# Does God Love Everyone? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [June 9, 2010, 11:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-god-love-everyone/542590 "2010-06-09T23:01:06Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 7
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2010, 8:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-god-love-everyone/542590/121 "2010-06-11T20:36:23Z")
> [@lekatt](#): > > The universe is not set up to please one individual. God gave us free will so we could learn about ourselves and Him at our own pace. There is no hurry, we have an eternity. The laws governing the universe are just, equal, and absolutely fair to all. Those who seek will find, those who knock will find the door open. Those who do nothing and expect God to make the first move will be disappointed. Who told you this, and what are his qualifications? ---
**Author:** ![lekatt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lekatt/32/7269_2.png) [@lekatt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lekatt)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2010, 8:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-god-love-everyone/542590/122 "2010-06-11T20:37:24Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > 1. Your posting history is my “cite”-if anyone _else_ has trouble finding out what you’ve posted, I’ll PM them. > 2. Again, I’m not going to advertise your blog for you. I like all things out in the open for all to see, cuts down on the insults and personal attacks. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2010, 8:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-god-love-everyone/542590/123 "2010-06-11T20:41:10Z")
> [@lekatt](#): > > I like all things out in the open for all to see, cuts down on the insults and personal attacks. If your own blog insults you, feel free to correct it. ---
**Author:** ![lekatt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lekatt/32/7269_2.png) [@lekatt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lekatt)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2010, 8:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-god-love-everyone/542590/124 "2010-06-11T20:46:51Z")
> [@Nature\_s\_Call](#): > > I want to frame my response by reminding you of how this line began: > > It appears you are saying > > 1. there have been scientists who believe in God > 2. Einstein was one of these > 3. therefore there are more ways than the scientific method to discover the true nature of God/the universe > > I refute the notion that Albert Einstein would endorse anything other than the scientific method as a means of understanding the universe. I repeat the quote I quoted earlier: > > There is no doubt Einstein used the word God. We can debate whether those uses were metaphorical or whether Einstein believed in something tangible that he called God. That’s not the point. (sidebar: I myself have been overhead saying “God help me, I’m late for work” Taken out of context you may convince people I’m not an atheist. That doesn’t make it true.) Whatever else Einstein may have meant by God, he didn’t mean an higher intelligence or higher consiciousness (that’s what “personal” means “the persistent and contiguous unity of the individual person which is attested by consciousness” - Webster) and certainly not a source of knowledge that bypasses the scientific method. Well then, according to your post we will never know whether Einstein believed in God or not. I have read many of his books and from them I believe, he believed in God. There is nothing wrong with a non-personal God. Millions of people believe in a non-personal God. However if you seek and knock you will find God is not so non-personal any more. ---
**Author:** ![lekatt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lekatt/32/7269_2.png) [@lekatt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lekatt)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2010, 8:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-god-love-everyone/542590/125 "2010-06-11T20:47:57Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > If your own blog insults you, feel free to correct it. It doesn’t, no problem there. ---
**Author:** ![lekatt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lekatt/32/7269_2.png) [@lekatt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lekatt)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2010, 8:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-god-love-everyone/542590/126 "2010-06-11T20:49:36Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > Who told you this, and what are his qualifications? God, he is the Creator of all things. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2010, 8:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-god-love-everyone/542590/127 "2010-06-11T20:50:51Z")
> [@lekatt](#): > > God, he is the Creator of all things. Read it in a book, or divine revelation? ---
