OFG

Sep 24 2016, 04:55 PM

Ummm.... how? lol

Sousen Ichimonji

Sep 24 2016, 05:07 PM

I mean, accusing other people of a fallacy is also a fallacy, or so I've been told. And me pointing that out is also probably a fallacy. Debates don't really come down to who can say the word "fallacy" fastest, or most.

To take this topic back to its roots, there is absolutely no way to rationalise or make sense of the problem of evil in the ideals of Christianity. In fact Christianity and Islam are the only major religions in our history to have that problem. In ancient Greece, the gods were recognisably human. Poseidon was the god of the sea and earthquakes. He was also a rapist. It was easy to rationalise that he would still cause an earthquake in a perfectly good and devout city because he was aggrieved in some way. Zoroastrianism taught that the world was in conflict between two deities, one perfectly good and one perfectly evil. Traditionalist religions across the world included shamanism, where spirits of any kind might always try to interfere and cause harm. Basically, for the vast majority of human history and across the world, we've allowed for bad intentions in the religious sphere.

Reading the Bible, you'll notice a conspicuous lack of the words 'omnipotent', 'omnipresent' and 'omniscient', unless reading a very new rendition (I know that the Book of Mormon uses them plenty). God is just... great. He's unknowably powerful, because he's never taken part in any Deity Olympics so we can track and measure his abilities. But being unfathomably more powerful than a human doesn't make him capable of absolutely anything. And the Hebrew's who created and kept the Torah clearly didn't envision him as being all-knowing or all-present; he straight up walks out of the Garden of Eden at one point and Adam and Eve get up to their mischief.

The God we recognise from the Old Testament and the Torah is of the same cast as the other ancient world deities; powerful, at times generous and most crucially, as passionate as a human. His anger, sadness and pride is pretty well evidenced. So Judaism has no real issue with 'the Problem of Evil'. But Christianity and Islam do.

Following the New Testament, the new script was that God loved everyone. He cared about everyone. So immediately you have to take out the stuff where he can get angry and just cause suffering cause he's been disobeyed. Over the next 4 centuries, Christianity came to dominate the socio-religio-political sphere of the Roman Empire, making it the dominant religion of a vast swath of the world at that time. The Christian God was bumped up and over hundreds of other deities, and this had to be justified by the pantheistic and open-minded Romans. Emperor Constantine, who made Christianity the central religion of the empire, claimed that he knew this god was the mightiest, and would lead him, and his subjects, to victory. Over those centuries God went from strong to the strongest as other religions were forsaken and the cult grew, and over time this lauded power became indistinguishable from omnipotence. So by the Dark Ages God had become omnipotent and all loving. He had become/created a problem that can't be explained; the problem of evil. There is still no real, solid answer.

But for the title question; how do Christians respond to the problem of evil. Well, that's an unbelievably broad question. I could make an equally broad topic called "how do humans deal with being cold sometimes." There are so many sects and outlooks in Christianity; the only certain consensus you'll get with Christians is that there was a figure called Christ who is our salvation. Off the top of my head, some Calvinists might say that suffering is a reflection on your worldly works, and a part of the life planned out to ensure you go to heaven. Some gnostics would say the physical form is an illusion anyway and all suffering is a cheap deception from some other agent besides God (gnostics be crazy). Some Pentecostals might say it's a mark that you are failing god and need to up your game to get into Heaven. Catholicism would say it's a consequence of sin. In modernity, people think that Satan is a much much bigger part of Christianity than he actually is; that he constantly struggles with God and causes/creates evil, despite God's seeming omnipotence which should alow him to crush Satan in an instant. There are so many ways of looking at evil. Most involve all of those who suffered going to heaven for eternity by the end, which rationalises the suffering as something bad happening rn but which will be effortlessly overshadowed by the following afterlife.

Shining Light

Sep 24 2016, 06:47 PM

OFG

Sep 24 2016, 04:55 PM

Ummm.... how? lol

Because it shows you don't have a counterclaim.

OFG

Sep 24 2016, 10:33 PM

If your aim is to gain wisdom, why do you continually attempt to correct people
who aren't wrong? You misread my entire post. I wasn't trying to counter against anyone in particular; I was commenting on the fact that in every single one of these threads, certain people have to play the know-it-all and claim that others are misinterpreting the bible when, in reality, they are the ones doing so.

And then you said I was wrong because I had no counter-claim. That makes literally no sense considering I wasn't countering a claim to begin with. Soooo... whut is even going on here? You tell me.

(I know that I'm wasting my time here, but it sucks being cooped up all day, so I'm going to keep responding despite the fact that I have no idea what's going on.)

Quote:

 

You say everybody is wrong with their interpretation

Steve

Sep 24 2016, 11:38 AM

Shining Light

Sep 24 2016, 03:58 AM

Ah, one of those lists where they twist verses and pull stuff out of context and conveniently leave out details. Yup.

Care to actually back that up?

There are links to the verses right there. Assuming you have your own Bible how about you go check it and see that they're the same.

You just completely dodged that which doesn't do much to help your side of the argument.
This is why I don't keep religious stuff on hand, because most of the time it's ignored or dodged with "That was metaphorical" "We can't understand God" etc etc



Yet again if God was omniscient then it would know every choice that every being could ever make across all of time so it made humans full well knowing what would happen.
And if it created everything it still created evil.

Why did there need to be a balance between good and evil? Who gave God these rules exactly?
That's merely an attempt to explain and justify God's actions, as in, things God chose to do.


In any case there are two options:

A) God didn't know what it was doing when it created everything
B) God did know what it was doing when it created everything

Both of those are as bad as one another.
A means we have a highly fallible God on our hands that makes awful choices.
B means we have an almighty God that makes awful choices for the fun of it to watch s*** hit the fan.

Neither God are respectable, wonderful beings.

OFG

Sep 24 2016, 11:11 PM

Quote:

 

You say everybody is wrong with their interpretation

See? This is why it's impossible to have a conversation with you. You put words into other peoples' mouths. I never said that.

Frankly, I think your "woke af," enlightened attitude is a bit off-putting, which is why people keep arguing with you.

EDIT: To add to this, I'm not trying to be mean. You say that you're willing to take what people say and learn from it, so that's what I'm trying to do. I originally posted in this thread to call out what I had seen (people throwing around context a bunch) and you responded, so I switched my aim to you, but I don't mean it in a rude way. I'm medicated at the moment, so take what I say lightly.