ProjectOmega I respect your opinion, I really do… but your last post about if there is no suffering there would be no love seems to me to be absolutely ludicrous. Once again, if God wanted for us to experience just love and happiness… such as in heaven ooh ooh ooh (IT IS POSSIBLE IF HEAVEN IS POSSIBLE - I am assuming you believe in heaven)… he would have made life that way in the first place. Why did he not just make us happy and not create evil in the first place?
Can God be a personal God? Can he really love every single one of us and want us to feel good about life all the time? If yes, why would he not just send us straight to heaven?
I don’t feel I have to suffer in order to have fun at a party. I don’t feel like I have to lose a relative in order to love. Before I knew of those things, I was experiencing love and everything else that is wonderful in this life.
Furthermore, if evil is real then God knows evil, right? Would it be fair to assume that God is just a great balancer of good and evil… kind of like, I dread to say, karma… instead of being just a “loving God?”
In heaven, supposedly, you are treated to an eternity of happiness, but only after you’ve lived life. You can be happy in heaven because you’ve known suffering on earth. Otherwise, if you were born in heaven, you couldn’t possibly appreciate it.
Now, God didn’t create evil. Man did, basically. God gave us free will, and with that we can either, as I said earlier, walk with God or walk against God. The former is “good” and the latter is “evil”. To eliminate evil is to strip us of our free will.
Because heaven is reserved for those that do good in life. Think of God as a stern parent, who will kick you out of the house at 18 and force you to pay your own way through college, even if he had the means to support you the rest of your life. Why would any parent do that? To give the child a real sense of the real world, and have that child fully grasp what it is to be alive. Likewise with God, we could all get a free buffet 24/7 for our entire lives, but we wouldn’t, at any point, be truly living. In both cases, the love of the child is unconditional. Tough love, in other words.
You have fun at a party because the rest of your week is made up of hard work and the change of pace and chance to relax and have fun is different. If you could party every day, you’d soon grow tired of it. You may not have to lose a relative to feel love, but you must experience a lack of love, or even loneliness, to fully appreciate it and strive for it. The universal goals of man (love and happiness) are only there because we wish to get away from the negatives of life. If we were born full of love and happiness, there would essentially be no point to life (what IS the point of life, you ask? Nobody except God knows that).
Hm. Well, God himself doesn’t balance good and evil. Mankind does that on its own.
Now, God DOES love us, but he’s not necessarily “loving”. He’s not going to dole out free meals just because he feels benevolent on any particular day. Like the stern parent analogy, the love is unconditional, but love isn’t always expressed materialistically.
ProjectOmega, what’s stopping God from MAKING us appreciate it? Or just downloading an abstract of what suffering is into our brains, then port us into heaven? God isn’t parentlike: parents don’t have the option of handing their children perfect futures. And again I ask: why doesn’t God make us the way He wants us sans suffering?
Why doesn’t God give us three legs? Or fins? Or make us all speak the same language? Or make us all blind? Or, or, or.
I’m not God’s spokesman and I’m certainly not God himself. Think of how the world works now, with what I’ve said in this thread so far. It’s a pretty nifty system if you ask me. Anyone can think of a thousand ways to make it “better”, but I’m willing to guess that what we have right now is perfect for what God has intended. Now, I know that sounds like a cop out, and in a way it is, because I certainly don’t understand how the world works and I’m not going to pretend to. I think pain and suffering is the price we pay for having free will–indeed, necessary for free will–and heaven (or something like it) is the reward for using that free will for good instead of bad.
What we have now is a self-sustained system. God doesn’t have to interefere in any way for life to go on and on and on. We, as humans, seperate ourselves as good or evil, and we alone, faced with the innumerable challenges of life, determine how we exercise our free will, and in turn, determine if we are to get into heaven or not.
Somehow, Omega’s pretzel logic fails to convince me of anything, since it implies that God created people, and then created their capacity for evil, just so he could create a Hell to send them to. This excessive complexity convinces me that God is, at best, a half-assed beaurocrat, and certainly not someone I’d be interested in spending eternity with.
