There’s a difference between allowing something to happen and causing something to happen; I do not believe that God caused the Holocaust to happen, but I do believe that God, upon examining the fact that the Holocaust was to occur without any intervention, opted to not intervene, and allow humankind to handle such a tragic event on their own.
Going by your metaphor, it would be like the parent of a kid allowing their child to touch the hot flame and be burned by it in order to show that fire is hot and bad to touch, not like the parent of a child forcing third degree burns onto the kid.
Again, at some point the discussion ceases to be about the nature of God’s benevolence and more about what level of maturity humanity is at and what constitutes a level of self-danger that requires parental intervention.
I would certainly hope that I haven’t given you the impression that I empathize with the beliefs of Moral Majority types, and if I have, I apologize profusely, as that was not my intention.
As always, I prefer to think that God takes a non-interventionist stance towards things such as the Trump election; rather than intervening directly to prevent Trump from being elected, God would rather see us deal with the consequences of, err, a person like Trump being elected, and grow collectively as a result of it.
I frequently recourse to the idea that the last year or so has all been a collective fever dream and that we’ll all hopefully wake up some time soon.
Really? If The Holocaust is on the “touching fire to learn a lesson” side of the scale, please describe to us the utterly horrendous event equal to “the parent forcing third degree burns on the kid” that might convince your god to maybe lend a hand. :eek:
I was saying that instead of forcing third degree burns on the child, God would instead opt to let them touch the fire to learn that it is hot and burns them.
Which is the difference between causing the Holocaust to happen and allowing the Holocaust to happen.
But the question remains: How large a tragedy would it take for your god to step in and do something, if The Holocaust wasn’t horrendous enough?
Ever hear of the term “Red Shirt”? On the show Star Trek they would be the nameless(for the most part) security personnel that were almost guaranteed to be the ones killed to push the story along. It seems to me that the Jews, Gypsies, gays and all the other people killed in The Holocaust are the “Red Shirts” that are killed just so the important people can learn a lesson in your version.
I don’t know how large of a tragedy it would take for God to step in and physically intervene in the universe, but I would appreciate it if you stopped getting dangerously close to accusing me of considering Jews, Roma, and LGBT to be “unimportant” people.
I’ve done no such thing. If I was convinced that your god existed, then I would be accusing it of considering people as nothing more than faceless pawns to teach a select people some sort of “lesson”.
My dead relatives, and the dead first wife and children of my friend’s father sure appreciate God’s little lesson. You believe that this monster is a god of love? That’s sick.
Interesting is a euphemism for not made up out of whole cloth, in other words not total bullshit. Fine for fiction, not so fine for the real world.
Not by other people, by the culture. Don’t you think it is odd that your leap of faith wound up in a standard kind of religion? A variety of which is believed in by most of our culture? Don’t you think your leap might wind up in Hinduism if you lived in India, and Islam if you lived in Pakistan?
You might be surprised at the number of theists who think they have real evidence.
If you look back at the first part of the Bible, you’ll find faith is nowhere in evidence - and did not have to be, since they had lots of evidence of God. God was angry at Moses for striking the rock since that gave the audience an out - the hitting of the rock caused the water to flow. Without that, the evidence for God was more clear. Faith only became a necessity when we get closer to the events and the evidence is not there.
If Jesus thought faith was such a good thing, he wouldn’t have done his miracles, would he?
I said nothing about forcing anyone to do anything. If you want someone to believe in you, you could force him to, which gets into free will issues, but at least you can provide evidence that you exist.
The multiple faiths in a vacuum might be okay, but over the last 2,000 years or so the multiple faiths did a good job of killing each other. Does God want that too?
And don’t tell me that God wants this or that - one of the problems is that all these faiths tell us god wants contradictory things. Since no one elected you Pope, what you think God wants ain’t going to fly.
