A Loving God

[Edwardo Piet]

So, let's say we have someone who is devoted to God, and dedicates a majority of their time to carrying out good works in His name. One day, while walking to the store, they get taken, dragged behind a dumpster, beaten, brutally gang raped, and left for dead, ultimately giving up the ghost as they lay there. God allows this?

Of course he does.  God never promised his followers that they wouldn't suffer.

I'm Christian now. Now I know that an all-powerful and all-knowing God had all the power to save that good person that he knew was being beaten and raped from being beaten and raped and he chose not to save them just for funsies... I am now a Christian.

Thank you Lek. You make perfect sense.

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Anyone who hasn't spotted my sarcasm deserves a

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[mcolafson]

Of course he does.  God never promised his followers that they wouldn't suffer.

I'm Christian now. Now I know that an all-powerful and all-knowing God had all the power to save that good person that he knew was being beaten and raped from being beaten and raped and he chose not to save them just for funsies... I am now a Christian.

Thank you Lek. You make perfect sense.

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Anyone who hasn't spotted my sarcasm deserves a

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Alasdair Ham,

you are missing something. All are sinners. That means the person who was beaten and raped was gently rebuked by the loving God.

3 For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; (Romans 3:23)

A seemingly good person beaten and raped... You probably think it is unfair, but there is a possibility that
she fully deserved it!
(It could be he, but let's assume it was meted to a girl, for the simplicity sake).

She probably missed church some Sunday.
Does she tithe? How much? Does she give to her church 10% or only 9%? of her income?
Does she give it gladly or thinks that she could spend that money on text-books instead?
If there was a period in her life when she didn't tithe enough, did she ask for forgiveness and make up for it?

Does she sing with genuine enthusiasm during the church service? Or only pretends?
Does she ALWAYS pay full attention to the sermons? 

Does she ALWAYS go to the church or her parents have to make her go there?
Maybe she argues with her parents (a lazy bitch would rather stay at home instead of getting scriptural instruction?! ). You have to RESPECT your parents.
and HONOR them.
Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee. Exodus 20:12.

You may think that what happened was unfair. But
maybe she flirted with some boy or young man on the way to the church. When she had to think about Jesus!

Was she thinking about some boy from her college when she had to think about temptations of Jesus in the desert or his triumphant entry in Jerusalem on the ass?

How well-versed is she in the Bible?
How often does she read it?
Does she know by heart all ten Commandments?

Did she start that day when she was raped with a prayer? Was it perfunctory or honest?

So, it is quite probable she brought on herself the Divine Punishment.

[mcolafson]

Let's return to that person who was beaten and raped...

Mostly likely, this was because of bad tithing.

“But you ask, ‘How are we robbing you?’

“In tithes and offerings. 9 You are under a curse—your whole nation—because you are robbing me. Malachi 3.

Apparently, she robbed God. God really hates that.

[chimp3]

Let's not forget the story of Ananais and Sapphira in the NT:

Acts 5 :

5 Now a man named Ananias, together with his wife Sapphira, also sold a piece of property. 2 With his wife’s full knowledge he kept back part of the money for himself, but brought the rest and put it at the apostles’ feet.
3 Then Peter said, “Ananias, how is it that Satan has so filled your heart that you have lied to the Holy Spirit and have kept for yourself some of the money you received for the land? 4 Didn’t it belong to you before it was sold? And after it was sold, wasn’t the money at your disposal? What made you think of doing such a thing? You have not lied just to human beings but to God.”
5 When Ananias heard this, he fell down and died. And great fear seized all who heard what had happened. 6 Then some young men came forward, wrapped up his body, and carried him out and buried him.
7 About three hours later his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. 8 Peter asked her, “Tell me, is this the price you and Ananias got for the land?”
“Yes,” she said, “that is the price.”
9 Peter said to her, “How could you conspire to test the Spirit of the Lord? Listen! The feet of the men who buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out also.”
10 At that moment she fell down at his feet and died. Then the young men came in and, finding her dead, carried her out and buried her beside her husband. 11 Great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about these events.

