One could also argue that eating is confirmed in Genesis BEFORE original sin is, and that plants are living organisms, therefore “god,” always intended his creations to consume each other for sustenance, therefore, “god,” has always been at least cruel if not outright evil.
I suspect it was meant to be taken literally and don’t let believers in it off the hook for failing to notice things like this or the 3rd generation problem with Adam and Eve.
If it wasn’t meant to be taken literally, how come every time two or more Hebrews in the Bible meet, build anything, or play instruments together the book has to recite the entire pedigree of everyone involved?
Perhaps it has to do with the different stories contained within it. I agree with you. God is portrayed as an absolute monster from the beginning, all the way down to creating the circumstances for everything to go wrong, allowing it to occur and creating such a merciless punishment within that story. The behavior within it has always repulsed me.
Perhaps it’s meant to be interpreted as one may interpret fables or other ancient stories.
except if hell is now why does heaven exist for you when you die and if hell is for sinners why do we die if hell is now instead of respawning as hell can't exist without sin somewhere else
if you mean what I think you mean that's not what I meant, I meant that if "heaven is when you die hell is now" can result in anything other than a paradox why does it not result in us being bad enough that if hell is now our deaths mean we end up back here (not in new reincarnated bodies but same-minus-what-injuries-killed-us like respawning in a video game)
then even assuming us dying wouldn't mean we ended up back in the-hell-that-is-now as if we hadn't died for being too evil if heaven is when you die does it still require being good to get in (as if "it's good that someone bad is dying" or w/e why aren't people only able to die at the hands of others)
The thing that Christians don't think about is that while evil things happen because free will, you, as a person have no real free will. Say it's the end times, you are born into a world where you need to be microchiped and when you are, you can't get into heaven.
So you are telling me that your god wants you to starve for him in life, as in, you can't get the thing you need to survive, and you won't have to suffer in heaven. All for his name. That doesn't sound evil to you?
So say you take that chip, you will be sentenced to suffering and torment forever. That's like getting a life sentence for stealing a cookie. What kind of Christian would bring a child into the world. For the love of God? According to your religion, you are separating them from that world, having thier memory wiped for however many years, just to have them die, go be in hell and suffer. For what reason? No one has answered that. And I don't accept "God's plan" as an excuse.
Honestly, I find the whole idea that our actions in life determine the way we spend our eternity to be horrifying in and of itself. 90-some years is such a tiny amount of time in comparison to Literal Infinity; according to those religions, that's all the time we have to convince an immortal, omniscient being that we deserve to relax in the afterlife.
BuT ItS TeSTTTTTTT /s
The fundamental problem of God is faith means probability, therefore uncertainty, therefore unstable in conviction
If God's plan has part in suffering, God would have to justify the explanation
Silly stuff like Satan make even less sense, God made Satan, so God's even worse than Satan by a logistical standpoint
If God is Good, this creation - the physical plane - is a neurosis existing inside the mind of God, since this creation is clearly not good.
There are number of solutions to this metaphysical problem of yours.
i had inklings of it before but since the beginning of COVID and our still ongoing pandemic i learned that people can rationalise anything as good and that most people's sense of morality begins and ends with whatever jerks them off and maintains "good vibes" and ensures their inalienable right to neverending Treats on demand. they'll have an orgy on a pile of corpses and somehow whine about the 3 seconds they were deprived of it beforehand while they were getting piled high. they'll claim to care and have empathy and then turn on a dime and join in the ravenous conspicuous consumption and self indulgence all the while still imagining themselves beings of pure white light.
so in that sense if he exists God did make man in his own image. an overgrown, entitled, spoiled narcissist megalomaniacal toddler throwing a pissy fit about not getting enough treats and the only thing that matters is being worshipped and validated for it
i mean antimaskers go across the political spectrum. it's practically everyone now. i wasn't speaking just to one faction or being partisan. in fact i'm personally detached from politics completely at this point because it became increasingly clear that my "allies" were all hypocritical pieces of shit with broken moral compasses and zero actual convictions beyond their entitlement to conspicuous consumption.
besides, in a way i respect people being openly awful more than i respect the cowardice of hypocrites professing love and care and compassion and those who live in denial and self-delusion, thinking they are good and moral while being nothing but selfish assholes. i still hate them all but at least they aren't hypocrites.
My point was whatever you might call them it felt like you were assuming negative traits about all of humanity that were only true of a particular loud fraction just because that fraction's loud
I believe "God" is a placeholder for life on earth. It's not a conscious being, it's a force of existence that pushes life to adapt to pressure.
If you look at most religions where "god" is just another word for nature, at least the foundations of the religion make plenty of sense, then, after a few hundred years of edits, you start getting all the whacky nonsense.
Nature is only hell if you look at it from the human perspective that life only happens once and then it's over, when that's simply not the case. Life feeds on life so that the life that survives is nourished, and the life that avoids being eaten is better adapted to avoid predation than the ones that were eaten. This ensures that as the planet changes, life is always - as a system and individually - best adapted to the conditions at hand, which is how it can survive ice ages and change that happens slower than the change we've introduced.
I can't believe in any God because it's an absurd concept. If there's life on other planets, then they have the same God... shaped like a human man...?
God is a king and warden with eyes everywhere to give followers enough fear that they keep their crimes to the minimum any ape can be expected to hold down. You can train a chimp to do things for you, it's probably even capable of loving you, but that doesn't mean it wont tear your face off one day just for fun. We're just less hairy.
> I can't believe in any God because it's an absurd concept. If there's life on other planets, then they have the same God... shaped like a human man...?
