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Originally Posted by danielf
This Bishop apparently thinks that either he is qualified to comment on God's intentions and thoughts when it comes to happenings in daily life (which I would imagine religious people would find extremely arrogant; I'd be interested to hear what you think of this), or thinks he can use his religion to comment on how other people lead their life, which I find extremely arrogant and patronising.
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I would think anybody who believed themselves qualified to comment on God's thoughts to be somewhat deluded, and possibly arrogant, maybe even a little unhinged.
The only proper position of a Christian teacher is humility and absolute reliance on God, and not reliant on a sense of personal qualifications. However that does not preclude the possibility of God asking such a person to deliver a prophetic message. In such cases the person speaking would indeed be in a position of commenting on God's thoughts on specific issues. This is why, in Christian terminology, we're told to 'discern the spirits' - know the man, know his ministry. I don't know the Bishop of Carlisle (assuming that's who it was, I've not seen a link yet), hence my reluctance to weigh in on either side on this specific issue.
It would be dishonest of me not to point out, however, that the principle of God using major calamities - sometimes military, sometimes natural disasters - as a means of exercising judgment at a national or cultural level, with the intention of causing people to reassess their lives and turn to him, is well established in the Bible. The destruction of the Temple and the exile of the Israelites to Babylon in the 6th century BC is directly attributed by both historical and prophetic authors in the Old Testament to Israel's disobedience and God's judgment as a direct consequence.
I don't expect any non-believer to simply roll over as a result of this and say 'well that's ok then' - simply to accept that such a view is far from alien to Biblical Christianity and to be just a little less surprised to hear someone mention it. Again, I stress, I'm not using this general point to validate the specifics of what the Bishop has apparently said this weekend.
To your final point - any religion which sets out to promote a certain way of life in its adherents, and to persuade other people to join up and adopt that same way of life, is inevitably going to end up saying that it believes one lifestyle is better than another. It has always been so and it always will be so. All that has changed is the current fashion for relativism and the privatisation of 'truth'. It's not surprising that a generation that has been taught that truth is a personal thing rather than an absolute would be offended when it clashes with a body of thought that holds truth to be an absolute concept.