Question about faith- Can you believe in a God and hate him/her ? (souls, Revelation)

[Tricky D]

Originally Posted by Wendell Phillips

Perhaps, rather than issuing commandments that every one believe in Him, God would do better with a good publicist.

Nah I doubt it, because the Devil is the ultimate spin doctor and his creed would be that there is no such thing as a bad publicity.

[Tzaphkiel]

Originally Posted by Mooseketeer

He would have never let me commit murder or torture. He would have stopped me. He would have never let another person hurt me. Anyone who tired to hurt me would have suffered consequences. He loved me and wanted me to understand him and his sense of ethics and morality, he wanted me to be safe and would have killed anyone ( or at least severely injured ) anyone who raped me or killed me.

He would have never stood by why a gang of men assaulted me or whilst a soldier shot me in the face. He would not have let me starve if it had been in his power to feed me. He would not have allowed an earthquake to crush my legs if he could have stopped it. He would not have stood by whilst my loved ones died of lingering illnesses.

He would have done everything in his power, moved the earth to save me and keep me safe.

Most of all he would not have expected me to worship him and do his bidding simply because he said so.

Challenge, question and never settle. Those were his greatest gifts to me. I am still grateful to him even thoguh we are estranged.

I see nothing of a loving father in your God. I am sad to say that if you could ever prove he existed to me , I would reject him as at best a fool , at worst a hateful, sadistic monster .

Are you able to hear and accept that for a lot of people, we do experience a loving god, that is NOT AT ALL what you describe above?

The greatest gift we are given as humans is free will. God never stands in the way of free will, for god wants us to grow into mature responsible capable human beings. That is our job as humans, not to have some "big daddy in the sky" who does it all for us.

The daddy who does it all for us is good until we are maybe 5 or 6 years old. But every loving parent knows it is up to the child to grow and learn their own skills and gifts, grow into a wise, mature, capable confident human being. If "big daddy in the sky" does it for us all the time, which is what I am hearing you describe above, we stay forever locked in a perpetual sick crippled state. It's OK for a 4 year old. It's not OK for a 24 year old or a 44 year old.

No loving parent on earth or above wants that for their chidlren. God doesn't "let" bad things happen, God allows us to learn through our free will, accepting the natural consequences for our actions, thoughts, beliefs, and choices. That is a sign of very healthy relationship.

Any time in our lives that we blame anyone for anything (including blaming god, including blaming loved ones, including blaming parents) we are not taking responsibility for our own lives and well-being. We are in "victim" mode which is a draining helpless exhausting unsatisfying, and yes immature, place to be. It is OK to pass through, it is not OK to get stuck there.

[HsvMike]

No offense Moose, but most of what you are saying is ridiculous. You are basically saying that you don't believe in God, but if you did then he is the cause of all your problems, not you.

I am a father myself and I try and raise my kids to the best of my ability. But if one of them when they got older killed another person or tortured someone, if they didn't tell me that they did it, how would I know. So how could your father stop you from doing it?

I said this before but we made the world the way it is now, not God. Blame the person that shot you in the face, blame the person that rapes, kills, and steals from you. If God stopped every bad act then there would be no free will, he would be a dictator. Then everyone would live in a constant state of fear, wow how great would that be. People would then complain that he should lighten up some and let us make our own decisions.

No matter what, people would not be happy. Start putting the blame where it rightly belongs, on the people actually doing these atrocities. God is a loving father that gives you a blue print on how to live. Then it is up to you to live that way. Some people do, some people don't.

[Mooseketeer]

Originally Posted by DimSumRaja

Are you able to hear and accept that for a lot of people, we do experience a loving god, that is NOT AT ALL what you describe above?

The greatest gift we are given as humans is free will. God never stands in the way of free will, for god wants us to grow into mature responsible capable human beings. That is our job as humans, not to have some "big daddy in the sky" who does it all for us.

The daddy who does it all for us is good until we are maybe 5 or 6 years old. But every loving parent knows it is up to the child to grow and learn their own skills and gifts, grow into a wise, mature, capable confident human being. If "big daddy in the sky" does it for us all the time, which is what I am hearing you describe above, we stay forever locked in a perpetual sick crippled state. It's OK for a 4 year old. It's not OK for a 24 year old or a 44 year old.

