Oh, itās just what Iāve noticed in myself, and others when I ask them what they believe in and the convo goes from there.
It seems that in the end itās one of two thingsā¦ Thereās whatās known as the Epicurean paradox or the problem of evil, where the confusion arises from many sources: forgetting about the existence of free will and the causal chain of events, semantic nonsense or even simple immaturity. This is the one thatās just all fluff, all wind, but words can kick oneās ass, especially if you live more in words than in reality.
And then thereās the one that I respect a little bit more: while the beginning of the causal chain that we can conceive (so, embedded in/attached to space and time) is evidently not a source of it, but also since things exist today we canāt deny the āproto-thingā existed then I can somewhat accept you telling me that this essence we call matter and energy was always there and God is not necessary and etc etc. God has been understood for millennia as the āprime engineā and unmoved mover, behind the universe and before it, the One that ācomes from nothingā that we have to accept because nothing comes from nothing and things exist. But many folk just skip that part and say āthings exist, thatās all I can see and thatās all I will believe inā. Thatās fair, but I better not see you making any logical inferences then, lol.
Those two arguments are very biased. The first one is only a problem in Christianity, and like you said itās a silly argument, God can be malicious and that solves that issue.
The second one is a bit trickier, because youāre making the same mistake you accuse others of making. There are two possibilities, either something can come from nothing, or it canāt. If stuff can come from nothing God is not needed to create the Universe (and while physics have been able to prove this, letās look at the other possibility just in case). On the other hand if stuff canāt come from nothing then stuff must have always existed, otherwise you will get the problem of where the stuff that did that came from, and that applies to God too, so of you can ask āwhere did the Big Bang came from if there was nothingā you can also ask āwhere did God came from if there was nothingā, so in this scenario you also donāt need God, because if it can come from nothing then other stuff can also come from nothing so weāre in the other scenario.
Also those are two of the weakest arguments against God, and they specifically go after the Christian God of the gaps. Better arguments against the existence of God are usually about pointing at contradictions in the definition, similarly to how you said nothing can come from nothing but made an exception for God, another example is omniscience vs free will (if someone knows what you will do then youāre not free to do different), or omnipotence in itself (can God microwave a burrito so hot that even he canāt eat it?), and if weāre talking about the specific Christian deity the fact that he needs an innocent blood sacrifice to forgive people should be a clear indicator of the type of being youāre dealing with, and itās not an all loving entity.
Eventually youāll reach a stopping point. The believers go a step behind the nonbelievers, a step into the unseen, thatās all. Up until the beginning of the universe weāre all in agreement because things exist, lol. And thereās no contradiction in the definitions Iām using, thatās just semantics and often due to the Frankenstein monster of inconsistencies thatās Roman Catholicism and everything that came from it. You have to think about it without labels, the way the Greek philosophers did, and assume corruption in much of the remaining scriptures. And blood sacrifices? Are you referring to Abraham? God doesnāt require blood, just faith and acts, weāre not Aztecs! But if you believe in the unseen and in a judgment post death, you believe in life after death, and if you do and God Himself asks you to sacrifice your child, is it even a negative or are you, with 100% certainty, sending your kid to Heaven? Not that itās an easy pill to swallow, thereās a reason Abrahamās name is known today, but thatās not because BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD, but it fits as an acknowledgement of our ephemeral nature and āmeaningless existenceā and a test of faith (everyone dies in the end tooā¦).
If you ever wanna talk about it in earnest, Iām up for a call. These convos are not very productive in this format, lol.
Yup, eventually believers reach the same stopping point but instead of saying āI donāt knowā they go āGod did itā, until science explains how that happened, so believers go to the next thing and say āwell I donāt know how this happened, therefore Godā. That is called āthe God of the gapsā and itās a terrible argument, itās okay to admit we donāt know something.
And no, Iām not talking about Abraham, Iām talking about Jesus, the whole reason why Jesus is crucified is so that his blood can clean the sin of mankind. The basics of Christianism are the following tenets:
God canāt (or doesnāt want to) coexist with Sin
God requires blood sacrifices, usually animals, to purify Sin
God offered a loophole, by sacrificing an innocent person anyone can point at that sacrifice and say āIām using this sacrifice to purify my sinsā.
