And has no problem letting thousands of children suffer and starve every day.
The evidence we have is that God is either powerless to stop suffering (so why call it a god) or is unwilling to end suffering (so why claim it is a force for good), or the suffering is part of god's plan (making god evil in my book).
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/19/2015 09:21AM by MJ.
MJ Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > The evidence we have is that God is either powerless to stop suffering (so why call it a god) or is unwilling to end suffering (so why claim it is a force for good), or the suffering is part of god's plan (making god evil in my book).
I vote for none of the above. I think we are basically on our own in this physical existence. I see God as being a parent who has let us loose, much like a parent who sends a kid off to college or to life. If there is misery in the world, it is up to us to alleviate it.
Either we are alone or God is a force for good, which is it?
Even parents that let us go usually do not let us starve to death if they can help it.
I can just see your parents, when you were 18 "Get out of our house and we never want to see, or help you again! Starve to death for all we care."
I am certainly glad that my parents were not the "turn your back on my suffering" sort of parents you post implies.
My parents would never let their grandchildren starve if they could prevent it, the way your god allows so many of its innocent, helpless starve.
How about your parents, would they let their grandchildren starve because they have let their children go? If the answer is no, then why the different standard for God?
Edited 6 time(s). Last edit at 04/19/2015 12:22PM by MJ.
I bet I wouldn't like him. But he'd like me and hang around, wanting to be my friend, and there would be a lot of awkward moments and all my other friends would be pestering me to tell him to get lost because his aura hurts their eyes.
Ghawds. You know there is only one. Ghawd: a magical anthropomorphic agent, saving you from its self. Unbeleivable. There us more than one. Sorry Mormons if you really beleive in original sin then jump on board the sinking ship of Christianity. best wishes tscc, ironic.
How nice is famine, genocide, raping and pillaging...? God hasn't exactly tucked everyone in, with milk and cookies.
If God was nice to me, I would wonder why others were tortured... so I wouldn't trust him or her.
If Gods just roll the dice, or win a planet in the lotto-with hands off the planet, how could they watch their creations at war and wrecking the environment/trashing the place? If they could tolerate observing human and animal suffering, I don't think I would want to be around them. Good luck with that God, knock yourself out.
I think our notion of god may have a bit to do with our human fathers/role models/families... If we mouthed off to God, would we get grounded? Tossed into a fiery pit? God doesn't have a great track record, or spokes-models.
Ex-Sister Sinful Shoulders Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > How nice is famine, genocide, raping and > pillaging...? God hasn't exactly tucked everyone > in, with milk and cookies.
No, what I'm asking is wouldn't it be nice if there was a god who protected everyone from harm and there was no evil or suffering in the world. As opposed to what we actually have. And he didn't consider us all to be born sinners who he will torture eternally if we displease him in any minor way?
> No, what I'm asking is wouldn't it be nice if > there was a god who protected everyone from harm.
Oh, then yep, that would be a nice god.
But I still see potential problems there. If you're keeping people from doing harm to one another, then you're controlling them in some fashion.
It could become a little too much like a dictatorship, where everyone is told that they're happy and they'd better darn well be happy, whether they like it, or not.
I don't know what the answers are to becoming a more peaceful society, with or without a god being involved. We do tend to glorify violence a little too much. We might want to start by looking at why this is so.
If there were some mechanism for saving humanity from its own stupidity and providing adequate resources for everyone that might be nice. But a lot of people wouldn't be happy to let go of their free will and the demise of capitalism.
I HOPE that I am immortal and that I am totally in charge of myself. I hope that I'm like a Fibonacci number, that my new life will be made up the previous lives added together, and I'll become greater and greater each time.
MJ Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > A nice god that lets so many innocent children > suffer and starve to death? That isn't very > comforting to me.
The nice God I'm proposing wouldn't allow that. Sorry for not making myself clear.
If god were real I doubt our experience would be any different. The logical constructs that would need to be used to conjure up a god would make that god unable to be nice. The difference would be an ambivalent god vs a meddling god. Tomatoes, tomatoes in my opinion.
Never heard the phrase how can god serve you. It is always serve god or else. A genie would be better specially if it was Barbra. Then I would be like, stop serving me. I liked Toni a lot then he got all JR on me.
I sometimes wonder if humanity will ever give up on the idea of a God.
We all know about economic inequality that is on a scale that defies logic, plus hunger, wars, power hungry bullies, disease, social inequality, boarders, environmental catastrophe's and last but not least religion, by far the champion of all champions when it comes to justification to all the fore mentioned items.
Then, after humanity creates this horrible mess expects Jesus Christ (a made up deity) to come back to earth after he's already been put to death by most of the fore mentioned items above. Comes back to life and decides after two thousand years that humanity just isn't getting it. Then for no real sound reason takes over and by my understanding solves all of our problems.
Or, and this is the very unlikely probability. Humanity gets it, and figures out that we have the power to wipe out everything bad on this planet. We have at our power the most incredible ability to put to an end hunger, poverty, homelessness, wars, borders, etc. and still have so much left over that we all would be eating plenty, living in very nice homes, having outstanding quality of life in every facet of being. But, in the end put off our ability to work together for such petty reasons to hasten our own destruction in the hopes that a magical man in the sky born of a virgin in the most backward and illiterate part of the world two thousand years ago, will come down and save us.
I personally believe we might pull it off in a few thousand years. But I don't hold out much hope.
Not really. Any "all-powerful" being wouldn't have any compelling reason to be "nice" in the first place, or to continue to be so if it was in the past. It could do whatever it wanted. I don't see any benefit at all in a capricious, powerful being not subject to any laws, restrictions, or human empathy running the universe. Good thing there's no evidence of any such thing :)