No loving parent on earth or above wants that for their chidlren. God doesn't "let" bad things happen, God allows us to learn through our free will, accepting the natural consequences for our actions, thoughts, beliefs, and choices. That is a sign of very healthy relationship.

Any time in our lives that we blame anyone for anything (including blaming god, including blaming loved ones, including blaming parents) we are not taking responsibility for our own lives and well-being. We are in "victim" mode which is a draining helpless exhausting unsatisfying, and yes immature, place to be. It is OK to pass through, it is not OK to get stuck there.

I do take responsibility for my own life. Every day.

Your answer does not explain how innocent people are allowed to suffer whilst the wicked flourish. Where exactly does the responsibility fall on an innocent landmine victim ( oh no nasty word) or a little girl raped repeatedly by her father ? How is that their responsibility ?

The perpetrators get away with it, but heck I feel better because THEIR free will is intact.

If someone grabs me from behind in the street and rapes me, exactly how is that MY responsibility ?

If my crops fail, if famine strikes, if bad people do bad things to each other, why should I be punished for it ?
If an earthquake kills my entire family. Do I suffer from victim mentality or am I just a victim ?

Thank goodness I don't believe in God because anyone who brandishes free will as an excuse for allowing evil to continue is in my opinion not a deity worth his weight in prayer beads.

What you are saying is God created us all so injustice and violence would hurt the most vulnerable because they can't defend themselves , but heck all his children are entitled to free will. Wow. Compassion for the innocent indeed.

I am 40 not emotionally crippled and pretty independent. I do not expect Daddy in the sky to help me live my life.
Fortunately for me I do not believe in such mythology. I do take responsibility for my own life.

If he/she did exist I would indeed expect him/her, big omnipotent thing to keep me safe from evil I cannot control. Not having the power to stop earthquake, famine, war or poverty does not make me a victim. If he had given us powers to defeat the horrors life unleashes on us, we would not need him/her.

He/she could help., He/she doesn't. According to your logic , he/she respects murderers and criminals rights to free will than my other people's rights to life and happiness ? Am I right. He can't be bothered though.

Obviously his/her innocent children suffering are of no interest to him. Talk about an absent father/mother. Verging on neglect. Wait a minute not verging on.

My father to this day even though we are estranged would I know still protect me from harm if he could. It's called love. It's called caring. Loving God indeed.

And I would protect him and any other people in danger if I could. If I had the tools to stop misery and war and did nothing I would be a pretty appalling creature.

It seems I am more capable of love and compassion than the big great daddy in the sky. Rather sad IMO.

What you call a victim mentality is just called being often impotent in the face of evil. God the wondrous supreme being who knows and understand all is still incapable of helping his children ?

Good people can be good people all their lives and have the most appalling things happen to them . They bear no responsibility for tragedy, trauma, natural disasters, war, famine, etc...

I see bad people get away with murder and worse. Why ?

Thank goodness my conscience is my guide not some made up, fairy tale about a creator of immensely selfish and barbarous ways.

I do think people should take responsibility for their actions. Bad people do bad things. Good people do good things. But add an omnipotent deity to the mix and I am left with tears of frustration and disbelief.

‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing’ . Good words to live by.

But God not being a man is excluded from that one. How convenient ! And he needs no explanation, no reasons, his believers just meekly follow.

He does nothing whilst the Earth cries out and the good people get thrown in the same pit as the bad ones.

Brilliant sense of justice there....

In my world if you have the power to intervene and do nothing, you are a coward, and an accomplice to whatever crime is being perpetrated.
Your God wins the ultimate accolade IMO. Big Rosette for doing nada.

Do you stand around with your arms crossed when your fellow beings are suffering, because let's face it it is after all their responsibility.

[Mooseketeer]

Originally Posted by HsvMike

No offense Moose, but most of what you are saying is ridiculous. You are basically saying that you don't believe in God, but if you did then he is the cause of all your problems, not you.

I am a father myself and I try and raise my kids to the best of my ability. But if one of them when they got older killed another person or tortured someone, if they didn't tell me that they did it, how would I know. So how could your father stop you from doing it?

