Job

[The Grand Nudger]

 Would you choose not to protect a man from someone who took his possessions, his health, and killed his family?  That's not even the problem of suffering, that's active complicity.

Assault in progress, what do you do?

I study self-defense for this purpose, I would like to be able to stop an assault in progress and help protect innocent lives if I can.

Of course I don't treat the creator the same way that I would treat a man or an animal. So I wouldn't try to fight YHWH if he were attacking an innocent person, but I would at the least pray about it and be curios as to why he would do such a thing.

-and there's you, certifying in advance your own moral failure, as dictated by your beliefs...but also that your religious beliefs and your actual day to day beliefs are completely unaligned.  Let's just hope that you don't witness an assault after a bad plate of shrimp makes you hallucinate gods, huh?

Is it possible that an omnipotent being can come to conclusions which are alien to our own understanding?

It seems that most people here are more upset with God than Job is despite only reading of his suffering but having never experienced exactly what he went through.

I knew this would be a difficult topic when I started it, and so far I am not disappointed by the response I've gotten. Ultimately you either trust God to do what he will with his creation or you don't, but I believe that an eternal reward is what makes all of this suffering truly worthwhile. Even if we lived in a fair world where the righteous prosper and those who do evil always get punished; what would any of our labor amount to if our destiny is dust? Our physical bodies are destined to return to this Earth at some point and nothing we build, save or work for is ever guaranteed to last forever. 

What amount of pain is worth eternal paradise? What perishing thing can I lose or gain that would deter me from pursuing that which can never perish? 

(I know most of you are atheists so please just take the last two questions as hypotheticals.)

Trust?  Who needs trust?  God actively fucked job in the story - he can give him all the lollipops he wants after the fact - in this life or the next..but that won't change that fact.  It's not something I could bring myself to do, so it's a pretty direct line from that to the fact that I wouldn't worship a god that did it.  

I've heard that some murderers are sometimes very remorseful, and also do things to try and make it up to the families of their victims.  I rate your gods paradise no higher than that..but you and I both know it's alot shittier.  It's got a pretty exclusive guest list.  God is not contrite.

Meanwhile, this notion that things are worthless unless they're eternal? Speaking of alien conclusions, that one's entirely alien to me. I'm not willing to be a dirtbag to get some item just because it lasts forever. That would only amount to eternal shame, for me. Nothing to do with atheism, merely that I possess a strong moral character which you..according to you..in the presence of your god, could not. That's the great pity of a transactional faith. You want the thing some evil being offers, and you'll debase yourself for it, and you know it.

Tell me how anyone could trust turning their back to you? What wouldn't you do to me or anyone else, or be willing to passively watch done to me or anyone else, for punch and pie in the sky?