Why is God so mean?

[PJM]

=estesbob;5313377]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.

Do I understand your position correctly? Personal opinion justifies widespread and seemingly indiscriminate suffering?

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.

Even if I believed that and I don’t, [so personal choice is irelevent?] it does not explain World wide poverty, widespread health issues, like cancer for exaple. Sure some folks offer it up, to their benefit, but what about everyone else? WHY!

 

[tonyrey]

Why is their existence so prevalent?
Certainly not every one in poverty 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?”

Even the archsceptic David Hume recognized that natural evil is inevitable in a universe governed by physical laws. Disease, deformity, death and disasters are bound to occur as the result of unfortunate coincidence. But poverty, pollution, malnutrition, inequality and injustice are caused by moral evil - the abuse of free will.

 

[PJM]

=tonyrey;5313700]Even the archsceptic David Hume recognized that natural evil is inevitable in a universe governed by physical laws. Disease, deformity, death and disasters are bound to occur as the result of unfortunate coincidence. But poverty, pollution, malnutrition, inequality and injustice are caused by moral evil - the abuse of free will.

So if I agree with your view, a “just God” should only afflict those who deserve it?

 

[4Horsemen]

God is merciful. In fact, He is Divine Mercy itself. He created a perfect world, but sin entered into the world because the creature chooses to be independent of the Creator. His children chose to use their free wills to learn the nature of good and evil (eating of the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil”), which God forbade. When that happened, the world of perfection was lost (Garden of Eden) to an imperfect world in which we are wanderers trying to find the way back to the Garden, back to God, or choosing to live apart from Him.

Consequently, evils beset us from all around–from natural disasters to man-made. All of our choices have effects, some neutral, some for good and some for evil. They reverberate down through the ages. Only God, in His Mercy, can bring good out of evil. Only He can change history, which He did by becoming one of us to show how much He loved us. He wants His Christians to remake the world looking towards the New Jerusalem. He not only intervened in the history of mankind, but he is in our own lives in very personal ways.

 

[estesbob]

Do I understand your position correctly? Personal opinion justifies widespread and seemingly indiscriminate suffering?

Even if I believed that and I don’t, [so personal choice is irelevent?] it does not explain World wide poverty, widespread health issues, like cancer for exaple. Sure some folks offer it up, to their benefit, but what about everyone else? WHY!

If I came to you when say you were 5 years and told you that sometime in your life you were going to have one hour of pain and suffering and the rest would be a livf of unlimited joy and hapiness would you compalin about the one hour of pain? Would you wonder why i was so mean?

 

[KyivAndrew]

If God is Good and God is Love then how can God be so mean?

Perhaps this question was phrased improperly but, in the interests of cutting to the core, what exactly do you mean by God being mean?: (you’ve hinted here and there)

1. that there is suffering in this world in which the innocent suffer and for this God is strictly responsible?
2. that there was and is evil in this world, Communism, Nazism, and that God’s “meaness” is responsible for this?;
3. that there are natural disasters in the world, irrespective of the gift of freewill, and that this too is caused by God’s meanness.

Please specifically what to you is the biggest example of God’s being mean?

In one post you claim: "One understands the “cause” but what about “the effects?” The effects, what “effects” do you mean and what do you understand to be the causes (you did not specify) as you’ve just explained you understand the causes. What “effects”. I’m just trying to make logical sense of how you’re approaching your own question. God Bless.

 

[Baloo]

If God is Good and God is Love then how can God be so mean?

This is what I think of God as similar to when people say things like this, a school teacher.

Teachers may SEEM mean, they give you lots of homework and tests, they punish you for talking in class or for roughhousing, and sometimes they may even be sometimes downright angry. But there’s always one thing that the teacher has in mind, and that is to help you learn. The teacher takes punishes you so that you may learn a lesson, and that you may learn more from your lessons. They’re preparing you for the life ahead of you, for the world out there. God is doing the same thing with suffering. To some people, it may seem mean that God has all this suffering in the world today, but really, he is preparing us and forming us, that we may turn to him in the time of need. The sufferings may be to teach us a lesson, just like the school teachers do when they give out punishments. God helps us get through life.

