Before one can define a god, one must first prove that a god of some sort actually exists.
If religion helps you make sense of the world, or it gives your life meaning and makes you happier then that is cool.
However there has been a near extinction event for humans, probably from a super volcano. The species was down to a few thousand people about 70,000 years ago. That is not enough to fill the seats in a minor league baseball stadium, and that was all the humans on earth.
Also keep in mind homo sapiens are only 200,000 years old. Life is 3.8 billion years old. Agricultural civilization is only 6,000 years old. The industrial revolution (which gave birth to all the good things we take for granted in 2015) is only 250 years old. Major extinction events do not occur every 100 years, they occur far more rarely. Earth has had 5 mass extinctions (6 if you include the current one done by us). However that is only post-cambrian explosion. So every 100 million years or so there is a mass extinction for multi-cellular life (no idea if mass extinction events affected single celled life).
And what if you asked parents had a child who was born with a disease that caused her to live in screaming agony for 6 years, and then die?
Do you suppose those parents would say that the experience was worthwhile? And that is they knew that was the outcome, they would have chosen to have the child anyway?
Because this is the choice that this god had. He put these laws into motion, knowing that the result would be terror and misery for billions of people. He never had to have this particular child, he chose to do so a knowing the result.
Either this God is either a blind idiot or a psychopath.
If he started the universe but had no idea what the result would be and is unable to steer it, then he obviously isn’t a god by any standard. He is functionally no different for the big bang.
If he knew what the result would be and he can intervene but chooses not to, then he is a sadistic madman.
but
So, a rational-thinking individual might question that all of their personal experiences (and what they have read) are limited on their representation of what’s really going-on in the universe/world. Plus, you are looking at but a brief snapshot of time. Being generous and going with the (christian) accepted view that the world is only ~6000 years old and (again generously) assuming you are 50yo, that makes your views less that 1% of your total frame of reference of time. I don’t think it’s fair to say, “well I’ve seen 1% of the universe, therefore I KNOW this to be true”. If one agrees that the world is billions of years old (which many do), then all of man’s experiences are an infinitesimal view of reality. Additionally, keep in-mind that everything you are referencing was told to you by another man. Men make mistakes and often perceive things wrong or, at least, out-of-context.
Actually, I think you have it backwards. How the hell would anyone prove that an undefined thing exists. Or even demonstrate that it doesn’t exist.
“I’ve just proved God exists.”
“Okay, define your God.”
“This rock here. It exists. I define God as it. QED.”
I don’t think it is too much to ask theists to describe what the hell they are talking about - but usually they do think this is too much.
You know the drill. God inspired the Bible. Some of the Bible. God loves us and wants us to be happy except when we are not happy which is when he wants us to suffer for our own good.
And to top it off they ask us atheists to disprove a god they never quite can describe.
You really should read “Climbing Mt. Improbable” by Richard Dawkins. After you do so you won’t say such foolish things. Evolution looks nothing like throwing stuff in the air.
I’ve had similar thoughts to the OP, although I wouldn’t say I thought very deeply about them. I approach it this way: If I were a research biologist who just created some form of life in the lab, and say I was able to imbue some intelligence into that life. Would I demand that lab life to “worship” me? The very idea is repulsive.
First of all, the words that you put in quotes shouldn’t be in quotes, unless you use an ellipsis, because they come from two distinct speeches in different chapters of John’s Gospel.
More importantly, the two quotes that you merged here do nothing to justify what you wrote in the OP. Since you seem to need a reminder, here’s what you wrote: "
So we have a God as defined by Christianity who’s sole reason for making the universe and us was to give His only Begotten Son a big backyard to play in and an earthfull of pet humans that Jesus could demand worship from for Himself and His Old Man under threat of eternal torment if we don’t comply with the “worship Us for all eternity-or else”." Obviously the two quotes that you took from John don’t say the same thing as what you claim Christianity defines God to be, nor does any other Christian source.
Perhaps you should consider making fewer untrue claims.
I suppose it does. If one believes as I’m interpreting the OP, then God would be unable to create a universe where beings learn and develop without needing un-god.
