Cheerful Charlie wrote:
The question is, how does one square all of this with God's supposed goodness. All is predestined by God, who will be saved, and who is to be damned. One answer is to fall back on original sin, but then the question is why God grant's some grace to overcome original sin and denies it to others. Again, Paul's theology from Romans. Original sin then is not an explanation. God's arbitrary acts here are. Why are some given a working sensus divinitus and others saddled with a broken sense due to original sin? People like WCL don't seem to notice this problem.
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I recognised this problem when I was 13, and a budding determinist. Trapped as I was in a poor family, bad school, and eating a poor diet, whilst all around me privalege and elitism was running the country. I could not help but wonder how a fair minded god with all that power could expect people come with equamimity to 'open the door to Jesus'.
My growing sketicism of religion was guided by my personal experience and about causal factors over which I had no control. Given the sort of person that god had made me, how was I to suspend my disbelief to accept a dogma that was utterly bereft of reason and evidence. And since an all powerful god, omniscient, and omnipresent, must have known from the beginning of time how I would turn out, and with that knoweldge created me, I could only conclude that he had made me one of the damned.
This was either true and god was unfair OR God was a figment of man's poorly constructed imagination. Either way I wanted no part of God or religion and so my atheism was born.
As for sensus divinus, I had felt it very strongly when faithful, but then so had Torquemada, Ivan the Terrible, Alexander the Great, and Ghengis Khan too. And when Joshua blew his horn and killed thousands when the walls of Jericho fell on them we can only assume that the sense of the divine was running hot in his veins.
Does this feeling hold water for evidence for God? I think not. When I asked how is this different from any other sort of delusion I was at theat time reflecting on the Trance Dance of the Bushmen of the Kalahari, who in a state of emotionally charged collapse think themselves capable of healing. Whatever "IT" is, it is likley that the sensus is not 'divine' at all.