In a recent thread, I challenged Christians and other believers to explain why their supposedly loving God treats people so poorly. Toward the end of the thread, I commented:
We’re more than 1200 comments into this thread, and still none of the believers can explain why their “loving” God shits all over people, day after day.
If you loved someone, would you purposely trap them under the rubble of a collapsed building? Or drown them? Or drive them from their home and destroy their possessions? [Or stand by, doing nothing, while a maniac mowed them down using automatic weapons?]
Your supposedly loving God does that. Why?
As you’d expect, the Christians struggled to find a good answer. One of their failed attempts was to appeal to the Cross. Fifthmonarchyman, for instance, wrote this:
I just think that the way to understand God’s love is to look at the Cross and not at the latest natural disaster.
That’s fairly typical. Christians do see the Cross as a great symbol of love. Jesus was willing to lay down his life for us, after all. What could be more loving than that?
The problem is that they haven’t thought things through. When you do, the Cross becomes rather appalling. Here’s how I put it in response to FMM:
That’s right. God had the power to forgive Adam and Eve. A loving God would have forgiven them. The Christian God refused to forgive them, banished them from the Garden, made their lives miserable, and then blamed their descendants as if they had anything to do with it.
The Christian God is an unloving asshole. Thank God (so to speak) that he doesn’t exist.
And just to complete the picture, he decides that since Adam and Eve ate a particular fruit — something he knew would happen before he even created them — everyone must be tortured for eternity after they die. (Can’t you feel the love?)
But wait — there’s a way out! This psychotic God is willing to forgive us after all, because he tortured himself to death! He just needed a little more blood and gore in order to forgive us, that’s all. (Can’t you feel the love?)
So FMM comes along and says “ignore the natural disasters, ignore all the ways God torments people, and look to the Cross,” as if the cross were some great symbol of love. It isn’t. It’s the symbol of a creepy God who
a) creates people and sticks them in a Garden;
b) gets the bright idea of putting a tree in the Garden that he doesn’t want them to eat from;
c) blames them for eating from it, even though he knew that would happen before he even created them;
d) blames their descendants, as if they had anything to do with it;
e) decides that everyone must be tortured for eternity, because Adam and Eve ate from a tree that he was stupid enough to put in the Garden;
f) decides that he might be willing to forgive everyone in exchange for more blood and gore;
g) in the ultimate act of self-loathing, tortures himself to death; and
h) with his blood lust satisfied, finally agrees to forgive people;
i) except that even with his bloodlust temporarily satisfied, he’s still an asshole; so
j) he decides that he’s still going to torture for eternity the folks who don’t believe in him at the moment of death, and only forgive the ones who suck up to him.
Can’t you feel the love?
Christians, pause and ask yourselves: What happened to me? How did I end up believing something as stupid and ridiculous as Christianity? Why am I labeling this monstrous God as ‘loving’?
The Holy Spirit is a wondrous thing. It descends on people, making them incredibly stupid. It even makes them forget what love is.
Now, I’m fully aware that Christians don’t all agree on the historicity of the Adam and Eve story or on how atonement works. We can discuss some of those differences in the comments below. But I do think it’s striking that Christians have not come up with a story that makes sense, and that a large number of them unwittingly hold beliefs that paint God as monstrous, not loving, and the Cross as the symbol not of love, but of a petty and ungenerous refusal to forgive until blood is spilled.
The Cross truly is an embarrassment, right at the heart of Christianity.
I have been recently been reading about Christadelphians and their beliefs. Apparently there is no Trinity, (who knew?) , and Jesus was adopted by god. Which makes it worse, as far as I can see. A god sacrificing himself to himself is no sacrifice at all, but Christadelphians seem quite happy for a father to murder his own ‘child’.
quarrion,
There’s also a creepy Gnostic idea known as “separation Christology”, in which the human Jesus is possessed by the Christ, who enters Jesus’s body at the time of his baptism. The Christ then ‘operates’ Jesus as he undertakes his teaching ministry, but abandons him to suffer on the cross alone. Hence Jesus’s anguished cry “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” To the Gnostics, Jesus really had been forsaken by God.
