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Why were 42 children slayed by the bears for saying Elisha was bald?
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Benadam
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God is bigger than you.
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Spyridon
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Thank you for the obeisance. Now come, kiss my sacred foot.Yes your Holiness
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Curious11
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So is Godzilla. He’s still fictional
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Curious11
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Ah yes, context. God’s plan was fulfilled. No more intervention was necessary. I’m sure the people that were being gassed at Auschwitz were relieved God had saved Elijah and not them.
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Curious11
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More of the same. God is infinite, he has a cosmic plan!
Seriously? What plan is that? Allowing children to die of bone cancer every day fulfills his plan? Seriously?
Are you telling me you are so unbelievably arrogant, you’ll accept literally anything God does without using your logic to see what it’s about? And dismiss any attempt to challenge that notion as irrelevant since it comes from a human? In other words, nothing could ever happen that could lead you to question God
So God is the origin of morality, but he can do anything he wants and it will be good because he does it. How then, is there objective good? God breaks his own commandments all the time, just because he’s God he can’t be held accountable?
Seriously? What plan is that? Allowing children to die of bone cancer every day fulfills his plan? Seriously?
Are you telling me you are so unbelievably arrogant, you’ll accept literally anything God does without using your logic to see what it’s about? And dismiss any attempt to challenge that notion as irrelevant since it comes from a human? In other words, nothing could ever happen that could lead you to question God
So God is the origin of morality, but he can do anything he wants and it will be good because he does it. How then, is there objective good? God breaks his own commandments all the time, just because he’s God he can’t be held accountable?
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Spyridon
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It’s pretty clear from you’re words that you’re a misotheist, not an agnostic.
An agnostic person wouldn’t be expressing the hatred for God that you are. And please, spare me of your excuses why you “can’t hate what you don’t believe in” - it’s pretty clear you hate God. At least have the decency to be honest with yourself and others, and admit you’re a misotheist.
An agnostic person wouldn’t be expressing the hatred for God that you are. And please, spare me of your excuses why you “can’t hate what you don’t believe in” - it’s pretty clear you hate God. At least have the decency to be honest with yourself and others, and admit you’re a misotheist.
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HarryStotle
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Look, either God exists and is the Creator and Sustainer of all that exists or God doesn’t exist and there is no inherent purpose, plan, or, ultimately, any significance to what happens around us.
You brought up the Holocaust as if it is a damning piece of evidence against God. Is it, though?
Consider the point that if God doesn’t exist, all that brutality that was suffered by those undergoing it during the Holocaust will, ultimately, not have any reason at all. Just empty, meaningless suffering.
The only possibility for bringing any kind of meaning (and justice) to the suffering of those who underwent the horrors would be if an infinitely good God does exist and the pain and anguish ends up being meaningful in ways that we may not even be able to imagine.
And I am not talking about mere retribution, here. I am talking about something in the suffering itself that is redemptive and realizes some unfulfilled ontological purpose, just as the suffering undergone by Christ brought about some greater reality that only obtained because of it.
To abandon that, is simply to say the Holocaust and all the suffering undergone by those who lived through it was inherently meaningless and without any purpose or value.
That is, by the way, a moral judgement on your part because you are imposing a certain moral judgement about reality upon reality without knowing for certain the full nature of reality.
Actually, I fail to see how your “logic” isn’t the arrogant one since you are so absolutely certain about your conclusions that you can “literally” not accept any other possibility vis a vis the nature of the moral landscape than the one you impose upon it.
What I am saying is that we are in no position to make absolute judgements about what God can or cannot do precisely because we are not properly positioned to have certainty regarding the whole moral enterprise.
Certainly, we can and should govern and assess our own moral actions since based upon what we do know we can make appropriate choices and act accordingly. But extrapolating from what we do to what God ought to do is, in fact, arrogant.
If “questioning God” is merely a placeholder for questioning the very nature of morality such that morality itself is undermined and becomes a meaningless enterprise, then yes nothing could lead me to question God because questioning God implies kicking out from under morality itself the underpinnings of any moral order.
Continued…
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HarryStotle
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Non sequitur. If God is the origin of morality then it behooves us to reconcile the events going on around us in a way that is not a facile dismissal of the foundations of morality itself.
Certainly it is possible to claim that morality is merely what we ourselves think to be true about the way reality ought to be, but that immediately runs into massive obstacles. The first – but not the only one – being that there is no inherent meaning or value that can be derived simply by observing the world around us. Nature, being red in tooth and claw, certainly does not provide a consistent basis for developing a sound moral ethic.
Second, if morality is subjective to human beings and the physical universe is all there is then human behaviour is caused and not governed. There is no sense to be made of a morality that is simply the end product of a long deterministic causal order. It cannot be prescriptive except in some illusory sense.
