If God exists...

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Why would he want to? If he's omniscient, all knowing, by that logic he can also follow right down the path of free will, cause and effect, and he would have in that sense knowingly created Lucifer to be what he was in the end.

OK. That settles it. God is a sadist.

To a point, yeah.

The evils of the human world reflect certain ultimate evils, I think. But I will havew to say that a lot of so-called evil is just stupidity, misinformation, and weakness.

And as a matter of fact a lot of good is stupidity, misinformation and weakness.

Ok, and how exactly does that work?

Interesting argument:

It's complicated. But it follows Murphy's law that no good deed goes unpunished.

I have no problem with the idea that it could have been (superficially) random chance. Billions of years ago when the moon was far closer to the earth the whole globe was wrapped in heavy storms, far more violence in the oceans, and billions of years of chemicals bumping into each other to create some ultra-simplistic single cell organism; its harder for me to imagine it not happening that way.

As far as an evil genius of a God though, nah, I'd say he's more like the a**hole dad who's gets a thrill out of toughening up his kids and firmly believes its what's good for them. Could an all loving God be both loving and as I just described? In my opinion, yes - in the sense that our perspective on it is a matter of the sealed paradigm within which we exist; seen in full detail and perspective it could be a completely different story. Especially if this life is meant to be a test, meant to never be a utopia, and meant to be more of a side-trip rather than the core seat of our existence as we'll ever know it (again, examining what our paradigm means to us as well as the effects it has on our thoughts and beliefs in terms of perspective means a great deal).

To me that's almost proof positive that he does exist. If good was directly rewarded more than evil, everyone would do good for the sheer sake of what's in it for them, right? People wouldn't develop much inwardly in such a world.

Whenever I feel like life's squatting on me for my better nature, I do well to tell myself a joke - its God's way of saying he likes me, and of course I find myself very grateful that he doesn't like me even more - just looking at the the atrocities the Jewish race has suffered and taking a look even further, what he sent his son here to endure (and yes - I know this is all hypothetical).

No doubt it's a bit unpleasant that Christ got nailed up but frankly, lots of people through the ages went through much worse and it seems to me the Christians make too much of it since he lived happily ever after. Atheists have gotten kicked around many times worse with no afterlife at all.

The archangel Lucifer who became Satan did so of his own volition. He rebelled, got kicked out of heaven for it.

I guess he was the only angel to ever question God's authority.

LOL

Christ got nailed up there for a reason. And it was not supposed to be pleasant.

To a Catholic, the above post is very offensive. Was it your intention to inflame?

That's not how really how the whole story goes. Yes, he did get nailed to the cross, but there's **huge** also that went along with that.

You've probably heard the whole shpeel about what people say hell is - lake of fire, black fire in a 3x3x3 box for all of eternity, Dante's Inferno...yada yada yada for all of eternity. When they say that Jesus died for the sins of everyone who existed after him - on the j-curve that our population has gone through that's what, maybe 25 billion so far in about the 1,980 or so years since he was crucified at age 33? The whole idea was this - everyone's sentence to hell, hell for the fact that they were not believers, was taken - 30, 40, maybe 50 billion people's eternity in hell was poured out on him - in concentrate and in one dose, right before he died on the cross.

When they talk about the night of Passover when he was betrayed, he wasn't even there yet, just contemplating what he'd be going through in a few hours, and the anticipation that he was going through - its in the bible - he was sweating and tearing blood, not on the cross but just praying the night before.

In that essence yes, many people died on the cross, as many people have been killed through the ages in genocide or utopian pushes by the early communists to re-aggregate everything under government control; its all been very legitimate and terrible suffering. However, Jesus death was in fact like no one else's in terms of what he did go through.


Now mind you, I'm not at all saying that I'm absolutely certain what I believe on this, I have my inclinations but I also have enough temperment of reality to know that they could be carefully constructed allegory written for the sake of explaining to the people a lot of higher principles that may have been divinely inspired, may have just been written by brilliant philosophers of the time. I am very hesitant to deny the reality that the bible presents regarding Jesus, its documented four different ways, gets very immersive into explaining the mechanics of how just the standard every day and every moment we live in is supposedly controlled by God, and that goes right back to the idea that - if he's timeless, omniscient, has not only unbounded intelligence but unbounded processing power (can't think as fast and hard as he wishes without getting a migraine); it tells me that he could calculate the outcome of freewill before it happens.

On the other hand, realistically, I agree that 90% of our lives are going on autopilot. Its like one of those books you get from the library and every time you make a salient choice to either go to p. 255 or p.74; you read about 10 or 11 pages to get there. For the most part then I think any thin watered down amount of free-will that we do have really comes down to our long-term thought processes, what we decide to change in how we think, what illusions we decide to slash through in our own minds, and of course staying restless in our quest for both truth and wisdom. From everything I've seen and heard just by listening to different ideas from different people and following my own observation; free will is a definite London force and it takes very deliberate effort to make much use of it.

According to the story a whole 1/3 of heaven fell right along with him; the guy was evidently pretty smooth and likable.

My own biggest struggle, one that I really have yet to resolve, is that when it comes to anything that gargantuan in terms of dynamics of the like and what the outcome is right now - I can't imagine his presence and creation not being deliberate. While I'd hesitate to say that I don't believe in a physical hell, there is some dissonance in the understanding that those agents he most likely created and employed do do exactly what he wanted them to do - provide a struggle - should go to such a place as hell in the end. Yes, my scope of logic could be too limited just by being here on Earth like everyone else but when people do propose that all of this was just people or things falling away from him and what he stood for and he would have been unaware of exactly what would have happened when he made them who they were; it makes God sound like a bit of a bumbling idiot and that's why its too hard for me to believe that any of this just happened on Lucifer or anyone else's own volition unknown to God when it was God himself who created all the gears and inner workings of their volition.

The only other possibility is that there is something like an entropy, a natural disorder that hits people and things kind of like radiation, and causes mutations of will in a way that has nothing to do with anything that God put into motion; that would mean that there would have to be either something outside of God's creation or - a randomizing element that he deliberately build into not only his universe but yes - his Kingdom as well, maybe for the sake of creating free will.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 11 Oct 2008, 2:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.