(In this one God is like the loving bookie that you a gambiling debt to.)

[robvalue]

No it's fine. As long as the right voice in your head is telling you to do something, it's "moral".

The trick is figuring out which is the right voice. Make sure it's not some other fake God talking to you, or you talking to yourself, or mental illness. As long as it's genuinely God talking directly to you, which isn't an arrogant thing to think at all, you're good to go. It's by definition moral, whether you're raping people or smashing babies to bits with a giant hammer.

[GUBU]

I, like most christians and non-christians, have long had a problem to one degree or another with the seemingly wrathful God of the old testament.  I've always come to the conclusion of God being a God of justice as well as of love.  Because of the sins of mankind, our lives here on this imperfect world involve suffering.  It's a consequence that stems from our sins.  Even innocent children often suffer consequences of the sins of others because they live in the resulting world.  I don't see the directly effected people in God's violent acts in the old testament, such as the flood, as necessarily having to suffer any more that anyone else.  I myself would rather drown or be run through with a sword than die a slow, excruciating death from disease.

This morning as I was walking I was listening to a christian radio talk show and they were discussing various views of hell that have been held by christians since the beginning of the church.  The view of hell as a place of everlasting punishment became almost universally accepted after the catholic embraced it around the 4th or 5th century AD, but there have been other views, also based on scripture, that have been held by christians all along, including a significant number of early church fathers.  One view would be that those who refuse to accept Christ would be sent to hell after the final judgement where they would receive proper punishment for their sins and then would be annihilated.  They would then no longer exist.  Another view, which I see the most biblical evidence for, is that hell is remedial.  Those who fail to believe go to hell after the final judgement, where they experience existence without God, which is extremely unpleasant, and eventually realize that they want to be with him and are then taken to him.  This really bears out the belief that God loves us ALL and that Jesus paid the price for the sins of ALL.  I see more biblical support for the latter two views than for the traditional view of everlasting damnation.  

Anyway, the way that I link my view of universal reconciliation with the supposedly unloving and unfair God of the old testament is that, though we must all suffer the consequences of a sinful world, the punishment aspect has been overridden by God through the atonement of those sins by Jesus Christ.  We no longer need to suffer the punishment for our sins, which is eternal death, but we must suffer the suffer consequences of a sinful world, even as an innocent child must suffer consequences of a parent who screwed up the child's life.  For eternity, though, we will be with our creator sharing in his love in a perfect existence.  This is whether we had an easy death from drowning or being run through with a sword, as the did the victims of the old testament catastrophes, or whether we died a slow and painful death, as did so many others who were not victims of those.  To me, this really brings together the loving, yet just, God of both the old and the new testaments.

I invite comment from christians and non-christians alike.

So, basicly, it's your fault that your god is a piece of shit.

Have you never wondered that the obviously fantastical and mythical sections of the bible point to a much simpler explanation of yhwh's shittiness? Viz, that he was the creation of a bronze age tribe who fetishised war and violence and used their fetishisation to create a very exclusive in group dehumanising everybody else who wasn't part of their tribe and religion (hence why all the bloody war, rape and slavery in the bible committed on other Canaanite peoples), and who invented a fantastical beginnings for themselves in an attempt to distance themselves from their neighbours and distant relatives who they wanted to demonise. It's all there in the bible if you're willing to engage your brain when reading it.

[GUBU]

No loving almighty "God" would ever allow that. You just can't justify that.

I'm discussing the issue from a biblical standpoint, which we often do in this forum, and I think what I expounded on was a pretty good justification, although I really don't need to justify God's actions.  Coming from a believer's standpoint it makes sense.  I understand that no matter what I say, God isn't going to be what you want or accept.

No, it makes far more sense to realise that the fictional being you believe is the creator is a piece of shit rather than to believe that he is real, he is good, and his shitty creation is your fault.