#2 - joke. Though on the order of the stuff in the 10 Suggestions. As for #3, I think all of it is mortals manipulating spiritual beliefs. Every last bit. If you don’t, you can maybe tell me the way of determining which parts of holy books are inspired and which are not. Some are obvious parables, but was the resurrection real or a story? How about the earthquakes and rising of the dead at the time which no one seemed to notice?
I’m sure you could start an excellent church with this uplifting philosophy. God’s word as the asteroid crashes into Earth: “It’s okay, I’ve got spares.”
My thought is that if there is a creator god, he probably created the universe for the benefit of a race in that galaxy they just found that got formed only a billion years after the Big Bang. Why wait for 14 billion years for us? We are just the accidental byproducts of a universe fit for life. We can only hope that he isn’t done with his real people and decides to shut things down.
Your god gets lonely.
God is defined as the greatest possible.
A being who does not get lonely is greater than a being who does, all other things being equal.
Therefore, your god is not a true God. QED.
My kids in their mid-20s were a hell of a lot more mature than our civilization as a whole. Plus, what maturing we have done (usually not destroying cities for the principle of the thing) has come as governments have retreated from being religiously based.
How do you tell? If god is the source of morality, which many believe, how can the morality you believe in which tells you to reject the zealots is what God really wants? You can make an excellent secular argument for it, but not a good religious one. They may fail any test you give them, but so would the religious leaders you do accept. You should study what jolly folks Popes from 600 years ago or so were.
Love in general or love of god? Atheists have plenty of love, very often. At least as much as believers. Are you saying salvation of the normal Christian variety has nothing to do with it? That is not something I’m going to argue with.
He might tell us it was wrong. Remember, bigots from 200 years ago found Biblical justification for their bigotry. Bigots about other things do so today.
Your God never even said don’t touch the fire. Your god lit the fire and stood around whistling while the kids got burns.
My kids managed to learn that fire is hot without getting third degree burns. I suppose we were better parents than God. If there is a CPS for planets, how can we report this schmuck?
Wow, what a horrific fucking monster (God, not you). You know how some parents don’t vaccinate, and then their children die of preventable diseases? This is like that except a million times worse, because those parents at least have the moral luxury of not knowing with 100% certainty that their failure to vaccinate their children will specifically cause their children to die. God knows. God lets it happen anyways. For thousands upon thousands of years, he lets people die horribly of these defects… In order to teach us a lesson?! That’s horrifying! What a fucking disgusting monster.
If I set up a huge pit full of fire and spikes in the center of my home with no safety mechanisms and let my children crawl around that pit, knowing full well that some of them will at some point fall in, that’s not good parenting. That’s not just bad parenting, that’s a cause for murder by neglect charges! The difference between causing the holocaust to happen and allowing the holocaust to happen is not very large, morally. If someone gives me a button to stop the holocaust without causing any further harm (which any omnipotent god could easily do), and I don’t press that button, any sane individual would consider me a complete and utter monster who is complicit in the slaughter of millions.
Not that it matters, because…
Congratulations, you have described something which is utterly indistinguishable from something that doesn’t exist. And if you insist that it will continue to be undetectable, then it is not distinguishable from something that does not exist even in principle. Why would anyone posit a being like that? Why would someone posit anything like that existing? That’s a being whose existence you cannot back up with any evidence at all. Why believe?
Imagine an alternative universe where there’s no such thing as fatal genetic defects in infants to begin with. It’s not a hard universe to imagine. Would that universe be better than a universe which had fatal genetic defects in infants for millions of years before humans eventually stepped in and fixed it?
If so: god could have created that universe, and instead created this one. Why?
If not: would the universe be better if god had created more fatal genetic defects that we could eventually step in and fix?
Imagine an alternative universe where there’s no such thing as murder; where humans are fundamentally incapable of conceiving of the actions necessary to kill one another. Would that universe be better than a universe where most of humanity’s history is painted in the blood of other humans?
If so: god could have created that universe, and instead created this one. Why?