So for some people, God may SEEM mean, but he is really truly loving and caring, and is always looking out for our best interest, to make us the absolute BEST people that we can be. Remember this, if God ever stopped thinking about you for one SINGLE second, then you would not exist. God is always thinking about you and caring about you, every single moment of everyone’s life. God is pure love, and he’s always loving you.

 

[PJM]

=estesbob;5314778]If I came to you when say you were 5 years and told you that sometime in your life you were going to have one hour of pain and suffering and the rest would be a livf of unlimited joy and hapiness would you compalin about the one hour of pain? Would you wonder why i was so mean?

Would the answer not depend on why “I” out of all of humanity was selected for “five minutes” of suffering, and you, and you, and you were not?

 

[estesbob]

Would the answer not depend on why “I” out of all of humanity was selected for “five minutes” of suffering, and you, and you, and you were not?

There are lots of fallacies in your poistion. oOe is that being in poverty or suffering equates with being unhappy . The other is that being well fed and well off leads to hapiness. Neither is true,

 

[anEvilAtheist]

If I came to you when say you were 5 years and told you that sometime in your life you were going to have one hour of pain and suffering and the rest would be a livf of unlimited joy and hapiness would you compalin about the one hour of pain? Would you wonder why i was so mean?

I would not complain at all. But that still wouldn’t make you omnibenevolent.

 

[anEvilAtheist]

Even the archsceptic David Hume recognized that natural evil is inevitable in a universe governed by physical laws. Disease, deformity, death and disasters are bound to occur as the result of unfortunate coincidence. But poverty, pollution, malnutrition, inequality and injustice are caused by moral evil - the abuse of free will.

If God made the natural laws, he could have made them whatever he wanted (he would not have been constrained by the way matter behaves in our universe). He could have made the world the same as it is now, except without any natural disasters.

 

[anEvilAtheist]

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.

I still think that someone who inflicts unnecessary pain cannot be omnibenevolent, regardless of what he does afterwards. By your logic, God could sadistically torture someone without justification for as long as he wanted, even trillions of years, and as long as he put them in a place of eternal happiness afterwards, he would still be omnibenevolent. I disagree.

 

[PJM]

There are lots of fallacies in your poistion. oOe is that being in poverty or suffering equates with being unhappy . The other is that being well fed and well off leads to hapiness. Neither is true,

Very GOOD answer

But with millions in each catagory, I suspect “my truth” is closer to The TRUTH? Why?

 

[estesbob]

I still think that someone who inflicts unnecessary pain cannot be omnibenevolent, regardless of what he does afterwards. By your logic, God could sadistically torture someone without justification for as long as he wanted, even trillions of years, and as long as he put them in a place of eternal happiness afterwards, he would still be omnibenevolent. I disagree.

I didnt know God inficted unecessay pain?

 

[anEvilAtheist]

God is merciful. In fact, He is Divine Mercy itself. He created a perfect world, but sin entered into the world because the creature chooses to be independent of the Creator. His children chose to use their free wills to learn the nature of good and evil (eating of the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil”), which God forbade. When that happened, the world of perfection was lost (Garden of Eden) to an imperfect world in which we are wanderers trying to find the way back to the Garden, back to God, or choosing to live apart from Him.

Consequently, evils beset us from all around–from natural disasters to man-made.

God is supposed to be omniscient, so he would have known that they would eat from the tree of knowledge. When he created the world, and the tree of knowledge, he knew what would happen and so, since he’s omniscient, must have intended for us to suffer. There must be some justification for this suffering. But I think most of the common justifications fail. For example, why couldn’t God have just created all of us in heaven? You might say because we must freely choose God over the course of our lives on earth, but I have a number of problems with this. For one thing, babies who die have not had the opportunity to decide whether to follow God. If he lets them into heaven, why can’t he let everyone into heaven? If he sends them to hell, how can God be good in a meaningful way?

