QUESTIONS FOR CHRISTIANS.

Freethought Review, Volume I, Issue 7, 1 April 1884, Page 10

QUESTIONS FOR CHRISTIANS.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE FREETHOUGHT REVIEW. Sir, — In your March number appears twelve simple questions for Christians : simple in one sense, but extremely difficult to answer reasonably. Ido not think any Christian, or believer in the statements that these questions affirm, will answer them, in your journal. An agnostic will give his answer to them ; as any answer from a believer in the notions therein expressed will only lead that believer deeper into the mire. Personal devils tempting personal angels, hell, endless hell, personal devils tempting man, "going about as roaring lions !" original sin, and other nonsense, arc the inventions of degraded man, promulgated in an age of degraded people, Beliefs, however atrocious, handed clown thiough those thousands of years, made sacred by tradition, only a solitary bright reason appearing at long intervals protesting against such tolly ; handed down by the degraded ; burned, guillotined, or imprisoned from a.d. 1300 till a.d, 1800, till we arrive at a.d. ISB4, when Ave find such folly is exposed from thousands of lips, and a crop of men arise endorsed with common sense—a rare commodity in the dark ages—bearing good fruit. However, still under the ban of the majority, and likely to remain so till common sense asserts her pre-eminence, when the degraded in their turn, as evolution marches on, fall out of sight and be a thing of the past. The beliefs by some, that these twelve questions affirm, lead them into this dilema : they say that “ God knows from all eternity whatsoever comes to pass,” We shall see that knowledge from eternity, fore-knowledge, or fore-ordination, have the same meaning whether war, famine, pestilence, tortures of every description, railway accidents, shipwrecks, hurricanes, tempests, earthquakes, blight, vermin, poverty, disease, misery, despair and death— all have come to pass, and are daily with us. This they say God knew from all eternity, and they tell us also he knows who are to be treated, after passing through this suffering, to an endless hell of torture ; the exact number they have totted up, showing an overwhelming majority for the sport, pastime, or employment of devils throughout all eternity. The Calvinist knowing that the fore-knowledge of God and the fore-ordination of God are synonymous terms, present -to us the author of all this misery ! Many Christians try to evade the difficulty by making a difference between fore-knowledge and fore-ordination; but this is an impossibility. The Calvinists, although sneered at by the other Christians, are in the right as to the inseparableness of the terms What does this lead us to ? That as He did not foreordain all this misery he could not fore-know it. This deprives Him of an attribute that must be upheld by believers in Him. Will someone come to the rescue and deliver an agnostic out of a serious dilemma ? Let the deliverance be plain. Did God foreknow this misery here and hereafter? If so, has he not foreordained it ? If he has fore-ordained it, is He what we are taught by the meaning of the word “ good,” or good God ? If He has not fore-ordained it, did he not foreknow it ? If He did not foreknow it, should the attribute of omniscience be ascribed to Him ? If this attribute is denied Him, may not other attributes be denied him ? May he not be as other gods are, who only exist in the imagination of some men’s minds, is asked by one who does not know, and is consequently Greymouth, March, 1884. An Agnostic.