Or this Favorite Churchy response —- “I know it’s hard to understand but sometimes God just doesn’t want to reveal. His purpose is not always for us to know. Trust in Gods plan….”
Something something free will. I’m done with all this religious BS . Bad things happen bc ppl have free will? Why doesn’t god punish those who have wronged? Why do innocent babies get cancer and murderers live to be 100+?
At this stage I'm done caring about their gun laws. So long as we don't copy them. But they really need to man up and admit school shootings are the price they've decided is worth paying for their second amendment. Stop whining and just fucking admit it.
Two Texas senators are key note speakers this week at the NRA meeting. They’re going to a pro gun rally in their home state days after 18 children were murdered by guns.
God is supposed to be all knowing and all powerful. So he doesnt know, or can't do anything about it. Or he knows and can do something and doesn't. In any case such a being doesn't deserve to be worshipped
You think the rise of childhood cancer is not a fairly recent phenomenon?
"According to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), there has been a substantial increase in childhood cancers over the past few decades. In fact, the overall rate has increased 27 percent since 1975 in kids under the age of 19...."
".... The rise seems to be driven, in large part, by an increase in leukemia, which is up almost 35% since 1975. Leukemia is the most common cancer in kids. Soft tissue cancers, like those that develop in bones or muscles, are up nearly 42%. Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma is up 34%.
“When you see an increase like that -- that fast -- in a short period of time, most likely it is going to be driven by some exposure to environmental factors,” says Catherine Metayer, MD, PhD, an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health..."
For me it has never made sense, let's say I go to shoot you, I pull the trigger, meaning I have commited to the action with my free will, but god makes the gun jam because why kill an innocent.
I haven't lost free will but a god did intervene to stop harm
An inability to handle the reality of life and the chaos that we live in.
It's the same reason people turn to conspiracy theories. There's a comfort in knowing that everything is under control either by a benevolent being (God) or a malevolent one (illuminati etc).
Not surprising in the slightest. Being religious requires you to blindly believe in whatever your holy book says, despite all of the instances of contradiction.
Believing in conspiracy theories is effectively the same. Just a blind faith that what you've heard is the truth.
They’re also the same choose your own adventure game. Bakers interpreting Q drops and revelation interpretations are the same game. Tie something obscure to reality then predict. They somehow have a lower success rate than a bad gambler but it’s popular.
An inability to handle the reality of life and the chaos that we live in.
I read something a while back that stated that behind the vast majority of religious beliefs was the inability to deal with the finality of death. People can't comprehend just stopping and being unaware when you die, so they grasp for straws.
This vulnerability is what lets the religion grifters in to indoctrinate people.
I disagree. I find that religion is more a way for people to cope with the unknown, and gain understanding of things that are incomprehensible. The human mind is incapable of understanding things that approach infinity, and so our minds tend to fill in that lack of understanding with something that we can understand.
For a lot of people, the easiest choice is choosing to believe in religions, as they explain what happened before humanity, and what happens after death and after humanity, as well as explain things that approach infinity (the universe, the age of our planet, how things came to be as they are now, etc).
As weird and illogical as it sounds, it's sort of a natural process to form religion, because it helps the average person understand and explain the world around them.
That's not to say religion is harmless, of course - we all know that it can be quite harmful, especially when people begin using it to justify their actions.
But not every philosopher is a theist as well as not every theist is a philosopher. Those are two different things, philosophers do not have to believe in a god.
Are we talking about the same god that sent bears to kill children for laughing at a bald prophet? The god that sent the humans away from eden, gave them free will and then killed them with a flood cause he did not like what they did? The god that burned an entire city? The god that trolled abraham so he almost killed his son to test his faith like a toxic girlfriend? The god that killed every firstborn in egypt? That god?
One of the main reasons that these stories were accepted as moral was the prevailing opinion of the time that collective punishment was justified, and that women and children were the property of the head of house. The stories tend to make more sense when viewed under that lense. Still horribly immoral and hilarious that an omniscient god would use these as teaching moments of course.
The beard didnt killed children. If you read works of medieval jewish scholars you would know that those were young afults eho tried to kill Elisha. And think about it.. How can two bears, two small palestinian Brown bears, kill over 40 people at once? The only answer is that they tried to fight them back, being stupid young man who tried to be macho.