I know of Christians who have this happen to them – horrible loss of a child in terrible suffering – a few times if they are born with a genetic defect. How they go on believing in Jesus and prayer when thousand of their prayers to Jesus failed is a completely mystery to me. Such is the power of delusion.
In response to the human extinction statement I posted, I seriously doubt man evolved to homo sapiens several times only to be completely wiped out. The odds of a human assembling itself even once is so infinitesimal as to be virtually impossible, so several times, well I’d say you have better odds of winning the PowerBall every week for the rest of your family’s life. I like to show people this image of a single protein molecule
and remind them that all these little atoms had to come together in just the precise order to make a single molecule and them quadrillions of these had to form playing the same odds just to make a single organelle in a cell and then quadrillions of these organelle molecules had to come together playing the exact same odds to make a single nucleus, cell wall, mitochondria, etc all knowing how to take up their individual functions to make the cell work properly – and you still have a dead cell lacking the spark of life. Then take a look at the human body and guesstimate what the odds are that a human body developed on its own playing these odds. Suffice to say I wouldn’t take those kinds of odds with me to Vegas.
I think you misunderstand my interpretation of the OP. its not some distant grand-nephew, but the same entity (soul, eternal being, whatever) that suffered is learning from that experience.
According to many astrophysicists, the answer is “we were starstuff,” an answer Job could never have understood.
Either that or it’s a Koan.
Uh, no. Western medicine existed long before 150 years ago. You may disagree with many of the methods used by doctors in earlier centuries and have quite reasonable grounds for doing so, but doctors certainly existed in those centuries.
You are throwing together a lot of claims here, and not making them specific. “For the vast majority of human history people were illiterate and sick”. Are you saying all people were illiterate and sick, or just some people? I’d imagine that at any moment in history, most people were not sick. Certainly if you’re saying that a majority of people were sick, the onus is on you to justify it. As for being illiterate, literacy rates varied greatly by place and time. While I personally enjoy being literate, I don’t suppose that the billions who lived in pre-literate societies were unhappy as a result.
Laying aside whether the “half died young” claim is true, the notion that a person who dies before 10 can’t learn any lessons is debatable, to put it mildly. Further, one must also consider whether such a person could teach, as well as whether he or she could learn.
Originally Posted by SeekerofTruth View Post
“God sent his only Begotten Son as a sacrifice to save men from their sin. If you do not believe in me you will perish in your sins.”
First of all, the words that you put in quotes shouldn’t be in quotes, unless you use an ellipsis, because they come from two distinct speeches in different chapters of John’s Gospel.
More importantly, the two quotes that you merged here do nothing to justify what you wrote in the OP. Since you seem to need a reminder, here’s what you wrote: "
So we have a God as defined by Christianity who’s sole reason for making the universe and us was to give His only Begotten Son a big backyard to play in and an earthfull of pet humans that Jesus could demand worship from for Himself and His Old Man under threat of eternal torment if we don’t comply with the “worship Us for all eternity-or else”." Obviously the two quotes that you took from John don’t say the same thing as what you claim Christianity defines God to be, nor does any other Christian source.
Perhaps you should consider making fewer untrue claims.
Seeker replies:
Let’s look at the quote, which, if you want to get picky, you’re right shouldn’t be in quotes:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
For what purpose, I ask?
So that God could put Adam & Eve in a garden and set them up to fail His command miserably by yielding to the temptation of a talking snake and eating the fruit, thus causing all of mankind to inherit Eve’s “original sin” and thus put all of mankind in need of being saved from their sin lest God be forced against His will to throw them into eternal flames with satan because they refused to believe…
I’m getting ahead of myself.
Because Adam and Eve sinned, this threw the entire planet (some theologians say the entire universe–apparently God isn’t the only one full of himself, even theologians feel this theological “need” to profess that Adam eating the apple was such a cataclysmic event that it infected the entire universe with sin. I’m really LOL through all this as I type it sounds so ludicrous.
