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yay. It's another "God does things I consider bad, so he must not be God" thread.
Honestly...these threads are getting old. The fact that God behaves in a way you think is wrong has nothing to do with whether or not he's God. Let us know when you come with an actual, logical argument.
I actually agree with you in part in that I also do not see the God/no god question as a matter which may be settled by the vagaries of human fortune or misadventure. Good things happening does not establish that a god is responsible, nor do bad things negate the possibility.
However, I would add that your final sentence is a dishonest one in that you have indeed been frequently presented with powerful logical arguments concerning the validity of the Bible and those you run from rather than confront. You most often take refuge in the "I wasn't there, I don't know" dodge when it comes to scientific evidence, but simultaneously embrace a wide array of mythological assertions for which you were not there either.
I've always thought that maybe the roll of our little 'ole church ladies in heaven is probably to manage the rather large nursery in heaven where all the little pagan babies and little kids are.
It is difficult to fathom how believers rationalize these actions by their holy God. What is more difficult to fathom is when they accuse others have lacking logic.
But, of course, they're all grown up in Heaven. What were you thinking?
I actually agree with you in part in that I also do not see the God/no god question as a matter which may be settled by the vagaries of human fortune or misadventure. Good things happening does not establish that a god is responsible, nor do bad things negate the possibility.
Such debates are only an effort to meet theists halfway by granting for the sake of argument the existence of THEIR god as THEY conceive of him (tri-omni), in which case human misfortune and bad things happening undermine THEIR conceptions.
They are no longer MY conceptions, but maybe some theists can profit from my experiences without having to go through something similar. That is all.
The sum total of the arguments of many theists is little more than, "good things happen, therefore my god". I will always happily counter with "bad things happen, therefore most definitely NOT your god" until they knock it off and move up to less superficial arguments.
It is difficult to fathom how believers rationalize these actions by their holy God. What is more difficult to fathom is when they accuse others have lacking logic.
Well, their rationalizations essentially means that the morality of an action is determined NOT by the act committed but by the person committing it.
Thus, it is like claiming the Holocaust was bad because Hitler committed it. But if Mother Theresa, the Pope, or William Lane Craig had mudered 14 million people with industrialized death, history would see it as a blessing for those victims, and Holocaust survivors would be lamenting how unlucky they were not being chosen by Mother Theresa (et. al.) to go into the gas chambers. Anne Frank would have run out of her house toward the William Lane Craig Gestapo agents shouting, "Me! Take me!" And when the camps were liberated by the Allies, the soldiers would have had to make the prisoners leave by physically forcing them. Jews and Communists and Atheists from all over the world would be fighting to get into Germany, and history would see the Allies as the bad guys for stopping those glorious executions and preventing the spread of such moral goodness.
There was only one reason God told King David & others to destroy all the people in certain villages - Everyone including the animals were infected with sexual diseases!
Uh, oh. Flocks of promiscuous sheep needing to be destroyed because of an unhappy God. Sunday school must get mighty interesting when Miss Jessica starts teaching the kids about Sex and the Wrathful God.
Uh, oh. Flocks of promiscuous sheep needing to be destroyed by an unhappy God. Sunday school must get mighty interesting when Miss Jessica starts teaching the kids about Sex and the Wrathful God.
I'm sure some Sunday School lesson has children putting floating corpses made of felt onto a velvet-covered board representing the waters of the flood. "And this is what happens to bad people who have sex with anyone other than their opposite gender wife in the missionary position with the lights on - and only to procreate!"
I'm sure some Sunday School lesson has children putting floating corpses made of felt onto a velvet-covered board representing the waters of the flood. "And this is what happens to bad people who have sex with anyone other than their opposite gender wife in the missionary position with the lights on - and only to procreate!"
Interesting possibility.
Notice how quick two of the most conservative posters were to complain about the OP and his thesis but neither addressed the "the sheep and all those sinners had VD!" proclamation? Silence is often more telling than anything spoken or written.
Last edited by DewDropInn; 02-23-2014 at 10:45 AM..
The only other thing I wanted to stress here is that if we agree as Eusebius pointed out that it is inconsistent, hypocritical and immoral for God to command us not to do certain things because they are sinful or diabolical, and then turns around and does those exact same things under the guise of "I am God; I can do whatever I want" (again, we can thank Paul for that pathetic logic) then something is seriously awry here.
If this makes absolutely no sense any way you slice it, then we have to look to other explanations for how all this came about and the answer is so simplistic we just gloss over it: most of the Old Testament scripture, especially the Pentateuch was not inspired by God. It was written by ordinary men under absolutely no inspiration by the Holy Spirit who were doing nothing more than writing a novelization of all the fables and mythologies they had heard dating back 3500 years to Adam and Eve. As they wrote they embellished, exaggerated and imagined all these mythologies the way all good novelists do.