**Author:** ![begbert2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/begbert2/32/3357_2.png) [@begbert2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/begbert2)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2010, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-god-love-everyone/542590/128 "2010-06-11T20:51:27Z")
> [@lekatt](#): > > The universe is not set up to please one individual. God gave us free will so we could learn about ourselves and Him at our own pace. There is no hurry, we have an eternity. The laws governing the universe are just, equal, and absolutely fair to all. Those who seek will find, those who knock will find the door open. Those who do nothing and expect God to make the first move will be disappointed. Did you even read the post to which you responded? Oh well, anyway: Statement 1 is true - the universe was not set up at _all_ much less to please any individual. Statement 2 is not true - I don’t know what **lekatt** means by free will but I suspect he’s thinking of something we don’t even have, and of course God didn’t give us anything, being fully occupied by the task of not existing. Statement 3 is true and false - we have no reason to hurry, since there is no god to find or imposed goal at all, but we do not have an eternity. Statement 4 is true - gravity is no respecter of persons. Statement 5 is false and gravely insulting to the hundreds of millions of people who have made honest efforts to try to gain faith but never recieved it. Statement 6 is false because those who _actually_ do nothing don’t care and aren’t disappointed. If you were _really_ all about love, **lekatt** , you would never say things like statement 5. ---
**Author:** ![Blaster\_Master](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/cab0a1/32.png) [@Blaster\_Master](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blaster_Master)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2010, 10:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-god-love-everyone/542590/129 "2010-06-11T22:07:37Z")
> [@Meatros](#): > > Fair enough to the first part. I ask that you explain the second part. Perhaps it’s because it’s early, but I’m not seeing a direct link to direct interventionalist God and a violation of the omnimax principles. You know, I think this might actually help clear up the discussion, now that I think about it. Basically, I like to describe my belief as saying God is the ultimate dominoes player. Being omnipotent and omniscient, God is capable of setting up a set of dominoes in such a way that he knows exactly how and when each domino in the series will fall. As such, it seems more consistent to me that God would set up the dominoes to fall exactly how he wants them to and then sort of kick them off. A God that has to keep stepping in and making adjustments seems to me to be a sign that either he didn’t know exactly how they would fall, violating omniscience, or that he wasn’t able to set them up that way, violating omnipotence. Of course, he is capable of intervening, it just seems, for lack of a better term… weak. Now, that’s not to say that he doesn’t have a way of influencing action, but it’s all part of that ultimate game of dominoes, as he’d know exactly what needed to happen when, so why would he reach in and intervene when he could have set up the natural process to do exactly what he wanted to happen at exactly the right time? That is, if we’re viewing something as a miracle, like say when Elijah’s challenge to the followers of Baal. Let us say, for the sake of this point, that the events happened more or less as described. Obviously God could create fire then and and there, but that is more of an interventionalist type of God. Instead, I think it was probably a natural phenomenon. The miracle in either case, isn’t whether or not reached in and manipulated the laws of physics, but that it happened exactly in accordance with the predictions of the prophet. …I hope my explanation makes sense, it’s something I’ve had difficulty articulating in the past. > [@](#): > > I would say that human beings act as though free will exists - as though we have a choice in what we do. I don’t think this is really the case. I think that our decisions are an amalgam of our histories, our biologies, and our current physiologies. I don’t see anything ‘free’ about it. To me, what is commonly considered ‘libertarian free will’ simply doesn’t make sense. In fact, it seems contradictory in that it assumes that we are able to make decisions without them being based on any of the prior things that I brought up. This seems chaotic and random to me and, more importantly, _out of our control_. > > As to the importance of free will - it’s not important in the every day actions of human beings. The illusion of free will might be, we could argue, but not actual free will. Where the importance lay is with a resolution to the argument from evil. You take free will off the plate and you take a proposed theodicy away. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly think our decisions are heavily influenced by all the factors that you indicate. In fact, in some ways our histories and physiology can eliminate or force certain options in some cases, but I think in most they simply serve as weighting mechanisms; however, I don’t see how it makes things chaotic. That, to me, seems to assume that, once those weights are established, that we’re going to choose randomly amongst them with those constraints. I get that that’s probably the only meaningful way to deterministically model it because that’s just how non-deterministic processes appear within a deterministic frame of reference. > [@](#): > > Yes, this is true, but I’m not sure that it saves the concept… > > Well, yes, you can - but here is what I consider the important distinction - you are not perfect. God, on the other hand, is. God could not make an imperfect (or sub-optimal) move because to do so would violate his perfection. I have a hard time buying that. Going back to the tic-tac-toe example, I could play any number of games