“That’s a odd question coming from a Christian”, you say. But hear me out.
More people have died in the name of God than almost any other reason. Don’t you think that upon seeing this, God could’ve come down by now and stated, “look guys, I’m here, this is what religion you should or shouldn’t follow, now stop killing each other over me. I hate seeing my children kill each other. Peace out…”?
You know, kinda like a “stop fighting or I’ll turn this planet around and go right back to the beginning !”
I mean, how hard could it be, he’s/she’s/it’s God?
The whole point of having a God is faith: belief. If you can believe in something of which there is no evidence, then you can get through all of the other shit that this world confronts us with. Even the personal misery that so many on the planet experience.
Is there a point you’re trying to make?
I’ve had friends and relatives that exhibit self destructive behavior. You can try to help. You can try an intervention. At some point if they are ever going to have their own life you have to let them choose and then bear the consequences of their choices. good or bad.
God’s existence is conspicious by it’s absence. If indeed there is a God it’s not a theistic one involved with the day to day affairs of the world, or the place would be a lot tidier.
Except as the OP points out, people kill each other over God. Faith won’t help you if somebody else kills you because of their faith. Not to mention that faith in general is likely to lead to all sorts of bad judgement that will hurt or kill you. Perhaps less faith would help you not suffer in the first place, which is better than faith helping you to endure that suffering.
As for the OP; of course he could show himself, if he existed. But even assuming that there is a God, the state of the world and of humanity seems to indicate that he’s quite indifferent to human suffering. So, the reason that he doesn’t show up to stop people killing each other in his name, is that he doesn’t care. No more than he bothers to stop hurricanes from killing and destroying.
As a parent I know that all the love I have for my kids won’t stop them from making self destructive decisions if they are determined to do so. It doesn’t mean I’m indifferent.
Have you ever known people whose parents want to control them and make all their decisions for them in order to “protect them” What kind of adults do they become?
But did you design them so poorly ( or at all ) that they would make self destructive decisions ? Did you teach them things that were nearly certain to lead them into destructive behavior, and then refrain from asking them to stop when it did ? Can you simply will for them not to be hurt or rise from the dead and have it happen ?
God, supposedly, has more power and wisdom than us humans; he should be held to higher standards, not lower ones. Judging from behavior, governments desire to be worshipped more than God, because they do more good in the world. Given how bad governments can be, that’s a pretty low standard to fail.
You are creating a false dilemma. There’s a lot of middle ground between controlling every detail of someone’s life and standing by silently while people kill each other in your name.
I think there’s a difference between belief in a God and religion. (Thomas Jefferson, for example, was a deist. He believed in a God, but he didn’t follow any particular religion.) Religion is a social organization. When such organizations grow, and become conflated with governments and military power, then yes, people kill each other. But it’s not over God per se. I don’t think any group has been killed for being atheist. Nor has any group been killed because they weren’t atheists. It’s differences between religions that lead to such killings, not belief in God.
They are made of the same stuff as I am but they have their own will. The goal is to teach them to be independent adults. My peers, and yet still my children. I taught them what I could but ultimately they had to determine the truth and value of what I taught them through their own decisions and their own experiences. If they did not, if I exerted pressure to force them to follow my demands, they would not develop into the mature adults who would be my peers.
Even as adults I can still love them and advise and recommend, but I have to then stand back and let them make decisions.
Once again, if I could spare them every anguish and hurt, and then did so, what kind of adults might they be? Would sparing them every anguish, sparing them every bad experience be an act of love? If there were no “bad” consequences" would there be any choice or free will at all?
Concerning rising from the dead. That would be a plus if we assumed that this physical life is our highest aspiration. When we’re discussing “why wouldn’t a heavenly father figure do that?” then we have to consider that it may not be.
Well I for one don’t think whatever god may be has any desire to be worshiped in any ego sense.
I also doubt if it matters what name people kill each other in to God. Killing in the crusades doesn’t strike me as any better or worse than killing to conquer land and seize treasure.
For the sake of discussion, tell me what you see as a better middle ground. How would God allow us free will and yet exert more influence to make the world a better place?
I agree, to an extent. Often the reasons given for killing or just expressing dislike against another group is a result of the religious trappings of an organisation, rather than a belief that their god wants them to go out killing. OTOH, the religion wouldn’t exist without the belief in that god. And there are some occasions it seems where people genuinely believe their god has either commanded or would like their adherents to murder away. The organisation that no-one suspects, for example. You can’t totally detach gods from religion in that way.