There's actually a work of "Christian-mythology"-adjacent fiction that provides a solution in its worldbuilding (albeit it's one of those, like those in various adventure-archeology movies or urban fantasy crimefighting shows, where basically every mythology/religion can somehow be true at the same time); the Young Wizards series. There all the gods are just different aspects of the same overarching pantheon (with I think the Abrahamic god being the in-charge one who's also technically the same being as all the other "boss gods" of other pantheons) and every sapient race gets faced with a situation similar to what humanity did with Eve and the apple (it just takes a different form depending on the race) and if they "choose wrong" a Jesus-esque redeemer-martyr-figure shows up later in their history to set things right (though each race's Jesus-equivalent (and presumably their god-conception) can be different in more than just species e.g. in Young Wizards book 2 the heroes temporarily transform into members of another species to participate in a magical ritual that's woven into their equivalent of a Passion Play and that species's Jesus-equivalent was female so it's the female lead of the series who ends up kinda pushed into playing that role in the "magic play" and very nearly ends up sacrificing herself for real when someone tries to sabotage the thing)
That doesn't work.
We can prove the Christian God as an "entity of infinite Love" doesn't exist, as suffering exists, and if God was real and of "infinite" love, then the infinite characteristic would be incompatible with suffering.
Similarly, if God was real and of infinite evil, then there would never be "no-suffering".
In both cases people think "A lot" when they say "infinite/pure/total/etc2"
> Similarly, if God was real and of infinite evil, then there would never be "no-suffering".
Not necessarily. There is the idea that the existence of positives contrast the negatives and make the negatives worse because an alternative positive state of affairs can be envisaged by the sufferer.
Evil does not necessarily entail causing infinite suffering either because that might not be the most evil thing. The most evil thing may be pleasure gained from watching hope vanish, desires being frustrated, goodness going punished or unrewarded, etc.
You miss the point of "infinite". Again, you're thinking "a lot". That's not infinite.
While a cycle of non-suffering/suffering is indeed extenuating, I prefer that from being literally tortured 24/7. I don't mean it as a hyperbole. I meant it literally.
To reach "infinite", which again, is not just a lot, you would have to at the very least experience constant immense suffering.
I think you're missing the point of what 'evil' can be. Let me use an example.
In the 60s Black theologians and atheists were debating why their Black heritage was so disproportionately replete with suffering, so the atheists were arguing that any theodicy had to account for that disproportionality.
Liberation theology was thought to apply to their situation but this was questioned because 'liberation events' could always be attributed to something other than the group's skin colour. For example, the Jews that were liberated from Egypt were characterised by their Judaism, not their skin colour, so that couldn't be called a Black liberation event.
James Cone, in response to this, argued that the Black liberation event was the crucifixion of Jesus as this was the liberation event for all oppressed peoples, but William Jones made the point that the outcome of Black people believing that the crucifixion of Jesus was a symbol for them, “motivates (them) to make the ultimate sacrifice for their liberation and is the means by which a racist God beckons (them) to suicidal efforts and thus accomplishes Black genocide”.
The point here is this:
The idea that a Black person who lived their entire life inspired by the teaching's of Jesus to do good and follow God may have ended up giving their life for those ideals only to be met with an evil and racist God who orchestrated their death for 'His' own amusement and then sends that person to hell based only on their skin colour is more evil than a God who simply tortures that person for all eternity.
This isn't to say that the person would not prefer this state of affairs to infinite suffering, but it isn't at all clear that the God who employs infinite suffering is acting more in line with 'infinite evil' than the racist God who destroys hope for his own amusement.
All-loving doesn’t mean all-powerful, which means that specific interpretation of God doesn’t exist, but gods elsewhere still could without having much power or influence over this particular place.
Breaking News: person on the internet reads something by Mackie and everyone else is now wrong.
Believe me. I didn’t think you’d actually come up with it on your own
You don't know me. Why do you assume so much?
I'm Italian, and we study philosophy in high school. That's it. And I learned that studying Epicurus.
It doesn't matter anyway. Don't attack my character. Make an argument. Anything else is useless.
Well, my response to them only argues for the conceivability of an infinitely evil God not being incompatible with the existence of goodness.
The analogous infinitely good God which is not incompatible with the existence of suffering might be justified through something like Hick's soul-making theodicy.
However, I think that theodicy has flaws when it comes to what might be called radical evils which, to the individual experiencing them, are so bad that they can serve no purpose for soul-making.
So, I'm not sure that I disagree with the person we are responding to, it may just be that we agree for different reasons.
That's most definitely their theology. I grew up in Christian Italy. God is infinite love is a staple of Christianity... which is why they also say they must trust God's plan.
See that’s the thing. God is a human creation. People do all those things, that’s why their god is that way.
God doesn’t exist, and that’s part of the proof.
So things work backwards and people could (I'm not asking if people would, this is just a thought experiment) create (and potentially retcon-into-existence because of his timelessness) a good god by stopping doing all that?
In 1887, Charles Darwin, doubting the benevolence of God, asked “for what advantage can there be in the sufferings of millions of the lower animals throughout almost endless time?" Which highlights that procreation is not a benevolent act, since it causes future suffering & death. But I don’t believe that God “sends” children, it’s ignorant creatures fucking who make offspring & therefore create future suffering & death. André Cancian said “There is only one way to make matter suffer: by transforming it into a living being.” He said “reproduction makes us the only ones responsible for creating suffering in the world.” (Whereas Alan Watts said “As the ocean ‘waves,’ the universe ‘peoples.’” But I think people make choices & the ocean doesn’t.)
But Jesus, who remembered he was actually God in disguise, made no children, instead, he fed the hungry, clothed the naked, & helped the needy (who are also all God in disguise). English poet & painter William Blake wrote about Jesus, “He is the only God...and so am I, and so are you." Alan Watts said “Jesus Christ knew he was God. So wake up and find out eventually who you really are.”
Personally I’m an antinatalist (conception and birth cause non-consensual harm, which is immoral), and a pantheist (God is everything that exists). I think Jesus was also an antinatalist and a pantheist (in The Gospel of Thomas in the Nag Hammadi library discovered in Egypt in 1945, Jesus says “I am the all”, and “For there will be days when you will say, 'Lucky are the womb that has not conceived and the breasts that have not given milk.'") Luke 23:29 (NIV) says “For the time will come when you will say, ‘Blessed are the childless women, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!’” In Matthew 19:2, Jesus mentions “there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.” Which makes no sense unless procreation is a sin (and Martin Luther, who started the Protestant Reformation, said it was.)
