Do you find that christians and other god believers have hindsight bias when they think of answered prayers?
For example, a person would say, “Now that I think about it, God wanted me to quit the job and these are the reasons why.”
Another thing that bothers me is the self centered outlook people have about God related consequences
For example, A person’s friend is killed in an accident. So that person thinks, “God is testing my faith.”
What about the friend that died? What was God ‘testing’ him for?
Does everything revolve around that person being tested?
Where could I find information about that phenomenon of viewing all consequences from a self centered point of view?
It always makes me laugh when an athlete assigns their success to god.
Quite obviously, god has favourites when he is watching sporting events. And the best thing about being omnipresent is he can watch more than one contest at a time.
To me it makes a great deal of sense to ascribe positive occurrences to God while not seeing an instance of divine intervention in comparable negative occurrences. It’s no different from how I view my relationship with human beings. For example, when I was in graduate school and read a lengthy proof in algebraic topology and did understand the proof, I ascribed my success to the math professors who had taught me all the math I knew. But when I encountered a complicated proof that I didn’t understand, I would not blame my incomprehension on some failure on the part of those professors. Maybe I was guilty of hindsight bias, but I don’t really care.
I also think that it’s quite reasonable for athletes to give thanks to God for a win. Without God there wouldn’t be any universe, any human race, or any athletic contest at all, so therefore God does play a vital role in any win. It’s really not different logic than thanking someone who sponsored your team. If you lose, you don’t start complaining that the sponsor is responsible for your loss.
But in that example you’re talking about an obvious cause & effect. When there’s a tornado and one guy survives and everyone is killed horribly, people thank god he survived, but no one curses god for having caused the tornado in the first place. No one can demonstrate that god anything to do with the tornado, and yet they’re giving him praise for the good things, and not finding fault with the bad things.
Your professor actually could have taught you incorrectly and made it harder for you to understand something, at which point it would be appropriate to criticize him. So if god, as you claim, is responsible for everything in the universe, he is responsible for the tornado that killed all those people, so why isn’t criticism in order in that case?
Of course it’s different from thanking your sponsor. Your sponsor had an actual demonstrable effect on the proceedings. God, as far as we can prove, did not.
The universe, human race, and athletic contest are equally to blame for the loss. Can’t you come up with anything God did that isn’t equally responsible for the loser’s loss?
The problem isn’t that they’re crediting god for the good - though that’s invariably a result of sloppy thinking and stealing credit. The problem is that they have a double standard. If I can be blamed for my failures, why can’t I be credited for my wins?
I love it when a natural disaster occurs, devastating a city, and the handful of survivors give God credit for sparing them. Who do they think caused the disaster in the first place?
This could make sense out of the practice of praising god for one’s own successes and blaming oneself for one’s own failures. But it doesn’t address the practice in question in the thread–that of praising God for one’s own fortunes, and not blaming God for one’s own misfortunes.
If that is their basis for praise, then they will also publicly and joyfully praise God for their losses as well. But they don’t. So it is not their basis. Perhaps it is arguable that it should be their basis. But it manifestly is not.
We do not understand death as God does, for instance, once Adam and Eve eat of the fruit they died that day, yet we see them live on. IMHO That person lives on in their death, just in a crueler world, unless saved by Jesus, where they will basically relive their life choices but things will not be as pleasant, so they can learn from their mistakes and turn to God.
In short that person needed to die to move on, to eventually come to God.
It’s not only religious people who sometimes get the “it’s all about me” attitude, but maybe there’s something particularly egregious in thinking that God arranges things strictly for my benefit.
Lately I’ve been watching a lot of UFC fighting. I’m always amazed when they interview the winner right after a fight, a guy who’s just beaten his opponent to a bloody pulp, at how many of these guys will say something like “I just want to give the glory to Jesus” or something similar.
The answer to the OP is of course that many theists define god to be omnibenevolent so whenever god does something that may look wicked (e.g. the Old Testament), well…you aren’t looking at it the right way.
Things like praising god for the only person who wasn’t killed in a disaster flow from this combined with other, more ubiquitous, human biases.
It’s interesting this omnibenevolent thing. Looks fairly recent on the religious scene.
Polytheists seem happy to have a multitude of morally flawed gods.
Early monotheists were happy with a vengeful, jealous god.
But modern monotheists usually insist that their god is perfect, even where that perfection leads to contradictions like omnipotency vs omniclairvoyance or the POE.
When I was a believer I found it odd, and now find it even odder, that people don’t hold God to the same standards they hold the average human. I’m not expected to read your mind, but I’m expected to read God’s mind. You are responsible for the bad results of your actions, but God isn’t responsible for bad results of his. For you, the ends don’t justify the means, but for God that’s absolutely acceptable.