I mean we all we always question why does God do this or do that. Well what do you say lets flip it around.
What do you think He thinks of us(His creation)? Do you think He is pleased with the way we treat each other? Do you think He is happy with the way we fall for so many of the Devil’s tricks and schemes? Do you think He is pleased the way we twist things around in the the Book He gave us to live better lives by? How about the way we try to explain him away with our limited intellect? How about the way we come up with weird religions that let us do what we think is the best instead of the One that was smart enough to create us.
What about the way we treated His Son then and now? He sent His Son to bring us back in to Grace with him and some people won’t even believe that he died for their sins so they could have eternal life.
You know, there are a million smartass ways to answer this question. I think I’m going to go with the following, only slightly smartass answer:
Your god is perfect and omnipotent, right Bill? That means he has made us exactly the way he wants us to be. So why would he be disappointed with us, since we are precisely what he wanted in the first place?
Not that the fundamentalist version of god ever made a lick of sense in the first place.
Oh, you mean the Koran? Yes, I’m sure God is displeased by your failure to observe the five pillars of Islam (1-fasting at Ramadan, 2-saying prayers five times a day, 3-making the pilgrimage to Mecca at least once, 4-giving charity to the poor, and 5-making the declaration of faith, “There is no God but God, and Muhummad is his prophet.”)
God is especially displeased by your heretical worshipping of the prophet Issa (or “Jesus” as the faithless say) as a god. The Holy Koran says that there is only one God, and Him only shall you worship.
As minty green pointed out, god’s omnipotence implies that he created us exactly as he wants, right down to the molecule.
Again, the idea of god experiencing “pleasure” or “disgust” at the way humans treat each other (or anything) is a huge anthropopathization. God, in his omniscience, necessarily “feels” the same way about human behavior as we do about the laws of physics. We know that if we drop a ball from a certain height, that it will take a certain amount of time to hit the ground. Ditto for God and human actions. A truly omniscient deity knows how humans will behave as surely as we know how long a dropped ball will take to hit the ground. This complete lack of surprise pretty much negates all possibility of emotion.
Again, yes, everything is exactly as God wants it to be. Or else it wouldn’t be that way!
You mean the Qur’an?
No, Jehovah’s not too upset about this. He knows that a lot of people still believe in him. It’s Zeus, Loki, and Osiris who are pissed at our disbelief.
I imagine he’s more pissed at people who deny the beauty and depth of his creation, insisting on a 6,000 year old universe and a man with a magic boat when the overwhelming evidence indicates otherwise. Think about it this way: the universe in 15 billion years old. The earth 4.5 billion. Man 4 million. Religion 100,000. Modern religion 6,000. Judaism 3,500. Christianity 2,000. Protestantism 500. If you were God, would you be more upset at someone rejecting something you had worked on for 15 billion years, or some side project which has occupied a mere .0000033% of your divine time?
If you are speaking to Christians, who believe in the Bible and the fact that God gave us free will to act as we wish…
then I would say, probably not.
Not because we’re failing miserably at converting everyone to Christianity (which was our great commandment), but because so many people have taken Christianity and abused its teachings to death, completely ignoring what JESUS HIMSELF said was the most important: Love each other. LOVE EACH OTHER…and once more with feeling:
LOVE EACH OTHER.
I don’t think God is pleased with Abortion Bombers. I don’t think God is pleased with pro-athletes who only praise God win they win a game. I don’t think God is pleased with people who condemn or judge or harm other people in HIS name. I don’t think God is pleased with people who take “spare the rod and spoil the child” as an excuse to beat the everloving crap out of their kids.
When I was little, we were taught that the greatest thing we could hear when we got to heaven would be to hear God say “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
I’m often afraid that those words will not be uttered, and so that inspires me to reconsider my words or actions. It’s not out of a fear of God…but a fear that I’m not living the life God wanted.
If every Christian did that: worried more about THEIR actions than the actions of OTHERS, which they cannot control…
then I think God would be pleased.
As for other religions, I can’t speak for them. But I suspect people falter in the Jewish, Moslem and assorted Eastern religions as well.
I just cannot understand why so many people are so eager to put God in a box. “Sure, He’s infinite, but only inasmuch as we can understand and pigeonhole Him.”
Lord, forgive them . . . they know not what they do.
Hello God? Hello?
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no password required
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Manny people have asked me and now I wonder…what do you think of us, generally speaking?
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In general, fascinating and delightful, but you folks are too sheeplike and credulous towards any nitwit that manages to set himself up as source of spiritual wisdom.
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That makes sense. But what about how we behave, how we treat each other and all that?
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Don’t get me started. You can be loving and kind but too often you tend to be hateful and vindictive. I’ve experienced that first-hand you know.
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Oh, you mean the, um, events of approx 2000 years ago?
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Precisely my point. I come down for a visit and have an innocent little fling with a cute Jewish chick and you folks are STILL gossipping about it!
Personally, I never question what God does, partly because I’m not at all sure whether God currently does anything that can be detected here on Earth. Setting that aside for the moment, re: a couple of other points in the OP:
Just so we’re on the same page, could you name a few of these “tricks and schemes”?
Are you talking about the “Left Behind” novels? Again, it would be helpful if you could provide one or two examples of this “twisting” of the Biblical message.
Sorry to sound like a broken record, but once again, examples, please. Also, I am curious whether you include religions that predate Christianity, or perhaps all non-Christian religions, as part of the “weird” group you refer to.
Minty, just for fun and because I haven’t had this sort of debate in years, I’m gonna play <pun intended> devil’s advocate.
Why couldn’t free will and omniscience exist? One’s free will isn’t dependent on someone else’s knowledge. If a Skinnerian behaviorist was able to predict your actions with perfect accuracy, it wouldn’t change the fact that you still made the choices. Unless the omniscient one interfered with my decision making, his omniscience doesn’t limit my freedom to choose.
I knew you were going to say that before you were a gleam in Mama Fenris’ eye. Sorry, but since I know and see all, time is irrelevant. Your future is as transparent to me as your past. I know every step you’ll ever take–because, in a very real sense, it has all already happened.
This is one of those popular myths along the lines of another that is absurd prima facie, namely, that you cannot prove a negative. (Oh yeah? Prove it!)
This is a bit like Schroedinger’s cat. Yes, from God’s frame of reference, everything has already happened. It’s finished. Over. But also, and equally true, it has not yet even started. The key is in your own statement, “time is irrelevant”. Precisely because it is irrelevant, it does not bear upon your free will.
I was free to make that choice regardless of whether or not someone else knew the outcome. I know that when I get the can-opener out, the cats’ll come a-runnin’. The fact that I know the outcome doesn’t change the fact that the cats made a decision freely.