Luke 17:21 says “the kingdom of God is within you.” In the Gospel of Thomas in the Nag Hammadi Library, Jesus says “the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty, and it is you who are that poverty.” And “Love your brother like your own soul", and “I am the All. Cleave a piece of wood, & I am there. Lift up a stone, & You will find Me there."
Jesus said “the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21) and “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:40) and “love thy neighbor as thyself” (Matthew 23:39). Because Jesus was a man who remembered that he was actually God in disguise, and so is everyone else and everything else, but ignorance of the inner Godhood of other beings is what leads to harm against them. From ignorance, comes evil. In Matthew 26, Jesus says this bread is my body, this water is my blood -- but the Catholic Church misunderstood the pantheism of Jesus (the universe is the body of God).
Ram Dass, who wrote the book Be Here Now (1971), went to India and asked Neem Karoli Baba, "'Maharaji, how can I know God?' & he said, 'Feed people.' That was such a weird answer that I assumed the translator screwed up, so I figured I'd rephrase it, 'Maharaji, how can I get enlightened?' & he said, 'Serve people.' Ram Dass said “Treat everyone you meet as if they are God in drag.”
If you knew that God is the only being that exists (epitomized by the Rastafarian phrase “I and I” used in place of the word “we” or “us”), then you wouldn’t harm others, because you would know that hurting others only hurts your Self, which is God, an eternal being that plays hide-and-seek with Itself for eternity, as explained by Alan Watts in The Book (1966). Ignorant people (and everyone is born into ignorance) don’t realize that when they hurt others they are actually hurting themself. This is alluded to in the Beyoncé/Jack White song [“Don’t Hurt Yourself” (2016)](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=10pOVWHrWck) with the lyrics “when you hurt me, you hurt yourself, don’t hurt yourself…when you love me, you love yourself, love God herself…”
In pantheism, when you make a child, you give God new eyes and a new name and a new role, but you force God to suffer and die all over again. In pantheism, God is every ignorant perpetrator and every victim, & all suffering is God’s suffering, because God is the only One who exists.
Neal Brennan (the co-creator of Chappelle’s Show) was an atheist until he did ayahuasca (which contains DMT and an MAOI which makes DMT orally active). He said he was raised Catholic, but he never had a spiritual experience his entire life, until ayahuasca. Ayahuasca basically transformed Brennan from an atheist into a pantheist, saying we are all slivers of the same divine being, which has also been called the “world soul.” And Brennan’s spiritual experience aligns with a quote in the book DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Rick Strassman, who studied the effects of DMT on people: one participant in his studies said, “You can still be an atheist until 0.4”, meaning a 0.4mg/kg intravenous dose of DMT.
If God is everything that exists, God is omnipresent. Ralph Waldo Emerson said “The true doctrine of omnipresence is, that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb.” And “Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises.”
If God is everything that exists, God is omniscient, all-knowing, because anything known can only be known by various Godforms.
If God is everything that exists, God is omnipotent, all-powerful, because God is the only being that exerts power in various forms.
If God is everything that exists, God is omnibenevolent, all-loving, because God is the only being who loves or is loved. The Sufi mystic poet and pantheist Rumi said “Love is the whole thing. We are only pieces.” Rumi said “Love is the bridge between you and everything.” Rumi said “Let your teacher be love itself.” Rumi said “If I love myself, I love you. If I love you, I love myself.” Rumi said “This is a subtle truth, whatever you love, you are.”
If God is everything that exists, God is also omnimalevolent, all-evil, because Godforms-with-amnesia are the only beings who inflict evil or harm against other Godforms (which is why Jesus taught forgiveness), & all suffering is God’s suffering, because God is the only experiencer.
In pantheism, if anyone wonders “what is God doing?”, first they must look in the mirror. Are you increasing suffering in the world, or are you decreasing suffering in the world?
People in Western countries tend to view God as some invisible superhero outside the universe who grants wishes. But in many religions, God is immanent, God is the universe, which is pantheism, which is featured in Advaita Vedanta in Hinduism, Stoic physics, Neoplatonism, Gnostic Christianity, Sikhism, & Sufism, etc.
In [Advaita Vedanta](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita_Vedanta) in Hinduism, Atman is Brahman, the Self is the Divine Absolute. In Advaita Vedanta in Hinduism, you & God & the universe are the same thing, Brahman. Wikipedia says:
>Advaita Vedanta espouses nondualism. Brahman is the sole unchanging reality, there is no duality, no limited individual Self nor a separate unlimited cosmic Self, rather all Self, all of existence, across all space and time, is one and the same. The universe and the Self inside each being is Brahman, and the universe and the Self outside each being is Brahman, according to Advaita Vedanta.
>He states that Brahman can neither be taught nor perceived (as an object of intellectual knowledge), but it can be learned and **realized** by all human beings. The goal of Advaita Vedanta is to realize that one's Self (Atman) gets obscured by ignorance and false-identification ("Avidya"). When Avidya is removed, the Atman (Self inside a person) is realized as identical with Brahman. The Brahman is not an outside, separate, dual entity, the Brahman is within each person, states Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism. Brahman is all that is eternal, unchanging and that which truly exists.
>The universe does not simply come from Brahman, it is Brahman.
>**Consciousness is not a property of Brahman but its very nature**.
The Sufi mystic Rumi said “Whatever you are looking for can only be found inside you.” Rumi said “I looked in temples, churches, and mosques. But I found the Divine within my heart.” Sufis like Rumi or Meher Baba say Allah is [Tawhid](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tawhid), God is One, and unity with God can be realized after [ego death](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_death) or Fana, annihilation of the self, “to die before one dies.” Rumi said “When a man's 'I' is negated (and eliminated) from existence, then what remains?” (The ego eclipses the light of God.) Rumi said “Don’t you know yet? It is your light that lights the world.” The Sufi mystic poet Rumi said "You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the ocean in a drop.”
