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As I stated before, the Jewish Holocaust had one important positive effect. The entire world was so shocked and horrified by the what had happened, especially with all the photographic and physical evidence, that it forced Anti-Semites to question their bigotry. If their hate could lead to something so horrible, maybe it's wrong to hate Jews -- that sort of things. Today, when we hear Muslim extremists spouting off about wiping Israel off the face of the Earth, we envision yet another Holocaust and we refuse to let it happen. Only the most brainwashed of people -- like Stormfront or the KKK -- still hate Jews as much as virtually everyone in the world hated them in 1930. And there is no chance that the State of Israel could have existed pre-Holocaust. It couldn't have happened in the Middle East, it couldn't have happened anywhere. Nobody would have allowed it. The fear and prejudice against Jews was too widespread and commonplace. After the history they've had, having a nation to call their own is a very good thing for the Jews.
I'm not going to tell you that 6 million lives are a fair price for that outcome, but I am saying there are good outcomes.
I would suggest that 6 million lives (and not just blinked out like turning off a light switch, but suffering terribly on the way out) is, even if you ignore the human cost, a terribly inefficient way to bring about personal reflection on the downside of bigotry on the part of some, but not all, people.
IF you believe god is loving, all powerful and all knowing, then it is trivial for him to negate 100% of the suffering in the world, past, present and future (or more economically, to have created the universe without that suffering in the first place).
If you believe god is not all three of those things, that he lacks even one of those attributes, then he becomes either irrelevant (pragmatically might as well not exist) or a terrifying monster who is best avoided.
The objection to this line of thought is always that man working it out for himself at any cost is the whole point. To me this is simply a failure of imagination borne of eons of shared experience with misery and want. Although people can learn and grow in spite of suffering, suffering itself is never ennobling. It invariably diminishes the sufferer.
The only rational response to suffering is to consider it unacceptable and to always work to ease or remove it. This is something that a lot of humanity gets -- apparently whatever gods there be, do not.
God fails to intervene throughout the Biblical record. Direct intervention is extremely rare.
I am only responding to this as I have dealt with the most of the rest already.
Your statement is disingenuous. I actually agree with it and it is precisely what we as atheists conclude that all of the twaddle is man made writings and nothing more. It would have been more appropriate to share where this god intervened and under what circumstances. I also addressed that, in that this god typically tends to intervene by having his chosen taken out, the ground swallowing them up or the mythical Moses sending men out with swords to do his bidding to execute folk for the golden calf debacle (which probably never happened in the first place, one would think these are barbarians if they would execute folk on the simple premise of becoming impatient)
We also have the intervention claimed that god stopped the sun for Joshua to win a battle against the Amorites. It even references a non canonised book of Jasher. We all know this is a view of a flat earth geocentric society and the rotation of the earth cannot be arbitrarily stopped on a whim. This only works in an appeal to magic which for the most part, the entire Old Testament tale is.
In a nutshell, god has never intervened b/c he is the mere fabrication of mortals just like all the other gods invented by men.
There are other part of your post I will expand on later.
So this really is a "Prove to me that God exists thread" after all. It was the OP's question that was the disingenuous one. Thanks for clearing that up.
And with that dismissive response you are excused from class
I would suggest that 6 million lives (and not just blinked out like turning off a light switch, but suffering terribly on the way out) is, even if you ignore the human cost, a terribly inefficient way to bring about personal reflection on the downside of bigotry on the part of some, but not all, people.
IF you believe god is loving, all powerful and all knowing, then it is trivial for him to negate 100% of the suffering in the world, past, present and future (or more economically, to have created the universe without that suffering in the first place).
If you believe god is not all three of those things, that he lacks even one of those attributes, then he becomes either irrelevant (pragmatically might as well not exist) or a terrifying monster who is best avoided.
The objection to this line of thought is always that man working it out for himself at any cost is the whole point. To me this is simply a failure of imagination borne of eons of shared experience with misery and want. Although people can learn and grow in spite of suffering, suffering itself is never ennobling. It invariably diminishes the sufferer.
The only rational response to suffering is to consider it unacceptable and to always work to ease or remove it. This is something that a lot of humanity gets -- apparently whatever gods there be, do not.