Because there are no Sinless humans he had to come down in human form to sacrifice himself so that he could charge the innocent blood price for the Sins of mankind
Otherwise why would God need to offer himself as sacrifice to purify sins? Couldnāt he just say āall sins are goneā? However you look at it he asks for a blood sacrifice, however he allows you to cash in his own blood sacrifice in its place, and if you donāt he sends you to Hell, very loving fellow.
I understand the concept of the āGod of the gapsā but this is not about that. Our origins before the start of the universe is not something we can ever study or know anything about! Of course itās a āgap in our knowledgeā, but itās a fundamental one, not one that can ever be filled. You make a decision to be on one of two camps: āthings existā or āthings exist, and that implies a Creatorā. Thatās all. And like I said, I donāt think thereās a āfinal irrefutable argumentā after that to make anyone believe in the Creator. Itās just a personal decision.
And I donāt believe in Christianity, itās a mixture of European paganism (including the winterās solstice now called Christmas) and some Abrahamic/Mosaic superficial aspects and tenets besides the most important one: donāt equate anything/one to God. God is no man. I mean, if youāve read the Bible (heavily ācorruptedā, but the whole Roman Catholic religion was based in corruption and the co opting of a āJewishā religion movement), youāll see that Jesus doesnāt even want you to call him āgoodā (let alone God!), telling us that āonly the Father is goodā. Disregard everything you know about God that comes from whatever Western understanding you have of Him. Disregard anything Paulian (the actual founding figure of Christianity, and to a great extent why itās a fucked up thing). If youāre really interested: read Ecclesiastes, read at least the Sermon of the Mount, read the Qurāan and make your own conclusions. The wise and inspired said all the same things in the end (āfear God and keep His commandmentsā, āLove your enemies. Bless those who curse you. Do good to those who hate you. And pray for those who hurt you and persecute you, so that you may be the children of your Father, Who is in Heaven.āā¦) just with different accents. Nothing thatās nonsensical belongs to Godās system nor are they words inspired by Him!
It seems that in the end itās one of two thingsā¦ Thereās whatās known as the Epicurean paradox or the problem of evil, where the confusion arises from many sources: forgetting about the existence of free will and the causal chain of events, semantic nonsense or even simple immaturity. This is the one thatās just all fluff, all wind, but words can kick oneās ass, especially if you live more in words than in reality.
I am assuming we are speaking about the Christian God in this context.
God is all knowing, and omnipresent. This means that God knows in advance the result of itās own decisions.
If God granted free will to humans knowing that humans would commit horrible acts with it against each other, how can that God be considered benevolent?
And then thereās the one that I respect a little bit more: while the beginning of the causal chain that we can conceive (so, embedded in/attached to space and time) is evidently not a source of it, but also since things exist today we canāt deny the āproto-thingā existed then I can somewhat accept you telling me that this essence we call matter and energy was always there and God is not necessary and etc etc. God has been understood for millennia as the āprime engineā and unmoved mover, behind the universe and before it, the One that ācomes from nothingā that we have to accept because nothing comes from nothing and things exist. But many folk just skip that part and say āthings exist, thatās all I can see and thatās all I will believe inā. Thatās fair, but I better not see you making any logical inferences then, lol.
The question remains both Theologically and Scientifically unanswered: If ānothingā can come from ānothingā, where did the āthingā that created āeverythingā come from?
If we accept the Big Bang or Creationism as two theories explaining the same event from a different point of view, what was existence prior to that? Did God simply exist in infinite nothingness up until the point of creation? Wouldnāt the existence of God contradict ānothingnessā simply by existing?