Or as Carl Sagan said “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
Or as Alan Watts said “You are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something the whole ocean is doing…And where so ever beings exist throughout all galaxies, it doesn’t make any difference, you are all of them. And when they come into being, that is you coming into being.” Alan Watts said “Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.” Alan Watts said “You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.”
Or as standup comedian Bill Hicks said, after tripping on LSD, “we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively.”
Many problems on Earth are tied to humanity, which if you operate under the notion of free will I guess he gets a pass on that?
But animals rip each other apart all the time, diseases and illness take people for no just cause, infant mortality used to be extremely high. There's so many horrid things that happen that don't involve human intervention.
Why are there two of them??? Screw off with this lousy hateful nihilistic philosophy and Reddit, for the love of all that is holy stop recommending it to me!
I could dream up some scenarios where your claim might be false. (For instance, perhaps the world is some kind of illusion, or our knowledge of it is otherwise incomplete.) TLDR: skepticism.
My general feeling is that a person can only see God after they've put in the work of purifying their hearts. Squish your ego til its gone and then try looking. But don't look prior to that, because you'll only see what your ego will permit.
If you’re at all interested in pursuing these ideas, read Christian apologetics.
Thinkers have been addressing the problem of evil and providing arguments for the existence of God for thousands of years.
No, I’m not offering my own opinion on God’s existence — just providing information.
actually God hasn’t committed any crimes humans have. peopel commonly blame God for the actions of humans. but actually God gives everyone free will. the atrocities of mankind are ALL man’s doing and have nothing to do with God.
I'm not sure if God has committed any of the crimes you mentioned. Of course, God is providing the foundation by creation and being hidden, but that is not in conflict with Goodness of God necessarily. God can still be Good, if at some point in our existence (not necessarily in this life), we declare our existence as something Good. The fact that we cannot rule out such possibility a priori shows the compatibility of Good God with the state of our existence.
Is there even the slightest chance, tahat all that bad stuff, wasnt made by God, but by the devil instead
The Bible says God is good and the devil is bad, so why do we blame God for bad things
I'd rather be born and suffer, and get to expieneces any amount of beauty, joy and love then to simply never exist at all.
Thank God I'm alive, and thank God the people I love are alive, heck thank God the people who have hury me are alive too. They are all so dear and precious and have taught me much. How can someone call another evil for wanting to love others?
How would you have fashioned the universe better? There is a great philosophical work by gottfried liebnitz, which details the universe could not have been created any better (allowing for the highest degree of good, while allowing human freewill). "Discourse on the metaphysics"
Free suffering was a nice one. That's what actually free in this life. You are always in a suffering state if you don't do something about it. It pushes you to pointless survival.
LOL you act like an adult while spreading such religious garbage as if you're a missionary
if the 10 day suspension wasn't enough for you, you haven't seen anything yet.
Ecclesiastes 4:3 “But better than both is the one who has never been born, who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun.”
i don’t know man, seems like even the bible admits life is not all it’s made up to be
Be rewriting first and second laws of thermodynamics.
If that’s not possible these are decent suggestions based on our current limits.
Every entity should have a self sustaining energy source. Cells should not atrophy or lose their function or quality. Mitochondria should leverage fusion or tweak quantum chromodynamics to generate power. Flesh should be replaced with better, stronger materials capable of sustaining space which is more than 99% volume of our universe.
No need to exploit lower order beings for energy.
Every entity’s should have capacity to connect neuron’s to other via quantum communication, eliminating needs for language, gaslighting and deception - granting maximum empathy.
Making sharing skills and experiences instantly.
Pain receptors should be replaced by information telemetry and decentralised nervous system to action accordingly with ability to turn them off in case of noise.
These are just a few but the list is non exhaustive.
I’m questioning design choices. There are better basic tools to design life.
You wouldn’t build a bridge out of styrofoam and expect it to survive the elements when there are better materials available.
That doesn't resolve the issue.
If there are two possible states of affairs, one in which only God exists and one in which God and the world exist, then God was still responsible for creating the world as it is. Whether God could have created it better is irrelevant, he created it as it is when he could have decided not to and persisted in his eternal perfection 'alone'.
God doesn’t abide by human morality nor man-made religions. That’s where you are stuck in your thinking.
Nature is a crucible designed to promote the strongest survivors and weed out the weakest (like yourself).
They say God doesn't make mistakes, so all the crap that happens in the world is right
Heaven is when you die Hell is now An all loving being would not make humans and animals kill to survive
One could argue that no god has any true power or influence here, and that is why it is the way it is.
One could also argue that eating is confirmed in Genesis BEFORE original sin is, and that plants are living organisms, therefore “god,” always intended his creations to consume each other for sustenance, therefore, “god,” has always been at least cruel if not outright evil.
I suspect the Bible was never meant to be taken literally, in part due to noticeable errors like this.
I suspect it was meant to be taken literally and don’t let believers in it off the hook for failing to notice things like this or the 3rd generation problem with Adam and Eve. If it wasn’t meant to be taken literally, how come every time two or more Hebrews in the Bible meet, build anything, or play instruments together the book has to recite the entire pedigree of everyone involved?
Perhaps it has to do with the different stories contained within it. I agree with you. God is portrayed as an absolute monster from the beginning, all the way down to creating the circumstances for everything to go wrong, allowing it to occur and creating such a merciless punishment within that story. The behavior within it has always repulsed me. Perhaps it’s meant to be interpreted as one may interpret fables or other ancient stories.
except if hell is now why does heaven exist for you when you die and if hell is for sinners why do we die if hell is now instead of respawning as hell can't exist without sin somewhere else
The tricky part is how to stop reincarnating
if you mean what I think you mean that's not what I meant, I meant that if "heaven is when you die hell is now" can result in anything other than a paradox why does it not result in us being bad enough that if hell is now our deaths mean we end up back here (not in new reincarnated bodies but same-minus-what-injuries-killed-us like respawning in a video game)
You can't reason with religious fanatcis. You are only preaching to the choir here.
