Gods Dandruff.com

you beat me to the punch, i was just writing a post about this and googled it and your site came up!!!!
I don’t believe any of those bullet points, BTW.
except:
*pursuing happiness can be and should be a Kingdom purpose.
*happiness ‘can’ be selfishness.
remember i focused on the word ‘deserve’, as i cruise the internet i think the word deserve should be changed to …something else.
i haven’t come up with it yet, tho.
Maybe once we realize what it is that makes us happy, it should then be aligned with God, or maybe we get happy about the wrong things (i’m just thinking out loud.)
check back, i am writing a post about it.
Kristina
Thank you for making me think

Maybe a better question is this:

What about the Bible, God or Christianity leads you to believe that as God’s creation he doesn’t want you to be happy?

C. S. Lewis has an essay in his book “God in the Dock” entitled “We Have No Right to Happiness,” in which Lewis warns us that the continual pursuit of happiness as an ultimate goal will result in an unnatural affection for something that will eventually sweep us away.

I think I would probably argue that most Christians idea of “happiness” is not very Christian, and most likely far from God’s. For this version of “happiness” watch Oprah or Joel Osteen, or read the Secret.

I would highly suggest to anyone to also read Lewis” “The Problem of Pain” where he talks about our incorrect notions of love and happiness. Some of his best work I think.

The end of chapter 3:

When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy. Those Divine demands which sound to our natural ears most like those of a despot and least like those of a lover, in fact marshall us where we should want to go if we knew what we wanted. He demands our worship, our obedience, our prostration. Do we suppose that they can do Him any good, or fear, like the chorus in Milton, that human irreverence can bring about “His glory’s diminution”? A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word “darkness” on the walls of his cell. But God wills our good, and our good is to love Him (with that responsive love proper to creatures) and to love Him we must know Him: and if we know Him, we shall in fact fall on our faces. If we do not, that only shows that what we are trying to love is not yet God—though it may be the nearest approximation to God which our thought and fantasy can attain. Yet the call is not only to prostration and awe; it is to a reflection of the Divine life, a creaturely participation in the Divine attributes which is far beyond our present desires. We are bidden to “put on Christ,” to become like God. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.

Yet perhaps even this view falls short of the truth. It is not simply that God has arbitrarily made us such that He is our only good. Rather God is the only good of all creatures: and by necessity, each must find its good in that kind and degree of the fruition of God which is proper to its nature. The kind and degree may vary with the creature’s nature: but that there ever could be any other good, is an atheistic dream. George Macdonald, in a passage I cannot now find, represents God as saying to men “You must be strong with my strength and blessed with my blessedness, for I have no other to give you.” That is the conclusion of the whole matter. God gives what He has, not what He has not: He gives the happiness that there is, not the happiness that is not. To be God—to be like God and to share His goodness in creaturely response—to be miserable—these are the only three alternatives. If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows—the only food that any possible universe ever can grow—then we must starve eternally.

If the Bible is correct in that we bear fruit according to the type of tree we are, then Christians will bear Christian fruit–they can do no other.

Then what value does it have? If Christians don’t have any option they don’t deserve any credit- you might as well praise a rock for rolling downhill or a raindrop for falling from a cloud.

And conversly, if the Christians’ fruit isn’t to their own credit than neither is the sins of the sinners. You might as well get mad at the sun for shining. You can’t condemn people for acting in one way when they don’t have an alternative.

I find that atitude rather frightening, Kev. It robs goodness of its goodness and evil of its evil. It sounds more Taoist than Christian.

I’m familiar with that piece of scripture. Unfortunately.

Don’t you think that those chapters contradict the ideas underlying the entire Bible up to that point? I mean, God deciding our actions in advance sorta makes the idea of all those laws He gave us seem pretty stupid, doesn’t it?

The only thing crazier than that would be if God demanded for us to repent for Him making us break His laws so that He’d forgive us for His forcedly making us break those laws when only He can make us repent for His originally causing us to break those laws in the first place! Oh wait, wouldn’t that be most of the New Testament?

I mean, say what you will about the questionable morality of that passage (God is being responsible for our evil actions? God will damn people even if they struggle to be good?), but you have to admit that it just doesn’t fit at all with the rest of the Bible. Nothing in the Bible makes any sense in the light of that passage. NOTHING.

And consequently I’m surprised you stick by it. You’ve acknowledged being an errantist in the past, so why hold true the one single passage in the Bible that throws absolutely EVERYTHING out of whack?

You’ve flummoxed me, Kev, you really have.

Aby explaining determinism is a whole ‘nother thread.

If Romans was not written by Paul or if 9-11 wasn’t written by Paul, then I would have a point saying “this isn’t Paul writing.”

But there is no evidence that is the case.

So, while I allow for the possibility that passages were added or redacted from the Bible, the real question is whether Paul, the architect of Christianity, wrote Rom 9-11 (whether inspired or not.)

Yes, I believe he did.

If he did, then with his understanding of both Judaism and Christianity he felt this was consistent with what he believed to be true.

Aby,

I’ll start a thread once my sprained knuckle heals. I am having to hunt and peck with my left hand.

If I told you how I sprained it nobody would believe me…

I was working in a missionary position…on a waterbed with my redhead and hyperextended my middle finger.