against an opponent of any skill level and never lose; I’d say that would qualify me as a perfect player. The reason I make those decisions isn’t because I’m forced to by the quality of being a perfect player, but because my decisions will be consistent with my motivation, which is to never lose. Am I unable to make a sub-optimal move? Absolutely not. That is, I think the description of “perfect” is descriptive, not prescriptive. That is, it is an emergent property that arises from omniscience because he is able to determine, even in the massive statespace that is the universe, exactly what the ideal action is for any given state. And this is all the makes us not perfect, is our inability to necessarily determine that a particular action will necessarily be the optimal one toward our goal. Regardless, we will always try to make the action that best fits with our motivation. If we didn’t make choices that match our motivation, then we would indeed be acting randomly. > [@](#): > > You can say that God is omnipotent and therefore he can do anything (logically possible, anyway), but when we scratch a little bit, it seems to me that God can do certain things only if he compromises other qualities he has. In short, God could make a sub-optimal move - but in doing so, he negates his perfection. > > This is one of my beefs with the creation story in the bible. A perfect being creates imperfect entities. How is that possible? One could argue free will, but I don’t think that gets the problem off the hook because, as has been brought up, God could have created beings that only choose to do the good. FWIW, I’m not a creationist.. at least not in that sense. It just seems to me like the problem your running into is an assumption about what God’s goals in creating us is and then believe that manner in which humanity was created doesn’t fit that goal. I believe that, as part of that goal, God wanted us to learn to choose to do good and, as such, the manner in which humanity was created is consistent with that goal. There is, of course, another potential problem here in the assumption that creation is somehow done. In the manner that I think God created the universe, essentially setting it up to roll out and basically just tipping the first domino, exactly what is “creation”? Was it just the very first moment when things got turned on? In that case, we really weren’t directly created at all. Were we done being created the moment we became humans? Even there, you’d be hard-pressed to draw any meaningful line where one generation isn’t human and the next is. Or is creation an ongoing process where, in fact, we’re effectively still being created even now? We certainly aren’t at his goal yet, muchless whenever we may have been “created”. > [@](#): > > Now, I realize that one problem (or I should say, ‘potential’ problem) is that such beings wouldn’t know what evil was, since they are never able to act on it (due to their choice). There are two problems with this: > > 1. I can envision a state of affairs where evil is known on a conceptual level - or even an experiential level (with regard to non sentient organisms). > 2. If _knowledge of the actual action of evil_ is necessary then that places God’s omniscience in jeopardy since it creates a state of affairs where _I_ (a lowly ignorant human) have knowledge that God does not. How can God be called omniscient if he does not have all available knowledge? To be honest, I don’t really have a good answer for this that will solve this to your satisfaction, because I think it’s really one of those things where we’d have to peer into God’s mind to really know. It seems to me that you think that evil is avoidable, and perhaps it is, I don’t know, but I don’t think that means it is necessarily inconsistent with God’s motivation and, therefore, imperfect. > [@](#): > > I might go 1/2 way here. I don’t think it’s necessarily an issue in motivation on God’s part, since the problem - as it seems to me - is how to reconcile God’s actions with his nature. > > On the other hand what you are arguing is that evil is necessary for ‘soul making’ which is interesting, but ultimately I think it doesn’t resolve the initial problem. It also brings up some thorny issues with heaven, miscarriages, and the like. > > As to God’s motivations, I’m not sure that a perfect being can “do” something since it seems to conflict with the idea of perfection. I’ll table that though since it doesn’t quite seem relevant to the discussion. I think part of the problem here is a difference in perspective. I would agree that unnecessary evil probably violates the proposed properties of God, and we can come up with countless examples of starving children in Africa, and injured children in the war-torn middle East but, quite frankly, I don’t have any kind of perspective to those sorts of events to make any sort of meaningful judgment about them for each individual life. Those are very easy circumstances to look at as unnecessary evil. Instead, I have certainly seen a share of “evil” in my own life. But even now, in the vast majority of those cases of “evil”, I have ultimately drawn lessons from them. There are some from which I haven’t, but I can’t think of any of them that are not relatively recent and, thus, just haven’t happened yet. Now, you may say that they’re not really comparable, and you’d be absolutely right. But my path is my path and my path alone, just as is everyone else’s. It is up to use to evaluate the “evils” in our own lives. I’ve, in