In order to eliminate all human suffering, the following steps must be accomplished:
1.) Humans do terrible things that cause other humans to suffer. So obviously we cannot be trusted with free will and we all need to be turned into robots (so to speak) that are preprogrammed to only do things can never cause yourself or another to suffer in any way, shape or form.
2.) Just to be on the safe side, best if we just take all human emotion away entirely. Far too much emotional suffering in the world. Clearly we're better off without emotions.
3.) All mountains, rivers, lakes, streams, valleys hills, etc must be leveld. The world must be resurfaced with a super duper safe cushiony material so nobody can ever injure themselves anymore.
4.) All sharp objects, tools and utensils must be eliminated. Somebody might get hurt after all.
5.) With no spoons, knives, forks or chop sticks to eat with, food choices must be simplified. A uniform edible paste will now spontaneously appear whenever you are hungry. This paste will contain all nutrients you need of course and be completely hypoalergenic. Nobody can get heartburn or indigestion from it.
6.) Now that we've eliminated all standing water (somebody might drown!!), water will now spontaneously appear in super duper safe cushiony cups.
7.) Child birth is unpleasant. So is growing up. From now on, new people will spontaneously appear.
8.) Since we've now done away with the need for sexual organs, lets just get rid of sexual organs entirely. There is human suffering every month for women after all. Just make everyone genderless. We can't have anyone thinking they're better than anyone else.
9.) Really ... we can't have anyone thinking they're better than anyone else, so obviously we must make all humans look exactly alike.
10.) It's obvious, isn't it? All animals must look just like the rest of the genderless, emotionless, pointless, uniform population of humans. We all get to be equal! Yay!!
11.) Since death is bad, let's get rid of that too. Nobody dies anymore. This puts us in a bit of a pickle though. If nobody dies then eventually you're going to run out of room, right? Hmmm, maybe we just have a set number of people on each planet. Let's go with 10 billion on planet Earth. That's a nice round number.
12.) Now that we have nothing to build out of, each immortal robot-person gets a house. All houses will be exactly the same of course. Not that you really need a house with no rain, no wind, etc. But it's the principal of the thing, right?
13.) Did I mention that the entire planet would be set to 70 degrees Fahrenheit?
So there you have it! 10 billion immortal, robot-like, uniform, emotionless, genderless, pointless people living on a super-cushiony-safe uniform planet earth. I bet we'd all love it if we hadn't been stripped of all emotions. And if we actually had emotions, what's our basis for comparison? 10 billion pointless human-robot thingies living forever and doing nothing. It's Utopia!!
In order to eliminate all human suffering, the following steps must be accomplished:
1.) Humans do terrible things that cause other humans to suffer. So obviously we cannot be trusted with free will and we all need to be turned into robots (so to speak) that are preprogrammed to only do things can never cause yourself or another to suffer in any way, shape or form.
2.) Just to be on the safe side, best if we just take all human emotion away entirely. Far too much emotional suffering in the world. Clearly we're better off without emotions.
3.) All mountains, rivers, lakes, streams, valleys hills, etc must be leveld. The world must be resurfaced with a super duper safe cushiony material so nobody can ever injure themselves anymore.
4.) All sharp objects, tools and utensils must be eliminated. Somebody might get hurt after all.
5.) With no spoons, knives, forks or chop sticks to eat with, food choices must be simplified. A uniform edible paste will now spontaneously appear whenever you are hungry. This paste will contain all nutrients you need of course and be completely hypoalergenic. Nobody can get heartburn or indigestion from it.
6.) Now that we've eliminated all standing water (somebody might drown!!), water will now spontaneously appear in super duper safe cushiony cups.
7.) Child birth is unpleasant. So is growing up. From now on, new people will spontaneously appear.
8.) Since we've now done away with the need for sexual organs, lets just get rid of sexual organs entirely. There is human suffering every month for women after all. Just make everyone genderless. We can't have anyone thinking they're better than anyone else.
9.) Really ... we can't have anyone thinking they're better than anyone else, so obviously we must make all humans look exactly alike.
10.) It's obvious, isn't it? All animals must look just like the rest of the genderless, emotionless, pointless, uniform population of humans. We all get to be equal! Yay!!
11.) Since death is bad, let's get rid of that too. Nobody dies anymore. This puts us in a bit of a pickle though. If nobody dies then eventually you're going to run out of room, right? Hmmm, maybe we just have a set number of people on each planet. Let's go with 10 billion on planet Earth. That's a nice round number.
