I know a number of very good people who are Abrahamic-religious (some Christian, some Jewish, some Muslim) and in every case their goodness is in spite of or unrelated to their religion. If you have to believe in eternal torment/bliss and the watchful eye of a Creator in order to treat others with kindness, you’re on shaky ground. It should be part of your whole being. My Wiccan and atheist friends are good in equal measure, and they have the additional grace to not go around trying to get others to follow their belief, only their example of humankindness.
Our goodness is hard coded actually, it’s the default, you actually have to really spin the rationalisation wheel and be nothing but a lost hedonist to cancel it out. But, again, it’s more about not disappointing God and yourself, since you were made good, than it is fearing Hell, although the latter works well for many people because most are sheep. But the important thing, really, is to fear God’s judgment, not because Hell sucks but because, if God in all his mercy says you sucked as a human being, He’s right, objectively so.
God is slaughtering innocents? Where? Do you mean like floods and stuff? That would just land them in Heaven, honestly, so what’s the big deal? Btw, we’re all God’s property, we didn’t make any of this we just enjoy it for free, He just happens to be Merciful as well.
If there’s a God and He’s omnipotent, then all the old men living long perverted lives raping bombing and starving children are His fault. Cancer, his creation. A quarter of all pregnancies, which the Omnipotent One created, He aborts. He raises heartless hypocrites to prominence and starves hardworking people who worship Him honestly and live in Christ’s example. If God exists and He’s watching you now, he’s laughing with cruelty at you.
Or… No, people get pregnant and some miscarry. Evil people get rich because they’re ruthless and manipulative, and they can afford things that keep them alive a long time. Luck determines whether hard work pays off or doesn’t. Cancer is caused by a virus or a gene, and science has found some treatments by trial and error. Planets spin in space, and some are swallowed up by black holes. Life evolves or it doesn’t, and it takes millions of forms, and some of them think they’re important.
The Spanish Inquisition used your excuse, if they tortured the wrong person to death, they’d go to Heaven. Heaven is just an excuse for cruelty here on Earth, and Grace and Forgiveness are the loophole the evil ones expect to use to get to Heaven themselves.
Whether or not you believe in Heaven or God, if you want to be a moral person you should start paying attention to how you help others in the Here and the Now.
Otherwise you’re just abdicating your moral responsibilities by throwing it all to Big Sky Guy.
But just like Science, Goodness doesn’t rely on Faith. You can just do it, even when it’s hard, because you do have it in you. You’re full of good and evil and neutral, just like the Universe, and you just have to choose.
I understand what you’re getting at but… His fault? My man, again, free will. Even as a silly argument , this one cannot be made. Everyone chooses who they want to be, right? Would you rather God had made humans automatons that just follow his word to the letter like a computer program? They wouldn’t be humans, you wouldn’t have the awareness you have right now.
And of course everything is in His hands, He made it all and sustains it for free. Should he just unplug the universe because some people are so cunty it’s painful? That wouldn’t be nice to those actively and consciously trying to serve Him, just trying to live a righteous life and enjoy themselves in the process. That’s what Heaven and Hell are for, which are way more lasting than this ephemeral life. And, again, I dunno why you think that the material reality, the cause and effect of things, invalidate the idea of a loving Creator or a Creator at all. Of course A follows from B and rain will get us wet and cancer will kill and people miscarry and etc etc. That’s not “the problem of evil”, that’s just the problem of the universe (when you dislike it, if not it’s just a thing like fish coming out of the ocean, developing limbs and eventually becoming human, which, again, do not invalidate God. He made the calculations for this to happen and the computer that is the universe ran it and now here we are). If you want perfection and lack of worries and pain, you gotta earn it first. You already got one existence for free! And God is not here, this is just an ant farm, God is outside of the universe. How could He create something that contained Him already?
