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.
No. Pretty much everything in your post was anticipated and answered in mine. I can only conclude you are incapable of giving a substantive answer.
Erik,
I don’t care whether you think I took my faith seriously. Your opinion is not important.
I’m interested in hearing whether anyone, Christian or otherwise, can defend the Cross against the argument I made in the OP. So far, no one has.
Erik,
Don’t forget to answer this question.
I’m curious to know where you got that strange idea.
If Christians think that the Cross is not an embarrassment, but at worst a mystery, your argument is irrelevant.
Um, no. Closing their eyes to the problem won’t make it go away.
You’re asking others to solve your own embarrassment for you. This can be helped a bit as soon as you stop projecting, but ultimately everyone must solve one’s own embarrassments, not that of others.
I’m not a Christian, Erik. Christianity’s problems are not my problems.
Erik,
If you think I’m wrong, let’s hear your counterargument in defense of the Cross.
Don’t be shy.
The only answer to my question about how much suffering would a loving God allow, according to your side is, NONE.
Its not up to my side to say how much suffering a loving God should allow, because I am not the one questioning it. If the only definition you can provide is none, your side has no argument to stand on. You want heaven on Earth. I call that an impossibility, if you accept that the world has choices.
phoodoo,
Be brave and answer Timothy’s question.
keiths,
How much money keiths? How much whip cream?
Be brave.
Of course you have to give some sort of limit, that’s the whole point. We are having a discussion here and you are being asked to consider at what point the suffering in the world is incompatible with the idea of a loving God. You can’t just brainlessly refuse. Or well you can of course, but that will basically demonstrate that you’re afraid of probing possible answers to the question.
As I have been trying to get across, your argument seems to entail that there is literally no amount of suffering the world could contain that you would take to be incompatible with a loving God. Because if we assume your argument is successful, no matter how much suffering we imagine, we can simply insert your argument to “defeat” it. And this is a problem. It shows there is something wrong with your argument if it “works” in all possible situations.
We can make some pretty simple analogies to show this. There is clearly a level of indifference to the suffering of children at which point we would agree that the parents of said children, if they are aware of this suffering and capable of acting to reduce it, if they still don’t, they’re bad parents. Whatever love they may claim in words to have for their child, is flawed, or a lie. They don’t have to be the cause of the suffering, but if they do nothing to prevent or minimize it, they’re not loving parents.
This is exactly analogous to the argument we are making concerning the relationship between God and mankind in christian mythology. At some point, some kinds of suffering are so gratuitous and excruciating, the fact that God does not intervene to prevent them, is an indictment against the character of God. Because if a human person in the same position also did nothing, we would say of that person s/he is a bad person. Perhaps a sociopath incapable of feeling love. If the argument works for a human person, then it works for God even better. Because there are all sorts of possible excuses we could invoke for a human person we could not invoke for God. A human being can be simply ignorant, or make errors in reasoning, or not have enough time, or be exhausted, and so on and so forth. None of that applies to God. For God, there is no such excuse. So God’s failure to act HAS to be an indictment against His character.
That doesn’t even follow. Even if NO suffering was the only logical option, then THAT would still make a valid argument.
But we could easily grant for the sake of argument that there could be a non-zero “optimal” level of suffering in the world that God could allow. For example, we could imagine that in order to truly appreciate some of the good things in life, we have to go through some sort of hardship and challenge, as this will make the good things in life seem all the better in contrast. Or even that there are at least some good things which, if no bad things happened, they would not even seem good at all.
Even were we to stipulate this is at least possible, we still don’t have any reason to think that we actually live in a world with the “optimal” balance between suffering and happiness.
But we can go further still and show how that option also entails a problem for your argument, in that we can at least use this to demonstrate that there IS a level of suffering in the world at which your argument would fail. Even if we assume that it is the case that we live in the world with the optimal level of suffering, then it immediately follows that there is also a possible world with a non-optimal level of suffering. And if there is a possible non-optimal level of suffering in the world, then it follows that there is an amount of suffering in the world that is incompatible with the existence of a loving God. And if it is possible there is a world with a non-optimal level of suffering, then that would be a world where your argument fails.