As for the OP; i’d say that pretty much all the religions i’ve heard of had gods that wanted to be known, so yeah, i’d expect a reveal. But then pretty much all religious people think such a reveal has either happened already or is still happening.
I find this a truly bizarre and curious concept. It makes absolutely no sense to me, and goes against my scientific training. I know this is widely held, but that doesn’t change the illogic of this odd…belief.
It’s not at all clear to me why it should be considered good and praiseworthy to em,phatically bwelieve in something for which there is no proof, and evidence in favor of it being, at best, ambiguous.
When I get to run my own universe (if I ever do), I’ll have designated Miracle Points that are easily accessible and very convincing to satisfy the questing mind about such a fundamental thing, so that we can avoid all the unpleasantness associated with uncertainty and faith bullies, and move on to important things.
How would God make himself known? You might hear a voice come out of a burning bush that is not consumed, saying, “I am God!” It’s clearly something out of the ordinary going on. But how do you know it’s God? It could be Satan. It could be some supernatural being from a non-Christian mythos. It could be an extraterrestrial sentient, no more supernatural than you or I, with good special-effects technology and a wicked sense of humor. Heck, it could be some human prankster from Hollywood. I have my doubts that even God is capable of conclusively proving God’s existence.
Bertrand Russel answered this by saying that he would be convinced if he heard a voice telling him exactly what would happen the next day (assuming this was something very unusual and unpredictable).
Me, I’d settle for a voice that told me precisely what I was thinmking and could perform telekinesis. You might argue that some sort of Psi-powered alien could do this, but I’d argue back that, for practical purposes, any entity that could read my mind and perform telekinesis was pretty close to God.
This whole “God analogous to loving human parent” thing has always bothered me. I mean really, what we’re talking about is a loving Father who, at some point prior to your conception, dictated some vague recommendations to nobody in particular and then made every effort to conceal His very existence for the remainder of your natural life.
At some point you might find yourself reading over those recommendations and you might have a question or two-- but you can’t ask Dad because well, he’s trying really hard to create the impression that he doesn’t exist. You might even find yourself wondering if the joker who transcribed Dad’s advice didn’t accidentally (or even intentionally) get a detail wrong here and there. Sure, a lot of it seems reasonable, but there’s some really weird stuff there, too. If only Dad could, ya know, stop kidding around with this whole pretending to not exist gag.
Well, just for the sake of cheekiness, I’ll presume an omnipotent deity, and say, “Why, whatever sort of adult He wills me to be.”
God could convince me by doing something neat like say, rearranging the stars in the night sky to play a game of Pong with me in which I control my paddle with my mind. Naturally, I wouldn’t expect to win, but still. After we’d gone three out of five on the Atari Cosmic™, if he was still in a convincing mood He could cause the last three books of George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire to spontaneously blink into existence for me. That’d be swell.
Oh, and regarding whether or not this “God” was the real God… I’m not sure it would matter. I’m not picky. I’m not married to a particular implementation of a specifically Christian God. Like Jon Stewart said, “…just someone with the basic skill set to create an entire universe.”
Well, have you considered that one persons “Miracle Point” could likely be anothers nightmare?
The concept of faith is what keeps us hanging onto life. If we were to make God tangible, then we would have the key to the hereafter. Now if we know all the answers I truly believe this planet, the human race would completely abolish itself.
I have no idea what you mean by that. But we don’t live in a zero-sum universe. Just because sometyhing nice happens to one person doesn’t mean that something evil has to happen to somebody else. There’s no shortage of injury-free miracles I can imagine.
it is? I have faith in plenty of things, mostly from experience. I could live quite easily knowing for certain that God existed, if he did, by demonstrated impossible-to-argue-with proof.
Why? Even if I had irrefutable proof of God, it wouldn’t prove that an afterlife even existed. He might be one of those Gods who created a Universe without it.
I cannot see why this would be the case. There’s nothing about my existence or will to continue living that’s contingent on not being absolutely certain that God exists by things other than pure faith.
Really? What about those of us somehow getting by without faith? Are we living a lie? I’m laboring under the impression that I rather enjoy my life. Perhaps I’m wrong?..
The issue of what it would actually mean to “know all the answers” aside, this raises an interesting point. If total knowledge somehow negates the necessity of existence, what am I to infer with regard to the existence of an ostensibly omniscient God?