The mystery is why He created anything at all, sure, but our existence and everything that surrounds us is a net positive, a free gift that we can always opt out of if we truly wish and bring it back to the zero that nonbelievers believe in. Nothingness is just a rope away after all, right? Every truly happy person out there, believer or not, sees it as the gift it is. God didnāt have to make anything, yet He did, and my life despite its hardships, created by other people, has been a very enjoyable experience. Now, the promise of God (yes, weāre talking about Abrahamic tenets here) is that of eternal life as long as you keep Him in mind and act right (pretty small price for some, seemingly impossible for others). In that context, sure, God is inherently, supremely benevolent (first you get a life for free that can honestly be great and you can always opt out ofā¦ although you can also suffer and 99% of it will be due to someone else, of course; but then you get another one that depends entirely on your own deeds and nothing else). But even without it, how could I reasonably blame God for other peopleās amorality when, as a moral person or at least one who tries to be one, I understand itās not that difficult not to cross some major lines? Thatās itās entirely in their hands and they just decided they didnāt give a fuck? Thatās the immaturity Iām talking about. You might as well complain to your parents that they brought you into the world, lol, right? Thereās no cause and effect chain here between my childhood bully, his abuse and Godās will, thereās just one between (for instance) his childhood trauma, lack of information on his situation, lack of self control, lack of reflection and, finally but perhaps more importantly, lack of empathy and āhumanityā. Itās not āunfairā that God endowed us with free will, itās just the way He wanted us to be, for whatever reasons He had, and whether we like it or not (another function of free will, lol) itās what weāre left with. And the world could be close to utopia if dads raised their kids, husbands didnāt beat their wives, Casey Anthony didnāt murder her daughter, of course! All we can do is invite people into morality and then reprimand/banish/incarcerate them if they poop on the invitation.
For the second part: youāre thinking of God as a thing. Or even worse, as a man, maybe (Christians do this, probably due to their creedās Roman origins, lol). God is not here, God is outside. The Creator cannot be constrained in its creation! It would mean that the creation came before the Creator, lol, which is obvious nonsense. And so this creation is at least a level beneath Him, and in the same way that Stan Lee is not carbon on paper and text bubbles, God is not matter nor energy. I can tell you that much with logical certainty. Whether you wanna stop at āthings exist, at times in shocking order, and compose a chain of cause and effect that takes us to the beginning of time and space, and thatās all I can say with any degree of material certaintyā, or follow up it up with āand I believe that, because of this complex existence, a āhigher level entityā with more complexity than existence itself made it and sustains itā, is up to you. I havenāt really found any connecting arguments or whatever, which is why I respect an agnostic position if you reach this conclusion, but maybe there are not and they are not necessary (belief can only happen in the absence of material information, after all [Jesusā ābelief in the unseenā]). Also, thereās only so many things you can communicate through words!
I rarely get into these sorts of debaters because theyāre almost always pointless, however a few of the things you said made me want to answer this.
Youāre completely missing the point for the first argument, people canāt choose to fly or kill each other by staring, so if humans were created by God then any flaws in humanity, including but not limited to ability to suffer and cause suffering, is part of Godās design that he could have removed. In other words, if God gave people the option to cause harm knowing they would (omniscience, remember) then heās directly responsible for everything bad that happens, itās like a father that gives a sharp knife to a kid and tells him to go run and play with his friends. God could have prevented suffering to begin with, therefore the fact that it exists proves that suffering is part of his plan. If thatās the case then yes, you being bullied and your bully being in an abusive home is all done by design, which is very twisted if you think about it.
As for the second argument you admit that things exist outside our universe that can affect it, if thatās the case you donāt need God to create the Universe, we could be the result of a collision between two extra dimensional rocks. And thatās sort of the point of that argument, i.e. that you donāt need God to explain the beginning of the Universe because whatever question you have about the origin of the Universe can also be directed at God (e.g. and what caused that) and whatever answer you give using God can also be used for a non-God answer (e.g. extra dimensional causes)
Extra dimensional causes for creation, sustainability and order? Yeah, thatās what we call God, lol. And it has to be One, for actual reasons (read Ibn Arabi).