I don’t understand what you’re getting at. Yes, God created man with a capacity for both great good and great evil. If you choose evil over good, you pay the price. To interfere and stop man from doing evil, he is restricting free will, which is what everything’s about in the first place. I don’t see how that’s so complex. Maybe I’m misunderstanding you.
Because God created the devil, knowing in advance exactly how he would behave.
So might really does make right. Good and evil are not intrinsic values, extant in the universe in and of themselves, but defined by a Power which is not bound by either of them. If that’s so then Saddam Hussein is “right” in his own country and Adolf Hitler was “right” in his as long as they had the power. I can’t agree with the “might makes right” argument for God any more than for any other tyrant.
All forms of pain? No. It is instructive for a child to know that touching a hot iron will burn the flesh and that certain behaviors have negative consequences. But of what instructive value is pediactric AIDS? Spina bifida? Cancer? Who benefits from those and a host of other horrors visited upon children throughout the world? Their parents? Is God teaching the parents a lesson by afflicting their children? Seems sort of like Saddam Hussein torturing and murdering the families of dissidents.
Clearly not, but given even the average amount of human compassion you probably would have done a better job. Well, maybe not you. But I think I would have. I would not have permitted any child to suffer at the hands of an abusing parent, for example. Free will may allow one person to do evil, but it doesn’t justify injury to the innocent.
I agree with Deathstatistic’s view of Original Sin. We are taught to regard as “gifts” all of the characteristics of human beings. God, we are told, endowed mankind with the “gift” of a thirst for knowledge, a consuming desire to know – then stuck the Tree of Knowledge directly in his face and told him not to touch it. In his face. The Book says so.
Not only did God not put the tempting object up and out of sight, as a reasonable human father would have done, but he didn’t so much as put a fence around it. And, if that were not enough, he sent a tempter to goad the humans into doing what He, their Lord, had told them not to do, but which their nature (the gift of that very same Lord) demanded that they do. Then he punished them and their innocent heirs for all time to come, for obeying the nature with which He had created them. It is as if a human father had thrown a matchbook into a playpen with a toddler, and then blamed the baby for getting burned.
This is a little silly. God isn’t a man. God transcends man. He is ABOVE man. He doesn’t cause suffering for personal gain, and he’s not out to exert his iron will over anyone. If he wanted that, he could snap his fingers and have it so. Saddam and Hitler might not have been judged evil in their own circles, but they certainly are/were by the rest of the world and they most DEFINITELY are/were by God.
“Might makes right”? As it applies to God, of course it does. His power makes everything as it is, whether you consider it “right” or “wrong”. God gives you the tools to do with as you like. From then on, the right and wrong is out of his hands.
Who benefits from AIDS and cancer? That’s a tough question. First of all, I’ll address your analogy to Saddam Hussein. Simply put, that’s a ridiculous connection, because you’re implying God benefits from people dying of AIDS just as Hussein benefits from murdering rebels, which is obviously ludicrous. Please, no more “GOD = DICTATOR” references, because not only does it make no sense, it looks like you’re just trying to rile people up connecting their beliefs with universal symbols of evil.
Now, back to the AIDS thing. There are two schools of thought on this general subject, I believe:
God set the universe in motion and let things fall as they may. If this is true, AIDS developed on its own quite naturally, like any other virus, and as a result, God had no direct hand in creating it. He also isn’t interfering to stop it, just like he doesn’t stop natural disasters, wars or famine, because these are all occurances that mankind must overcome, and putting a stop to it would indirectly interfere with the process of free will. God doesn’t solve our problems for us, nor should he.
The second idea is that all natural disasters (diseases included) are intentional “tests” of mankind’s resolve. In other words, the few may suffer so that the many are tested. HOW people are tested differs from disaster to disaster, but in every case, many many people are forced to make choices.
I personally think idea #1 holds more water (which ties into my belief in the Theory of Evolution).
Of course it doesn’t! Why do you think we punish people that DO injure the innocent? A murderer standing trial won’t get very far in saying, “Well, your honour, I had free will to murder that man.” As an added bonus, God lays the smack down on him in the afterlife.
