Sunday, March 1, 2009

Does God Love Everyone? BibleOrTraditions

I came across this video on bibleortraditions' channel on YouTube. I’ve since discovered that it can also be found on other channels, but since I found it on bibleortraditions’ channel first, I am basing this entry on my experience there. On this particular channel, the comments section is not disabled, but it is moderated. Needless to say, my comment was not accepted. Okay, so here we go.

Does God Love Everyone is a video of a supposed theological scholar answering the question posed in the video’s title. His first bitch is that the question is the totally wrong thing to ask. Dr. Robert A. Morey claims the question is “very shallow, very inept, not really thought through.” He claims the question should be “Does the bible anywhere teach that God loves every human being from Adam to the last human being ever born or does the bible teach that God hates some people, as well as loves some other people?” and “Are we ever told in the bible that God loves anybody? I mean why assume that he should or not. Matter of fact, looking around, I would think God should hate everybody. If he loves anybody, that’s a shock. No one deserves the love of God. Nobody.”

Then he opens his bible to Romans 9:13 “Jacob I loved,. . .” So, apparently the bible does state that God loved a specific person. Now, does he state that he hates anyone? Yes, same verse “. . . but Esau I hated.” Dr. Morey then rationalizes that there are two classes of people. One is worthy of God’s love and one worthy of his hate. Well, isn’t that special!

He then moves on to the Gospel of John and Morey states, “We go to Jesus Christ, who, of course, was the son of love.” [I found that last bit extremely ironic.] John 3:36 “He who believes in the Son has eternal life; but he who does not obey the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God continues to abide on him.” This, you see, is the proof for two classes of people. There are those who God is no longer angry with because they believe in Jesus, but the non-believers are exposed to God’s anger and wrath. Morey continues, “Right from the book of Genesis all the way through the book of Revelation, you have two groups of people. God is angry with sinners.” My question? Why did God create sin if he wanted us to be so darned perfect in order to be loved? He set us up to fail and then hates us for doing so. Nice guy, this God!

There’s more to the video than this, but I can’t stomach listening to it any further, and it’s not really all that important anyway. My unacceptable comment was the following:

At best, the bible is hearsay, which any clear thinking person would never accept as truth. At worst, the bible is a book of collective myths, which any clear thinking person would never accept as truth.

I said this because Dr. Morey’s quotes are just that – they are either hearsay (Romans was written by Paul somewhere around 51 A.D. and the Gospel of John was written decades after that) or they are simply folklore. In the 21st Century, don’t you think we should be basing our lives on reality rather than hearsay or folklore? Is it not time we got over the ignorant explanations of ignorant people?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

If I were God, I'd 'hate' him.

Did you check any of his supposed credentials? He has probably either bought them or invented them. Talk about over-kill!

How many degrees must one do to learn nothing of value?

I regularly observe this phenomenon in apologists - they claim things such as, "I have a degree in Biology" before going on to declare, "I don't believe in evolution. I believe in intelligent design". I doubt that they do have a degree, but if they do, then they ought to demand a refund of their tuition fees considering that they have learned so very little.

Genuine experts, on the other hand, do not list all of their academic credentials. They expect that the content of their arguments or explanations will demonstrate their expertise.

Oriented x4 said...

I think a couple of his supposed degrees came from unaccredited universities. He also started his own unaccredited university, which didn't stay around or never really took off or something like that. I may watch some more of his videos at some point. I noticed some earlier ones on YouTube where he was quite chubby. Maybe his holy rollering was seeing better days back then and he's only become so angry because his flock left him to starve.