So the christian concept of heaven is impossible? Okay I guess. I suppose now you’re going to tell me in the choise between Heaven and Earth, you will choose Earth because in Heaven there is no free will? Then what good is Heaven anyway if you prefer Earth? I dare say your arguments here make nonsense out of all sorts of christian concepts.
Besides, this choice red-herring is irrelevant to circumstances that bring about suffering of sentient creatures beyond their control. Like all sorts of natural disasters and so on.
Of course it is. We should be embarrassed that humans could carry out the abuses inflicted on Christ as reported in the New Testament.
Rumraket,
Are you proposing some amount of suffering that would still prove a God is loving to your satisfaction? Because I haven’t seen where you are saying what that amount is. Is heartache allowed? Suicide? Death? Are you going to give some details about this supposed limit of yours, or are you going to try to continue to pretend that the onus is on our side to say how much suffering is still considered loving?
The onus is on you to explain what that amount is, not me. I can easily just suggest that the amount of suffering that exists right now, is the amount of suffering that free choice and struggle requires.
It on you to show how it could be different. No pain? How much pain? No love, means no pain?
Again, its you argument that it could be another way, what way?
There is no great glory without great tragedy.
This plays out on so many levels:
http://www.creationevolutionuniversity.com/insight/
and
and
http://www.creationevolutionuniversity.com/idcs/?p=36
and
http://www.creationevolutionuniversity.com/idcs/?p=45
and
http://www.creationevolutionuniversity.com/idcs/?p=40
As an aside:
Something to think about before a Rugby Match:
You’re boring. A one-trick pony. You have but one drum so you think pounding on it is what is meant by the term music.
Also, you were already given an answer and ignored it.
Water appears to be somewhat critical to life. And not just any life, but human life.
And he took a verse out of context in order to “support” his “argument.”.
If keiths were a Christian he would be embarrassed by the cross, therefore, Christians ought to be embarrassed by the cross.
And let’s just forget about the fact that at the time of the cross there were no Christians.
Yet you seem obsessed with them.
Phoodoo I already gave you my answer: None.
So now you no longer have any excuse for dodging my questions. Up you go, read my posts again and find the sentences that end with question marks. It hasn’t escaped notice that you continue to ignore them.
Mung,
Is he embarrassed by the resurrection? It’s devastating to his case for Atheism. 🙂
keiths,
Your entire post is aimed at a straw man.
Nothing wrong with that, whatever you happen to think of the historicity of the Genesis account.
Nothing wrong with that either, even if you take the tree literally (and most Christians don’t).
Nothing in the Bible says God knew that our first parents would eat the forbidden fruit before He created them. And if you adopt a Boethian view of Divine foreknowledge (as many Christians do) then God’s timeless knowledge of our free choices is logically (but not temporally) consequent on our performance of those acts, which means that God had no way of knowing which way our first parents would choose, apart from actually creating them.
Nothing in the Bible or in the doctrinal statements of Christianity says that God blames us for what our first parents did.
This is a total travesty of Christianity. Why are you wasting our time? You know better than this, keiths. I might add that Hell is mentioned only once in the entire Old Testament – namely, in the book of Daniel, chapter 12, and without any reference to the Fall. In Genesis 3, the punishment for the Fall is said to be death, a lifetime of hard labor (for Adam and his descendants) and pain in childbirth (for Eve and for her descendants). Nothing here about Hell. And if Hell were the automatic punishment for the Fall, why did Jesus bother to preach to the spirits of the dead, according to 1 Peter 3:19?
There’s nothing in Christian doctrine which says that God, Who is almighty, could not have somehow redeemed us without shedding any blood.
Hang on. The death of Jesus on the Cross was the death of a Divine Person, according to orthodox Christian doctrine. So in that sense we can say: “God died on the Cross.” However, God, as God, cannot die. What the Church teaches is that Jesus suffered and died in His human nature.
What’s more, Jesus did not torture Himself. He allowed men to torture and kill Him, without resisting.
You’re seriously telling me that God never forgave anyone in the Old Testament? I suggest you read Psalm 51.
Gratuitous.
