If God knows everything, then we do not have free will. Why does he create people

[JRLeft]

just to send them to hell? Why does he create evil, when he can create good only. Why not create joy and happiness for everyone instead pain and anguish for so many? Why not make life amazing for everyone? Instead he creates people to send them to the torture chamber aka hell.

How can anyone view this any other way but utterly evil?

[Hoppy]

1. He created people because he needs money in the collection basket.

WhatdafuxamatterU?

[JRLeft]

2. I've always wanted to know why he needs so much money.

On a serious note, why won't people think?

[uriel1972]

3. COMPLEX THEOLOGY!!!!1!!!!!

and hand waving... Nope, still not convinced.

[JRLeft]

6. Why does he create a guessing environment, either pick the right religion or go to hell.

Last edited Sun Dec 20, 2015, 09:34 PM - Edit history (1)

This is fucked up.

[Binkie The Clown]

4. If I were god and could make the laws of physics be anything at all...

I would have made the world flat and infinitely large in every direction so we always had more to explore, and more room and resources to support a growing population.

And I would have made gravity with constant velocity instead of constant acceleration so you could jump out of a 60 story building and not get hurt.

And I would have made the healthiest foods all taste like chocolate chip cookies and ice cream or whatever your personal preference are at the moment.

There's so many ways I could have done a better job of it.

[JRLeft]

5. If God was nice he would have made earth a paradise and allowed people to

live in happiness for eternity.

[whatthehey]

40. But he did

And then your damn great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandmother had to let a talking snake convince her to eat a quince and fucked it up for the rest of us however innocent, don't you know anything?

Note to lurking "sophisticated theologians" and their quisling enablers: A 2014 poll of 3000 Americans revealed 44% belived in a literal Adam and Eve. Since this is greater than 50% of the number of Christians in the US even if you, laughably, assume ALL Muslims and Jews believe in them, it is inescapable that it is the belief of most Christians.

[Arugula Latte]

7. There's a Grand Plan, ours is not to question, mysterious ways, blah de freakin' blah ...

[JRLeft]

8. Gawd I hate that answer, God killed my kid I guess it's all part of God's plan.

Every answer to things theist cannot understand is answered with it's all part of God's plan.

[Arugula Latte]

9. Yep, such bullshit. And then there are those who say things like

"Well, the reason your kid died was that s/he could teach others about appreciating life!" or some such nonsense. So, basically, this evil piece of shit deity makes sacrificial pawns out of certain people. And then there are the millions of babies who have been wiped out by famine and disease ... I wonder what they were supposed to teach other people?

Sick, sick, sick.

[JRLeft]

10. Yep, I always ask people about innocent baby deaths, and their response is

Last edited Sun Dec 20, 2015, 02:50 PM - Edit history (1)

if the parents were evil, they reap what they sow. The baby didn't do shit.

No one can explain to me why God creates people knowing they're going to be evil in order to send them to hell.

[Mariana]

43. There's Biblical support for that idea.

God killed David and Bathsheba's baby boy, slowly and probably painfully, because he was mad at David.

NIV 2 Samuel 12: 13 Then David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the Lord.” Nathan replied, “The Lord has taken away your sin. You are not going to die. 14 But because by doing this you have shown utter contempt for the Lord, the son born to you will die.” 15 After Nathan had gone home, the Lord struck the child that Uriah’s wife had borne to David, and he became ill. 16 David pleaded with God for the child. He fasted and spent the nights lying in sackcloth on the ground. 17 The elders of his household stood beside him to get him up from the ground, but he refused, and he would not eat any food with them. 18 On the seventh day the child died...

He tortured and killed a lot of innocent children (and adults) in Egypt, too, with the plagues, because he was mad at Pharoah, according to the story.

By the way, it's even worse than the way you put it. According to most flavors of Christianity I'm familiar with, landing in Heaven or Hell has little or nothing to do with behavior. People who have committed the most heinous acts can ask Jesus to forgive them and then they go to Heaven. People who spend their lives doing good, but who don't believe in Jesus go to Hell.

[JRLeft]

45. How sick of God do such a vile thing.

[Mariana]

47. That particular god has done a lot of vile things

according to the storybook. Even if someone believes that particular god is real, how can they love and worship a deity that has done so many terrible things? I really don't understand it at all.

[JRLeft]

49. That makes 2 of us.

How about baby smashing on rocks. Recommended by their mythical savior?

[CrispyQ]

79. The unforgivable sin is not believing in God. If you don't believe, you can't ask forgiveness.

It's fucked up. I spent a year in high school hanging out with the religious kids & I'm glad I 'saw the light' & got new friends the following year.

