Four questions for Christians

[Consilius]

God can't always be an anti-war hippy because people will need to be defended from their common threat because we all have the will to survive.

For an all-capable superbeing, God sure has an awful lot of limits he has to work around.

I mean, he could snap his celestial finger and end all conflicts and threats in an instant. He chooses not to. He could have made humans not prone to conflict, not desire bad things. He chose, instead, to create a violent, envious species. You can cite 'free will' here, but that doesn't deflect responsibility, because not only does that imply that we developed sinful behavior all by ourselves, but he made all life forms behave this way. When your god is omni-capable, he is also omni-responsible for everything that happens, good and bad.

Ultimately, the plagues are God's fault because he had virtually infinite methods he could have solved the problem and opted not to choose a non-violent method.

God does not make people do evil. The choice is ultimately ours. Anything less would justify "God made me do it." The only way God IS responsible for things would bring up the question of evil.
God is responsible when bad things happen to good people. These tragedies have the potential to inspire them, and their recovery from disasters also can inspire others when they are dealing with hard times. Tragedy brings people together, like the Israelite slavery or refugee families, and it can also tear them apart.
A Christian would say that if you trust in the God who brought the affliction, like in the case of Job, you will eventually conquer it, even if it means that you die, because then you get to live forever with the God you didn't lose faith in. Because tragedy also teaches us to detach ourselves from our sense of control and the comforts and conveniences of everyday life to seek something more valuable.
Now back to Egypt.
God did not pull violence out of thin air. For around 80 years, without any provocation except fear, all Israelite babies were drowned. This was about more than saving the Israelites from slavery: this was about God performing his role as judge and punishing the Egyptians according to Egyptian law.

[LeoVonFrost]

Consilus the lion's share of the percentage of people that have lived on this planet had no idea your god exsisted. Their only sin is where and when your god decided to put them on this planet. If they are burning in the lake of fire it is god's fault and you should admit there is a responsibility there. I seem to remember being told that they are offered a chance at redemption at the pearly gates, or is that just another lie I was told wherein god is absolved of his own sins toward us?

[Consilius]

Consilus the lion's share of the percentage of people that have lived on this planet had no idea your god exsisted. Their only sin is where and when your god decided to put them on this planet. If they are burning in the lake of fire it is god's fault and you should admit there is a responsibility there. I seem to remember being told that they are offered a chance at redemption at the pearly gates, or is that just another lie I was told wherein god is absolved of his own sins toward us?

You are preaching against "no salvation outside the church", which many Christians believe does not exist.
We all have our basic moral values, and the Eurocentric 16th century stereotype of "immoral savages" probably does not exist, and morality is not dependent on whether or not your particular tribe has been evangelized. There were law systems in ancient societies like Egypt and Mesopotamia, and people in general would have had an idea of what was right and what was wrong, based on, I admit, stuff that was evolutionarily beneficial. To attack a band of runaway slaves or to refuse them hospitality in the middle of the desert was something that you don't need Jesus to agree is wrong.
On what happened when they died, Jesus himself preached on the difference between getting it wrong when you knew it was wrong, and getting it wrong when you SHOULD have known it was wrong by your own rationality (Luke 12:47-48). I can't speak on their behalf, but some will say that the reasonably good ones went to heaven, while the truly bad ones went to hell. Catholics say that the good ones stayed in a state of limbo until Christ died, and that the good ones who had done some bad things suffered for a finite amount of time in Purgatory before going to heaven.

[LeoVonFrost]

You are preaching against "no salvation outside the church", which many Christians believe does not exist.
We all have our basic moral values, and the Eurocentric 16th century stereotype of "immoral savages" probably does not exist, and morality is not dependent on whether or not your particular tribe has been evangelized. There were law systems in ancient societies like Egypt and Mesopotamia, and people in general would have had an idea of what was right and what was wrong, based on, I admit, stuff that was evolutionarily beneficial. To attack a band of runaway slaves or to refuse them hospitality in the middle of the desert was something that you don't need Jesus to agree is wrong.
On what happened when they died, Jesus himself preached on the difference between getting it wrong when you knew it was wrong, and getting it wrong when you SHOULD have known it was wrong by your own rationality (Luke 12:47-48). I can't speak on their behalf, but some will say that the reasonably good ones went to heaven, while the truly bad ones went to hell. Catholics say that the good ones stayed in a state of limbo until Christ died, and that the good ones who had done some bad things suffered for a finite amount of time in Purgatory before going to heaven.