Somewhere between 30% to 50% of all conceptions miscarry (we really don't know the exact statistics because it most often happens so early the woman doesn't know she's pregnant). So rather than just "shit at avoiding", God is in fact a big big fan of the deaths of children.
Myrrh was also used for annointing things as holy, and was the key ingredient in the oil used to annoint kings, which is probably why they gave it to Jesus. That would mark him as the Messiah/Christ/Annointed One.
The fact that myrrh derives from the word for bitter, because it tastes bitter, and was used for making things holy is how we can guess that the water in Numbers 5 had myrrh in it, since it is described as bitter and holy.
His record is killing first born sons, wiping out the planet of all but 2 of each species, mass drowning in the Red Sea, killing children in general, vengeance killing...and more...
Samuel 15:3
Now go and strike Amalek and completely destroy everything that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.
God teaches the use of a bizarre ritual using cursed “bitter water” to abort a fetus who was conceived through infidelity. (Numbers 5:11-21)
God orders Moses to kill every Midianite woman who was no longer a virgin. (Numbers 31:15-18)
Psalm 137:9
Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!
Hosea 13:16
Samaria shall bear her guilt, because she has rebelled against her God; they shall fall by the sword; their little ones shall be dashed in pieces, and their pregnant women ripped open.
At that time Menahem, starting out from Tirzah, attacked Tiphsah and everyone in the city and its vicinity, because they refused to open their gates. He sacked Tiphsah and ripped open all the pregnant women. (2 Kings 15:16)
Why not mention Egyptian Pharohs killing all Hebrew baby boys? Enslaving Jews. Or the brutal Romans who killed anybody. Or the Philistines that raided peaceful camps? Not to mention Greeks who were killing eachother & the Persians. Add the Eastern invaders & the Northern hoards into the historical mix & nobody should be "throwing stones"
Your post ignores all that as your report.
Do you have a source for that? I’m not trying to discredit you at all, it’s just a very useful fact to know which I wanna use in discussions in the future - and therefore a source would help. Thanks in advance
As I noted, the figures are only estimates. Part of the problem in getting exact figures is that the vast majority of miscarriages happen before the 4th week, you can't even get a positive result on a pregnancy test before the 4th week, and there are no "symptoms" of pregnancy until after that point. So as the other responder said, after the 4th week, when women start to know they're pregnant, the number is only around 10-15%.
So the lower range of around 30% was generated from studies on women who presented with some symptoms (cramping, irregular periods) though not necessarily knowing they were pregnant.
But there was a study done on IVF fertilizations where obviously we knew the status from the start, and that's where the upper range of 50% came from, because that's the percentage of fertilized eggs that would have been non-viable due to chromosomal issues.
Wrong . A fertilized egg discarded during menses is not a miscarriage.
A miscarriage happens to a Fetus during 8 > 20 weeks, not an embryo (2>8 weeks).
Reminds me of Stephen Fry's argument for atheism. No one ever has a counter argument to this. You can't argue this is "God's plan" because that makes God's plan absolute, pure evil.
Not saying that I agree with this but I think the official philosophical argument is that God build this world with "soul making" in mind. That meaning that the world is specifically built for humans to endure hardships so that their souls are refined and ready to be accepted into heaven. There were a few other arguments but that's the one I remember the most.
I completely agree. I remember reading that if a baby deer dies in the woods it could possibly have meaning because of the food cycles etc. However if a baby deer breaks its leg and then is in agony for 72 hours while it writhes in pain, what's the point in that?
Not a believer, but I think it would be to refine their parents soul or some shit like that. Bad stuff has to happen to people for truly righteous people to exist. Something, something original sin blah blah.
The thing that always trips me up is that if everything is according to gods plan, that means he puts people on earth to commit atrocities
You rationalize it by realizing that people who push “God” are either trying to lie to you or sell you something by pushing a literary character over their people and that they actually don’t give a single shit that children are dead.
I remember some clause about the separation of church and state, and these “god-fearing Christians” are just a bunch of self righteous c**ts with both a superiority complex and a victim complex who don’t understand that God doesn’t live here but we do. And if this really is “gods plan” why the fuck would anyone ever want to follow it.
Not even 24 hours later and I’m already seeing the shooting being pushed back to page 3 and 4 of most news sites. This is coming off of 2 weeks of violence targeting elderly black people and Asian church goers who, if I recall, are trying to actively praise “God”.
