Tough question. How do you believe in a loving caring God who could allow an innocent baby to be born deformed or disabled? Well first we have to assume that being deformed or disabled is somehow “lower” than being born “normal”. I am sure some of the deformed and disabled people of the world would disagree.
In any case God didnt create the baby anymore than he created us. I believe that God found us here as a struggling species and raised us up and gave us what I would call a “soul”. Why he did that? I dont know. Maybe he saw something in our cave dewelling ancestors that made Him think we could be more than evolution itself could provide.
After that, for the most part, he let us be. He is still there but whatever cosmic plan is in store for us cannot be forced but must be experienced. The good, bad, and the ugly must be felt to be understood.
Or maybe im delusional and this my brains way of dealing with vast emptiness that is life and the abyss that awaits after death
Who knows? Why do you think that we are here to gain experiences at all?
But if you’re perfect, you don’t have to learn, because you already know. If I had a child, and I could either let them figure out that fire is hot by themselves, or program into them a false memory of them sticking their hand into the fire, I’d choose the latter, as it is safer and causes less suffering.
And if you knew, for a fact that your child was going to go out and die on a specific day from one of their crash-and-burn escapades, wouldn’t you stop them, no matter what? That is the action that a supposedly omniscient and all loving God fails to take.
Which really comes back to the “God works in mysterious ways” response. Which I could almost buy, if not for the inclusion of eternal punishment. Infinite punishment for finite crimes is wrong, no matter how mysterious God is. It’s not going to make any of His children happier or better people; It will only make them suffer.
Further, the inclusion of eternal punishment precludes the people in Heaven from being happy. I mean, could you honestly be happy in Heaven knowing that your parents or children were in Hell? God would have to start erasing people’s memories, and that kind of makes the whole “we’re here to gain experiences” concept null and void.
This is a favorite topic that I bring up when I’m with company. I am agnostic-atheist. As far as God-fearing folk are usually concerned, disabled children are gifts made to facilitate lesson learning. It’s my opinion that a higher power is completely irrelevant. If they exist, they do nothing. If they do exist, then they would create miracles or something. Why else exist. If they exist for no purpose, why exist at all? For all we know, we should be raping, stealing, and murdering. Seriously. The hand of man wrote the Bible/Dead Sea Scrolls/Whatever. Did God tell them exactly what to write in a language that was understood by men? Why? Why didn’t these texts materialize from air, created by God? The big reason why the Higher Power is irrelevant to me is that babies are raped. What the heck is the purpose of God if babies are raped? That is the most heinous crime imaginable, yet God doesn’t care. So, he’s non-existent or irrelevant. You can say that Satan commits terrible acts, but why would God let him do that? How friggin powerful is Satan that he’s more powerful than God, if that’s the case? If Satan is more powerful than God, God is irrelevant completely. If you were born and raised to believe whatever you believe, it’s because you were taught it. Ferrell children would not find Jesus.
I find it insulting in the extreme to refer to people with disabilities as burdens, or as the fruits of man’s evil nature, or as mistakes, or anything else that is demeaning to them as people.
I have friends who are paralyzed in one way or another, some from birth, some from injury or disease. I have friend, and have had several acquaitances who are blind. They all have things to deal with, and they deal in their own individual ways, as all of us do.
What they have that’s different from those without disabilities, and what they most emphatically don’t need, is nitwits questioning why a such an unfortunate mistake as them exists in the first place.
Kelly, you make a good point. That seems most frequently the opinion of people who feel sorry for themselves for having to “deal” with someone close to them who happens to be disabled. Either that, or people who have no experience with the disadvantaged think these people are a mistake and believe the disabled are people who sit around wishing they were not afflicted so. However, I assume most people with or without disabilities would be glad to assure, with dna-type genetic tinkering, that their offspring are born without genetic hic-ups.
One of the reasons I decided a born-again friend of mine had become a total brainwashed fucking crackpot was her assertion that disabled children happen because “Satan gets into the womb and messes them up.” The “religious” justification for this was that God only ever makes perfect things, so therefore imperfections must be the Devil’s work.
Yes, but when they started taken them off and wouldn’t listen, I let them feel a good zap. It only took once. Those sweet little burdens were quick learners.
