> > So you're saying that there exist people whom Jesus has chosen not to forgive?
>
> Of course!--those who don't ask.

That's not his choice. That's theirs. There is an important distinction.

(In fact, I'd rather phrase it that they've been forgiven but they haven't accepted that forgiveness and its consequences. You can't choose to forgive yourself or not to forgive yourself if you haven't been forgiven yet; you can only accept or reject forgiveness that has been offered.)

>
> > Mercy is *not* withholding justice from the guilty, in the long run. The justice has been given out already; it was poured on Jesus' head. In that sense justice has been withheld from all of us.
>
> James is quite clear that mercy is the opposite of justice, even on the personal scale. James 2:13 "...judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. Mercy triumphs over judgment!" Note also where God spoke to the nation of Israel, "...what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy...(Micah 6:8)"
>

I said that we see them as opposing, and that they seem to be opposing aspects of God; that's why people talk about the dichotomy of the OT Yahweh and the NT Jesus as though they were two Gods and not one.

But what I meant was that they *are* aspects of one God. (Remember the Sh'ma? "Hear, O Israel, the Lord is your God, the Lord is one.") And God may be three Persons, but he is one nature. That single nature encompasses both justice and mercy, and both justice and mercy are part of his sovereign and perfect plan.

That plan involved pouring out justice on a willing innocent so that he might show mercy to the guilty, so that the Cosmic Balance Sheet shows zero. And so now that we've all been shown mercy (and our balance sheets are, in a sense, in the red; we owe God for paying our debts), we must show mercy in turn. (If God erases our red ink, it would be fundamentally wrong of us not to erase others; the Parable of the Debtors.) Mercy triumphs over judgment, as you said. Judgment without mercy will be shown to those who have not been merciful, true; but in context James is talking about that as a lifestyle, not in each individual choice. James, John, and Peter were unmerciful on certain occasions and they were not explicitly punished for it, though they were rebuked; otherwise mercy would just be another kind of Law. But those who don't have the mindset of mercy, who haven't truly received mercy so they don't understand it and don't live with it in their hearts, still have the red on their balance sheet (because they never cashed God's check, to over-milk a metaphor), will still receive the judgment Jesus tried to take for them.

BTW, in fact, in the last verse you quoted God asks Israel to *both* act justly *and* to love mercy, indicating that the two, though they appear to be opposites, are not mutually exclusive and that both are required of us. How can we be both just and merciful at the same time? By recognizing evil for what it is and calling for and working for repentance and a turn away from evil, but at the same time recognizing evildoers as those loved by God and calling for and working for their welfare and forgiveness.

> > if it were I victimized by a murder it would be my burden and my duty to forgive him...
>
> Actually, you'd be dead.
>

*sigh* I thought about how to say that; what I meant was "if I lost one of my loved ones to murder", though there are more ways to be victimized by murder than even that. (Think of the chaos in a country when its leader is assassinated, or the disruption and fear caused in a community by a murder of even someone most people didn't know.)

Murder leaves many more victims than simply the person who's been killed.

(Although, to be honest, I do believe in life after death and I do think that, after death, I would be able to forgive the one who killed me. Jesus himself did, and I can do no more but to follow his example, especially after I've left my imperfect flesh behind and joined him in Heaven.)

> > Love encompasses and contains the written Law. The written Law on its own does not encompass love.
>
> Please provide references.
>

Okay. Love encompasses the Law: Galatians 5:14. The Law does not encompass love: Matthew 5:20. Or I Corinthians 13:2-3. There are others.

The idea seems pretty self-evident, though; if one has love for all people, there are some things one will do and some things one will not do; one will follow the so-called Law of Love, and, as Jesus said, all good human laws are ultimately based on this law. However, it is possible to follow all human laws in existence and not have any motivation based on love. Such people were like the Pharisees and teachers of the Law Jesus came into conflict with so much.

> > One very well *can* commit crimes against the soul; James told us to commit crimes against the body was basically committing crimes against the soul.
>
> Where?
>

Jamaes 2:15-16. If I show concern for a person's spiritual well-being and even pray for the person's future physical well-being but do no concrete action to help that person physically, I'm basically not doing anything. Faith without works is dead, and here James is implying love without works is likewise dead.

I don't mean you can do anything directly to "harm" the soul in the sense that damnation "harms" the soul, but since a soul comprises a person's consciousness, mind, and experience, persecuting a person in body in a manner so that they will experience it is persecuting them in soul; wouldn't it be?

How else could Jesus accuse Saul of persecuting him when he was physically gone from the world by the time Saul got around to joining the anti-Christian movement? Because Jesus was present in *spirit* though not body (the Holy Spirit, in the hearts of believers) and persecution of Jesus' followers was persecution of him.

Anyway, the original point was, IIRC, that the Law provided no penalties against the soul because the soul could neither commit nor be the victim of sin, which I think is first of all wrong because Jesus *did* tell us there would be a penalty imposed on the soul, Matthew 10:28, and second because the soul (or "heart") is the source of sin, Matthew 15:18, and the only part truly victimized by sin, see above. We can disagree on parts of this, but I think it is pretty clear that the lack of reference to the soul and the afterlife was a deliberate omission from the Law (a truth God was not yet planning to reveal); the true Law Jesus gave is all about the soul.

