Could A Good God Permit So Much Suffering?

Cypress said:
Understood.

I am not rendering a judgment on whether the Bible is true or not.

I'm rendering a judgment on whether the God of the Christian faith, the God believed in by Christians, is supposed to have the capability of suspend the laws of nature and the laws of logic. I'm checking my beliefs at the door, and rendering judgment on a God conceived of by Christians.
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Paradox. irrational. You cannot call the Bible False and True at the same time.
 
Cypress said:
I believe the authors of the Bible used a variety of literary techniques, including hyperbole, poetry, metaphor, parable, allegory, and historical testimony. There is no analytical history or true biography in it, because those genres of writing did not exist yet in the Near East.
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Yes they did, Sybil.
Cypress said:
The laws of physics explain very little.
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They explain a lot. You just want to ignore them.
Cypress said:
And I don't like saying that because I wish we could rely on science to explain everything.
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Science is not an explanation for everything. It never will be.
Cypress said:
Physics is a system of rules that make predictions of motion, energy exchange, and quantum field behavior.
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And you still ignore them.
Cypress said:
They don't explain why the laws of physics exist, why they take certain discrete mathematical properties,
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Science isn't mathematics, Sybil. It is obvious you don't even know what discrete mathematics even IS. It is not algebra.
Cypress said:
and they don't explain things like love, liberty, loyalty, friendship, freedom, beauty, or justice.
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Why would it, Sybil?? YOU don't explain them either.
 
Cypress said:
The test isn't whether you choose to cooperate and practice restraint with peers in a tribe, in a community, or in a pack for self preservation. That's self interest, that's not morality. Even lion prides, ant colonies, and monkey troops do that. Morality is not a synonym for self interest.


The test is what you do to strangers, to the weak, to the sick, the diseased, the disadvantaged, or even to rivals. The test is when your actions of cooperation and self preservation extend beyond the self interest of the tribe or pack.

It's obvious from human history that orphans, lepers, prisoners, strangers, widows, rivals were generally not recipients of cooperation and compassion. Orphans could be ritually sacrificed to pagan gods, the sick and weak were often abandoned or driven away, sharing and mercy for strangers and rivals tended to be the exception, not the rule. Might makes right is the moral code humans have a tendency to gravitate towards.
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Exactly my point. There's no such thing as a universal morality. Only survival.

Watch the videos of 1/6 and tell me how moral those assholes were. LOL Same goes for all the shit that went down in New Orleans after Katrina or that is going on in Haiti, Nigeria, Ukraine, Yemen, etc. The instances of "morality" often described seem to be social indoctrination not genetic programming from a moral Universe.

Agreed on history being a teacher of basic human nature. "Might makes right" is the law of the jungle. It's the way of life on Earth. Mankind has the capability of rising above that natural law, but the whole "civilization is a thin veneer" truism still holds.

"Overwhelmed by the disaster, people could not see what was to become of them and started losing respect for laws of god and man alike," Thucydides wrote.

Katherine Kelaidis, resident scholar at the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago, said, "The Greeks very much had this sense … that civilization is a very thin veneer and that under even slight amounts of pressure, that social contract starts to break down, and [when] people lose that veneer … that can be very dangerous."
 
鬼百合 said:

Could A Good God Permit So Much Suffering?​


The answer to this is that there is no god.
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Kindergarteners and other school kids claim adults are cruel for making them go to school. They only see the present, not the long term.

People who believe in an afterlife think more about the journey and the destination, not uncomfortable bumps along the way.
 
Cypress said:
Your free to believe a dead body that is resurrected does not defy any principles of chemistry and biology.

I always know I am on the right track when you show up to say I am wrong.
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Occam's Razor: He was in a coma, not dead. These people were not very sophisticated.

LOL. I really do love you Cypress. You're the most intelligent and educated person on this forum. When you get angry, it catches my attention. Intelligent people like you don't get angry without a reason.
 
martin said:
But the question assumes, at least hypothetically, a “good God”.
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God is God.

The dichotomy of the Universe is not about "is God good", but what choices we each make in our lives. We all fuck up, but do we try to learn? It's a choice.

I strongly believe that we exist to make those choices.
 
martin said:
Yeah, I did think about this before commenting. As for the Wiki piece I looked for their entry on the subject this morning. It's a tricky subject.
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Brilliant people like Augustine and Aquinas wrote about this topic, so it's obviously been discussed for almost two thousand years.
 
Dutch Uncle said:
Exactly my point. There's no such thing as a universal morality. Only survival.

Watch the videos of 1/6 and tell me how moral those assholes were. LOL Same goes for all the shit that went down in New Orleans after Katrina or that is going on in Haiti, Nigeria, Ukraine, Yemen, etc. The instances of "morality" often described seem to be social indoctrination not genetic programming from a moral Universe.

Agreed on history being a teacher of basic human nature. "Might makes right" is the law of the jungle. It's the way of life on Earth. Mankind has the capability of rising above that natural law, but the whole "civilization is a thin veneer" truism still holds.

"Overwhelmed by the disaster, people could not see what was to become of them and started losing respect for laws of god and man alike," Thucydides wrote.

Katherine Kelaidis, resident scholar at the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago, said, "The Greeks very much had this sense … that civilization is a very thin veneer and that under even slight amounts of pressure, that social contract starts to break down, and [when] people lose that veneer … that can be very dangerous."
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Hitler, Stalin, and the 9/11 conspiracy went to great lengths to conceal what they were doing because they knew they were violating universal norms. They also had to go out of their way to invent novel, flimsy, and illogical reasons to justify to themselves and to the world what they did.


Biological evolution encoded self interest and the law of the jungle in us.

To me, self interest is not morality.

I believe we also have higher rational facilities and a conscience that knows absolute right from absolute wrong independent of our biological needs of self interest and maintaining our genetic line. Or, at a minimum there is a conscience that can be appealed to and cultivated.
 
Dutch Uncle said:
Occam's Razor: He was in a coma, not dead. These people were not very sophisticated.

LOL. I really do love you Cypress. You're the most intelligent and educated person on this forum. When you get angry, it catches my attention. Intelligent people like you don't get angry without a reason.
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Thanks for chiming in on this thread. The apostles were highly skeptical about the resurrection at first. That's what makes the Gospels seem compelling in a way that pure mythology isn't.

Agreed. I've thought for several years that the resurrection might be explained by a near death experience Jesus had from the crucifixion.
 
Cypress said:
Thanks for chiming in on this thread. The apostles were highly skeptical about the resurrection at first. That's what makes the Gospels seem compelling in a way that pure mythology isn't.

Agreed. I've thought for several years that the resurrection might be explained by a near death experience Jesus had from the crucifixion.
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A near death experience is one thing, but being sick and in a coma is another.

Even as few as a couple hundred years ago caskets were built with a bell to alert others the person wasn't dead.
Of course, that was before embalming was popular. You know, to make sure they were dead. LOL


en.wikipedia.org

Safety coffin - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
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