I said this before but we made the world the way it is now, not God. Blame the person that shot you in the face, blame the person that rapes, kills, and steals from you. If God stopped every bad act then there would be no free will, he would be a dictator. Then everyone would live in a constant state of fear, wow how great would that be. People would then complain that he should lighten up some and let us make our own decisions.

No matter what, people would not be happy. Start putting the blame where it rightly belongs, on the people actually doing these atrocities. God is a loving father that gives you a blue print on how to live. Then it is up to you to live that way. Some people do, some people don't.

So what you are saying is that god is not omniscient ?

And BTW I did say if my father knew I was going to kill someone. If. But it doesn't work that way with god. He knew from the beginning exactly what we would all get up to.

He knows exactly what you are thinking, and whether you will killed or be raped.
My father does not. He is not God.

Sorry to sound ridiculous to you. I find believer's faith mostly ridiculous too.

I do not believe in a God. It makes no sense on so many levels it's quite laughable.

And I do blame individuals for their actions , but ultimately who is responsible for creating such individuals in believer's eyes ? Your god.

A god so negligent he created evil. so negligent he created an imperfect earth which would kill his children. An earth he knew we would destroy, taking in its path millions of innocents.

And I am the ridiculous one ? Pot , kettle anyone ?


I am sorry my intellect is not up to yours, we all have our crosses to bear. What can I say, I was at the back of the queue when they handed out brains. God obviously wanted me to remain simple and unencumbered by intellectual curiosity or logic. Mea Culpa.

So if you saw your wife being murdered and you stopped it , that would be being a dictator ? People would complain. If it works for a deity it works for us right. we should just let the bad guy get away with it ? It is his conscience after all, his free will and who are we to interfere. He will pay in hell , right ?


I will go and lie down now, all that thinking has got my brain a bit confused....

Oh and by the way you are right, I AM saying that I am NOT responsible for the vast majority of my problems. I did not get leukaemia because I wanted to for example. It just happened. A genetic weakness, environmental cause, I will never know, but nope it wasn't my fault. Sorry. Not my fault though. Sorry to suffer from victim mentality.

[HsvMike]

I don't feel that God knows every step that I will take. He leaves me to make my own decisions. What would be the point of just going through the motions if every step, every movement was already inevitable.

You don't put the blame on the individuals because in your next breath, you put it back on God.

It still baffles me that someone can find religion utterly ridiculous and laughable but yet they get so emotional and involved in the discussion. If I was a non-believer, it wouldn't even be a topic. If I thought it was untrue, I wouldn't give it the time of day.

And before someone does something wrong, maybe they hear that little voice in their head saying that you should not be doing it. Do they heed that warning, or go ahead and do it anyway? This is the father guiding you, not forcing you, but telling you that it is not good.

And about intellect being up to mine, please. I do not attempt to pretend to be smart, I am sure you are much smarter than I am.

If I stopped someone from assualting my family, of course not. But if God stopped every person on Earth from doing anything wrong, kinda sounds like a dictatorship to me.

Really, I am sorry you have leukaemia. I do not know why you have it. There are a lot of things that I can't explain, so I really don't even try to. And no it isn't your fault that you have it. But I hope that you are stonger for it.

[Mooseketeer]

I do put the blame on individuals, because I do not believe in a creator or supreme being. To me it means , we are born, we live and we die. We make good choices and bad choices. The person who hurts others is responsible for his/her own actions because nobody but his parents made him/her.

However I cannot understand how someone who does believe in a creator can still excuse it when the ultimate source of misery, pain and natural disasters is god. God if the creator created all. Including evil, including an Earth which would cause natural disasters.

I think I could just about understand why someone might believe in a supreme being, a spiritual big bang if you will. But why one would attribute benevolence, and compassion to such a creature is beyond my comprehension and I have genuinely tried very hard to understand.

I do get emotional about it when someone tells me that I have to accept responsibility for actions which are none of my doing.

I think if I believed in God , I would despise and thoroughly hate him. If he does exist and I am wrong he is IMO, an imperfect, cruel and manipulative creature. Not worth of respect and certainly not worthy of worship.

Intervention in people's lives when it makes their lives better and saves them from pain, misery, poverty, slavery, famine , war, rape, murder, torture really seems a small price to pay .
You call that dictatorship. I call that caring, loving and compassion.

