Pope Leo seems to be a nice bloke; yet he developed lung cancer. Other world leaders are killing people left & right, yet keep on living. How can this be explained, other than God doesn’t exist?
With the way Christians and similar preach? Yea, God's a psychopath and so are they.
Though there are several theologically sound explanations, especially if you truly believe "God" is beyond or bigger than our universe.
Basic believer: "God works in mysterious ways". Sure, that Harlequin baby only ever had a miserable existence, but that's because their soul didn't need to experience a full life! Sure, your school teacher only ever did good works and then got ran over by a truck, but God thought it was her time!
More logical theology: God is bigger than the universe. He sees the whole thing. If something bad happens, then it is merely a wrinkle, or if you believe in divine guidance, it's a tragectory change to something better. Either way, God's not helping you, because what you want makes for a worse over-all universe. Or, if you want to be more literal about it, maybe God doesn't necessarily have the power to truly magic something. Maybe he cannot instantly change an exact, single detail about this universe, yet created it, could destroy it, and has enough control to drastically change things? Like a video game dev seeing how their Sims playthrough plays out.
Deeper theology: We're here to be tested/checked/validated/etc. God said he gave us the answers, not that he'll do the test for us. Besides, if we were instructed to take care of something (like Earth, or your personal life), why in the ever loving FUCK would you expect someone else to do the job you were told to do? Nobody is going to be happy to have to step in to fix something you fucked up, especially when they were the ones who put you on the job to take care of it in the first place.
Deeper science fiction: How would such a great being even begin to care about the individualities of creatures even lesser than ants to him as ants are to us? It's not hard to imagine someone caring deeply about their creation, but not really caring about exactly how the tiny details come out for every single detail. Like a single piece of glitter falling off your child's art piece, an individual life is meaningless so long as the whole picture remains.
Mix and match those views to your heart's content, and I've heard all of them and more growing up in a church. Bunch of intellectually weak clowns unwilling to admit religion is just Baby's First Philosophy...
Not sure of too many other opinions I've directly heard, but what kind of belief do you want to hear more of? (I know I said I heard more dismissive/excusive beliefs, but I don't remember them in any representative fashion; it was thankfully years and years ago!)
The old Cainites, Cathars, Marcionites, and other similar Gnostic sects quite directly believed God was the bad guy. (or at least the physical world and its creator; it gets weird in some of them...)
No, you can and should beg god for devine intervention that he probably doesnt do and thank for his gracefullness which he hasnt shown. Or at least whoreship him, because he is so great and benevolent while he is hearing the prayers and letting good people die nevertheless. Or maybe there werent enough prayers yet, for THE POPE.
"God works in mysterious ways" is the only "explanation" religious clowns have. It's 100% post-hoc justification. If they're bad, they deserve it. If they're good, then they must secretly be bad and deserve it. If they're really good and don't deserve it, then, "God works in mysterious ways". Always. Every time.
There is no questioning faith, only declaring heresy to such clowns. If things didn't work out for you, it's not a systemic problem here, it's because you deserved it!
You're talking about the same god that let Satan torture Job to win a bet. Even in Christian doctrine, god doesn't give a fuck about people. He just wants obeisance.
So, most religious mythology (including Christianity) defines its god as 3 absolutes:
All good (not a shred of evil)
All powerfull (its will is our reality, period)
All knowing (it's fully conscious of literally everything that happens in its universe)
So how is it that evil can exist? Cuz we can see that clear as day, everywhere. God either...
is aware of it, has the ability to stop it, and chooses not to, in which case it is not all good.
is aware of it, wants to stop it, but doesn't have the ability to, in which case it isn't all powerful.
Has the power and desire to stop it, but isn't aware it's happening, in which case it isn't all knowing.
Every single attempt to answer the Epicurean paradox does so by rugpulling one of the three pillars and presenting god as instead only being two of those absolutes. (and if anyone reading this takes that as a challenge, feel free to give it a go).
How can this be explained, other than God doesn’t exist?
Either Christianity and most other religions are being deliberately dishonest about the nature of their gods, or, as you said, god doesn't exist.
Ehhhhhhh. You're conflating this existence with all of eternity. Those are very different things.
Consider God as a parent. I used the example in an earlier response but my friend took her child to be vaccinated. For a baby, that's a very unpleasant day. In a week, she won't remember it.
Similarly, an all powerful, good God can be okay with someone suffering for a momentary blip because the end result is an eternity of paradise. (What is a lifetime of suffering against infinite years of happiness?)
"But wait!" you cry, "surely an all powerful God can skip the ANY suffering bit, right? He's just choosing not to because he's a prick!" Which misses the possibility of self imposed constraints on power. If I build a system and choose to work within that system, that's still me being all powerful. And if, as an all knowing being, I know that a half moment of unpleasantness means an eternity of bliss (so I can reward free will, instead of just creating a bunch of automatons), that's a tradeoff a good and all powerful God may make.
You’re conflating this existence with all of eternity. Those are very different things.
Those are very different things, but I don't see how or where they were conflated. Nor how conflating them would even be problematic in this context: they'd both be within god's full scope of control, right?
Similarly, an all powerful, good God can be okay with someone suffering
So, not 'all good'.
self imposed constraints on power. If I build a system and choose to work within that system, that’s still me being all powerful.
And if that system you just built includes evil, again we're in not 'all good' territory.
I know that a half moment of unpleasantness means an eternity of bliss
According to self imposed rules that include evil
that’s a tradeoff a good and all powerful God may make.
A tradeoff? Why would god need to trade? If he wants something, he just makes it so -- unless he isn't all powerful. Or unless we're still in the self-imposed-rules that allow for evil, which again is claiming that god is evil.
(so I can reward free will, instead of just creating a bunch of automatons)
Yeah free will usually comes up in these conversations, but right out the gate that's an attack on god's power: does he not have the ability to grant free will without also allowing evil? And even if he can't, and ignoring that that claim is that he isn't all powerful: why is the ability to commit evil always a criteria for free will? We can't fly, shoot lasers out of our eyes, or fart out unicorns either, so with or without the ability to commit evil our freedom is still not absolute - does that make us a bunch of automatons?
Or rather, if the ability to commit evil was taken away from us, would we lose our free will? Let's look at your freedom of choice within the context of dinner. Half a second's thought, and I've got dozens of restaurant options, or grocery stores that allow me to cook up something that might fall outside of what the restaurants here offer: the number of options, while technically finite, are so mind-bogglingly huge that it might as well be infinite: so I'm gonna say my freedom of choice here is almost literally absolute.
One of those dinner options is to kidnap my neighbor's 4-year old, throw him in the oven, and cannibalize him. Why? Cuz god lets me, right? Sure it's illegal, but we don't care about legal authority, we care about god's. So if god snapped his fingers and changed our reality so that I'm no longer even capable of considering that, let alone committing it, evil is officially off the menu... but the billions of other possible combinations are still open, so I'd argue that my freedom of choice didn't actually change all that much. Does that make me an automaton?
...and what about the things that I already don't have the freedom to eat? Most of our reality isn't edible. And even if it was, I can only fit a few handfuls of it into my belly at a time - I can't have the moon for dinner, it won't fit. ...does that make me an automaton?
Point is our free will already exists within a system that has limits. Evil is one of many, many, many parts of that system, so even ignoring Epicurean Paradox, why is evil always a focal point of free will?
Those are very different things, but I don’t see how or where they were conflated.
Because a moment's or even human lifetime's suffering is effectively nothing when compared to eternity. Show me someone who wouldn't trade a hundred years of suffering for an eternity of bliss and I'll show you a silly goof.
So, just like my friend's kiddo getting jabbed, yeah, sucks in the moment but no reasonable person would really call it horrific suffering given that, while unpleasant, it lasted under a day compared to her (hopefully) ~ 35,600 days on Earth. Saying because suffering exists on a human time scale when you're talking about infinity is similarly silly.
You keep coming back to this "why can't God make free will without evil? If he can't, he's not all powerful!"
But it's a basic definition problem. You're effectively asking God to make 1 = 1 AND 1 = 2, which fine, could do but it eliminates the entire usefulness of 1 as a number.