12.) Now that we have nothing to build out of, each immortal robot-person gets a house. All houses will be exactly the same of course. Not that you really need a house with no rain, no wind, etc. But it's the principal of the thing, right?
13.) Did I mention that the entire planet would be set to 70 degrees Fahrenheit?
So there you have it! 10 billion immortal, robot-like, uniform, emotionless, genderless, pointless people living on a super-cushiony-safe uniform planet earth. I bet we'd all love it if we hadn't been stripped of all emotions. And if we actually had emotions, what's our basis for comparison? 10 billion pointless human-robot thingies living forever and doing nothing. It's Utopia!!
I don't think those arguing on the basis of "The Problem of Evil/Suffering" actually think it through when they slam God for allowing evil/suffering and not intervening and "doing something about it".
They don't stop to think that, to eliminate all suffering, you couldn't even have something as simple as a sporting event.
After all...the pitcher may be happy if he strikes out the batter, but the batter suffers emotionally because it...visa-versa how the pitcher feels if the batter jacks a home-run into the stands off of him.
Suffering either way...so, you'd hav'ta nix it.
In order to eliminate all human suffering, the following steps must be accomplished:
1.) Humans do terrible things that cause other humans to suffer. So obviously we cannot be trusted with free will and we all need to be turned into robots (so to speak) that are preprogrammed to only do things can never cause yourself or another to suffer in any way, shape or form.
2.) Just to be on the safe side, best if we just take all human emotion away entirely. Far too much emotional suffering in the world. Clearly we're better off without emotions.
3.) All mountains, rivers, lakes, streams, valleys hills, etc must be leveld. The world must be resurfaced with a super duper safe cushiony material so nobody can ever injure themselves anymore.
4.) All sharp objects, tools and utensils must be eliminated. Somebody might get hurt after all.
5.) With no spoons, knives, forks or chop sticks to eat with, food choices must be simplified. A uniform edible paste will now spontaneously appear whenever you are hungry. This paste will contain all nutrients you need of course and be completely hypoalergenic. Nobody can get heartburn or indigestion from it.
6.) Now that we've eliminated all standing water (somebody might drown!!), water will now spontaneously appear in super duper safe cushiony cups.
7.) Child birth is unpleasant. So is growing up. From now on, new people will spontaneously appear.
8.) Since we've now done away with the need for sexual organs, lets just get rid of sexual organs entirely. There is human suffering every month for women after all. Just make everyone genderless. We can't have anyone thinking they're better than anyone else.
9.) Really ... we can't have anyone thinking they're better than anyone else, so obviously we must make all humans look exactly alike.
10.) It's obvious, isn't it? All animals must look just like the rest of the genderless, emotionless, pointless, uniform population of humans. We all get to be equal! Yay!!
11.) Since death is bad, let's get rid of that too. Nobody dies anymore. This puts us in a bit of a pickle though. If nobody dies then eventually you're going to run out of room, right? Hmmm, maybe we just have a set number of people on each planet. Let's go with 10 billion on planet Earth. That's a nice round number.
12.) Now that we have nothing to build out of, each immortal robot-person gets a house. All houses will be exactly the same of course. Not that you really need a house with no rain, no wind, etc. But it's the principal of the thing, right?
13.) Did I mention that the entire planet would be set to 70 degrees Fahrenheit?
So there you have it! 10 billion immortal, robot-like, uniform, emotionless, genderless, pointless people living on a super-cushiony-safe uniform planet earth. I bet we'd all love it if we hadn't been stripped of all emotions. And if we actually had emotions, what's our basis for comparison? 10 billion pointless human-robot thingies living forever and doing nothing. It's Utopia!!
Every one of those things is an excuse for the far simpler - it's just nature doing what nature does and has always done because that's the way the Earth evolved without any supreme being.
Well, what were the Jews trying to do? They were trying to blackmail Pilate into sentencing an innocent man to death. I suppose they must have believed that killing Jesus of Nazareth was that important.
This topic of a midnight Sanhedrin trial has been dealt with previously before the Jewish folk got their own space.
If this were true, then according to the law, Jesus was worthy of a stoning as it was unheard of to claim to be god. The gospels allude to this. You should perhaps look at the Can we trust Paul thread that covers aspects of this in more detail.