Christ, to Jesus:
No you didn’t. That’s another complete falsehood, whip cream boy.
What keiths actually did was suggest: “God doesn’t love me enough, and I don’t know what loving enough means…”
Then ran away.
Let me say that as a Christian the cross does not embarrass me at all.
What it does is remind me of what love is like. Love is sacrifice.
This is My commandment, that you love one another as I loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.
I write my response above before even reading the OP.
From the OP:
Nothing. See above
Matthew 7:6 -7
“Do not give dogs what is holy; do not throw your pearls before swine. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and then turn and tear you to pieces. 7 Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.”
Just a word of advise to Christians and other religious who might be provoked by this OP:
Don’t let keiths get under your skin!
My kids (14, 12 yo) and I have given him enough reasons to come to the right conclusions that there is a striking difference between random, mindless killings such as the one in Vegas and the executions similar to the executions of sentenced criminals which was decided by human courts…
He refused to hear it..obviously because this would mean accepting reason…
My kids also came up with an illustration of a town full of Nazi war criminals that is spared by human army general sent to execute them because there maybe a few innocent people in that town. This was in reference to the account written in Genesis 18:16-33 where Abraham is questioning God’s justice before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Just like in the illustration of the Nazi town of convicted war criminals, God was willing to spare the two cities of bullies, rapists, murderers, people sacrificing their own children to gods, and much more, if only 10 righteous people (according to humans, not God) were found there… God was willing to forgive tens of thousand or more barbarians just because there may have been 10 righteous people there…
Would you? Anybody who saw what the Nazi’s have done in the concentrations camps, would probably have no doubt that justice needed to be served they and deserved to die…God was willing to forgive it just on the account of the few… Remember that!
If you REALLY WANT to find out how keiths operates, read his responses to mine and others on these threads:
The Mystery of Christianity: 1. The Problem of Evil
FMM throws Jesus under the bus
While initially I thought keiths knew something about religion and the bible well, soon I have realized that his “knowledge” was probably coming from some anti-religious website.
He bluntly has refused to acknowledge that all the trails that Job experienced described in Job 1 and 2 were caused by Satan, including weather anomalies that killed Job’s family, and blamed God for it anyways…
Keiths is just another troll, retired engineer ( I doubt he was an engineer, because if he were one he would not question the obvious, such as similarities between human, chimpanzee, and gorilla to share similar genetic code—a common feature in engineered systems with similar function that would be expected that the gene regions encoding common biochemical pathway that enzymes would have a high level of similarity).
Keiths is not interested to hear what he doesn’t want to hear- a very common feature among bloggers not only at TSZ. He is one of the reasons I decided to leave TSZ (other than than the censorship imposed on my OPs), because he thinks “he knows everything and has all the time in the world to tell you that…”- a very common feature among retried people who have no further purpose in life but waiting for death…
It is so sad but true fact…
Keiths decided this comment is spam and removed it
Matthew 7:6 -7
“Do not give dogs what is holy; do not throw your pearls before swine. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and then turn and tear you to pieces. 7 Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.”
Just a word of advise to Christians and other religious who might be provoked by this OP:
Don’t let keiths get under your skin!
My kids (14, 12 yo) and I have given him enough reasons to come to the right conclusions that there is a striking difference between random, mindless killings such as the one in Vegas and the executions similar to the executions of sentenced criminals which was decided by human courts…
He refused to hear it..obviously because this would mean accepting reason…
My kids also came up with an illustration of a town full of Nazi war criminals that is spared by human army general sent to execute them because there maybe a few innocent people in that town. This was in reference to the account written in Genesis 18:16-33 where Abraham is questioning God’s justice before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Just like in the illustration of the Nazi town of convicted war criminals, God was willing to spare the two cities of bullies, rapists, murderers, people sacrificing their own children to gods, and much more, if only 10 righteous people (according to humans, not God) were found there… God was willing to forgive tens of thousand or more barbarians just because there may have been 10 righteous people there…
Would you? Anybody who saw what the Nazi’s have done in the concentrations camps, would probably have no doubt that justice needed to be served they and deserved to die…God was willing to forgive it just on the account of the few… Remember that!
