Big questions

[Eftwyrd]

Hi! I found this place tonight, and puttered around for a while before deciding to just jump in at the deep end.

To make a very long & weird story a whole lot shorter, I’m one of the many on the fence. I was baptized into the Church in 1987, and so I am “officially” Catholic… but I ended up going down other paths for a while, eventually coming full circle back to Catholicism. Almost.

I guess my belief in all of this is solid on nearly every front, but there’s still that final little gap between me and total acceptance… it seriously feels like I’m trying to hammer a round peg into a square hole. This is the point where I’m sure most would say to just take that last great leap of faith, but I’m just not quite able to.

To try to summarize all of the things that have been swirling around in my head for the last decade or so: I just cannot believe that the Christian God is a loving god. Belief in his existence? Sure. But belief in his benevolence? Eh…

Case in point: Hitler. And probably not in the way that you’re thinking! Forget the millions who died because of him: I want to know why his life went the way it did.

This is a guy who was at least technically Catholic himself. And surely, at at least one point in his unhappy life, he prayed for guidance/answers/etc. Long before the Holocaust, he was just a bum living on the street.

But apparently God’s response was “screw you, I need you to be miserable so that you can slaughter lots & lots of people so that Israel can be re-created”.

I’m sure that that’ll be a pretty unpopular comment, but if you believe in Christianity at all, then you believe that everything that has happened throughout history had to happen. After all, it’s not as though Jesus died “hoping” others would carry on his work… or did the Son of God flip a coin and hope for the best?

God knew how “the Jesus adventure” would turn out… he knew how the Bible would turn out… and he knew how his Church would turn out. He knew how everything would turn out. He’s God, isn’t he? He knew from before creation that I would be sitting here typing this… if you believe in an all-knowing, all-powerful God, that is.

So apparently Hitler was born to be screwed (and don’t try to dismiss him as a monster… monsters don’t sell pretty watercolors lol). Hitler was born to be a spectacular !@#$, and to make countless others suffer even more than he did.

My question, then, is this: when the Nazi death squads were sweeping across Europe, and God’s people were begging him for help, where was The Big Guy in Charge? As Christians were being mowed down or stuffed into cattle cars, was God taking a nap? And when the Soviets came back a few years later and “liberated” that part of the world from the Germans (ie horrifying oppression that lasted for decades), was God taking a “smoke break”?

It seems to me that God takes a lot of smoke breaks.

I’m not worried about the question of evil in the world necessarily… I’m just wondering if there’s any point whatsoever to believing in a god who presides over a world of such atrocities. Even in “civilized” America, we’re wiping out future generations via abortion… and then there are the colossal natural disasters… not to mention the delightful things happening now in Libya and other parts of the world. And the list goes on & on.

Why should we care, if we’re just another pawn like Hitler… or just another guy standing on a Japanese beach at the wrong time?

 

[HickmanJosh]

I’m not worried about the question of evil in the world necessarily… I’m just wondering if there’s any point whatsoever to believing in a god who presides over a world of such atrocities. Even in “civilized” America, we’re wiping out future generations via abortion… and then there are the colossal natural disasters… not to mention the delightful things happening now in Libya and other parts of the world. And the list goes on & on.

Why should we care, if we’re just another pawn like Hitler… or just another guy standing on a Japanese beach at the wrong time?

Hi i think i heard a Holocaust survivor say once about people asking where God was, he said something along the lines of “Where was humanity”

Yes theologically speaking God knew in the end Hitler would kill himself in a bunker in Berlin after ordering the deaths of millions, but didn’t God also know Judas would betray Him to the execution of His son, and yet God not only permitted the evil to occur but gave Judas every opportunity not to go through with it, any yet regardless God made it into something amazingly Good.

I think this does relate in a way to the problem of evil, why does God allow it to become so widespread, why doesn’t He stop it?

maybe because for every measure of Good that can be archived through free will there is a measure of evil that can be made.

as to the issue about weather or not God can be Loving, we have free will, why would an evil(or even non-good) god permit lesser beings like ourselves to have free will to reject or serve him, wouldn’t he be much more likely to want to keep existence all to himself, what would be the point in creating us in the first place, God by definition doesn’t need us yet we exist and we have the choice to chose him or otherwise,

hope this helps God Bless!

