(1) As was said earlier, Genesis (and Revelations) explains all of this. (2) None of us will live forever and what happens on this planet is, frankly, peanuts. You think malaria is bad? Try getting !@#$% by Satan over tongues of hellfire for eternity. The purpose of our stay here on Planet Earth is not necessarily to live a malaria/disease free life. (3) Related to (2) and probably most important for the OP, the reason why children are dying of malaria is because of human weakness. If humans were truly virtuous, industrious, and committed malaria would have been eradicated, or a vaccine would have been developed, or every person living in a malaria zone could have been evacuated to a safe area. But humans are weak, flawed, lazy, and selfish. And we're weak, flawed, lazy, and selfish not because God made us that way...it's because we chose it for ourselves. (4) As a Catholic...I have a healthy respect for the "God To Be Feared" archetype. I'm in complete agreement that the "Loving God" archetype is a bit overblown.
If I had all of that I would be a serious Godite too. Maybe after you lose some of it you will come around, Or maybe you have it because God approves of how you think and act. In either case, congrats and I hope you can keep it up. I only posted here because I noticed nobody had posted anything on this board for 22 days. How bizarre is that?
As a Christian, I agree with all you write above except for the last phrase. Learning about how the universe works should and does help us understand what God is like. At the same time, I don't feel the need to evolve or work towards a higher state. Through the gospel I believe I already exist in the highest state possible.
I hadn't posted on this thread in a while, but I'll take a swing at xover's question. From what I read in scripture, it would seem to me that our life on this world is a preparation. Everything we see God commanding us to do, the way we're called to live, all of it points to one thing: that this life and the impulses and fleshly pleasures provided on earth are temporary. They are not of the spiritual nature, and are not connected at all with an eternal existence with God. So if you or I want to live with God for eternity - if we would even ENJOY such a thing - we have to be able to look to other things. If I don't enjoy worshipping God, I won't enjoy Heaven. If I don't enjoy as Paul talked about, thinking on things that are good and pure and holy, rather than on things that are base and worldly, I'm going to be very bored for eternity. If I'm the type that thinks those goody-goody Christians and their morals are sickening, then I'm probably not going to want to be in Heaven for eternity. It seems to me that our whole life on earth is about learning to put our trust in God, to hope for something BETTER than this life. So many people I think have decided that Heaven is just going to be the same stuff as we have on earth, just more fun and without the pain and death. That's not the place I read about in scripture. If it's true, as Paul says, that "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of Heaven", then our life on earth is about learning to live spiritual lives. As physical beings, we can't do this perfectly, and we find ourselves sinning and falling short. But if we aspire to that goal, and we are willing to place faith in God and do what he's asked us to do in the best of our ability, we'll have that opportunity. As someone pointed out earlier in the thread - the harsh reality is that all life on earth ends in death, and it's a small thing in comparison to eternity. We often require God to be "judged" based on our limited scope and sight - that life on earth is the center of all this, and that God is somehow unjust in allowing or commanding a life to be ended before it ends naturally. Knowing that God knows the hearts of men, knows their intentions and knows whether they do or do not desire a spiritual life with Him, I understand more how God might not see an additional 30-40 years of life as particularly significant in the face of eternity. We may not like that, we may say that "if I were God, I'd do it differently", and that's our choice to evaluate with our own free will. But if God exists, none of us can "disapprove him out of existence", and certainly none of us can stand before God to demand that God bend His will to ours. So we're left with this as the system which God has set in place. We either accept that and place our faith in it, or we denounce it and rebel against it.