If you REALLY WANT to find out how keiths operates, read his responses to mine and others on these threads:
The Mystery of Christianity: 1. The Problem of Evil
FMM throws Jesus under the bus
While initially I thought keiths knew something about religion and the bible well, soon I have realized that his “knowledge” was probably coming from some anti-religious website.
He bluntly has refused to acknowledge that all the trails that Job experienced described in Job 1 and 2 were caused by Satan, including weather anomalies that killed Job’s family, and blamed God for it anyways…
Keiths is just another troll, retired engineer ( I doubt he was an engineer, because if he were one he would not question the obvious, such as similarities between human, chimpanzee, and gorilla to share similar genetic code—a common feature in engineered systems with similar function that would be expected that the gene regions encoding common biochemical pathway that enzymes would have a high level of similarity).
Keiths is not interested to hear what he doesn’t want to hear- a very common feature among bloggers not only at TSZ. He is one of the reasons I decided to leave TSZ (other than than the censorship imposed on my OPs), because he thinks “he knows everything and has all the time in the world to tell you that…”- a very common feature among retried people who have no further purpose in life but waiting for death…
It is so sad but true fact…
J-Mac:
What are you babbling about? I haven’t removed any comments.
I think you meant droll.
keiths,
No surprises so far.
Phoodoo is in denial about what happened in the other thread, and Mung is doing his best hands-over-the-ears “La la la I can’t hear you” routine. J-Mac is replaying arguments that failed for him in other threads, and trying to fabricate a martyrdom for himself.
Any Christians out there who are willing and able to address the argument I make in the OP?
Yes, yes and yes!
I posted it previously and it disappeared. When I went to edit it, it was marked as spam. Who else could have done it but you withing 10 seconds of posting?
This is just the very proof of what I had written about…
Don’t waste your time!
BTW: Now he is even denying that he marked my comment as spam within 10 seconds of my posting it…
Can anybody ask him what he’s trying to achieve while waiting for the inevitable?
I’m not interested in any of his answers for obvious reasons…
J-Mac:
Ever heard of a spam filter, doofus?
You think I’m refreshing this page every few seconds so I can remove comments from the great and feared J-Mac?
It doesn’t strike you that it was caught in a spam filter?
Reason, it’s not as bad as you think.
Glen Davidson
I had a comment get accidentally marked as spam the other week. Neil posted it and apologized. I think it has something to do with how the spam filter reads embedded HTML codes and if it can’t resolve the address. In my case I was posting a comment that linked directly to a downloadable PDF, so it looked like spam to the system.
Send keiths more whip cream, please God send keiths more whip cream.
La la la I can’t hear you
I don’t see an argument there. Plus, it appears to be something you wrote previously that you’ve just regurgitated into an OP.
Not an argument.
No one expects you to be able to defend your faith, Mung.
I’m interested in hearing from Christians who are at least willing to try.
The argument is tolerably clear.
1. If God were loving, then He would not have done A.
2. But Christians believe that God has done A.
3. Therefore, the God in which Christians believe is not a loving God.
The burden would then fall on Christians to give reasons for rejecting (1), or (2), or both.
Or on keiths to clarify how (1) is a thing. He has his very peculiar ideas about what evil is and why something is evil. If God exists, keiths hates wanton evil, but without God he loves it. Go figure. As for the suggestion that there is no wanton evil, he simply does not hear it.
