The Responsible Puppet responds exactly as expected:
There is some irony here in that Vox is slow to give his own bible verses. The passages referred to above do not in any way prove that his interpretation is true, he can only use them to show that his interpretation is possible.
I ask Vox – how many Bible passages do you want? You can find them more than a few in my “Both Ways” category and I will be giving more presently. But I send the challenge back.
Please show me the ‘outright demonstrations’ where God is not actively managing what goes on in our world…. I am interested to see which approach you will take.
But to show that I know the requirement to use Bible verses goes both ways, here is a passage that we studied in our Adult Sunday School Class yesterday: 1 Samuel 2: 6-8
6 “The LORD brings death and makes alive;
he brings down to the grave [c] and raises up.
7 The LORD sends poverty and wealth;
he humbles and he exalts.
8 He raises the poor from the dust
and lifts the needy from the ash heap;
he seats them with princes
and has them inherit a throne of honor.
“For the foundations of the earth are the LORD’s;
upon them he has set the world.This says that God has controls how much wealth individual people have.
Does it really? Because in order for this passage to say what TRP is concluding from it, we would have to observe that every single individual poor person is raised from the dust and that all of the world’s needy are seated with princes. And yet, we can observe that this is manifestly not the case, especially since Jesus Christ informed us that the poor would always be with us, not sitting with princes in what one can only imagine to be a series of extremely overcrowded court rooms.
The point is that that the quoted verses only state what God CAN do with regards to these subjects, not what He IS ALWAYS DOING. In other words, they are a statement about CAPACITY and not about ACTION. In fact, this is also a very good example of the very omniderigiste/atheist error that I mentioned in my first post on the matter:
1. Take a Bible verse
2. Assign a possible meaning to it.
3. Insist this is the ONLY possible meaning, even when the meaning doesn’t make sense. (In this case, the problem is apparent a priori, but usually it is only evident when considered in context with other, contradictory verses.)
4. Ignore all other plausible interpretations, especially more logical and Biblically supported ones.
And allow me to correct my initial statement. TRP’s response wasn’t exactly what I expected. I would have thought that he knew me well enough by now to know that it is always a mistake to confuse any slowness in showing my cards with a poor or nonexistent hand.