E. You deserved it
He caused it/allowed it to happen because he wants to test YOUR faith and make sure you’re cool with needless pain and suffering so long as it means you get to go to heaven/avoid an eternity of torture.
BeCaUsE hE’s MyStErIoUs!
deleted by creator
Reincarnated as the Christian God!??
This is, entirely unironically, the central tenant of the Catholic teaching on the subject.
It really does just boil down to “You can’t adjudicate the morality of the Divine.” And, for the most part, its a line of reasoning that hierarchical social structures condition us to accept. God is just the CEO of the Universe. If you accept that your boss at the toxic waste and murder machines factory is Beyond Good and Evil, believing it about God is downright trivial.
I tell this story a lot but as an escaped Xtian the thing that marks the moment I was fully off board with the church was hearing those magic words ‘God works in mysterious ways’. I had heard it so many times because of course they say it all the freaking time but that was the time it really clicked for me that I won’t be getting any real answers and can stop pretending.
One of the earliest forms of copium
I mean, dealing with the Problem of Evil (or Suffering or however you want to describe it) isn’t unique to Christianity. It certainly isn’t one that’s gone unanswered. Hell, a cornerstone of the orthodoxy is that the Original Sin of defiance of God’s Will is at the root of all evil.
I think there’s a superficial knee-jerk response to these beliefs that boil down to “No, that sounds like some made up bullshit”. But you can dig deeper and talk about the fundamental impulses toward pride and gluttony and conclude there’s a kernel of truth over the religious pastiche.
God is, at the end of the day, an unproveable/unrefutable hypothesis. But the immediate causes of human suffering are knowable, tangible, and preventable. Whether you’re blaming a god or snubbing one, if you’re doing so on the grounds that nobody stopped one human from abusing or neglecting another it would seem like your accusation is misplaced.
Human suffering doesn’t just come from human actions.
It also comes from natural causes, genetic defects, disasters, disease and parasites
Human suffering doesn’t just come from human actions.
Virtually all modern human suffering is the result of deliberate aggression or institutional neglect.
It also comes from natural causes, genetic defects, disasters, disease and parasites
We’ve had the technology to mitigate or eliminate these problems for decades.
We’ve had tools to minimize their impact and insulate against their consequences for centuries.
Natural events are nakedly exacerbated by greedy, gluttonous administrators. You can’t blame the Spanish Flu on “nature” because it was the direct result of factory farming and poor hygiene during mass troop mobilization.
You can’t dismiss the catastrophic storms wrecking major cities as we hit climate change peaks.
You can’t blame famine on deserts that formed in the wake of industrial mining and deforesting.
At some point you have to recognize humankind as an enormous global force within its own right. One that is responsible both for its own preservation and destruction.
The Garden of Eden is metaphorical in that sense. Eating the apple of knowledge means assuming control of your own destiny in a way no other organism on the planet can claim.
You take a very narrow view of history.
If all that exists was the last hundred years thwn you may have a point.
But you can’t just shrug aside the thousands of years before that.
If all that exists was the last hundred years thwn you may have a point.
Even prior to the last century, the overwhelming bulk of human suffering was inflicted by other humans. Slavery, most prominently.
But you can’t just shrug aside the thousands of years before that.
You can go back to The Taiping Rebellion, New World colonization, and the Inquisition to find plenty of fully human made disasters before the last century.
Fucking Abrahamic religions
E. Invented by humans
That follows from D.
Yes, he didn’t exist until he was invented. 😁🫠
In one of the Discworld books there are two gods. One is the mighty Thunderer, who has temples all over the vast Empire. The other is a Frog God worshipped by a tribe of about fifty people in a swamp. When they have a fight the Frog knocks the other guy out, because nobody really believes in the Thunderer and the Frog’s people have strong faith in him.
I miss Terry. Discworld should be read by everyone!
So you’re arguing a mix of Voltaire’s “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” and John Lennon’s “God is a concept by which we measure our pain”?
Don’t blame makind for that. It was necessary.
Think about the following:
In the medieval ages, people were popping out 5-10 children on average. Chuld mortality was extremely high, with roughly 80% of children dying before they were 5 y/o.
