Sin separates us from God because He is sinless and will not allow sin to enter His heaven. We can choose to pay for our own sin in hell for eternity, or we can accept the gift of eternal life in Heaven through Jesus death on the cross, through which His sacrifice covers our sins. Once we have received this gift, nothing we have done or can do will change our eternal status. However, those who claim to be followers of Christ but live in unrepentant habitual sin are unlikely to have ever received this gift, since the gift itself changes us through God's Holy Spirit indwelling the true believer and changing them from the inside out so they no longer want to sin.
That fails to counter my point. I asked, if violating a commandment doesn't preclude one from entering 'heaven', what's to hold you back? You can be a murderer and still go to heaven.
Already demonstrated, but through your FREE WILL, you have chosen to reject it.
I do not claim to have free will as you describe it; the challenge was put to you, specifically for you to choose to believe that gods are only characters in books, and then later this week, choose to believe what you previously believed.
I expected you to respond with obfuscation rather than attempting the challenge and responding honestly, and you did exactly that.
Ah, but you did. You said "If this "supreme being" can muster the effort to open their own account here and join this thread, I'll read what gets posted." You don't think God read that and thought "Of all the nerve! How many times do I have to write it down?!? I wrote it for Moses and he broke it so I wrote it again, and then I wrote out the whole shebang using 40 authors spread over 3 continents over a period of 2000 years, and now this guy wants me to write it again?!? What gives?!?"
No posts were made. More obfuscation.
God already did with Creation and then explaining it all in the Bible. Like the old TV show used to say, "Believe it or not!"
Again, observations of the universe contradict what is written in the bible. You are declaring the bible to be in error each time you make this claim.
Yes He did, using the hands of inspired human authors. On gold? No.
The Mormons would beg to differ. Perhaps their god was smarter than yours.
:lmao:
But how about preserving them on papyrus in sealed jars inside temperature-controlled caves for more than 1500 years?!?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea_Scrolls :shock:
What about them? Originals? No. Complete? No. Those people [allegedly] had access to an all-power-all-knowing-deity-thing and that's the best they could come up with? Fail.
Simple: if you haven't read it, it's illogical to say that it's "wrong" because you don't know what's in it, only what you've heard that it says.
I know what it is about. You've got a character named "God" that [allegedly] walked and talked in a garden that has no evidence of having existed, poofed people and animals into existence, and later, in a manner contrary to the modern understanding of genetics, populated the planet with a tiny group of individuals and animals that survived a global flood in an unbuildable boat, an unevidenced flood that killed the dinosaurs in a manner that only *appears* to be 65 million years ago, because the Earth is really only somehow 6000 years old, and this character remains - by every objective measure to date - indistinguishable from nothing.
Just a high-level synopsis, of course.
72 hours is all it takes most people to read it one time through, and then if you still have doubts or concerns, we'll be happy to talk them through.
You've had your chance, and besides portraying your interpretation of it as ethically and morally bankrupt, you have not attempted to ground your claims about your religion in reality. Do you need more time?
Notable author C.S. Lewis used to think the same as you, so he read the bible through in order to prove it wrong; then he became a Christian. :ror:
Are you suggesting there is a correlation between belief and being right? lol.
“All the hundreds of millions of people who, in their time, believed the Earth was flat never succeeded in unrounding it by an inch.”
― Isaac Asimov