Similarly, if the idea of free will is to find and reward good people and punish those who squander free will (by being jerks) free will probably necessitates the capacity for evil. (Otherwise, just stick with angels. Haven't read the bible thoroughly but I'm pretty sure that's basically the point of angels, perfect beings incapable of doing evil except for the one God made rebellious etc.)
So if there will be no suffering and no evil in the eternity, why can't it be like that already? If one is incapable of doing evil in heaven does he have free will? If your answer is that he will not be willing to do that, why? Because here on earth one can be good and die and one can be good and turn evil in the end, what makes heaven different and why it wouldn't be possible right here right now?
If one is incapable of doing evil in heaven does he have free will?
What evil could you do in an eternal paradise? And similarly, in a paradise, what sort of temptation to evil do you foresee?
what makes heaven different and why it wouldn’t be possible right here right now?
Again, if you want to reward people who are good, you need a proving ground. In a paradise, anyone can be good. When life is harder (or has more temptations) that's when our character shines through.
This weighing of temporary suffering against eternal bliss is just another example of what a lousy game God is playing. He could have come up with something else - but he didn’t. That makes him, in any case, a huge masochistic asshole.
And even if all of that were actually true, the question arises as to why anyone would ever regard such a being as the measure of all things, let alone worship it.
This weighing of temporary suffering against eternal bliss is just another example of what a lousy game God is playing. He could have come up with something else - but he didn’t.
Wait, why is an asshole move? He figured out a way to figure out who ought to be rewarded for all eternity after a moment's existence, that's pretty amazing. Think how much of art etc is grappling with the concept of death or non-existence. God instead figured out, "hey, here's a way to sift through a bunch of people with free will and temptation and reward the good ones for all eternity." I'd be impressed!
a huge masochistic asshole.
I mean, I agree but only because I think you're not using the word you mean. (Masochist enjoys harming themselves, you probably mean sociopath or somesuch.) And yeah, I think you'd have to be a masochist to create this potential for infinite reward and then have ungrateful snots running around bitching about a temporary inconvenience.
Why would God create a system to "figure out who ought to be rewarded" when he already knows that information? He's omniscient, he knew that information since the beginning of time, no system required.
If he needs to create this system, he is not omniscient.
If he chooses to create this system anyway, including creation of childhood cancer and starving puppies, then he is evil.
Of course I meant sadistic, you're right. I guess my coffee was bad.
As for the rest of your answer, I don't understand why you show understanding toward a being that had every opportunity, and it explicitly chose to play a cosmic game that seems to serve no purpose other than its own amusement.
But George Carlin said it best:
Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time! But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money!
Because a moment’s or even human lifetime’s suffering is effectively nothing when compared to eternity. Show me someone who wouldn’t trade a hundred years of suffering for an eternity of bliss and I’ll show you a silly goof.
And if that were a real scenario a mortal was faced with, yeah it'd be a good tradeoff; but we're talking about god, and he doesn't need to make those kinds of decisions.
So, just like my friend’s kiddo getting jabbed, yeah, sucks in the moment but no reasonable person would really call it horrific suffering given that, while unpleasant, it lasted under a day compared to her (hopefully) ~ 35,600 days on Earth. Saying because suffering exists on a human time scale when you’re talking about infinity is similarly silly.
The vaccine makes sense for us to do despite the pain because failing to do so leads to more pain - but all of our options regarding vaccines are all within a system that includes pathogens. If we had the option to just magic our immune systems to perfect without any suffering at all, you bet your ass that's what we'd do. But vaccines are the best we got. But god made the pathogens, and god gave us vulnerable immune systems to those pathogens. God had the power to create a universe without them, or without our susceptibility to them, but he chose not to, allowing us instead to suffer at his whim. Not all good.
You keep coming back to this “why can’t God make free will without evil? If he can’t, he’s not all powerful!” But it’s a basic definition problem. You’re effectively asking God to make 1 = 1 AND 1 = 2, which fine, could do but it eliminates the entire usefulness of 1 as a number.
Did you just skip over that whole spiel? I gave an example of free will without evil. So, now you're just just whipping up some strawman bullshit about '1=1 and 1=2' - I've already explained why that's not the case. You also skipped over why the ability to commit evil is always so pivotal to the concept of free will. Again, in the system that god made that is our universe, I'm not free to shoot lasers from my eyes or fart out unicorns: why are those any less of a requirement to having free will? Without those freedoms, we're just automatons, right?
Similarly, if the idea of free will is to find and reward good people and punish those who squander free will (by being jerks) free will probably necessitates the capacity for evil. (Otherwise, just stick with angels. Haven’t read the bible thoroughly but I’m pretty sure that’s basically the point of angels, perfect beings incapable of doing evil except for the one God made rebellious etc.)
Yeah you might want to read it a little more thoroughly before trying to defend it: scripture is pretty explicit about not giving a fuck about you living a sinful life, so long as you repent in the end. ...you're familiar with Jesus, right? That's kinda his whole story. Like, you could live absolutely stuffed to the brim with sin, defraud your way into a position of high office, use it almost excusively for greed and to do things like start wars to distract the world from your visits to some sketchy island to rape children... and then open your heart to Jesus on your death bed, and enjoy eternity in heaven with no consequences at all.
And going even further than that, according to scripture you can live an extremely moral life and still get thrown into hell if that moral behavior was for its own sake and not as a function that repentance. One of the stories is about the Pharisees, which is a big cautionary tale about walking the walk without actually believing in the message. Doesn't matter if you're doing good, if you're doing it for the wrong reasons, yer gonna burn!
...I grew up in a Christian household, church, sunday school, the whole 9. If your only exposure to it is through sermons and things like sunday school, you're not going to notice all the red flags, cuz they're not gonna talk about them. Start reading that shit on your own, and take the time to really understand what it's saying... it gets pretty fucked up. But again, don't take my word for it - read the fuckin thing.
Why are you asking me? Those already have established meanings, there's no need for me to reinvent them, nor do I have any kind of authority on our language even if I wanted to.
The early Christians weren’t really happy with the new religious literature they had at the time, so they agreed to remove specific parts. The remaining books were largely incompatible with the older ones, but they clearly weren’t aiming for a consistent collection anyway. As a result, we got a book series with all sorts of twists and turns.
You'd have to ignore a fair bit of the old and the new to get there, Jesus said he hadn't come to abolish any of the old law and he is recorded to have spoke about hell more than any other topic.
I think it makes more sense to say Yahweh is malevolent. It started off as a god of thunder and war, and when the ancient Judeans moved from a polytheist pantheon to a monotheist model, that's who the groups that won had chosen as their god.
But yeah, name a single diety directly responsible for more death and destruction? It literally pits 3 and a half groups that worship it against each other! To generate war. To generate death. It feeds on death and pain.
There's no indication that God would be good. In the Bible, David did something bad so God had 10 of his wives raped as punishment. He ordered genocide, specifically including that suckling children were to be killed. He does a lot of bad shit. Maybe he's real and he's a Trump supporter.
That's not entirely true. While he doesn't support women in the priesthood or as bishops (as set in Catholic dogma), he has placed women in high administrative positions within the Vatican, which is something other popes haven't done.
vilified the LGBTQ community
Also not true. He's pushed a policy of welcoming all people, and while it's true he doesn't support gay marriage, that is again due to established Catholic dogma and has been much more progressive than previous popes.
protected pedo priests.
I can't say whether or not that's true, I can't find any instances of him protecting pedo priests.
There's another case in Chicago if I recall correctly
In any case, being gay is still considered a sin and he was at a pedo priests birthday party 3 years ago. He's being told to pander by his media team, but absolutely nothing has changed and he's more than likely a hateful power hungry horrorshow. He's at a minimum worst than Francis (not saying much, every Pope is a low bar)
The whole org is a fucking shit show, I can't believe people are actually buying this stuff.
I'd argue striving to be head of one of the most hateful orgs automatically makes you bad person. Protecting pedos comes with the territory but doesn't give him a pass so to speak.
