Judith said

I think the lost sheep and parable son teaches that God loves us all regardless of whether we are obedient or not.   

Sure, but the claim was that 

” it seems to me that God is dealing on a very individual basis with people and not on a national level and I really do have doubts that he is overly concerned with the Christian movement or even the growth of Christianity he just loves each and every person on the planet.”

Did God upgrade his computers and can now deal with everyone on an individual basis, whereas before he was limited to either national or regional settings?

Judith:

 I should add that my remarks about bending facts or making stuff up was not about you or this particular thread. 

Often we see arguments made, which seem persuasive to the person in question, only to the extent that it appears to support something they want to believe.  Take a look at the following, rather strained argument in reference to whether Peter was the author 

I agree that Peter might have been illiterate, but I disagree that he could not have been the author of 1 Peter. Even if Peter was illiterate, he could still have been the author of the letter, even though he himself did not put the pen to papyrus to physically create the letter. I believe, as do a host of others, that Peter basically could have told a Greek-speaking “secretary” what to write. Ehrman dismisses this possibility, stating his objections this way:

“Nor could he have dictated the letter in Aramaic and asked the secretary to translate it into Greek, because the letter contains sophisticated forms of argumentation and presentation that work only in Greek and presupposes knowledge of the Greek Old Testament, not the Hebrew version, which Peter himself would have been familiar with.”

Peter’s illiteracy does not force us to presuppose that Peter did not have a knowledge of the Greek Old Testament. Ehrman’s claim supposes that an illiterate, Aramaic-speaking Peter could not have gained knowledge of the Greek Old Testament without being able to read Greek. But, of course, Peter could have gained such knowledge easily. Peter could have asked an Aramaic-speaking, highly literate “secretary” who was knowledgeable in the Greek Old Testament, and who also was familiar with “sophisticated forms of Greek argumentation and presentation,” to read to him portions of the Greek Old Testament that the secretary knew would be theologically relevant to Peter, translating as he read, from the Greek to Aramaic, so Peter could understand.

After absorbing enough of the needed content from the Greek Old Testament, Peter would then have been able to convey to the secretary, in Aramaic, the gist of what he wished to say to his Greek-reading audience, idea by idea, sentence by sentence, speaking to the secretary as he wrote. The actual Greek words used, the grammar, sentence structure, would have been choices made by the secretary, and the secretary would make sure the arguments would work in Greek, but all of the ideas would have been Peter’s, and he would have signed off on the final product, sentence by sentence.   Is this what Prof. Ehrman thinks should be called a “forgery”?

Notice that COULD HAVE is the logic of the entire argument. As long as someone can construct a scenario where Peter, with

enough gyrations to please Rube Goldberg,  COULD HAVE been the author, you can’t say he wasn’t. ** you do not have permission to see this link **