> > If there were two entities like you describe, the only way one of them could be defined as "good" would be if there were some sort of higher entity that determined "good" and "evil"
>
> Or there might be concrete concepts of good and evil.
>

What do you mean by "concrete", exactly? (I assume you don't mean good and evil could be solid, material quantities.)

Do you mean two entirely separate, self-existent qualities of good and evil? Both existing absolutely?

But then how can we call them good and evil? How can they be opposites? To be opposites they *must* be connected or related to each other somehow.

What do we mean by good and evil anyway? Good is... well, the Way Things Should Be. Right. Truth. Evil is the Way Things Should Not Be. Wrong. Falsehood.

Every meaningful definition of good and evil comes back to this. Do you define evil as self-centeredness? But doesn't everybody and everything capable of desire desire the optimum condition for him/her/itself? Isn't that what the whole concept of "selfhood" is predicated upon? (C.S. Lewis said even physical objects can only exist by the principle of exclusion, taking up space and pushing other things aside.) So what the heck is good, then? Good is desiring what's best for others? But nothing on its own desires that, does it? In order to want the best for others there must be some scheme in which both the self and the others fit; there must be some code that overrides the self's self-nature; there must be something... else. Some morality from above imposed on the self.

In every definition of good and evil, good somehow ends up being *more* than evil. Evil is recognizing one self as "myself" and fighting for the welfare of that self; good is recognizing *all* selves as selves and fighting for the welfare of all of them. Evil is seeing the world from just this one point of view; good is being able to see from the other's point of view. Evil is recognizing no law but the one that comes from oneself; good is recognizing a higher law that comes from above. Evil is taking whatever one can whether it belongs to one or not; good is recognizing the higher principle of what is rightfully yours and what isn't.

Just as there's more than a semantic difference between darkness and light or between truth and a lie, there's more than a semantic difference between good and evil. They are *not* equivalent and opposite entities, as some worldviews claim. Good is a Thing, and evil is the lack of the Thing. Just as darkness is nothing but the absence of light. Light has quantity, energy, measurable properties; darkness has nothing but the absence of those.

This is why I am a monotheist and not a dualist. Two warring Gods don't make sense to me, because two warring Gods can't produce a single Universe that operates with both a single system of physical law and a single system of moral law. (Yes, I do think there is a single system of moral law universal to all humans, though we see it from different POVs and some have distorted it. But everyone can understand the basic principle of "Love your neighbor as yourself"; the problem only comes when defining who the "neighbor" is. Like Granny Weatherwax said, "When you stop treating people as people and start treating people as things. That's sin. Nothing more to it.") Of course, one of them may be the source of the Universe and the other may not, but that's tantamount to saying one is God and the other is not. (After all, I'm quite willing to concede that Satan is a god, small "g", and in this time frame he even tries to take on the attributes of God. But he isn't God and never will be. Not by a *long* shot.)

> > I still hold that they're both facets of the higher truth known as Love, and that it's our limited POVs that make them seem to be in opposition to each other. (A loving God could not abandon the innocents to the criminals's predation; nor could he abandon the criminals to the innocents' vengeance. Especially when the criminals and innocents happen to be the same group.)
>
> Where does this come from? I think you're making too many assumptions in order to avoid a simpler explanation. But, by all means, if you have explanations, I'd love to hear them.
>

Well... what is love? Not the many lesser meanings we've put on the word ("I love this brand of toothpaste") but _agape_ love, the sort of love the Bible speaks about?

_Agape_, the word translated "love" in the NIV ("charity" in the KJV), means unconditional love. A desire for another's well-being with no strings attached; giving oneself up utterly for another.

A loving God could not allow true evil in the world, because he cannot tolerate evil ("sin"; the Greek word used means "missing the mark", "falling short", the Way Things Should Not Be), not only as part of his true nature but out of love for those evil victimizes. Something must be done; evil must be vanquished.

But he cannot simply take the obvious course and vanquish evildoers along with the deeds they do. Why? Because a loving God could not abandon his love for another being no matter *what* that being did; that's what unconditional love means. Love means loving a human being for the fact that she is a human being, for the fact that she is alive and created and bears the image of God. Jesus made an analogy with a parent and his child; the parent loves his child because he is his child and because part of himself is in the child, and he can't separate that part of himself from the child no matter what the child does. That's why Jesus said to love one's neighbor as oneself; a person who has perfect love sees all other people as though they were, in some measure, herself.

So God can't stand evil but God can't bear to destroy the evildoers. What can he do? Simple; separate the evil from the evildoers. Have one who has never done evil take the guilt and consequences of the evil onto himself. Hence the Cross.

(That's the spiritual consequences of evil. God will deal with the physical consequences, too, but those are comparatively easy. After all, he has absolute control over the physical world in the end, but souls have free will. Else they couldn't truly give or receive love.)

This comes straight from my reading of the Bible, though parts of it are semi-high-level interpretation. I think all the pertinent parts are fairly well-accepted by the Church and well-documented in the Bible, though.

Out of curiosity, what simpler explanation would you propose? Starting from my worldview, that explanation is the "simplest" (actually, the only one that makes complete sense to me, though others come close). The only assumptions I started with were that God was the source of everything that exists, and yet God is also the standard of everything that *should* exist; all-powerful and all-good. And the only belief system I've found that can explain a God like that given the world we live in is Christianity.

> gab"er, *see them, I suppose."by

Ar"Looking forward to seeing from you again, too"thur