He gave us electrical outlet covers too. Commands for a healthy, happy survival. Doesn’t take away all of the risk or pain, but tells you how to cope with it and learn from it. He sent us on this little trip and told us to have a lot of experiences and reminded us to take and use that amazing brain he gave us. He used evolution to create us. It doesn’t have rules on what’s perfect and acceptable. We determined “our standards” for those things. Evolution plays no favorites and is always full of variations and surprises. It’s one of our character weaknessess and failings to think that something or someone different than the “norm” is less. It’s a disgusting and egotistical denial of the beauty of our life process. To decide it has to do with sin or punishment is sick.
No, he doesn’t usually intercede. It’s not possible to “kill ourselves off”, only shorten our time here, with more to follow. Why would he punish us here on earth? We’re quite good at causing our own pain. We were given the abilility to bounce back, to fight back and claim what we need from this experience.
I see this argument used alot around here. If God is omnipotent couldnt he just make us all happy and teach us what we need to know with the suffering? To me tho, this is kind of circular logic. To look at the other side, God is omipotent so He knows that making us all happy with no suffering wont get us to where we need to go. And forcing us to the end of journey without the travel part accomplishes nothing.
So God being omnipotent or not really points to nothing, since the argument could be made either way.
Well, we could be here for no reason at all. No G-d, no soul. Just a product of the pot that boiled and then cooled to just the right temperature. It’s just my experience with G-d tells me that’s not true or at least only partly true. We weren’t “implanted” with a manditory requirement to believe in G-d, so we’re all going to gain that knowlege at our own rate. Some find out sooner because they need to and others find out later because it’s proven to them. No long term advantage either way and the short term advantage is debatable. I can even admit that my need to “believe” now, without factual evidence, could be a weakness, a prop. I don’t really think so, but it’s fun to poke a smug believer with that theory.
The point is you teach them not to stick their hand in the fire. You don’t follow them around for the rest of their lives to make sure they don’t. Learning makes us proud, fulfilled, self-confident. It adds to all that we are. Why deny someone that gift.
He doesn’t take that action, because our soul is not at any risk. The body has an expiration date or do you think he should have made that last forever too. It’s not that great of a design to not want to improve on it someday.
Eternal punishment was man’s spin on the whole thing. The OT doesn’t even refer to Hell, although it does refer to some form of punishment, it’s not eternal and I think it had more to do with learning than being spanked. The reward punishment stories started growing and seem to be a product of churches competing with other churches. Most of what I was taught about hell, when I used to be a Christian, I found out later, didn’t even come from the Bible. The information that did, came from the NT whose writing was most affected by the whole greed, power, competition thing. People weren’t excluded from heaven on religious grounds until then.
I’ve posed this question to Christians, because the concept of knowing even one person could be in hell would be enough to make heaven, not heaven for me. The answer was “how could it be considered heaven if everyone got in?” Well obviously I don’t agree with that answer. It can’t be heaven unless everyone can be there. I don’t believe the Christian concept of heaven is even remotely correct, or that you need Jesus to get in. That’s a religious concept, not from G-d. Our concept of “heaven” is too tied up in trying to make it a literal place. To me, it’s just continuing on and my version of perfect doesn’t extend much beyond here, so I’m content to take whatever’s offered.
>> What you are seeing today, is thousands of years of humans polluting,
>> tinkering, misuse of sex and other things, and in general, abusing
>> their bodies and their genes.
> I take it you don’t believe in evolution?
Apparently, she believes in devolution. Over many generations, human genes can be mutated by abusing one’s body and then those bad, mutated genes are passed on to the children.
Yet, if asked, I’ll bet she denies the possibility of evolution and natural selection, whereby helpful mutations are passed on to subsequent generations.
I’m still taken aback by the claims that no disease existed and that people lived for hundreds of years and drove flying cars!
Wow. You only read every other word I type. :rolleyes: I actually admitted that it’s possible I believe because I need to. I don’t think an atheist is stupid because of not believing in G-d. I think it’s a reasonable conclusion. Obviously if G-d wanted you to believe right now, you would. I simply have a pet peeve at people who think that belief is an identical choice for everyone. It may be smug of you to believe you’ve reached my conclusions for me, though. Peace, already!!!
I think it has something to do with God wanting mankind to have a free will and the ability to make moral choices. You wouldn’t be able to make a choice if there was only the right choice.
I’m sure you meant that to be a happy, friendly smiley and not an eye-rolly one?
I mean, the only reason I’m an atheist is because God has not “revealed the truth” to me. Can’t be from my years of study, consideration, experience and reasoned thought, could it?
