[Vision2020] Life and morality in the Bible

[Ralph Nielsen]

>
> From: Joshua Nieuwsma <joshuahendrik@yahoo.com>
> Date: Wed Sep 24, 2003  12:48:36 PM US/Pacific
> To: vision <vision2020@moscow.com>
> Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Re: Evolution and cruelty
>
>
> Mr. Nielsen,
>  
> you are arguing for a moral standard. But if there is no life after 
> death, then why have a moral standard? It definitely does not follow 
> for you to want to live in harmony precisely because there isn't 
> anything after it.
>
> There are answers to your objections about eternal life. Including the 
> fact that science by definition cannot find out whether eternal life 
> exists through experiment or analysis of the stars or the human body 
> or anything, just as it cannot prove whether you have got a soul, or 
> whether love exists, or anything else. Science proves nothing. It only 
> discusses the purely metaphysical and draws conclusions based on the 
> number of times something can be replicated or repeated. Your appeal 
> to science shows that you are making a universal standard out of 
> something that is clearly only capable of being a tool.
>  
> It is never morally wrong for the Creator to take a life, since He 
> gave it freely in the first place. Life is not a right that we require 
> of God. It is a gift, which is why it is wrong to take it unlawfully 
> from someone else. The state does not give life, nor do parents, but 
> God alone bestows the gift of life at conception. We indeed live in a 
> proud and stubborn time when men question the acts of God Almighty and 
> dispute His justice and mercy.
> If I appeal to chapter and verse, I am not arguing that chapter and 
> verse were inspired. Similarly if I appeal to the 4th commandment, 
> that is not claiming that God labeled it the 4th commandment.

RALPH
So what in your opinion is what you label as the Fourth Commandment? I 
can't read our mind.
As for the rest of what you write about, please reread what I wrote in 
my previous reply to Douglas. I have already told you what the Bible 
says about life after death and God's "justice and mercy."
Life on earth began about 4 1/2 billion years ago. But according to the 
Bible life begins with the first breath of life at birth. And it ends 
with the last breath when you die. Then you cease to exist and you 
return to the dust from which you were made. Don't you believe God?