And my point is he is a bad person, maybe the best we could hope for but still a bad person.
I never said I expected better, just that the media lays it on thick and that it's laughable all the rubes that praise a guy who shrouds himself in homophobia and trans hate, and who protects pedophiles.
I'd argue with how pathetically shitty the average person is, that Leo is, in fact, a good person, whether or not you believe in any sort of divine guidance.
Hell, he doesn't even have to be a good Christian (by teachings, not Christian acts) to never the less end up on the 'good' half of humanity!
That's ... rather abstract. Besides, hating trans people is (sadly) still not a guarantee to find yourself on the 'bad' 50% of humanity. ... and that's assuming that only 50% of humanity is bad, which is rather forgiving!
Well he hates AI too, because it threatens the confession booth. And trans people hate AI girlfriends because they demonstrate that love was never gated by an expensive operation; while Hinton, the father of backprop, considers AI conscious already. So there's that. In general the more someone thinks they're the Good Guys, the more they're the Bad Guys. Now watch Lemmy turn into a mental pretzel to justify their own hatred of AI while missing the parallel with the cotton plantations wherein black people were also treated as unconscious and inferior. I'll see myself out before my inbox fills with comments calling me a loser for siding with Turing.
If he smoked or other risk factors and genetics have a lot to do with health. Some are more at risk from genes, but bad lifestyle can make various illnesses sooner, worse and advance faster than those who live healthier. There is no supernatural reward for suffering now. We're all temporary conscious stardust in this time to exist, and all the elements in us will be recycled again. That's the truth that frees us from the damaging dogmas and conditional belonging. Enjoy being the universe observing itself for this short time, peace!
Besided, all the World Leaders obsessed with immortality, having health checks and tests daily, from the top of the top doctors money can buy. They get all the extreme treatments, boosts, spikes and highly customized medicine and enjoying very early detection of malignant stuff.
I bet this pope bloke missing a few of these privileges, so it was a late-ish diagnosis.
Do you mean the designer, omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent, creator, Jehovah, or the lord god that gave that gave us viruses, deadly bacteria, genetic diseases, parasites, , volcanos, earthquakes, blindness, cancers, floods, droughts, starvation, meteorites, death from lightning strikes, pestilence, holy wars, tidal waves, asbestos, infant mortality, trachoma, life threatening radioactive elements, solar flares, malaria, smallpox, despots, dictators, slavery, mass extinctions, ice ages, trachoma, hare lips, cleft palates, animal sacrifices, infant genital mutilation, mental illness depression, bilharzia and anxiety, autism, Parkinson's disease, Hansons disease, hernias, the appendix, compacted wisdom teeth, acne, dementia and complete morons?
Not to take away from your beautiful comment, but wasn't there recently some research that the appendix might actually be beneficial? It had something to do with storing a copy of gut bacteria that can be re-seeded into the gut if needed. (I'll post a link if I come across the study again.)
The beginning of the biblical worldview is that everything was created in harmonious order, but then everything was fractured by us and broken bits now cause almost all of what you mentioned. God did give us the appendix though, and we think we've figured out why a few years back, it seems to hold a backup of the intestinal bacteria that can restart it if it gets wiped out.
Do you mean the designer, omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent, creator, Jehovah, or the lord god that gave that gave us viruses, deadly bacteria, genetic diseases, parasites, , volcanos, earthquakes, blindness, cancers, floods, droughts, starvation, meteorites, death from lightning strikes, pestilence, holy wars, tidal waves, asbestos, infant mortality, trachoma, life threatening radioactive elements, solar flares, malaria, smallpox, despots, dictators, slavery, mass extinctions, ice ages, trachoma, hare lips, cleft palates, animal sacrifices, infant genital mutilation, mental illness depression, bilharzia and anxiety, autism, Parkinson's disease, Hansons disease, hernias, the appendix, compacted wisdom teeth, acne, dementia and complete morons?
As an atheist: you get the concept wrong. All religions treat this life as a test and the nice part is yet to come. Children dying early or the Pope is them getting to heaven faster
You're asking an existential question: why do bad things happen to good people? I would wager that this has been a subject of philosophical debate for as long as humans have existed.
Ultimately, I think it's the wrong question.
What you're experiencing is a form of confirmation bias. You expect bad people to live and good people to die, and that expectation is shaped by societal conditioning and the beliefs you've been exposed to throughout your life.
In reality, cancer, for example, affects a relatively small percentage of the world's population at any given time, although that percentage still represents a tremendous number of people.
You're seeing it affect people in roughly the proportions you'd expect. The problem is that the people you pay attention to tend to be the ones you believe shouldn't be affected by it, while those you believe should be affected often aren't.
We tend to perceive these events as unjust because we expect the world to operate according to some inherent sense of fairness. Unfortunately, nature doesn't make that distinction between good and bad people.
Another reason on the list that I do not believe in God such as God is portrayed in the Bible, Torah, Koran, etc. If there is a God, I don't think it cares about life on Earth. It may have created the beginning of everything somehow but I don't think it micromanages what happens on Earth or even cares one way or the other.
The best explanation I've heard, as an agnostic, is this is our misperception of this life vs an eternal (infinite) afterlife.
Sure, bad people might live really fun lives for maybe 100 years while good people might suffer for the same. But then, for millions and millions and gazillions of millennia after that, both are punished or rewarded for how they chose to live those 100 years.
My friend's baby had a bunch of vaccinations the other day. Horrible day for the kid, unfun and stabby. But in a dozen years, will she remember it? Nope. But that day, that's all she could comprehend. Similarly, for this brief go around, yeah, what we can see and experience is all we can really comprehend. But the promise of at least Christianity, but I think many other religions, is that the next life is infinite and all that matters.
At least as long as you believe in the right god. Because if you bet wrong, and the ownership rights to heaven and hell are not the Christian God's, but someone else's, you're fucked.
Yeah, I was trying to joke about this a bit, but in all honesty, I just find this specific argument for belief to be basically Stockholm syndrome.
First things first, it's a really old argument. It's called Pascal's Wager, and the little joke I tried to make was about a criticism of it, called "argument from inconsistent revelations". This whole conversation has been done before. (This goes to OP about this, as well @[email protected])
But, fundamentally, this whole deal with the "infinite value" of heaven and hell, is just a threat. It's your pimp saying "Obey me, and you get money and comfort. Don't, and I break all your bones and destroy you. Nothing else in your life matters, due to the absolute power I have over you".
There's nothing more to this argument. It's just taking a carrot-and-stick threat at face value.
EXCEPT your pimp can plausibly offer you literal eternal bliss.
This whole conversation has been done before.
Yup, just like the "oh you better have chosen the right God!" I think every ten year old has that thought and figured they've got religion on the ropes.
It's probably one of those irreconcilable arguments. If a God exists etc, then yeah, you can absolutely see a system of infinite reward/punishment. If no God exists, yeah, you can easily see a system enacted to control the masses.
I know which I think is more likely but I also know that anyone completely dismissing the other side without qualification probably hasn't thought it through with a mind willing to question their own beliefs.
Existence of evil isn't proof that [the Christian] God doesn't exist, for a variety of reasons, some less obvious than others. Although it's still very unlikely that he does exist.
Which is generally irrelevant, because faith is entirely separate from objective facts. You don't need to consider the hypothetical existence of God to be a true fact in order to be a good Christian. To 'believe' in him means something else completely, but depending on your language it might not make linguistic sense (assuming it makes sense at all, but that's a separate discussion).
The same is, however, not true for Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity (stupid ass name), Mormonism, or some others. Mostly because they have nothing to do with Christianity, and are just... well, scams.
Catholicism, and most other Christian denominations, use Christianity in a similar fashion to the Nazis using swastikas.
The main idea of Christianity is that earthly life is essentially an entrance exam for the next, true life. You live your life as best you can, then you're judged afterwards, and if you pass - you go to heaven, which is supposedly a paradise free of evil.
So evil (or what we generally consider to be 'evil') being omnipresent does not prove anything in the context of Christianity. The crucial part is whether or not evil exists in the 'next life'. Conveniently, we'll never know until we reach it, so it'll probably never be possible to prove anything on this topic.