 

[JRKH]

Eftwyrd,
First off welcome to the boards…I think you will find a good bunch of folks here to help with some of your questions.
Second…Congratulations on being in the Catholic Church - even if you are having problems…We’ve all been there in one way or another.

Now to your question - which is about a loving God. It is a big question and one that is difficult to answer. Certainly I have no “big answer” to your “big question”. The “Why” of evil is a tricky one. Entire books have been written on the subject from various viewpoints. The “Why” of people choosing evil is simpler…They choose evil because they can. Because, like yourself, they question things and in their own personal cases they come up with the wrong answer…

Our Loving God granted to us Free Will. He did this for a very important reason. Because He wished that we would love Him freely, and not because we are “hard wired” in this way. Naturally Free will means that some will Love Him Some will reject him most will fall into the middle somewhere…
As a result of these choices, we live in a world populated by a range of characters from good to bad, and of actions, good and bad. This is simply the way of the world…
But the ways of the World are not God’s ways. For God’s ways do not stop at our finite time in this world but at the immenseness of eternity and the Joys awaiting those who Love Him. So likewise we should not be distracted or deterred by the evils we see about us, but instead, Live only for Love of Him who Loves us. To seek first the Kingdom. To love our neighbor as ourselves, for the Love of God.

Yes - Hitler was once a Catholic and even dreamed of the priesthood at one point as a child (I think many of us do that). But as he grew older he turned from the path of rightiousness and the evil one found in him the fertile ground of anger, resentment and hate. The evil one nurtured this and Adolf accepted it willingly.
So why was God silent during this? He wasn’t. But Adolf had closed his ears and hardened his heart to Love. Many others had done this same thing and satan and him minions had taken full advantage of this turning from God in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.
Yet - even in this, Good existed and persisted in the hearts of many and in fairly quiet places. So that, even with the great desolation of the 2 world wars, the killings and injutices, the mighty powers of evil, fascism and bolshivism finally fell and along with them a festering wound in the Christian body also fell. I speak of engrained, institutionalized, anti-sematism.

Now - much of the above is looking only at the world - and the very recent one at that. But let us look outside of the world. Let’s consider the problem from the perspective, not of finite human history, but from the infinite view of the Eaternal Soul and our God.
Yes, many people suffered. Many people died. What happened to the ose people who suffered and died? Were they not then judged - as individuals - before the Holy Throne? Did they not achieve salvation or condemnation on their own individual choices?
If one considers the great numbers of ninocents slaughtered, just in the first half of the 20th Century, can you not see how full and how strong the forces of God, of Holiness and of Love have become?
The Holy innocents who fall daily to the abotionists tools are comprising an army of immense size and dedication to life. All of this grows out of God’s Holy Love for us as well as His justice.

It’s easy to look at our tiny, finite world and ask of God - “Why Evil”. Jesus too lived in an evil time. A time of oppression. I time of death. A time of injustice. His mission, and our salvation, was to show us the way through such times. Not by grand gestures recognized by the world, but by simple Love and living out the faith. By remaining focused on the Kingdom of God. By even accepting suffering and death willingly for His sake and for the sake of our eternal souls.

As the psalmist says. Lift up your eyes to the heavens from whence our help comes.
Seek first the Kingdom of God.

I apologize for the disjointed nature of the above, but as I said, there is so much to consider in these matters.
I hope that something I have written will be of help to you on you rjourney.

Peace
James

 

[GEddie]

One thing we need to remember is that great historical events, though they may have one person at their head, are never created by that one person, but by the actions of thousands or millions.

As nasty as A.H. was, the Holocaust could not have happened without the thousands in the civil adnministration, the millions in the armed forces, the workers in physical production, etc. All of whom, if they did not agree with him, were willing to serve him for the sake of their country, or just their own neck. (And many did agree with him, because of the wrong turn their national life had taken.)

