Christians, Prove Your God Is Good

[Cyberman]

Where are you getting this stuff?

[Nope]

No matter what we believe in, being real or not, as long as it makes us happy and doesn't hurt others, there is nothing wrong in that belief. If that belief also makes us a good person, then again there is nothing wrong in that, I hear all the time atheist who are miserable and even afraid of death, this is because they have missed the boat, they have thrown the baby out with the bathwater, their lives are dry, no poetry, no mystery about the world, just knowledge that they worship.

Do people that voluntarily come on this forum not understand that it is set up to debate? Debates might get heated but no one is forced to take part.

In my off line life, I rarely discuss religion with others except to encourage them to take more a more progressive view such as accepting evolution.

Being religious is the default position in many places. That means that when religious people try to convert someone to their way of thinking or go unasked into foreign countries no one wonders why the theist don't leave those people in peace. When atheist do the same thing, apparently even on an atheist forum, they are being jerks.

Depression is a chemical imbalance of the brain. One of my father-in-law's family members committed suicide and she was religious. Several of my family treated their depression with alcohol. They are all religious southern Baptist but they couldn't pray away their disease. My son is in therapy for depression. We admit he has a problem and so he is getting help With or without religion, he would have issues

No of this addresses how Christians can prove their god is good.

[watchamadoodle]

...
Of course there is still a big difference. Usually the victims of genocide are helpless militarily.

No, this is inaccurate. The reason I say that is because while death from aerial bombardment is random and (as in the case of US firebombing of Japan) that bombardment is aimed at hampering the enemy's economy (through destruction of factories, homes housing workers, or entire swathes of cities), genocide is specifically aimed at a targeted population, with a systematic mechanism in place to do that population to death.

LeMay most likely committed war crimes, and the nuclear attacks were not the worst ones. In early March of 1945, around 300 B-29s each carrying 4.5 tons of incendiary bombs attacked Tokyo. The pathfinders for that force marked the target by fire-bombing an "X" on the city center with each leg a mile long. That was as precise as it got: X marks the spot. Subsequent American bombers flew in as low as 8,000 feet scattering cluster bombs containing 1,600 incendiaries per bomber. The city was burnt out, and over 85,000 people were killed -- the biggest casualty list of any single bombing raid, including both atomic bomb attacks.

That, however, is not genocide, in the sense that while we Americans were happy to kill copious amounts of Japanese, we weren't aiming to exterminate them as an ethnicity, nor did we have a system in place to ensure that end. Americans didn't kill Japanese with the intent to wipe that ethnicity off the face of the Earth. We killed Japanese in order to win the war. Once the Japanese surrendered, we stopped killing them.

There is a clear difference between war and genocide. Learn it.

Yes, that is another difference - probably more significant from a legal perspective than the difference I mentioned.

[Drich]

[The Reality Salesman01]

Your god is a fiction, a sex toy you use to masturbate.

I used to work in sales. I had a boss who used a term "mental masturbation". He used it to describe to things you say during a sales pitch that have no contractual obligation, but they make the person "feel good" about what you're offering. When he'd see us doing it in practice, he called it "Stroking". Such as "Ha ha, I heard you talking to that guy over the phone yesterday, you were stroking the hell out of him to get that done!" This sort of reminds me of another application. I think GC is trying to stroke the hell out of us.

---

Where are you getting this stuff?

I see the lord!!!!

[Nope]

Drich, what does any country's actions, no matter how heinous, have to do with the question about whether your god is good? If you want to start a thread on the atrocities any country has committed, please do so but it seems like on this thread you have found a way to participate in the thread without answering the original question.

You are a Calvinist. Do you even believe your god is good? I thought it was all about power with Calvinsts and not whether god was good or loving

[robvalue]

The thing I find stupid is when people say that "good" is "whatever God is and does". So when they then say God is good, they are saying God is God. Indeed. How could he not be?

Why use the word "good" in this instance? Any other word would be just as meaningless.

[Ignorant]

This sounds very similar to what I saw in the Catholic Encyclopedia. How do you define "happiness/human fulfillment"? If we can't define those terms then we haven't defined "good".

Happiness/human fulfillment is the satisfaction of all human desire.

Well, I was trying to encourage you to offer a definition. "Is this what you mean?", "Is that what you mean?", ... Sorry if you misunderstood my intentions as hostile.

Not hostile, they seemed evasive. Usually, when people are already speaking quite freely and certainly that some thing "is good" or "is not good", you would expect them to have at least a rudimentary understanding of what they mean by those words. When you didn't offer an explanation, it was curious to me.

Do you have any definition or explanation to offer?

[Nope]

I must have missed it. Did you answer my questions, Ignorant? Also, you have been given several explanations of what is good.

Unless you are a Calvinist, the Christian god is supposed to be all good so it should be easy for a Christian to define good. Don't worry, we will probably have some basic agreement.

[Esquilax]

Educate yourself before you speak.

Oh no, my irony meter!