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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.
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See the 4th and 15th posts for direct responses. Further discussion can also be found by reading subsequent posts.
I would also consider your first post in the thread a direct response, which is why I thanked you for it.
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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.
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Why is understanding the message relevant to being a child of God? God does not cultivate children - parents and society do that.
The issue was whether or not the Word was for everyone. If you want to talk about salvation, that is another issue and not limited to listening to or understanding some of the Word.
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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.
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No it isn't. Let's go back to the quote:
"For God so loved the world"
The world. The passage does not contain any qualifiers to exclude any part of the world, therefore it is most reasonable to conclude that no part of the world is excluded.
The only way you could possibly continue with the idea that man is somehow excluded from 'the world' in this context is to ignore the context of the passage. Here it is:
John 3:16 "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."
Obviously, belief is something men do/have, not rocks or trees. Not only are men included in 'the world', men are the focus of the phrase.
Next time you refer to scripture, consider the context of the phrase you use. Selecting half lines to focus on, while ignoring context, can provide justification for damn near anything. It's a matter of intellectual honesty and integrity.
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If God didn't choose who his people were, then why were they called his Chosen People?
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God, of the Old Testament, did chose his people. They are refered to as the Chosen People and are the Jews. However, Chosen People is not equivilant to children of god. This is evident in the fact that Jesus did not limit his audience to Jews, the Chosen People, yet still lead his audience in prayer "Our father".
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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.
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Only if we make the mistake of taking the text literally. We are spekaing of scripture, with figurative language. Allegory.
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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.
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Not all of us accept everything that is written in the Bible.
In any case, if you'd like to compare notes on scripture, I'm game. Jesus is pretty clear about the issue in the Synoptic Gospels. John takes a different stance and contradicts the other three. The commentary following the Gospels is all over the place. I prefer to rely on the words attributed to Jesus, and go with which ever opinion is most agreed upon by the authors of the Gospels.
Cherry picking snippets of scripture is pretty useless (as you have done so far with your quote from John 3:16).