is powerless to optimize the world enough end suffering for us all? Or alternatively would you say that god does have the power to optimize the world to such a point, as to keep little girls from being raped and killed, but chooses not to do so because it is in fact god’s wish that little girls be raped and killed.
Observable and reproducible evidence indicates that most herbal and folk remedies are BS, but that some are clearly not. With religious experience and belief there is no observable and reproducible evidence that any of it is not BS. That’s kind of a big difference to try and slip past us, but nice try.
Please then, cite your source that god saving our souls on his heavenly hard drive is valid datum?
I guess, and dividing as such I reckon one could argue that there is only one school that say the bible isn’t as you describe above.
Sure and it’s a straw man fallacy to suggest that those who criticize you are suggesting what you say. I really don’t know anyone, certainly not I, who have claimed that because the bible contains one error, it can not be true on anything. Rather because the bible contains errors it can not be held as “extraordinary evidence” of the rigor necessary to justify belief in the “extraordinary claims” held within said bible. Once we agree that errors are present, as you and I both do. And once we agree that errors are, shall we say very very numerous, as you and I both do. We can then start to place subjective probabilities of occurrences on the various events placed within. What should then be doubted most? Mmmmm, I know, I know. Answer; the miracles, to include the resurrection of Jesus and any afterlife scenarios. As for truth in the bible I agree there is some, but no more than I could find reading Homer and the bible is no more evidence for the existence of the Christian god, as the Iliad is for the god’s of Olympus. Do you disagree?
Actually sciences could study such stuff, if god visited like he reportedly did thousands of years ago, if he did miracles, or if he indeed answered prayers, but since none of that seems to happen anymore I suppose you can safely fantasize about god outside of human experience.
Almost as if there were no god?
One problem is what even constitutes sin. What sins Jesus was excusing he also endorsed on the Sermon on the Mount, and what Jesus (if he was really one and the same as the creator of the universe) spoon-fed to Moses as his will.
Consider it done.
I am again sorry if I don’t have any respect your beliefs, nor do I wish to give your beliefs the artificial appearance of value by feigning such respect. However, that does not inhibit my ability to argue against them. It should not inhibit your correspondence either. I do not think you respect the beliefs of Fred Phelps but that wouldn’t stop you from debating him, would it?
PS. Fair warning: If you reply to this Polycarp, I plan to re-ask every question of mine that you ignore.
Why do say it’s arbitrary? Is that how it’s described in the NT?
Nobody is asking you to feign respect for beliefs. Hopefully you can *communicate respectfully * with the person that holds those beliefs if you want the discussion to be an exchange between two parties.
Cause we have no choice, and according to the idea of “grace” none of us deserve it.
Pretty much:
“For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy. For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might shew my power in thee, and that my name might be declared throughout all the earth. Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth. Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will? Nay but, O man who art thou repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why has thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?” Romans 9:15-21
Ouch. I think perhaps we’re not communicating in this instance. It was not my intent to make an assertion about what factually happens, but rather the divergence of pre-Christian Jewish thought and modern-Christian concepts on God-as-judge. (And let us note that some of the “modern Christian” view is derived from a strawman oversimplification of rather complex evangelical conservative Christian theology by people only casually interested, having rejected the entire complexus of belief.)
My initial assertion was that, while most moderns regard “what Christians think God will do” is sit as Supreme Judge of a cosmic criminal court, deciding whether to acquit or condemn people as “good” or “bad” – cf. every St.-Peter-at-the-Pearly-Gates joke you’ve ever heard in support of this view – the Jewish view, as far as we can infer it from Job, the Psalms, etc., seems to have been one where the “righteous” person expects God to judge civilly, in a sort of tort lawsuit against his adversaries. Look at Psalm 7, Psalm 17, Psalm 71, Psalm 82, and Psalm 22 – this is not someone pleading for mercy in a criminal case, but someone seeking the divine justice against those who have maltreated him. To be sure, there is a certain amount of “Hey, I’ve trusted in You as You commanded; be merciful to me and don’t look upon my sins” (cf. Psalms 6 and 51). But in the main, the view is of someone who expects to be vindicated, not condemned, by the divine justice.
