Christianity and Philosophy

Christians have to deal with the fact that not everyone in the world believes in their God and that their beliefs contradict other peoples beliefs. This could lead to conflicts but in the bible it does say “love thy neighbour”, meaning that everyone is equal. Here are some of the problems the Christian could face when dealing with other people.

Everyone on earth has a free will, God supposedly gave us this free will as a test for the humans to see if they would believe in him. Many humans as a result of this free will do not believe in God and as a result of not following God’s will their actions stem the moral evil in this world.

One of the ten commandments of the bible states that “you shall not kill”. From this you can ask “not kill what” showing the vagueness of the question and uncovering all the possibilities of its meaning. For example it could mean that you cannot kill plants or animals, or anything which is living. But this is unworthy as you need plants and animals to eat and if you could not kill either of those your life would not be so easy. You could even go as far as saying that you shall not kill bacteria living inside your body but bacteria in the mouth when swallowed are killed by the acidic stomach. So this also could not be the true meaning of the commandment. This commandment could mean that you can kill other human beings without Christian beliefs, just like in the crusades and even when God killed every first born child in Egypt. Believers could claim that killing someone that was from a different religion is what God would have wanted as they could have been “polluted” by another religion.

Christians are told to respect other peoples beliefs, but what about Jehovah’s witnesses. Their job is to visit people and try to convert them to Christianity. This contradicts the idea about every human having a free will as the unfortunate host is unlikely to change his beliefs after listening to these converters. Obviously they think they are doing the right thing but if God gave us free will he would shorley not approve of these Jehovah witnesses.

There are many problems that a Christian could face with when dealing with other people. People might ask why if God is an all good, all powerful being then why is their so much suffering in the world, contradicting the notion of an all-good God. Why not believe that there is an all powerful, all bad devil, after all there is not conclusive evidence of the God Christians believe in.