Got this email today from a rather perplexed individual:

"Several dozen people, dead seven children, drowned in the basement of the school and people on TV thanking God that they are alive--so I have to ask the question again:

"Why did thier Benevolent all-knowing all-powerful God not like those other folks?"



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/21/2013 06:46PM by steve benson.

It is that God does not interfere with nature except in extraordinary circumstances. The truth is that mormon miracles are not true, nor the vast bulk of all claimed miracles over the ages. Far worse than understanding that God does not interfere is the mormon belief that God calls people "home" early for his special purposes! Yuck!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/21/2013 06:35PM by rhgc.

With all due respect, how exactly do you know that "God does not interfere with nature except in extraordinary circumstances"?

The proof is in the pudding. As the OP pointed out, God did not prevent the deaths of innocent children. God does not plan events to kill, but as the expression goes, shit happens. The Bible notes that it rains on the just and on the unjust. Believing in the scriptures (non-LDS) one does see events where God intervened but even in some of those cases there are natural explanations. I would submit that in the vast majority of cases, God does not intervene. Would you really want a God who was micromanaging your life?

How do you KNOW that "God did not prevent the deaths of innocent children"?

True. Some children may have been saved by God's hand and others saved, many, by people listening to the warnings and sirens and being pulled from wreckage while still alive.

Or another possibility, they could have all been saved by a combo of luck, themselves, and the awesome rescuers.

Micromanaging? You mean the god who counts the hairs on my head and knows when one falls out?

And who cares about the lilies of the field and the birds in the air?


Anagrammy

I take those sayings as hyperbole, just as descendants as numerous as the sands of the sea. Above all, God may know when a hair comes out but I think God does not know such follicle releases in advance. God caused many things to be random.

Well it's good to know you're not a christian. They think their god knows everything. Which god do you believe in, by the way?

With zero respect, god is nature, it created nature. God is 100% responsible for 100% of nature because god created 100% of nature. That whole god doesn't interfere argument might be good enough for you but I call bullshit.

To me this is no different than Joseph Smith apologist claiming from one side of their mouth that the BOM is inspired and from the other say that Joseph didn't know what he was talking about when it came to BOM locations.

Sack up god and take responsibility.

You give God credit for all the good that happens, while absolving him of any responsibility for the bad.

Living on planets is dangerous...

There are soooo many people that follow all these weird Christian religions here in Oklahoma...none of the prayers were answered to take the huge tornado away. Now the trained doctors, firemen and policemen have to take over and clean up after a negligent pos god. Good thing we are here to impose humanity upon ourselves.

Really, I hope the people can deal with this huge tragedy...my heart goes out to them.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/21/2013 09:52PM by orange.

God has provided man with the ability to help. The bible, in the dutero-canonical works tells us to call on the physicians when sick. In the Book of Judith, the heroine tells the leaders that they are not to sit back and just pray but use their heads to solve the problem. She did. But JS and moism has no such heroines.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/21/2013 10:26PM by rhgc.

Well, they won't be blaming Mardi Gras that's for sure.

The idea that God speaks through the weather is so patently Stone Age thinking that the Federation anthropologists must be having a field day wondering how people who sent a rover to Mars are believing that.

On the other hand, maybe I should believe it too, you know, just in case since the wind does seem to be picking up a little outside...

Anagrammy

Everyone notes that god appears on the back end of such events, in the outpouring of love, service, thoughts, statements and charitable gestures. I think it's nice god shows up...why the fuck can't he show up on the front end?

Remember too (since this is RfM and not the pages of some other whack church) this was the work of the Mormon god/Jesus - on Sunday everyone was singing If You Could Hie to Kolob, then he thought "let's send em a muther fuckin tornado a mile wide...to test them!"



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/21/2013 08:52PM by Susan I/S.

. . . not by some invented "Sky Daddy" up in "heaven."

I hope god has malpractice insurance....cuz he is going to be sued huge!!!!

We live on a rotating unevenly heated planet.

God does no good and he does no evil. He is just a concept in people's minds... kinda like Santa Claus.

People ask others to pray for them when tragedy, like a tornado, hits them. What are we to ask this all loving God? To comfort the family he just smacked with a tornado? To ease the pain of parents whose child was killed in the wrath of a tornado he created and sent that child's way?

Or is it more logical that the weather in Oklahoma was prime for a tornado yesterday and it occurred according to it's natural cause based on the atmospheric standards of earth and happened upon Moore?

I'm so tired of hearing people praising a God they're so scared to offend. They won't dare speak how they really feel about him. They're pissed that this guy, who supposedly gives and takes away all things would allow suffering to happen to their family, but they won't say it out loud because they've been told he gets mad about that sort of thing.

Religious people largely act in fear of offending a God who they claim gives them all things, but has no problem hurting them or anyone else. Then they claim we can't understand why he does the things he does.

