Thanks for your reply, skroah. I just lost two long response attempts with links, so this will probably be short.

I'm afraid it is worse than purgatory, but the second one you mentioned - it's eternal conscious death and punishment for sin (in fact, purgatory is not even an option). I honestly don't like it at all either, and would gladly change that part if I could, but it's not up to me.

I wouldn't use Flew to prove anything, but this topic reminded me of the description of the human condition found in Romans 1, especially verses 18 to 20. We tend to suppress the truth in our sinful state and turn away to other things.

But there is good news in addition to the bad news for which the good news was given. There is love and mercy, grace and salvation through the Lord Jesus Christ who rose from the dead in the history of this world, a fact by which God has furnished proof to all of many things.

You might want to look at Acts 17, especially verses 30 to 31.

How many times must you have heard or read this as well:

John 3:16 -

"For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life." NASB®

As for only theism itself, however, we cannot deny the evidence of the creation around us, we can only suppress the recognition of it dishonestly. Nothing can arise from pure absolute nothing, and the notion of eternally preexistent impersonal matter or energy or whatever one may call it is untenable. God has surely given proof of His existence through creation as well as through the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.

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Spinoza is considered a pantheist. He did have the intelligence and courage to reject the beliefs he was indoctrinated with as a child, which was very hard in his time. He was excommunicated and suffered financially for his views. I think he is a hero of western thinking. His double aspect theory was and still is very influential.

Many philosophers from history are labeled atheistic when they are more properly theistic, Hume for example. Eventually once the Christians get over their giddiness and actually examine Flew's beliefs and can't find their own particular version of God in them they will throw him back in the pit as an atheist.

Philly, my original assessment of you still stands. Maybe your 2 now lost posts contained the nut of an argument that would illuminate a path for my dark soul to find your god. Maybe your god conspired to delete those post and forever banish me from the kingdom. Woe is me, have you no compassion for us?

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Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. - H.L. Mencken

But skroah, dear soul, does it make no difference at all when I say that I don't like the part you find so "nasty," too, and would gladly change it if I could? Not advocating the grim reality by any means, but merely believing it is true whether even I like it or not?

As for the two lost posts - actually, it doesn't quite work that way. What I mean is that while apologetics and "philosophy" and agrgument may often have great value, ultimately no one is saved by or through any of that, no matter how good it is. In my case I'm also not particularly good at apologetics anyway. God uses the "foolishness" of the preaching of the Gospel of the Scriptures to save even the smartest of the smart, and not clever, learned or even brilliant argument.

In this case one or both of the lost posts may have contained some useless content such as me talking about a tiny incident from my past that your post reminded me of. Rather than God "conspiring" in the direction you suggest, it occurred to me afterwards that what may have really happened was that my post was a little too self-indulgent and God may have wanted that nipped. But I don't know for sure why it happened, only that it is funny to have happened with a person as computer and Web involved as me on my favorite browser.

"So will My word be which goes forth from My mouth;
It will not return to Me empty,
Without accomplishing what I desire,
And without succeeding in the matter for which I sent it." NASB® Isaiah 55:11

Moreover, the greatest extrabiblical "argument" of all is the historical fact of the Resurrection, which even God declares constitutes proof of the Gospel and divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ. Acts 17:31, Romans 1:4

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It's tough to tell about Spinoza. In his own time and in that of Voltaire he was considered an atheist, because he states that "god" is in the mind. One could take that two different ways.

An atheist cannot deny that god is in the mind, a product of the mind. The concept of god actually exists in the mind of humanity and that can't be denied. Many atheist want to pretend he doesn't exist there, but Spinoza correctly concludes that he does and proposes how we're going to deal with it. That's an atheist who acknowledges god, but as an aspect of imagination. In his book on religion he discusses how the various Jews simply invented stuff that went along with their character and times, so he "proved" that the prophets were actually rather selfish people with overactive imaginations. He then set out to boil down the good in their message report that many people across the world had arrived at the same conclusions. This is why his fellow (not really) Jews wanted to murder him, as he very logically and calmly destroyed their claim to fame.

The pantheist Spinoza seems to be a modern attempt to make him sound religious, and fits if you haven't read him. He proposes the idea that everything in the world is a miracle because god invented everything, so the natural world is constantly sending us messages from god. A nice day is an expression of god, for instance. Fantastic miracles that are outside of physics are just imagination, because physics is an expression of god, and fantastic events would violate god's plan That's a little different from the pantheism of cultures that believe that spirits are in everything, such as American Indians.

I would agree with this. At best, it gives you intellectual assent to facts, which doesn't do anyone any salvific good. It is sometimes important to bypass the intellect (not be anti-intellect though) and speak straight to the conscience.