So for example, when the tale started about Joshua going into Canaan it might have been told, "And the Lord said to Joshua, 'Drive the people from the land but do not shed their blood' " But then a few centuries later a storyteller might have thought, "Our god, Yahweh, wouldn't be that big a wimp". So he embellishes it a little, "And the Lord said to Joshua kill all the men but spare the women and children that they may learn the ways of My people". Then a few centuries later a storyteller thinks, "Surely our god, Yahweh wouldn't allow filthy non-Hebrews to mingle with His pure-blooded people [racial discrimination]." So he exaggerates the story even more,
Quote:
"And the Lord said to Joshua, "When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girga****es, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you— 2 and when the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally--every man, woman and child among them.[a] Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy.
And the storytellers hear this for the next 20 generations and when one generation of scribes in Babylonian captivity finally decide to write all this down they put it down as it was told to them in the above quote, and voila--the violence-loving, primitive Hebrew writers finally have the kind of god that their enemies worship--a god who's not afraid to order slaughter of the enemies of His people; who doesn't sicken at the sight of blood the way manly soldiers wouldn't; a god who isn't a 'wimp' but a warrior god who will smite all the Babylonians holding them captive.
This "evolution" of God's character into a pagan god is a fascinating study in its own right and is very easily traceable in the Old Testament as the Hebrews intermingle and learn of the gods of the pagans surrounding them and begin to incorporate many of the human traits of these pagan gods into their own Yahweh: anger, wrath, merciful at certain times, but absolutely no mercy at other times, jealously [Zeus, Hera, anyone?] and in the end, by the time Jesus comes onto the scene you have a Yahweh that Jesus totally disowns, as is evident in the Sermon on the Mount when He repeatedly says: "You have heard of old, "You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy, but I tell you...." Why did Jesus have to correct all these inconsistencies? Because His Father's character had been so maligned by the scribes with changes and fabrications over many thousands of years that He had to set the record straight on what His Father, not the Yahweh they had come to know, was really like: a God filled with compassion, love and mercy who would never have ordered the slaughter of millions of innocent children and babies.
But then enter the church who over the next 2000 years after Christ play up these Old Testament scriptures and we get to William Lane Craig and the rest of these Fundamentalist apologist bozos and...well, you know the rest of the story.
Nobody wants to brand ALL Christians any particular way. All that needs to come to light here is the truth.
We need to find rational explanations for why so many ethical issues arise when reading the scriptures. For fundies like the right reverend pastors here that's not a problem...if the Bible says it, it's good even when it sounds dirty, barbarous and cruel to honest, ethical minds. If they can sleep at night with the kind of cockeyed reasoning eddie gein notes in his post:
then more power to them; they have stronger stomachs than I do.
But this is not so much trying to justify horrible things purportedly done by a very "human" God, who has very "human" out-of-control emotions, as it is trying to point out that the "real" God who runs things would never involve Himself in such atrocities. So if God is much further "out" in the universe and running things at arm's length, then how did we come to worship this other god who calls himself Yahweh and who causes all this havoc in the Old Testament?
Quite simply, powerful men in the church over two thousands years have so whitewashed fables by an itinerant band of goat herders called Hebrews that when all the contradictions, exaggerations, sometimes outright lies come to the fore in modern-day intelligent society, apologists are scrambling to come up with plausible explanations for inexcusable behavior and hence we get sickening excuses for why the god of the Bible and the Old Testament acted in such disgusting ways:
1. God gives life; He has the right to take it
2. children die by the millions every day; what's a few million more 3. God does these little pagan babies a favor by having them slaughtered because at least they get to go to heaven.
That last one, the worst of the bunch in my opinion, should sound familiar; it's the exact same rationalization Andrea Yates and thousands of other "good" Christian women used to kill their own children to save them from eternal hell. One has to wonder if the god of the Old Testament would secretly approve such tactics since he employed them so effectively himself.
Yeah...He should have slaughtered me right at the beginning! IT would have saved me so much trouble. Actually...come to think of it...he should have just slew both Cain and Abel immediately. It would have prevented so much suffering and so many souls from being damned for all eternity!
If this makes absolutely no sense any way you slice it, then we have to look to other explanations for how all this came about and the answer is so simplistic we just gloss over it: most of the Old Testament scripture, especially the Pentateuch was not inspired by God. It was written by ordinary men under absolutely no inspiration by the Holy Spirit who were doing nothing more than writing a novelization of all the fables and mythologies they had heard dating back 3500 years to Adam and Eve. As they wrote they embellished, exaggerated and imagined all these mythologies the way all good novelists do.
I have come to this conclusion myself and I am currently in the process of researching areas that may help solve all of this.
Particularly interesting are the Sumerian Legends. Also the discovery of how the Sahara Desert was once a Beautiful Garden (much like Eden) before it dried out a few thousand years ago...and how that affected the Egyptians and other nearby nations, with the ensuing struggles for supremacy in the area and how theories about God developed as possible explanations for what was happening to them...with the distant memories of that once beautiful place called EDEN that was now gone.
I am also planning special research on the concept and laws of Karma, (and how some people can temporarily escape it) and how that factors in to the way the real and True God works...and how that also relates to Christianity, as well as the shortcomings of Christianity and the scriptures to accurately describe what is really going on spiritually with the human race and how to achieve the real "salvation" that Jesus talked about.
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