If AH had not had that following, he would have been just another nutcase in the shadows.

He acquired that following because of the wreck that German general society had become post WW1.

So the issue isn’t really “why GOD gave A.H. a hideous young life so that he could launch a Holocaust and the survivors would restore Israel,” but rather, “why did WW 1 begin, which caused entire countries to collapse and propelled him to the head of a hideous chapter in human history.”

And WW 1, of course, was not God’s doing. Like all armed conflicts, it was powered by HUMAN sinfulness taken to collective level.

ICXC NIKA.

 

[JRKH]

One thing we need to remember is that great historical events, though they may have one person at their head, are never created by that one person, but by the actions of thousands or millions.

As nasty as A.H. was, the Holocaust could not have happened without the thousands in the civil adnministration, the millions in the armed forces, the workers in physical production, etc. All of whom, if they did not agree with him, were willing to serve him for the sake of their country, or just their own neck. (And many did agree with him, because of the wrong turn their national life had taken.)

If AH had not had that following, he would have been just another nutcase in the shadows.

He acquired that following because of the wreck that German general society had become post WW1.

So the issue isn’t really “why GOD gave A.H. a hideous young life so that he could launch a Holocaust and the survivors would restore Israel,” but rather, “why did WW 1 begin, which caused entire countries to collapse and propelled him to the head of a hideous chapter in human history.”

And WW 1, of course, was not God’s doing. Like all armed conflicts, it was powered by HUMAN sinfulness taken to collective level.

ICXC NIKA.

You make some good points above. There were a large number of factors that led to A.H. and all the horrors of WWII.

The bottom line on A.H. as he relates to the “Loving God” that the OP is asking about is obedience. Adam and Eve gave away the Garden through disobedience to God and a rejection of God’s Love. Likewise, Hitler was made possible because of disobedience to God and a rejection of His Love…On the Part of Hitler himself, as well as many other people.

If we are obedient to God, if We Love Him above all else, then we need not fear suffering. We need not fear those who can kill the body but can do no more (Luke 12:4). Our Love for Our God may not save our mortal bodies from physical deathbut will certainly save our immortal souls from teh fires of Hell. The body will die eventually, regardless of cause or method or the sufferin that preceeds it. It is what happens after physical death that is what is true and speaks to God’s Love for those who Love him and are obedient to Him.

Peace
James

 

[Eftwyrd]

Thank you guys for the responses!

Yes theologically speaking God knew in the end Hitler would kill himself in a bunker in Berlin after ordering the deaths of millions, but didn’t God also know Judas would betray Him to the execution of His son, and yet God not only permitted the evil to occur but gave Judas every opportunity not to go through with it, any yet regardless God made it into something amazingly Good.

That’s an awesome comparison… I can’t believe I didn’t think of it myself! lol

I see what you’re saying… but ultimately, Judas could never have done anything otherwise. This comes back to the “coin flip” mention, as Jesus couldn’t have banked his entire theological legacy on a guy who might or might not have caused it to be fulfilled… so a Judas who remained loyal is a Judas who could not have existed in the Christian worldview.

Just imagine Jesus calling him out, and then Judas feeling bad enough to call off his plan… and ultimately not going through with it. Awkward! Or maybe Jesus would have prodded him into it, paying him off himself, or maybe even blackmailing him into it (“hey, I know you think you’re doing the right thing… but either get me killed or I’ll tell the others what you did to the punch bowl”). lol

I think it’s quite a bit more sound to believe that God created Judas to “fail”, in very much the same way that Hitler was “born to die”, as it were.

He wished that we would love Him freely, and not because we are “hard wired” in this way.

That’s a good point, but precisely one where I’d have to disagree: I absolutely believe that we are hard-wired a certain way. Hitler was pretty determined to burn the world, and that determination could never have been averted, any more than Judas ever had a choice regarding his own actions. They did precisely what they wanted to do, and without those actions, we would have an extremely different world… which is a possibility that just cannot jive with Christianity (no Jesus legacy in the one case, and no Israel in another).