Goodness relies on free will, forming habits and a moral framework and ideology that elevate virtue. Abrahamic - Muhammadian monotheism is the latter, and maybe you can postulate one that doesn’t rely on the objective judge and rulemaker that is God, but I cannot conceive one. Eventually, someone will say “but that’s just X’s opinion” or “X said this but what do they know, they’re human just like me, maybe they’re wrong” and invalidate the whole thing.
Finally: God IS watching, and He knows what’s in my heart and that I’m trying to guide people to the best of my limited abilities (I also love to yap and was an atheist myself for about two decades, which makes it way easier for me). And I think He’s pleased (with this part of me at least).
I’d rather curse the cancer directly than pray to someone else to magic it away. My results have been empirically just as effective.
I have seen too much of church and temple and finally stopped pretending I ever believed. And they weren’t even the pernicious kind, just based on a false premise. The more times I read the Bible the more patently destructive I found it, and the more I hear from people like you the less I want to have anything to do with it.
You seem harmless enough, you’re just wrong.
There’s no God, nobody is watching but your own conscience. And that’s enough.
And a good thing it is because the God you described is useless. Worse than useless.
I appreciate you calling me harmless, it’s nice of you. And, like I’ve said before, there’s much wisdom and much garbage in the Bible, it’s a collection of books after all.
Useless as we enjoy the universe He created, chatting through waves and electricity He allowed us to comprehend and manipulate? And we cure cancer in the same way, because he’s endowed us with enough intellectual capacity to deal with it.
Anyway, I’m sorry about your horrible experiences with so-called religious folks, and I hope you have an easy day. You seem nice and reasonable overall. 👋
Nah, most of them weren’t horrible, they’re just confused like you. Stuff happens. That’s existence. No Creator necessary to achieve it, nothing but natural forces, beauty and shit in various measures. Human evil and goodness are possible in each of us, no deity tips the scale, it’s all in ourselves as we interact with the world around us.
I know a number of very good people who are Abrahamic-religious (some Christian, some Jewish, some Muslim) and in every case their goodness is in spite of or unrelated to their religion. If you have to believe in eternal torment/bliss and the watchful eye of a Creator in order to treat others with kindness, you’re on shaky ground. It should be part of your whole being. My Wiccan and atheist friends are good in equal measure, and they have the additional grace to not go around trying to get others to follow their belief, only their example of humankindness.
Our goodness is hard coded actually, it’s the default, you actually have to really spin the rationalisation wheel and be nothing but a lost hedonist to cancel it out. But, again, it’s more about not disappointing God and yourself, since you were made good, than it is fearing Hell, although the latter works well for many people because most are sheep. But the important thing, really, is to fear God’s judgment, not because Hell sucks but because, if God in all his mercy says you sucked as a human being, He’s right, objectively so.
Any God that slaughters and tortures so many innocents while enabling and pandering to so many human demons is worse than no God at all.
I wouldn’t give a shit about the opinion of any human with that record, I’d actively seek their disapproval.
I’m a pessimist, but even I am not enough of a doomer to believe this is the Plan of a Creator.
God is slaughtering innocents? Where? Do you mean like floods and stuff? That would just land them in Heaven, honestly, so what’s the big deal? Btw, we’re all God’s property, we didn’t make any of this we just enjoy it for free, He just happens to be Merciful as well.
The Canaanites? Jericho? Countless genocides in the old testament?
Every first born in Egypt? Are you for real?
If there’s a God and He’s omnipotent, then all the old men living long perverted lives raping bombing and starving children are His fault. Cancer, his creation. A quarter of all pregnancies, which the Omnipotent One created, He aborts. He raises heartless hypocrites to prominence and starves hardworking people who worship Him honestly and live in Christ’s example. If God exists and He’s watching you now, he’s laughing with cruelty at you.
Or… No, people get pregnant and some miscarry. Evil people get rich because they’re ruthless and manipulative, and they can afford things that keep them alive a long time. Luck determines whether hard work pays off or doesn’t. Cancer is caused by a virus or a gene, and science has found some treatments by trial and error. Planets spin in space, and some are swallowed up by black holes. Life evolves or it doesn’t, and it takes millions of forms, and some of them think they’re important.
