@Holly Pham: It is true that sin is not without …

Comment on Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull by Sean Pitman.

@Holly Pham:

It is true that sin is not without its short term rewards – which often appear very attractive indeed. However, this does not mean that sin is perfectly rational either. If any rational excuse could be found for it, it would cease to be sin:

Sin is an intruder, for whose presence no reason can be given. It is mysterious, unaccountable; to excuse it is to defend it. Could excuse for it be found, or cause be shown for its existence, it would cease to be sin.

– EGW, GC, p. 493

Also, there is no “sin” where there is true and complete ignorance that the act in question is “wrong”. The act may in fact be wrong, but the person committing the act is not sinning if in a state of honest ignorance regarding the harmful consequences of the act. Personal sin is defined as an conscious rebellion against that which is known to be right, true, and good.

Jesus said, “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains. – John 9:41

While there is certainly “the pleasure of sin for season”, the insanity of sin is in knowing, ahead of time, that the act is wrong and ultimately harmful to one’s self and to others – yet doing it anyway.

Baalam’s life is a good example of this sort of insanity. He wrote:

Who can count the dust of Jacob or number the fourth part of Israel? Let me die the death of the righteous, and may my end be like theirs! – Numbers 23:10

He was shown in vision the Second Coming of Jesus and the reward of the righteous. He knew for a fact that what he was doing what wrong, but he chose to act contrary to what he knew was right for what he knew would be a very short-term gain in acting against the interests of God. This is insanity.

This is the same thing that happened to Satan. He knew for a fact that what he was doing was wrong and what would be the final result. All of it was shown to him in detail. Yet, because of his pride, he chose what he knew was wrong and what would be the end result…

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com

Sean Pitman Also Commented

Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull
Consider the following comments from the E.G.. White Estate regarding the origin of disease, suffering and death:

Suffering, other than sickness due to neglect of physical laws, is also caused by Satan and not the deliberate intervention of God. On many occasions she reinforced the teaching of Jesus on this point…

Her teachings regarding the cause of death, as well as suffering, flowed from the big picture of the great controversy between God and Satan:

“It is true that all suffering results from the transgression of God’s law, but this truth had become perverted. Satan, the author of sin and all its results, had led men to look upon disease and death as proceeding from God—as punishment arbitrarily inflicted on account of sin… Sickness, suffering, and death are [the] work of an antagonistic power. Satan is the destroyer; God is the restorer.”

Ellen White, The Desire of Ages, p. 471. and The Ministry of Healing, p. 113

http://www.whiteestate.org/books/mol/Chapt7.html

So, again, neither the Bible nor Mrs. White see diseases, like childhood leukemia, as being the result of a deliberate act or intervention of God…

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com


Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull
@Ron:

Where talking about the ability to detect the need to invoke intelligent design to explain various phenomena that exist in nature – regardless of if the intelligent agent is God or your wife or some alien from Zorg.

The loaves of bread that Jesus made by Divine power were the obvious result of intelligent design. They looked like regular loaves of bread that your wife might make. No one could tell the difference by looking at them if they were placed side-by-side. Yet, one loaf would have been made by God and the other by your wife. The fact is that God can make what humans can make. What would be obvious, however, is that both loaves of bread required intelligence to produce. In other words, they weren’t the product of mindless process of nature or natural laws that had no access to deliberate intelligence.

In short, just because your wife’s intelligence is “natural” doesn’t mean that all natural processes have access to intelligence or that every natural phenomena requires intelligence to explain beyond the basic non-intelligent laws of nature.

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com


Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull
@Ron:

So, you think that if God is directly responsible for the death of anyone that He is therefore the direct cause of all sickness, disease, death, and destruction? Every natural disaster is God’s doing? – a miracle of Divine design and creative power?

Do you not see the difference between the miracle of something like Lazarus being raised from the dead and a tornado wiping out an entire town the other day in the Midwest?

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com


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