Precisely. He set an abitrary rule and set it up so that they WOULD sin. It was intentional. It was a jumpstart to civilization, so that from then on, they would know the ramifications of their actions. Eden was a lot like the theoretical paradise that a lot of people have brought up, where God simply hands everything to you on a plate and you live free of suffering. But, without suffering, as we see, there is no logic behind doing anything God wants us not to do (like not stealing, murdering, lying, etc.). Of course, it’s a non-issue if Eden is in fact metaphorical.
God doesn’t blame us for anything. He’s not punishing us for anything, either, despite what a lot of people have come to believe. The world now is as he intended, and Eden was simply a way of getting us out the door without directly zapping our brains with a Bolt of Knowledge +5. If there’s one thing about God that I’ve found out about him, it’s that he doesn’t cut corners.
Now, I have a question for the people opposite me in this thread:
The argument is that God has the means to stop the evil in the world, but he doesn’t, which makes him a bit of a putz, right? God also has the means to stop all the GOOD in the world, but doesn’t, which makes him a sort of ok guy, does it not? Do the two not then cancel each other out, making him a sort of neutral figure? And when you think of it, there is more good in the world than bad, which means he’s probably leaning to the “good” side. How can you come down on God so hard for not solving your problems for you, but simultaneously ignore that just being alive is his doing? Do you really despise your lives that much?
Think about it this way. You have a dog. You want to vaccinate him from bigandscary’s disease, because if you don’t he’ll die. So you take him to the vet. As soon as he feels the needle, he’s probably thinking “hey, my master is a big jerk/not very intelligent!” But when he gets the good effect (no disease) there’s no indication to the dog that it’s the reason for the injection.
OTOH, this works both ways. If a master beats a dog who firmly believes in the master’s goodness, other dogs’ opinions won’t budge the dog’s convictions.
And for extra fun: if you could keep your child from ever being burned, or if you could appear in front of him and tell him, “You know, grabbing that soldering iron by the tip will be a wee bit painful,” then most parents would.
Re: God and might makes right:
The way I see it, if there is an objective moral standard we can hold God to, he fails miserably. On the other hand, if we cannot judge God’s actions, then calling God good or loving is just as flawed as calling Him evil or spiteful.
And for many, many people, the bad does outweigh the good. Many people do suffer the hardships we mentioned.
And again about omnipotence: I fail to see how an ineffecient method with biotches of side effects (life) is a better method of imparting knowledge then Bolt of Knowledge +5.
So, God is like an abusive parent?
It’s like this: God created bad stuff. Being omnipotent, there is no higher purpouse to it that He could simply magic into being, being God and all. Therefore, since our continued suffering demonstrates that God is not willing to, e.g., get up off His omnipotent ass and smite the AIDS virus, we can deduce that God, for whatever reason, wants the AIDS virus to exist, and wants people do die horribly from it. You can’t really call that good or loving in my book.
I’m sorry, but I am no longer interested in this pissing contest. ProjectOmega is obviously set in his ways and not interested in logic. I am definitely not interested in hearing how a personal God is the equivalent of a ubiquitous dick… which, by the way ProjectOmega, you have just made me more dead set in my ways by talking in circles. You argue like my mom.
Me: “why can’t I go to the party?”
Mom: “because there is alcohol at parties.”
Me: “what’s wrong with alcohol?”
Mom: “It makes you want to go to parties!”
Me: “what’s wrong with parties?”
Mom: “there is alcohol at parties.”
“Re: God and might makes right:
The way I see it, if there is an objective moral standard we can hold God to, he fails miserably. On the other hand, if we cannot judge God’s actions, then calling God good or loving is just as flawed as calling Him evil or spiteful.”
There ISN’T an objective moral standard, though. “Morals” were originally defined by God. At this point in civilization, we’ve come to think that morals are something else, but that’s not God’s fault that we’ve altered the definition. And if you don’t want to call God good or loving, then you don’t have to.
“And for many, many people, the bad does outweigh the good. Many people do suffer the hardships we mentioned.”