The Spanish Inquisition used your excuse, if they tortured the wrong person to death, they’d go to Heaven. Heaven is just an excuse for cruelty here on Earth, and Grace and Forgiveness are the loophole the evil ones expect to use to get to Heaven themselves.
Whether or not you believe in Heaven or God, if you want to be a moral person you should start paying attention to how you help others in the Here and the Now.
Otherwise you’re just abdicating your moral responsibilities by throwing it all to Big Sky Guy.
But just like Science, Goodness doesn’t rely on Faith. You can just do it, even when it’s hard, because you do have it in you. You’re full of good and evil and neutral, just like the Universe, and you just have to choose.
I understand what you’re getting at but… His fault? My man, again, free will. Even as a silly argument , this one cannot be made. Everyone chooses who they want to be, right? Would you rather God had made humans automatons that just follow his word to the letter like a computer program? They wouldn’t be humans, you wouldn’t have the awareness you have right now.
And of course everything is in His hands, He made it all and sustains it for free. Should he just unplug the universe because some people are so cunty it’s painful? That wouldn’t be nice to those actively and consciously trying to serve Him, just trying to live a righteous life and enjoy themselves in the process. That’s what Heaven and Hell are for, which are way more lasting than this ephemeral life. And, again, I dunno why you think that the material reality, the cause and effect of things, invalidate the idea of a loving Creator or a Creator at all. Of course A follows from B and rain will get us wet and cancer will kill and people miscarry and etc etc. That’s not “the problem of evil”, that’s just the problem of the universe (when you dislike it, if not it’s just a thing like fish coming out of the ocean, developing limbs and eventually becoming human, which, again, do not invalidate God. He made the calculations for this to happen and the computer that is the universe ran it and now here we are). If you want perfection and lack of worries and pain, you gotta earn it first. You already got one existence for free! And God is not here, this is just an ant farm, God is outside of the universe. How could He create something that contained Him already?
Goodness relies on free will, forming habits and a moral framework and ideology that elevate virtue. Abrahamic - Muhammadian monotheism is the latter, and maybe you can postulate one that doesn’t rely on the objective judge and rulemaker that is God, but I cannot conceive one. Eventually, someone will say “but that’s just X’s opinion” or “X said this but what do they know, they’re human just like me, maybe they’re wrong” and invalidate the whole thing.
Finally: God IS watching, and He knows what’s in my heart and that I’m trying to guide people to the best of my limited abilities (I also love to yap and was an atheist myself for about two decades, which makes it way easier for me). And I think He’s pleased (with this part of me at least).
I’d rather curse the cancer directly than pray to someone else to magic it away. My results have been empirically just as effective.
I have seen too much of church and temple and finally stopped pretending I ever believed. And they weren’t even the pernicious kind, just based on a false premise. The more times I read the Bible the more patently destructive I found it, and the more I hear from people like you the less I want to have anything to do with it.
You seem harmless enough, you’re just wrong.
There’s no God, nobody is watching but your own conscience. And that’s enough.
And a good thing it is because the God you described is useless. Worse than useless.
I appreciate you calling me harmless, it’s nice of you. And, like I’ve said before, there’s much wisdom and much garbage in the Bible, it’s a collection of books after all.
Useless as we enjoy the universe He created, chatting through waves and electricity He allowed us to comprehend and manipulate? And we cure cancer in the same way, because he’s endowed us with enough intellectual capacity to deal with it.
Anyway, I’m sorry about your horrible experiences with so-called religious folks, and I hope you have an easy day. You seem nice and reasonable overall. 👋
Interesting that you call the word of your god “garbage”. Wonder how he feels about that.
Nah, most of them weren’t horrible, they’re just confused like you. Stuff happens. That’s existence. No Creator necessary to achieve it, nothing but natural forces, beauty and shit in various measures. Human evil and goodness are possible in each of us, no deity tips the scale, it’s all in ourselves as we interact with the world around us.
You have a good day, be good, I’m off to bed.