The Bible tells us that God answers prayers uttered even by sinners, at the point of death (Luke 23:43). I once knew a priest who taught me the Agnostic’s Prayer:
“Oh my God, if there is a God, save my soul, if I have a soul.”
I put it to you that if God is merciful (as Christians teach), then a sincere seeker after truth who uttered that prayer would surely be answered, at the moment of death.
You seem to be saying that the amount of suffering that would refute the loving god is, well, more than is occurring now. No matter HOW MUCH suffering there is now. And “now” doesn’t mean, for example, last week. So if there is more suffering today than there was last week, well, that was then and this is now, right? You can never be wrong with an infinitely flexible yardstick.
If you’re keiths, it’s what you do.
vjtorley, Mung,
Now you know precisely how knowledgable folk feel about your mangled (mis)understanding of biology.
Poof!: An embarrassment at the heart of Evolutionism
Kudos to Vincent for actually addressing my argument and attempting to defend Christianity.
Mung, Charlie, colewd — why cling to a faith you are unable to defend?
Because my faith depends on the cross and not on your nonsensical arguments. 🙂
Mung:
…which you are unable to defend. Vincent is at least trying.
keiths, do actually believe that Jesus existed and was crucified?
phoodoo, to Rumraket:
I addressed that goofy idea in a set of comments on the FMM/bus thread:
October 4, 2017 at 6:52 am
Will Mung and phoodoo ever summon the courage to answer the questions? It’s doubtful. They’re clearly spooked.
But while we wait, let’s talk about the Las Vegas shooting. Here’s a question for those, like phoodoo, who think that evil is the price we pay for choice, in God’s great plan:
How did God determine that 58 dead and 515 injured (or whatever the latest toll is) was exactly the right amount of “choice” to offer the gunman, who clearly would have chosen to kill more if he’d been given the opportunity? It clearly must have been exactly the right amount of choice.
Praise be to your wise and benevolent God, who so precisely tunes the amount of choice available to us all, giving us the best of all possible worlds.
October 4, 2017 at 11:32 pm
And what about all those people who lived before the invention of high-rise hotels and automatic weapons? How does God justify having deprived them of the choices he offered to Stephen Paddock?
Will phoodoo be protesting on their behalf, since choice is so important?
The whole “choice” defense is stupid.
October 6, 2017 at 7:00 am
More questions for proponents of the “choice” defense:
1. If choice is so important, why does God deprive children of a lifetime of future choices when he kills them with childhood cancer or in a natural disaster such as a tsunami?
2. How did God decide that six million Jews needed to die in the Holocaust? Wouldn’t, say, three million have been a sufficient amount of “choice” to grant to Hitler?
3. Why do leaders like Hitler get so much “choice” when the rest of us are so limited? Why did Stephen Paddock get the short end of the stick? He clearly wanted to kill more, but God deprived him of that choice.
Mung,
Yes.
phoodoo,
Timothy’s question awaits you:
Why would you hesitate to answer “no” to that question?
Readers, ponder the fact that phoodoo is actually afraid of that question, and consider what that says about his God. Phoodoo knows that if he answers “no”, as any decent, loving parent would, that he makes his God look pitiful by comparison.
So he dodges the question.
Why worship a God of whom you are so deeply ashamed, phoodoo?
Just confirming I am still here, Phoodoo, and still waiting for you to answer my question. Does’t it feel a bit odd to go on ignoring such a simple question as if no one notices?
Sal,
Therefore God is an asshole who refused to forgive people unless Jesus was tortured to death, and even then refused to forgive the ones who didn’t suck up to him?
This is all about glory?
I asked Vincent a question similar to Timothy’s:
Those 2 statements do not appear to be logically compatible. Unless each of Adam and Eve’s descendants goes to the Garden to eat of the tree personally, then their toil and labor-pains are accrued based upon the actions of their first parents. And given the cherubim and flaming sword guarding the gate, the former seems unlikely.
Christians (generally speaking) believe that the Old and New Testaments represent a single body of revealed knowledge. I’m confused by your emphasis on parsing the two sections out in this regard. And you seem to be suggesting a third destination for eternity. I’m no scholar on the book of Revelations, but I’m only familiar with 2 of them.
Timothy,
Perhaps God did move the children out of the school. In fact he did it 1 million times. But the one million and one time people put kids in a building they knew would collapse he didn’t.