I'm not sure if it's still possible to track where it all started, but to me it seems quite likely that precisely this idea of 'true life' or 'soul' being disconnected from physical, observable, empirical reality is where all our troubles with capitalism started.
If this life is largely meaningless, and the real one starts after we die, then sooner or later some people will just do whatever they want. And if humans are the only 'intelligent' beings, or the only beings with souls (Christianity + later Enlightenment philosophy), then mass destruction of nature is morally sound.
Then add focusing on accumulation of capital, as well as industrial machinery, and you arrive where we are today, pretty much.
You don’t need to consider the hypothetical existence of God to be a true fact in order to be a good Christian.
Other than the fact that according to the Bible you need a personal relationship with God in order to be a Christian and spend eternity with God.
The main idea of Christianity is that earthly life is essentially an entrance exam for the next, true life. You live your life as best you can, then you’re judged afterwards, and if you pass - you go to heaven, which is supposedly a paradise free of evil.
See above, according to the Bible, no one will be judged good enough based on how they lived their life and the only hope of getting to heaven is a personal relationship with God, by which Jesus's death in the cross can pay the outstanding debt owed from your life that you yourself cannot pay.
This is an extreme oversimplification, and a literal interpretation of obviously symbolic and allegorical texts.
Just like 'giants' doesn't refer to literal giant people, 'relationship with God' can mean several dozen different things, depending on the context.
Allegories and symbols are very common in religious texts. To treat them literally misses the point.
These texts also tend to repeat the same points multiple times, or overwrite them altogether (countless occurrences in the Bible), with broader context in entirely different sections of the texts, if at all present.
Annotations usually help with this, but it depends on the translation and version of the Bible you're reading.
Keep in mind I'm by no means advocating for or defending Christianity or any other religion. This is purely about theology, as well as reading and understanding religious texts. It's a fairly complex topic, regardless of if you're religious or not.
This is an extreme oversimplification, and a literal interpretation of obviously symbolic and allegorical texts.
Just like ‘giants’ doesn’t refer to literal giant people, ‘relationship with God’ can mean several dozen different things, depending on the context.
Allegories and symbols are very common in religious texts. To treat them literally misses the point.
Which texts? I'm going to disagree with most examples, so please give examples so we can hash it out. "Obviously symbolic and allegorical" is going to depends heavily on the plausibility structure you start with before reading them, I'd like to see evidence for that statement.
These texts also tend to repeat the same points multiple times, or overwrite them altogether (countless occurrences in the Bible), with broader context in entirely different sections of the texts, if at all present.
More examples please.
Annotations usually help with this, but it depends on the translation and version of the Bible you’re reading.
What do you mean by annotations? Comparing various translations can help to get a better understanding of the original text, I don't take a single translation as the only correct one.
I've got to know Professor Lucifer personally; He can be quite pesky with His Math and Physics tricks sometimes, but I promise you, He's not the manager... You may want to talk with "Yaldabaoth" instead.
I was just saying - as he's a Christian and pretty much won that whole game, he probably isn't worried about dying. And Christians, like other religions, think earthly suffering is unavoidable but human life is short and eternity is long. In their view, God gives you what you can handle, and it would make sense that he could handle more, right?
Earthly suffering, or earthly success, doesn't prove or disprove God. God could also be a villain, right? Or just not be able to perceive us as individuals. Nothing that happens here can prove or disprove God, short of a God coming here and proving themselves.
I think it depends of the definition of a god that you can prove or disprove their existence, I remember the invisible green dragon in Carl Sagan's garage: only falseable gods can be proven or disproven, if defined unfalseable then there is nothing to discuss about (but at the same time such god would have zero consequences/influence in our universe)
A part of the problem is that you're misunderstanding fundamental parts of the religion you're referencing.
In this religion:
The God of Abraham does not answer your prayers because he made you to experience all the negatives so you can learn from them, it's part of "His Plan™". He made you as you are, to sin and fail and suffer. He then made a half human son, Jesus, who he allowed to be sacrificed in order to forgive you for the sins you have been made to commit. You simply need to give yourself to Jesus and accept him into your heart. According to the story.
The rest of the problem is all the logical failures that come as a part of this.
As an atheist, and a devils advocate (Gods advocate?? hmm), my friend used to tell me that God knows best, and every unexplainable events could be explained by God seeing further than us, therefore having a long-term goal. Meaning, to achieve this noble goal, it is paramount to bestow cancer upon the pope (suffering is closely tied to Christianity after all), while also keeping billionaires alive.
Pedo priests are like bad apples in barrel. As per allegations they've been there for centuries. I wonder if there are any apples that aren't rotten for one reason or another
This is simply the laws of nature with no supernatural design behind them. Read or listen to Christopher Hitchens. He can articulate this position much better than I can. But religion will tie itself in knots trying to explain our lives within its overview. And when we rightly question how things can be we are told we must have faith. No evidence is given because there is none to give. It's a clever trick.
People who face challenges learn and grow as individuals. They become better people. The best people usually have had the most to overcome. Lung cancer is a hell of a life lesson and teacher.
The people you don't respect or you dislike usually haven't earned it. They've had it the easiest.
I believe we set/choose paths that put our own obstacles in our way. Not because we are wrong or stupid, but because we choose to learn or gain strength (spiritual or physical).
And saying God can't be the light in the sky, a flower in a valley, an antique carbureted engine, or a lung cancer diagnosis is to limit God's ability to make us better people... and I am not willing to do that.
Can be explained however you want. You can't prove a negative. God does not exist because that is what makes the most sense overall. Same reason santa does not exist and ghosts don't exist and superman does not exist.
You don't understand. It's all part of gOd'S pLaN. And God, being omnipotent, naturally develops plans that we couldn't possibly comprehend. So don't even try. Stop asking questions. Just let the Big Man handle things. It's all good. If you die an awful death you'll just go party in Heaven anyway. Who even cares what happens here?
Im of the opinion that God, as it were, might exist. We're just not able to understand the longview, so to us, at the moment, it seems incomprehensible.
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Plenty of other, more concrete evidence that (the abrahamic) god doesn't exist. But hey, if that's what convinces you then kudos.
"Only the good die young" -William Martin Joel
This is the bad timeline, evil is rewarded
Also known as Kalyug.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali_Yuga
Other than god not existing? God is malignant
With the way Christians and similar preach? Yea, God's a psychopath and so are they.
Though there are several theologically sound explanations, especially if you truly believe "God" is beyond or bigger than our universe.
Basic believer: "God works in mysterious ways". Sure, that Harlequin baby only ever had a miserable existence, but that's because their soul didn't need to experience a full life! Sure, your school teacher only ever did good works and then got ran over by a truck, but God thought it was her time!
More logical theology: God is bigger than the universe. He sees the whole thing. If something bad happens, then it is merely a wrinkle, or if you believe in divine guidance, it's a tragectory change to something better. Either way, God's not helping you, because what you want makes for a worse over-all universe. Or, if you want to be more literal about it, maybe God doesn't necessarily have the power to truly magic something. Maybe he cannot instantly change an exact, single detail about this universe, yet created it, could destroy it, and has enough control to drastically change things? Like a video game dev seeing how their Sims playthrough plays out.
Deeper theology: We're here to be tested/checked/validated/etc. God said he gave us the answers, not that he'll do the test for us. Besides, if we were instructed to take care of something (like Earth, or your personal life), why in the ever loving FUCK would you expect someone else to do the job you were told to do? Nobody is going to be happy to have to step in to fix something you fucked up, especially when they were the ones who put you on the job to take care of it in the first place.
Deeper science fiction: How would such a great being even begin to care about the individualities of creatures even lesser than ants to him as ants are to us? It's not hard to imagine someone caring deeply about their creation, but not really caring about exactly how the tiny details come out for every single detail. Like a single piece of glitter falling off your child's art piece, an individual life is meaningless so long as the whole picture remains.
Mix and match those views to your heart's content, and I've heard all of them and more growing up in a church. Bunch of intellectually weak clowns unwilling to admit religion is just Baby's First Philosophy...