The evil one nurtured this and Adolf accepted it willingly.

I just don’t believe he ever had a choice… not if God really knew how everything was going to turn out. When an ideology claims that fate is determined (as Christianity does, unless - again - you believe that Jesus really was just flipping a coin), then “free will” of any kind is just an illusion.

God is apparently moving reality from Point A to Point Z, whether we think we’re a part of The Grand Play or not!

So why was God silent during this? He wasn’t.

But that’s what I’m saying: he was certainly silent to those people who were being lined up in front of the trenches!

I had a Jewish friend who, it turned out, had not-very-distant ancestors who had either escaped the Holocaust or who had died in it. And finding that out really drove home the reality of that history for me: I can’t explain away that nastiness with “well, hey, God wanted Israel back, so tough cookies for your grandpa” to even one person, much less the millions & millions of others who will always wonder where else God could possibly have been during this!

One thing we need to remember is that great historical events, though they may have one person at their head, are never created by that one person, but by the actions of thousands or millions.

That’s very true… and all the more reason to believe that individuals never had a chance!

And WW 1, of course, was not God’s doing. Like all armed conflicts, it was powered by HUMAN sinfulness taken to collective level.

But that’s exactly what I’m saying: it was God’s doing, because he knew from before time began that it would happen… that people would be born simply to be thrown into that meatgrinder, just as surely as people are born every day to live under a bridge on meth until they die.

On a bit of a side note, I notice that people are eager to give God credit when good things happen… but not when bad things do. If trapped coal miners live, then praise God! But if they die… well, let’s find someone to blame (but never the guy who created the entire situation, along with everything else).

Hitler was made possible because of disobedience to God and a rejection of His Love…On the Part of Hitler himself, as well as many other people.

I can’t help but think that everyone is completely missing my point here.

If Hitler had a choice in the matter - had he been able to do anything else with his life - then God would be proven to not be in control.

As I stated before, it’s not like Jesus “hoped things would turn out right”… like there was a 50/50 chance that Christianity would exist, much less flourish! What Christian could possibly believe that?

Catholicism in particular is grounded in the idea that Jesus specifically founded his Church through certain people & certain means. At no point in the Bible does Jesus say “whew, I wasn’t sure if things were going to pan out for a while there!” He apparently picked a doofus like Peter because he knew - KNEW - that despite the odds, Peter would succeed.

Imagine if he had chosen Peter… but then this “first pope” decided to instead go and open a taco stand? I mean, if it’s all about “choices”, then why not?

Or maybe after that incident on the road to Damascus, Paul simply wrote it off in a modern way… “what a trip… I’d better get my meds tuned!” LOL

On a more serious, note, though: I can’t get into the whole judgement heaven/hell thing without this first being solved. I just cannot believe that lonely individuals like Hitler & Judas, praying for help, were just screaming into the wind because they were, in fact, simply born to die.

 

[JRKH]

Much of what you are writing above sounds very Calvinistic - predestination and total depravity. Which is not Catholic teaching. Calvinism denies free will. The Catholic Church embraces free will.

As far as what God knows one could consider it in a couple of different ways.
The first way is the Cavinistic way - A single timeline, God making people predestined to heaven or hell…etc. In this timeline God knows everything that is to happen and no one can change it.
But there might be another alternative that I never see mentioned.
That is that God knows the outcomes of ALL possible decisions we make with our free will.
Consider this. You as a parent let your child go out on a date but set a curfew of midnight. You explain that if he returns home late, there will be consquences. If on time there will be rewards…Nothing is hidden here. When the child leaves, you don’t know which choice they will make, but you DO know wht the results will be of the decision. The Child retains free will.
Under this kind of system, if Judas had not chosen to betray Jesus, little would have changed. the Leadership was determined to be rid of Jesus and would have found a way rather quickly. So the ultimate facts of the Crucifixion and Resurrection would not change. The only thing that would change is the text of the bible leading up to the arrest…

Another thing to consider in all of this is which perspective one takes. Even though God knows all, we do not…Therefore, we are not “Born to…” some destiny. We choose it. God does what he can but ultimately it is our choice to either Love Him or not.

