Quote:
So God is willing to kill me if I make a bad decision? What happened to my free will? Someone holding an executioners axe above my neck waiting for a misstep doesn't seem like high regard for my life to me.
No, and making it out to be something trivial does a disservice to the discussion.
There are several things that are true here, as far as Christian understanding goes -
- God loves mankind, and each human in particular, and created them in His image and likeness
- God's will for mankind, and each human in particular, is that they one day become like Him
- The consequence of sin is ultimately the erasure of any likeness of God, and ultimately to become unhuman
- This is a fate worse than death
- God is unwilling that mankind should be destroyed in this way
- Therefore God intervenes, both on a macro story-arc level (Israel, the Incarnation, etc) and on an individual basis
As for your question, God is willing that you die rather than be utterly destroyed - or destroy others. Death is not utter destruction. I understand that if you are a pure materialist this is nonsense, but until you can contemplate that this is our faith, you won't begin to understand it even intellectually wither or not you believe it.
That being said, I believe even a materialist could conjure up a scenario where it may be kinder for someone to die than to continue living, and even call this compassion.
Quote:
Jesus was able to perform miracles and came back from the dead, so he wasn't like humans in every way. And even if what you claim is true, it doesn't change any of the killings perform by God before Jesus, it also doesn't change all of the killings allowed or performed by God since.
Quite the contrary, what Jesus is as a Man is what all mankind is to become by God's will. He is The Man, the prototypical human being, the New Adam. And this includes the supernatural aspects.
As death is not final, or irreversible, the "before" or "after" isn't really relevant.