If not: would the universe be better if the holocaust had killed 3 billion people instead of 6 million people? After all, it’d be a much better lesson to the rest of us, wouldn’t it?
Seriously none of this makes any sense given the premise of a loving god. You can’t just handwave it away by arguing that “god wants us to learn on our own”. The point where someone dies is the point where they are physically incapable of learning anything ever again in any way that would be useful to them. All the jews who died in the holocaust? They didn’t learn shit from being gassed to death, other than “wow, life sure is pretty shit” and “oh so this is what dying of cyanide poisoning feels like”. Society as a whole might have learned something, but lessons taught to “society as a whole” have a way of not sticking very well, as the entire rest of the mid-20th century went on to prove. The holocaust did exactly fuck-all to establish a world without genocide. This is a phenomenally bad argument from front to back.
The problem with the general idea is that the more mistakes you allow someone to make, and the more serious the consequences of those mistakes are, the worse it becomes to step in. The former example is fairly harmless. That said, a parent who doesn’t pick up their child when their child falls into the path of a rolling boulder is a fucking moral monster, and that needs to be part of the calculus here. You can’t just excuse literally anything that way. If we’re assuming someone who is paternalistic and cares about us, they should, y’know, care about us.
You’re not going to find many people willing to take that axiom here, for the same reason you won’t find many people willing to take the axiom of “there is an invisible intangible dragon in my garage”.
When did humanity reach “maturity” in your eyes? In the 1940s, in the gas chambers? In the 1950s, in the Gulags and killing fields? In the 1960s, in cambodia? In the 1970s, in Vietnam? In the 1980s, in Guatemala and San Francisco? In the 1990s, in Rwanda? In the 2000s, in Iraq? In the 2010s, in Syria?
I think God would rather see us defeat misguided bigotry on our own, rather than constantly recoursing to a higher power to take care of it for us.
Well good for you! You are willing to rationalize your faith into a part of your mind where it doesn’t affect your thought processes. This tends to not work very well - all of reality is interwoven in such a way that lying to yourself about one thing makes it very difficult to be right on other things. If your epistemology is broken on this one thing, there is no reason to believe it is not equally broken on other things. If you’re willing to break the rules in order to sneak in one superfluous axiom, would you not be willing to do the same again later, if you found another unnecessary or nonsensical axiom you really wanted? I dunno, it seems like a really bad idea. There are good reasons to reject the “axiom of faith”.
And another thing:
Can you explain how your faith is different from the faith of the 9/11 hijackers? I mean, clearly they don’t draw this magisterial line you do, but the act of faith itself is a root cause of their problems.
To what end, though? What is the metaphysical value in developing technology that relieves humanity of genetic disorders? Say this technology results in increased abortions as we get better at identifying problem genes in utero. Or more people sterilizing themselves? Why would God want us to go down this path?
I’m intrigued by your thoughts on God because they are similar to ideas I bandied about as I came to terms with my non-belief. Eventually I had to be honest with myself and admit that that belief in a non-interventionist but paternalistic deity satisfied my emotional desires more than anything else. The belief fell apart when I probed it intellectually.
If a god exists, what is the likelihood that people could accurately surmise its motives, its limits, its plans? I’m not all that impressed with our collective abilities to get stuff in the real-world right, but in the supernatural plane? Forget it. I think this is where I’m inclined to see religious folks as irrational. It’s not their beliefs per se, but their confidence that their beliefs represent Truth.
Yeah, I wish he’d stop doing that, and find another teaching method. Causing or allowing, it wouldn’t describe anything that deserves the title of God if onmi-benevolence is one among many of his traits. Any decent human would intervene if they thought it possible to do so and prevent. Is this your take on natural disasters too?