Anyway, it became necessary for God to send His divine Son to earth to be born of a virgin so that His Son could be sacrificed as a ransom payment to redeem mankind and pay satan the debt God owed him in order to “buy back” the human race. Thus Jesus became our ransom payment by his death on the cross.
Like I said, you couldn’t make this stuff up, except someone actually did.
Your earlier post is factually wrong and logically incoherent. Here’s what you wrote:
“But if we take just one line, “Jesus Christ and him crucified for the forgiveness of sins” from Romans we still have an idea borrowed from pagan rituals dating back to the dawn of civilization that, as far as applying this idea of atonement to appease the wrath of God to Jesus, is still in its embryonic form and has less that 5 years or so (having been written circa 65 CE) to catch on to the whole Christian network before the temple is destroyed. Such a thing would be utterly impossible; to throw out this ridiculous concept Jesus died for us to a handful of followers and then expect the idea to explode all over the empire before Jerusalem gets sacked. Once Jerusalem was razed in 70 AD now it becomes a “necessity is the mother of invention” situation; now this handful of Christians need something, someone–anything to put this belief that God needs to have His anger appeased so we have to make some sort of sacrifice to Him. And that’s where this Jesus of Nazareth legend so beautifully fills the bill. Thus, over the next couple of centuries AFTER THE FALL OF THE TEMPLE the dogma of Jesus being a sacrifice for the sins of mankind slowly starts to dominate”
You begin by saying that you will begin by taking just one line from Romans. Unfortunately for you, the line you quote isn’t in Romans, or anywhere else in the Bible, so that would be another example of you being blatantly wrong. (Perhaps you were thinking of 1st Corinthians 2:1-2, which at least contains the first five words of the line you made up.)
More importantly, you never explain why you choose to look at only one line that isn’t from Romans, rather than all of Romans and the rest of the Pauline epistles. An intelligent approach would obviously consider the entirety of the available text. When we do that, it shatters your claim that Paul’s understanding of atonement and justification through Christ was in its embryonic form. The truth is the exact opposite. In Romans Paul gives us the longest, clearest, and most detailed exposition of the doctrine of justification found in the Bible. 11 chapters on the subject–that’s not “embryonic form”.
Continuing through your reign of error, you imply that we have to choose between either the doctrine of justification through Christ beginning with Paul when he wrote Romans, or beginning after the destruction of the Temple. There is another obvious possibility: Jesus taught the doctrine during his ministry, roughly 40 years before the destruction of the Temple.
I have never said the words that you attribute to me or anything like them.
Dammit! That’s why I had kids.
Wait, what? I’m sorry if I’m completely missing the point, but are you really arguing for creationism here?
First of all, these two statements would seem to contradict each other. Second, if you’re saying that Christians “have a monopoly on divorce, neurosis, lying, …” that would mean that no non-Christian has ever divorced, had a neurosis, or lied. Do you really want to defend what you said, or should we classify it as yet another false statement on your part?
To be fair, it probably suggests that Christians experience the vast majority of divorce, neurosis, fraud, yadda yadda yadda.
Which is still entirely false.
ooooookay, let’s take these one by one:
You got me. it’s 1 Corinthians. Checking Bible Hub somehow the words got jumbled and spit out the wrong epistle. But isn’t this really like semantics? Does it really matter which epistle Paul’s words come from. Isn’t the message still the same? Doesn’t this become just petty nitpicking to divert attention away from my point? :dubious:
Do you dispute that pagan rituals of human sacrifice to appease the gods’ anger dates back to when civilization began? I mean without going into a lot of useless rhetoric that diverts attention away from my point, can you just give a simple yes or no?
You’re saying Jesus said this 30 years or something before Paul, but how do we know that? What proof do you offer that Jesus said he was a ransom other than dragging out Mark, which was written 40 years after Jesus supposedly said it. I maintain, because there is no writing to the contrary, that the idea of Jesus as a ransom started with Paul; that before Paul the idea of Jesus being a ransom had no currency at all. If the idea started with Paul in Corinthians and it’s just a few decades before the temple is destroyed, then that is any rational person’s definition of an idea being in embryonic form.