Yep, but the world is full of good too, much of which is intangible, like love. Even someone dying of AIDS can give and receive love. I guess it’s up to the individual to decide which is more important.
“And again about omnipotence: I fail to see how an ineffecient method with biotches of side effects (life) is a better method of imparting knowledge then Bolt of Knowledge +5.”
Well, “inefficient” is a bad term to use. That implies God is using up more time and energy than is necessary. Since time and energy are infinite in God’s hands, there’s no such thing as inefficient. I do understand what you mean, though. If you believe in souls, perhaps a soul can only be imparted with knowledge through experience? Or perhaps souls create themselves, without input from God, meaning life is a sort of self-sustaining filter to get all the benevolent souls into the heaven? God may not want to mess with souls on that level, for whatever reason.
“So, God is like an abusive parent?
It’s like this: God created bad stuff. Being omnipotent, there is no higher purpouse to it that He could simply magic into being, being God and all. Therefore, since our continued suffering demonstrates that God is not willing to, e.g., get up off His omnipotent ass and smite the AIDS virus, we can deduce that God, for whatever reason, wants the AIDS virus to exist, and wants people do die horribly from it. You can’t really call that good or loving in my book.”
I kind of touched on this earlier. My line of thinking is that God didn’t directly create AIDS, and even as much as he might want to cure it and end the suffering, he won’t meddle in the lives of humans so directly. The world is very “hands off” right now for God, so it’s up to US, using our God-given intelligence, logic and rationality, to cure AIDS, cancer and everything else.
You could also say that without things like AIDS and other human-on-human evil, there would be no way for the rest of humans to prove that they are good. If God prevented anyone from murdering, stealing or committing genocide, everyone would be on even moral ground, right? Then everyone would get into heaven, and the whole idea is shot. Likewise, without AIDS, no one could prove the good inside them by, say, going to Africa and running an AIDS relief centre, or maybe even working around the clock for a cure, simply in the name of benevolence and progress. In that way, “evil” is simply synonymous with “opportunity”.
Ok? I thought we were having a surprisingly mature and reasonable conversation. It’s not often you can go this long without the non-believers calling the believers ignorant and stubborn, or the believers calling the non-believers hell-bound pagan heathens. And I didn’t realize I was talking in circles. I thought I was doing a pretty good job at staying on the side of logic and trying to keep everything linear. I didn’t even quote Bible passages, because I know people don’t appreciate that in these debates. Please point out where I’ve started looping, and maybe I can clarify things.
One of the symptoms of immaturity is being convinced of one’s own maturity…
Deathstatic, has it ever occurred to you that it’s possible your mom might know more than you? That she has reasons for her rules that you don’t necessarily need to understand? That she actually does care about you and wants the best for you? That she’s not a dictator imposing her will just to demonstrate her power over your life?
Has it occurred to you that God might be the same way, only more so?
Perhaps. Would you still do this after the 12,000,000,000[sup]th[/sup] time your child starts to grab a soldering iron? Or would you decide, “Kid, if yer ever going to grow up, you’ve gotta learn…”
Depends. Is it abuse when a parent doesn’t bail his kid out of jail?
As for this stuff about “Why couldn’t we just have all knowledge dumped into our brains at birth?”… You do understand that if you weren’t what you are, you’d be something else? You’re asking why didn’t God make people as gods. The answer is, because He made them as people. Beings with free will to make choices, and reason to figure out HOW to make choices.
People were created as they are and the world was created as it is. robertliguori, are you really asking the time-honored chestnut, “If God exists, why is there suffering?” This has been addressed and answered many many times over the last several thousand years. However, I can’t answer as well as the world’s best philosophers & theologians. I can’t even recommend the best place to start looking for an answer. (Except a really good minister! )
Like I said, God made this [points at war, famine, death, pestilence]. I see no reason to call him good, loving, or moral.
True. However, said person will also be able to give/receive love if they weren’t fucking dying of AIDS, and very possibly moreso. Like I said, this implies that love or goodness cannot be the primary reason for bad things.
