I guess what I’m getting at is that my parents did not ‘create’ me per se since it is God who gave man/woman the egg/sperm to come together to create a human being. He gave the ingredients, they put the ingredients together much like if I buy a model airplane to put together, I have the ‘ingredients’ given to me but I assemble them. I don’t go back to the manufacture to get more parts — and I guess I don’t see God at some point after conception infusing a soul into the fertilized egg/sperm.

Anyway, that’s what I always thought though I honestly did not contemplate it nor study it. Whether I’m right or wrong, that’s been my view.

I think I talk too much and make something simple complex that it confuses even me.

Oi!

Dudley

Often because I just take a position at the other end of the spectrum from them just to see if they can defend their position.

I suppose I’m Socratic at heart.

Actually, “one’s theological position” does impact his or her relationship with God. It matters whether what you believe is the gospel or Pagan fatalism. Nobody can truly love and adore the god of Calvinism, who has not a gospel (good new) but a baspel (bad news), who (if he were the real) decreed before creating Adam that Adam would sin just so he would have an excuse to deny humans free will and then he would be able to damn the majority of mankind not for any choice they made but because he decreed them to eternal damnation to fulfill his good pleasure of roasting people alive for doing what he decreed they would do and not allowing them to choose any different, and yet he would save a few also by decreeing it and making them to believe as robots seeing they also do not have a choice. This god inspires no love. You can’t have a relationship with him. And even if you could, it would be the kind of relationship you have with your computer or your cell phone, since if all this were true, you are no more than a robot to him. Without free will, human beings can’t have a relationship with God, and if God has not given us free will, then he isn’t worth having a relationship with. The gospel then is that although we have damned ourselves with our own personal sins, yet God loved us so much that he sent his Son to die to save us from sin, and by his shed blood we can be saved, if we will believe and accept his sacrifice as Isaiah 53:10 says “Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in his hand.” The “thou” in this verse is YOU. When you accept his soul as an offering for your sin, you become a spiritual child of his. This is the real gospel.

Doesn’t this seem to be sort of a cop out? I mean, why, in a sense, “blame” God for the diversity? As a non-but-former-Calvinist, I can understand why you said this, but the noetic effects of sin remain. Not that I only rely upon that aspect either. It is just as much an issue of men’s inabilities to grasp ancient paradigms and a lack of evidence for exhaustive historical analysis.

I wonder if there is another flaw by assuming that postmodernism is only relativistic and breeds apathy. Key word there is “only.”

Coming from those two presuppositions may not allow for more options than what might actually be available.

I commend your effort to tackle this issue because I’ve encountered it numerous times.

Maybe what would have been more helpful is identifying productive means and proper heart attitudes to dialog. At what point does a dialog then remaining in disagreement just be left a disagreement with no one claiming victory but patience for more evidence in the future to solve the disunity? I don’t think that’s apathetic or relativistic. It just leaves things questionable untill the proper time. For the most part, I don’t think people are trying to be wrong. Both/and scenarios probably exist more than we realize too. Until the future paradigm is divulged tensions will remain, not because God wills it, but because of insufficient understanding/evidence/heart issues. I wonder if disagreement will occur in the eschaton for believers over issues just because, well, we are finite beings.

The idea of a preexitent soul has its origins in Plato and the idea of the inherent qualities that a mother or father may/and do impart to the child are mysteriously interwoven in the physical/spiritual idchotomy of the human nature makeup.

I don’t pretend to comprehend this complex and interwoven union, but its explanation is to be found in the unsearchable wisdom and abilities of God Almighty and His outworkings of His plan in time and space – as well as eternity.

Vladimir