Are these signs?

I can not help but wonder if all the natural diasters, the war and terrorism are God's warning of his coming wrath.

It's like he's allowing Satan some more free reign to push the issue as to what side we are going to line up on. Are we going to curse God, think this is all a fluke or bow in reverance hoping to be saved.

Look at New Orleans. The only horseman missing is war. There is famine, pestilence and death. Is it only a matter of time before it happens on a grander scale? And, even though this is all going on, we are bomarded with ads to buy this and that. I gotta think God is getting pissed off.

what god?

There has been famine, pestilence, death and war for many thousands of years. If such disasters are a sign for God's coming wrath, then he's been putting out signs for a loooong time now and we can't go ahead and assume that NOW they mean something. I mean, just counting the amount of time that humans have been around, we've been experiencing volcanoes, earthquakes, tornadoes, epidemics, monsoons, ice ages, floods, forest fires, etc. for hundreds of thousands of years. And before we were around, natural disasters were a hell of a lot worse. There are multiple times in the fossil record where the majority of life on earth has perished in a single disaster. At one point hundreds of thousands of square miles in what is today Siberia were covered in molten lava. Earth has been battered with asteroids and meteorites, just like the cratered Moon (but weathering and erosion gets rid of most craters on Earth). Hell, the Moon itself was probably formed when something the size of MARS (!) slammed into the Earth at an angle, ejecting huge amounts of material into orbit around the Earth and sinking into the planet's core.

We've just got to face the fact that the universe is a dangerous, violent place. Your life is often put into the hands of huge impersonal forces you cannot control, and this hurricane is just another example of that. We're lucky to have a planet which is inhabitable at all, but we can't expect it to always take care of us. The universe has no underlying plan behind it, it just is. The laws of physics, and the natural disasters that arise from them, do not care about whether you are "good" or "evil" any more than they cared about whether the dinosaurs were.

I really don't understand this whole "Satan" theory. If such a creature existed, why would it punish people like me who don't believe in God? Isn't Satan supposed to encourage rebellion against God? And is this Satan creature all-powerful like God? If the worst he was able to do is whip up a measly little hurricane, that is, recreate a weather phenomenon that shows up naturally every year anyways, the evidence is that Satan is not all-powerful. So what then are the limits to his powers? Could everybody in Hell gang up on him and beat the crap out of him? Spirits can feel pain in Hell, right? So why not Satan? Could God demolish Satan? It seems an omnipotent being devoted to universal goodness and forgiveness would pretty much have to destroy any system of eternal punishment, so if Satan really does exist then God must not be able to demolish him and therefore must himself not be all-powerful. If God has a divine plan for everything, like most Christians like to claim, and he created everything, that means Satan influencing our decisions is just part of God's plan of creation so it would be pointless and anti-God to try to stop it. Same goes for the whole Antichrist thing. If Biblical prophecy predicts that the Antichrist will bring about the end of the world, why do so many Christians go out of their way to try to find and defeat the Antichrist? To make the Bible's prophecy not come true?

There are just too many holes in the theory, and no supporting evidence whatsoever.

every bloody person in every time of hardship throughout history is convinced they're living in the most important times in history :rolleyes:

i think god's more about grace than wrath

I think god's more about fantasy then reality ;) but meh each to their own (couldnt help myself my apologies).

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Originally Posted by SpiritualExcess

i think god's more about grace than wrath

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Have you read the Bible? There's a lot of wrath in there. Check it out: http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/cruelty/long.html

Here is one of my favorite examples of the "graceful" God's hateful wrath, in which he sends two bears to rip apart 42 children who have taunted a man for being bald. It comes from 2 Kings 2:23-24.

Quote:

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And he [Elisha] went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head.

And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them.

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Like Ermonito stated, stuff like that has been going on worldwide for thousands of years. They aren't signs, these things are just finally affecting the U.S. instead of far off 3rd world country.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ermitonto

There has been famine, pestilence, death and war for many thousands of years. If such disasters are a sign for God's coming wrath, then he's been putting out signs for a loooong time now and we can't go ahead and assume that NOW they mean something. I mean, just counting the amount of time that humans have been around, we've been experiencing volcanoes, earthquakes, tornadoes, epidemics, monsoons, ice ages, floods, forest fires, etc. for hundreds of thousands of years. And before we were around, natural disasters were a hell of a lot worse. There are multiple times in the fossil record where the majority of life on earth has perished in a single disaster. At one point hundreds of thousands of square miles in what is today Siberia were covered in molten lava. Earth has been battered with asteroids and meteorites, just like the cratered Moon (but weathering and erosion gets rid of most craters on Earth). Hell, the Moon itself was probably formed when something the size of MARS (!) slammed into the Earth at an angle, ejecting huge amounts of material into orbit around the Earth and sinking into the planet's core.

We've just got to face the fact that the universe is a dangerous, violent place. Your life is often put into the hands of huge impersonal forces you cannot control, and this hurricane is just another example of that. We're lucky to have a planet which is inhabitable at all, but we can't expect it to always take care of us. The universe has no underlying plan behind it, it just is. The laws of physics, and the natural disasters that arise from them, do not care about whether you are "good" or "evil" any more than they cared about whether the dinosaurs were.

I really don't understand this whole "Satan" theory. If such a creature existed, why would it punish people like me who don't believe in God? Isn't Satan supposed to encourage rebellion against God? And is this Satan creature all-powerful like God? If the worst he was able to do is whip up a measly little hurricane, that is, recreate a weather phenomenon that shows up naturally every year anyways, the evidence is that Satan is not all-powerful. So what then are the limits to his powers? Could everybody in Hell gang up on him and beat the crap out of him? Spirits can feel pain in Hell, right? So why not Satan? Could God demolish Satan? It seems an omnipotent being devoted to universal goodness and forgiveness would pretty much have to destroy any system of eternal punishment, so if Satan really does exist then God must not be able to demolish him and therefore must himself not be all-powerful. If God has a divine plan for everything, like most Christians like to claim, and he created everything, that means Satan influencing our decisions is just part of God's plan of creation so it would be pointless and anti-God to try to stop it. Same goes for the whole Antichrist thing. If Biblical prophecy predicts that the Antichrist will bring about the end of the world, why do so many Christians go out of their way to try to find and defeat the Antichrist? To make the Bible's prophecy not come true?

There are just too many holes in the theory, and no supporting evidence whatsoever.

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