Very possible. If you posit that there are things that God can’t touch, then much becomes plausible and the problem of evil goes away. You do end up having to bow out of omnipotence, however. Plus explaining accounts of creation/ensoulment of mankind gets a little awkward.
Did God create the universe? If so, then he knew (by virtue of omniscience) that nucleotides would combine to form the HIV virus, and left it to remain so. Even if we’re hands-off now, we weren’t always (given a created universe), so God always had a window of oppertunity to eliminate disease/famine/aging.
And why is it a good thing that we can cure diseases? Is it not better that diseases simply never were?
But it’s bloody well not. I mean, did God create an obstacle course simply to watch and judge us muddle through it? Again, if God is good, and dying of AIDS is bad, then people shouldn’t die of AIDS, because only a bad God would let them suffer needlessly. If it is not bad that people die of AIDS, then curing them isn’t good.
Or, I wouldn’t have a soldering iron lying around the house. Or, I would teach my kid not to grab hot things. Or alter the physical structure of reality so that soldering irons would not burn flesh. God has all of the above options. Or, the aforementioned ba-zaming said kid into grownup-hood without the 2nd-degree burns.
He made AIDS as a virus, too. Saying “he did” does not answer why he did, which was my fux0ring question in the first place.
Yes, you can. That’s the reason that the problem of evil has survived for so long.
If so then of course he will say God is a big jerk. Everyone praises God when He is good to them, but forsake Him when something bad happens. The Lord gives and the Lord takes, live with it.
I didn’t mean to imply that God was a man, only that he is a tyrant (assuming, for the sake of this debate, that he exists at all).
In my opinion, God is a figment of man’s imagination, present only because human beings need to explain the unexplainable.
If, as you apparently do, you believe that God (the Judeo- hristian model) exists, and that he created right and wrong, good and evil, then you are correct that might makes right. I happen to believe that good and evil (positive and negative, if you will) are intrinsic values in the universe, existing independently of power. We choose one or the other (usually both over time) and reap the rewards or suffer the consequences of our choices.
The Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler comparisons were intended to show not that God is a man, but that his behavior (read the book of Job as one small example) is that of a tyrant. An almighty tyrant, perhaps, but a tyrant nonetheless. In Job the Almighty allows Job’s entire family, wife, children, grandchildren, to be destroyed to teach Job a lesson in humility. I won’t even ask you how this is just, because I’m sure your answer could not surprise me. As for “riling people up,” I am in no way trolling here. I believe what I said, and you are free to refute it.
You’re skipping around the question I posed, which was how are things like diseases, particularly ones which kill children before they reach an age at which they could be responsible for the consequences of their own “free will” actions, teaching them anything at all? It seems to me that the only thing they may learn is that the protection from harm they are told that the innocent receive (guardian angels, you know) is a fable and that God cares not a whit for them except as flails with which to punish their errant parents.
Again, my original coment regarded children. I have no qualms about adults suffering the consequences of their own actions, although I have some trouble with the idea that AIDS is a just punishment for the “sin” of homosexuality, as some people believe (I do not impute that belief to you, I don’t know what you think about that). But pediatric AIDS, and diseases such as cystic fibrosis and others I enumerated before, as inflicted on children, are simply unjust if there is a power that could prevent them and chooses not to.
But if we are honorable, we do our best to prevent injury to another, particularly children. Again, the god on whom so many rely does not hold out his hand to prevent the injury to a child when the human father (unless he is the injurer) would do so without hesitation if he were able. Adults are on their own, I get that. But children should be protected. That we can’t always protect them is not the consequence of their own failures, so the god who has the power (in your apparent theology) to protect them has a duty to do so. That’s the way I see it. Obviously you disagree.
In human terms that’s called entrapment. People behave according to their nature. You appear to believe that that nature is god-given. “Free will” is a cop-out. How free is your will if the consequence of exercising it in opposition to God is eternal agony?
