Shirely, you don't paly fair. I answered your question; why don't you answer mine:
If God is perfect and you are not - how could you possibly be sure that you could tell the difference?
westibilly questions:
supposedly the reason why mankind is suffering is because the issue of sovereignty was raised in garden of eden.....but the more i think about this viewpoint the more i fail to see why a god would a) have allowed his sovereignty to be challenged
This is not what happened in the G of E. This is what the WT says happened. Nowhere does the bible say this. What really happened is that Adam and Eve exercised their free will right to not believe God. When they did this, they disconnected themselves and their children from the Source of Life. Decay, the natural state of the physical world took its course. God's sovereignty was never in question. This is a subterfuge delimma created by the WT.
humbled muses:
But there must be a shared definition of GOOD as well as GOD. Do they fit together, Perry?
I think they do. For those that accept the dictionary definition of God, they must also accept that good can only be ultimately defined by God, the only perfect and all-knowing being. Apart from God, we certainly have strong notions of good and evil, having been created in his image unlike the animals; but the details are worked out from a viewpoint of limited perception. God has no such limits. On a personal level, we are under obligation to love our neighbor as ourselves. Governments, exercising a greater responsibility, define more complicated issues of governance that include life and death issues at times. Governments are given more latitude becasue of the greater responsibilities involved. Sometimes they get it right, sometimes they don't.