With Roman and Germanic concepts picking up on the unearned-grace aspects of Paul’s theology, coupled with the prophets’ and Jesus’s condemnations of those who ignore their own sin, this subtly moved over into the criminal-judgment point of view. But that’s not where it started. And that solidly Biblical conceptualization needs to be re-emphasized as against the Edwardsian sinners-in-the-hands-of-an-angry-God perspective.
Now, I have no issue with anyone rejecting the idea of an existent God, much less one sitting in judgment over humans, entirely. My assertion was focused on the specific: “Presume, for the sake of argument, the Christian God and His judgment. What is the procedural structure, the due process of His Court?” And it’s, well, not proven factual, but extremely clear from context, that that conceptualization has suffered a severe shift from David’s day to today.
My second issue was with the proposition that human beings are entitled to eternal life, as a matter of course. Those angry with Christianity seem to find God’s judgment as depriving them of something. But where, either in natural history or in Biblical thought, is there any assertion whatsoever that man is anything but mortal? He may be given immortality, according to God’s promises. But nowhere that I can see is there any assertion that he is automatically entitled to it.
I don’t disagree in the slightest. If it were in my power, I’d like to find a way to heal the hurts that so clearly fuel his anger. However, I have no more power over them than you or he. I may be wearing rose-colored glasses here, but my idea of the Divine Mercy is something strong and gentle enough to reach past the hurt given to people like Der Trihs and Valteron by Organized Religion, those purporting to act in His Name, and show them love and grant them healing of the scars His followers inflicted. Triskadecamus’s comments up above about God fighting against the Church are very apposite. When the Church injures and wounds human beings in the name of Christ, it’s committing one of the most heinous of sins.
If you think I judge Der Trihs for hating religion, farthest thing from it. He’s been hurt and he’s lashing out in anger, generalizing. He occasionally pisses me off with those generalizations – I am, after all, human, and hate having things dear to me insulted – but I try my best to get beyond that, and seriously care about the person. And if I can do that, the God I purport to follow blessedly-well can.
My impression of pre-Christian Judaism and of the Mediterranean pagan faiths was that they were very much here-and-now beliefs. Post-mortem rewards and punishments were not at the focus of their beliefs, and insofar as they had any, it was focused on the idea of impotent gibbering waif-spirits regretting what they had not done while alive. As for Buddhism, there’s such a congeries of belief systems attached to it that almost anything you say is true. Gautama was the ultimate apostle of “bootstraps salvation” – you achieved nirvana yourself by dint of your own purging of false attachments, or not at all. But in an ironic twist, something very akin to the Catholic-doctrine Treasury of Merit pervades most Mahayana schools of belief – you can rely on the meritorious deeds of Amida etc. to whitewash over your own faults and shortcomings.
Nope. It’s the weak spot in my doctrinal system, and I’m not surprised you flagged it. All I can say is that I believe in a God who promised something of the sort, that those who followed Him would have eternal life, and that abundantly. I choose to believe that promise – but I’m aware that I’m doing it out of trust, not out of logic.
I’m an Almost-Universalist. That is, I believe that what God has promised is not dependent on “believing seven impossible things before breakfast” – that He is going to, over time, make it possible for anyone who is willing to believe that the thing they see in front of their face is their own nose to accept His salvation. How, I do not know. How this ties into rewards and punishments, I do not know. But it’s in line with what He says about the limitlessness of His own mercy. I suspect you or Czarcasm or Der Trihs would be amenable to believing in God based on evidence satisfactory to you (individually) that He does exist and is Cosmic Good personified. And I wouldn’t expect you to do so with anything short of such evidence. But here’s the kicker: IMO, neither does He. Regardless of what the Ol’ Time Gospel Revival and Soul-Winning Revival Tour, or the latest Papal Bull, may say to the contrary.
Almost-Universalist because I believe that for free will and valid choice to be meaningful, there has to be a way for you to choose otherwise. But, IMO, not out of ignorance nor out of a false picture of Him drawn by misconception or incompetence on the part of human self-chosen spokespersons (including me).