Value, especially moral value, needs to be applied a priori, and by voluntary intelligent agency, so it must be grounded in some ordered view or other and not in a mechanistic universe. If you move to dismantle the absolute and obligatory nature of moral responsibility – the absoluteness of which is not in our hands to create or fabricate – then you rapidly descend into an abyss of subjectivity which blows away morality itself, since all that remains is a causal, physical and material universe without purpose and without any grounds for responsible morality,
Now you might insist upon some “survival” model as the basis for morality, but that assumes every human moral agent will simply buy into that model for no real reason except that they should.
By the way this is not an argument, on my part, that human beings ought to accept some distorted theistic notion because they will be punished eternally if they don’t. The argument is that the deepest meaning and value of our existence is not fulfilled by anything in this life, but that – and we intuitively get this – our temporal existence is more akin to a preparation for what our deepest aspirations point us towards.
It also points to the fact that true notions of morality and the good are not shallow and obvious but are deep and ever-expanding, just like truth. As Aquinas pointed out, the truth, the good and being itself are transferable. Ergo, just like truth and what it means to exist, our concept of the good is not static but ever deepening.
So it isn’t so much that nothing could lead me to question God or that God isn’t accountable to my notions of the good, but that my notions of the good are what I question and hold myself accountable to based upon an ever deepening understanding of the good, rather than assume that my current notion is the final say regarding morality.
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Kei
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One of the things to recall is that the Hebrew can feasibly be read as scattering the boys instead of mauling and killing them. I would say this is the reasonable interpretation given the small bears that were in the area. I have high doubt that just two of those rather small bears could, in fact, maul 42 young men. It’s not like this happens in America or the Arctic to have giant bears that maybe could possibly do that. It is likely they scared the boys away, scattering them.
Of course, we read Scripture from the end of the slain Lamb, and so anything that would be a malicious reading of God is de facto wrong. Recall the number killed. 42. This is a very important spiritual number, in many different cultures, not just to the Jews. Let us not forget the spiritual lesson we are being taught here.
Of course, we read Scripture from the end of the slain Lamb, and so anything that would be a malicious reading of God is de facto wrong. Recall the number killed. 42. This is a very important spiritual number, in many different cultures, not just to the Jews. Let us not forget the spiritual lesson we are being taught here.
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Kei
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What is important to consider is Job’s encounter with God.
What did God do to this righteous man suffering so much? He puts the suffering in wider and wider contexts.
Look past the self, to the bigger picture. Suffering is not a strange thing to the Christian religion. Our Faith is based around the One who deserved the LEAST suffering suffering the MOST.
The various prophets, the righteous…they underwent much suffering.
We don’t know what can come out of the sufferings of others. A child suffering can present chances for others to express love that they never would have. It can offer inspiration. Growth. Why do bad things happen? So that good things can come out of it.
If you care about them to complain in this way, perhaps you could go see a children with cancer. See how they take it. I believe there may be lessons I’m the little ones.
What did God do to this righteous man suffering so much? He puts the suffering in wider and wider contexts.
Look past the self, to the bigger picture. Suffering is not a strange thing to the Christian religion. Our Faith is based around the One who deserved the LEAST suffering suffering the MOST.
The various prophets, the righteous…they underwent much suffering.
We don’t know what can come out of the sufferings of others. A child suffering can present chances for others to express love that they never would have. It can offer inspiration. Growth. Why do bad things happen? So that good things can come out of it.
If you care about them to complain in this way, perhaps you could go see a children with cancer. See how they take it. I believe there may be lessons I’m the little ones.
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catholic1seeks
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I highly recommend Fr. Robert Spitzer, SJ and his series.
If you want a meaty, intellectual description of Christianity, God, science, and suffering, please give this series an honest and open look.
(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)
If you want a meaty, intellectual description of Christianity, God, science, and suffering, please give this series an honest and open look.
(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)
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anhphan
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Old Testament is very hard to understand and explain. Many people explain in their understanding.
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goout
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Ummm…
Senses of scripture.
Genre.
Literalist fundamentalism is the modern thing, relatively speaking.
Church fathers and others are not literalists. The Catholic Church has never read the bible as literalist fundamentalists do. Nor did the Jewish culture these passages were written in.
Literal sense, and spiritual senses, all read through the lens of Christ.
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goout
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And so your human existence is a tragedy with no hope in sight, right?
Is it an injustice that you were born, must live, and die?
Is that what we hear you saying?
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TechieGuy
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There’s a much simpler explanation, perhaps the priests who wrote the story put that part in to make the narrative more exciting and also to incorporate a humorous message of “so don’t mess with priests, you little thugs,” for the younger crowd.
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