And if the reason to reject (1) is that us, mere mortals, are in no position to judge God, then it seems to me we’re not in a position to deem him all loving, or justified in believing any of his purported teachings: everything he supposedly said could be a lie, and you would be in no position to question that either
I’d just like to point out that if you think this excuse of yours works, then there is no level of suffering and evil in the world at which you couldn’t make it. There could be twice as much evil and suffering in the world, and people would take that as evidence against a loving God, and then you’d still sit here and argue it’s like people not having enough luxuries.
And the same if there was 4 times as much. Or 8 times. Or 4 billion times as much. If every person or sentient creature that ever existed suffered in physical and emotional agony for the entirety of their lives, you could still sit there and just brainlessly declare if they complain about it it’s just like wanting more whip cream.
Your excuse doesn’t work and it never did.
It’s true that there is just no pleasing some people. 🙂
According to “Monty Python’s Life of Brian,” that’s just what Jesus said, too.
Are you in the position to judge say…homosexuals without knowing all the details?
I suppose one could argue that their god is loving, but clearly does not love everyone. He’s pretty good about the (self-)chosen few, but brutal toward anyone else. The OT god who does these terrible things, pretty much sticks to doing them unto those who didn’t write the Bible, and this becomes another case of history being written by the winners, casting themselves as protagonists.
Considered in this light, Christians are truly followers of god, coming down hard on those who offend their xenophobia.
Why dodge the question with another irrelevant question?
In previous debates about morals, theists argued against the Euthyphro dilemma affirming God is good. God is himself the standard of morality. But if you can’t judge God, then you can’t judge morals at all.
#AtheistLogic
Not being a Christian myself, I’m reluctant to comment too much. But I think this points to the underlying tension in Christianity (and to some degree in Judaism).
On the one hand, the ancient Israelites worshiped a god not radically different from other gods worshiped by other ancient Near Eastern tribes. Their god plays favorites and he’s not a god of love. He makes mistakes and he can be swayed with carnal appetite. (Let’s not forget that the reason why he preferred Abel over Cain is because roasting meat smells better than roasting vegetables!)
On the other hand, by the time we get to the New Testament, we have documents that are almost six hundred years younger. One of the big things that happens in that intervening time is the rise of Greek and Roman philosophy. Not only Plato and Aristotle but there are also indications of Stoic, Neoplatonic, and even Epicurean influences on New Testament texts. Paul in particular is quite sophisticated. And when Jesus says “it is not what goes into a man’s mouth that defiles him, but what comes out” (Matthew 15:11), that’s relying on an understanding that there are psychological processes — that people have intentions. The psychology at work in the Gospels and Paul’s letters is light-years beyond anything the Old Testament.
The problem that Christians have is that they have to reconcile the quasi-pagan god of wind and storm worshiped by the ancient Israelites with the far more abstract Being as understood (however differently) by Neoplatonists and Stoics, among other Hellenistic schools.
Derp
No, he didn’t.
There’s a wordpress spam filter that decided your post was spam. That’s probably because it had several links (and spammers like to do that).
In any case, I have now marked it as not-spam.
Thanks for a viewpoint I’d never encountered (and based on abundant knowledge I lack).
Seems to me this tension is resolved on the ground by what appears to be a universal habit of cherry-picking biblical verses, and inserting them into a context generally unrelated to the material surrounding the extract. It’s even said that the devil can quote scripture for his purposes, regardless of what those purposes may be.
You could argue that logic dictates that the “true” Christian MUST be hypocrites, this requirement being embedded so deeply in their scripture.
Flint,
He’s an ass toward his chosen people, too. From an older thread:
KN,
Paul’s God is just as arbitrary, unjust, and unloving as the God of Cain and Abel. From Paul’s epistle to the Romans:
I guess that’s how you can tell the REAL chosen from those who only claim to be chosen.
Erik:
WTF? Where did you get that bizarre idea?
Rumraket,
Right. Or there could be half as much suffering. Or half of that. Or a billion times less suffering, and keiths would still complain its too much. How much less is enough Rumraket?
