If you read the OP, you’ll see that CC specifically addressed it to everybody who believes in God. Not to Pat Robertson. Not to those like Pat Robertson. “If you believe in God”, it’s addressed to you. So CC is mocking all persons who believe in God, which includes most victims of the earthquake by his own admission. It is possible, but I think we’d all agree that it’s highly unlikely, that someone who responds to the earthquake by expressing nastiness and sarcasm towards the victims is going to donate to help those same people.
Now you may have realized that CC’s words make atheists look bad, so it’s understandable that you’d try to narrow the scope of what he’s saying. But his words are on the page. “I mock those who believe in God.” He thinks that mockery of the victims is the appropriate response to the earthquake. Maybe you don’t, in which case good for you, but he does.
So the deal is this: God may do all kinds of horrible things, … I don’t mock God - there is no such thing. I do, in fact, mock those who believe in God. QUOTE]
How can you say “God may do all kinds of horrible things” in one breath, and then say “I don’t mock God - there is no such thing.” ? Are you blaming an entity that you don’t believe in??
Also, God doesn’t do all kinds of horrible things. God told Noah that he would not “interfere” anymore, after the flood. Earthquakes are just a natural occurance. It is not something that happens because God is angry with a culture/country/president. Maybe God is watching to see how pathetic some people can be about having to blame somebody, when infact, what needs to happen is simple: let’s band together as humans, and do what we can to care for them. Isn’t that what you would want if it happened in YOUR backyard?
You should actually read the whole post you quote before commenting. Then maybe read the brief book of Job, as your comment is fairly off base. If you don’t want to bother, maybe read the whole post you quoted, as it summarizes the book…oh, I already mentioned that.
What Hilary Algar wrote was “In the Old Testament book of Job, God allowed Satan to do anything to Job short of killing him, and believe me, in the story Job did just about every evil thing that he could.” (underlining mine)
My point was that I was pretty sure Hilary Algar had meant to say “In the Old Testament book of Job, God allowed Satan to do anything to Job short of killing him, and believe me, in the story Satan did just about every evil thing [to Job] that he could.”
God is normally claimed to be omniscient, and the creator of the universe; in that case, yes, he’s responsible for every evil that has ever occurred or ever will. He planned it all beforehand.
And even a non-omniscient creator - even some hypothetical advanced aliens for that matter who made Earth and humans - could do a better job of design. So he or they would still have responsibility for how badly put together we are, mentally and physically.
[QUOTE]
God is normally claimed to be omniscient, and the creator of the universe; in that case, yes, he’s responsible for every evil that has ever occurred or ever will. He planned it all beforehand.QUOTE]
So, if you have a child, and he grows up and it turns out your son was Hitler, should we all blame YOU for what Hitler did? You created him. You must, by your logic, be responsible for every evil that ever occurred, afterall, you planned to have this child.
Well, yes, duh, if I was omniscient and omnipotent then I *would *be responsible for allowing my child to do evil. But since I don’t have God’s powers, my duties are less.
Consider this: Two men see a toddler fall into a swimming pool. One is able-bodied and could easily dive in and rescue the child. The other is confined to a motorized wheelchair; no matter how much he’d like to help the child there’s nothing he can do.
Wouldn’t you agree that it would be evil for the able-bodied man to just stand there and let a child drown? But that the man in the wheelchair is freed from such a moral judgment? After all, we can’t say that it’s evil to fail to do the impossible.
In this case, God is the able-bodied man. His inaction in the face of suffering is evidence of evil (or nonexistence), just as the inaction of an able-bodied man confronted with a drowning child would also be evidence of evil.
Thank you, Cat Whisperer, ThudlowBoink and Panda Mom for interjecting some much-needed reason and common sense into this thread. Odd that it should come from those who are supposed to have eschewed reason.
Only 2 idiots involved in this thread: Pat Robertson and the OP.
You’re overly obsessed with things being God’s will.
After setting stuff up to run as best he could, he’s pretty consistently taken a hands-off approach. To my mind that makes a lot of sense. I mean what would be the point of setting up a seemingly orderly unverse, if the only way to get it to run properly was to dick with it all the time?
If there is a supreme being, I seriously doubt that he’d put up with such an inelegant creation for very long.
Did I just wanter into great debates by accident? It seems it isn’t just Christians who proselytize anymore…
First, as to the question of guilt of Haitian, Christ himself stated that victims of natural disasters are not suffering punishment:
Second, we have to consider the role of human free will in exacerbating the gravity of the damages. When a 7.4 quake hit California a few years ago, there were, iirc, 63 deaths. The same 7.4 magnitude quake near Quom (is that the right name) in Iran resulted in over 100,000 deaths. The series of human choices that resulted in the poverty and poor construction materials and methods in both Iran and Haiti greatly aggravated the severity of damages.
Thirdly, it’s arrogant to think that this is a new development offering fresh perspective on the role of God on Earth. Natural disasters have been around for millenia. Just think of the number of black-death plague epidemics that swept through the Europan continent, which make even this event pale in comparison. Yet out of the black death arose an economic revival which encouraged the burgeoning of the Renaissance, surely a good thing. Who is to say what will come of this yet. Could this be the start of a hugely painful rebirth for Haiti? Is this a way of making a clean slate to rebuild a country that was already in the throes of suffering, but just not in a way that attracted continuous CNN coverage?
I don’t know what my protestant brethren teach, but , iirc, the Catholic doctrine is that, just as humanity was corrupted when we chose to ascribe to ourselves the power to judge good and bad, so the physical world was also corrupted by the introduction of evil coming from the separation from God brought about by man’s rejection of God. Don’t forget all the disasters described in Revelation.
Christianity does not promise a life free of suffering, or disasters. Christ himself was tortured to death in a huge miscarriage of justice. He has fully shared in our suffering.
This post is not as clear as I would like it, but I’m really supposed to be making dinner now, among other things.
For believers in the intervening finger things like Haiti are an endless mystery where none exists. Your God is a monster who, according to the problem of evil, either allows/causes (the difference is trivial for an all-powerful being) hundreds of thousands to die and suffer for no good reason, or is unable to prevent it and shouldn’t be called God.
Take out the intervening finger and everything is clear. It’s an unfortunate shift in plate tectonics.
On preview:
Tell that to the pious who we buried and crushed to death under the collapsing Cathedral of Port-au-Prince.
No he hasn’t. What kind of suffering or sacrifice is it if you get to become God afterwards?
Nobody has been able to come up with a convincing argument reconciling an all-powerful God with goodness in the face of natural disasters (things which humans are involved with you can get out of because of ‘free will’). Just the old cop out of ‘working in mysterious ways’. There’s nothing mysterious about it, as Yossarian says.
I think you must have misunderstood me.