So your question seems to defy an understanding of choice. If your idea of choice is like Rumraket and keiths, that not a single bad thing can ever happen to you, then you are now asking God to do something that is impossible. That is to have both good and bad, without the bad. A logical impossibility.
So again, like Keiths and now Rumraket, if you think God should just make infinite souls, experiencing infinite pleasure for infinity, then that is not a world with choice, it is not a world with bravery and striving, and good deeds, and caring for others, and relationships, and greatness. You just want selfish orgasms all day long. Well, maybe heaven is like that, who knows, but in a world with mortality, and choice and consequences, that is not a possibility.
And thus, maybe the whole story of Adam and Eve is an explanation for that conundrum. I am not a bible literalist, but the story of Adam and Eve is about choice. If you have choice, you have good and bad consequences. If you only had good consequences, then there is never a reason to make a choice. Because even not choosing is good.
So sorry to tell you, even God can not make logical impossibilities. He can not save all children, from all death, for infinity, and still have a world of choice, and motivation, and heroism. It can’t be done.
This concept is above the heads of people like Rumraket and keiths. Perhaps, you could grasp it.
phoodoo,
What are you babbling about? The school, in Timothy’s scenario, doesn’t collapse one million times. It collapses once, and you know, ahead of time, exactly when that is going to happen.
Any decent, loving parent would make sure his or her kids were not in the school that day, and they would warn everyone else as well. Your God says “Fuck it. Who cares?” and lets the school collapse on the kids.
The conclusion, for any thinking person, is that your God (if he exists at all) doesn’t love those children (or their soon-to-be-bereaved parents and relatives.) He does nothing to warn them or to prevent the collapse. He stands by, simply watching, as the school collapses (right on schedule) onto the helpless kids, who had no idea this was coming.
Can you imagine if the principal of the school did that, despite knowing in advance that it was going to happen? He’d be crucified by an enraged community. Yet when your God does the same thing, you make excuses for him. How pitiful is it that instead of being able to point to your God with pride, you have to make excuses for why he doesn’t live up to even a minimal standard of decency?
You are fighting against an obvious truth, phoodoo, and it makes for a pathetic spectacle.
i said if you read the bible carefully. It can be seen god never said he did anything to anyone. However much he took responsibility for satans actions.
by allowing it.
The biblical flood is case in point.
I think the bible says sAtan destroyed land and life even while god said, HE, repeat, HE brought the flood.
Yet not actually him.
Byers:
Where does it say that? Quote a passage, please.
So you think God is a liar?
Robert,
For the record, regarding this passage:
You think God lied about what he would do. Correct?
And regarding this:
You also think God was lying to Noah there, correct?
And here:
Another lie from God?
And here:
And:
God is quite the liar, according to you, isn’t he?
keiths,
Perhaps Timothy has the capacity to grasp it. We will see.
We all get it, phoodoo. Timothy and I get it — that’s why we’ve been pushing you to answer Timothy’s question. You get it too — that’s why you’ve been running away from his question for an entire month.
Your God — if he exists at all — is far less loving than a typical parent, who actually cares enough to protect his or her children from harm.
Vincent’s claim is ridiculous:
Anyone can imagine a love greater than that of a callous God who does nothing to protect children from being drowned in a tsunami or crushed under the rubble of a school building.
keiths,
Whip cream orgasms huh keiths? That’s your solution.
keiths:
Vincent:
Don’t fall into the “no true Scotsman” trap, Vincent. You may not believe that Adam and Eve’s rebellion doomed humanity to damnation, but other Christians do and did, including:
Augustine:
The Council of Florence:
The Lutherans who wrote the Augsburg Confession:
I was taught the same thing by my own pastor.
Will you argue that none of them qualify as Christians? That Augustine wasn’t a Christian? Or that what he and they believed was “a travesty of Christianity”?
Come on, Vincent.
I’m glad that you reject some of the seamier aspects of Christian belief, but don’t pull the “No true Christian” bit on us.
phoodoo,
When you sink to the level of comparing the rescue of children from disaster to “whip cream orgasms”, you know you’ve hit rock bottom.