Can’t you see that this is the whole point? How little suffering does there need to be before its enough. THIS is exactly what keiths can’t answer. Maybe keiths wants no suffering, ever-he can’t say. Without an argument about how much suffering is the world expected to have, its a totally pointless view he holds.
So the only logical response to keiths is that unless every soul on earth, has complete pleasure, infinitely, he can still complain that why would a loving God give warts. His argument is so facile, so lacking depth of thought, and so easily refuted, that if you can’t see it, I guess you also just don’t want to think for more than 20 seconds.
Flint,
Which is bad news for the Christians here. Their record of failure at TSZ is not exactly a sign of God’s favor.
According to some, it is the Jews who are God’s chosen people. But keiths only obsesses over Christians. 🙂
phoodoo:
Poor phoodoo is still avoiding my actual argument, which asserts no such thing.
Here’s the question again:
Phoodoo has no answer, so he desperately tries to change the subject.
He was even afraid to answer this question of Timothy’s:
Imagine what it must be like to be phoodoo. So ashamed of the truth that he is unwilling to come out and say ‘no’ in response to Timothy’s question.
Why the fear? It’s obvious. If he admits that his answer is ‘no’, then the inevitable follow-up question is “Why doesn’t your God say ‘no’, then?”
Most humans are far more loving than phoodoo’s God, and phoodoo is ashamed of that. Rightly so.
“I want more money!”
“Ok, how much more?”
“Just more!”
“Ok, here’s 5 dollars.”
“No, I want more money!”
“So then how much more more? Here’s 1000 dollars.”
“I don’t have to answer that. I want MORE money! More means more, why do you have to ask so many details. If you love me, you should give me more. If you loved someone would you give them less? Why are you giving me less? You have more you can give me.”
Keiths argument.
And Rumraket is struggling getting why its so pathetic.
phoodoo,
Be brave and respond to the actual argument.
Meanwhile, are there any Christians out there who can defend the Cross as a symbol of God’s love?
As I remarked to FMM:
But after more than 20 seconds of thought, you raise a rather interesting point. Granting that there is still SOME suffering, and granting that there could be more and there could be less, what we need to do is compare the amount of suffering between universes containing a loving god, and universes without any gods. THEN we could see whether the loving god in fact decreases the overall suffering level. What we need, in other words, is a control universe.
Alas, lacking that, we’re forced to compare cultures that have gods, with cultures with more gods, or no gods, or different gods. Nonetheless, one might reasonably expect the culture with the loving god to have significantly less suffering, according to any more or less rational metric. Do we see this? And even if we do, we must eliminate non-god factors which might influence suffering levels, such as living standards, lifestyles, technology, affluence, etc.
This strikes me as a challenging project, in which initial operational definitions will be of critical importance.
Flint,
No, that isn’t reasonable at all.
It depends on some patently unreasonable assumptions, including the assumption that a) the gods in question actually exist, and b) that they favor their adherents over everyone else.
This is what I was referring to when I said initial operational definitions would be critical. Just for starters, what is a “god”, when no two people seem to conceive of exactly the same thing. Clearly (to me, anyway), this operational definition must be subjective — by any objective definition, we’re talking about an imaginary construct. Whether this “god” favors its adherents is the TARGET of the study, not an assumption beforehand.
Still, there have been studies that set out to determine whether the predominant religious faith of a culture, in and of itself, increases or decreases the satisfaction with life generally among members of that culture. One might determine that shared delusions confer psychological benefits. Certainly the faithful on this forum seem quite happy in their belief.
Even Paul recognized that the Cross is pure foolishness to intelligent people who haven’t drunk the Kristian Kool-Aid:
He just figures that stupidity will triumph in the end. Those smarty-pants eggheads will get what’s coming to them.
You hear much the same reasoning from Scientologists, who pity the poor “wogs” who don’t understand the truth of what L. Ron Hubbard said.