And then he kills a bunch of innocent people because Pharaoh wouldn’t do what God ensured he wouldn’t?
A lot of those Babylonian gods didn’t seem so kind.
Marc
He’d be the same as he is now, except there would be no such thing as cats and pizza.
Yes, we have free will, so God doesn’t protect us from the things of this world. He does, however, provide guidance. How could we learn with God making our decisions for us? Good point made. There is a very harsh God depicted in some places in the Bible, and in others a God of love. There is a problem with the God of paper and ink, but no problem with the God within us.
It might take a separate thread, but I’m not sold on that at all - except that theologians need it as an out.
And we all seem to need the illusion of it. But as a statement of fact - I don’t think it holds up at all… we live in a largely deterministic universe. If all is quantified… there isn’t much that can’t be predicted. It’s just there’s too much to know to actually DO that.
I can understand the idea of free will. I have trouble with so much suffering for people not caused by anything they did. A lot of times it’s a result of the evil free will of others but it’s also caused by random things like cancer and disease.
Just my opinion, but I would think that all things would work together to cause only anguish. As it is now, at least we can sometimes see good coming from those times which have caused us the most sorrow.
Ah, but if there were only anguish, we’d not be able to tell the good we were missing. So, a world with some good is worse than one with no good. Especially a world where the evil (and the nonbelievers) have it pretty good.
And, silly Skald - obviously God swiped your Alfa.
For more on “what we have now” here is one of the better sites around:
You may want to check out the “Cruelty and Violence” section especially.
Fundies may want to skip this. There are way too many examples to continue to call the Bible “good” and same for BibleGod, at least if you have an inclination toward intellectual honesty. OTOH, the site manager links to opposing sites that make some attempt at rebuttal or minimization, and you may find some comfort there if you are committed to blessed denial and sacred intellectual hypocrisy. (Your problem, not mine, if you are.) As one example, one fellow tries to tell everybody that when a certain king’s daughter was sacrificed in fulfillment of a randomly-directed oath it was not her life but rather any chance for married life in an imposed confinement. Uh huh.
“Truly” Yours…
Nah, an unjust god would look significantly different from the no-god we have right now.
Same as we have now – except in your scenario God would actually exist :eek:
That would depend on how actively unjust he was, I’d think. Perhaps he’s lazy as well as evil, and can’t be bothered to keep up a proper smitings-per-day count.
The only difference I could forsee is that now, bad things happen, but not everyone is suffering all the time. At any given moment, you’ll find happy people and miserable people. And in the course of a lifetime, you’ll have happy moments and miserable moments.
A hateful God wouldn’t grant us any happy moments.
Still, it seems like the current entity is more of a “likeable” God than “loveable”.
I can understand anyone wondering how God could allow some of the things that happen, and even concluding that there must not be a loving God. I don’t think there’s an answer that will satisfy those that reject god’s existence.
perhaps if there was an unfair, unjust, and unloving god, there would be no opportunity for love or justice. No hope for anything other than protecting ourselves, our social group and our possessions.
A thread about some serious spiritual issues would be nice. There is free will, one can choose to be bad or good, choose to be negative or positive, choose to be helpful or self-serving. Yes, there are choices, and these choices determine the quality of life.
I wouldn’t say he’s likeable. I would say he is a fucking piece of shit. But you know, when God kills your mother of breast cancer when you’re 22, that tends to shape your view of things. And I know that relative to hundreds of millions (perhaps billions) of other people in the world, I’ve gotten off pretty easy in this life. So no, I’m not going to endorse ‘likeable.’
I would point out that a “just and loving god” would provide for more than just the hope and possibility of love and justice.
The problem with the question is that it depends on concepts that are far too subjective. Everyone has a different definition for “justice and fairness,” and they usually have some selfishness and prejudice thrown in, whether they care to admit it or not (usually not). We could argue all day about whether a given scenario from the bible/torah/koran is fair and in whose eyes. When all’s said and done, someone’s going to find it unjust and wrong. That said, it isn’t difficult to find spots where Yahweh went off the deep end and wildly overreacted. The parable of Elijah and the bears mentioned earlier was a good example. Kids ripped to bits because they made fun of an old man’s beard? Really? C’mon. I get that we’re going for the whole “respect your elders” concept, but isn’t that taking it just a bit far?
Despite lekatt’s protestations, if we go by what we’re told in those books there is no such thing as free will. Either god knows everything and it all works the way he wants or it doesn’t. It’s all very well to claim we have choices, but those choices aren’t always black and white, good and bad, right and wrong. Sometimes the best you can hope for is to choose the lesser of two evils and hope for the best. And I would point out that even then, it’s subjective as to what is right and wrong.
What choice did the two year old baby who was raped to death (after constant abuse) by her mother’s boyfriend make? Surely you must admit that’s a pretty sucky quality of life. What determined it in this case?
What would be the point of life if there was no free will? Would it be like a video game with God at the keyboard? I don’t know whether God knows everything or not, we only have the “book” as our guide. What if He doesn’t know everything? Would He not be God though He created everything. After all if He gave free will to His creation how could He know everything or what course His creation would take. Yes, it is a dilemma, but not unsolvable. With free will comes responsibility, when we accept responsibility for our thoughts and deeds new perspectives of life become apparent. We can use our free will to guide our thoughts and deeds into better, more productive ways to live thereby avoiding many of the problems of life. But if we just feel sorry for ourselves or constantly blame someone else for our troubles we become helpless and stagnated.
Since there is no god, whether or not there is free will is an interesting debate but of no use, because we don’t know how things would turn out. With a god who knows (whether or not he pulls the strings) it all seems pointless.
If you believe we have free will, but you’re wrong, maybe you are preordained to act as if we do. So it shouldn’t make a difference. If you think we don’t have free will, you still have to make decisions. So that makes no difference either.
As for blame, don’t you think the characters in a novel, if conscious, could legitimately blame the author for what they are going through?