"May God have mercy on you"

Post Reply New Topic

Am I the only one who thinks God has no mercy? Assuming he is real.

I'd say nature has no mercy, and to the extent that it does it's some combination of good luck (eg. no asteroids or comets, super-volcanoes, or other world-ending catastrophes ) and on smaller levels nature's contrition to our ability to reshape our environment - something we still overestimate plenty but which has still given us much better living conditions than if we were still in the wild in a true un-tuned sense.

God? No clue. Most people who experience NDE's report a being they'd identify as God hug-bombing them beyond anything they could have ever imagined. I've also heard NDE's where such beings affirmed their own existence but not as God itself. There are cosmologies that allow for thousands of such nodes vast enough that people might mistake them for God. We still know too little about consciousness to even vet any line of connection between ourselves and such experiential super-aggregates. Enough people can be relatively sure that they've interacted with forms of consciousness more vast than human, I still doubt that any have truly persuasive evidence that they've ever talked to 'The All' and it's also an open question whether consciousness in the universe stacks to create a whole, emanated from a whole, or is millions, billions, trillions, or more very large but scattered pieces.

I also still have yet to hear a story about why nature is as unforgiving, heartless, and ruthless as it is that sounds comprehensive enough for me to even provisionally say 'Yeah, that's probably it'. Most of the stories sound like excuses and if I have any bias it's toward putting nodes of consciousness within rather than outside of nature and my guess would be that they can't do a whole lot and are along for the ride and limited by the universe about as much as we are (the whole universe would probably be more friendly to life otherwise). Pure reductive materialism attempts to make a full case but there's a lot it has to doggedly jump up and down on and I'm not sure that'll work for much longer.

In other words I think the question may be loaded with a lot of historical religious claims that generally don't show up in direct experience.

If God exists, God is so far beyond humans that it would be hopeless of us to understand God's powers and motivations.

^I think that's just a fancy rationalized way of denying that God doesn't exist.

"Oh it's OK that God allows horrible torturous suffering to happen all over the world everyday because we humans are too stupid to understand that God sending us diseases like AIDS, allowing people to be burned alive in his name, and big destructive wars that kill millions of people is his way of showing that he loves us."

My parents would hate to hear it but I believe God is mostly a social construct.

A God with mercy was better in stabilizing societes at some stages of civilization, for a society with high regard for mercy worked better than a society disregarding mercy.

My country was "liberated" by Soviet Union.

I remember a comment about Vietnamese partizans: "And thank to their heroic actions, they avoided the fate of West Germany and South Korea".

If there's a God, I don't believe he would have "mercy."

I believe he would just let us fight it out amongst ourselves, with Him laughing it up "Up There."