As an aside - you are right. Knowing someone closely connected with some horrible event like the holocaust does put a new spin on things…It can take a while to work through.

Peace
James

 

[Eftwyrd]

I do see what you’re saying about Calvinism… but I honestly just can’t take Protestantism seriously, so… lol

The Catholic Church embraces free will.

I’ve broken this down into two possibilities:

1) God knows everything

• Jesus knew that Judas was going to betray him. I just don’t believe that it was a crapshoot. Unless maybe the Son of God was just throwing stuff at a wall until something stuck? It’s not like Jesus was going through his rolodex… “hey, wanna betray me? No? On to the next…”
• God knew the Holocaust would happen, precisely as it did

2) God is NOT all-knowing

• Jesus “knew” that Judas would betray him because… he seemed like a sleaze who would do anything for a few bucks? Jesus’ legacy, then, was just a bizarre roll of the dice that happened to turn out the way it happened to turn out
• God was as surprised by the Holocaust as we were. “Oh, Israel’s back? Well, that was unexpected!”

If you’re a Christian, then you must - by definition - believe that God knew/knows everything. Whether this is defined as “free will” (or the illusion of it, anyway) or “fate” is actually pretty irrelevant to me.

 

[limabeanerson]

I’ve thought about similar things a lot as well. I think most of us have. Free will is complicated.

I think in the case of Hitler though, he’s not destined to do what he did. He did what he did and then maybe God (with his irony in tact) chose to use these events to re-establish Israel. If Hitler would have made other choices maybe we still don’t have an Israel today and it comes about in a different way in the year 2087. who knows.

Similar thing with Judas. If he had not betrayed Jesus than the Bible would read another way with the same result. There were many people that hated Jesus at the time…

Here’s one way I’ve thought about free will and I recognize that its not perfect but it kind of helped me.

Yes, God knows everything that has happened, is happening and will happen. This does not remove free will. When I watch “Star Wars” on DVD I know exactly what will happen. I could recite the movie with out error. That does not mean I control the movie. That does not mean I chose the storyline. God put the metaphorical actors and directors in place with the ability to make any of billions of movies. He seems to be like a ‘silent investor’ that got the ball rolling and intervenes at time, usually in small ways, sometimes in larger ways but virtually always intervenes with in the “script” that we are writing with each of our decisions.

I know, not a perfect metaphor but maybe it will help you like it did me.

 

[fhansen]

Hi! I found this place tonight, and puttered around for a while before deciding to just jump in at the deep end.

To make a very long & weird story a whole lot shorter, I’m one of the many on the fence. I was baptized into the Church in 1987, and so I am “officially” Catholic… but I ended up going down other paths for a while, eventually coming full circle back to Catholicism. Almost.

I guess my belief in all of this is solid on nearly every front, but there’s still that final little gap between me and total acceptance… it seriously feels like I’m trying to hammer a round peg into a square hole. This is the point where I’m sure most would say to just take that last great leap of faith, but I’m just not quite able to.

To try to summarize all of the things that have been swirling around in my head for the last decade or so: I just cannot believe that the Christian God is a loving god. Belief in his existence? Sure. But belief in his benevolence? Eh…

Case in point: Hitler. And probably not in the way that you’re thinking! Forget the millions who died because of him: I want to know why his life went the way it did.

This is a guy who was at least technically Catholic himself. And surely, at at least one point in his unhappy life, he prayed for guidance/answers/etc. Long before the Holocaust, he was just a bum living on the street.

But apparently God’s response was “screw you, I need you to be miserable so that you can slaughter lots & lots of people so that Israel can be re-created”.

I’m sure that that’ll be a pretty unpopular comment, but if you believe in Christianity at all, then you believe that everything that has happened throughout history had to happen. After all, it’s not as though Jesus died “hoping” others would carry on his work… or did the Son of God flip a coin and hope for the best?