God has no more to do with what happened in OK yesterday than he does with the thousands of children that die of starvation and disease daily in other parts of the world. If he's there, he doesn't care.

It's called tornado alley for a reason.

God did not cause the tornado beyond having created a natural system which creates tornados as well as wind and rain which is necessary for plant life as well as animal life.

God is a magical concept that evolved in the brains of humans. The burden of proving that god actually exists rests with the believers. When science can't explain events in the real world then humans use their wishful-thinking-god as an explanation.

Then when the natural real world causes disasters, the Moore OK tornado being a case in point, people who believe in god conveniently ignore the question of why their god caused the disaster. Instead they resort to asking (praying to) god to help them survive the consequences of the natural disaster.

If that gives the unfortunate humans comfort then I don't need to rain on their parade.

Wait, wait, wait...

Let's try this:

Mr. Jehovah B. God was busy in Africa saving some of the 80,000 babies that starve every f#cking day on his watch. While his back was turned his nemesis Satan snuck a tornado down the bible belt's throat.

Once again, God has an out courtesy of Satan.

Hooray for goD!

Humans have been on this planet only a short time. We're just the latest natural selection experiment.

God made all creatures great and small. Every single one of them, plant, animal and microscopic organism, dies. It is programmed into the system.

God made the climate. He made the atmosphere and the weather, the tectonic plates, the oceans, etc.

Why do people assume that God thinks death is a bad thing? Even insurance companies call natural disasters "acts of God".

The town of Moore, OK has been hit by deadly tornadoes 6 times in the last 15 years. Obviously, God likes tornadoes and he doesn't think people dying in them is a bad idea.

The bigger question is: why do people only want to believe in a god of healing, kittens and rainbows. If you are a monotheist, you believe that the same God who made puppies and babies made pythons and small pox.

God made us to die. If he had wanted us to be immortal, he would have made it so. He clearly thinks death is a feature, not a bug.

Ref:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore,_Oklahoma
"The city of Moore was damaged by significant tornadoes on October 4, 1998; May 3, 1999; May 8, 2003; May 10, 2010; and May 20, 2013. Moore is located in Tornado Alley, a colloquial term for the area of the United States where tornadoes are most frequent. About twenty tornadoes occurred within or in the immediate vicinity of Moore from 1890 to 2013."

I cannot come to terms with a god who would allow the things I have seen in life to happen. My only conclusion is that IF a god exists he is an absent "parent" leaving us on our own. So, what use is he/she/it??

Things that are too big or too small to comprehend, people will immediately dismiss off as an act or will of god.

Throw some scientists in the mix to figure it all out and... heretics!!!

God was too busy helping Beyonce to bother with Moore, Oklahoma. Priorities people. Her quote from this week:

"I'm actually quite nervous because yesterday I was diagnosed with tonsillitis, (but) hopefully I'll give Croatia a great concert. I'm gonna fight as hard as I can and I know that god has my back and god will protect me."

(http://www.contactmusic.com/news/beyonce-secretly-battled-tonsillitis-on-tour_3679241)

When you say benevolent what do you mean, Steve? Consistently benevolent? Intermittently benevolent? Mysteriously benevolent? Unfailingly benevolent?

My question to you is how do you decide how others quantify or qualify benevolence in their God? Or for that matter, how do you decide how others define their God?

Ten years ago I would have been right there with you on the question you are asking - I would have been annoyed by their lack of assignation of blame to God for the bad and their quick praise to God combined with their own sense of Specialness when they are graced or spared. But, I see things so much more differently now because **my definition and attributes of God changed**. For me, God is not a personified entity. God is the sum of all things including weather, chance, earned entitlement, poor interpretation, bad choices, etc. etc.The sum of all things, The A and the O.

Knowing what you now know about MY God we can substitute, Thank Location I was spared! Thank Choice I was spared! Thank Chance I was spared! Thank Weather I was spared! In my world God did spare and God did condemn, all things conspired to save ME. ( First by my not living in Oklahoma!) But MY God is not slapping hisself on the back for saving most of Oklahoma's children. My God does not care. But that doesn't change that MY God spared me and I am grateful that's the way it went down.

When I started tweaking what endless possibilities people can really believe about their God I realized there were much less benign interpretations of what they were saying. My being offended was a reflection of my own limitation, I stereotyped, I assumed. Just my 2 cents.

Live happily without anger or frustration.

Pardon me, I mean much MORE benign interpretations, not much less benign.

You see god as the sum of all things. Do you also see god as the origin of all things?

If the people who live in Oklahoma did a mass migration to Wyoming-Montana-Idaho then they would no longer be subject to tornados. If Muslims or Mormons migrated to Oklahoma then they would be the people who would get beat up by tornados. It is a matter of where the air currents are right (wrong?) for the formation of tornados. No God is involved, just established science.

Coincedence:
All Miracles stopped with the invention of film, video,recordings and the interweb