I assume you mean behaving as God wants us to. We are only honest, peaceful, truthful, etc., according to you, because we fear the punishment for stealing, killing, lying.? That’s a common belief, but I think people behave kindly toward one another because it is in their own best interest to do so. If you steal, kill, lie you may rightly expect others to treat you the same way. Of course there will always be thieves, killers and liars, but we have our own means of dealing with them. Fear of punishment, even eternal punishment, never stopped anyone from committing a crime. Of course the belief of many (unfounded IMO) that saying, “Sorry, God,” between the last sin and the last breath gets you off the hook and into Paradise actually promotes bad behavior.
So Matt. 5:22 (…danger of hell fire), Matt. 9:43-44 (…if thy hand offend thee) and numerous other references in both the Old and New Testaments don’t mean what they say? Your theology appears to be somewhat out of the mainstream. Or am I incorrectly assuming that you are a Christian?
If that’s true, and he has the power to make it otherwise, the OP is correct. God is a big jerk!
So if your father beats the shit out of you, belittles you, and barely feeds you enough to live he’s still okay because he gave you life? I don’t think so.
The condition of the world today, the suffering of innocent children, all the evils that exist are acceptable as just “how things are” IF there is NO god. If there IS one who could have made things, or US better and didn’t, he alone is to blame for the outcome. That’s just my opinion.
Oh, and Deathstatic, I had no idea that my last post was number 666. I assure you, though, that I am NOT the Evil One.
“That’s the reason that the problem of evil has survived for so long.” —robert
Hang on. We’re talking about suffering, not evil. Evil has only existed as long as man. Suffering is man’s inheritance for his turning away from God’s will.
There is no promise in ANY religion that “If you believe what we believe, then you will never again know pain or suffering.” The God of Christ certainly doesn’t promise that. At least, not in this lifetime. His promise is that through faith in Him, man will regain his inheritance of Paradise, free from suffering and surrounded by love eternal.
It is this promise that gives those who believe comfort and strength to continue in the face of the suffering and cares of the world. I’m telling you, the suffering of life is, or can be, only a fleeting, temporary thing.
I don’t KNOW why God made AIDS. Or cancer. Or Alzheimers. No one does. No one ever will. There is a possibility that it has some unknown, unseen benefit elsewhere and that its effect on people is an unfortunate side effect.
“Well, why didn’t He make it so it didn’t?” I don’t KNOW. What I just said was wild speculation on my part. And that’s all ANY answer will ever be. I promise I’ll ask God when I see Him face-to-face, but by then I won’t be able to come back and tell you.
Though I agree that there isn’t a truly objective moral standard, because of cultural, historical, and even personal variations, I can’t agree that morals were originally defined by God, since I am unable to believe in God.
I do agree with robertliguori that if we are able to judge God as good, we must be able to judge him as bad. If we say that God is good, we are either making a judgement or parroting what we’ve been taught to say, without any real understanding. The way I interpret the God represented in the Christian Bible, he is as at least as bad as good. Note that I don’t presume to judge a God that I believe literally exists–that would be reckless in the extreme. I’m judging a concept, a flawed one whose time, in my view, has come and gone.
There are many, at this point in civilization, who understand morals as deriving from expedience, real or imagined. Rules about incest, violence, diet, intoxication, etc. originally arose in response to the perceived consequences of those actions to society. They were dictated to the general populace by people who said they were given by God, and the populace bought it, for the most part. They vary according to time and place. Some of us have come to see morals as practical rather than divine in origin, which I suppose is altering the definition. No, it isn’t God’s fault that we’ve done that–I don’t see it as a fault at all. I think it’s to our credit that we’ve done that.
I would not have permitted any child to suffer at the hands of an abusing parent, for example. Free will may allow one person to do evil, but it doesn’t justify injury to the innocent.
Ok? I thought we were having a surprisingly mature and reasonable conversation. It’s not often you can go this long without the non-believers calling the believers ignorant and stubborn, or the believers calling the non-believers hell-bound pagan heathens. And I didn’t realize I was talking in circles. I thought I was doing a pretty good job at staying on the side of logic and trying to keep everything linear. I didn’t even quote Bible passages, because I know people don’t appreciate that in these debates. Please point out where I’ve started looping, and maybe I can clarify things.
That’s the reason that the problem of evil has survived for so long.