There is no Jewish expectation that a messiah would be god incarnate, that is mere fiddling of texts to try and make this invented Jesus fit to some alleged previous prophesy.
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They seem to have fervently believed that this "false Messiah" was a huge threat and needed to be eliminated immediately.
I do not concur. The trial reeks of a set up if it even actually happened. For the most part of the narrative, Jesus is not mixing it with the priestly types and is more into the teaching of the so called down trodden. His ministry is in the fields and far from the folk he may have upset. Yes there appear to be occasions of interaction with the religious but inferred it was not on their turf.
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You see much the same thing when the RCC burns Reformers John Hus, William Tyndale, Robert Barnes, Hugh Latimer, John Frith and Thomas Bilney at the stake. The Church viewed them as a threat to the souls of Christians everywhere.
The parallel is there perhaps but again is really illustration my POV rather than yours. It is men carrying out these actions. If any of the bible were fact, the dictated or inspired word of god etc. then the heretics would have been struck down by some divine magic. Seeing this never happens once apart from a questionable tale of Annanias and Sapphira, it is always men carrying out the so called "will of god". Nothing has really changed in over 2000 years.
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It's not hard to piece together that the Sanhedrin felt exactly the same way about Jesus of Nazareth. If you were absolutely determined to see somebody killed but needed somebody else to do it, you might just go overboard with the words you choose. Besides, if they were that sure that Jesus was a dangerous corrupting influence then the word choice effectively takes credit for doing something that God surely would have wanted done anyways.
Again, this is men carrying out stuff. Then you go on to suggest this was already part of the plan.
Taking the fact that it was already deemed not what god wanted in the practices of blood sacrifice referred to in Psalms and again in Hebrews, the fact that the gospels seem to only mention doves, the act of huge animal sacrifice under the Mosiac laws had for all intents and purposes ceased to be practised. You now had Scribes and Pharisees. Therefore the aspect of a human blood sacrifice is nothing more than an imported pagan concept. This is where it gets difficult to explain as personally I do not think Jesus even existed. There is just too much evidence that suggests he is an amalgam of many earlier man gods. Under Jewish laws and tradition it would be therefore unthinkable that one of their own would lay claim to being god incarnate. But staying with the narrative, it is obvious that this alleged sacrifice made absolutely no difference to the lot of man as have all human or animal sacrifices before and post this non event.
If the Romans were the executers of this Jesus fella and somehow would actually listen to the whims of the occupants of the folk they were obviously oppressing, do you not find it ironic that they then go on to fabricate a religion which is more or less based on the man they just happened to kill? AFAIK, they won that war and had no reason to fear the Jewish god. The epic of Masada clearly shows that they had no real god as claimed on their side, you may have to read up on that, there was even a movie made on it. When they all commit suicide then the Jewish god is obviously absent/non existent and would foster no real reasons for the conquerors to adopt the religion of the Jews which is what christianity purports to be.
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The Jews may or may not have said precisely what Matthew recounts. Most likely, it was a small group of Sanhedrin members speaking on behalf of the crowd and all Jews everywhere. They probably did say something a lot like what Matthew recounts. But I do not accept that they have the ability to curse thousands of years of generations after them.
It probably never happened. If there was an upstart causing problems, the Romans would not take council from the Jews, they had their own laws. Emperor worship was the meme of the day not some imaginary Jewish deity.
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If I murdered somebody tomorrow, I do not have the power to transfer nor share my guilt with my son. The very idea is just idiocy. Jews have been terrorized and massacred for the last 2000 years because the people doing the terrorizing and massacring were a bunch of dicks (to borrow from your eloquent word-choice.)
Yes, and in all that time their claimed god does not intervene once. Only humans driven by their abhorrence to the practices actually intervened. This is why most Jews are secular or atheist.
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Jewish persecusion was nothing new when Hitler came along. Anti-Semitism was so commonplace in Christian Europe that it was assumed as a given. The very idea that any Christian would not hate the Jews would have been a very strange idea indeed. Anti-Semitism was also rampant in the USA. You can read all about it here: History of antisemitism in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Yeah I know and it is all because some dude named Paul invented a religion based on nothing but hearsay. The complicit relationship between the 3rd Reich and the RCC is a testament to the lengths people will go to, to persecute and/or defend and imaginary god that they hijacked from the very people they carried this out against.
