Originally posted by Dr McBeefingtonThat's only because God is awesome for you. Epicurus was targeting (a) religious God(s), whose followers preached his/their divine goodness but he/they still allow evil to exist. Kinda makes God(s) look like (a) jackass(es).
No I understand it, it's just stupid. Like your mom
Theodicy FTW.
Consider the destruction that Hurricane Katrina leveled on New Orleans. More than a thousand people died, tens of thousands lost all their earthly possessions, and nearly a million were displaced. It is safe to say that almost every person living in New Orleans at the moment Katrina struck believed in an omnipotent, omniscient and compassionate God. But what was God doing while a hurricane laid waste to their city? Surely he heard the prayers of those elderly men and women who fled the rising waters for the safety of their attics, only to be slowly drowned there. These were people of faith. These were good men and women who had prayed throughout their lives. Only the atheist has the courage to admit the obvious: These poor people died talking to an imaginary friend.Of course, there had been ample warning that a storm of biblical proportions would strike New Orleans, and the human response to the ensuing disaster was tragically inept. But it was inept only by the light of science. Advance warning of Katrina’s path was wrested from mute Nature by meteorological calculations and satellite imagery. God told no one of his plans. Had the residents of New Orleans been content to rely on the beneficence of the Lord, they wouldn’t have known that a killer hurricane was bearing down upon them until they felt the first gusts of wind on their faces. Nevertheless, a poll conducted by The Washington Post found that 80% of Katrina’s survivors claim that the event has only strengthened their faith in God.
As Hurricane Katrina was devouring New Orleans, nearly a thousand Shiite pilgrims were trampled to death on a bridge in Iraq. There can be no doubt that these pilgrims believed mightily in the God of the Koran: Their lives were organized around the indisputable fact of his existence; their women walked veiled before him; their men regularly murdered one another over rival interpretations of his word. It would be remarkable if a single survivor of this tragedy lost his faith. More likely, the survivors imagine that they were spared through God’s grace.
Only the atheist recognizes the boundless narcissism and self-deceit of the saved. Only the atheist realizes how morally objectionable it is for survivors of a catastrophe to believe themselves spared by a loving God while this same God drowned infants in their cribs. Because he refuses to cloak the reality of the world’s suffering in a cloying fantasy of eternal life, the atheist feels in his bones just how precious life is—and, indeed, how unfortunate it is that millions of human beings suffer the most harrowing abridgements of their happiness for no good reason at all.
One wonders just how vast and gratuitous a catastrophe would have to be to shake the world’s faith. The Holocaust did not do it. Neither did the genocide in Rwanda, even with machete-wielding priests among the perpetrators. Five hundred million people died of smallpox in the 20th Century, many of them infants. God’s ways are, indeed, inscrutable. It seems that any fact, no matter how infelicitous, can be rendered compatible with religious faith. In matters of faith, we have kicked ourselves loose of the Earth.
Of course, people of faith regularly assure one another that God is not responsible for human suffering. But how else can we understand the claim that God is both omniscient and omnipotent? There is no other way, and it is time for sane human beings to own up to this. This is the age-old problem of theodicy, of course, and we should consider it solved. If God exists, either he can do nothing to stop the most egregious calamities or he does not care to. God, therefore, is either impotent or evil. Pious readers will now execute the following pirouette: God cannot be judged by merely human standards of morality. But, of course, human standards of morality are precisely what the faithful use to establish God’s goodness in the first place. And any God who could concern himself with something as trivial as gay marriage, or the name by which he is addressed in prayer, is not as inscrutable as all that. If he exists, the God of Abraham is not merely unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.
God bless Sam Harris.
Deism is an unnecessary compromise: "No, you are wrong about the attributes and qualities of a god because you have no proof but there is a god, even though you have no proof."
I strive for agnosticism (I wish that I was mature enough not to believe in entities that may not exist or disbelieve in entities that may exist) but usually end up with Atheism. Ardent rationalism, especially in the face of the ludicrous is a difficult obstacle to coexistence for me to overcome.
Ok, getting back to the MEANING of the thread, Vader DID bring balance to the force, as by the time of episode 4, there were 2 Sith Lords, and the Inquisitors were dark jedi, with the Shadowguards, and there were 2 Jedi Masters, with a handful of knights and some padawans, so the numbers were essentially equal, thereby balancing the "scales" of the users of each side of the force.
Originally posted by ~:Mr.Anderson:~
"true sith" are a race that revan set out to find at the end of kotor. As far as we know "sith" are extinct, and the race of "sith" is defenitely extinct. Its just a name given to dark jedi at this point. making the EU moneymilkers ****ing retards when it comes to story writing. seriously. STOP WRITING SHIT THAT COMES AFTER THE OT!
Ty.