It's nice to think that if I were a well-behaved savage I would have made it to heaven. Unfortunately you are all over the map here, and while I appreciate the information, I was looking forward to seeing what you felt personally about what happened to those hundreds and hundreds of thousands of forced un-believers' souls, did they dry up like a raisin in the son? Is your god responsible for anything at all?

[Ryantology]

God does not make people do evil. The choice is ultimately ours. Anything less would justify "God made me do it." The only way God IS responsible for things would bring up the question of evil.

God chose to not give people the ability to follow the rules he designed. How can it be our fault that we can't adhere to rules designed to be impossible to follow? That's like saying it's my fault I can't walk to Pluto; what could I possibly do about it?

God is responsible when bad things happen to good people. These tragedies have the potential to inspire them, and their recovery from disasters also can inspire others when they are dealing with hard times. Tragedy brings people together, like the Israelite slavery or refugee families, and it can also tear them apart.

Since God can accomplish the same results without inflicting disaster and misery upon people, and he knows everything, how is this not proof that God is malicious?

God did not pull violence out of thin air. For around 80 years, without any provocation except fear, all Israelite babies were drowned. This was about more than saving the Israelites from slavery: this was about God performing his role as judge and punishing the Egyptians according to Egyptian law.

What does it say about a being's justice if he lowers himself to the level of mere humans?

[Consilius]

You are preaching against "no salvation outside the church", which many Christians believe does not exist.
We all have our basic moral values, and the Eurocentric 16th century stereotype of "immoral savages" probably does not exist, and morality is not dependent on whether or not your particular tribe has been evangelized. There were law systems in ancient societies like Egypt and Mesopotamia, and people in general would have had an idea of what was right and what was wrong, based on, I admit, stuff that was evolutionarily beneficial. To attack a band of runaway slaves or to refuse them hospitality in the middle of the desert was something that you don't need Jesus to agree is wrong.
On what happened when they died, Jesus himself preached on the difference between getting it wrong when you knew it was wrong, and getting it wrong when you SHOULD have known it was wrong by your own rationality (Luke 12:47-48). I can't speak on their behalf, but some will say that the reasonably good ones went to heaven, while the truly bad ones went to hell. Catholics say that the good ones stayed in a state of limbo until Christ died, and that the good ones who had done some bad things suffered for a finite amount of time in Purgatory before going to heaven.

It's nice to think that if I were a well-behaved savage I would have made it to heaven. Unfortunately you are all over the map here, and while I appreciate the information, I was looking forward to seeing what you felt personally about what happened to those hundreds and hundreds of thousands of forced un-believers' souls, did they dry up like a raisin in the son? Is your god responsible for anything at all?

You would probably agree that morality originates from extra-religious sources, and religion simply identifies them and lays them out.
Therfore, these 'savages' would have had a perfect idea of what it meant to be moral, even if they had been atheist. Morals are not counter-evolutionary, so the unevangelized of even today know what it means to be good, and don't need people to tell them. Maybe…God set it up that way. Just a theory.
But say it was true. In that case, every person on Earth at the time of the Israelites would have had their own abstract Ten Commandments and a sense of justice. Therefore, when someone is being bad, they would not be able to blame their people any more than they would be allowed to blame God.
So bad Christians and bad 'savages' are the same. They both are denied God when they live sinful lives of unrepentance. They both go to Purgatory (I am a Catholic) if they didn't know what they were doing was wrong and strove to do good, which would be better than having done wrong while knowing it was wrong. And if they both follow their nearly identical moral codes to fullness, they both live for eternity with God.

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God does not make people do evil. The choice is ultimately ours. Anything less would justify "God made me do it." The only way God IS responsible for things would bring up the question of evil.

God chose to not give people the ability to follow the rules he designed. How can it be our fault that we can't adhere to rules designed to be impossible to follow? That's like saying it's my fault I can't walk to Pluto; what could I possibly do about it?

