Demanding “faith” makes no moral or logical sense. There’s nothing particularly noble about demanding obedience either, but at least that would be logically comprehensible if he was ever willing to clearly state what his orders are. How can you obey someone who won’t tell you what he wants you to do? Why does an omimax god need obedience anyway?
An omnimax god doesn’t need to play a long game. Any goal which accomplished by short term “horrible-ness” can be effortlessly and instantly accomplished without any horribleness. There is no excuse for childhood leukemia, or harlequin babies or serial killers or holocausts. Calling evil and suffering a means to God’s end ignores the fact that God doesn’t need any means to achieve an end. All he has to do is will it. If there is an omnimax God, then all evil is God’s will and all of it is unnecessary.
If there were clear evidence for the existence of God, it would be as pointless to believe in him as it is to believe that the sky is blue. The point of faith is believing in something for which there is no evidence.
Praising God is for the benefit of the praiser, not God.
Similarly, obedience is for the benefit of the obeyer, not God.
That is arguing from ignorance–just because you cannot imagine an excuse does not mean there is not one.
That’s something added by denominations that believe in Christian exclusivity. Most Christians do not believe that.
This makes no sense whatsoever. What’s the virtue of believing in something with no evidence? Why should I? Why should anyone get a cookie for believing something they ave no good reason to believe? Why should anyone be denied a cookie for not believing something they have no good reason to believe? I can’t see any moral justification for making salvation contingent on a random guess as to which one of an infinite number of possible gods, ultimate truths or answers – all with exactly the same amount of evidence – is the “right” one. This is no different from God saying, “it makes no difference what kind of person you are. In order to get to Heaven,you have to guess what number I’m thinking of between zero and infinity. You get no hints. Go.”
How so? What if I feel just fine without either praising or obeying God. Why does God care?
It’s not a question of imagination. I’m arguing syllogistically from predicates, not from ignorance. It is logically impossible for an omnimax God to allow suffering. To say that there’s a necessity for evil or suffering is to say that God is not omnipotent. To say that God chooses to allow it even though he doesn’t have to is to say he’s not omnibenevolent. Anything God can accomplish by allowing suffering, he can accomplish instantly and effortlessly without allowing suffering. If God is all-powerful, all suffering is unnecessary. If God is all-good, he logically can’t allow unnecessary suffering (as soon as he does, he stops being all-good).
The existence of suffering demonstrates syllogistically that God is eithernot omnipotent, not omnibenevolent, or – one more possibility – not omniscient.
Of course, it can also mean he simply doesn’t exist.
Nobody judges a god. Whatever a god does, is whatever such a being decides it is. If not intervening with a creation to see what happens when you give them freewill is evil, who says it is evil? God says it is good, so it must be, since he defines those terms. Such a being could arbitrarily define different good/evil terms for his/her creation if they wanted. They do not need to be subject of their own rules. Omnipotence does not demand action.
Richard Wurmbrand, a Christian who had been kept in solitary confinement by the Soviets said it best. “No law is just, even if it is divine, because all laws fix equal standards on men of unequal abilities in unequal situations.”
There’s no evidence for god though, so it’s all a bit futile.
You’ll have to ask those who believe that faith is important. I fall on the “works” side of Christian theology. I’m simply saying that faith can’t have evidence by definition, so it’s unfair to make that complaint about it.
That’s your choice. Advice is given, you can use it or ignore it.
And one more possibility: logic does not apply to God.
Same here. A “profession of faith”, without any works or actions, is just empty lip service and means nothing. I suppose that could be from my Catholic upbringing.
Are ‘acts’ more important than faith? What if I have the correct acts, but no faith? Is that just as good, or would I get less heaven than someone who had both? If not, why bother with the faith when the acts are all that matter?
No it isn’t. Belief without evidence is also by definition irrational. Why is such a thing held as anything but bad?
I’m not complaining about the definition. I’m asking why it has any moral virtue – or, perhaps more importantly – why the lack of faith deserves penalty.
Can I ignore it without penalty? Who’s giving this advice, by the way?
Again, ask someone who values faith. I am a Christian who values works. As told by the Good Samaritan story–it was the one who did good work that is saved, not the one who was a member of the correct religion.
Why should irrationality be bad? If I prefer green M&Ms to red, am I bad for being irrational?
I don’t believe there is a penalty. God is giving the advice.
We don’t really have that capacity. There’s too much infighting, corruption, historical emnity, greed, selfishnes, and so on.
If I have a sandwich and there is a starving person next to me, I have the capacity to give that person the sandwich.
I would think that humanity as a whole is against childhood hunger, or at least indifferent to it. However, since humanity as a whole has an excess of sandwiches and yet childhood hunger persists, I can only surmise that we don’t have the capacity to end it. Now, if I were a religious person, I may wonder why we were created without that capacity, and who to blame for that creative lapse.
Because logic does not permit it. It’s not something God can magic his way out of. Either the premises or true or they aren’t. If they’re true, then the necessary inferences are true. There’s nothing God can do about it. Saying logic doesn’t apply to God is like saying arithmetic doesn’t apply to God. It’s a senseless statement.
That might mean we have the capacity but allow it to be overshadowed by other things. Perhaps we were created with the capacity, but other faults exist as well.
You assert that a particular statement must be true or not. Why should that be accepted? Even in science there are statements that are not subject to binary logic. (Both “the electron is spin up” and “the electron is not spin up” may be false.)
God is an entity for which there is no evidence. Yet you are now asserting that God has a particular property: that he is subject to logic. So do you have evidence for this assertion, or do you deny that there is evidence about God?
Well that’s the point I was making earlier. It appears to be faith, not acts.
If I am a well-behaved atheist, but die saying “You know, there’s no evidence for God”, then Christians say all sorts of things could happen to me (including burning in Hell forever :smack:).
However every Christain I’ve met (possibly except Pleonast?) states that a genocidal maniac who sincerely repents on his deathbed will go straight to Heaven.
