That directly contradicts your link: “The physical world, in which we now live, was created to provide a classroom for young souls to learn about themselves and others.”
Making up random nonsense and changing your stance from post to post is not an effective way to argue … .
Another response to the question of suffering that I hear frequently is that those who suffer the most often have the most faith in God and are generally more at peace than those who aren’t suffering. People who believe this usually cite inspirational “Chicken Soup for the Soul” stories about handicapped people who run marathon races and rescue kittens stuck in trees. Suffering, they say, not only makes those people stronger but they inspire the rest of us to have faith in God when we’re suffering.
But there are plenty of people who had loads of faith in God who’s stories don’t make into the “Chicken Soup for the Soul” series. They don’t because they end up suffering horribly and tragically, with no happy ending until death arrives.
God doesn’t give you more than you can handle…until he decides to kill you.
Congratulations. You’ve just rationalized away the idea of right and wrong.
If all pain is meaningless because we are all eternal souls then why is it wrong to hurt another human being?
I can’t help but notice that we keep using a Christianity-centric (perhaps Islamic-centric as well) view that God (if it exists) is for some reason supposed to be benevolent. A lot of folks are saying, “well, if God is an evil prick, then that’s not a god I would want to believe in.” If one actually believes in God, though, it’s not really a choice as to whether or not to believe. Belief is belief. It’s not a lifestyle or a diet. You can’t just change it. People these days may change their religion every other week, but theoretically religions are supposed to reflect the true beliefs of their followers, who would stop following if their beliefs diverted from the religion’s tenets. It’s possible to have a cruel, capricious God, and still believe in that god. Supposedly, people who believe in a particular deity do it because they actually, really do believe in it, not just for some expected reward.
Look at the Old Testament God. Cruel and capricious as hell (even though the idea of hell wasn’t there at this point). Singles out an entire group of people, a “chosen people,” to toy with, letting the crap get persecuted out of them, making them walk through the desert for a ridiculous length of time, among other things. Decides for the hell of it to come down and kill the first born of a separate group because it was screwing with the first group. This is the kind of God that you were when you were playing Sim City and, after spending a huge portion of the game building your town into a metropolis, decided to subject it to fires, floods, and a big alien robot. Despite this, there are a lot of folks that believe in this kind of god. They’re called Jews. (Yes, I realize I am grossly oversimplifying Judaism, Jewish culture and Jewish mythology here)
It’s not surprising that Judaism produces so many agnostics and atheists (I happen to be one of these “spiritually agnostic, culturally Jewish” folks). That said, I know a number of Jews who are pretty religious, and they don’t live in fear of God. They just accept the idea that we’re not supposed to know why God does what God does. Maybe it’s out of cruelty or good fun. Maybe there’s some other reason, a reason that’s actually pretty good and makes sense once you hear it directly from God. Hard to say unless you get contacted by the big guy directly. Or maybe the answer is revealed to you after you die.
Saying “that’s not the kind of God I want!” is not an argument against there being a cruel God. The argument of “If God is real, then there shouldn’t be hatred and tragedy” also fails, because it’s fully possible that God thinks amputees and burn victims are hilarious.
But if God is so cruel, how are we supposed to love and worship him? By just focusing on the flowers and rainbows and lollipops?
Why are we supposed to love God? 
Then again, love doesn’t always happen for good reasons. I’ve known women who stay with the men who beat them, and abused children who cry at their sadistic parents’ funerals.
Maybe people love God for when He/She/It isn’t cruel. If God has been beating the crap out of you for most of your life, and then for one day decides to be nice and give you that big raise, you know what people say? “Thank God!”
Well, the 10 Commandments tell us that if we want his steadfast love, we’ve got to love him back and keep his law. I’m just saying…it’s kind of hard not to be a blasphemer if God finds mutilation and torture hilarious.
It’s not just Christians who talk about God having love for his creation.
And it doesn’t make sense. It would be one thing if people would acknowledge that their love for God doesn’t make sense. But instead they rationalize it in a million contradictory ways, causing non-believers to drift further and further away from them and their god.
Bad dream, you mean. According to your own records, you didn’t have an NDE.
I should have said the evil, then. I am sure most understood.
That is not what I said. Nor did I change right and wrong. You don’t wish to understand I guess.
I think that’d go hand in hand with aggressive* monotheism : upon the consolidation of manygods into monogod, the one god naturally had to take the powers of all the minions, and even be more powerful than the pantheon combined. Otherwise the religious pissing contest would be all skewed in favor of pantheism : they could just zerg the monogod, or something.
So you start with a single Gawd that knows more, can do more, and is less of a random evil jerkwad than the older gods of the neighbouring tribes. Considering the hijinks of the Roman gods, the latter is a far cry from omnibenevolence, but still ;).
From that point on, whenever the monotheistic group encounters another religious group, be they pantheists or monotheists as well, the Monogod can’t but take from them whatever attributes He doesn’t have yet - if He’s the one true God, He must beat all the other gods, He can’t be the one true God if some other god can, I dunno, stop the Sun dead in its tracks and He can’t.
Since Buddha is omnibenevolent, and Odin is omniscient (or nigh-omniscient ? I must confess my Norse lore ain’t what it used to be. Skald, an expert counsel if you please ?), and there’s a god out there for every single power and every natural phenomena, well… overtime, you’re bound to wind up with an omni* God.
So, IMO, the omni* tradition comes from missionary PR, simple as that. You can’t convert anyone to your faith if your God ain’t better than theirs.
*not in the sense of being warlike, mind you, but in the sense of aiming to convert other people to the creed - a Christian novelty.
That wasn’t the question. The question was, why do atheists point to such comparatively mild examples of suffering, when clearly trying to stress a point about the types of severe suffering that exist?
Compared to the eternal torment of hell as laid out in the Judeo-Christian traditions?
Um, yes, Diogenes.
The Abrahmic God, by all accounts, does have such power. Your argument rests on a baseless assumption that you know the will of God. You clearly don’t.
Huh? Where on earth did I argue that?
If you are so poorly versed in these topics that you’ve never read the Abrahamic traditions’ accounts of hell, you are hopelessly ill-informed to be even participating in this discussion.
Again, who is arguing this? Are you in the right thread?
Because nothing more is necessary. Unlike you, they don’t regard such things as rape and torture and the Holocaust as “silly” ( and by doing so, you demonstrate one of the many reasons religion is evil ). Nor have you presented evidence that sucking up to your demon god won’t result in being thrown into Hell anyway.
Yep, it’s patently absurd. The Abrahamic traditions talk about existence being eternal. Life on earth is merely a transitive, temporary state. Now, if you were to ask me if letting gang members beat me up would lead to an eternal paradise once my transitive earthly existence is over, then yes, I would give it serious consideration.
I have absolutely no idea.
“But heaven doesn’t really exist!”, if true, is not a relevant argument to this discussion.