God heals? Question FROM a Christian

Great Debates
81

God is at fault. he made humans with flaws, he knew they would sin, just as he should have know Satan would rebel. The punishment for sin was death and that is the reason people die according to the Bible. Free will does not mean if you do your will and not God’s you are punished, If a human father tell it’s child," you will to go to the movies, I don’t want you to go , so if you go I will kill you" is not free will!!!

It is my way or the highway! And there is no way to know what God wills. All any human knows is what some other human said God said, so belief is not in God, but in another human. There is nothing written said, taught or thought that is not of human origin. That is a proven fact!

82

Your speaking of God’s great love for people doesn’t add up! On one hand he is said to give free will, to me that would be like a human father giving a small child a gun or knife and then if they kill someone,because they don’t know how to use it, or what it is for, he punishes them for it, when the father knew ahead of time that is how the child would use it.

This same God is supposed to have just told a few people what he wants done but they distort this, and then he blames the people who don’t know? Wasn’t the first sin eating of the tree of knowlege and because now they knew the difference between good and evil they had to die? God wanted them to stay ignorant rather that teaching them right from wrong!

83

www.whydoesgodhateamputees.com

84

My mother and two of her sisters were all God-fearing, Jesus-believing, “saved” women who believed that the God was sovereign, that Jesus had died for their sins, and that it was incumbent on everyone to accept Christ into their hearts, which they all had. They all believed in miraculous healing. Two of them died long, protracted, torturous deaths from cancer. The other one died a relatively quick but nonetheless torturous death from cancer.

My son died from a congenital heart defect. He believed in God. His mother and grandparents and big sister and aunts & uncles all believed in God and prayed for his healing. He didn’t make it to puberty.

The only comfort the notion of God gives me in such circumstances is that there isn’t one: that there is no omniscient, omnipotent being who created the universe and watches uncaring or, worse, enjoying, as humanity suffers.

If your God was willing to let my mother and son and aunts die in agony because they didn’t believe, fuck him.

85

Sorry to hear about your friend, but when there no other alternatives left many people grasp for the supernatural. Believing that God would/could/can heal is the same as believing God sends the killer storms and floods to the Bible Belt for some reason.

86

Maybe god doesn’t like ass kissers.

87

We are programmed to see ourselves–the human race–as being a special twinkle in God’s eye, so when nature happens in a way that we find displeasing, we’re scrambling to find an explanation.

But animals experience the same diseases and tragedies that we do. What’s the higher meaning when a random bear in the woods suffers from idiopathic renal failure? When an elephant is born with crippling limb deformities? When a wildebeast is brutually killed by a lion? If there is no higher meaning to animal events, we shouldn’t be searching for higher meaning to human ones. Are we are not animals too?

88

The Devil has free will. And one point of those stories is that being created perfect isn’t enough to keep you perfect when you have the free will to choose something else.

Well, that isn’t free will is it?

You were in that free will thread with me. And from what I saw, your “turtles all the way down,” belief wasn’t supported even by people who didn’t believe in free will. Here’s what I ended that thread with… (on quantum effects and possibility of free will.)

The point is that “Free Will” isn’t if you don’t get to choose. (i.e. “then why doesn’t God only create people who will freely choose good?” is ridiculous.) And perfection isn’t enough when free choice is involved. So, you need to build people who will choose good even when it’s a difficult choice… Here’s how I come to that conclusion, but it involves some perfectly reasonable assumptions that others reject

  1. Free Will. already discussed in another thread, and it’s not strictly necessary.
  2. A creator God would come from his own fully formed reality, and not just a closet attached to a remote corner of ours, (as one athiest once tried to claim was “just as likely.”)
  3. There would be something for us to do in that fully formed reality *other *than staring at God’s glory and praising him for all eternity. Not that that won’t happen, but it isn’t the *only *thing to do. And that’s why he wants people with free will, and not just automatons to constantly praise him, in some sort of, (as I put it in another thread,) mastabatory praise machine.

from that I conclude that suffering is necessary to produce people who will always choose good, unlike the previous example of a perfect being who chose evil.

89

What does the word perfect mean in the above quote?

I’m not being a smartass here; the word doesn’t have to mean flawless. But I can’t engage you without being sure of the definition you have in mind, and the most common meaning of perfect makes the above nonsensical.

