“God would never do that”
or
“I cannot respect/worship a God who would knowingly…”
or similar things. There’s a certain respectable sentiment there. But at the same time, if the God you believe in never has and never would do anything that you personally would find disagreeable, what are you really worshipping?
So, for the theists- does God (the actual version of God you believe in, not ‘somebody else’s’ account of Him) do anything you don’t like? Is there any theological reason to expect that He would, or expect that He wouldn’t? How important is “I don’t like that” or “I wouldn’t have done it that way” type thoughts when evaluating whether or not to believe a claim about God?
I was once a theist and I always asked myself why God would go through the trouble of giving us free will, but yet give us a set of standards to live by and then condemn one for straying from those standards.
I could understand if God wasn’t claimed as “all loving”.
He wills that you will make the right choice. He can’t force you, he doesn’t want to, he wants you to want to.
God doesn’t condemn you for not choosing him, you condemn yourself.
There are different theories on such a thing, you are entering into this inclusvistically now, these are things where many theist differ. Some believe God doesn’t love everyone, and they back it will saying he wills your love but he cannot force his love on you if you don’t want it. It’s there, but it’s nothing like if you have a relationship with him, and in a sense I agree.
Thank you, but actually that doesnt go very good with my thread. I’m looking for people who actually believe there is a God doing things they don’t like. If I can’t find any, I’m going to propose a good anti-theistic argument basd on it.
I don’t think I need to define God for the purposes of my question, do I? I mean whichever God you believe in. The question just is, “Do you believe there is a God doing things you don’t like?” if you like everything your God is doing, the answer is no. If you don’t think there’s a god, the answer is also no.
Hmm… Good question Ucci. Well… Katrina sucked, many other natural disasters have sucked… but I can’t say it’s wrong of God, he does know more than I do. That’s really all I can think of, I believe I control most of my life unlike many others who want God to do it for them, so any problem I have I blame myself. Does this help?
Oh sure, that makes sense, and I’m not saying stuff that you can prove God is wrong about, necessarily (though if anyone has anything like that, I’d like to hear that too.) I just literally mean, stuff you don’t like. Hurricanes is a good example. When you think about hurricanes, and God, are you trying to rationalize it by saying God doesn’t really cause hurricanes, and somehow exempting Him for responsibility of hurricanes, or are you saying “Yes, God creates hurricanes, and I don’t like it…but whaddya gonna do?”
The Terran gods are much like the men. They are not all in agreement with eachother. How much moreso could they be in disagreement with humanity? And humanity, in disagreement with them?
I consider most Terran gods to be formats of archetype: that which satisfies a class of expectation once seen. And behind the form, the multiplicity of structure is unfathomable for Terrans, so they wish to relate to something as simple as “personality”, “character” and “form”… instead …
I’m not sure. I don’t know very much about scripture, but if I take certain parts of the OT as true, then I’m not sure if I agree with God’s actions as recorded.
Though this might just be due to my relative lack of scriptural knowledge.
I don’t believe in a god, nor religions. I do know that there is one or more beings superior to us, superior enough that they or it might appear omnipotent. They may or may not have been the one or ones that instigated us into being. For the sake of arguement I shall quit shifting and say they or it created us and our surroundings.
So what would I Say that I hate or would change? Trivial nuisances. Everyday pain in the butt average problems. Although even then I can still see their usefullness as I can see how major catastrophes and death benifits us.
I suppose really though The only suffering I would truly remove is the death of children, babies, fetuses. I would make all humans immune to death until they reach their majority. And I would of course cut way back on the human body’s ability to procreate. Or change its ability to procreate entirely.
The problem with a God of attributes is expectations. If we name God, it seems that we have to give him/her certain attributes,such as omnipitence.We begin to develop expectations of performance and begin to evaluate that performance.
The reference to Katrina is an example. God is all loving. God (nature) just knocked the Gulf Coast into yesterday. and here it comes… "How could…? Kris sees the same issue in the death of innocent babies. "How could…?
As an agnostic, I find the naming of God, the assigning attributes to such an entity to be idolatry of the worst sort. One may sense the presence of, be aware of the ‘something’ called God, but to suggest that this presence should in any way explain or answer to human enquiry is ludicrous. Who are we to judge the performance of such an entity?
Of course, man has written volumes concerning God’s expectations of humans, and so the things we don’t ‘like’ are most often interpreted as some form of punishment for failing to meet God’s expectations of us. Remember the famous Robertson pronouncement that the hurricanes that ravaged Florida two years ago was God’s punishment for the iniquities of Floridians?
And now for the dreaded word: INEFFABLE That which we would call God may be sensed, and we can feel awe and reverence before that sensing, but in naming that awareness as an entity with this power, that attribute, we build an idol whose performance we can ‘like’ or ‘dislike’. Whatever this sensing, this awareness may be, is not to be chained to the puny human constructs of mind.
Some might do a great “job” while others might piss me off.