Why is God so mean?

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PJM said:
If God is Good and God is Love then how can God be so mean?
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I think my dog wonders that about me when I have to correct him for doing something he shouldn’t for his own good.
 
PJM said:
If God is Good and God is Love then how can God be so mean?
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Which part was He so mean: 1) When He gave you (and me) the gift of life or 2) When He sent His Son to die for your (and my) sense of pride and lack of charity so that you (and I) can have eternal life? 🤷 :confused:
 
PJM said:
If God is Good and God is Love then how can God be so mean?
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God has given us a gift of free will that makes us in His image and likeness. But, we are not God(s). We were taught that right off the bat in Genesis when God gave Adam a commandment not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

This was a type of covenant between God and humanity, and Adam and Eve violated the covenant. Note, that they were mortal beings even before the ‘original sin’ as we see that to live forever, they had to eat of the tree of life.

Part of God’s punishment was to exile them from Eden, because they had misused their free will. They were blocked from the tree of life.

To answer your title question with a question, why would people want to break the covenant with God? It’s beside the point, in a way. God’s action throughout history has been to renew the covenant with mankind as a free gift.

God reveals His punishments in history to remind us the consequences of breaking covenant with Him. wouldn’t you WANT to know this? His actions are against nations as well as against individuals to show us His earnestness and power. We are not the judges of those who were punished. Their earthly punishment may have been redeeming for some of them, who knows?
 
PJM said:
If God is Good and God is Love then how can God be so mean?
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God created us to “know, love, and serve Him in this world and be happy with Him in the next.” (Catechism) Now how mean is that? 😉
 
How can God be mean? Didn’t He give us beer, pizza and popcorn? 🍿:clapping:
 
=tonyrey;5308032]Your question implies that God allows His creatures to suffer unnecessarily. How would you prove that?
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So you don’t think that their is unnecessary poverty, sickness, pain and suffering?:hmmm:

Love and prayers,
 
Crumpy: in Psalm 82:6 God says, “I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.”

Attributing meanness to God is a necessary function of mistakenly beliving in the christianist version of an anthropomorphic God believed separate from Creation. Attributing such meanness is not different from attributing any other quality to God, especially personal relationship. God is neither mean nor not mean. Whatever you are extracting that from, PJM, is a product of your imagination. Meanness can only be attributed to a mind capable of choice and also sociopathic to the degree of its inability to percieving the “other” as Self. Or it can be the misinterpretation of an necessary act from the standpoint of immaturity, eg a child deprived of something it wants that may cause it harm.

Bindar Doondat, FZAP, Latin Rite
 
PJM said:
So you don’t think that their is unnecessary poverty, sickness, pain and suffering?:hmmm:

Love and prayers,
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“Mans inhumanity to man”.
Most of the suffering in todays world is inflicted by man on his fellow man. Poverty, suffering pain and even sickness, could be greatly alleviated if we were more socially concious of how our actions and inaction affects others, down the street, and on the other side of the world.
If you are refering to terminal illness, we are all born to die, and even Jesus suffered and died on the cross. John Paul II spoke on suffering, may be worth a google.
 
PJM said:
*Your question implies that God allows His creatures to suffer unnecessarily. How would you prove that? *
So you don’t think there is unnecessary poverty, sickness, pain and suffering?
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In more than fifty years of research I have never came across a feasible blueprint of a perfect world. The onus is on you to explain why poverty, sickness, pain and suffering are unnecessary.
 
tonsofquestions said:
I think one of themean things God did was intentionally harden Pharoah’s heart so that he would not let the Israelites go, and then used the fact that Pharoah wasn’t letting the Israelites go(which God had caused), as an excuse to unleash horrible death and destruction upon the Egyptians.
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God is love. If you oppose love, your heart naturally hardens through neccesity of your opposition.
 
PJM said:
So you don’t think that their is unnecessary poverty, sickness, pain and suffering?:hmmm:

Love and prayers,
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Well there of course pain and suffering but as to whether it is “unecessary” is another question. many of the Saints considered pain and suffering as a GIFT from God.

To really understand, however, you have to look at the larger picture. When we are talking about an eternity of happiness and joy with the Lord preety much everything that happens to us on this earth(other than following the Lord) is irelevant.
 
Please define “following the Lord” in other than relativistic terms?
 
Please don’t discuss interpretation of Sacred Scripture in the Philosophy forum. If you want to discuss God’s actions in the Bible please take the discussion to the Sacred Scripture forum. Thank you all.
 
=tonyrey;5312209]In more than fifty years of research I have never came across a feasible blueprint of a perfect world. The onus is on you to explain why poverty, sickness, pain and suffering are unnecessary.
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Why is their existence so prevelant?

Curtainly not eveyone in povery deserves to be in poverty.

And the same for serious illness, not everyone inflicted “are being justly” punished.

One understands the “cause” but what about “the effects?”
 
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