Why can't God return his protection to the world?

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K_Kelly
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03 Sep 2017, 12:30 pm

Why can't God return his protection to the world? Even if I don't always subscribe to conservative ideas, I have low confidence with doubting that God has abandoned his protection of America and the rest of the world. I am frustrated by it and I think it's horrible petty that because we all collectively turned against him, he won't protect all of us. I'm getting angry feelings about God, because I believe he exists, but I don't desire the system he set up, when he could've had made things less corrupted. Really, the stuff that was great about America 50-60 years and back, growing up back then is my literal vision of what I want to see in Heaven sometimes.

I'm sorry for my whine, anger. I maybe didn't write as much as I wanted to post, but I am agitated because nobody I seen post or heard from anywhere shares the same concern or outlook as I do. The conservatives on one side are brainwashed in telling sensitive people that they need to "accept" God's ways, and the atheists on the other side of the spectrum are kind of snarky too, or don't get it because they don't believe he exists at all.

At the same time, I hate having to fixate on these issues.



shlaifu
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03 Sep 2017, 2:47 pm

what makes you think God ever protected the world? From what?


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naturalplastic
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04 Sep 2017, 9:21 am

Exactly ^^^.

When did God ever "protect the world", and when did he "stop" doing it? And protection against what?

The question he asks is several kinds of meaningless.



techstepgenr8tion
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04 Sep 2017, 10:13 am

I think our basic problem in the US, and it's crippled one maybe two generations now in terms of having a proper scope of reality, is we've had things so good that we've lost track of the notion that the universe in and of itself is completely amoral. That's the sort of ontological brain-damage that prosperity can do to a country and it's also the reason why everyone's so blind-sided by the current political strife as our economic success ebbs.

We're at a point now where that beneficial push we received in the late 40's, ie. capital and scientific flight to the US to where the US had 50% or greater of the world's capital, has fizzled out from ample mismanagement. That economic stimulus was our hedge of protection where we got to feel like we were the darlings of the universe.


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DataB4
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04 Sep 2017, 10:38 am

I'll try to understand... You used to feel that God protected the world, but now you feel abandoned by God because of all the suffering and disorder in the world.

Where do you stand on concepts like free will and omnipotence?



naturalplastic
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04 Sep 2017, 11:32 am

During the "Age of Faith" in the Middle Ages they were all devoted to God. And God responded in kind. He sure did a good job of "protecting" us then. Only about one third of Europe's population died in one fortnight because of the Bubonic Plague.

And within modern times?

You are dating the time in which God supposedly "stopped" protecting the world to vaguely fifty years ago.

That would mean that god was protecting us in the first circa 70 years of the 20th Century. The era that included two world wars, the Great Depression, the Spanish influenza epidemic that killed atleast 20 million in American and in the world, a polio epidemic, A civil war in Russia, and civil war in spain, the war in Korea, Vietnam, etc.

In the 21st century USA- if you took the homeland civilian victims of Islamic terrorism (including 9-11) and add to them the total number American military deaths in the wars spawned by 9-11 (Iraq, Afganistan), you would probably get less than ten thousand. That number of Americans died every year during the Johnson, and early Nixon, years, in Vietnam. American deaths in the Korean War of a similar magnitude. And American deaths in both Korea, and in Vietnam, are dwarfed by our losses in WWII. And American deaths in WWII are dwarfed by the losses suffered by other countries in WWII. So you could make a case that God is doing a better job of protecting us now than fifty years ago.



techstepgenr8tion
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04 Sep 2017, 11:54 am

This is part of what really rubs me the wrong way about modern US evangelism. We actually need articulate voices of social and economic conservatism, people rationally defending the constitution, and instead a lot of these pastors are too busy convincing their parishioners that these are the most sinful times ever and that the 70th week of Daniel is due to drop any day this year. I also don't need to say what the 70th week of Daniel and the Book of Revelations does to one's sense of ecology.


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Yo El
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04 Sep 2017, 2:44 pm

naturalplastic wrote:
During the "Age of Faith" in the Middle Ages they were all devoted to God. And God responded in kind. He sure did a good job of "protecting" us then. Only about one third of Europe's population died in one fortnight because of the Bubonic Plague.
Wouldn't really call it devoted, just pretending enough to not get burnt on the stake for heresy.



hurtloam
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04 Sep 2017, 3:52 pm

Don't most religions have an idea of a golden age and then something goes wrong and the age of trouble starts.

Like everything was ok before Pandora opened that jar of woe.

You know what the last thing left in that jar was?

After Pandora opened that jar and let everything out... There was still hope.

Yadda yadda yadda... there's still hope.



naturalplastic
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04 Sep 2017, 4:03 pm

hurtloam wrote:
Don't most religions have an idea of a golden age and then something goes wrong and the age of trouble starts.

Like everything was ok before Pandora opened that jar of woe.

You know what the last thing left in that jar was?

