this is it, folks...

http://www.walkfaithsline.com/

http://matt.walkfaithsline.com/

These are my websites. You can have one like them too, if you want. All you have to do is contact me via AIM or email or whatever, really, and I'll set you up.

Sometimes I think the US justice system, and in fact the whole concept of being tried by a jury of your peers, is prone to making a mockery of justice.

There are a number of reasons for this. Perhaps the most obvious, and the most damning, is the fact that a jury of a person's peers does not necessarily include people who are properly educated in logic and statistics, or trained to remove their own emotional and prejudicial bias, in order to make a decision regarding the evidential deduction of a series of events relating to the commission of a crime. To put it more simply, the fact that a lawyer can convince a number of laypeople that someone did or did not actually commit a crime reflects more on the quality of the lawyer and the impressionability of the jurors than it does on the guilt or innocence of the defendant.

While the system of trial by peer jury is certainly preferable to a number of other systems, and delivers correct and justifiable verdicts in most cases, it is still not the best system. And if there is a system better than the system we now have, then we need to be using it, rather than making a mockery of justice. A system which is prone to any injustice, due to problems in the system itself, is an entirely unjust system. Such a system is not worth keeping around.

In response to Mike's questions (this is my best estimate, anyway):

How do we choose him? wouldn't it mean that we already have or have not? or will or will not?

It seems to me that we make our choices, and God's response to them reflects in his eternal character, making it appear as though God has determined our choices from the beginning of time. The choice, however, is still made by us, at that particular point in time. I would say that we have not already made the choice, or that we will definitely make a specific choice, because it is not at all obvious to us what God's response to our choice was until we have the same knowledge of it that he does.

I'm not sure I can clarify beyond that right now, though, because It's 1:30, and I have to work at 7, and thinking about the nature of time and eternity this late at night tends to tie my brain in knots

I'll try to clarify better later.

By the way, mike, you should IM me sometime. We have some catching up to do

The thought occurred to me just now that predestination only makes sense from our point of view. If we try to apply it to God's nature, then it becomes entirely meaningless, if we are also to believe that God is outside time. Therefore, we cannot use the concept to make any judgment regarding God's character, including his exercise of his sovereignty.

If God is outside time, then the concept of destining something before it occurs is meaningless, because the concepts of prior and posterior are time-dependent. Therefore, Paul's discussions of predestination are reflections on the human standpoint, rather than reflections on God's character. What Paul describes is the following: God can indeed respond to human action (Amos 7, Jeremiah 18, Jeremiah 26, Jonah 3, not to mention John 14), and when he does, he affects a particular point in time. What we see, however, is God acting continuously through the entirety of time to affect a specific point in time, which we interpret as predestination.

The conclusions we draw from this are not valid, however. We use this to say that God does not respond to man, that he determines our every action, and a host of other things which are not legitimate, simply because our imagination of God's action is not equivalent to God's character. We cannot apply those perceptions of ours which are time-dependent to an infinite, time-independent God. Much less are we justified in making extensions from those perceptions which deal with the true character of God.

That's all for now.