[mountain grammy]

24. Yeah like when I was 10 and someone said

God needed your dad more than you did...yeah right!

[JRLeft]

28. Why does God need anyone, he can do whatever he wants right?

Religion makes brilliant people sound ridiculous.

[awoke_in_2003]

54. My mother died on thanksgiving day 1981

I was 13. Nothing anyone told me any damned sense.

[JRLeft]

59. That's because no one actually reads the bible, and if they fid I believe most would become

antitheist.

[Binkie The Clown]

33. "Mysterious" means "This is nonsense, but I don't want to admit that even to myself." n/t

[JRLeft]

37. You there are a lot of people who have doubt, but choose to

believe out of fear.

[Curmudgeoness]

11. Great questions.

I got nothing.







That is unless you want to discuss how man created god in an attempt to explain all the things that we have to deal with in living.

[JRLeft]

12. The creators of religion have done mankind a huge disservice.

[Curmudgeoness]

13. No shit! nt

[JRLeft]

14. Religion is a plague on the planet, the sooner it is eradicated the better.

[Curmudgeoness]

15. Good luck with that.

All of us evil "new atheists" are working to make this a sane world without believed mythology. I understand the reason for religion back when it was conceived. They had nothing to explain the world and their place in it...why did volcanoes erupt, why did rivers flood, why was there a light show and big booms when it stormed? But today, with our knowledge and the knowledge that there is an explanation for everything, even if science hasn't figured it out yet, I don't get it.

[JRLeft]

16. That rationale still exists. If I can't explain, only God can.

SMFH

Those people were from the bronze age. They didn't know shit, but you can't get some believers to see this.

[Warpy]

36. Not necessarily

Monotheism will always have that problem, the one Epicurus set out so succinctly so many years ago.

Polytheistic religions didn't have that problem of squaring evil with an omnipotent good guy in the sky. They had gods and goddesses who were just as fickle and capricious in their behavior as human beings. Of course terrible things could happen, some god was having a bad day and took it out on you. Their stories were a hell of a lot more interesting, too.

[AlbertCat]

18. Great questions. I got nothing.

I have something!

If you eliminate god altogether, the mystery just disappears!

[JRLeft]

21. Agreed.

[Freelancer]

17. Read up on child abuse and it reveals a lot about religion.

When authorities show up to check on child abuse reports, usually the parent that the children are clinging-to and fawning over is the abuser. Similarly, when people personalize an almost entirely impersonal Universe that has hurt them, they see it as an abusive parent that all love and devotion must be heaped upon in order to stay its punishing hand. This relationship makes sense to the pre-rational mind. It's foundational -- like a big stone at the base of the mental edifice. That's why it's so hard to dispense with entirely, even when a person becomes adept at higher reason.

An almost entirely impersonal Universe is in motion. Sometimes we capitalize on it and sometimes we get in its way.

Take the God out of God, and there is plenty of wisdom to be gleaned from the old books (a lot of bullshit too, unfortunately (shrug)). Think of God as an old surfing instructor -- not the creator of the waves, but one adept at reading them -- who is willing to show you how to get up on a board and surf this impersonal Universe.

I try to keep that mental image whenever I'm forced to listen to scripture, or a benediction. It helps to keep my blood pressure down.

[AlbertCat]

19. Think of God as an old surfing instructor

Who's invisible and never says anything.... or does anything to help or hurt... and appears to be random.

[Freelancer]

31. LOL. Think of it as Chewbacca, or Jiminy Cricket if you like...

It's a way of relating and drawing upon the collective wisdom of mankind.

Whatever floats your goat.

[JRLeft]

23. I've heard the battered wife analogy.

[onager]

42. I've seen that expressed another way.

"Religion. The world's only business where the customers blame themselves for product failure."

[JRLeft]

50. That's the best one yet.

[Freelancer]

53. That's a good one. I'll use that someday. -- nt

[awoke_in_2003]

55. Perfect. nt

[trotsky]

62. That's a fascinating comparison.

And seemingly quite accurate. Curry favor with the abusive authority figure to spare oneself.

[AlbertCat]

20. Here's another good question....

Why would a god spend about 15 billion years creating a universe in which his chosen people cannot survive in 99.99999% of?

Hell, why create a planet for his Chosen Ones on which 2/3rds of they cannot live?