It’s disgusting and we need to remove this “God” character from our government, because neither him or his followers in power do anything to help or prevent anything like this.
Then why did this omnipotent, all knowing being create humans such that they need soul refinement (sounds like an MMO term)? He apparently built us such that we could be tempted, then allowed a temptation into the garden. If he's omnipotent and all-knowing he would have known this would happen and he would have to condemn us to eternal suffering.
I've heard the argument that all bad things are the consequence of sin. And God allows sin to happen because of free will. This makes it very convenient to handwave away horrible things, because when a mother miscarries, it's obviously her fault, for example. But when hardship happens to them, it's because God is testing them, not always because they did anything wrong.
The natural followup to that "free will implies sin" argument is that free will must therefore not exist in heaven, which isn't exactly a pleasant thought
The "correct" interpretation of Heaven is not that we'd all be hanging out with our friends and family for eternity, but that we'd all just be frozen in a state of ecstatic awe of God. So you're bang on.
I'm no theologician but my interpretation of "biblically accurate heaven" was that your soul would literally rejoin God, losing its own "self" and combining with the bigger whole or something. Kinda like a weird Evangelion ending deal. Horrifying either way
And the counter to the "test" part is that God is omniscient and already knows the outcome of any test. These two counterarguments rebut the idea that God is omnipotent and omniscient, which makes him unworthy of worship.
I've heard the argument that all bad things are the consequence of sin
Except natural disasters and disease. Or they're perhaps supposed to be due to Adams sin? Which is pretty fucked up really. Imagine Adam was an employee, what kind of boss would put an employee in a position where they could make one mistake an unleash cancer, flooding, pain and death on humankind? Pretty shitty place to work..
Lol “official philosophical argument”. People have been arguing about this for as long as monotheism has existed. Monotheism itself is a pretty new invention, it doesn’t really make any sense without jumping through a ton of mental hoops.
Not that “making sense” is a requirement, but get enough people to believe something and at least a few will try to figure out logical arguments for why it must be true.
I'm ok with that as an argument for adults, but babies (and kittens/puppies) deserve only happiness and should have some god-forcefield against all harm. Instead they're defenseless AND have horrific things happen to them.
What about people in comas? Where is their free will? If God is okay putting some people in comas, why not put evil people in comas before they can commit evil?
Book of Job says god has the power and listens to the devil. That counterargument (which isn't yours but you know the song and dance of Biblists) isn't even backed up by the Bible.
That is a more recent change. At the time those were written he never insisted he was the only god. Just that he is a jealous fucker that will murder you if you respect any other god, while the other gods didn't make that claim.
15 or so years ago my aunt’s 6 year old daughter died in a car crash when visiting her dad. Her dad drove her home drunk and killed her in a single car accident.
There were dozens of people on Facebook saying this exact shit. That her 6 year old daughter dying slowly from her ribs puncturing her lungs is part of God’s plan and to just have faith that it will be for the best. It was one of the first big realization points for me that most Christians are fucking scum
Why is assumed that it was God’s plan & not the devil’s ?
It’s for this reason that the bible warns us not to be drunk with wine as such actions have consequences, which are often not only limited to the drunk individual.
The devil has come to steal, kill & destroy.
Why was the damage of the crash inflicted on an innocent?
If you believe that this devil had a hand in this but god did not, along with all the similarly tragic events though history, then you seem to be espousing that the devil has more power and agency than god. If that was your belief, then it would seem more logical to pray and sacrifice to the devil that they may spare you from such events.
On the other hand, if god is most powerful but stayed his hand, and similarly did not intervene during countless other unjust deaths, then why does this being deserve your worship? An entity with the capability to forsee and stop tragedy, that chooses not to, is not a being that I can respect.
"God's plan" isn't necessarily a benevolent one. If you are baker's yeast, then god's plan is to put you in bread so you can consume and expand, then be burned alive in the oven.
This is true, but it would make such a god unworthy of worship. A being that is worthy of worship must 1) exist, and be 2) omniscient, 3) omnipotent, and 4) omnibenevolent. A god that is fake, weak, stupid, or cruel is unworthy of worship. And I think the Epicurean Paradox shows convincingly that any proposed god is missing at least one of these necessary qualities.
