[Solace]

Then I encourage you to reread the posts. No one attempted to 'deflect responsibility'. When faced with such an accusation from boagie, I responded - you can refer to those arguments if you like.

Can you provide a link to a post in this thread that said anything pertinent about the list of things mephistopheles pointed out in his original post? Something that actually directly adresses the issues, that is, and doesn't brush it off.

And your quote would only support the fact that not everyone will understand, so what's the point?

Point being God knows full well who will understand the message, and if understanding the message is relevant to being God's child, which I should hope it is, elsewise God cultivates ignorant children, then preordination of salvation is the only reasonable catalyst.

And so man would be included.

And so any of the elements which make up the world could have been included or excluded, we simply don't know. It's presumption either way.

God didn't chose or leave out any humans from being his children, even in the OT. Instead, some of his children were his chosen people - those who worshipped him.

If God didn't choose who his people were, then why were they called his Chosen People? Who is doing the choosing here? If you're going to say the people, then you're suggesting that there's absolutely no divinity involved in the decision at all, and that, in fact, the Jews being God's Chosen People was just a wild claim made by the Jews, supposing to impose their will upon God.

From scripture, I would argue that everyone is the child of God. To be a Christian would be to turn to that scripture for guidance.

From scripture I can show you that everyone is most certainly not the child of God. New Testament scripture says outright that most people are, in fact, the children of the Devil. Not to put too fine a point on it, actually, if you read that New Testament scripture you'll quickly realize that, according to the scripture, you probably don't actually know anybody who fits the criteria for being a child of God, but everyone you know very easily fits the criteria for being a child of the Devil. But hey, if you don't like what the scripture says you can go right ahead and do what just about everyone that I've shown this scripture has done, you can just ignore it. Christians are good at ignoring things that they don't like which are written in the Bible.