[JRLeft]

22. Maybe God was bored?

[Arugula Latte]

25. Yes, and why wait 14 billion + years

for the Earth to be formed, life to start on Earth, humans to evolve, and then -- poof -- pick some random poor virgin in Judea on one little planet in one little galaxy amongst billions and rape her and the kid that is born is the only magical human ever and seemingly the only magical life form in an entire universe of 100 billion galaxies.

I guess we hairless apes are certainly very special, as we've got the full attention of the creator/director of the entire universe.

[JRLeft]

29. When we anti-theists make sense, theists get frustrated and

remind us how we're going to hell. They forget their bible tells them not to judge people yet that's all theists do.

[Freelancer]

32. Maybe the closest thing to what we've called God is the living part of the Earth

Life began on Earth 3-4 billion years ago. After fits and starts, and mass extinctions, came awareness and then sentience billions of years after that. Not until around 6 million years ago did a constituent life form evolve that developed the capacity for rudimentary understanding (humans). It's just getting started.

[JRLeft]

38. Yep we are still evolving.

http://m.mentalfloss.com/article.php?id=30795

[arcane1]

26. "We're stooges for Jehova, he loves to knock us over"

It's revelation, revels,
Divine comedy (and more)
Please welcome your four hosts -
Death, famine, pestilence and war.

You say that we are all Gods' children, can you please explain -
How any father could inflict his children so much pain.
I'm sure he finds it funny - but I fail to see the joke,
I bet he'll piss his breeches when we all go up in smoke.

Life's one big disaster
I hear the sound of laughter
coming from the hereafter
(I find it kind of odd)

We're stooges for Jehova
he loves to knock us over
so if I die laughing it'll be an act of God!

Thunderbolts were once his style
It's now malignant tumours,
I wonder what he'll think of next
To test my sense of humour?

You said I must accept his will - that God will spare the weak,
I bet those tears aren't tears of laughter running down your cheeck -
When you are stood right there beside me (egg upon your face),
Your precious soul floats with the dust back home in outer space.

Life's one big disaster
I hear the sound of laughter
coming from the hereafter
(I find it kind of odd)

We're stooges for Jehova
he loves to knock us over
so if I die laughing it'll be an act of God!

[Arugula Latte]

35. "As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods. They kill us for their sport."

Gloucester, King Lear, Bill Shakespeare

[beam me up scottie]

27. Epicurus once asked the same things:

[JRLeft]

30. ^ right

Is God, evil, lazy, or does he not give a shit?

[NeoGreen]

34. None of the above, because...

...he does not exist.

[JRLeft]

39. Exactly!

[trotsky]

41. Here's a related one to ponder.

Do people have free will in heaven?

Supposedly, "free will" is such an awesome, important thing that we have to allow for people murdering and raping each other and disease and everything bad in the world just so we can have it.

But heaven is free from all those bad things, presumably. Otherwise we'd just call it "the other Earth you go to after you die here." So either:

1) It's possible to have free will without anyone suffering. The whole foundation of Christian theology is a lie.

or

2) People don't have free will in heaven. But since free will is the most important gift god gave us, how much of a paradise can heaven be if we aren't free to do what we want?

[onager]

44. I thought some Sophisticated Theology might help.

As I remember, all the Great Church Fathers used a lot of weasel-words and flummery when they talked about Heaven.

Vaguely remembered Augustine describing it as a place where the saved just "enjoyed the presence of God for eternity." Which sounds a lot like an eternal Baptist Sunday School to me. Which is about as appealing as an eternal skin rash.

Didn't find that, but here's one short sample of Augustine describing Paradise. The link is to his entire "Confessions." This is from Book Twelve, Chapter IX. It should clear up any questions about Heaven...chortle...:

9. And therefore the Spirit, the Teacher of thy servant,[470] when he mentions that "in the beginning thou madest heaven and earth," says nothing about times and is silent as to the days. For, clearly, that heaven of heavens which thou didst create in the beginning is in some way an intellectual creature, although in no way coeternal with thee, O Trinity.

Yet it is nonetheless a partaker in thy eternity. Because of the sweetness of its most happy contemplation of thee, it is greatly restrained in its own mutability and cleaves to thee without any lapse from the time in which it was created, surpassing all the rolling change of time. But this shapelessness -- this earth invisible and unformed -- was not numbered among the days itself. For where there is no shape or order there is nothing that either comes or goes, and where this does not occur there certainly are no days, nor any vicissitude of duration.

http://www.ourladyswarriors.org/saints/augcon12.htm

[Mariana]

48. It has been said that one of the great pleasures of Heaven

is to be had in watching the damned suffering in their eternal torment. That fits right in with the personalities of some Christians I have known, who become positively gleeful when they fantasize that all the people they don't like are going to Hell.

