The truth is not always or necessarily harsh and unpleasant!
The truth is always emotionally neutral. Its effects, not so much.
"greylorn:
However, your reply, if true, implies that God is an entity who chose to create and love a few billion incompetent, stupid little needy machines running needy programs who cannot follow his most basic rules, and have nothing whatsoever to contribute to the greater universe.
Don’t forget you are one of these items! It is not self-evident that they (we) are machines or that the vast majority are stupid or incompetent or that they all know his rules or have nothing whatsoever to contribute!
How can I forget? I look at my own ugly face every morning, spend part of the day cleaning up my mistakes and the rest of it creating new ones. I use myself as a model for the worst of humanity.
While it is not self-evident that we are machines, it will become objectively evident to anyone who studies a microbiology primer.
In a universe run by an omnipotent God Who can fulfill every one of His needs by a simple act of will, exactly what might a human being contribute?
As we get older we need to resist the temptation to become cynical and adopt a jaundiced view of humanity.
I began life in a childlike spirit of belief in good and hope for the future. My cynicism developed gradually, with everything I learned.
Had I learned cynicism and distrust of my fellows earlier, I’d have a lot more money, and maybe even all of my original parts. Perhaps when I become both old and senile, my hard won cynicism will go the way of my depleted neurons. .
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An amusing fantasy but it has nothing to do with Christianity.
I devised the fantasies to parallel Christianity. If you don’t see the connection, my paragraphs were incompetently written. That has happened before.
The question arises as to how you can be sure that your interpretation of God is superior to other interpretations.
Existing belief systems have many internal contradictions which their believers do not address. My ideas are internally self-consistent.
Since the time of Galileo, scientists and religionists have been acting as if there are two separate realities. My ideas allow for only a single reality which encompasses the idea of a Creator, the human “soul,” and the laws of physics in a perfectly integrated package.
Since Darwin’s publications, religionists and evolutionists have been squabbling over the causes of biological life. One of the difficulties which Christianity has had to deal with is why an omnipotent, omniscient Creator Who could have created life in a figurative finger-snap has been fussing with it, often changing His mind about the entire direction of the process, for well over 3 billion years. My ideas require such a long time span.
There’s more. But,so what? Good Christians value the words of ignorant old men over and above logical consistency and supportive evidence.
When all is said and done we believe what seems true, hope for the best and love ourselves and others.
You are speaking for yourself and perhaps for many wishful others; certainly not for me. I’m content to believe what can be shown to be true, have learned to expect the worst, and choose to treat others honestly whether I like them or not. Love is a costly emotion which I cannot afford, and would bankrupt me if I applied it to myself.
… don’t underestimate the capacity of even the humblest person. One of the wisest men I ever met was an uneducated Cuban gardener…
I guess if he wasn’t in Cuba when you met him, he was wise enough to have left. One of the advantages of having low expectations is that I am seldom disappointed, and occasionally delighted. My theories declare that genetics applies poorly to the human mind, or not at all, Therefore I am no more surprised to find the occasional glimmer of wisdom in common people than to commonly find greed, evil, and hypocrisy in the well bred.