And I know God couldāve made the human equivalent of calculators, but he didnāt want to. Thereās no other way to āmake people that cause no harmā. I mean, many of my sad memories involve only words, should God have made people mute? You can forget the hands too, lol. He wanted intelligent beings with freedom. He made a sandbox and put us in it. Everything youāre talking about is nothing but the product of human ingenuity (and even before knives we were using sticks and stones), and all the evil youāve been subjected to is the product of the misuse of human freedom. We wouldnāt even be able to reflect on things like we are right now if it werenāt for it! You want a world in which PEOPLE are not people, and are disappointed in God, instead of being happy of being alive for free (and I assume youāre enjoying it because youāre an adult arguing online, not the e-ghost of a man who roped some years ago) and being disappointed in people misusing their freedom (if youāre a correct person as I hope you are you see how easy it is not to be blight on the world). Itās immature and the product of a misunderstanding of reality. And I didnāt have a bully, I was the ābullyā! But I wanted to make it ārelatableā. And yes, you can 100% act right after a very difficult childhood. Knowing this is how I know the people who in their adulthood are still misbehaving are simply being willingly lazy and dgaf and/or hiding their heads in the sand in cowardiceā¦
Nope, just extra dimensional cause for creation, no higher purpose required, for all we know whenever two rocks collide in that scenario they create a universe.
Also no, youāre completely missing the point, if God is omnipotent he could have made humans to never suffer and still be free, in theory most Christians believe that Heaven is free of suffering, do you cease being yourself when you go to heaven then? Just because you or I canāt imagine a world where humans are free but canāt hurt one another doesnāt mean thatās beyond the realm of possibilities, and if your counter argument will be that then we wouldnāt really be free, I tell you that humans canāt explode someone by looking at them, so he already imposed some limitations on the amount of harm we could cause to each other, yet you donāt see this as less freedom because you just accepted thatās the natural state, I propose there could be a natural state where humans canāt cause harm to each other and are still free.
No, youāre picturing impossibilities because not every thought is rational, thinking they could become realities and being disappointed about it and finally blaming God for it. āIf God were truly omnipotent heād make 1=0 and Aā A!ā. And perhaps only those who were tested and showed, at least by the end of their days, that they were people who refused and would never cross (again?) major moral lines are accepted in a place with no lackings and no stress, which means Heaven can actually be entirely utopic. And if humans had lasers coming from their eyes from birth then we wouldnāt have made it past our first cave and God wouldāve just had to make humans like us so we could actually develop a little bit, lol. Thank God he didnāt make us with lazerssss! š Or claws or fangs, for that matter. At least we developed/were given moral codes that we can easily understand and willingly follow early enough in our civilizational development, cause we were dangerous and impulsive enough without them and now we have nukesā¦ But of course He didnāt, cause we might be stupid AF at times but Heās on the opposite end, in a category of His own.
What are the āTwo fundamental arguments for not believing in Godā?
I havenāt heard the idea that there are only two fundamental theories.
Oh, itās just what Iāve noticed in myself, and others when I ask them what they believe in and the convo goes from there.
It seems that in the end itās one of two thingsā¦ Thereās whatās known as the Epicurean paradox or the problem of evil, where the confusion arises from many sources: forgetting about the existence of free will and the causal chain of events, semantic nonsense or even simple immaturity. This is the one thatās just all fluff, all wind, but words can kick oneās ass, especially if you live more in words than in reality.
And then thereās the one that I respect a little bit more: while the beginning of the causal chain that we can conceive (so, embedded in/attached to space and time) is evidently not a source of it, but also since things exist today we canāt deny the āproto-thingā existed then I can somewhat accept you telling me that this essence we call matter and energy was always there and God is not necessary and etc etc. God has been understood for millennia as the āprime engineā and unmoved mover, behind the universe and before it, the One that ācomes from nothingā that we have to accept because nothing comes from nothing and things exist. But many folk just skip that part and say āthings exist, thatās all I can see and thatās all I will believe inā. Thatās fair, but I better not see you making any logical inferences then, lol.
Those two arguments are very biased. The first one is only a problem in Christianity, and like you said itās a silly argument, God can be malicious and that solves that issue.