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As I stated before, the Jewish Holocaust had one important positive effect. The entire world was so shocked and horrified by the what had happened, especially with all the photographic and physical evidence, that it forced Anti-Semites to question their bigotry. If their hate could lead to something so horrible, maybe it's wrong to hate Jews -- that sort of things. Today, when we hear Muslim extremists spouting off about wiping Israel off the face of the Earth, we envision yet another Holocaust and we refuse to let it happen. Only the most brainwashed of people -- like Stormfront or the KKK -- still hate Jews as much as virtually everyone in the world hated them in 1930.
You should have stopped here.
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And there is no chance that the State of Israel could have existed pre-Holocaust. It couldn't have happened in the Middle East, it couldn't have happened anywhere. Nobody would have allowed it. The fear and prejudice against Jews was too widespread and commonplace. After the history they've had, having a nation to call their own is a very good thing for the Jews.
This is where you are wrong. These were not the direct descendants of the Jews from biblical times. Their history is somewhat younger than claimed but that is another topic I am not going to delve into now.
The aspects of the state of Israel and all the end time crap associated to it is very much an American thing. Orthodoxy here does not even allude to what evangelicals came up with.
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I'm not going to tell you that 6 million lives are a fair price for that outcome, but I am saying there are good outcomes.
Nothing that happened is defensible in any way shape or form. No one made too much noise with various genocides in Africa. They of course have no lobbyists.
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It should also be noted that the defeat of Nazi Germany borders on the miraculous. A seemingly unstoppable military machine was ultimately stopped and crushed. The European population of Jews was reduced by about 2/3's but they were not completely wiped out. Such mass-destruction events are a recurring theme of the Old Testament -- and not necessarily because "they deserved it." Time and time again, God didn't intervene fully, but the Jewish people always survived and rebuilt. It is miraculous that a group as hated as Jews survived at all, so I think God has intervened in indirect ways to ensure their survival as a people.
Sorry these are just biblespeak excuses trying to get your god off the hook. It has always been religious people that did these persecutions or self inflicted in the mythical OT times.
Again the Epicurus argument holds true and he said that long before Jesus apparently existed.
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?
Among Jesus’s followers there were those who were considered by others criminals and bad characters, etc. Yet Jesus would treat them like everyone else and even dine with them. Because of that many who considered themselves pure and righteous took great offences to the fact that Jesus would allow those criminals to be His followers and even sat with them. They judged and criticized Jesus’s wisdom based solely on their own ignorance and prejudice. So Jesus gave them a parable and said “I tell you, there is more merriment in heaven over one repenting sinner than over ninety-nine honest folks who have nothing to repent. Such, I tell you, is the festivity among the angels of God over one repentant sinner.”
The moral here is that the mind of us human is like a new born infant compared to that of our creator, the almighty God. Some of us may fancy ourselves possessing supreme knowledge, but the truth is we are all utterly ignorant of His thoughts and reasoning. We are simply incapable to comprehend His divine plan for us. How could we possibly question, judge and criticize His actions based on our severely limited experience and wisdom?
Joseph were sold by his brothers and become a slave. It seemed like a tragic event on the outset, but because of that and by the grace of God he managed to become the right hand man of pharaoh and ruled the land with him. Holocaust was no doubt a monstrous event that only God could justify. But since then Israel had become such a strong nation in the Middle East which its ancestors wandering in the desert could only dream of. And finally, for the first time in history, the twelve tribes of Israel have a country to come home to and be united once again. It is such a glorious achievement.
Let me tell you this, His divine plan is still on going and the ultimate goal is to have absolute humanity on earth restored. It will take us many life times, many generations and series of distinctive events to have it accomplished. It spans for such incredibly a long time that we’d consider this period human history as we measure it in human time, but in God’s eye it is barely a minute past. In that sense, human history is actually His story in which we are only the characters, not directors.
So don’t be troubled with things that are utterly incomprehensible and trust that God has a divine plan for all of us. As terrible as some of the historic events might be, there will be an absolute good in the end. Have faith in your God and stop questioning, judging and criticizing His action with ignorance and prejudice.
God bless and may the Lord give you wisdom
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