Yuyutsu - if it is true as you say that "there is nothing but God, there can be nothing else, there can be no will but His", then all talk about anything else is just a waste of time.

If there is no will but God's, then even my disagreement with you must be God's will.

The Holocaust must have been God's will, as must be all murders, rapes, and acts of torture.

If that is what you really believe about God then we clearly believe in very different Gods.

To: Peter Bowden

Peter
You are on the wrong track. If you believe, as Christians do, that life begins at conception then there is no moral justification whatsoever for abortion.
Greg at FamilyVoice Australia

Interesting how the noisiest promoters against abortion are found in the Republican Party thanks to Jerry Falwell snr. and his creation the Moral Majority, although Falwell was not pro-life before..... it has became a defining GOP issue and central policy, since.

The isse of abortion was highlighted and promoted by libertarians to form a coalition of Catholic and/or Evangelical Christians to vote for the GOP (vs. garnering only a potential vote of <5% themselves), then allowing libertarian bills to pass, and to control the SCOTUS with Christian 'conservatives' plus related media agitprop.

Not wanting to sound trite or glib, but one is bemused by protections (demanded) for the unborn but the same are then expected to sink or swim in a socio Darwinist swamp after birth?

Dear JP,

Since there can only be one God, it is not possible for us to worship two different ones. All we could possibly differ on, is what we believe ABOUT God.

My strong faith is that God is not limited, by anyone or by anything. The worship of any limited being is called idolatry.

The wise and the saints indeed state that any talk, indeed even any thought, that is not about God, is a waste of time.
But alas, until we are able to follow their advice all the time, which we work towards, and think about God alone, so long as we fall short and still think about personal consequences: pain and pleasure, cold and heat, fame or disgrace, gain or loss, etc., to that extent we must consider our subjectively-free personal will seriously in the sense that our choices bring about consequences that make us happy or unhappy respectively. Once we grow to be focused on God alone, our personal will no longer matters.

Attempting to compare God's will with our limited, slow and frail thought processes that constitute our will, free or otherwise, is ridiculous.
God's will is not anything that we can fathom, compute or judge: attempts to do so are repudiated both in Hindu scriptures and in the book of Job, chapters 38-41. All we can say about it is retrospectively: whatever already happened could not have been but God's will.

Yuyutsu – we seem to be going around in circles somewhat but I’ll make one more comment.

I agree that there is only one God – false “gods” are no gods at all.

You say, “whatever already happened could not have been but God's will”, so you therefore must believe that the Holocaust and all murders and rapes that have been committed are what God willed.

God is usually understood to be perfectly good and loving. If the Holocaust, murder and rape are willed/wanted/caused by God then apparently the Holocaust, murder and rape are examples of God’s perfect goodness and love.

To say this is to turn upside down and effectively destroy all ethical understanding. God must be evil as well as good – this is a non-sensical statement.

No, I believe that God voluntarily limited his sovereignty so as to enable human beings to have meaningful free will and thus be able to freely love their creator. Humans have abused that freedom however and have brought suffering into this world as a consequence.

God does not will the Holocaust, murder and rape. He hates those things and wants to work with us through Jesus to stop such things.

Dear JP,

There is no contradiction between what we say - we just speak of different layers of reality: relative truth and absolute truth.

Experiences within the relative truth which we often call "nature", including human nature, are as you describe. Within nature, the experience of human life includes both free will and human-inflicted suffering that happens when humans break their ethics.

The absolute truth, however, is God. Nature (in general and human nature in particular) is an expression of God that can only exist within God. God cannot be part of nature, His own creation.

So getting back to my previous example, suppose there is a clay pot full of water, then when asked "what holds this water?" an argument erupts: one saying "the pot", the other saying "clay". How silly to argue about this - both are true!

Similarly, the will of man is also part of the will of God: both are true, it is not an either-or situation.