The second one is a bit trickier, because youāre making the same mistake you accuse others of making. There are two possibilities, either something can come from nothing, or it canāt. If stuff can come from nothing God is not needed to create the Universe (and while physics have been able to prove this, letās look at the other possibility just in case). On the other hand if stuff canāt come from nothing then stuff must have always existed, otherwise you will get the problem of where the stuff that did that came from, and that applies to God too, so of you can ask āwhere did the Big Bang came from if there was nothingā you can also ask āwhere did God came from if there was nothingā, so in this scenario you also donāt need God, because if it can come from nothing then other stuff can also come from nothing so weāre in the other scenario.
Also those are two of the weakest arguments against God, and they specifically go after the Christian God of the gaps. Better arguments against the existence of God are usually about pointing at contradictions in the definition, similarly to how you said nothing can come from nothing but made an exception for God, another example is omniscience vs free will (if someone knows what you will do then youāre not free to do different), or omnipotence in itself (can God microwave a burrito so hot that even he canāt eat it?), and if weāre talking about the specific Christian deity the fact that he needs an innocent blood sacrifice to forgive people should be a clear indicator of the type of being youāre dealing with, and itās not an all loving entity.
Eventually youāll reach a stopping point. The believers go a step behind the nonbelievers, a step into the unseen, thatās all. Up until the beginning of the universe weāre all in agreement because things exist, lol. And thereās no contradiction in the definitions Iām using, thatās just semantics and often due to the Frankenstein monster of inconsistencies thatās Roman Catholicism and everything that came from it. You have to think about it without labels, the way the Greek philosophers did, and assume corruption in much of the remaining scriptures. And blood sacrifices? Are you referring to Abraham? God doesnāt require blood, just faith and acts, weāre not Aztecs! But if you believe in the unseen and in a judgment post death, you believe in life after death, and if you do and God Himself asks you to sacrifice your child, is it even a negative or are you, with 100% certainty, sending your kid to Heaven? Not that itās an easy pill to swallow, thereās a reason Abrahamās name is known today, but thatās not because BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD, but it fits as an acknowledgement of our ephemeral nature and āmeaningless existenceā and a test of faith (everyone dies in the end tooā¦).
If you ever wanna talk about it in earnest, Iām up for a call. These convos are not very productive in this format, lol.
Yup, eventually believers reach the same stopping point but instead of saying āI donāt knowā they go āGod did itā, until science explains how that happened, so believers go to the next thing and say āwell I donāt know how this happened, therefore Godā. That is called āthe God of the gapsā and itās a terrible argument, itās okay to admit we donāt know something.
And no, Iām not talking about Abraham, Iām talking about Jesus, the whole reason why Jesus is crucified is so that his blood can clean the sin of mankind. The basics of Christianism are the following tenets:
Otherwise why would God need to offer himself as sacrifice to purify sins? Couldnāt he just say āall sins are goneā? However you look at it he asks for a blood sacrifice, however he allows you to cash in his own blood sacrifice in its place, and if you donāt he sends you to Hell, very loving fellow.
I understand the concept of the āGod of the gapsā but this is not about that. Our origins before the start of the universe is not something we can ever study or know anything about! Of course itās a āgap in our knowledgeā, but itās a fundamental one, not one that can ever be filled. You make a decision to be on one of two camps: āthings existā or āthings exist, and that implies a Creatorā. Thatās all. And like I said, I donāt think thereās a āfinal irrefutable argumentā after that to make anyone believe in the Creator. Itās just a personal decision.
And I donāt believe in Christianity, itās a mixture of European paganism (including the winterās solstice now called Christmas) and some Abrahamic/Mosaic superficial aspects and tenets besides the most important one: donāt equate anything/one to God. God is no man. I mean, if youāve read the Bible (heavily ācorruptedā, but the whole Roman Catholic religion was based in corruption and the co opting of a āJewishā religion movement), youāll see that Jesus doesnāt even want you to call him āgoodā (let alone God!), telling us that āonly the Father is goodā. Disregard everything you know about God that comes from whatever Western understanding you have of Him. Disregard anything Paulian (the actual founding figure of Christianity, and to a great extent why itās a fucked up thing). If youāre really interested: read Ecclesiastes, read at least the Sermon of the Mount, read the Qurāan and make your own conclusions. The wise and inspired said all the same things in the end (āfear God and keep His commandmentsā, āLove your enemies. Bless those who curse you. Do good to those who hate you. And pray for those who hurt you and persecute you, so that you may be the children of your Father, Who is in Heaven.āā¦) just with different accents. Nothing thatās nonsensical belongs to Godās system nor are they words inspired by Him!
