Which is why a literalist sort of Christianity is (it seems to me) a mental house of cards that requires the believer to continually make excuses for God. God is Perfect Love, Perfect Holiness, Perfect Wisdom and Perfect Justice. He creates humans with free will and allows supernatural evil to roam freely among them, knowing that the slightest sin - which is 100% inevitable - will estrange them from Him and require His Perfect Justice to be satisfied. He makes provision to satisfy His Perfect Justice through the life and death of His Son and makes this satisfaction available to sinful humans as a gift. But those who don't accept will receive hideous eternal torment, which doesn't sound to most (if any) humans anything like either Perfect Love or Perfect Justice and might reasonably cause them to question His Perfect Holiness and Perfect Wisdom in creating this scheme in the first place.Yes. That's essentially what I am saying. No loving father would do it that way.
That's essentially Christian Universalism in a crude form. - LOL
The atheists make a good point.
I have often asked why Christian think God holds us to a higher standard of conduct than himself.
If we were to be more godly, what would that look like? Incinerating your enemies? Yikes!
/
It just doesn't "work" in any way that is emotionally or intellectually satisfying - which is why literalists are continually forced to chalk it all up to God's mysterious ways. But if humans are made in God's image and our familial relationships model and reflect God's relationship with us, then how is it possible that God's love, wisdom and justice seem SO DIFFERENT from that of any human father this side of an abusive monster?
Which, of course, makes me sound like "not a Christian at all" to the Bible-worshippers, whereas I'm more inclined to believe that this house of cards isn't, and simply can't be, correct. The Good News simply has to be something better. The Bible-worshippers are as a big a mystery to me as I am to them. It always occurs to me that if I latched on to Ancient Egyptian or Sumerian religious texts in the same obsessively literalist way the Bible-worshippers latch on to the Bible, pretty much everyone would think I was completely insane. It's a very odd dynamic, at least to moi.