fact, found that there isn’t anything at all inherently “evil” about pain, grief, sadness, suffering, or any of these other things… but perhaps that’s getting into a completely different philosophical aspect of it all. > [@](#): > > Perhaps there is an issue with what ‘perfect’ means. It does seem very subjective. > > With regard to the issue I bring up - I am “Christianizing” it to the best of my ability, since I find the Christian origin story very problematic with the notion of ‘fallen’ man. It could be the case that this is not what you believe and if so, obviously my aim is very off. > > In any event, if we find that suffering/evil is an imperfection (which I think it is), then the problem springs up with the idea of God - a perfect being - being responsible for suffering and evil. If God can create entities that will only choose the good, then what is responsible for those entities that choose evil? How does God - a pure good being - create entities that choose evil? What is the basis for the choices that those entities make? Biological, historical, environmental? Those cases can be directly attributed to God’s initial creation. > > If it’s not one of those, then what is it? I think it does all come down to what “perfect” means, and perhaps this is where my other philosophical aspect comes into play that might make sense, at least for why it’s my perspective. I think part of the problem arises from a common idea that most people take for granted. Why is sadness “bad”? Is it because it’s unpleasant? There’s many things that are unpleasant to varying degrees that people would say are good. In fact, I don’t even think sadness is necessarily unplesant; surely, we’ve all had those situations where we’ve been sad and indulged in the feeling, saying and doing things that just made us sadder. Is it because it results in “bad” things? Sure it can, but some “good” emotions things can result in “bad” things too. And, in fact, sadness doesn’t have to result in bad things; for example, there’s countless works of art that were inspired by and/or invoke sadness, and yet they’re beautiful. In the end, I don’t believe sadness is “bad”, nor is it “good” either; what makes it good or bad is what comes out if it. In my philosophy, a similar argument can be made for pretty much any emotion, and many other “bad” things like suffering, loss, and violence, as well as for many “good” things too. The problem arises in generalizations that we see these sorts of things and try to put them in a box where one size fits all. Imagine for a moment a goal where one has a goal where he wants to enjoy himself, eating some delicious cake, relaxing, and watching a good movie would all be “good” choices to that end. Now imagine he has a goal where he wants to get in shape, those are now “bad” choices. To me, asking why “evil” has to exist would be like taking this example and asking why does cake taste so good if one can’t eat it when trying to lose weight. It’s conflating the two goals. > [@](#): > > The soul making theodicy is a very interesting one, but I’m not sure it is sufficient for the reasons I’ve brought up earlier. In addition, if suffering and evil make souls ‘greater’ then there is a very substantial problem with morality. > > Namely, why _help_ anyone at all? If souls are made greater through suffering, then don’t we owe our fellow man the harshest cruelties we can imagine? Or if _we_ do not, then doesn’t this inhibit us from helping others? From stopping wanton brutalities? I’m not saying that suffering necessarily makes one better, but rather that I think it’s possible that sometimes it is the shortest path to the goal. The idea of morality, to me, is that it’s our “best guess” at a method for choosing which options to take when traversing the statespace that is the universe. One with low morality will more often choose worse options than someone with higher morality. As our morality grows, we will become more likely to make better choices toward that ultimate goal. It’s a continuing iterative process. > [@](#): > > I’m not sure evil is necessary. Is there evil in heaven? Was there evil prior to the creation of the universe? More or less, N/A on both things. Obviously, the first question depends one what heaven is. I see it as the dwelling place of God and, hopefully, eventually us, once we’ve learned what we’re here to learn. The second one, really, just doesn’t make sense within my beliefs, at least. That is, I believe “before” doesn’t make sense within that context, as time is a property of the the natural world, and is not a property of God. I believe he is a non-temporal being. It’d be akin to asking who the best football player was in 1850, when football hadn’t been invented yet. > [@](#): > > As to learning - that is an interesting point - however through those lessons, aren’t you learning something that God cannot learn? I could also turn this around and ask how you can truly know evil without committing evil? How can you learn the horror of brutality without committing it? Fair questions, and I don’t really have good answers for you. Does learning even make sense for God? If he’s omniscient, is there, in fact, anything he can learn? I tend to believe, and I’m still iterating on this one, that his omniscience is actually more of an emergent property of him being a non-temporal being. That is, he knows everything, because he effectively can see everything at any time… even thought that doesn’t really make sense. As an attempt at an analogy, imagine