Read it. Never found anything definitive in there to lead me to believe God exists. Just another book. Frankly they could have put a little more though into not making their God look like a hypocrite. I guess it was too difficultto that while still trying to scare people into obeying their God.
What if they live a normal good/bad life, never been baptized, never following the rules god put down? Theyve done nothing to merit hell and nothing to get them to heaven. Or a Hindu who has never heard about the teachings of Christianity but have lived a good life with no sin, they get to go to hell for not knowing, following, false worship etc?
When a small, harmless sin that wasnt repented is worse than a unforgivable sin as long as they ask for forgiveness and doesnt do it again. Not ashamed about swearing > mass murder then repenting in gods eyes?
Its not my view on punishment, its the sense that the slightest human leveled sin is worth a divine leveled punishment with no chance to repent or rehabilitation afterwards. How does the omnibenevolent one justify these views on punishment and excuse what he does to be fair?
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"Gonna need more chloroform..."
"If you look down on us, judge us, condemn us... then you shall fear us!"
If I choose to kill someone how is God at fault? And I never said God is not responsible for any pain or suffering. I said He is not responsible for any unnecessary pain and suffering. We are limited in our perception of things, but God sees the whole picture. He might need to allow some pain to reach something good.
God does not want anyone to go to hell. He even went to far as to send His own son to die so that people wouldn't have to. I would consider that merciful, certainly.
Like I said, if a person lives a good life without the possibility of knowing God then he should be fine. I can look for the verse if you don't believe me. However, worshiping a false god is not fine.
We might see sin as slight and harmless, but God does not. Sin is directly ignoring/ turning your back on what God has commanded. That's serious, regardless of how the action affects us humans.
how is it obvious to you? can you read his mind? seems like you cant answer his query so you have to resort to being arrogant and calling it wrong in such a way that only people like you can OBVIOUSLY see whats wrong with it but not simply explain to other lesser mortals WHAT it is thats wrong wiht it.
He's not responsible for ANY of the twenty deaths by hunger per minute? I kinda hold myself responsible, and that's even without a god's power to halt it. But I guess I don't share God's ability to shift responsibility away from myself.
You realize you're asking me to hook my conscience up to the matrix, right?
The natural man sins. So God designed people to sin.
He was making up for how he'd designed people to sin. He designed us to sin and he designed hell, which is sadistic to start with. Then he designed the repentance process to involve sacrifice of the innocent. I don't need you to agree with me that it's necessarily sadistic, but you surely don't think it's merciful, right?
No, He design me to have free will, which I used to kill someone.
Again, I said no unnecessary suffering. If you want to say God is allowing pain for no other reason than He enjoys making people suffer, you have to provided a reason to think so. It's possible God allows pain so that some good may come of it.
What?
God designed people to have free will. Unfortunately, this demands the possibility to perform evil.
Free will demands that people have the potential to sin. I think we should stop trying to blame god for OUR sins. Wasn't it you who said that God possessed the ability to shift blame onto others? Isn't that what you are doing right now?
Yet you say he's still torturing people forever over minor infractions. If you say something mean to me, pretend I don't exist or something, I'll maybe be rude and eventually forget about it. God will tear your skin off and let maggots fester in your brain for a million years until he comes up with something worse.
Now, I don't want to yell at you and God doesn't want to subject you to horrific torture but I'm obviously the more merciful person. And if someone is more merciful than God he is, by definition, not as merciful as possible.
If you can't understand that there's no point in continuing this conversation.
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Graffiti outside Latin class.
Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
A juvenal prank.
I had a friend who got addicted to drugs and ended up stealing a bunch of money from me.
It really upset me, to the point where I wanted to punch his face in. There is no doubt I could have, and I had ample opportunity. However, after listening to Desmond Tutu talk about forgiveness, I realized how petty it was to want to see him punished, especially given the situation he was in.
By sending people to hell, God is less merciful than I was in that situation. In fact, retributive justice and mercy are essentially mutually exclusive. By deciding that you are going to punish over forgiveness, you are by literal semantic definition, deciding that you aren't being as merciful as you could be.
oh, and to add to how merciful I am, he never had to ask forgiveness. For God to be more merciful than is possible, he has to be more merciful than I was in that situation.
sure, but it is a great point against his benevolence
also, isn't forgiveness seen as a strength in Christianity? I remember a certain carpenter who saw it as important, you know, so important that he forgave the person he knew would turn him in?
Yes, but God is omnipotent and would know well in advance that you were going to murder someone and let you do it anyways. Effectively condemning you to Hell. Unless of course He/She is not all powerful and all knowing. It's not really free will if it is already known what you are going to do. It almost seems sadistic.
Why not blame Him if you do actually believe in God. Didn't you say yourself that God said we were all sinners anyways. In that case, it is in our nature, which would be His fault.
But he isn't forced to subject people to horrific, endless torture as that punishment. A just leader, especially one who is merciful, lets the punishment fit the crime. God only hands out torture to the sinful. Murderers and people who are rude to their parents both get the same infinitely horrible punishment.
A judge who sent people to be flayed alive because they didn't pay parking tickets is neither merciful (because of the nature of the punishment) nor just (because of the excess of the punishment). The same standard applies to god.
To lighten the mood a bit:
Yes, I'm very very white.
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Graffiti outside Latin class.
Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
A juvenal prank.
Last edited by Symmetric Chaos on Aug 19th, 2011 at 05:50 AM
But allowing someone to get away with sinning is not justice. He has to punish them. God is merciful, but He is all just first. He cannot do something unjust. Letting someone get away with sin is unjust.
The Bible never says that God is "all merciful" to the point of turning a blind eye to injustice and completely disregarding the "all just" part of His nature.
1.) Interfering with people's choices would be interfering with their free will. God would never do that.
2.) It is still free will if someone knows what choice you will make. The simple fact that they know you are going to freely choose something does not suddenly mean it isn't free any more. If I know my friend well enough to know for certain what movie he will pick out at the store, that does not mean he didn't freely choose that movie.
He gave us free will. That means we must have the potential to sin. But free will out-ways the bad of potential evil. It's still OUR choice to sin. God certainly doesn't tell us to.
That's the thing. You think the punishment is unjust. God disagrees. I'm more inclined to believe an all just beings thoughts on justice than I am a humans.
In the end, you would have to prove that these punishments are unjust. But the only defense you can really bring is "I find them unjust, thus they must be." Which isn't valid.
I don't know about that. I think sending a son to die so that all the people who cursed Him, beat Him, and spit on Him could be forgiven of their sins, as well as the sins of everyone else who would be born is far more merciful that we could ever hope to be.
God forgives any sin, no matter how bad. All you have to do is ask.
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Aug 13th, 2011 08:09 AM