Neither of the above. I have no more insight into the Problem of Evil than anyone else, but my own take on it is: He is powerful enough to do it. But for some reason He doesn’t. And my personal guess as to that reason is that He expects us to clean up our own messes – humanity as a whole cleaning up the mess that humanity as a whole has made. To break out my Macchiavelli quote: “God is not willing to do everything, and thus take from us that share of glory that is rightfully ours.” God could zap that child-molester, He could magically stop the pyroclastic cloud from the volcano from incinerating the village; He could end homophobia, cure AIDS, end poverty, you name it. But He expects us to do those things, following His lead.
Oh, I don’t know about that. I’m sure there are clear reports analyzing some of the modern apparitions: Lourdes, Fatima, Medugorje, etc. What I’m saying is that I think there’s a lot of BS, and a few quasi-factual incidents thrown in. What they have to say about the individuals reporting them is something we can disagree on. Clear factual evidence of the nature of “This man was irreparably paralyzed and miraculously cured”? I don’t personally know of any that have stood up under skeptical analysis, and I’m prepared to have an open mind there – might happen, but most such reports derive from over-credulity?
As noted, only based in my own faith and trust, and from the nature of “soul” if you will allow that such exists: something self-aware that runs on a human brain but is not AFAWK able to be isolated from it. If “soul” is in the nature of a program – my presumption – then “salvation” must be in the nature of “making a backup” or “reprogramming for fault-tolerance redundancy.” I decline to offer a proof, because as yet I don’t have one.
I defer to Diogenes or other Bible scholar here, but the evidence seems to indicate to me that reading Scripture in a sense that pseudo-deifies it to inerrancy and principally composed of totally-factual reportage is very much a modern concept. There is nothing inherently contadictory in some random 1600s writer thinking that Adam and Eve or Noah were actual people but that the Biblical accounts of them were “story” in the normal historical usage: semi-accurate but not necessarily factually detailed accounts with the details perhaps not accurately reported.
First, I added that because there are those who do argue from the one error invalidates all perspective, and I felt that deserved addressing at least in passing. I surely was not pointing at you or anyone else in particular in making the point.
Second: I find the miracle stories (a) difficult to believe, but (b) irrelevant except as illustrations of teachings. Luke and John were both fond of illustrating some point Jesus was making in His teachings by alongside the teaching reporting a miracle that in some way illuminates what he was saying. As for the Resurrection, the key miracle to the whole Jesus story, as I think you’d agree, I’ve said the same thing since I first began posting about it: Something happened that was a life-changing experience for the followers of the recently-crucified Jesus. The reports are extremely nebulous and inconsistent about exactly what, when, who witnessed, etc. But they generally show Him as having resumed living human form, but, so to speak, equipped with Star Trek transporter powers. He bears the wounds of the Crucifixion, walks and talks like a human being, eats fish and bread with disciples, but then He appears and disappears at will, enters into locked rooms, etc. So I think there’s a good bit of room in interpreting what the Resurrection was supposed to betoken – and that I Corinthians 15 has a significant point to make about it.
Oh? I’m saying that when you want to know how human beings individually will behave, you use the methodology of psychology, not that of chemistry. If you want to know how they govern themselves, you use comparative political science, not astronomy. And if you want to do a scientific study of how God purportedly interrelates with humans, you devise a methodology that studies that.
====
I’ll finish responding to you a bit later. But I do want to react to one thing:
I do not expect you to “respect my beliefs” when they disagree with your own (for convenience of vocabulary allowing disbelief as the “null set” of belief). What I do expect is what you’ve done: countered my statements with your own in a civil manner, respecting me as an individual, your equal, no better and no worse, entitled to the courtesies of civil discourse while subject to challenging questions where we disagree. If we can continue on that basis, that’s the kind of “respect” I meant.