God knew how “the Jesus adventure” would turn out… he knew how the Bible would turn out… and he knew how his Church would turn out. He knew how everything would turn out. He’s God, isn’t he? He knew from before creation that I would be sitting here typing this… if you believe in an all-knowing, all-powerful God, that is.

So apparently Hitler was born to be screwed (and don’t try to dismiss him as a monster… monsters don’t sell pretty watercolors lol). Hitler was born to be a spectacular !@#$, and to make countless others suffer even more than he did.

My question, then, is this: when the Nazi death squads were sweeping across Europe, and God’s people were begging him for help, where was The Big Guy in Charge? As Christians were being mowed down or stuffed into cattle cars, was God taking a nap? And when the Soviets came back a few years later and “liberated” that part of the world from the Germans (ie horrifying oppression that lasted for decades), was God taking a “smoke break”?

It seems to me that God takes a lot of smoke breaks.

I’m not worried about the question of evil in the world necessarily… I’m just wondering if there’s any point whatsoever to believing in a god who presides over a world of such atrocities. Even in “civilized” America, we’re wiping out future generations via abortion… and then there are the colossal natural disasters… not to mention the delightful things happening now in Libya and other parts of the world. And the list goes on & on.

Why should we care, if we’re just another pawn like Hitler… or just another guy standing on a Japanese beach at the wrong time?

This is a world where the Master is essentially gone, for all practical purposes, where, according to the story of the fall, He exiled man from the garden-or man exiled himself-and in any case man’s will reigns instead of His. The Catechism teaches that we sort of prefer things this way, truth be told, at least until we come to our senses and ask God to be God again.

Meanwhile the human will, in order to have any significance, is radically free, with man exploring all the options this freedom allows for, for better or worse. The promise is that justice will reign in the end, good will be separated from evil, and God will provide peace and happiness beyond our imagination for those who choose good. Meanwhile we get to play god here on earth to see how well we’ll do the job, often with ugly results.

 

[danserr]

I just don’t believe he ever had a choice… not if God really knew how everything was going to turn out. When an ideology claims that fate is determined (as Christianity does, unless - again - you believe that Jesus really was just flipping a coin), then “free will” of any kind is just an illusion.

I just want to respond to this one part of what you say, that God knowing that something will happen means that everything is destined and there is no free will.

You actually have several options on ways around this; it depends on your understanding of God’s foreknowledge.

Simple Foreknowledge: You say “if God knows Hitler will do x, then Hitler is not free not to do x.”

• But there is another possibility. Instead of it being the case that “Hitler will do x because God knows that he will,” It could be the case that “God knows Hitler will do x because Hitler will freely choose to do x.” God’s foreknowledge does not determine Hitler’s action, rather Hitler’s freely chosen action determines God’s knowledge. God does not in any way cause the future, he simply foresees it.

Molinism God has middle knowledge. He does not know the future (the future does not yet exist), but he does know the present perfectly. Part of this means that he knows counterfactuals. ex. “If hitler loses his job, he will go into politics, if he goes into politics, he will become a Nazi… and so on.” God knows the present so well that his knowledge of these counterfactuals allows him to predict the future. But this does not mean that he foreknows the future and so he does not cause it.

Open theism- This view (which I don’t like because it seems contradictory to the Bible), says that God does not know the future at all. God is omniscent; he knows all truths, but the future does not exist, so obviously God can’t know it. In this case there is no issue of foreknowledge and free will.

God is outside of time- People live in time, we look forward to a future and backward to the past. But if you think of a timeline, God is not on the line; he is the page the line is drawn on. He is outside of time and sees all moments as the present. All moments are now to God. But then God does not “foreknow” our actions, he simply sees us doing them in his eternal now, and obviously seeing someone do something in the present does not cause him to do it. So human free will is protected.

There are a couple others. They are have their pluses and minuses, but you do have some options for views that you can take so that God’s foreknowledge does not interfere with human free will.

And because human free will is protected, this explains why God allows what happens to happen. Free will. He loves us enough that he did not want to create robots. He wanted sons who could freely choose to accept him and for this he had to create us free.