[JRLeft]

51. Watch people suffer like it's a TV show for God's enjoyment.

[trotsky]

63. Yup, I have met several of those kinds of Christians.

In old debates on Usenet and various BBSes, I'd try to appeal to a heaven-and-hell Christian via their own sense of morality. "How do you think it will feel to know that people you love are being tortured for eternity?"

The scariest response I got is that god would essentially "re-wire" their brains so that they would understand fully why the eternal torture was necessary, and that they would feel good knowing it was happening. In other words, the person *knew* it was an atrocious idea, but had "faith" that god would somehow make it OK by altering part of their human reasoning and morality.

[JRLeft]

65. Can you explain to me how, Jesus freaks cannot see how immoral their God is?

It's not like his immorality is being hidden, it's right there in plain sight. Their supreme leader gets pleasure out of atrocities. How could any worship such a God?

[trotsky]

66. It is all part of the "humans cannot comprehend the mind of god" nonsense.

It's a great meme because it's a natural reaction when confronted with something as WTF as eternal suffering to immediately question it. But with the "mind of god" bullshit, you can shelve those thoughts and reassure yourself that it makes perfect sense, you just can't possibly understand it... yet.

[JRLeft]

71. Turn a blind eye to the evil shit, in order to accept the religion as a whole.

[Mariana]

72. The ones who thinks it's fine and dandy now

with no re-wiring needed are a lot scarier, I think. They wouldn't just watch, they'd participate if they could. And they'd enjoy doing it.

[JRLeft]

74. Well they think it's find and dandy, because their fiction book

told them it was OK.

[CrispyQ]

80. Won't they all be surprised when they wake up on Riverworld!

Riverworld is a fictional planet and the setting for a series of science fiction books written by Philip José Farmer. Riverworld is an artificial environment where all humans are reconstructed.

After the last human has died, they are all reconstructed on Riverworld. You can't die, either. Well, you can, but you just get reconstructed again, on a different part of the world.

[edhopper]

46. The SyFy channel just did a series based on

Arthur C Clarke's Childhood's End.

spoilers...







Aliens come down and make Earth a Utopia. They do it with relative ease and ask for far less in return than God does. It makes you question why God can't easily do this as well.

They also bring a much nicer and more benign version of the rapture.

[JRLeft]

52. Sounds more realistic.

[OriginalGeek]

69. I liked it

One of the few things Syfy has done that they didn't completely Eff up.

I haven't bothered to look into it but I wonder if they just presented it and somebody else made it.

[BlueJazz]

56. I usually piss off weird believers when I tell them. "When this God stops somebody from..

...torturing, raping and murdering a 5 year old little girl somewhere, I might have a look at him/it."
"Until then, I'm too good to be associated with this disgusting thing"

[JRLeft]

57. You're moral compass is far superior to their God's.

[Iggo]

68. I like it.

[DetlefK]

58. Mysterious ways.

He has a plan. THE plan. And he's always right. So shut up.



But honestly, this religion was created about 4000-3000 years ago (IIRC, the earliest historically proven reference is King Salomo in ~800BC) by Bronze-Age desert-dwellers. Don't expect deep insights into the nature of the universe from there.

[JRLeft]

60. The Bible was written by primitive men.

[Act_of_Reparation]

61. The Argument from Free Will is as insipid as it is stupid.

So the argument goes: there is evil in the world because God gave man free will, and to enter the kingdom of heaven, man must choose to do so of his own volition. Sure, the universe is capricious as a result, but it shows God's not a dictator and that's just peachy.

It's bullshit.

As you note, God's omniscience and omnipotence are incompatible with free will. God created each of us with complete knowledge of the course of our lives; meaning he created each of us to a particular specification. Whether he exists within the timeline of the universe or beyond it, he knows events will play out to spec unless he intervenes. By refusing intervention, God ensures there is no course of action save that which he himself has created.

But the problems go much deeper than that.

Apologists claim God doesn't reveal himself irrefutably because people, endowed with free will, must choose to acknowledge his existence through faith. If we take that a step further and ask whether or not there is free will in heaven, the argument breaks down completely. If there is free will in heaven, God clearly can reveal himself to people without their choose and that people on Earth must choose is an arbitrary -- even cruel -- rule. On the other hand, if there is no free will in heaven, then free will isn't all that important to the happiness of mankind, and again, the rule is arbitrary.

