The framing of this as whether anyone would begrudge Walker his comfort is obviously not the point. Of course he can choose to cope with this tragedy on a personal level any way he chooses.
The point is, to the extent some superstitious notion of God’s ineffable plan enters the debate on public policy, that’s where it must be challenged as nonsense.
Hell, the notion that racist murderers are part of God’s plan is small potatoes. Pence and Pompeo believe that crisis and war in the Middle East is foretold in Revelation, a precursor to the Second Coming. They regularly attend an “End Times” Bible study group, and these beliefs shape our foreign policy.
There is absolutely no reason you can’t do both. It’s part of God’s plan, and these bad people did bad things. It’s the same issue as noticing that the macroscopic world is deterministic, and yet people still make choices. The answer is just that their choices are already baked in.
It shouldn’t be hard at all to conceive of the idea that a God who knows everything that is going to happen can have a plan that takes into account the choices of humans, given that he knows what those choices will be. There is no reason this should mean that people should not try to influence those choices to make the world better. It’s not like the Bible isn’t full of people trying to stop evil people or giving advice on how one should act, after all.
It also shouldn’t be obvious to see that this is true in practice. No one who says “it was God’s plan” also stops looking for the natural cause. They try to help the doctors, stop the criminals, fix the safety hazards, etc. Hell, God’s plan could be in part to wake people up to these dangers.
The worst thing you can do to try and convince people that an atheist worldview is correct is showing a lack of compassion. If you can’t even sympathize when they have a grieving child, then when can you do so? Christians see this sort of uncompassionate atheism and recoil in horror.
Is it not the same when you encounter a Christian who feels the need to proselytize at a funeral? Their lack of compassion, seeing it as a place to recruit rather than caring about comforting the grieving, is disgusting. They likewise have their excuses for why it’s okay–that they have some higher cause to worry about–but it doesn’t stop it from seeming cruel and thus causing their target audience to hate them.
And the only reason this part of the debate lasted longer than 5 minutes was because these many “sharp minds” were so stubbornly resistant to the obvious (and only) way to resolve the fundamental logical contradictions inherent in their religious beliefs.
We can discuss the exact mechanism for Egyptian pyramids raising the bodies of Pharoahs from the dead - they did it thousands of years ago so we cannot say anything new about it - but 30 seconds of thought soon yields the fact that they were wrong for all of those thousands of years.
So now we wonder why they thought such obviously wrong thought and how those thoughts turned into a belief system that acquired an institutional momentum which became a religion that drained resources and bled their nation white.
So, we are not debating the obvious logical flaws - the relevance here is how it came to this, and how we can avoid such stupidity in the future.
Lots of things in religion are very much like conceptual viruses, they spread and are very difficult to cure and take many lives and are often beyond logical understanding.
Equanimity in the face of both good fortune and bad is, in my opinion, not something to be contemptuously dismissed as ignorant religiosity. A peaceful heart is characteristic of people with a deep spiritual practice, and in my experience it is rarely attained without a great deal of persistence, attention, and struggle. Being able to hold grief, fear, or the desire for revenge within a context of healing usually requires community support and it helps to have context, examples, history, ritual, and faith. Remember the Amish whose children were killed by a mass murderer?
Nothing about Christian faith is intrinsically passive nor unquestioning. Whether some choose to use it that way does not negate this.
I also find that the angry arrogance of people on this board who seem never to have had anything of spiritual significance ever happen to them, never felt comforted by communal ritual, never found richness and meaning in a religious tradition, and assume that the yes billions of humans who have, are grotesquely deluded and incredibly stupid compared to themselves, to be a bit laughable.
This comment supposes that religion is a requirement of feeling spiritual relief, that somehow religion has answers that are not available anywhere else in terms of community, family, support and guidance.
Quite simply it is not, in fact, for billions of us religion has been a destroyer of life, property and community values.
Even today it is used as a basis for discrimination and murder, and it is not an excuse to state that such people who practice religion in such ways are not ‘true’ believers or are not following the real spirit of god’s grace.
So, we ask, does Gods will’ mean we are predestined to certain courses and does this absolve us of fault for following such a path - in which case sin itself simply does not exist - or
Do we have ethical and moral responsibility for the choices we make because we always have self determined courses that we select.
No, it doesn’t But it seems to be a very strong component. I have been around people of deep religious/spiritual practice for five decades now. They are Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and sometimes interesting combinations of these. I don’t know anyone who does not have roots in some spiritual tradition who has the qualities of these people. This may be anecdotal evidence but it’s all I have, and I’m willing to stand by it.
Unfortunately, 2Bits, many “Believers” don’t really have a strong knowledge of what it is they so ardently believe. According to Scripture, God’s “Plan” was for humans to live a sinless, perfect life in the Garden of Eden which, for all practical purposes, was Heaven on Earth. Humans subverted “The Plan” by doing something that God specifically did NOT want or plan. Nothing has changed over the intervening millennia.
Jesus wasn’t big on mandates, but he did have one of great note. "This commandment I give unto you, ‘Love one another.’ " That’s basically “The Plan”. So, how are we doing? Well, based on empirical evidence, most of what humans do is NOT “The Plan”.
In the long run, God wins eventually. We can’t change that. But that doesn’t mean that He likes it when we delay His plan. He’d much prefer that we all just choose to be good to each other now.
In the long run, God wins eventually. We can’t change that. But that doesn’t mean that He likes it when we delay His plan. He’d much prefer that we all just choose to be good to each other now.
I suggest we refrain from applying such challenges to the publicly expressed personal beliefs of a black family member of a black lynching victim, especially since he’s already clearly stated that he’s angry about the lynching and wants the perpetrators brought to justice.
If some racist shitstain starts in trying to minimize the lynching with musings that "Oh yes it’s a very sad tragedy but in the bigger picture God has a plan for everybody so we shouldn’t be making such a big deal about it", then of course you can and should tear said racist shitstain a new one.
But getting on your high horse about the need to publicly “challenge” the black family member’s expressed belief as “nonsense” because you’re concerned about its hypothetical negative impact on “the debate on public policy”? That strikes me as getting a little too close to arrogant-asshole-behavior territory. And given that the family member is black and you’re not, you could be veering towards the particularly smelly area of white-condescension-arrogant-asshole-behavior too.
Right. As a POC myself (though not black), it makes me feel very cringy to see a bunch of white liberals look down upon black folks for being religious, and lament that those religious black people are important in the Democratic Party. And then turn around and go after the other side for racism (which, they definitely have, but way to completely ignore the log in your own eye).
Now I can’t for sure state that the posters here are white or liberal, but it’s something I’ve come across quite a bit. Though it could be I’m just tired of the racism in the Democratic primary.
Do people who trust in “God’s plan” believe in the literal Old Testament? Where God decided to do a hard reboot and wiped out 99.9% of humanity, not to mention most land-based life, in a flood? Not to mention a thousand other dickish plans the Old Testament God came up with. That’s not a God I’d want to trust in.
Do people who trust in “God’s plan” believe in the literal Old Testament? Where God decided to do a hard reboot and wipe out 99.9% of humanity, not to mention most land-based life, in a flood? Not to mention a thousand other dickish plans the Old Testament God came up with. That’s not a God I’d want to trust in.