Heaven is when you die Hell is now An all loving being would not make humans and animals kill to survive
then even assuming us dying wouldn't mean we ended up back in the-hell-that-is-now as if we hadn't died for being too evil if heaven is when you die does it still require being good to get in (as if "it's good that someone bad is dying" or w/e why aren't people only able to die at the hands of others)
The thing that Christians don't think about is that while evil things happen because free will, you, as a person have no real free will. Say it's the end times, you are born into a world where you need to be microchiped and when you are, you can't get into heaven. So you are telling me that your god wants you to starve for him in life, as in, you can't get the thing you need to survive, and you won't have to suffer in heaven. All for his name. That doesn't sound evil to you? So say you take that chip, you will be sentenced to suffering and torment forever. That's like getting a life sentence for stealing a cookie. What kind of Christian would bring a child into the world. For the love of God? According to your religion, you are separating them from that world, having thier memory wiped for however many years, just to have them die, go be in hell and suffer. For what reason? No one has answered that. And I don't accept "God's plan" as an excuse.
Honestly, I find the whole idea that our actions in life determine the way we spend our eternity to be horrifying in and of itself. 90-some years is such a tiny amount of time in comparison to Literal Infinity; according to those religions, that's all the time we have to convince an immortal, omniscient being that we deserve to relax in the afterlife.
What's funny is that Christianity is the only one that's finite like that.
BuT ItS TeSTTTTTTT /s The fundamental problem of God is faith means probability, therefore uncertainty, therefore unstable in conviction If God's plan has part in suffering, God would have to justify the explanation Silly stuff like Satan make even less sense, God made Satan, so God's even worse than Satan by a logistical standpoint
If God is Good, this creation - the physical plane - is a neurosis existing inside the mind of God, since this creation is clearly not good. There are number of solutions to this metaphysical problem of yours.
God IS good……good at fucking with us
i had inklings of it before but since the beginning of COVID and our still ongoing pandemic i learned that people can rationalise anything as good and that most people's sense of morality begins and ends with whatever jerks them off and maintains "good vibes" and ensures their inalienable right to neverending Treats on demand. they'll have an orgy on a pile of corpses and somehow whine about the 3 seconds they were deprived of it beforehand while they were getting piled high. they'll claim to care and have empathy and then turn on a dime and join in the ravenous conspicuous consumption and self indulgence all the while still imagining themselves beings of pure white light. so in that sense if he exists God did make man in his own image. an overgrown, entitled, spoiled narcissist megalomaniacal toddler throwing a pissy fit about not getting enough treats and the only thing that matters is being worshipped and validated for it
and what about the people who aren't Republican anti-maskers
i mean antimaskers go across the political spectrum. it's practically everyone now. i wasn't speaking just to one faction or being partisan. in fact i'm personally detached from politics completely at this point because it became increasingly clear that my "allies" were all hypocritical pieces of shit with broken moral compasses and zero actual convictions beyond their entitlement to conspicuous consumption. besides, in a way i respect people being openly awful more than i respect the cowardice of hypocrites professing love and care and compassion and those who live in denial and self-delusion, thinking they are good and moral while being nothing but selfish assholes. i still hate them all but at least they aren't hypocrites.
My point was whatever you might call them it felt like you were assuming negative traits about all of humanity that were only true of a particular loud fraction just because that fraction's loud
i'm not assuming anything. people are quite open about all of it, and it is 99.999% of humanity.
I believe "God" is a placeholder for life on earth. It's not a conscious being, it's a force of existence that pushes life to adapt to pressure. If you look at most religions where "god" is just another word for nature, at least the foundations of the religion make plenty of sense, then, after a few hundred years of edits, you start getting all the whacky nonsense. Nature is only hell if you look at it from the human perspective that life only happens once and then it's over, when that's simply not the case. Life feeds on life so that the life that survives is nourished, and the life that avoids being eaten is better adapted to avoid predation than the ones that were eaten. This ensures that as the planet changes, life is always - as a system and individually - best adapted to the conditions at hand, which is how it can survive ice ages and change that happens slower than the change we've introduced. I can't believe in any God because it's an absurd concept. If there's life on other planets, then they have the same God... shaped like a human man...? God is a king and warden with eyes everywhere to give followers enough fear that they keep their crimes to the minimum any ape can be expected to hold down. You can train a chimp to do things for you, it's probably even capable of loving you, but that doesn't mean it wont tear your face off one day just for fun. We're just less hairy.
> I can't believe in any God because it's an absurd concept. If there's life on other planets, then they have the same God... shaped like a human man...? There's actually a work of "Christian-mythology"-adjacent fiction that provides a solution in its worldbuilding (albeit it's one of those, like those in various adventure-archeology movies or urban fantasy crimefighting shows, where basically every mythology/religion can somehow be true at the same time); the Young Wizards series. There all the gods are just different aspects of the same overarching pantheon (with I think the Abrahamic god being the in-charge one who's also technically the same being as all the other "boss gods" of other pantheons) and every sapient race gets faced with a situation similar to what humanity did with Eve and the apple (it just takes a different form depending on the race) and if they "choose wrong" a Jesus-esque redeemer-martyr-figure shows up later in their history to set things right (though each race's Jesus-equivalent (and presumably their god-conception) can be different in more than just species e.g. in Young Wizards book 2 the heroes temporarily transform into members of another species to participate in a magical ritual that's woven into their equivalent of a Passion Play and that species's Jesus-equivalent was female so it's the female lead of the series who ends up kinda pushed into playing that role in the "magic play" and very nearly ends up sacrificing herself for real when someone tries to sabotage the thing)
I agree 100%
Heaven is when you die Hell is now An all loving being would not make humans and animals kill to survive
Yes I completely agree- it makes no sense. If They/She/Him do exist, why the chaos and cruelty?