As to evil that supposedly arises from man's freedom to choose: is free will so important to us that we should sacrifice the lives of innocents for it? Frankly, I think no.

Of course, there isn't any evidence (despite what a certain physicist might allege) that free will is actually a thing. A kind of limited free will affected by social and genetic determinism is much more likely given the evidence.

[Freelancer]

73. God was created by time traveling atheists sent back to save the future.

I'll explain. Just bear with me...

Surely, you know that there is always some convoluted way to explain why we can't be granted any obvious proof, or direct intervention by God in our problems. Well, after this, you'll be able to sleep soundly in your bed.

Know that this information came to me at a cost. While I was engrossed in these quasi-religious musings, in another room, my dogma was gnawing the legs off of my coffee table.

It was written,

> So the argument goes: there is evil in the world because God gave man free will, and to enter the
> kingdom of heaven, man must choose to do so of his own volition. Sure, the universe is capricious
> as a result, but it shows God's not a dictator and that's just peachy.
>
> It's bullshit.

Well, yes.

Unless God is like 'Sky Net' from 'Terminator' movies, and not fully assembled yet. Then it makes perfect sense.

> Apologists claim God doesn't reveal himself irrefutably because people, endowed with free will, must
> choose to acknowledge his existence through faith. If we take that a step further and ask whether or
> not there is free will in heaven, the argument breaks down completely. If there is free will in heaven,
> God clearly can reveal himself to people without their choose and that people on Earth must choose
> is an arbitrary -- even cruel -- rule. On the other hand, if there is no free will in heaven, then free
> will isn't all that important to the happiness of mankind, and again, the rule is arbitrary.<

In this 'incubating God' scenario, even though God is watching, he can't interfere, because he's just looking back at the moments leading to his own creation. Certain key moments in time have to remain 'fixed' (yep, that's from Dr. Who) in order for him to come into existence. To interfere too much would alter those fixed moments and result in a time paradox, another version of God, or no God at all (shudder).

People can't interact freely with God, in this scenario, because we are all moving parts in the Rube Goldberg machine that results in a particular future. Taking a selfie with God could mess everything up.

Since God doesn't really exist fully yet (gasp) from this viewpoint, and didn't create us, then he didn't bestow free will upon anybody. He simply relies upon the sons and daughters of ice age hunters to do what they do -- what they've always done from his perspective -- so that all the events leading to his creation come about.

There has to be conflict, though. What would a good yarn be without it? There has to be a rebel, rival, villain, or hero that is bent upon altering the timeline -- upon creating hell or preventing it. One or more sides bumping the timeline and God reaching back to seal the breach would account for all the supposed interventions in history.

It also explains the mass graves of angels and demons at Area 51 -- just kidding. Or am I?

> Of course, there isn't any evidence (despite what a certain physicist might allege) that free will is
> actually a thing. A kind of limited free will affected by social and genetic determinism is much more
> likely given the evidence.

Is this like the Schrodinger's cat box thing -- that until you root around with a plastic scoop, it exists in a state of abeyance between poop, and poop-less-ness? Since we're talking God and end times, would that make it es-scat-tology? (Oh, come on! How many times in a person's life do they get to make that joke?)

Semi-seriously, if we take this one step further -- which I am wont to do, and usually regret later -- God could be taken out of this scenario completely and the results would be the same. If time travel were weaponized at some point, you could have a particular version of the human future trying to safeguard its own timeline, pretending to be angels or gods when forced to interact with primitive peoples during their interventions throughout human history.

So, there you go... God is really a "great and powerful Oz" contrivance utilized by time traveling atheists sent back to save the future of humanity.

Ouch -- I think I tore my corpus callosum.

[JRLeft]

75. LMFAO!

[Freelancer]

77. Glad somebody read it, and had a little fun. Thanks! -- nt

[JRLeft]

78. That was hilarious, but it also shows how absurd the whole idea of religion is.

Theists cannot demonstrate God's existence, if someone ever does, that will be the day I believe. Since we all know that will never happen I will enjoy the one chance of life I have.

[mr blur]

64. You're asking the wrong people.

Try a couple of groups over. Mind you, if they don't ban you, they'll ignore you. Because, of course, there is no answer that makes any sense to anyone who isn't a deluded fantasist.

[onager]

70. And here's the perfect soundtrack for that visit...

<iframe width="640" height="360" src="

?feature=player_detailpage" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

[Iggo]

67. To.Fuck.With.Us.

Either that, or he doesn't exist.

One of those is way more probable than the other.

[JRLeft]

76. If you ask a theist he does indeed exist, the Bible is proof.