Now, what should god do (if they existed)? Let the children life and cause overpopulation, which leads to famine and disaster, or kill a lot of children? There’s literally no solution.
That was until contraceptives were found. And interestingly, contraceptives exist at roughly the same time that antibiotics exist, thus preventing both high child-mortality and overpopulation.
Funny ideas but completely wrong. Contraceptives existed throughout the human history. And antibiotics were discovered a bit later than Haber dealt with overpopulation problem.
Yeah bro, you make a sheep intestine condom and get back to us on the efficacy
A: He can’t.
Dude forgot to add himself as admin.
He’s up there raging because his own system hit him with the ol “new password can’t be the same as the old password”
First thing you do is enable MFA these days… dude got a new phone and forgot the password to the old account.
this user does not have sudo access
this incident will be reported.
click me
“He gave us free will” aka he doesn’t want to.
Yeah I’m not religious but this is it. Christians believe free will is “more good” than the bad things it leads to are bad.
The problem for Christianity is that it doesn’t fit with how God is presented. He intervenes in things from time to time. Destroyed civilization with a flood because he didn’t like what people were doing with free will.
You might be able to take a Deist stance and make it work. However, then you’re implicitly saying there’s no evidence for God, and are one step out from agnostic atheism. You could say God changed his mind and saw the flood as a bad idea, but fundamentalists are never going to go for that one.
For that matter, the free will explanation isn’t even universal among Christians.
People have free will, because that is the greatest good, but not freedom of consequences (even from god) when they behave bad with that free will. Even though they behave bad, if bad is an objective scale, their bad bahvior was still less bad than having no free will. On this scale, god not punishing them for their bad behavior is more bad than gods punishment. So, because he always has to let the most good thing happen he both has to allow free will and people to do bad and also punish people for doing bad even though he knows they will be bad and he could prevent it. Again I think it’s bs, and there’s a lot of bad logic in Christianity, but that’s their subjective stance (usually but, like you said, not a monolith). It “works” because good and bad isn’t something you can logic out very wrll since it’s highly subjective.
If you make a child, you are responsible for it. Should parents drop children in a forest to be at the mercy of nature?
I don’t know what you’re trying to argue here. Do you want my opinion? The opinion of Christians? The opinion of people who view nature to be god?
In my opinion, no. Obviously not. But I also am not a Christian.
Oh well, you are neurotypical likely, you would not get it.
As someone who is neurodivergent: what a weird fucking non-sequitur-cum-ad-hominem. Fuck you for using “neurotypical” as an insult, like you are somehow better than others because you’re so special. You make us look bad. At least your username is accurate.
I make my room filthy and dangerous every day. My roommates are getting hurt!
Why doesn’t my mom clean it up for me? She certainly could. Does she want me to live in squalor? Perhaps she MAKES the mess!
IDK, maybe mom doesn’t exist.
No one claims your mom is omnipotent and omnipresent you eggplant. And if they did, you’d think nothing of such a ridiculous claim. Which is what a rational person would do.
I understand you think I’m a member of the nightshade family. Cool.
I’ll take Pascal’s wager and believe you’re an eggplant hooked up to a computer, just promise me a good time when I die.
So anything bad that ever happens to you is your own fault?
Do you just walk around through life assuming cancer patients did something awful to deserve their disease? Cause that’s the only way this analogy makes any sense…
Everyone dies saban. Are you saying that if everyone doesn’t die peacefully in their sleep, and unless no one ever gets bruised or cut or hurt or harmed in any way, it means there is no god?
Everyone dies saban.
sabin FTFY.
But true statement based on empirical evidence.there is no god
Also true statement based on empirical evidence.
Why can you understand one, but not the other?Empiricism, as an epistemological view, argues that knowledge is based on experience and that it is tentative and probabilistic, subject to revision and falsification.
Metaphysics, on the other hand, traditionally explores mind-independent features of the world, including the nature of existence, the features all entities have in common, and their division into categories of being.