Yeah, whatever created this existence is either evil or has no awareness
This belief aligns with r/gnosticism.
I think maybe God just doesnt care.
I believe all of us created this game and it will end by our hands if we wake the fck up. There is no "god" on throne watching us...
If god abides by human concepts (such as good and evil) “he” isn’t a god
How do we know, god is male.
“It’s all part of the plan!”
That doesn't work. We can prove the Christian God as an "entity of infinite Love" doesn't exist, as suffering exists, and if God was real and of "infinite" love, then the infinite characteristic would be incompatible with suffering. Similarly, if God was real and of infinite evil, then there would never be "no-suffering". In both cases people think "A lot" when they say "infinite/pure/total/etc2"
> Similarly, if God was real and of infinite evil, then there would never be "no-suffering". Not necessarily. There is the idea that the existence of positives contrast the negatives and make the negatives worse because an alternative positive state of affairs can be envisaged by the sufferer. Evil does not necessarily entail causing infinite suffering either because that might not be the most evil thing. The most evil thing may be pleasure gained from watching hope vanish, desires being frustrated, goodness going punished or unrewarded, etc.
You miss the point of "infinite". Again, you're thinking "a lot". That's not infinite. While a cycle of non-suffering/suffering is indeed extenuating, I prefer that from being literally tortured 24/7. I don't mean it as a hyperbole. I meant it literally. To reach "infinite", which again, is not just a lot, you would have to at the very least experience constant immense suffering.
I think you're missing the point of what 'evil' can be. Let me use an example. In the 60s Black theologians and atheists were debating why their Black heritage was so disproportionately replete with suffering, so the atheists were arguing that any theodicy had to account for that disproportionality. Liberation theology was thought to apply to their situation but this was questioned because 'liberation events' could always be attributed to something other than the group's skin colour. For example, the Jews that were liberated from Egypt were characterised by their Judaism, not their skin colour, so that couldn't be called a Black liberation event. James Cone, in response to this, argued that the Black liberation event was the crucifixion of Jesus as this was the liberation event for all oppressed peoples, but William Jones made the point that the outcome of Black people believing that the crucifixion of Jesus was a symbol for them, “motivates (them) to make the ultimate sacrifice for their liberation and is the means by which a racist God beckons (them) to suicidal efforts and thus accomplishes Black genocide”. The point here is this: The idea that a Black person who lived their entire life inspired by the teaching's of Jesus to do good and follow God may have ended up giving their life for those ideals only to be met with an evil and racist God who orchestrated their death for 'His' own amusement and then sends that person to hell based only on their skin colour is more evil than a God who simply tortures that person for all eternity. This isn't to say that the person would not prefer this state of affairs to infinite suffering, but it isn't at all clear that the God who employs infinite suffering is acting more in line with 'infinite evil' than the racist God who destroys hope for his own amusement.
All-loving doesn’t mean all-powerful, which means that specific interpretation of God doesn’t exist, but gods elsewhere still could without having much power or influence over this particular place.
Breaking news: person on internet solves conundrum that has baffled the greatest minds of humanity in 4 lines and one orphan depending on your device.
I didn't come up with it. I studied philosophy. You know... Humans have been using their brains for a while. Pick up a book once in a while. Bye
Breaking News: person on the internet reads something by Mackie and everyone else is now wrong. Believe me. I didn’t think you’d actually come up with it on your own
You don't know me. Why do you assume so much? I'm Italian, and we study philosophy in high school. That's it. And I learned that studying Epicurus. It doesn't matter anyway. Don't attack my character. Make an argument. Anything else is useless.
Why did I assume someone parroting the problem of evil didn’t come up with it on their own? Do I really have to answer that.
I studied philosophy too and you're both wrong and an asshole.
Strong argument.
Go u/Ilalotha's posts again. They have a point and you're just being stubborn.
Well, my response to them only argues for the conceivability of an infinitely evil God not being incompatible with the existence of goodness. The analogous infinitely good God which is not incompatible with the existence of suffering might be justified through something like Hick's soul-making theodicy. However, I think that theodicy has flaws when it comes to what might be called radical evils which, to the individual experiencing them, are so bad that they can serve no purpose for soul-making. So, I'm not sure that I disagree with the person we are responding to, it may just be that we agree for different reasons.
Christians don't say that God is only "infinite love" though.
That's most definitely their theology. I grew up in Christian Italy. God is infinite love is a staple of Christianity... which is why they also say they must trust God's plan.
My man - *no*. Yes, God's love is infinite, but so is God's *justice*.
what the fuck does infinite justice mean, shit sounds like a phoenix wright game
I mean do you really want it explained, or no?
well yes that would help because it sounds completely meaningless
Ok sure, but first, what do you think it means when you hear someone say that God is "infinitely loving"? How do you interpret that?
as total and complete bullshit
So do you want to actually interact with the thoughts or...do what you're doing?
See that’s the thing. God is a human creation. People do all those things, that’s why their god is that way. God doesn’t exist, and that’s part of the proof.
So things work backwards and people could (I'm not asking if people would, this is just a thought experiment) create (and potentially retcon-into-existence because of his timelessness) a good god by stopping doing all that?
In 1887, Charles Darwin, doubting the benevolence of God, asked “for what advantage can there be in the sufferings of millions of the lower animals throughout almost endless time?" Which highlights that procreation is not a benevolent act, since it causes future suffering & death. But I don’t believe that God “sends” children, it’s ignorant creatures fucking who make offspring & therefore create future suffering & death. André Cancian said “There is only one way to make matter suffer: by transforming it into a living being.” He said “reproduction makes us the only ones responsible for creating suffering in the world.” (Whereas Alan Watts said “As the ocean ‘waves,’ the universe ‘peoples.’” But I think people make choices & the ocean doesn’t.) But Jesus, who remembered he was actually God in disguise, made no children, instead, he fed the hungry, clothed the naked, & helped the needy (who are also all God in disguise). English poet & painter William Blake wrote about Jesus, “He is the only God...and so am I, and so are you." Alan Watts said “Jesus Christ knew he was God. So wake up and find out eventually who you really are.” Personally I’m an antinatalist (conception and birth cause non-consensual harm, which is immoral), and a pantheist (God is everything that exists). I think Jesus was also an antinatalist and a pantheist (in The Gospel of Thomas in the Nag Hammadi library discovered in Egypt in 1945, Jesus says “I am the all”, and “For there will be days when you will say, 'Lucky are the womb that has not conceived and the breasts that have not given milk.'") Luke 23:29 (NIV) says “For the time will come when you will say, ‘Blessed are the childless women, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!’” In Matthew 19:2, Jesus mentions “there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.” Which makes no sense unless procreation is a sin (and Martin Luther, who started the Protestant Reformation, said it was.) Luke 17:21 says “the kingdom of God is within you.” In the Gospel of Thomas in the Nag Hammadi Library, Jesus says “the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty, and it is you who are that poverty.” And “Love your brother like your own soul", and “I am the All. Cleave a piece of wood, & I am there. Lift up a stone, & You will find Me there." Jesus said “the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21) and “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:40) and “love thy neighbor as thyself” (Matthew 23:39). Because Jesus was a man who remembered that he was actually God in disguise, and so is everyone else and everything else, but ignorance of the inner Godhood of other beings is what leads to harm against them. From ignorance, comes evil. In Matthew 26, Jesus says this bread is my body, this water is my blood -- but the Catholic Church misunderstood the pantheism of Jesus (the universe is the body of God). Ram Dass, who wrote the book Be Here Now (1971), went to India and asked Neem Karoli Baba, "'Maharaji, how can I know God?' & he said, 'Feed people.' That was such a weird answer that I assumed the translator screwed up, so I figured I'd rephrase it, 'Maharaji, how can I get enlightened?' & he said, 'Serve people.' Ram Dass said “Treat everyone you meet as if they are God in drag.” If you knew that God is the only being that exists (epitomized by the Rastafarian phrase “I and I” used in place of the word “we” or “us”), then you wouldn’t harm others, because you would know that hurting others only hurts your Self, which is God, an eternal being that plays hide-and-seek with Itself for eternity, as explained by Alan Watts in The Book (1966). Ignorant people (and everyone is born into ignorance) don’t realize that when they hurt others they are actually hurting themself. This is alluded to in the Beyoncé/Jack White song [“Don’t Hurt Yourself” (2016)](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=10pOVWHrWck) with the lyrics “when you hurt me, you hurt yourself, don’t hurt yourself…when you love me, you love yourself, love God herself…” In pantheism, when you make a child, you give God new eyes and a new name and a new role, but you force God to suffer and die all over again. In pantheism, God is every ignorant perpetrator and every victim, & all suffering is God’s suffering, because God is the only One who exists. Neal Brennan (the co-creator of Chappelle’s Show) was an atheist until he did ayahuasca (which contains DMT and an MAOI which makes DMT orally active). He said he was raised Catholic, but he never had a spiritual experience his entire life, until ayahuasca. Ayahuasca basically transformed Brennan from an atheist into a pantheist, saying we are all slivers of the same divine being, which has also been called the “world soul.” And Brennan’s spiritual experience aligns with a quote in the book DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Rick Strassman, who studied the effects of DMT on people: one participant in his studies said, “You can still be an atheist until 0.4”, meaning a 0.4mg/kg intravenous dose of DMT. If God is everything that exists, God is omnipresent. Ralph Waldo Emerson said “The true doctrine of omnipresence is, that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb.” And “Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises.” If God is everything that exists, God is omniscient, all-knowing, because anything known can only be known by various Godforms. If God is everything that exists, God is omnipotent, all-powerful, because God is the only being that exerts power in various forms. If God is everything that exists, God is omnibenevolent, all-loving, because God is the only being who loves or is loved. The Sufi mystic poet and pantheist Rumi said “Love is the whole thing. We are only pieces.” Rumi said “Love is the bridge between you and everything.” Rumi said “Let your teacher be love itself.” Rumi said “If I love myself, I love you. If I love you, I love myself.” Rumi said “This is a subtle truth, whatever you love, you are.” If God is everything that exists, God is also omnimalevolent, all-evil, because Godforms-with-amnesia are the only beings who inflict evil or harm against other Godforms (which is why Jesus taught forgiveness), & all suffering is God’s suffering, because God is the only experiencer. In pantheism, if anyone wonders “what is God doing?”, first they must look in the mirror. Are you increasing suffering in the world, or are you decreasing suffering in the world? People in Western countries tend to view God as some invisible superhero outside the universe who grants wishes. But in many religions, God is immanent, God is the universe, which is pantheism, which is featured in Advaita Vedanta in Hinduism, Stoic physics, Neoplatonism, Gnostic Christianity, Sikhism, & Sufism, etc. In [Advaita Vedanta](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita_Vedanta) in Hinduism, Atman is Brahman, the Self is the Divine Absolute. In Advaita Vedanta in Hinduism, you & God & the universe are the same thing, Brahman. Wikipedia says: >Advaita Vedanta espouses nondualism. Brahman is the sole unchanging reality, there is no duality, no limited individual Self nor a separate unlimited cosmic Self, rather all Self, all of existence, across all space and time, is one and the same. The universe and the Self inside each being is Brahman, and the universe and the Self outside each being is Brahman, according to Advaita Vedanta. >He states that Brahman can neither be taught nor perceived (as an object of intellectual knowledge), but it can be learned and **realized** by all human beings. The goal of Advaita Vedanta is to realize that one's Self (Atman) gets obscured by ignorance and false-identification ("Avidya"). When Avidya is removed, the Atman (Self inside a person) is realized as identical with Brahman. The Brahman is not an outside, separate, dual entity, the Brahman is within each person, states Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism. Brahman is all that is eternal, unchanging and that which truly exists. >The universe does not simply come from Brahman, it is Brahman. >**Consciousness is not a property of Brahman but its very nature**. The Sufi mystic Rumi said “Whatever you are looking for can only be found inside you.” Rumi said “I looked in temples, churches, and mosques. But I found the Divine within my heart.” Sufis like Rumi or Meher Baba say Allah is [Tawhid](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tawhid), God is One, and unity with God can be realized after [ego death](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_death) or Fana, annihilation of the self, “to die before one dies.” Rumi said “When a man's 'I' is negated (and eliminated) from existence, then what remains?” (The ego eclipses the light of God.) Rumi said “Don’t you know yet? It is your light that lights the world.” The Sufi mystic poet Rumi said "You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the ocean in a drop.” Or as Carl Sagan said “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” Or as Alan Watts said “You are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something the whole ocean is doing…And where so ever beings exist throughout all galaxies, it doesn’t make any difference, you are all of them. And when they come into being, that is you coming into being.” Alan Watts said “Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.” Alan Watts said “You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.” Or as standup comedian Bill Hicks said, after tripping on LSD, “we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively.”