you’re taking an exam for a college course. If one student is taking it in a classroom, his knowledge on the material is limited to whatever he learned and studied on. Now imagine another student got the exact same exam, except he get to take it home, can use any resources he wants, and effectively has as much time as he wants. Now imagine the TA grading the exams is under the impression that both students took the exam in the classroom when grading it. Assuming the second student made good use of his resources and time, he ought to have gotten everything right, and from the perspective of the TA and the other student, he’ll appear to have mastered the material, but really, there wasn’t any way that he wouldn’t have gotten them right. This is how I view our perspective of God; being unconstrained by time, and having access to infinite resources, he inherently knows everything. > [@](#): > > In any event, I appreciate the discussion so far, so thank you for engaging in it in a reasonable fashion (which doesn’t always happen on the 'net). 🙂 Sure thing! ---
**Author:** ![lekatt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lekatt/32/7269_2.png) [@lekatt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lekatt)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2010, 12:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-god-love-everyone/542590/130 "2010-06-12T00:06:52Z")
> [@begbert2](#): > > Did you even read the post to which you responded? Oh well, anyway: > > Statement 1 is true - the universe was not set up at _all_ much less to please any individual. > > Statement 2 is not true - I don’t know what **lekatt** means by free will but I suspect he’s thinking of something we don’t even have, and of course God didn’t give us anything, being fully occupied by the task of not existing. > > Statement 3 is true and false - we have no reason to hurry, since there is no god to find or imposed goal at all, but we do not have an eternity. > > Statement 4 is true - gravity is no respecter of persons. > > Statement 5 is false and gravely insulting to the hundreds of millions of people who have made honest efforts to try to gain faith but never recieved it. > > Statement 6 is false because those who _actually_ do nothing don’t care and aren’t disappointed. > If you were _really_ all about love, **lekatt** , you would never say things like statement 5. Statement 5 is a contradiction, you don’t try to gain faith, you either have it or no. But if you really want to feel the presence of God, there is a path. Jesus taught that path. ---
**Author:** ![lekatt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lekatt/32/7269_2.png) [@lekatt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lekatt)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2010, 12:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-god-love-everyone/542590/131 "2010-06-12T00:08:16Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > Read it in a book, or divine revelation? Neither, learned it from my experience. ---
**Author:** ![Dostoyevsky](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b5a626/32.png) [@Dostoyevsky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dostoyevsky)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2010, 12:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-god-love-everyone/542590/132 "2010-06-12T00:23:35Z")
> [@lekatt](#): > > The key word here is “personal”, many religions don’t believe in a personal God, but certainly believe in God. A higher intelligence, a higher consciousness, which is also called God. You can tell by my post that I also don’t believe in a God that interferes with my life, but I certainly believe in God, a Higher Consciousness that created the whole of everything. In reference to your reference of Einstein’s faith: Einstein’s God was similar to Spinoza’s God which is similar to God = Everything… which is similar to atheism. ---
**Author:** ![begbert2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/begbert2/32/3357_2.png) [@begbert2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/begbert2)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2010, 12:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-god-love-everyone/542590/133 "2010-06-12T00:27:00Z")
> [@lekatt](#): > > Statement 5 is a contradiction, you don’t try to gain faith, you either have it or no. If so then “Those who seek will find, those who knock will find the door open,” would be a bald-faced lie. I don’t think you were lying when you wrote it; you are clearly just having trouble dealing with the contradictions in your worldview. > [@lekatt](#): > > But if you really want to feel the presence of God, there is a path. Jesus taught that path. And that path is a method of trying to gain faith. Yep, you have some bubbles under your wallpaper… ---
**Author:** ![lekatt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lekatt/32/7269_2.png) [@lekatt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lekatt)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2010, 5:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-god-love-everyone/542590/134 "2010-06-12T05:14:00Z")
> [@Dostoyevsky](#): > > In reference to your reference of Einstein’s faith: > > Einstein’s God was similar to Spinoza’s God which is similar to God = Everything… which is similar to atheism. Yes, then black must be similar to white. Your logic is beyond my understanding. ---
