I love you unconditionally, but only if you worship me and abide by my rules (some of which I may or may not have revoked when my son who is also me came down to Earth)
when my son
who is also mecame down to Earth
This is what annoys me the most about people who go on about God “sacrificing” his son. Since they think Jesus is now in Heaven, that means God got him back - when you don’t normally get something you’ve sacrificed back. God didn’t really “sacrifice” Jesus, he basically just sent him off to summer camp. Granted, the hazing at this summer camp was a bit extreme, but whatever.
It’s like Batman can go toe to toe with people with actual superpowers because he devotes every second of every day to training and preparing for his Batmaning, but whenever anyone suggests that Bruce Wayne would be able to do more good with his money than by punching people in the face we suddenly find out that he also devotes every second of every day to philanthropic efforts. The important thing is that your favourite imaginary friend is always right and is the best at everything, logical coherency be damned.
And all to basically deal with red tape that he put there himself. And somehow, sending his son and then the son getting lightly tortured and then murdered with a slow death by humans saved humanity? And people today still believe that bad writing?
And some even reject the actual decent parts because they’d rather hate their neighbours and church establishments enable this because they’ve really just been another angle to gain power and wealth over and from the people respectively and basically just say, “you’re good as long as you accept a world view that puts me into a position of spiritual authority”.
I mean, the guy is all knowing. That means he knew, back when he created Adam, that this moment would come. He could have changed 1000 things. Yet he chose this particular order of things leading to the ‘sacrifice’ of Jesus.
There’s just so many plot holes when you make a fella omniscient.
I love you unconditionally but I might just torture you while you are alive because I am in a pissing match with the devil.
I am all powerful, buuuut anything bad I guess the devil got the better of me. Oh and I don’t step in when, y’know, genocides happen, or disease—basically, I’m a very hands-off benevolent god…insomuch that my benevolence knows only the bounds of basically chance. If something good happened? You’re welcome. Something bad? Keeeep prayin’ biiitch!
Being raised in a Christian household, this was one of the things that I first picked up on as a kid, and the adults did not like my line of questioning about it. In my teens, I learned that hell isn’t even a concept in any Jewish or “Christian” scriptures… it’s purely a holdover from Hellenist Rome perpetuated by Ur-Catholic Roman cults monopolizing and institutionalizing the religion. You can imagine how pointing these things out went over in a religious household and circles.
Something pinged at the back of my mind and wondered before what is so bad with eating the apple of knowledge. Everyone loves to have knowledge, right? The fall of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden also sounds so strikingly similar from the story of Prometheus, who gave fire to humans to help themselves, but he was punished.
Now as an adult, the stories just tell people to stop thinking for themselves and surrender their agency to a higher authority and be unquestionably obedient.
this was one of the things that I first picked up on as a kid, and the adults did not like my line of questioning about it.
Children are natural philosophers. It’s because they have fresh eyes and untrained with the world that they see things that adults were taught to not see or ignore.
I didn’t save it and I wish I had. Someone did find a novel in Aramaic that mentions an idea of hell not far from the Christian idea. So to be pedantic it is found in Jewish writings but only once. It’s possible it got picked up or it is possible that it was just coincidence and got imported from Greek thought, like most of the NT concepts. Also worth mentioning that most Jews at the time didn’t believe in an afterlife and the ones that did had a very vague idea of it. This is why Paul seems to think that Jesus is the first person who has an actual afterlife.
Spot on. In Jewish thought (including Paul’s writings) there are three “heavens”. First, the sky. Second, the cosmos. Third, the dwelling place of YHWH. None of those are meant to be the a destination for any kind of human afterlife.
God is either omnipotent and a dick for making you suffer anyhow, or not omnipotent in which case why would you believe?
I was born with a severe congenital issue that causes me constant pain.
Why would a benevolent god do this to me? It’s sadistic.
So I had a head start in thinking the Christian god is a sadistic bastard. The priests I encountered tried to tell me I was being tested for reasons. How do you explain testing a four year old for your faith? What the fuck did your god want me to learn?
My constant, unrelenting pain was part of what stopped me believing that bullshit. They could never explain my suffering to me, except to say I was chosen by god to endure it, like the saints. I was not a saint, and that was just cruel.
The more I learnt about it all, the more I understood it was all just bullshit. It was just stories made up by those in charge to stop regular people from questioning their rules. When your own story is used by the church to justify the stories of saints, it becomes painfully obvious.
God is either omnipotent and a dick for making you suffer anyhow or […]
Probably this one. God is canonically a dick in the bible, between “testing” that one guy’s faith by telling him to kill his son, between killing humans to full on genocide on many occasions to killing everything everywhere that one time. Even Jesus has his cringe moments, like when he killed a tree because it wasn’t producing fruit which he took as an act of rebellion against God, despite trees not being conscious (he should know, he made the damn things) and therefore not being able to rebel against anything.
Also, if you’re omnipotent, why even have a tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden in the first place? Especially if you know that Satan will tempt the humans to eat from it (he’s omniscient is he not?) and the humans you created absolutely will eat from it. God is like one of those Sims players that deliberately create dangerous situations for the sims only he gets really mad when they predictably fall into the trap he set.
I know someone who was in the hospital a lot as a kid, and said her faith was shattered by three words “Pediatric Oncology Ward”. That and having been placed in the room across from where they took patients for burn debridement, in a children’s hospital.
Pretty much my goto for problem of evil. It is really hard to argue that an loving god, even with free will bullshit excuse, would create a situation where humans had to develop pediatric oncology. The one group of humans we can point to and say they are innocent the one group we can point to and say this injustice. Given a choice between a universe that is indifferent and one that is a machine for misery I know which I would prefer and which one makes the most sense given the data we have.
Pretty much my goto for problem of evil.
It’s a good example of it.
I’m fond of a work of fiction called UNSONG when it comes to the problem of evil though, it posits as a solution that god operates at a level of abstraction where if two things are identical, they are the same thing and God’s purpose is to maximize the amount of good that exists. So God goes about creating worlds, first a perfect one, then ones with a single imperceptible imperfection, etc, etc, every conceivable world that results in more good than evil on net. We’re out on the fringes of that.
This same work of fiction also manages to be an absolute masterclass on foreshadowing, and manages to be about theodicy, kabbalah, open source software, the works of William Blake and the song Miss American Pie all at once. Coherently. If something doesn’t make sense to you in the moment, it’s probably not a plot hole but a lack of understanding that has already been foreshadowed.
Not sure what you mean. Bible stories are second-hand at best, and mostly 5th hand or worse.
To be fair, Jesus didn’t set any conditions. It was his dad being a dick as usual.
To be entirely confusing to the point that words don’t have meaning any more. He literally is his father. So it’s still a bad excuse.
Isn’t Jesus his dad? And also the holy ghost at the same time?
Sounds like deflecting.
This was one of my early questions and one of the first reasons that started pushing me away from religion.
At one point I asked my religion teacher in high school something among the lines of “So if a hypothetical person is the most good person on Earth from all the ways of looking at things, except he doesn’t believe in God, does the latter invalidate everything else and he’d still go to hell?”. She pretty much said yes.
Luckily she was chill about some of us in the class not believing. We just agreed to disagree, and while there were multiple debates on various religious subjects started by someone in the class questioning something she was saying, it never got heated.