After Pandora opened that jar and let everything out... There was still hope.

Yadda yadda yadda... there's still hope.


The Biblical equivalent to Greek fable of Pandora's Box is Eve persuading Adam to eat the Fruit. The fruit that caused the Fall of Man. In fact all of Christianity is pretty much based on that story, and about how Christ will redeem us from that mistake made in that Pandora like fable of way back when.



naturalplastic
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04 Sep 2017, 4:04 pm

Yo El wrote:
naturalplastic wrote:
During the "Age of Faith" in the Middle Ages they were all devoted to God. And God responded in kind. He sure did a good job of "protecting" us then. Only about one third of Europe's population died in one fortnight because of the Bubonic Plague.
Wouldn't really call it devoted, just pretending enough to not get burnt on the stake for heresy.


Regardless. He still did a questionable job of "protecting" us.



hurtloam
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04 Sep 2017, 4:06 pm

naturalplastic wrote:
hurtloam wrote:
Don't most religions have an idea of a golden age and then something goes wrong and the age of trouble starts.

Like everything was ok before Pandora opened that jar of woe.

You know what the last thing left in that jar was?

After Pandora opened that jar and let everything out... There was still hope.

Yadda yadda yadda... there's still hope.


The Biblical equivalent to Greek fable of Pandora's Box is Eve persuading Adam to eat the Fruit. The fruit that caused the Fall of Man. In fact all of Christianity is pretty much based on that story, and about how Christ will redeem us from that mistake made in that Pandora like fable of way back when.


Well there you go. You've answered your own question from further up the thread.



naturalplastic
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04 Sep 2017, 4:46 pm

Hmmm.....

Well...

The Bible says that God kicked us all out of the Garden of Eden in 4000 BC, or like that.

The OP thinks that God was "protecting" us up until 1965, or 1970.

So I guess that the OP didn't read the Bible right and thinks that we all got expelled from Paradise around the time that they televised the first Super bowl in the mid Sixties.

Sorry to break it to you (OP) but...mortality, disease, pain in child birth, all of the trevail that human flesh is heir to (not to mention snakes not having legs), all LONG predate the first Super Bowl! LOL!



techstepgenr8tion
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04 Sep 2017, 5:03 pm

hurtloam wrote:
Don't most religions have an idea of a golden age and then something goes wrong and the age of trouble starts.

Like everything was ok before Pandora opened that jar of woe.

You know what the last thing left in that jar was?

After Pandora opened that jar and let everything out... There was still hope.

Yadda yadda yadda... there's still hope.


In antiquity there was a popular idea, at least among the Greeks, that the procession of the equinox marked off a 25,920 cycle. You'd split those up into 12 sets of 2,160 years - 5/12 of that would be a golden age, you'd have two flanking pieces (on the up and down-tick) of silver age, of bronze age, and an iron age at the bottom where things were in greatest disharmony (that supposedly straddled the sun being in Aries and Pisces). The Hindus also had their yugas and that these followed a similar motif albeit they seemed to follow these cycles over millions of years.

Both, as far as I can tell, are BS. We'd see some type of wobble in the fossil record, some type of wobble in geology, or some evidence somewhere in how crystals formed or some other thing if fir 9,800 out of ever 26,000 years we had significantly greater order and a cyclical spin out toward chaos around the other side. There's no such evidence to be seen as far as I know.


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shlaifu
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04 Sep 2017, 6:09 pm

I guess thinking about falls from grace and golden ages etc. is not helpful.

Until relatively recently, almost no one had anything, and an overly rainy or overly dry season posed an existential threat. then modernity happened, and all sorts of new problems arose that replaced the old ones- there's an incredible amount of people on the planet these days, which comes with new problems. they all want to improve their situation- which is new. A farmer in the 12th century stayed a farmer all his life, and had to be content with it, such was the social order. also, you know, the plague and work from dawn to dusk kept the farmer busy anyway.
today, the difference between rich and poor is incredible. A few hundred years ago, kings didn't have the luxuries of running water and toilets and so on. today, individuals have their own rockets built- something only one generation ago only the wealthiest of nations could do. while the poorest are still herding goats like 2000 years ago.

so.. we're definitely not "fallen from grace". we just have problems mankind didn't have for almost its entire history.
that's modernity.


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techstepgenr8tion
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04 Sep 2017, 6:27 pm

The only fall from grace analogy that makes any sense to me, and even there not really a fall from grace so much as the removal of blinders, was the story of the tree of knowledge of good and evil from the bible. To that end we went, perhaps more gradually than some would claim but with definite marked punctuations in abstract thought, from being animals that only could process the immediate present to becoming beings that could consider past, present, and future. We could consider opportunity costs, suffering became much more of a long-term consideration rather than an immediate one, and while our survival rates improved for it we did indeed take on a significant psychological stress burden in exchange. It's progress, but like many things it has it's trade-offs.


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“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin