A righteous god wouldn't condemn someone for only believing in what can be proven or observed; somebody with a logical and intelligent mind.

I know this and I'm not even omnibenevolent. The only conclusion is that if there is a truly benevolent god, he won't negatively judge me for trying to think for myself.

The same reason why I have problems. You simply have it worse than everyone else, and it pains me to know that.

The flesh of everyone has been completely corrupted by sin, and that has both spiritual and physical consequences. It's not because of anything you personally did, but because of your human lineage. My flesh has not been redeemed yet, and as such, I fight against it daily in both physical and spiritual ways.

It's easy to hate God for your own shortcomings, but God was the one who often healed people and set them free from their infirmities, and sometimes even from physical death for a time. Rather than blame God, I blame my flesh because I can see it for what it is. Despite its state, my flesh can still be used for good.

How were they innocent?


The key is to understand that depravity is a universal problem. Some people have worse flesh than others, but no one is completely free of it.

How about the first sons of egypt for one. What did a population of children do to deserve to die for what their leader did?

God made this clever loophole where nobody is without sin, therefore it's okay for him to murder anyone he likes just to make a point.

...Jep started this thread? I think that means that here, on page two, it's God's plan for us to get back to men lyin' w/ other men, emirite!?!?! *humpa humpa*

Bah, this was the point I was going to try to make with the crippled question.

If God gave me my "shortcomings" because we are from tainted flesh, why is he surprised that his creation does not worship him? This also poses the statement that I can't hold God up to my logic because he's omnipotent/benevolent. I am not all knowing because he made me that way, so he can't possibly expect a logical, reasoning being to worship him simply because he says you should. Especially when his only truth is a flawed book made by those same unbenevolent beings that just "don't get it."

I'm hardly bitter about my situation, I'm just saying that it's a pretty good example of a stupid God that holds beings up to a higher standard than they can achieve because he decided that he was going to be the only perfect being ever.

God was judging the nation of Egypt as a whole because of what they had done to Israel. The fact that God deferred punishment for roughly 400 years (From Joseph to Moses) shows God's patience and mercy, for how many generations of Egyptian children were spared? The children that died would have been no different than their parents if they had been allowed to grow up. Also, God could have simply killed everyone in that last plague, but He didn't.

There were lesser plagues before the death of the firstborn, but pharaoh did not relent up until that time (partly out of the stubbornness of his flesh and partly because God had to serve justice in its full measure)

A perfectly good argument for abortions!

So, instead of killing the people responsible for the misdeeds (which would have been a sign for life style changes for the children of the population) he killed innocents to make a point...

I can't believe you said this. That is by far one of the worst things you could ever say. If God know Adam would fall, God know billions (trillions?) would go to hell over the years. God allowed Adam to fall, and as a result God more or less CONDEMNED all those people to Hell. That is not a loving God, and I want no part of a God that allows something to happen that permits people to experience eternal pain.

Oh, and God did that so he could show off his mercy? That is the most ****ed up thing I've heard all day. That's like me taking a baseball bat to my basketball team's knees so I can show off how much better than them I am.

I don't understand people who like you who are so involved with God that you fail to see how someone could think otherwise and lose touch with reality. I had a teacher like you, and I couldn't and can't stand her. She literally lost her ability to decide for herself and had to base everything off the Bible, and if it wasn't said straight in the Bible she threw a strange interpretation she was told by someone else at you. She was IMPOSSIBLE to argue with. I tried, and she just stood there and stammered, saying one line over and over. She was unable to put up a dynamic conversation because she hadn't been told it.

Edit- I'm not saying the Bible is a bad thing to try and base your life around and get your morals from. It is that, and it's how I usually decide what I think is right or wrong. But some things I have to disagree with, and you, her, and everyone else can't accept that.

Are you really being a "logical, reasoning being" by a) raving about this here and b) trying to argue against Page, who is clearly very staunch in his belief system?



Suppose He killed the parents. The children would wander and die without parents, anyway. The adult population of Egypt (and specifically the Pharaoh) were the ones who were oppressing the Israelites, and as such, were the ones who could make the decision to free them.

Suppose he only killed the government that was responsible for the oppression the Israelites?

That sounds a lot more "righteous" to me than saying "well you guys are being evil, you deserve to be punished...so I'm going to murder your children!"

Free will bites sometimes, eh? Suppose I'm Mad Max and you're that biker dude. I handcuff you to a car wreck and let gas pour into a cup right over an open flame and hand you a hacksaw. You can cut your arm off and maybe escape, or you can blow up. Mad Max isn't technically condemning you to death, he's giving you a tough choice and before this choice, you might have been taking life for granted. Neither option is all that desirable in the short run, and just sitting there is easy. The harder route is to survive.

Now suppose you're any person. You can repent and spend a life resisting worldly temptations and temporal pleasures, or you can go to Hell. Neither one seems too nice in the short run, but the former works out better in the long run.

There seems to be this sense of entitlement...: "if a supreme Being doesn't conform to your expectations, don't believe in It!"

Assuming there were a God, if He didn't permit us to choose ourselves over Him, and forced us to lead a certain lifestyle, we'd be automatons.

Suppose I give everyone a billion dollars for no reason. Great, now your money is worthless and everyone will take the million bucks for granted. Now suppose I give a billion dollars to anyone who passes a rigorous, three-day exam and physical trial. Fewer people will make the effort, and the reward will be that much more meaningful to its recipients for all they had to go through to get it. Humans tend to define things in terms of contrasts early on. From the tautology: What's A? It's A. We get the slightly more brilliant, What's A? It's not not A.

Maybe achieving sainthood were more like "The Amazing Race", people would live more virtuous lives. In a Hobbesian world without a higher authority to which we can appeal (which I think our thinly and ambiguously lawed society is close to), natural selection can favor those who try to cheat others to get a little more for themselves. It can be highly reassuring to think there's some Great Recordkeeper who's always keeping score.

If the members of today's government all mysteriously died, imagine the anarchy and suffering that would reign...

Your Mad Max analogy is basically saying "well, I didn't condemn them to death, but I'm still responsible for putting them in a situation that cannot turn out well in any way." Is that how your god works?

And today's society is a lot different from ancient Egypt's. They would have been fine temporarily without a government, considering small settlements mostly governed themselves anyway.

#1 question:

who has avoided answering the logical so far?

I would consider Paradise to be a superlatively "well" outcome. I don't know how God works; I hope I am humble enough to admit that my single mind can't fathom every particular of the Divine.

And I probably wouldn't want to, anyway, seeing how little I am in comparison to a god. To me, the "agenda" of a god might very well be maddeningly horrifying as it could seem sublime because I, in many senses, am very concerned about me.

Logical? I'll look for "the" logical question and attempt a response. :\

I don't think God has to conform to my ideals in order to be real. Hell no, I don't believe in him because it wouldn't even be a question if it weren't for a book. (There is nothing outside of a book that you can show me today that would pose the question of a creator. The only thing you could show me is fantastic and wonderful things that we don't understand.)

But that isn't what we're arguing. We're arguing the goodness and awesomeness of God. The bible picture of God is a horrifyingly stupid one no matter how you cut it. God is a babbling baby who has a plan for how his toys are going to play today, and he's making rules that make the game more entertaining, and I think he's full of himself. The only reason anyone thinks this is OK is because he also says that killing people is wrong, which is right so all of it must be.

You know what the difference is between what your Mad Max analogy and God is? God KNEW people would go to hell. Mad Max (I never sat through that whole movie) doesn't know if the guy's going to cut his arm off or let himself asplode. There's a difference. God KNEW people would go to Hell as a result of Adam's faltering, to eternal suffering and pain, and he still let it happen.

Indeed. He even created all the elements necessary to ensure Adam would mess up.

I always thought the story of the tree of knowledge and such was like putting a bottle of lemonade looking antifreeze in front of a toddler, waving your finger and saying "don't drink that", and then going off to a corner staring at them, waiting for them to drink it. Hell, have some hobos come in and tell the kid to drink it as well. That story never, ever made any sense to be, except portraying the alimighty as kinda a dick. Which, well, is supported throughout the rest of the bible.

If that were the case, who wants to go to heaven then. I bet he'd just be itching to cast more people down for being slightly independent minded or maybe a shade against his will.

God knew that Adam was going to screw up, that's why he sent Jesus.
All of the people that died in between did NOT go to hell, but to a "waiting area" of sorts. When Jesus died, the bible alludes that these people that were in this place were given a choice to follow Christ or not.

I'm no apologist, so I can't answer all the questions. But I know what I've experienced (not just read or seen), and nothing can change that.

A poem I wrote once:

That makes no sense. What's with the lag period? There are other things too, but that is the most striking.

Puppetmaster Jepman was very clever to start this thread.

edit - And I sort of get the impression that some of you guys don't want to understand Christianity. And also, nobody here is really qualified to answer the kind of theological questions you're posing. If you're really curious, ask a priest. If not, stop trolling. And ban Jepman.

No clue. Maybe so they could see that all their sacrifices weren't doing any good? I really don't know.

...okay, but everybody hates Sweden.

Yea, but that mostly reminds me of how pagewizard is talking now :/

Remember guys, you (supposedly non-omnipotent) are trying to prove that a supposedly omnipotent being is doing it wrong.

Seems like an awful lot of work to go to just so he could let people "have the choice" and "demonstrate his mercy", which the latter I once again refer back to my earlier post where I knock my basketball team's knees out with a baseball bat so I can show how much better than them I am.

Why did he wait so damn long?

And I know not all those people went to hell. I don't remember the specifics of it though.

Fake edit- Oh, and why did he take one group of people, build them up for thousands upon thousands of years, and then rips everything they had away from them after, apparently, wasting all that time on them.

If I have a belief I'll try and support it as best as I can.

Oh, and I have asked priests, but they hit the same eventual snag: it's their belief/faith/feeling. Some contradictions and other questionable content in the bible just doesn't make sense, and it's a wonder that anyone actually not only believes in a certain religion, but will be a part of a subbranch or sect no less.

It's like if you had a friend who thought that there was a frozen clown orbiting Saturn that every Thursday would condemn a man to die, and he has to eat pickled cabbages to avoid this punishment. Wouldn't you be the least bit curious as to why your friend held such a belief? And at the very least, on some level, try and show him how ridiculous it is? Because it's believing in a fairy tale, make believe. And if you can accept that huge of a lie unflinchingly, how does that reflect your other decisions? Do they have "faith" in other aspects of life? How far can their reason be stretched or ignored in other ways?

I'm sorry that you're so spiteful. :[



What about killing people is inherently wrong? In an atheistic view of the universe, I would respond that the only arguments against killing others lie in a social contract we have with one another not to kill so that it's less likely we'll be killed. I would not valuate the act of killing with "good" or "bad" as those terms are meaningless, since they'd differ from person to person and situation to situation.

I think a lot of the "mainstream" appeal of Christianity (beyond its pervasiveness in today's society) is the whole "love everybody/Jesus loves you" philosophy that is very much a recent development in a majority of Christendom. Despite any rosy depictions of the New Testament we might have today, much of what you'd hear on the pulpit two generations ago spoke heavily upon the "fire and brimstone" aspects of the Christian notion of the universe. Either can be used as effective means of social control; however, as is clear, the "love everybody" is clearly less sellable than "live in constant fear of perdition."



o_O This just sounds body-snatchers-esque...

I now direct your attention to this thread I posted a long time ago as a response to my theological education. (Disclaimer: my beliefs may or may not have changed since then, but you may find it interesting)

Personally, I subscribe to Pantheism and retain a number of my Shinto beliefs of love, goodness, and respect for the nature of things. (So yeah, I consider the universe and all of the inter workings to be great and wonderful things) Good and Evil don't necessarily have to be religious concepts. Atheists can define good in terms of respecting the nature of things. We can even go so far (pantheism) to worship the nature of things. (That doesn't just mean tree hugging. There are tree huger pantheists. I'm talking more about the rules and systems that I "worship." Natural life is one of those systems.)

Alright, somebody answer me this. Why is it that Christianity only arose in Western society? If God were a benevolent and loving God, would he not reveal himself to all peoples? Would he not make them all see his true glory? And if he did, would Christianity in China, Japan, the Americas etc. rise in parallel to Christianity in Western society? Or was God content ignoring half the world until Western missionaries got around to spreading the word?

That would be the perfect question for someone who has actually studied religion.

This is a point that needs to be talked about through two possible mindsets. 1. Theism 2. Atheism.

1. He gave us the logic we have, and it is the only logic we can act upon. If he's doing things like showing his mercy and love, he's got to do it in mankind's terms or we wont get it. For him to act in a way that we can't understand that hurts mankind, doesn't make sense, and seems illogical and then expect us to take his acts for granted simply because we can't understand doesn't seem like a very kind God. "Trust me, I'm working for you. You have to trust me because I didn't give you the ability to understand, I only gave you the ability to believe me when I say to trust me."

2. The concept of all knowing and all powerful is a pretty convenient shield for justifying the acts of God in an attempt to show his power and wrath. He can kill a bunch of people if he feels like it, and he's got this place for bad people, and the reason he does this is because he loves you, and you simply can't understand how much love this is because you're stupid because he made you that way! Now pay your taxes like good individuals because the king wants to do God's work.

Like I said, I'm not apologist, so I don't have all the answers. I think some conjecture about the "wait" that the wait was for technology to be at a point (ala roman empire) where Jesus' message could be taken around the world. Also, they weren't just running around on their own, God sent prophets to remind them to follow God's laws (which apparently, they didn't like to do).

About it being "a lot of work"... so? How is "a lot of work" an argument? I'm not following what you're saying there.

As I remember NOBODY went to hell, until after Jesus came and died. Even Adam and Eve would have been in that waiting area. All the people that died because they disobeyed before Jesus came, would still have a chance to spend eternity with God, so they didn't miss out on anything anyway. "Oh, but they stoned the prostitute do death." She violated the law, that was the punishment. She wouldn't have gone to hell, she would have been in the waiting area until Jesus came.

As far as the "long time" issue, really, if nobody goes to hell, then it isn't that important, is it? Besides, we're assuming that time exists in the same manner after death as we know it now. I think it doesn't. I happen to think that God is outside of the dimension of time, which would explain omnipresence. I could be in many places at once if I wasn't defined in space by time.

Lastly, what exactly did God rip away from Israel? He provided the final sacrifice for the sins of the people in the form of His son. Seems more like fulfilling the requirements of his own laws on behalf of the people that weren't able to do it on their own.