Please keep going, that was great!
Not sure of too many other opinions I've directly heard, but what kind of belief do you want to hear more of? (I know I said I heard more dismissive/excusive beliefs, but I don't remember them in any representative fashion; it was thankfully years and years ago!)
I'm just struggling with my own slow process of discarding faith and found the arguments useful... I don't have a particular direction or anything
Ahh I see. Yea, it's a whole whirlpool of ad-hoc and circular logic... It always boils down to, "It's correct because I was told it's correct!".
I can understand community and wanting to be a good person, but there is SO much garbage piled on top...
Maybe one where god is plainly evil, and other similar to the last one: it was only a creator that put things in motion and it's long gone now.
The old Cainites, Cathars, Marcionites, and other similar Gnostic sects quite directly believed God was the bad guy. (or at least the physical world and its creator; it gets weird in some of them...)
Lots of variations on why and who and bla...
or he/she doesn't give a fuck
Forking shirtballs, we're in the bad place!
We're in the only place, unfortunately.
The theological explanation from Catholic dogma would be along the lines of God doesn't really interfere with the day-to-day goings on of the world.
Is prayer actively discouraged in Catholicism?
No, you can and should beg god for devine intervention that he probably doesnt do and thank for his gracefullness which he hasnt shown. Or at least whoreship him, because he is so great and benevolent while he is hearing the prayers and letting good people die nevertheless. Or maybe there werent enough prayers yet, for THE POPE.
It all makes a lot of sense you see.
"God works in mysterious ways" is the only "explanation" religious clowns have. It's 100% post-hoc justification. If they're bad, they deserve it. If they're good, then they must secretly be bad and deserve it. If they're really good and don't deserve it, then, "God works in mysterious ways". Always. Every time.
There is no questioning faith, only declaring heresy to such clowns. If things didn't work out for you, it's not a systemic problem here, it's because you deserved it!
Obligatory:
Gonna save this one
So, so many ways.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evil/ offers some good discussion.
Thanks, looks interesting!
Aww man. I tried getting Kagi's LLM to summarise the examples and refutations and even that's proving too much for my burnt out brains...
You're talking about the same god that let Satan torture Job to win a bet. Even in Christian doctrine, god doesn't give a fuck about people. He just wants obeisance.
He sent his own son to be tortured because he was too much of a coward to go himself, and that's supposed to be laudable!?
Yes, but also he is his own son so he did send himself. I will not be taking any further questions
This always boils down to the Epicurean Paradox.
So, most religious mythology (including Christianity) defines its god as 3 absolutes:
All good (not a shred of evil)
All powerfull (its will is our reality, period)
All knowing (it's fully conscious of literally everything that happens in its universe)
So how is it that evil can exist? Cuz we can see that clear as day, everywhere. God either...
is aware of it, has the ability to stop it, and chooses not to, in which case it is not all good.
is aware of it, wants to stop it, but doesn't have the ability to, in which case it isn't all powerful.
Has the power and desire to stop it, but isn't aware it's happening, in which case it isn't all knowing.
Every single attempt to answer the Epicurean paradox does so by rugpulling one of the three pillars and presenting god as instead only being two of those absolutes. (and if anyone reading this takes that as a challenge, feel free to give it a go).
Either Christianity and most other religions are being deliberately dishonest about the nature of their gods, or, as you said, god doesn't exist.
Ehhhhhhh. You're conflating this existence with all of eternity. Those are very different things.
Consider God as a parent. I used the example in an earlier response but my friend took her child to be vaccinated. For a baby, that's a very unpleasant day. In a week, she won't remember it.
Similarly, an all powerful, good God can be okay with someone suffering for a momentary blip because the end result is an eternity of paradise. (What is a lifetime of suffering against infinite years of happiness?)
"But wait!" you cry, "surely an all powerful God can skip the ANY suffering bit, right? He's just choosing not to because he's a prick!" Which misses the possibility of self imposed constraints on power. If I build a system and choose to work within that system, that's still me being all powerful. And if, as an all knowing being, I know that a half moment of unpleasantness means an eternity of bliss (so I can reward free will, instead of just creating a bunch of automatons), that's a tradeoff a good and all powerful God may make.
Those are very different things, but I don't see how or where they were conflated. Nor how conflating them would even be problematic in this context: they'd both be within god's full scope of control, right?
So, not 'all good'.
And if that system you just built includes evil, again we're in not 'all good' territory.
According to self imposed rules that include evil
A tradeoff? Why would god need to trade? If he wants something, he just makes it so -- unless he isn't all powerful. Or unless we're still in the self-imposed-rules that allow for evil, which again is claiming that god is evil.
Yeah free will usually comes up in these conversations, but right out the gate that's an attack on god's power: does he not have the ability to grant free will without also allowing evil? And even if he can't, and ignoring that that claim is that he isn't all powerful: why is the ability to commit evil always a criteria for free will? We can't fly, shoot lasers out of our eyes, or fart out unicorns either, so with or without the ability to commit evil our freedom is still not absolute - does that make us a bunch of automatons?
Or rather, if the ability to commit evil was taken away from us, would we lose our free will? Let's look at your freedom of choice within the context of dinner. Half a second's thought, and I've got dozens of restaurant options, or grocery stores that allow me to cook up something that might fall outside of what the restaurants here offer: the number of options, while technically finite, are so mind-bogglingly huge that it might as well be infinite: so I'm gonna say my freedom of choice here is almost literally absolute.
One of those dinner options is to kidnap my neighbor's 4-year old, throw him in the oven, and cannibalize him. Why? Cuz god lets me, right? Sure it's illegal, but we don't care about legal authority, we care about god's. So if god snapped his fingers and changed our reality so that I'm no longer even capable of considering that, let alone committing it, evil is officially off the menu... but the billions of other possible combinations are still open, so I'd argue that my freedom of choice didn't actually change all that much. Does that make me an automaton?
...and what about the things that I already don't have the freedom to eat? Most of our reality isn't edible. And even if it was, I can only fit a few handfuls of it into my belly at a time - I can't have the moon for dinner, it won't fit. ...does that make me an automaton?
Point is our free will already exists within a system that has limits. Evil is one of many, many, many parts of that system, so even ignoring Epicurean Paradox, why is evil always a focal point of free will?
Because a moment's or even human lifetime's suffering is effectively nothing when compared to eternity. Show me someone who wouldn't trade a hundred years of suffering for an eternity of bliss and I'll show you a silly goof.
So, just like my friend's kiddo getting jabbed, yeah, sucks in the moment but no reasonable person would really call it horrific suffering given that, while unpleasant, it lasted under a day compared to her (hopefully) ~ 35,600 days on Earth. Saying because suffering exists on a human time scale when you're talking about infinity is similarly silly.
You keep coming back to this "why can't God make free will without evil? If he can't, he's not all powerful!"
But it's a basic definition problem. You're effectively asking God to make 1 = 1 AND 1 = 2, which fine, could do but it eliminates the entire usefulness of 1 as a number.
Similarly, if the idea of free will is to find and reward good people and punish those who squander free will (by being jerks) free will probably necessitates the capacity for evil. (Otherwise, just stick with angels. Haven't read the bible thoroughly but I'm pretty sure that's basically the point of angels, perfect beings incapable of doing evil except for the one God made rebellious etc.)
So if there will be no suffering and no evil in the eternity, why can't it be like that already? If one is incapable of doing evil in heaven does he have free will? If your answer is that he will not be willing to do that, why? Because here on earth one can be good and die and one can be good and turn evil in the end, what makes heaven different and why it wouldn't be possible right here right now?
What evil could you do in an eternal paradise? And similarly, in a paradise, what sort of temptation to evil do you foresee?
Again, if you want to reward people who are good, you need a proving ground. In a paradise, anyone can be good. When life is harder (or has more temptations) that's when our character shines through.
This weighing of temporary suffering against eternal bliss is just another example of what a lousy game God is playing. He could have come up with something else - but he didn’t. That makes him, in any case, a huge masochistic asshole.
And even if all of that were actually true, the question arises as to why anyone would ever regard such a being as the measure of all things, let alone worship it.
Wait, why is an asshole move? He figured out a way to figure out who ought to be rewarded for all eternity after a moment's existence, that's pretty amazing. Think how much of art etc is grappling with the concept of death or non-existence. God instead figured out, "hey, here's a way to sift through a bunch of people with free will and temptation and reward the good ones for all eternity." I'd be impressed!
I mean, I agree but only because I think you're not using the word you mean. (Masochist enjoys harming themselves, you probably mean sociopath or somesuch.) And yeah, I think you'd have to be a masochist to create this potential for infinite reward and then have ungrateful snots running around bitching about a temporary inconvenience.
Why would God create a system to "figure out who ought to be rewarded" when he already knows that information? He's omniscient, he knew that information since the beginning of time, no system required.
If he needs to create this system, he is not omniscient.
If he chooses to create this system anyway, including creation of childhood cancer and starving puppies, then he is evil.
Of course I meant sadistic, you're right. I guess my coffee was bad.
As for the rest of your answer, I don't understand why you show understanding toward a being that had every opportunity, and it explicitly chose to play a cosmic game that seems to serve no purpose other than its own amusement.
But George Carlin said it best:
And if that were a real scenario a mortal was faced with, yeah it'd be a good tradeoff; but we're talking about god, and he doesn't need to make those kinds of decisions.
The vaccine makes sense for us to do despite the pain because failing to do so leads to more pain - but all of our options regarding vaccines are all within a system that includes pathogens. If we had the option to just magic our immune systems to perfect without any suffering at all, you bet your ass that's what we'd do. But vaccines are the best we got. But god made the pathogens, and god gave us vulnerable immune systems to those pathogens. God had the power to create a universe without them, or without our susceptibility to them, but he chose not to, allowing us instead to suffer at his whim. Not all good.
Did you just skip over that whole spiel? I gave an example of free will without evil. So, now you're just just whipping up some strawman bullshit about '1=1 and 1=2' - I've already explained why that's not the case. You also skipped over why the ability to commit evil is always so pivotal to the concept of free will. Again, in the system that god made that is our universe, I'm not free to shoot lasers from my eyes or fart out unicorns: why are those any less of a requirement to having free will? Without those freedoms, we're just automatons, right?
Yeah you might want to read it a little more thoroughly before trying to defend it: scripture is pretty explicit about not giving a fuck about you living a sinful life, so long as you repent in the end. ...you're familiar with Jesus, right? That's kinda his whole story. Like, you could live absolutely stuffed to the brim with sin, defraud your way into a position of high office, use it almost excusively for greed and to do things like start wars to distract the world from your visits to some sketchy island to rape children... and then open your heart to Jesus on your death bed, and enjoy eternity in heaven with no consequences at all.
And going even further than that, according to scripture you can live an extremely moral life and still get thrown into hell if that moral behavior was for its own sake and not as a function that repentance. One of the stories is about the Pharisees, which is a big cautionary tale about walking the walk without actually believing in the message. Doesn't matter if you're doing good, if you're doing it for the wrong reasons, yer gonna burn!
...I grew up in a Christian household, church, sunday school, the whole 9. If your only exposure to it is through sermons and things like sunday school, you're not going to notice all the red flags, cuz they're not gonna talk about them. Start reading that shit on your own, and take the time to really understand what it's saying... it gets pretty fucked up. But again, don't take my word for it - read the fuckin thing.
What are “good” and “evil”?
Why are you asking me? Those already have established meanings, there's no need for me to reinvent them, nor do I have any kind of authority on our language even if I wanted to.
Jordan Petersonesque comment. I think he was just sea lioning.
"What do you mean 'do'? What do you mean 'you'? What do you mean 'believe'? And what do you mean 'God'?"
Anyone whos actually read the bible knows the christian god is a violent genocidal sociopath. It only makes sense he would reward that behavior.
That is the god of the old testament, he had a complete personality shift in the new one.
Splitting himself into two (or three?) seems to have an calming effect on God
The early Christians weren’t really happy with the new religious literature they had at the time, so they agreed to remove specific parts. The remaining books were largely incompatible with the older ones, but they clearly weren’t aiming for a consistent collection anyway. As a result, we got a book series with all sorts of twists and turns.
You'd have to ignore a fair bit of the old and the new to get there, Jesus said he hadn't come to abolish any of the old law and he is recorded to have spoke about hell more than any other topic.
God doesn't care, or God doesn't know.
If he knows, but does not care, then he is not good.
If he cares, but does not know, then he is not god.
If this is part of the plan, then God is evil.
The Epicurean paradox.
God is obviously malevolent. All of his conservative representatives being evil should be a clue.
I think it makes more sense to say Yahweh is malevolent. It started off as a god of thunder and war, and when the ancient Judeans moved from a polytheist pantheon to a monotheist model, that's who the groups that won had chosen as their god.
But yeah, name a single diety directly responsible for more death and destruction? It literally pits 3 and a half groups that worship it against each other! To generate war. To generate death. It feeds on death and pain.
There's no indication that God would be good. In the Bible, David did something bad so God had 10 of his wives raped as punishment. He ordered genocide, specifically including that suckling children were to be killed. He does a lot of bad shit. Maybe he's real and he's a Trump supporter.
Or god likes the pope too and wants to hang with him but to do that he has to kill him.
Enoch would beg to differ
Fuck the the Catholic Church and anyone that supports it.
Fuck the Pope
If God existed, I doubt he goes around with a magic cancer wand. That being said, Pope Leo isn't a good person, he just has a good media team.
Why do you say that?
Original sin baybeee!
🤣🤣🤣
He doesn't support women in the ministry, vilified the LGBTQ community and most importantly, protected pedo priests.
That's not entirely true. While he doesn't support women in the priesthood or as bishops (as set in Catholic dogma), he has placed women in high administrative positions within the Vatican, which is something other popes haven't done.
Also not true. He's pushed a policy of welcoming all people, and while it's true he doesn't support gay marriage, that is again due to established Catholic dogma and has been much more progressive than previous popes.
I can't say whether or not that's true, I can't find any instances of him protecting pedo priests.
Admin positions aren't the Ministry
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/09/pope-leo-xiv-lgbtq
https://snapnetwork.org/2025/12/08/pope-leo-helped-shield-clergy-accused-of-abuse-in-peru-abuse-survivors-allege/
There's another case in Chicago if I recall correctly
In any case, being gay is still considered a sin and he was at a pedo priests birthday party 3 years ago. He's being told to pander by his media team, but absolutely nothing has changed and he's more than likely a hateful power hungry horrorshow. He's at a minimum worst than Francis (not saying much, every Pope is a low bar)
The whole org is a fucking shit show, I can't believe people are actually buying this stuff.
I mean... would he have even been allowed to be the Pope if he didn't do those things? (let's not pretend the Pope is actually a divine appointment)
I'd argue striving to be head of one of the most hateful orgs automatically makes you bad person. Protecting pedos comes with the territory but doesn't give him a pass so to speak.
What I mean is, the people who decide who is pope were never going to allow someone the title who would fight back against those topics.
It doesn't matter how good or bad he is.
And my point is he is a bad person, maybe the best we could hope for but still a bad person.
I never said I expected better, just that the media lays it on thick and that it's laughable all the rubes that praise a guy who shrouds himself in homophobia and trans hate, and who protects pedophiles.
Literally and directly better than someone who'd want to bring the crusades back...
You're really trying to make perfect the enemy of good here.
What constitutes a "good" person?
I'd argue with how pathetically shitty the average person is, that Leo is, in fact, a good person, whether or not you believe in any sort of divine guidance.
Hell, he doesn't even have to be a good Christian (by teachings, not Christian acts) to never the less end up on the 'good' half of humanity!
He's JK Rowling level bad.
That's ... rather abstract. Besides, hating trans people is (sadly) still not a guarantee to find yourself on the 'bad' 50% of humanity. ... and that's assuming that only 50% of humanity is bad, which is rather forgiving!
Well he hates AI too, because it threatens the confession booth. And trans people hate AI girlfriends because they demonstrate that love was never gated by an expensive operation; while Hinton, the father of backprop, considers AI conscious already. So there's that. In general the more someone thinks they're the Good Guys, the more they're the Bad Guys. Now watch Lemmy turn into a mental pretzel to justify their own hatred of AI while missing the parallel with the cotton plantations wherein black people were also treated as unconscious and inferior. I'll see myself out before my inbox fills with comments calling me a loser for siding with Turing.
rofl trans people getting operations has less than nothing to do with... what ever the hell you think.
God isn’t catholic
But is he mormon or protestant?
He is a scientologist. And his real name is Xenu.
LIES! He is spaghetti!
May His Noodly Appendage Touch You
Eru Iluvatar is not a scientologist. I have a number of books, not just one, that say as much, so it must be true.
Have you considered the possibility that God is an incompetent moron?
In any decently run universe this guy would have been out on his all-powerful ass a long time ago.
His plan is ineffable, it can't be effed
I'm an antitheist, but just to play along:
God is real, and he's a fucking asshole.
"god works in mysterious ways"
"but that's all bullshit"
"god works in mysterious ways"
if you look at how cancer develops
that doesn't need God.. that just happens here on earth as a random lottery / your life choices
And not from corporations poisoning us..
that's life choices. these corporations produce nothing but for people
Or God do exists and is the ultimate villain, the fucking last boss of Life™
God could still exist. It just means that either he isn't benevolent, isn't all-powerful, isn't all-knowing, or some combination thereof.
If he smoked or other risk factors and genetics have a lot to do with health. Some are more at risk from genes, but bad lifestyle can make various illnesses sooner, worse and advance faster than those who live healthier. There is no supernatural reward for suffering now. We're all temporary conscious stardust in this time to exist, and all the elements in us will be recycled again. That's the truth that frees us from the damaging dogmas and conditional belonging. Enjoy being the universe observing itself for this short time, peace!
Besided, all the World Leaders obsessed with immortality, having health checks and tests daily, from the top of the top doctors money can buy. They get all the extreme treatments, boosts, spikes and highly customized medicine and enjoying very early detection of malignant stuff.
I bet this pope bloke missing a few of these privileges, so it was a late-ish diagnosis.
and they still die to thier own hubris, sick and old, or from cancer.
God's interests are confined to the ocular, he doesn't do lungs.
Do you mean the designer, omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent, creator, Jehovah, or the lord god that gave that gave us viruses, deadly bacteria, genetic diseases, parasites, , volcanos, earthquakes, blindness, cancers, floods, droughts, starvation, meteorites, death from lightning strikes, pestilence, holy wars, tidal waves, asbestos, infant mortality, trachoma, life threatening radioactive elements, solar flares, malaria, smallpox, despots, dictators, slavery, mass extinctions, ice ages, trachoma, hare lips, cleft palates, animal sacrifices, infant genital mutilation, mental illness depression, bilharzia and anxiety, autism, Parkinson's disease, Hansons disease, hernias, the appendix, compacted wisdom teeth, acne, dementia and complete morons?
Not to take away from your beautiful comment, but wasn't there recently some research that the appendix might actually be beneficial? It had something to do with storing a copy of gut bacteria that can be re-seeded into the gut if needed. (I'll post a link if I come across the study again.)
It was ages ago, Wikipedia links to a paper for 2009 and another review paper in 2016.
you forgot omnipresent.
If God is everywhere, then he's up your ass too.
He didn't give us anything. After he kicked us out of paradise it was pretty much "figure it out" apart from Noah and Christ (Moses was delusional).
The beginning of the biblical worldview is that everything was created in harmonious order, but then everything was fractured by us and broken bits now cause almost all of what you mentioned. God did give us the appendix though, and we think we've figured out why a few years back, it seems to hold a backup of the intestinal bacteria that can restart it if it gets wiped out.
Do you mean the designer, omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent, creator, Jehovah, or the lord god that gave that gave us viruses, deadly bacteria, genetic diseases, parasites, , volcanos, earthquakes, blindness, cancers, floods, droughts, starvation, meteorites, death from lightning strikes, pestilence, holy wars, tidal waves, asbestos, infant mortality, trachoma, life threatening radioactive elements, solar flares, malaria, smallpox, despots, dictators, slavery, mass extinctions, ice ages, trachoma, hare lips, cleft palates, animal sacrifices, infant genital mutilation, mental illness depression, bilharzia and anxiety, autism, Parkinson's disease, Hansons disease, hernias, the appendix, compacted wisdom teeth, acne, dementia and complete morons?
You missed step 2. The design got broken, and that's where all those things come from.
Mysterious ways, brah. Mysterious ways.
As an atheist: you get the concept wrong. All religions treat this life as a test and the nice part is yet to come. Children dying early or the Pope is them getting to heaven faster
Which was Mother Theresa's whole thing. Making suffering worse to have them closer to Christ. I hope she burns in the hell she believed in.
You're asking an existential question: why do bad things happen to good people? I would wager that this has been a subject of philosophical debate for as long as humans have existed.
Ultimately, I think it's the wrong question.
What you're experiencing is a form of confirmation bias. You expect bad people to live and good people to die, and that expectation is shaped by societal conditioning and the beliefs you've been exposed to throughout your life.
In reality, cancer, for example, affects a relatively small percentage of the world's population at any given time, although that percentage still represents a tremendous number of people.
You're seeing it affect people in roughly the proportions you'd expect. The problem is that the people you pay attention to tend to be the ones you believe shouldn't be affected by it, while those you believe should be affected often aren't.
We tend to perceive these events as unjust because we expect the world to operate according to some inherent sense of fairness. Unfortunately, nature doesn't make that distinction between good and bad people.
Another reason on the list that I do not believe in God such as God is portrayed in the Bible, Torah, Koran, etc. If there is a God, I don't think it cares about life on Earth. It may have created the beginning of everything somehow but I don't think it micromanages what happens on Earth or even cares one way or the other.
Holy fuck that question is as deep as a puddle
The best explanation I've heard, as an agnostic, is this is our misperception of this life vs an eternal (infinite) afterlife.
Sure, bad people might live really fun lives for maybe 100 years while good people might suffer for the same. But then, for millions and millions and gazillions of millennia after that, both are punished or rewarded for how they chose to live those 100 years.
My friend's baby had a bunch of vaccinations the other day. Horrible day for the kid, unfun and stabby. But in a dozen years, will she remember it? Nope. But that day, that's all she could comprehend. Similarly, for this brief go around, yeah, what we can see and experience is all we can really comprehend. But the promise of at least Christianity, but I think many other religions, is that the next life is infinite and all that matters.
Conclusion: its use to keep the miserable good people placid while the bad guys have all the fun
If there's no God, then sure. If there is a God, there's a life of infinite paradise for those who deserve it.
That's the whole thing. The conclusion changes dramatically if there is or isn't a God.
At least as long as you believe in the right god. Because if you bet wrong, and the ownership rights to heaven and hell are not the Christian God's, but someone else's, you're fucked.
As an atheist. You create a straw man. You don't know what a god is looking for
Yeah, I was trying to joke about this a bit, but in all honesty, I just find this specific argument for belief to be basically Stockholm syndrome.
First things first, it's a really old argument. It's called Pascal's Wager, and the little joke I tried to make was about a criticism of it, called "argument from inconsistent revelations". This whole conversation has been done before. (This goes to OP about this, as well @[email protected])
But, fundamentally, this whole deal with the "infinite value" of heaven and hell, is just a threat. It's your pimp saying "Obey me, and you get money and comfort. Don't, and I break all your bones and destroy you. Nothing else in your life matters, due to the absolute power I have over you".
There's nothing more to this argument. It's just taking a carrot-and-stick threat at face value.
EXCEPT your pimp can plausibly offer you literal eternal bliss.
Yup, just like the "oh you better have chosen the right God!" I think every ten year old has that thought and figured they've got religion on the ropes.
It's probably one of those irreconcilable arguments. If a God exists etc, then yeah, you can absolutely see a system of infinite reward/punishment. If no God exists, yeah, you can easily see a system enacted to control the masses.
I know which I think is more likely but I also know that anyone completely dismissing the other side without qualification probably hasn't thought it through with a mind willing to question their own beliefs.
Existence of evil isn't proof that [the Christian] God doesn't exist, for a variety of reasons, some less obvious than others. Although it's still very unlikely that he does exist.
Which is generally irrelevant, because faith is entirely separate from objective facts. You don't need to consider the hypothetical existence of God to be a true fact in order to be a good Christian. To 'believe' in him means something else completely, but depending on your language it might not make linguistic sense (assuming it makes sense at all, but that's a separate discussion).
The same is, however, not true for Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity (stupid ass name), Mormonism, or some others. Mostly because they have nothing to do with Christianity, and are just... well, scams.
Catholicism, and most other Christian denominations, use Christianity in a similar fashion to the Nazis using swastikas.
The main idea of Christianity is that earthly life is essentially an entrance exam for the next, true life. You live your life as best you can, then you're judged afterwards, and if you pass - you go to heaven, which is supposedly a paradise free of evil.
So evil (or what we generally consider to be 'evil') being omnipresent does not prove anything in the context of Christianity. The crucial part is whether or not evil exists in the 'next life'. Conveniently, we'll never know until we reach it, so it'll probably never be possible to prove anything on this topic.
I'm not sure if it's still possible to track where it all started, but to me it seems quite likely that precisely this idea of 'true life' or 'soul' being disconnected from physical, observable, empirical reality is where all our troubles with capitalism started.
If this life is largely meaningless, and the real one starts after we die, then sooner or later some people will just do whatever they want. And if humans are the only 'intelligent' beings, or the only beings with souls (Christianity + later Enlightenment philosophy), then mass destruction of nature is morally sound.
Then add focusing on accumulation of capital, as well as industrial machinery, and you arrive where we are today, pretty much.
Other than the fact that according to the Bible you need a personal relationship with God in order to be a Christian and spend eternity with God.
See above, according to the Bible, no one will be judged good enough based on how they lived their life and the only hope of getting to heaven is a personal relationship with God, by which Jesus's death in the cross can pay the outstanding debt owed from your life that you yourself cannot pay.
This is an extreme oversimplification, and a literal interpretation of obviously symbolic and allegorical texts.
Just like 'giants' doesn't refer to literal giant people, 'relationship with God' can mean several dozen different things, depending on the context.
Allegories and symbols are very common in religious texts. To treat them literally misses the point.
These texts also tend to repeat the same points multiple times, or overwrite them altogether (countless occurrences in the Bible), with broader context in entirely different sections of the texts, if at all present.
Annotations usually help with this, but it depends on the translation and version of the Bible you're reading.
Keep in mind I'm by no means advocating for or defending Christianity or any other religion. This is purely about theology, as well as reading and understanding religious texts. It's a fairly complex topic, regardless of if you're religious or not.
Which texts? I'm going to disagree with most examples, so please give examples so we can hash it out. "Obviously symbolic and allegorical" is going to depends heavily on the plausibility structure you start with before reading them, I'd like to see evidence for that statement.
More examples please.
What do you mean by annotations? Comparing various translations can help to get a better understanding of the original text, I don't take a single translation as the only correct one.
Perhaps the war between Heaven and Hell wasn't fought on Earth. Hell won, and Satan is in charge now.
I've got to know Professor Lucifer personally; He can be quite pesky with His Math and Physics tricks sometimes, but I promise you, He's not the manager... You may want to talk with "Yaldabaoth" instead.
I was just saying - as he's a Christian and pretty much won that whole game, he probably isn't worried about dying. And Christians, like other religions, think earthly suffering is unavoidable but human life is short and eternity is long. In their view, God gives you what you can handle, and it would make sense that he could handle more, right?
Earthly suffering, or earthly success, doesn't prove or disprove God. God could also be a villain, right? Or just not be able to perceive us as individuals. Nothing that happens here can prove or disprove God, short of a God coming here and proving themselves.
I think it depends of the definition of a god that you can prove or disprove their existence, I remember the invisible green dragon in Carl Sagan's garage: only falseable gods can be proven or disproven, if defined unfalseable then there is nothing to discuss about (but at the same time such god would have zero consequences/influence in our universe)
Maybe he developed cancer after briefly meeting JD?
The world is not fair.
The pope is God's favourite person, so obviously God wants him in heaven as soon as possible.
Obviously it's to make room for the first gay pope.
Religion of any ilk is a mental illness.
I got a health scare recently and I'm a asshole apparently. So I'm confused. Why do good people have to suffer?
A part of the problem is that you're misunderstanding fundamental parts of the religion you're referencing.
In this religion:
The God of Abraham does not answer your prayers because he made you to experience all the negatives so you can learn from them, it's part of "His Plan™". He made you as you are, to sin and fail and suffer. He then made a half human son, Jesus, who he allowed to be sacrificed in order to forgive you for the sins you have been made to commit. You simply need to give yourself to Jesus and accept him into your heart. According to the story.
The rest of the problem is all the logical failures that come as a part of this.
Quite simple actually. It just wants to meet cooler people sooner.
that's the thing that pushed you to disbelief?
for me it was all the parasites - like botflies and screw worms.
oh and conservatives, and their sacred beliefs and enormous and constant hypocrisy. and their mistresses' abortions.
well, I guess, ok.
As an atheist, and a devils advocate (Gods advocate?? hmm), my friend used to tell me that God knows best, and every unexplainable events could be explained by God seeing further than us, therefore having a long-term goal. Meaning, to achieve this noble goal, it is paramount to bestow cancer upon the pope (suffering is closely tied to Christianity after all), while also keeping billionaires alive.
Suffering is a key element in Buddhism as well
Maybe there is just asbestos in the Vatican
Vance did reap the last popes soul, he could only do it partially on this one.
JD Vance decided to send him an email or smt
That god does exist and is just a huge piece of shit.
Exactly. Specifically, the following p.o.s.:
He makes quite a few of the right decisions. His stance on ai, giving press dumpl a hard time.
But still... not passing the bridge on some issues like same sex marriage afaik. Or putting pedo priests to justice .
(Someone correct me on this if it's outdated)
Pedo priests are like bad apples in barrel. As per allegations they've been there for centuries. I wonder if there are any apples that aren't rotten for one reason or another
This is simply the laws of nature with no supernatural design behind them. Read or listen to Christopher Hitchens. He can articulate this position much better than I can. But religion will tie itself in knots trying to explain our lives within its overview. And when we rightly question how things can be we are told we must have faith. No evidence is given because there is none to give. It's a clever trick.
Maybe heaven exists and god takes the good there early as a reward.
The universe was depending on good people killing the bad people.
The evils have the capabilities to give cancer to someone and they don't like the wokeish pope
People who face challenges learn and grow as individuals. They become better people. The best people usually have had the most to overcome. Lung cancer is a hell of a life lesson and teacher.
The people you don't respect or you dislike usually haven't earned it. They've had it the easiest.
I believe we set/choose paths that put our own obstacles in our way. Not because we are wrong or stupid, but because we choose to learn or gain strength (spiritual or physical).
And saying God can't be the light in the sky, a flower in a valley, an antique carbureted engine, or a lung cancer diagnosis is to limit God's ability to make us better people... and I am not willing to do that.
It could be the Old Testament Yahweh that exists.
No shit !
Can be explained however you want. You can't prove a negative. God does not exist because that is what makes the most sense overall. Same reason santa does not exist and ghosts don't exist and superman does not exist.
You don't understand. It's all part of gOd'S pLaN. And God, being omnipotent, naturally develops plans that we couldn't possibly comprehend. So don't even try. Stop asking questions. Just let the Big Man handle things. It's all good. If you die an awful death you'll just go party in Heaven anyway. Who even cares what happens here?
Iron Maiden did a whole song about this phenomenon, as it happens.
Im of the opinion that God, as it were, might exist. We're just not able to understand the longview, so to us, at the moment, it seems incomprehensible.