I am clear of leukaemia and it really has nothing to do with the way I feel about religion and god. I have always felt like that even as a child. It never made any sense to me and still does not.

I am not bitter about life for myself but to see others suffer is something which will always haunt me.
I consider myself so lucky in so many respects. I appreciate and value life.

I spent years travelling the world and you will never convince me that any loving god could allow what I have witnessed.

Apart from the scientific argument against a god , my emotional response to it is that what believers allow their god to get away with is just unbelievable. Things our society and most human beings would condemn as being barbaric and cruel seems to be perfectly acceptable because he moves in mysterious ways.

Let's say hypothetically we had a great earthly leader who stopped all murders and rapes, war, famine, etc... Would he be a dictator or the greatest man ever alive.
To you obviously the former, to me the latter.

As I said to allow evil to happen unchecked when you could so easily stop it seems to stretch beyond the credible.

I was talking about Leukaemia , how about diseases and terrible conditions which strike people. Who is responsible for that if you believe in Gid.
To me these are just natural occurrences, biological happenings.
But if you believe in God, he created everything on earth including the tiniest of bacteria, germs, and viruses. Was it just as a fun experiment that got out of control for him or was hurting people his prime purpose ?

I have seen some serious afflictions and diseases in my days and very few of them are man made.


I think the chasm between Atheism and Faith is such it can never be bridged.

I have since frequenting the forum started to realise exactly how bizarre it all is to me.

I never used to think about religion much at all ( not since my teenage years) but the more I think about it, the more I realise that the whole premise of religion is not only scientifically flawed for me but psychologically , intellectually and emotionally flawed.

The more I look , the less I see and the more I try to understand the less I do.
It will I suspect remain a mystery to me forever.

You said you would not give it a thought if you were an atheist but i think it is very common for Atheists to try and comprehend .
I think it comes from wanting to rationalise everything and curiosity always gets the better of many of us.
As the saying goes " I think therefore I am".

Where are we without intellectual curiosity ? I think it piques my interest precisely because it is so elusive and incomprehensible to me.

But I think I should learn to call it quits as I am getting nowhere. I get frustrated and bemused and no further in understanding why people believe what they do.

Anthropology has taught me that we are to a large extent a product of our cultural background and I definitely see religion as a cultural constraint. Genetics no doubt play a part at some primal level in the tendency human have to create Gods too though.

Still sincerely bemused and getting nowhere fast on the subject, that's me age 40 ! :0

[HsvMike]

Well first of all, I am happy to hear that you are clear of leukaemia. Are you a different person before the disease than you are now?

I am sorry but the cruel fact is that everyone dies. One way or another. And I am talking about natural disasters and all that. And if you read or study any information about the Earth, scientists are attributing the current state of the Earth to us. That we are destroying the Earth and making everything more volatile. So if you believe science we are to blame for that as well.

If someone always focuses on the negative aspects of everything, then of course they will only see bad. Some of the poorest people are the most spiritual and can be some of the most thankful. Not thankful for the new car, bigger home, boat, ps3 etc. but thankful for their meal, their family, a roof over their heads etc. There are a lot of horrible things in this world, but I am sorry most of them are man-made. People oppress their own to elevate themselves.

Listen I do see and understand what you are saying. Oops sorry, just realized what time it was, will have to finish this later....

[Wendell Phillips]

Fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt.
Julius Caesar, Gallic War, III:18.
___________________________

Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia 1431 - 1501) once said that men are so simple they will believe anything. The Borgia Pope, while the spiritual leader of the Church, was, if anything, a homme du monde; and, for all his faults, a keen observer of human nature, noting that it is a defect in the human character that we would rather listen to lies than believe the truth we can see with our own eyes. Even when forced to confront the facts, we deny them and make up excuses.

In The Prince (modeled after Pope Alexander’s son, Cesare Borgia), Niccolo Machiavelli wrote about the state and its rule as it is rather than as it should be, for which, after five centuries of experience, he continues to be roundly condemned. It is a social preference for what we choose to believe, though false, over what is in fact true. Great Caesar was right when he wrote: "Men willingly believe what they wish to be true."

[GCSTroop]

After reading through this thread I believe I finally do understand how the Freudian Oedipal Complex works in regards to God....

June's going to be so proud of me.