**Author:** ![lekatt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lekatt/32/7269_2.png) [@lekatt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lekatt)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2010, 5:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-god-love-everyone/542590/135 "2010-06-12T05:15:40Z")
> [@begbert2](#): > > If so then “Those who seek will find, those who knock will find the door open,” would be a bald-faced lie. I don’t think you were lying when you wrote it; you are clearly just having trouble dealing with the contradictions in your worldview. > > And that path is a method of trying to gain faith. Yep, you have some bubbles under your wallpaper… Faith is a choice, you either choose to have faith or not. Your logic is faulty. ---
**Author:** ![Zoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/a4c791/32.png) [@Zoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zoe)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2010, 7:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-god-love-everyone/542590/136 "2010-06-12T07:09:50Z")
**Voyager** , I would try to answer your questions and make a comment or two to others, but what is the point now that **Czarcasm’s** comments have made this about **lekatt.**. I didn’t think that **lekatt** had been unreasonable in this thread. Exercising your newly found freedom, Mr. C.? ---
**Author:** ![aruvqan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aruvqan/32/2891_2.png) [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2010, 11:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-god-love-everyone/542590/137 "2010-06-12T11:33:50Z")
> [@Jinx](#): > > In this shallow world, perhaps I am one of a small minority that ponders about God and his actions as captured in the Old Testament, esp. If God loves eveyone, why did he reject Cain’s sacrifices? Also, the “Jacob have I loved, but Esau I hated” is very intriguing to me. What do you think this says about God’s love? Are there other Biblical examples, either pro or con to my position that perhaps God does not love us all the same? God is interpreted by the bible and other religious texts. Just because some hairy bunch of hebrew speaking dudes claim that god does/says/is X does not mean it is true, and the same goes for arabic speaking dudes, or latin speaking dudes. God neither loves nor hates anybody, he/she/it/they simply exists. I have no doubt that there is a spirit in all of us and in nature, I simply do not think it actively does anything except exist. Religion is simply our attempt at forcing it into a mold so we can explain and quantify something that has no physical existence. It is nice that this attempt has given us a framework of social behaviors, though the generated morality laws are senseless as I see no reason to penalize people with differing sexual preferences, or a desire to not procreate, or a differing viewpoint. ---
**Author:** ![monavis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e0b2c6/32.png) [@monavis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monavis)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2010, 11:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-god-love-everyone/542590/138 "2010-06-12T11:39:27Z")
> [@lekatt](#): > > Neither, learned it from my experience. In other words it is just in your mind; you taught your self to accept your own ideas about a higher power! ---
**Author:** ![monavis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e0b2c6/32.png) [@monavis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monavis)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2010, 11:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-god-love-everyone/542590/139 "2010-06-12T11:57:19Z")
> [@lekatt](#): > > You have free will, God will not do anything to you, good or bad. It is your responsibility to seek the truth whatever it may be. If you are waiting for God to do something like reveal Himself, speak to you, or make your life wonderful, you will wait forever. You have been given the tools to find your own “salvation.” It is up to you and you alone to better yourself and your life. If you don’t do it, it doesn’t get done. > > An individual does not exist in the center of the world, the world exists in the individual. Are you saying that if we exercise our free will and it doesn’t agree with what God wants we are condemned, even if it is impossible to know God’s will? It would seem that Jesus didn’t know God’s will as (in the Garden before His death) He asked the Father if it was His will to lift the burden from Him! Then said Your will be done! If I tell my child that he may go to the movies if he wills it, but since it is my will that he doesn’t, I will kill him if he goes, that is not free will. It is just the freedom to do the parent,s will not his own! ---
**Author:** ![Cumberdale](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/8c91f0/32.png) [@Cumberdale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cumberdale)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2010, 1:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-god-love-everyone/542590/140 "2010-06-12T13:24:58Z")
> [@lekatt](#): > > Faith is a choice, you either choose to have faith or not. Your logic is faulty. So if you choose to want faith, try to find it and are still unable to get it, is the problem with you or is it because God as hardened your heart? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-god-love-everyone/542590.md?page=6) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-god-love-everyone/542590.md?page=8)