I am assuming we are speaking about the Christian God in this context.
God is all knowing, and omnipresent. This means that God knows in advance the result of itās own decisions.
If God granted free will to humans knowing that humans would commit horrible acts with it against each other, how can that God be considered benevolent?
The question remains both Theologically and Scientifically unanswered: If ānothingā can come from ānothingā, where did the āthingā that created āeverythingā come from?
If we accept the Big Bang or Creationism as two theories explaining the same event from a different point of view, what was existence prior to that? Did God simply exist in infinite nothingness up until the point of creation? Wouldnāt the existence of God contradict ānothingnessā simply by existing?
The mystery is why He created anything at all, sure, but our existence and everything that surrounds us is a net positive, a free gift that we can always opt out of if we truly wish and bring it back to the zero that nonbelievers believe in. Nothingness is just a rope away after all, right? Every truly happy person out there, believer or not, sees it as the gift it is. God didnāt have to make anything, yet He did, and my life despite its hardships, created by other people, has been a very enjoyable experience. Now, the promise of God (yes, weāre talking about Abrahamic tenets here) is that of eternal life as long as you keep Him in mind and act right (pretty small price for some, seemingly impossible for others). In that context, sure, God is inherently, supremely benevolent (first you get a life for free that can honestly be great and you can always opt out ofā¦ although you can also suffer and 99% of it will be due to someone else, of course; but then you get another one that depends entirely on your own deeds and nothing else). But even without it, how could I reasonably blame God for other peopleās amorality when, as a moral person or at least one who tries to be one, I understand itās not that difficult not to cross some major lines? Thatās itās entirely in their hands and they just decided they didnāt give a fuck? Thatās the immaturity Iām talking about. You might as well complain to your parents that they brought you into the world, lol, right? Thereās no cause and effect chain here between my childhood bully, his abuse and Godās will, thereās just one between (for instance) his childhood trauma, lack of information on his situation, lack of self control, lack of reflection and, finally but perhaps more importantly, lack of empathy and āhumanityā. Itās not āunfairā that God endowed us with free will, itās just the way He wanted us to be, for whatever reasons He had, and whether we like it or not (another function of free will, lol) itās what weāre left with. And the world could be close to utopia if dads raised their kids, husbands didnāt beat their wives, Casey Anthony didnāt murder her daughter, of course! All we can do is invite people into morality and then reprimand/banish/incarcerate them if they poop on the invitation.
For the second part: youāre thinking of God as a thing. Or even worse, as a man, maybe (Christians do this, probably due to their creedās Roman origins, lol). God is not here, God is outside. The Creator cannot be constrained in its creation! It would mean that the creation came before the Creator, lol, which is obvious nonsense. And so this creation is at least a level beneath Him, and in the same way that Stan Lee is not carbon on paper and text bubbles, God is not matter nor energy. I can tell you that much with logical certainty. Whether you wanna stop at āthings exist, at times in shocking order, and compose a chain of cause and effect that takes us to the beginning of time and space, and thatās all I can say with any degree of material certaintyā, or follow up it up with āand I believe that, because of this complex existence, a āhigher level entityā with more complexity than existence itself made it and sustains itā, is up to you. I havenāt really found any connecting arguments or whatever, which is why I respect an agnostic position if you reach this conclusion, but maybe there are not and they are not necessary (belief can only happen in the absence of material information, after all [Jesusā ābelief in the unseenā]). Also, thereās only so many things you can communicate through words!
I rarely get into these sorts of debaters because theyāre almost always pointless, however a few of the things you said made me want to answer this.
Youāre completely missing the point for the first argument, people canāt choose to fly or kill each other by staring, so if humans were created by God then any flaws in humanity, including but not limited to ability to suffer and cause suffering, is part of Godās design that he could have removed. In other words, if God gave people the option to cause harm knowing they would (omniscience, remember) then heās directly responsible for everything bad that happens, itās like a father that gives a sharp knife to a kid and tells him to go run and play with his friends. God could have prevented suffering to begin with, therefore the fact that it exists proves that suffering is part of his plan. If thatās the case then yes, you being bullied and your bully being in an abusive home is all done by design, which is very twisted if you think about it.
As for the second argument you admit that things exist outside our universe that can affect it, if thatās the case you donāt need God to create the Universe, we could be the result of a collision between two extra dimensional rocks. And thatās sort of the point of that argument, i.e. that you donāt need God to explain the beginning of the Universe because whatever question you have about the origin of the Universe can also be directed at God (e.g. and what caused that) and whatever answer you give using God can also be used for a non-God answer (e.g. extra dimensional causes)
Extra dimensional causes for creation, sustainability and order? Yeah, thatās what we call God, lol. And it has to be One, for actual reasons (read Ibn Arabi).
And I know God couldāve made the human equivalent of calculators, but he didnāt want to. Thereās no other way to āmake people that cause no harmā. I mean, many of my sad memories involve only words, should God have made people mute? You can forget the hands too, lol. He wanted intelligent beings with freedom. He made a sandbox and put us in it. Everything youāre talking about is nothing but the product of human ingenuity (and even before knives we were using sticks and stones), and all the evil youāve been subjected to is the product of the misuse of human freedom. We wouldnāt even be able to reflect on things like we are right now if it werenāt for it! You want a world in which PEOPLE are not people, and are disappointed in God, instead of being happy of being alive for free (and I assume youāre enjoying it because youāre an adult arguing online, not the e-ghost of a man who roped some years ago) and being disappointed in people misusing their freedom (if youāre a correct person as I hope you are you see how easy it is not to be blight on the world). Itās immature and the product of a misunderstanding of reality. And I didnāt have a bully, I was the ābullyā! But I wanted to make it ārelatableā. And yes, you can 100% act right after a very difficult childhood. Knowing this is how I know the people who in their adulthood are still misbehaving are simply being willingly lazy and dgaf and/or hiding their heads in the sand in cowardiceā¦
Nope, just extra dimensional cause for creation, no higher purpose required, for all we know whenever two rocks collide in that scenario they create a universe.
Also no, youāre completely missing the point, if God is omnipotent he could have made humans to never suffer and still be free, in theory most Christians believe that Heaven is free of suffering, do you cease being yourself when you go to heaven then? Just because you or I canāt imagine a world where humans are free but canāt hurt one another doesnāt mean thatās beyond the realm of possibilities, and if your counter argument will be that then we wouldnāt really be free, I tell you that humans canāt explode someone by looking at them, so he already imposed some limitations on the amount of harm we could cause to each other, yet you donāt see this as less freedom because you just accepted thatās the natural state, I propose there could be a natural state where humans canāt cause harm to each other and are still free.
No, youāre picturing impossibilities because not every thought is rational, thinking they could become realities and being disappointed about it and finally blaming God for it. āIf God were truly omnipotent heād make 1=0 and Aā A!ā. And perhaps only those who were tested and showed, at least by the end of their days, that they were people who refused and would never cross (again?) major moral lines are accepted in a place with no lackings and no stress, which means Heaven can actually be entirely utopic. And if humans had lasers coming from their eyes from birth then we wouldnāt have made it past our first cave and God wouldāve just had to make humans like us so we could actually develop a little bit, lol. Thank God he didnāt make us with lazerssss! š Or claws or fangs, for that matter. At least we developed/were given moral codes that we can easily understand and willingly follow early enough in our civilizational development, cause we were dangerous and impulsive enough without them and now we have nukesā¦ But of course He didnāt, cause we might be stupid AF at times but Heās on the opposite end, in a category of His own.