And?
Well for me, natural disasters occur because “god”(not in the concept of “an old man w/ a beard” but the meaning of being a “god” in general) wants us to remember that we’re just mere mortals, that there are things beyond our control, regardless of what we think or do. In this case I assume that “god” wants to be understood, but he doesn’t want to either.
It’s like grabbing your own shadow…
I know I’m a douche, sorry for my crappy opinion. Peace!!
wow, he might be an idiot, but he sure as hell has one philosophical principle down: know thyself
iambiguous wrote:
But that does not obviate the distinction I raised above. We can talk about anything. But that is not the same thing as demonstrating that what we think we know about these things reflects the most rational manner in which these things can be talked about.
And, therefore, any discussion of the relationship between God, natural disasters and human suffering can only be speculative because there is no way in which to confirm our conjectures in the absense of an actual God.
I merely assumed His existence, that He was loving just and merciful and that [later in the thread] He was both omniscient and omnipotent.
I can’t reconile the abominable suffering with a loving, just and merciful Creator.
Where do our conceptions of what a loving, just and merciful being is like come from? They are based on those individuals who exemplify those attributes in their lives i.e. individuals who have achieved moral excellence. If God exists, the world would be the way it is in order to produce such people. A world without the possibility of natural evils and free will would not produce such people. For example without the real threat of death in the world, real courage could not exist. The providential plan wherein life flourished on this planet the way it does would be evidence of that god’s love, justice and mercy.
Show me someone who is said to embody moral excellence and I will show you others who will adamently insist she does not. Why? Because she doesn’t worship the right God or she doesn’t embrace the right political faction or she doesn’t support the right side in the abortion wars.
And I guess we will never know if corageous heroes would not exist in a world without the horrors of natural disasters because so far God has not seen fit to shut them down yet. We’ll just have take your word for it?
I always encourage people to read Rabbi Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen To Good People. The first part of the book is nothing short of a devastating critique of any God who might be omnipotent. He lost his own son to progeria and he exposes all of the terrible suffering he has seen or known of. He simply concludes [as do I] that no God could be loving, just and merciful and do nothing to stop what the protagonist in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness called simply, “the horror! the horror!”
And allow me please to put to life flourishing on the planet the way it does into perspective.
Here is a snapshot of the world we do live in:
•In the Asian, African and Latin American countries, well over 500 million people are living in what the World Bank has called “absolute poverty”
•Every year 18 million children die of hunger
•For the price of one missile, a school full of hungry children could eat lunch every day for 5 years
•Throughout the 1990’s more than 100 million children died from illness and starvation. Those 100 million deaths could [have been] prevented for the price of ten Stealth bombers, or what the world spends on its military in two days
•The World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the world is well-fed, one-third is under-fed one-third is starving
•Nearly one in four people, 1.3 billion – a majority of humanity – live on less than $1 per day, while the world’s 358 billionaires have assets exceeding the combined annual incomes of countries with 45 percent of the world’s people.
•3 billion people in the world today struggle to survive on less than $2 per day.
•Malnutrition is implicated in more than half of all child deaths worldwide – a proportion unmatched by any infectious disease since the Black Death
•To satisfy the world’s sanitation and food requirements would cost only US$13 billion- what the people of the United States and the European Union spend on perfume each year.
•The assets of the world’s three richest men are more than the combined GNP of all the least developed countries on the planet.
And God [one of them] sees all?
You seem to have me mistaken.
You think talking about gods must be a discussion regarding natural reality, while I’m simply stating that a discussion on gods is a discussion about humanity’s relationship to their gods…not much else.
What is “natural reality”?
What I posited [hypothetically] is the realionship between those parts of humanity who insist that God can be both loving, just and merciful and the author of planet earth.
I see this basically as parents brainwashing their children to believe such things or as folks who believe it because it has become a psychological defense mechanism for them.
Apart from that, it remains a deep mystery to me.
That’s still picking at the torn meet from the bones of a dead animal.
Look at what is wanted, not what is matching.
As I said in another thread (Religion is a Force for Good in the World ), religion is changing in perspective within the minds of the adherents.
Rather than looking at that assertion and seeing how their relationship to their god doesn’t jive with the record of their god, look at it as what it is: their preference of what their god is in value.
Ignore the creation part; who cares?
Just look at how they describe their understanding of their god, because the values placed upon their god are the values upon which are held as the highest esteem in which to achieve; that is why they are attributes of their god.
They are saying they view the highest attributes to achieve are being:
. Loving
. Just
. Merciful
That is hardly worth condemning.
I agree, certainly, that the varying gods of the Torah or Talmud do not readily display this range of attributes in their varying identities of their god therein, but that doesn’t matter either.
Bringing that up only peals away at useless bickering.
You won’t convince them of anything, nor them anything you.
There’s no fruit in it…just shit.
Instead, look at their relationship to their god as it stands today.
Whether they openly accept it or not; they are worshiping a different god than one worshiped thousands of years ago…but again…good!!