God is responsible when bad things happen to good people. These tragedies have the potential to inspire them, and their recovery from disasters also can inspire others when they are dealing with hard times. Tragedy brings people together, like the Israelite slavery or refugee families, and it can also tear them apart.

Since God can accomplish the same results without inflicting disaster and misery upon people, and he knows everything, how is this not proof that God is malicious?

God did not pull violence out of thin air. For around 80 years, without any provocation except fear, all Israelite babies were drowned. This was about more than saving the Israelites from slavery: this was about God performing his role as judge and punishing the Egyptians according to Egyptian law.

What does it say about a being's justice if he lowers himself to the level of mere humans?

The thing about free will is that we are all as capable of living perfect lives as we are of living terrible ones. But perfection is impossible to achieve, so sometimes we make mistakes, are punished, repent, and continue trying to do our best. These "mistakes" are still our fault; people are sorry right after they do bad things, but they don't exactly feel that way when they are doing them. We fall below God's standards willingly, all the time, under the same conditions of free choice as Adam in the Bible, so he is not the origin of the problem of evil. We all are, and contribute to a lot of it in our own little ways.

Faith in God gets stronger only in tragedy and confusion. I don't think anyone in the Bible was exempt from that. Miracles prove facts about God and who he is and what he does, but the part about loving God in religion comes from when we have nothing else to hope for. Was it malicious of God to allow the Israelite slavery to take place? Notice how the enslavement was carried out by other human beings. But there were people who were born into and died in this slavery. But, after pushing Israel to the limit, he intervened and saved them.

The human sense of justice is the same as God's. Isn't every person in a nation subject to a single constitution? Judges cannot make rulings or dish out punishments based off anyhting other than the constitution. If God judged us by his own unique standards, then it would be an unfair judgement, because not only would no one be aware of his specific law code, but it would be unfamiliar to the people and be seen as unfair. The Egyptians needed to know that they were being fairly judged for their offenses, so the judgement was carried out according to Egyptian law and the general sense of justice.

[LeoVonFrost]

I appreciate the candid response. I charged you with knowing what your god wants and you didn't disappoint. I am happy to be learning about the theories of a possible after-life, although I am still having trouble wrapping my head around the premise that just the presence of great morals in a man allows him eternity in heaven with god. I feel kind of left out, it makes me wish I never heard of this jesus guy.

[Consilius]

I still think the Jesus guy is still pretty important. He DID greatly contribute to our morality with his radical morals e.g. don't be attatched to the world, be humble, be kind to the lowly and the sinful, forgive the people who hurt you. One would say that he completed what the Old Testament started by his exemplary life.
In that respect, Jesus came to the world and taught people to be better people, and by doing so serve God better. Something that I could see God doing.
Outside of the Resurrection, this also suggests that he was who he said he was: the son of God.

[LeoVonFrost]

Here's an interesting article on the science of morality. It only mentions religion when talking about shunning like excommunication.

http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/a...-1,00.html

Yugoslavia is the great modern example of manipulating tribal sentiments to create mass murder," says Jonathan Haidt, associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. "You saw it in Rwanda and Nazi Germany too. In most cases of genocide, you have a moral entrepreneur who exploits tribalism for evil purposes."

Bosnian Genocide -> 95% of the country believed in christ 80k muslims murdered
Rwanda Genocide -> christian Tutsis murder 100k christian Hutu christian Hutu murder 1million christian Tutsis
Holocaust -> 94% of the country believed in christ 17million murdered
Crusades -> christians murder 100million for blasphemy
African Slavery ->95% of slavers were christian 60million murdered
Spanish Conversion -> christian conquistadors bring plague and war 100million murdered

The thing I find so disgusting is that you apply your deity to my morals, you couldn't be taking away my individuality in a more insulting way considering the terrible things that this belief has perpetrated on humanity. If your god can not take responsibility then his believers shall bear the burden, you should be ashamed of yourself, honestly.

[FifthElement]

Sorry for being this blunt:

9/11 ???

Counterpoint: Cultural Revolution

Lol, I suppose you are referring to Chinese, new OWNERS of USA ?

Yep, bad ideology can indeed make people do stupid things in the name of it...

But what is really a difference between bad ideology and another bad ideology + promise of eternal life ?

What could possibly go wrong in either case ?