[GUBU]

Good point.  God may actually want us to suffer.  Suffering can create good results and can form us into better and stronger persons.  The bible actually refers to greater rewards in heaven for some than for others, which could be  compensation.  In the end though, I can't totally understand the reason God allows suffering among little children.  The apostle Paul, though, was of the opinion that the suffering that any one of us goes through here is not even worth consideration compared to the greatness of what God has in store for for us in eternity.

Something I posted in another thread that speaks to this.


The theory I'm working from is more fundamental than that of the mind. It is that of living being, of the objective body required for a mind to locate within and ride upon and the mind's most fundamental function as awareness of self existence. No intent required.

The only "intent" I require for a the eternal production of a deterministic metaverse, from an objectively infinite God that materially takes up all available space forever in all directions, Is a single expression of it's self. All it has to do it express it's own "Name", it own subject relationships it has with it's own matter...it relativistic nature. And this yields a specific geometry.

I even think this was a "spontaneous symmetry breaking event" a "quantum fluctuation". A self observation/realization and spontaneous expression of inherent order. No intent required.

The result is a planar traveling wave front that leaves infinite identical spherical universes in it wake, infinite "ones" at every quantum instant or unit of Plank time. The metaversal wave front will never stop because it is a self expression of the thing it is traveling through, expressed and received by it's Self with nothing to impede it.

In this model, the beginning of the metaverse is not necessarily the beginning of our individual universe. There would be no way to tell how many planes exist above or below us although what is below us would be fininte and increasing by one plane every instant. The planes above us may not be a finite amount either (without spatial beginning), if I intuit correctly that this is a self expressive embryonic process of an original infinite Individual (The One), individuating to reproduce other self sustaining individuals...and here we are.

So the total picture of this model's metaverse "without beginning" is as an extremely thick vertical stack of planes of universes that extend infinitely along the horizontal axis/plane, and this is traveling as a a downward iterational wavefront. New universes are formed at the bottom of the stack while completed/matured/fully developed universes are "born" off the top of the deterministic stack to exist as a free willed agent in the mass field of the original infinite substance.

Universes in the metaverse would be developing gods, souls dreaming of lives in material bodies on planets. Universes that have been completed are Gods, birthed as an autonomous individual into the infinite field of the original GOD, eternal life and a crown of glory, co-inheritor with Christ. From this view, GOD simply expressed it's own existence and the happy result is children and eternal company/co-creation/experience. We get to play as Gods together with GOD with no limit.

We were born in a Great Contraction, not a big bang. Though GOD is mentally Paternal, preserving and projecting pattern, GOD is also physically Maternal, holding all the infinite universes like children in infinite wombs within her infinite body, nurturing them unfailingly into perfection. This is the faith of GOD.

Wahey, it's arkilogues unique blend of incontinent quantum woo and fundagelical chrisitanity! A word of advice, when you're wrong it is far better to learn where you are wrong and to correct it rather than doubling down on the wrongness. Not only does your current strategy show you an idiot, it shows you an idiot unwilling to and incapable of learning.

[GUBU]

So, let's say we have someone who is devoted to God, and dedicates a majority of their time to carrying out good works in His name. One day, while walking to the store, they get taken, dragged behind a dumpster, beaten, brutally gang raped, and left for dead, ultimately giving up the ghost as they lay there. God allows this?

Of course he does.  God never promised his followers that they wouldn't suffer.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that the main reason you're a christard is because you're a vicarious sadist. You seem to positively delight in the suffering of others.

[robvalue]

God: "Hmm, shall I have suffering in this world I'm going to make, or not? YES. I will choose for there to be suffering."

Angel bitch: "Doesn't that make you, you know, less than perfectly good or something?"

God: "No. I can do what I want. I say what's good and what isn't."

Angel bitch: "Okay."

God: "Without suffering, people won't enjoy not suffering as much."

Angel bitch: "Why?"

God: "Because I made it that way."

Angel bitch: "..."