 

[anEvilAtheist]

I didnt know God inficted unecessay pain?

I was merely refuting your statement which seemed to argue that it didn’t matter whether God did.

 

[anEvilAtheist]

I didnt know God inficted unecessay pain?

But I do think that if someone suffers a horrible painful death all alone and ends up in hell, their suffering before death was unnecessary.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

anEvilAtheist

*If God made the natural laws, he could have made them whatever he wanted (he would not have been constrained by the way matter behaves in our universe). He could have made the world the same as it is now, except without any natural disasters. *

Well, I suppose if He wanted to avoid unhappiness altogether God could have decided not to create the universe. But He didn’t. Those of us who believe in Him are glad that he didn’t. Those of us who don’t believe in him, have no alternative but to think the universe with all its natural disasters is an evil horrible no-good-for-thing black hole. First you suffer, then you die, then you are swallowed up in nothingness.

How’s that for benevolence?

Yet, if I am not mistaken, you worship :bowdown: Nature? I have never known an atheist who didn’t.

 

[anEvilAtheist]

anEvilAtheist

*If God made the natural laws, he could have made them whatever he wanted (he would not have been constrained by the way matter behaves in our universe). He could have made the world the same as it is now, except without any natural disasters. *

Well, I suppose if He wanted to avoid unhappiness altogether God could have decided not to create the universe. But He didn’t.

Or he could have created a universe with just as much good, and less evil.

Those of us who believe in Him are glad that he didn’t. Those of us who don’t believe in him, have no alternative but to think the universe with all its natural disasters is an evil horrible no-good-for-thing black hole.

By my understanding of cosmology, the universe is not considered a black hole. Also, you say it’s evil, but I thought Christians thought that without God there could be no such thing as good and evil. Some atheists think that objective morality can exist without God and some don’t. In either case, I think the universe itself is morally neutral. The universe is not an agent who wants to help or harm individuals.

First you suffer, then you die, then you are swallowed up in nothingness.

I thought the apologetic argument was that some suffering is necessary in order to fully enjoy and appreciate the good. To some extent I agree with this. At least without God, I think it would be impossible to always have everything go perfectly and to be happy. If I won every single lottery, and nothing bad ever happened, and everyone treated me like royalty, I do not think that would be true happiness. I do not think that people like kings, who can have whatever they want, appreciate it. However I certainly don’t think the children in Africa need to live in a constant state of near starvation in order to appreciate the rare happy moments, nor do I think that someone has to die a slow and painful death in order to appreciate the last moments with his family. I am lucky in that I have experienced happiness, and while I have suffered, it has not been the most extreme kind of suffering that some people have had to face.

I also am not saddened by the fact that I will one day die. After thinking a long time about it, I have realized that death is part of what gives life its value. If we lived forever, then there would be no incentive to work hard since we could put everything off until tomorrow. We could relax and have fun for the first billion years of our lives and then do everything we wanted to accomplish. And if we stopped slacking off, we could master every single skill and try every single job within the first trillion or so years. Infinity is a long time, and at some point we would have learned and done everything it is possible to learn and do in our finite universe. There would be no success and failure, because any success would eventually have been achieved anyway, and no failure would cost you anything. I would consider such a life much worse than the one we lead. So I really hate the fact that one day I will die, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. And I realize that I have a really exciting life ahead of me and I will treasure every minute of it.

How’s that for benevolence?

Yet, if I am not mistaken, you worship :bowdown: Nature? I have never known an atheist who didn’t.

No, I do not worship nature. I don’t worship anything. I’m curious about why you assume that we have to worship something.

 

[tonyrey]

But I do think that if someone suffers a horrible painful death all alone and ends up in hell, their suffering before death was unnecessary.

You are assuming pain, death and solitude are directly inflicted by God. Even the archsceptic David Hume recognized that God is not the cause of evil, either moral or natural.