90

But CJE-MO (the person to whom I addressed that question) said that free will is unique to humans. If angels have free will, and can live in Heaven right from the moment of their creation, then why can’t people?

What does “perfect” mean?

Only God’s. People can only do what God intends them to do. It’s impossible to do anything against God’s will.

There is no contradiction here. God has the ability to create only people who will FREELY choose good. He doesn’t have to limit their ability to choose, justy use his omnipotence to only create those he knows upfront will only choose good.

What does “perfection” mean, and how does creating only people who will freely choose good a limit on free choice?

But you say that angels already have free will, and they don’t have to put up with God’s bullshit test to get into Heaven, so what was the point of creating humans?

This makes no sense whatsoever. Angels always choose good, do they not? And God knows ahead of time which people will choose good and which people won’t, so what forces him to create people who won’t?

What does “perfect” mean?

91

I’m an atheist, as you know, but I find Augustine’s answer to this hard to argue with. He argues that existence is a good thing; it is a good thing that God has created us. God did create a world of beings who always choose the good: it’s called heaven, and those beings angels. If God had decided to create only that world, none of us would exist. And that would be less good. Especially for us. If you ask why God created you as he did with all of your flaws and weaknesses instead of creating you with perfect strength and willpower and no inclination to do wrong, well, maybe God did create that person. But that person (presumably an angel) isn’t you. You’re you. God didn’t have to create you, but would it have been better if he hadn’t?

It seems to me that the logical conclusion of this argument is the Many Worlds hypothesis. If existence is good, and God seeks to maximise goodness, and if he can create multiple worlds (at least this one and heaven), then logically he must have created every possible world. Of course, such a state is indistinguishable from one in which every possible world exists due to multiple waveform collapse instead. Except, I suppose, for the worlds in which God interviens directly, which are only possible if God exists. But we clearly don’t live in any of those worlds.

ETA: Of course in infinitely many of those worlds, God would be a ruthless tyrant who tortures innocent people endlessly. But the alternative would be for them not to exist, which by Augustine’s definition would be less good.

ETAA: Ok, it isn’t that hard to argue with. But it seems like there’s something compelling about it, isn’t there? Isn’t it a good thing that this world exists?

92

Since we wouldn’t exist, we wouldn’t experience any less-goodness. And I think you could just as easily argue that more perfect versions of us would exist, which would be better.

93

It’s true that we wouldn’t experience the less-goodness, but I feel comfortable saying that my existence is good. (Under Augustine’s definitions of good and evil, it’s more explicitly clear.) And those more perfect versions of us already exist, so nothing would be gained by these less-perfect versions not existing. (Least of all would anything be gained for us, of course, since we wouldn’t experience the more-goodness you propose any more than we would experience the less-goodness Augustine proposes.)

94

I don’t have a problem with saying that either. But if we don’t exist, nobody experiences the less-goodness.

Nothing would be lost either. I’m not sold on the Many Worlds version of this, and I don’t think I believe this idea that if a god existed, there would be anything he couldn’t or wouldn’t do.

95

“Existence is good” is an assertion with absolutley no support that I can discern. I’m not even sure it makes any semantic sense. Existence as opposed to what?

96

The answer I’ve heard is though we take God as a healer of people today, we don’t as the creator of people today, and creative miracles will happen when the people are ready to want God as a creator and accept Him as a creator today as well as in the beginning.

97

So what you’re saying is that god fucked us over by essentially creating us as emotional and moral cripples. And then he started to punish us for the flaws the he put in us.

98

:: reads twice ::

Wh-- No, wait, hold on.

:: downs shot of Scotch to prepare self ::

Okay, what?

99

Sort of my initial reaction too. It was put forth by someone who claimed it was a prophetic message. I don’t know if it was or not. But it is sort of in line with how it seems God works. God doesn’t do it because we don’t have faith that God will do it. Since faith comes from God we need to ask Him for that faith.

From scriptures creation was different from healing, creation was from the beginning, healing was won by Jesus coming and living in the flesh and taking punishment “by His stripes we are healed”

Though this approach seems a bit legalistic too.

100

And you know this is from God and not what some person told you? It is your belief in the person or the belief in your own thoughts, for you that works. For many it doesn’t add up!