 

[YourAverageJoe]

Yes, God knows everything that has happened, is happening and will happen. This does not remove free will.

every morning I wake up I am at a intersection of endless choices, literally, we all are… I may choose not got to work, quit my job, cheat on my wife, abandon my family, take on drugs, abuse my kids, drink and drive, run a red light, drive like a maniac, lie to all those I love around me, buy a gun, commit murder, become selfish and alienate all around me, …literaly I have hundreds of choices thru free will, yet God knows the end result of each choice and consequence (predestination). Each one of these choices has a different end, and God knows all… I may die on my death bed at 80, with my family and grandkids around me, or I may be murdered tomorow because I chose to entangle myself drug dealers and prostitutes, or I may die of diabetes at 65, because i ignore the doctors advice and continue I drink a 12- pack of sodas daily… God wants me to make the right choice, however he will not force my hand…

Jesus always said, “have a change of mind” Why???
because he knew the path one was headed…so he asks, “have a change of mind”"

AH, had choices. He had free will.

 

[GraceDK]

Hi! I found this place tonight, and puttered around for a while before deciding to just jump in at the deep end.

To make a very long & weird story a whole lot shorter, I’m one of the many on the fence. I was baptized into the Church in 1987, and so I am “officially” Catholic… but I ended up going down other paths for a while, eventually coming full circle back to Catholicism. Almost.

I guess my belief in all of this is solid on nearly every front, but there’s still that final little gap between me and total acceptance… it seriously feels like I’m trying to hammer a round peg into a square hole. This is the point where I’m sure most would say to just take that last great leap of faith, but I’m just not quite able to.

To try to summarize all of the things that have been swirling around in my head for the last decade or so: I just cannot believe that the Christian God is a loving god. Belief in his existence? Sure. But belief in his benevolence? Eh…

Case in point: Hitler. And probably not in the way that you’re thinking! Forget the millions who died because of him: I want to know why his life went the way it did.

This is a guy who was at least technically Catholic himself. And surely, at at least one point in his unhappy life, he prayed for guidance/answers/etc. Long before the Holocaust, he was just a bum living on the street.

But apparently God’s response was “screw you, I need you to be miserable so that you can slaughter lots & lots of people so that Israel can be re-created”.

?

You are right.
But only if there is nothing that far surpasses every horrible thing that was suffered on this earth. We believe there is. There is a promise in the Bible that He will wipe every tear from our eyes. Can you imagine a place where the most horrible experiences become passified and even transformed by the most penetrating love, purity and joy.

You can’t live with evil in your God-universe. But Christ says: “Death where is your sting?”. We are called to believe in spite of what we see in this world. We are all a part of this mess. You might talk about Hitler… but how about the time where you made your mother cry with your thoughtlessness? How about when you didn’t give money to that beggar? How about the time where you dealt selfishly with a woman’s heart and broke it after you used her? What about all your hidden crimes?
As GK Chesterton said: The fact most easy to prove is original sin. We know it from our own lives.

Is it not benevolent that we are still held in existence by God with all our egoism?
When you see the shaved and starved walking towards the gas-chambers, are their hollow faces the last thing you see… ? As Christians we are called to see them as they are embraced by their angels above the chimneys. Death not not have the last say.

You ask: How can God be good if there is so much evil?
I ask: How can you expect good, if there is no good God?

God indeed placed the very need in you for justice, joy and love. If God was neither about right or wrong, we also would not know the difference and we would not see that one thing is good and high and another is low and bad.

So try to turn around your questions… ask your self: Why do I accuse God and ask Him to explain the presense of evil in the world, but I don’t ask Him to explain Joy?
You know… precisely in pain is joy felt as absent… but when we have joy we never demand pain…

Because we were created for joy and joy is our natural state… its evil that is the stranger, the enemy. Ask yourself how come, if the God who created us is evil or neutral.