Polycarp, I tend to disagree with your thoughts on whether we are “entitled” to eternal life. I can’t think of anything i’ve done, for example, that’s worth eternal life (or eternal torment for that matter, but you’re not a pointy-stick-having-demons type believer, so no worres there). However, while we’re not entitled to eternal life, I think it’s fair to say that logically we should be granted it. After all, him upstairs is supposed to be a nice guy, and granting this gift doesn’t take anything away from him. It’s like you baking cookies and me asking for one; you’re a nice guy, so you’re likely to share the goodies even though there’s no contract between us that says you have to. It’s the same situation here; there’s no paperwork I can point to to force God to do what I want. But it’s pretty fair to say that he, if he is who he’s said to be, should be expected to provide it.
It’s a magical concept designed to work with a fantastical theory of unproven existence in an unlikely and theoretical environment after death. It wasn’t designed to be logical, and was formulated in a world (Paul’s) quite different from ours, guided by non-scientific precepts.
magical concept: someone dying 2000 years ago has any serious effect on you due solely to your blind faith. Similar to eye of newt, wing of bat and that garlic repels vampires.
fantastical theory of unproven existence: life after death
unlikely and theoretical environment after death: heaven or hell
It would seem nice, but I don’t think it’s logical to assume that as the default. We already are disqualified as soon as we commit our first sin, so if anything I’d say it’s logical to assume eternal destruction.
But God forgives. I’m interested in your cite, though. In your opinion, does “it will be done for you by my Father in heaven” mean that what the two people agree to will be done by God, who is in heaven, or that it will be done actually in heaven by God? I would guess the second one, since i’m sure even you and I can agree on one thing, and the lack of results would be somewhat revealing.
Anyway, my point before was an argument against Polycarp’s view of God, not yours, as you both have very different views of him upstairs. I wasn’t claiming it as a “here’s a general argument against God”; more “here’s an argument that hopefully goes against your particular view”. I don’t claim it to be a good argument against you.
He can, but the sin must also be paid for. The only way to do both is to place your sin on His Son (only method available - yess by the will of the Father). Without that we are stuck with them. Why does God just throw everyone’s sin on Jesus - without getting into the battle of good vs evil, the easiest way is asking why Jesus has to take on another’s sins, what right does one person have to transfer their sins to another?
Now the Father has allowed us to place our sins on Jesus, but only if we follow the rules.
So again the default is eternal destruction.
BTW that is Matthew 18:19 not 23:9 - my error
Yes I know that the wording can lead to 2 main translations, the NASB, which is more of a word for word translation gives ‘by my Father which is in heaven’.
Taken in context, to claim this promise you have to be a believer (the ‘you’ is referring to a believer in Christ), in that respect follow the rules and laws, which really limit it’s ability. I suspect the lack of results would fall under ‘do not tempt God’ and generally wouldn’t qualify. The will of the Father is primary, and in asking such a thing while claiming that promise, it is not uncommon to add something along the lines of ‘Above all Your will be done Father’. It is very useful in a spiritual warfare context.
By way of clarification of one element of my response to badchad. I said this:
I just want to be clear that by it I am not asserting the validity of those alleged apparitions and resultant healing miracles. I brought them up as a counter to badchad’s comment to the effect that “God doesn’t work miracles anymore” (paraphrased, of course) to suggest, not that they were necessarily valid, but that they were reasonably contemporary (within 150 years or so) and eminently falsifiable if in fact invalid. They therefore furnish one quick and relatively easy control on the miracles question.
I know, just as sure as the Lord made little green aliens, that somebody is going to ask you why the sin must also be paid for. I am not out to argue the point against you, but I know that question is as inevitable as a reference to the Invisible Pink Unicorn or Flying Spaghetti Monster in a thread like this. Can you field it OK? My take is somewhat unorthodox, so I’d prefer not trying to explain the orthodox belief. Alternatively, somebody who knows St. Anselm (the medieval theologian who first spelled the logic of the Atonement out in detail) can jump in.
But just leaving it as an assertion without some rationale either appeals to “mysterious ways” or “dogma by default” or else makes God less powerful than Gerald Ford, whose recent death reminded everyone that he pardoned Nixon wholly and completely without any debt being paid by anyone (for Nixon’s misdeeds; several paid for their own!).
