1) Some people believe In God - He exists, He is Sovereign, He is a Creator etc.
2) Some people believe in beliefs about God - He is loving, He is kind, He is merciful
We also have beliefs about those beliefs about God
- It wouldn’t be loving to allow my child to die
- It wouldn’t be kind to allow my partner to leave me
- It wouldn’t be merciful to let those I love go to hell
Those beliefs about love and kindness and mercy become our beliefs about God.
. A loving God wouldn’t allow my child to die
. A kind God wouldn’t allow my partner to leave me
. A merciful God will make those I love become Christians
So when our child dies or when our husband / wife leaves, or when those we love remain hostile and angry toward God, some people come to a conclusion NOT that their beliefs about God were wrong, but that their belief in the existence of God must be wrong.
Now, God may NOT exist, but His existence is not, will not and indeed cannot be proven based on the twists and turns of life’s journey.
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23 comments:
So does it make sense to you that a loving God DOES allow children to die, DOES allow people to abandon each other and DOES send people to Hell?
Sounds like you think people should be entitled to paradise on earth.
I don't think we're entitled to anything. I don't believe in any gods or afterlife, remember?
I just don't think anyone deserves eternal punishment, and if it exists then whoever created it is unimaginably cruel. The suffering each of us might cause on Earth, no matter how terrible, is finite.
There is no need for anyone to experience eternal separation from God. "While we were still His enemies, Christ died for us and provided for our salvation."
How is that not love?
Jesus had one tough week and is now in Heaven with his father, apparently. The sacrifice on the part of Father or Son was insignificant compared to the reward. If that were the reward for dying on a cross, I'd do it.
The cruel may still love their families. They may even love their victims, but that doesn't often mitigate the suffering they cause. Does God's love help the people in Hell?
Does God's love help the people in Hell?
It's a little late by then. There's no salvation from the grave.
I never cease to be amazed by atheists who lodge moral protests against the God they say does not exist.
I never cease to be amazed by atheists who lodge moral protests against the God they say does not exist.
It's called rhetoric and our planet would be less interesting without it.
"It's called rhetoric and our planet would be less interesting without it."
It's called a Red Herring, a tactic often employed to divert attention away from an argument, which in this case was pointing out the self defeating logic of the previous commenter.
The point is to lodge moral protests against an apparently immoral character, fictitious or not, on whom a worrying amount of people have based their own morals.
Why are you wasting precious hours of this meaningless life trying to refute the beliefs or someone who thinks differently from you?
SmartLX answered this question before you even asked it.
"...an apparently immoral character, fictitious or not, on whom a worrying amount of people have based their own morals."
Still doesn't matter. And what are morals anyway?
I spend hours of my life because you're liable to waste years or decades of yours in the service of a shadow.
I impugn God's morals for the benefit of those who will themselves to believe because they want there to be such an ethereal power for good in the world. It might snap them out of it.
Morals: principles or habits with respect to right or wrong conduct. Very important to find effective ones, therefore.
Morals are utterly meaningless in a God-less world. The only thing that is ultimately meaningful is survival of the fittest. Remember? That is how things evolved. And even survival of the fittest is meaningless because, in the end, nobody survives.
"Morals are utterly meaningless in a God-less world. The only thing that is ultimately meaningful is survival of the fittest. Remember? That is how things evolved."
description not prescription
description not perscription
Exactly. Natural selection is an explanation of how life developed in all its forms, and that's it. It's not a guide to living. Just because your origin story and your moral system ostensibly come from the same source doesn't mean everybody's does.
Finding workable morals is in part what philosophy is for. Consensus is also a powerful tool.
Natural selection is an explanation of how life developed in all its forms, and that's it. It's not a guide to living.
It's not even that. Exacty how accurate are the predictive models put forth by this "explanation" of yours?
You don't believe that heritable traits that make it more likely for an organism to survive and successfully reproduce become more common in a population over successive generations?
Pretty accurate, in the right conditions. Evolution works too slowly for us to cast our fortunes too far forward, and the planet is too complicated to create a complete self-sustaining model of all evolution from the first life onward (as opposed to a family tree, which is easier), but we can still use what we know to predict what we'll discover has already evolved.
Ken Miller's favourite example: Evolutionary theory predicted there would be signs of fusion in one and only one human chromosome pair, as apes have one more pair than we do. The markers turned up in the second one.
One of the early ones: Darwin himself, I think, predicted based on the discovery of an orchid over a foot deep that a moth would be found with a tongue over a foot long; so closely linked is the development of the two species. The moth was found decades later.
Richard Lenski's e.Coli experiment: mutations were bound to occur and some of them would be beneficial, and when one eventually made itself clear it was a doozy; the bacteria could metabolise citrate as well as the usual glucose. That's like a human suddenly being able to live on dirt.
It's all in The Greatest Show on Earth.
@JD
"Exacty how accurate are the predictive models put forth by this "explanation" of yours?"
It's funny that you post such a "question" only a few days after I pointed to YOU an example of a prediction made by Darwin that turned out to be exact; and they named a new specie in his honor...
See this blog post for links...
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