That was the answer. ‘It’s better to have lived and suffered than to never have lived’. It’s been used many times. Not as a positive argument for life but as a way to dismiss suffering. Just take it to a logical extreme and see where it takes you.
In the atheist worldview, nothing beyond this temporal life is of consequence. In the Christian worldview, the way we choose to live our temporal life determines our eternal life. Our view incorporates the evil of suffering in this life as a means to sanctification in the next. In the atheist’s view, suffering is anathema, i.e., the ultimate evil to be avoided at all costs.
That’s not what believers believe, so how can that be hypocrisy?goout:
It is the exact opposite. IF there is a God, he is responsible for EVERYTHING, both the good and the bad. And the believers wish to give praise for the good, and deny the responsibility for the bad. That is the problem, and hypocrisy.
Having children is selfish? I’m confused.goout:
To whom? My parents? My wonderful parents realized that having children is selfish. They gave everything to me, love, help, teaching, whatever was within their means. And I was grateful for it.
Well, you don’t understand Catholic theology.goout:
But that is what they profess. God is all good, everything that is good comes from God… everything that is bad comes from the original sin and Satan. As if Satan would be free to act against God’s will… As if God did not foresee the disobedience and allowed it to happen.
With ultimate power comes ultimate responsibility. The fundamental problem for you is that you deny the equivalence between “actively doing something” and “passively allowing something”. Until you realize that there is no difference, you cannot be taken seriously.
What point?
He doesn’t but you do.
Who is innocent? Pain is physical sensation. Suffering is a state of the rational mind.
? Not by me.
And you also don’t understand what mystery means in Catholic theologygoout:
I understand what they SAY, and see the irreconcilable contradiction in it.
This is the dead giveaway. To re-classify something contradictory as a “mystery” simply does not work.
If free will is truly free within a given set of circumstances, then God cannot know a creature’s will in those circumstances unless the creature actually exists. I believe this is the Molinist interpretation, which is within orthodoxy.
Nope. Never claimed that.
Yes, you are.
And again, I did not claim, " it’s all an illusion."
Sure I do. If I study I pass. If I don’t most likely I won’t. Do your homework.
God sets the standard but you decide. See Exodus 20:1-17 and Matthew 5.
Yes, an all-good God wills to share his divinity with creatures made in His image – creatures able to know him and freely willing to be with Him. God is love. Love desires union. If you do not want to be with God then, as an all-loving God, He must accept your decision to not love Him.
God cannot create an unnatural world;
That’s only a question I could answer if I was a theist. Any atheist posting here is not saying ‘this is a problem’. They are saying ‘this appears to be a problem for you guys - how do you reconcile it?’
As I said upstream, natural ills that befall us can be written off as just that: Natural ills. The earthquake, the tsunami, the falling tree.
I think in Genesis the implications of The Garden of Eden, before the first sin, was that all creatures were vegetarian or didn’t even need sustenance and lived in peace. With the first sin man/woman needed animal skins to cover their nakedness and to protect against the elements. Also creatures became carnivores.