I’d also probably spend my last few minutes being pissed at God, too, and I don’t think God would hold my outrage at Him against me. After all, even Jesus, through his words, “Why hast thou forsaken me?”, was questioning God about His apparent indifference toward him.
However, I think examples of death by “heartless indifference” can be explained through this passage:
No one knows when the time of their death will be. Most people will die around the time of the average life expectancy (75, or whatever it is). However, a few will needlessly die in vocanic eruptions, say, next month. The few deaths that result from the eruption can serve as a reminder of our mortality, and the possibility of us dying young, to the rest of us. This can impel us to make the most of our limited time on earth, and inspire us to act more Christ-like on this earth, while we still have the time. It’s possible that the good that results from people realizing their own mortality and being inspired to act, outweighs the collateral damage from these few unneccesary deaths.
So Adam was punished by God for disobeying one of God’s suggestions. Therefore Adam was given a choice of eating the apple or munching cabbage instead. Adam knew that God had told him not to eat the apple.
I conclude that:
Adam had free will *before * eating the apple.
The act of eating the apple is evil in itself.
Adam *knew about evil * before eating the apple.
The whole apple story is a tautological inconsistency.
Actually, eating the “apple” wasn’t sin in itself, it was God telling him not to, and him still eating it, that made it sinful. Did Adam know it was sinful to eat the fruit? Of course, God told him so right in the beginning. Does that equate to evil? Hmm… maybe, we aren’t told, we only know that it was going against God’s will (possible to be going against God’s will without being evil?). Did he know it was evil before he did it (If, in fact, it was evil)? We’re not told that, but it seems he didn’t.
And, may I point out that the term “tautological inconsistency” is an oxymoron?
You consider life as something that must be good and death as something that is not simply the end of life. Why?
You consider a vulcano or whatever event in nature, as something that is evil while all of this is only the course of nature = creation itself at work.
Why should creation at work always need to be in the advantage of the other parts of creation (humans, plants, animals etc…)
You picture the Creator of creation as if the Creator was a being. That is not the doctrine of some religions I now of.
You see the Creator as a being that in your view needs to intervene constantly with and within creation. Also inconsistent with the view of certain religions.
You abandoned a former thread of yours touching the same points, yet in the form of a specific critique on Islam.
Why do you abandon that discussion and then come back with the same under an other form?
You have misinterpreted that passage. The line is from Psalm 22. Supposedly, in those times the Psalms were so well known that one only needed to reference the first line to invoke the whole thing. The Psalm ends with the speaker offering praises and worship to ‘God’ in spite of his own suffering. This was not a sentiment of being forsaken, rather, it was a message showing that Jesus still felt the greatness and compassion of his god, despite his pain.
OK, we have here a loosely defined phenomenon. griffen2 makes the claim that the referent of these varied descriptions cannot exist because of the irreconcilability of the various claims and attempted definitions thereof.
Nope, doesn’t work that way.
Now if I were insisting that griffen2 acknowledge the existence of that referent, this would be a valid point. griffen2 could legitimately say “How can I profess a belief in something that has been described to me in self-contradictory ways?”
But this logical river doesn’t flow in both directions. It can be true that I have recognized in my own experiences some interconnected phenomena that I conclude are one and the same as that which gave rise to the G word in the first place. On that basis I can (and do) come to consider these phenomena to be God. That’s the name that has been applied. Well, that name and others. Have people over the millennia asserted things to be true of God which I don’t agree with? Yep. Have some of those things been mutually contradictory? Yep. That happens a lot when you’re dealing with abstractions.
In the thread from whence I came, I replaced “God” with “love” and made the tongue-in-cheek assertion that love doesn’t exist because you can’t see it under a microscope, find it when you dissect a bouquet of roses, etc etc…love is an abstraction and I doubt if anyone here would have any difficulty assembling a rich collection of mutually contradictory assertions about love, contradictory definitions of love, and so forth. I left off with the passing assertion that I could do the same with freedom, another abstraction that is hard to define and can easily tie you up in contradictions.
Many things are said about God which are ridiculous oversimplifications, reductionistic babytalk notions that try to make God concrete and mundane. To me, to assert that God is an entity looking upon us and having a train of thought, incorporating new data, coming to a conclusion on Tuesday, etc., is in the same basket as saying that God has a long greyish white beard. But is the universe something other than a cause-and-effect clockwork of randomness running down? Is there intentionality and a true sense of “I” in this universe, as opposed to deterministically caused dependent variables, effects of prior conditions? Yes, there is. Is the commonly shared idealistic notion of “that which is good” something that is viable, something that has purpose, meaning in itself, as opposed to perhaps being notions that any given one of us harbors purely as an artifact of our location in social space and history and which have no validity in a world of competitive powerstruggle and realpolitik? Yes, it is. Is there a mental/psychological/emotional process through which individuals become more aware of this goodness and intentionality and participate in it, become part of it, and experience this process as pleasant, a process given its own names one of which is “prayer”? Yep, been there, done that, will vouch for prayer as a process.
Did God dictate two contradictory stories of creation and two (or more) inconsistent stories of a primordial flood? Carve the ten commandments in pieces of stone? Intimidate Egyptians by personally making an appearance in the form of a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night? Personally decree it necessary that in order for him to forgive his sinful creation Man, a significant blood sacrifice had to be made to atone for the sins of Man, which he, God, took care of by becoming one of us in order to get hisself killed so that he could allow himself to forgive us after rising from the dead to sit at his own right hand in heaven? Is God a magician, all-powerful, who can and could say “Let evil depart” as easily as “Let there be light” and zip zingo every human social and ethical problem would be fixed up hunky dory? Is God all-seeing and all-knowing, perceiving every sparrow that falls and, like Santa Claus, knowing when you’re sleeping and when you’re awake and whether or not you’re good for goodness sake? Is God the compassionate shepherd and nurse and caregiver, loving and forgiving and wanting to make everything all right like your Mommy when you got a scraped knee, such that every hurt and injury is something God wants to make go away so everything will be all better and perfect? Aw, c’mon.