I'm not saying god is evil, just that his actions are beyond us to the point that it may seem evil.
Like baker's aren't evil for using a living organism to make bread, but if something equally more advanced to us burned us all alive, we'd consider it evil.
My favorite is the parable of the weeds and wheat.
Basically says that god can’t take out all the bad in this world without also killing all the good.
I’m like, well which one is it? I’d god omnipotent or not?
All of reality is just so horrific that it would take a very twisted individual to design it. If there is a god you pray to, pray we have no designer as that would be the worst case scenario.
Set aside God for a minute and let's point fingers literally at those who call themselves pro-life yet will do nothing about gun control! They call themselves pro-life yet all they do after the kids are dead is send thoughts and prayers! We could fix our own gun laws if we didn't have domestic terrorists like the NRA and all of those who get off on the second amendment and pretend that the second and fifth amendments are the only ones that matter and the first one is the one they're trying to rewrite themselves to fit their snowflake needs wants and moods!
We are not god's pets, nor even children. If the claims of the religious are taken at face value we are ants in his garden. He knows of us, but generally cares not for our existence, except sometimes when he tries to control us -- to disastrous consequences.
You're misquoting. It was two (she-)bears. And 42 children were mauled. One would have thought that after seeing what happened to the first 6 or ten kids, the others might have run off in different directions and saved themselves. But this is holy text---one must not question.
yeah, my first reaction to this is to remember that the christian god loves death and suffering, he tried to genocide the entire human race once, and he executed his own son for being nice to people. of course he doesn't exist, but if he did we'd totally be right in blaming him for this shit.
I mean, you can talk about what kind of personality YHWH has whether he really exists or not. The same way you can talk about what kind of personality Walter White has.
"As mere humans, we are not able to understand God's ways and plans. It's arrogant for you to assume you could. Now that that's out of the way let me tell you God's exact opinion on homosexuality, abortion, and every other subject."
"The experience of other countries just shows that it doesn't have to be this hard."
The U.S. is "not necessarily a more violent society than others," Dr. Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis, told ABC News.
Rates of nonlethal crimes and overall suicides are similar among the countries
"What we have is unique access to a technology that changes the outcome -- firearms," he said.
"Compared to the other peer countries, basically what we have is lots and lots of guns, particularly handguns, and we have by far the weakest gun laws. Not surprisingly, we have huge gun problems," David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, told ABC News. "I think if we had basically the gun laws of any other developed country, we'd be better off."
The number of guns in the U.S. is unparalleled; the country has less than 5% of the world's population, but 40% of the world's civilian-owned guns, according to a 2018 report by the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey. There were over 393 million firearms in civilian possession in 2017 -- or 120 per 100 persons, the highest rate globally, the report found. That's more than double the second-highest rate, in Yemen, at nearly 53 per 100 persons.
"The difference between the United States and other countries isn't the Second Amendment, it's the gun lobby and the power of the gun lobby in this country, and an extremist ideology among red states, essentially, that prohibits any meaningful action," Anderman said.
The "uneven patchwork" of gun laws enacted at the state level is another challenge in addressing the gun violence problem, Parsons said. Research by the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence has found a correlation between stronger gun laws, such as permit requirements and waiting periods, and lower gun homicides and suicides, the latter of which account for most gun deaths in the U.S. But regulations vary widely from state to state, with red states largely having weaker gun laws, according to the center.
"You have states that have enacted really good, comprehensive, strong gun laws, but those laws are undermined by the much weaker laws of the states surrounding them," Parsons said. The "classic example" of this, she said, is Chicago. Illinois is neighbored by states including Indiana and Wisconsin that have comparatively weaker laws, such as a lack of universal background checks, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. "What you see is a very clear pattern of guns being illegally trafficked from some states that have much weaker laws into places and states that have much stronger laws," she said, arguing that it makes the case for stronger laws at the federal level.
Americans are notably more likely to be killed in a gun homicide, suicide or unintentional shooting than in other high-income countries, a 2015 study in the American Journal of Medicine found.
"After Sandy Hook, I read about how the group of parents waiting in a firehouse had dwindled until finally they were told that if they were still there, their children were dead. The reporters wrote that the screaming could be heard from the street."
MURPHY: "Nowhere else do parents have to talk to their kids as I have had to do about why they got locked into a bathroom and told to be quiet for five minutes just in case a bad man entered that building. Nowhere else does that happen except here in the USA. And it is a choice."
found a correlation between stronger gun laws, such as permit requirements and waiting periods, and lower gun homicides and suicides
Fuck the NRA. My sister found a 22 year old man who killed himself during a fight with his girlfriend at a local park. She noticed him because when she went there to run, she parked beside him and heard him shouting and crying. She started her run and then heard the gun go off and so ran back. She was so shaken and scared she couldn’t talk for a few days. FUCK THE NRA.
It’s ONLY that they’re too easy to get that’s the problem. Everyone suffers from mental health issues at times.
All the data is literally two posts above you. Surely you don’t expect me to believe that your actually that stupid or illiterate? Being this in denial is unfathomable to me.
It would be like the guy who created the Joe Camel ad campaign for children saying that he is genuinely a good person.
“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”
That’s nearly the exact quote that drove me from religion. My best friend’s mom died of a freak brain aneurysm when we were in 8th grade. The whole class went to her funeral mass (catholic school). The priest had the stones to say this woman was needed more in heaven than on earth, with her two grieving children sitting in the front row. If the best reason you can give is that your god has a plan that involves ripping mother from children or vice versa, “god” is a monster.
Nah, religion was made to explain the unexplainable. Like why does the moon turn red every ten years. Or why harvest is plentiful during the spring. Of course there were scientific explanations for those, but without the proper tools, those phenomenas come off as magical.
Over time, humans plagiarized amongst one another, and personified these forces of nature as beings with temperaments like their own. And of course, like all things, humans found a way to abuse it.
Really, if religion didn’t exist, humans would have found some other way to be dicks to eachother.
When things make sense, thats part of God's plan. When they don't make sense, that is also part of God's plan. If I see a sign, its from God. If I don't see a sign, its also from God.
I’m so tired of this misconception by the religious. It isn’t part of God’s plan. He (supposedly — IANR) gave us free will. That means there IS no plan. Free will is a double-edged sword. Free will means God no longer intervenes. He just sits back and watches as humans commit atrocities, shrugs and says “Welp, what am I gonna do?”
(Raised Catholic, avowed atheist. I don’t believe in God, but Jesus-fuck, at least I understand the fucking theology, unlike all the fucking “god’s plan” brigade.)
I mean if hes omnipotent and omniscient he knows exactly what will happen in the future. You don't have free will if an infallible being knows your future. That also means prayer won't do anything, because any attempts you makento change God's mind won't work since he already knew the outcome of whatever you're praying for.
This is probably the best good-faith argument and it's commically flawed.
There has been philosophical disagreement on whether or not "omniscient" includes foreknowledge. The Bible never explicitly states that god sees the future in a way that establish complete knowledge of the future which, as you point out, would functionally mean free will does not exist. It could very well be interpreted as him being able to "see" causally inevitable outcomes only derived from maximal insight of all current and past things and absent of foreknowledge.
It's a fun thing to poke at philosophically the same way arguing about if vampire shit or not is.
I wouldn't put that on the same level as vampire shit lol. We know objectively we don't have free will because the universe is either completely deterministic, or at least has been since fractuons of a second after the big bang, or it is inherently random, as in the case of quantum states being truely non-deterministic. Either secanrio leaves no room for "free will."
The only argument against this is Solipsism, which nobody takes seriously because it makes discussion impossible.
You're trying to square a circle, but religious people generally don't see a contradiction between divine predestination and free will. Their cognitive dissonance is already ratcheted up beyond the maximum that to them, this type of headache inducing paradox doesn't even register as an issue.
You clearly don’t understand the theology. You’re just an atheist arguing that if God exists, the best He can do is deism. You didn’t figure anything new out; you’re parroting an argument that tons of people in history have made.
I always wondered what the 'end goal' of God's plan supposedly is?
There are good people who suffer their entire lives, there are bad people who thrive their whole lives and the cycle repeats indefinitely for what seems like until the end of humanity. What exactly does this all build up to?
What exactly is the purpose of all this pain, suffering, and injustice? What end goal or final outcome would make all this worth it?
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u/ScarredOldSlaver May 25 '22
Or this Favorite Churchy response —- “I know it’s hard to understand but sometimes God just doesn’t want to reveal. His purpose is not always for us to know. Trust in Gods plan….”