1) Yes, the demons are in torment - they have been severed from communion with God, which is the one thing they were created to do.

2)



That's because you're not Catholic. Transubstantiation and all that.



3) Yes, the Lutherans split from the Catholic Church. But we Catholics still hold out hope that you'll rejoin. One Holy and Apostolic Church, after all...

OK, we've had plenty of Biblical quotes, so here for your edification and entertainment pleasure are some quotes from the other side:

1. Creationists make it sound like a ‘theory’ is something you dream up after being drunk all night — Isaac Asimov

2. I don’t believe in God. My god is patriotism. Teach a man to be a good citizen and you have solved the problem of life. — Andrew Carnegie

3. All thinking men are atheists. — Ernest Hemingway

4. Lighthouses are more helpful then churches. — Benjamin Franklin

5. Faith means not wanting to know what is true. — Friedrich Nietzsche

6. The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. — George Bernard Shaw

7. Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile. — Kurt Vonnegut

8. I believe in God, only I spell it Nature. — Frank Lloyd Wright

9. Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. — Denis Diderot

10. Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and remorseless exactness... It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading by contrast.--------- If there is a God, he is a malign thug. -------------------- A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows. — Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)

11. The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. — Sigmund Freud

12. Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. — Edward Gibbon

13. The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church. — Ferdinand Magellan

14. Not only is there no god, but try getting a plumber on weekends. — Woody Allen

15. It’s an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don’t try to make it posthumous. — Gloria Steinem

16. We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes---Gene Roddenberry

It was hardly rote memory and a "do this or else" choice for me. I, like anybody else, has the free will to choose what we believe and what we don't. Like everything else in the Bible, I choose to believe it is true and inspired word of God. Does that mean we completely understand the workings of the Trinity? No - we are finite beings with a finite mind and way of understanding.

And your point is...?

Not all who say "Lord, Lord" will enter the kingdom of heaven because inside their heart, they've not really chosen to live their life for the Lord. They choose to live a pious life only on the outside, for the approval of man, but inside their heart has not changed one bit. They are "whitewashed tombs," as the Lord so aptly puts it.

Name one example of this.

I tend to think the Ten Commandments are a bit more accurate than any Harry Potter book.

Here's another topic I'd like to hear opinions on from Christians.

How does prayer work? I've been told of situations where someone has a fatal disease, usually cancer, and they are prayed for and then make a miraculous recovery.

In other words, one individual gets cancer and is dying, and other individuals ask God to intervene and he does.

Given that, why did the prayer work? If God is assumed to be all knowing and never wrong, why did he allow that person to get cancer when he was willing to save them later? He wouldn't have let the prayer change his mind, because that would imply he made a mistake in the first place.

Also, since people have free will, there was no guaranty that anyone would pray for this person, so it sounds like God would have let this person suffer and die if people who knew him weren't people of faith and had prayed. How is that the fault of the person with cancer? Sure they could be held responsible for who they choose to associate with, but to take an extreme, but possible, scenario, someone could be on an evangelical mission to a remote area where there are no Christians and they can't communciate with their Christian friends to let them know they need prayer.

Perhaps God was testing that person's faith in the way he tested Job. No, wait, that wouldn't work, because when things get crappy almost everyone who's religious turns to God. I say test their faith by letting them win the lottery or have everything they could ever want in life. THAT will show who's faithful and who isn't.

Two issues that Arthonon brought up.

Hell: Jesus said there are degrees of hell.
Some will be beaten with many stripes, others will be beaten with few stripes, depending upon the amount of spiritual knowledge they have.

Essentially, this takes care of those in the dark who have never heard the gospel, the tribes in africa, the samurai in Japan, the chinese folk who live and die today, yet have never heard the gospel. Their knowledge is little to none. Thus, according to the Bible, they would not suffer any type of hell.

This also covers the mentally retarded and others who do not have the ability to understand right and wrong.


Prayer and suffering: Several years ago my aunt was healed from cancer by the prayer of my grandfather. She had been on her death bed for weeks. My grandfather told the church, I'm going over to pray for Dorothy Landis, and anyone who believes in prayer, come with me. He went alone. He kneeled beside her bed, prayed a silent prayer, got up and told Dorothy, you're healed, and left. The next day my aunt was out of bed and was absolutuely free of the cancer that was eating away her pancreas and stomach. She only died recently of old age.

My sister died last year of stomach cancer. She was a beautiful christian lady, and believed in prayer. We all went out and prayed for her many times. She vomited to violently due to the cancer that was eating away her stomach, that she died from a bloodcot that ruptured in her brain. No amont of prayer seemed to have worked.

Or did it? What is the purpose of God deciding someone to live and someone to die?

My uncle died suddenly 6 years ago. Another wonderful christian man. My dad's brother. Prior to his death, my father and I rarely spent time together as my uncle was my dad's best friend. After my uncle's death, I found that dad and I started spending time together like never before. As a result, 6 years later we are closer than ever before. I loved my uncle as much as my father, but today I say that if my uncle had not died, then I'd have never known my father this way. He's 73 years old now and likely has little time on this earth.

So, I think we have to look to the future to answer some of the dire questions of today. That's why I have faith, God is in control, and has a plan for everyone. If we walk in the center of that plan, things do work out.

Thanks for the reply. I do have a couple more questions to help me understand what you're saying.

You said



That's kind of the basis of my question. If God ultimately decides who lives and who dies, regardless of prayer, what purpose does prayer serve? And if prayer does serve a purpose, is God really deciding, or is he allowing humans to decide?

Also - and I don't mean this in any negative way, I'm just making sure I understand your point - are you saying that God decided that your uncle's life was less important than you and your father spending time together, and your uncle's death was a sacrifice to make that happen?