That which is God can (and has been)/be described in terms that deliberately avoid the G word or any references to divinity, supernaturality, magical sky pixies, pink unicorns invisible or otherwise, or “things that you just have to accept on faith”. Words is words. In a society where people do their own thinking and religion is organized for the purpose of doing a taxidermy number on their original referent in order to exhibit Holiness stuffed and mounted and defined in babytalk concrete parameters, people are likely to pick their own words for it all, or even never bother giving it a name, nor discussing it much with other people at all. But such is the flexibility of language: anything real can be put into more than one verbal container, described in more than one vernacular.
Language is flexible, yes – but finite. For me those verbal containers always turn out to be Klein bottles. But that’s okay too. The container is “flawed,” but that which it temporarily and inadequately contained still is.
Hence, we agree on the fact that evil isn’t necessary. So, why does it esist? And “because Adam ate the fruit” isn’t an explanation. God was under no obligation to let evil appear just because Adam disobeyed. That was God choice.
So, we’ve agreed upon the fact that evil isn’t necessary since God is omnipotent. You’re telling me that one can’t know the reasons and intentions of God for allowing evil in the present. If we can’t know them, why shouldn’t we assume that his intentions and reasons are evil rather than good? It seems a more logical explanation.
Besides, if you assume that God’s motives can’t be known, how comes you state to be able to say anything meaningful about Him? How would you know?
I don’t get it. It seems to me you’re saying exactly the same thing I did.
Then, if said love would prevent us from acting in an evil way, we would have lost our free will. After all, over the course of eternity, the probability of someone doing or intending to do anything (even some weird thing as having the desire to harm someone you love) becomes a certainty. Given an infinite time, anything will happen. If it can’t, it means that we have totally lost the ability to choose to do these things. Hence that we’ve lost our free will. Except, once again, if we assume, like in the case of Adam, that God can make free will and lack of evil compatible.
Then , we’re back to the original question. Why doesn’t he do so on earth? The most logical explanations (besides “there’s no god to begin with”) are : god doesn’t care about what happen on earth, or god is unable to prevent evil, or god is evil. And arguing that his motives are unknown to us, and not necessarily bound by our understanding of logic, plainly means that you too can’t know or say anything about god, as I already wrote.
To give an example: Would you commit an evil action towards your son, or someone that you truly loved? Do you have free will to do so?
[/QUOTE]
I forgot this part. Given an infinite amount of time, yes certainly, at some point I would have the irrationnal desire to harm this person. But even more likely, at some point I will stop loving this person. Will people in heavens able to stop loving God? If it’s impossible, then they have lost their free will.
Why would it be more logical? I don’t think we can make any correct assumptions of the sort, any more than we can make correct assumptions about the motives of the President. Sure, we can make assumptions, but we cannot say that they are truly what they are unless we claim to know what they are thinking. Moreso when you’re talking about the scale of things we cannot even imagine, over billions of years and the scale of the entire universe, we cannot even imagine to hold the thoughts of a million people at once, how can we say that we can even attempt to assume the motives of God?
Again, I’ve said that I don’t. I never claimed to know what God’s motives are. They might be for evil, sure, but not any more than it can be claimed that they were for good. And the thing is, I don’t really know. But hey, nobody said religion was a rational thing. That’s what I believe, and really, there’s nothing else I can do about it. But it still cannot be said that God is demonstrably evil, which is the premise of the OP.
Ability. You argue that in a place where you can commit evil actions (have free will), it wouldn’t be heaven. I argue that in a place where there are no evil actions, not the absence of the ability to commit evil actions, it would be heaven.
You assume an irrational human. Why?
Again, I agree that I can’t reason out why God is not evil, as much as you can’t reason out why God is evil, simply because we do not know the motives of God. As such, you cannot rule out the God exists, or that he is evil, because of the presence of evil, because we cannot know the motives for allowing evil to exist.
Yes, even the possibility that there is no God is logically sound. You can certainly believe that if you want to. However, your belief is not supported by any proof, any more than my belief.
Again, you assume an irrational human.
Also, it is said that we will be able to love endlessly in heaven. Is that true? Who knows? Still, attempting to disprove a tautology is not useful.
One of the more famous ones: Can God create a rock so big he can’t lift it? Sure he can! And then he’ll lift it anyway.
By definition, God is omnipotent. Omnipotence means that he can do anything. Therefore, a rock he cannot lift is like a square circle. It’s a logical impossibility. There are limits to logic, just like there are limits to math.
You believe in math? All of math is founded on 1+1=2, which cannot be proven. Of course, it’s a lot easier to believe that 1+1=2 when all around us, 1+1=2. But still, there might be somewhere where 1+1=3. But at least for math, the burden of proof is met in most people. Do you then believe in infinity? Maths says that there is infinity, but we sure haven’t seen it yet.
For religion, maybe not. Maybe all belief in religion is irrational. After all, omnipotence, like infinity is a pretty hard thing to figure out.
Again, I’m not trying to convert you, or to prove anything, because religion by it’s nature is not falsifiable. Still, the fact that it is not falsifiable means that your arguments by logic cannot work, especially to work to falsify religion. It cannot be proven.