And if this is how he treats his favorites, imagine what he has in store for me when I’m not even a member of his fan-club, and haven’t been since a child, and only then because I hadn’t bothered to read the book for myself, but none of them make any sense to me. Assuming our species could survive an all out world-wide nuclear Holocaust, think what few that might survive would actually find solace in he only allowed it, he didn’t cause it? And if we are around when our sun starts to run out of energy, in your mind, our task is to figure out how to re-light it too?
Not sure how anyone could find solace in the biblical god, thinking he’s the real deal, out of all the gods to pick from, but yet this is the omni-benevolent bad-ass that does it for many, and wins their hearts over. You have since re-read the bible as an adult, or a good portion of it, correct?
Before your conversion, think that avowed atheist for nearly ten years really best described you? If so, what happened to those arguments? How did they lose validity to you?
If God refuses to intervene to correct some of the worst monstrosities and horrors, then he might just as well not exist at all. You’re describing a totally passive entity, as in Deism, who set things up and is now letting it run its course.
To me, that makes such a God complicit in the horror, just as any human bystander who might avert a catastrophe – say, but throwing a life-buoy to someone who is drowning…but chooses not to – takes on a moral burden.
Also, no, God isn’t totally passive in this. As “creator of the world,” he set up hurricanes and earthquakes. He doesn’t just “let the child discover what it is to be burned.” He lit the fires and sent them toward us.
You might have an argument, when applied solely to human-caused woes, such as the Holocaust, but not with regard to “Acts of God.”
Fair enough… But when you posit an all-knowing and all-powerful God, then you describe a moral agent with knowledge and ability, who, nevertheless, chooses to let horrible things happen, and that reflects very poorly on that entity.
I apologize also; I seem to be tarring you with their brush, and that isn’t fair. You hold a completely different order of beliefs, and must not be judged by their sins. I’ll try harder to respect the (important!) difference between your stance and theirs.
(That said, they’ve done a lot of peeing in the theological pool. That’s one of the reasons I won’t go in the water!)
I can actually agree with this, as I hold democracy to be a higher value than the actual specific outcome of any given election. So long as the process was fair, and no one was prevented from voting, then the principles of popular choice and self-representation are paramount. I’d resent God for influencing the result, just as much as I resent it from the Russians!
Actually a benevolent parent usually steps in WAY before millions of their children endure horrific suffering, so we’re really talking about the difference between a heartless asshole and a heartless asshole who doesn’t even have a vague inclination to keep our species alive.
One thing I’ve noticed about theists and the Problem of Evil is that the definition of “benevolent” rapidly degrades down from “actually cares and wants good things for us” to “is possibly not literally instigating holocausts himself.”
When I first read the Bible (at the age of 29), when I came to the bit where it says the flood began In the 600th year of Noah’s life, on the 17th day of the 2nd month I thought … a MAP! The story contains numerical data from which a map of a voyage can be calculated! When the Egyptian Old Kingdom collapsed into a prolonged period of anarchy it seems that refugees left Egypt and sailed to the Aegean. The numerical data calculates out to a voyage from Heliopolis in Egypt to the Isle of Patmos in the Aegean. This happened around 2,200 bc. An interesting fact is that close to Patmos is a small island called Arkoi. The story of Noah getting drunk and Ham seeing him in the nude and calling in Shem and Japheth who, with their backs to their father, covered his nakedness with a cloak is interesting. Ham is Crete, Shem is Cyprus, and Japheth is Sicily. Noah’s nakedness is the peninsular on which Athens stands. The cloak is the land mass of Greece south of Athens.
Picture the Bible as a country through which one travels. Most of the inhabitants understand their environment by what is apparent to them. However, as you journey through this land you come across caves into which tne inhabitants never venture. On investigating you find that there is a secret “underworld” … inhabited by sophisticated intellects who have a very different world view to the above ground residents. IESOUS CHRISTOS, the Greek name of Jesus, anagrams to OSIRIS SET CHOUS, ‘chous’ is a Greek word meaning “a measure of capacity equal to 12 cups”. This anagram could, of course, be a coincidence … but I don’t think it is.