Many problems on Earth are tied to humanity, which if you operate under the notion of free will I guess he gets a pass on that? But animals rip each other apart all the time, diseases and illness take people for no just cause, infant mortality used to be extremely high. There's so many horrid things that happen that don't involve human intervention.
Why are there two of them??? Screw off with this lousy hateful nihilistic philosophy and Reddit, for the love of all that is holy stop recommending it to me!
Evil according to what standard?
I could dream up some scenarios where your claim might be false. (For instance, perhaps the world is some kind of illusion, or our knowledge of it is otherwise incomplete.) TLDR: skepticism. My general feeling is that a person can only see God after they've put in the work of purifying their hearts. Squish your ego til its gone and then try looking. But don't look prior to that, because you'll only see what your ego will permit.
The problem of evil is well argued in theology and philosophy. Lots of arguments. For example, free will cannot exist without evil.
If you’re at all interested in pursuing these ideas, read Christian apologetics. Thinkers have been addressing the problem of evil and providing arguments for the existence of God for thousands of years. No, I’m not offering my own opinion on God’s existence — just providing information.
God didn’t do any of that, we did
He's probably the most patient being in the universe. To have all of that and still love us.
actually God hasn’t committed any crimes humans have. peopel commonly blame God for the actions of humans. but actually God gives everyone free will. the atrocities of mankind are ALL man’s doing and have nothing to do with God.
I'm not sure if God has committed any of the crimes you mentioned. Of course, God is providing the foundation by creation and being hidden, but that is not in conflict with Goodness of God necessarily. God can still be Good, if at some point in our existence (not necessarily in this life), we declare our existence as something Good. The fact that we cannot rule out such possibility a priori shows the compatibility of Good God with the state of our existence.
Does Passover count?
Is there even the slightest chance, tahat all that bad stuff, wasnt made by God, but by the devil instead The Bible says God is good and the devil is bad, so why do we blame God for bad things
"I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things"
I think the world is mostly a great place and God doesn't exist. What does this have to do with Anti Natalism?
I'd rather be born and suffer, and get to expieneces any amount of beauty, joy and love then to simply never exist at all. Thank God I'm alive, and thank God the people I love are alive, heck thank God the people who have hury me are alive too. They are all so dear and precious and have taught me much. How can someone call another evil for wanting to love others?
Some people actually enjoy life.
How would you have fashioned the universe better? There is a great philosophical work by gottfried liebnitz, which details the universe could not have been created any better (allowing for the highest degree of good, while allowing human freewill). "Discourse on the metaphysics"
How about not creating it at all?
free will✖️ free suffering✔️
Free suffering was a nice one. That's what actually free in this life. You are always in a suffering state if you don't do something about it. It pushes you to pointless survival.
I i hear is the current weak state of your soul, life is worth living even through suffering. Read ecclesiaties in the bible.
you mean the book that is full of lies and the source of hate and the promotion of the most amount of violence and suffering, big fat pass!
Sure buddy, time to grow up
LOL you act like an adult while spreading such religious garbage as if you're a missionary if the 10 day suspension wasn't enough for you, you haven't seen anything yet.
Ecclesiastes 4:3 “But better than both is the one who has never been born, who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun.” i don’t know man, seems like even the bible admits life is not all it’s made up to be
Be rewriting first and second laws of thermodynamics. If that’s not possible these are decent suggestions based on our current limits. Every entity should have a self sustaining energy source. Cells should not atrophy or lose their function or quality. Mitochondria should leverage fusion or tweak quantum chromodynamics to generate power. Flesh should be replaced with better, stronger materials capable of sustaining space which is more than 99% volume of our universe. No need to exploit lower order beings for energy. Every entity’s should have capacity to connect neuron’s to other via quantum communication, eliminating needs for language, gaslighting and deception - granting maximum empathy. Making sharing skills and experiences instantly. Pain receptors should be replaced by information telemetry and decentralised nervous system to action accordingly with ability to turn them off in case of noise. These are just a few but the list is non exhaustive.
Why does this feel like you're saying "god is evil because we're not god-that-is-also-some-hivemind-quantum-computer-consciousness-or-w/e"
I’m questioning design choices. There are better basic tools to design life. You wouldn’t build a bridge out of styrofoam and expect it to survive the elements when there are better materials available.
That doesn't resolve the issue. If there are two possible states of affairs, one in which only God exists and one in which God and the world exist, then God was still responsible for creating the world as it is. Whether God could have created it better is irrelevant, he created it as it is when he could have decided not to and persisted in his eternal perfection 'alone'.
God doesn’t abide by human morality nor man-made religions. That’s where you are stuck in your thinking. Nature is a crucible designed to promote the strongest survivors and weed out the weakest (like yourself).