It’s so hard to believe in anything anymore. I mean, it’s like, religion, you really can’t take it seriously, because it seems so mythological, it seems so arbitrary…but, on the other hand, science is just pure empiricism, and by virtue of its method, it excludes metaphysics. I guess I wouldn’t believe in anything anymore if it weren’t for my lucky astrology mood watch. Steve Martin
That just to try and get you into a better headspace? Levity, anyone?
Also from Wikipedia on metaphysics:
Due to the abstract nature of its topic, metaphysics has received criticisms questioning the reliability of its methods and the meaningfulness of its theories.
The problem is that metaphysics isn’t even meaningful.
You obviously can’t say the same for science. Because science is the reason we can write together.
Metaphysics boils down to Descartes: “I think therefore I am”, and that’s it, it never got any further!!And what’s the point of quoting a joke?
Metaphysics addresses “why”. Like, “why are we doing science anyway?”
Can’t answer that with the scientific method.
The why question is a nonsense question. For science it’s obvious, because it improves our lives.
But if you are thinking along the lines of why do we exist, or why does the universe exist, those are questions that don’t have a rational answer.
The questions that may have answers are based on the how not the why.
Now you’re just trying to pivot without having admitted that your analogy only makes sense if you assume everyone who gets cancer must have done something to deserve getting it.
"
Does your mom…
Put eye parasites that blind children in your room?
Force you to eat and breathe through the same tube?
Give you horrible cancers?
Put drugs in your room and then get mad when you use them?
Tell you to love her unconditionally after doing all of these things?
Your mother, the allpowerful being.
It’s an analogy.
It’s a meme
Less anal, more logos next time.
A: then he isn’t god.
B: then he isn’t good.
C: then he is evil.
D: the truth.
If you want to short circuit a certain type of theist
E: He’s actually just a small g god who died when we stopped sacrificing bulls to him
It’s all a test. If you can’t put up with horrible shit while being alive, how you gonna become an angelic slave and sing happy songs for eternity?
we are just bald monkeys, stop pretending otherwise
go fuck a banana!
I’m not necessarily a theist, but this overused argument is flawed. It could be that terrible things happen because, for whatever reasons that could be incomprehensible to our teeny human brains, these terrible things happening are necessary to serve a greater good or purpose for the long run.
What that purpose could be, I have no friggen clue. But humanity has near zero understanding of the universe beyond us (I’m talking about the answers to fundamental questions; why are we here? Do we have a purpose for existence? Etc) and to claim that there is 100% nothing existing beyond ourselves is just as ignorant as claiming there is some personalized God directing everything. We have no fucking clue what’s out there, and anything else is the ego talking.
In such a case as you describe, this god either:
A) Would not desire faith, as it has concerns far grander than whatever some malformed ape thinks about it.
Or
B) It would not be worthy of faith, because it has the capacity to reveal these machinations in exchange for this obeisance, and chooses to watch us suffer and still expects us to thank it for our suffering.
Or
C) It would not be worthy of faith, because it has decided to test us, like some cosmic Jigsaw. Fuck that.
I hold with Stephen Fry: if I were to discover that god exists after death, my only response would be “how dare you”. If it did exist, it would not be an entity worthy of our faith, let alone love or admiration.
That’s a lot of words for have faith.
I don’t know. At this point I’m leaning toward C.
Really if you believe that God created the universe, then C logically follows.
But if we were created in the image of God, then B is very likely, too. Just look at what we do to characters that we create in The Sims.
Basically, the bibble confirms it’s C.
Old Testament God is super violent and vengeful and definitely C but it doesn’t jive with New Testament God so the faithful have to either ignore that fact or twist themselves into logic pretzels with stuff that basically amounts to ‘Bible Code’ to try and make it make sense.
Me too, but only because I very strongly lean toward “god was created by man” rather than the other way around.
Isn’t there that philosophical argument about how God can’t be both all-good and all-powerful? If he’s all-good, he would have to stop bad things.
It’s been well over a decade since philosophy class, but this reminded me of that argument.
Forgot who made it though.
Epicurus.
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
It’s the Epicurean Paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicurean_paradox
In summary:
If God is unable to prevent evil, then he is not all-powerful. If God is not willing to prevent evil, then he is not all-good. If God is both willing and able to prevent evil, then why does evil exist?
