1: Quoting the Bible to prove a point only convinces people who already believe in the Bible. If a person wants to convince non-Christians, then CS Lewis’ books would be a better example to follow.
2: My ex-wife grew up in the old Soviet Union. Everyone in academia just copied word for word from already approved texts so if challenged they could point to where they got it from, from first year students all the way up to the most senior professors. Everything published in the USSR’s academic journals was like that for years, and everyone knew it, and no one bothered with referencing their quotes because then everyone would have to admit everything was just rearranged quotations. So if “THE TRUTH” has already been established and you will go to the gulag, concentration camp, or hell for deviating from the dogma, “cut and paste” arguments are the norm.
3: The issue of predestination is interesting for me. Does it mean God knows what decisions we will make, or has God arranged it so He has already decided what decision we will make. If it is the first, then that implies that the nature of time is that it all already exists and we are merely passing through it one frame at a time the way we move through space one step at a time and God can see the entire framework. If it is the second, then God is sending people to hell because He had decided to make people that will go to Hell and divine justice is really a sick joke.
4: If there are two groups of people, those who love and hate who God does and those who do the reverse, then why did Jesus tell Christians to love our enemies? Presumably, the enemies of God are the enemies of Christians.
5: On Islamic ideas of predestination, there is a streak of fatalism in Islam that can get really out of hand. One of the reason Islam doesn’t have the same tradition of missionary work that Christianity does is that many Muslims believe that conversion is between a person and God, and people who are going to convert are going to convert. Or not. But some extreme Muslims believe that every second of every day in every place in the universe is an extension of God’s Plan or Will. If my car starts today, or not, it is God’s Will. This idea is so pervasive in the Arab nations (even if it is a minority belief in the Muslim world as a whole) that if a rich man’s car breaks down he might just abandon it and buy a new one. Some oil fields in the Arab world still need western engineers because Arab engineers apply this philosophy to oil rigs.
6: If Vulcans and Betazoids are telepathic and empathic respectively, does that mean they know the mind of God? Is the sense of God’s existence always in the back of their minds, or do they hang around each other a lot because God doesn’t exist and the emptiness is disturbing?
7: If being born of a woman without a man means being born without sin, then why aren’t women running the church? They apparently aren’t transmitting original sin, so maybe they ought to be in charge.