 

[Eftwyrd]

I dig what you’re saying, Lima… I’ll put that in my pipe and smoke it for a bit…

This is a world where the Master is essentially gone, for all practical purposes

Exactly. The older I get, the more down with Nietzsche I am! lol

For the record, though, I could never be an atheist, for several reasons that I might or might not get into at some other point. lol

Meanwhile we get to play god here on earth to see how well we’ll do the job, often with ugly results.

And that right there is ultimately the reason why I want to believe… and not just in anything at all, but in Catholicism: I’m not interested in classic American “religion”, where rules/denominations come & go. As Ratzinger said, the worst atrocities in history happened precisely where Catholicism was rejected. It’s a very slippery slope downhill, once the serious Church is rejected: as we’ve seen, Protestantism & the Eastern Orthodox Church were both pretty powerless to stop such nifty ideas as Nazism & Communism.

It could be the case that “God knows Hitler will do x because Hitler will freely choose to do x.”

I 100% agree with that. I guess I’m just using a different label for the same thing.

For example: I had a friend for many years who made extremely predictable mistakes. Anyone who knew him for any length of time knew that he was going to keep screwing up again and again… and always in precisely the same way. And this was a smart guy, too: a Cornell grad no less! Not exactly trailer trash injecting something bad day after day.

Yet despite being in his mid-30’s, with all that education and experience under his belt, he put his career at risk (his own ultimate fear, by the way) to just keep following this primal pattern.

So I guess I’m saying that it could be considered “free will” to keep doing that… but only in the sense that a train has “free will” to stay on its tracks! Which I know seems silly, but I’ve seen this sort of thing pan out a million times.

God does not in any way cause the future, he simply foresees it.

But he must have caused it! How could anything escape the Creator of All? To me, that’s like handing Charles Manson a knife and some LSD, and then saying “but how could I know that he was going to run amok stabbing people?” lol Especially if I happen to be the one who created Charles Manson!

God has middle knowledge. He does not know the future (the future does not yet exist)

That’s actually a possibility a friend of mine brought up… but how can God still be God that way? Jesus spoke of the future, which he was presumably aware of: I mean, if it was foreordained that Jesus himself would appear, then isn’t it foreordained that the end of the world will happen in a similarly predictable manner?

I think I understand this point of view, but I just can’t believe that God would have a laissez faire attitude toward his own creation… that millions of people might get annihilated… or might not.

God is omniscent; he knows all truths, but the future does not exist, so obviously God can’t know it.

Yeah, I can’t dig that one, either. The guy who created time itself from absolutely nothing can’t see the future? Eh.

God is outside of time- People live in time, we look forward to a future and backward to the past. But if you think of a timeline, God is not on the line; he is the page the line is drawn on. He is outside of time and sees all moments as the present. All moments are now to God. But then God does not “foreknow” our actions, he simply sees us doing them in his eternal now, and obviously seeing someone do something in the present does not cause him to do it. So human free will is protected.

I totally dig that… but I’d come to the opposite conclusion.

I think it’s more than obvious that people are not capable of recognizing certain realities that are beyond our comprehension. I myself was involved in some serious neo-pagan stuff that led me to witness & experience things that are just plain impossible (I’m weird, but I’m not crazy lol), all of which is one more reason why I could never be an atheist.

But if God sees everything at once - which I guess is kind of how I’ve looked at these things anyway - then doesn’t he obviously see our future right in front of him?

Come to think of it, that possibility makes everything look really bleak. LOL I mean, forget “fate”, we really are just an ant farm… and the ants were all precisely programmed a long time ago!

every morning I wake up I am at a intersection of endless choices, literally, we all are… I may choose not got to work, quit my job, cheat on my wife, abandon my family, take on drugs, abuse my kids, drink and drive, run a red light, drive like a maniac, lie to all those I love around me, buy a gun, commit murder, become selfish and alienate all around me

An old friend of mine became a Protestant for exactly those reasons: he saw his life spiraling, and really didn’t like who he was becoming. So while I disagree with him theologically (to put it lightly), I also don’t want to debate it with him… because he really is a happier and more stable person now.

Ironically, I’m fully aware that thinking about these things may very well make me the idiot!