Sorry grey area, you missed the point. The point was that God knew that Job was strong in faith, and that no matter what The Adversary did, Job might question why God let this happen, but his faith would not waiver and he would not turn his back on god.
I’m surprised you missed that with your great ability to critique writing style. Or maybee you were too busy critiquing to actually pick up the main theme?
ok let me see if i can grasp this whole there needs to be evil thing. its like there needs to be weak ppl. if everyone was scot mendelson then what would be the point. if everyone could do it easily wheres the challenge and also where is the measuring stick. you cant appreciate the strong if their isnt the weak to capmare agianst. so i could take it a step futher and saying since i am so weak i am preforming a service to the strong lol j/k
but thats pretty much the good vs evil right?
[quote]relentlessfury wrote:
ok let me see if i can grasp this whole there needs to be evil thing. its like there needs to be weak ppl. if everyone was scot mendelson then what would be the point. if everyone could do it easily wheres the challenge and also where is the measuring stick. you cant appreciate the strong if their isnt the weak to capmare agianst. so i could take it a step futher and saying since i am so weak i am preforming a service to the strong lol j/k
but thats pretty much the good vs evil right?[/quote]
That was probably the most intelligent way of looking at it coming from anyone who isn’t approaching this from a strictly religious point of view. If we were all Micheal Jordan, Nike would truly suck ass as a shoe company.
mindeffer01: I didn’t “miss the point”. I was questioning why God would allow Job to be tested in this way. God himself says that Job has done nothing wrong, yet he allows him to be persecuted and tortured. I know that he was testing Job’s faith, but I fail to see why it was necessary, and how this could possibly be justified in a supposedly benevolent being.
If one were brought up on child abuse charges, couldn’t you use the defense that you were only testing their faith/love in you? I burned my child with cigarettes to see if he would still love me afterwards kind of thing. Just asking.
[quote]Mr. Chen wrote:
My children began to interact with God after learning about Him in Sunday school. Maybe you will learn to interact with God while lying in a burn unit. Whatever physical pain a person suffers is irrelevant.[/quote]
Right. However, if we give 10 people on this forum the choice between meeting God through a near death burning accident or through some Sunday school lessons, I’d reckon 10/10 would elect the latter.
[quote]
God’s concern is your soul, and your spiritual interaction with Him. [/quote]
I’m sure the burn victim would appreciate God reevaluating his concerns.
[quote]Grey Area wrote:
mindeffer01: I didn’t “miss the point”. I was questioning why God would allow Job to be tested in this way. God himself says that Job has done nothing wrong, yet he allows him to be persecuted and tortured. I know that he was testing Job’s faith, but I fail to see why it was necessary, and how this could possibly be justified in a supposedly benevolent being. [/quote]
This whole thread has been about good and evil. It has been explained and explained again. You can reread every post here yourself because there is no need to retype anything. You keep asking “why?!” as if you don’t want to accept the point that evil, for us to exist, is a necessity. You live in a world bound by this, yet act as if you can’t comprehend it. No one is going to try to make you comprehend it. My view doesn’t have to be your view. You have been presented with the way God, and this reality, is viewed by those of the Christian faith. Take it or leave it.
For the record, much of organized faith, whether you be Catholic, Baptist or you believe in Smurfs as the true God is frankly retarded. Not because of the specifics of the faith outlined, but because of people. We fuck shit up. The Bible has withstood the arguments against it by anyone who has TRULY researched it and read it. That means, don’t believe in people. Don’t believe in me or anyone else. Take the one document that we base this faith off of and see what you get from it. The concept of why we suffer has been explained to you. Your acception of it is completely up to you. However, reading only one book in the Bible will never answer all of the questions for anyone.
If I didn’t know better, I would say the thread ends here…unless you plan to ask “WHY?!” a few hundred more times. Read it. That’s why.
Okay, assuming evil is required to show how “good” good is (as per Prof. X’s theory). Why is it neccessary that evil be so widespread? Couldn’t evil be confined to a small area and still serve thats area purpose? Like Georgia for example, I’ve been there in August, and I’m pretty sure that’s what Hell would feel like. Why not just have all evil be there? Or does there need to be an equal amount of evil to good ratio for the theory to work?
[quote]DPH wrote:
Right Side Up wrote:
(1) OMNISCIENCE – This means God is “all-knowing.” It is believed that God knows everything, quite simply, regardless of the boundaries of space time. He knows EVERYTHING.
GOD’s knowledge must be bounded by space-time or there is no such thing as free-will for humans…if GOD knows what we will do in the future then our actions are pre-destined and not truly acts of free-will…GOD knows everything there is to know up to this moment, but not passed.[/quote]
or, he knows the future as well, in which case we ought to sacrifice our belief in our own free will.
I agree with you. I reject the notion of omnipotence outright – in and of itself. Believers on this board disagree.
However, I should point out that if his power does supercede science and logic, it is because he is responsible for them and such a supercession can exist only beyond our understanding.
[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
And this circles back to our attempt to impose a definition on “good.” As I said, I am not at all pretending to know why it would be good to allow evil to exist for a set period of time – but then again, I’m not omniscient. If we do go with our original 3 premises, that God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibeneficent, and if evil does exist, then an acceptable assumption would be that somehow allowing evil to exist is part of an overall plan for good. That would solve the logical connundrum, even if that assumption seems counter-intuitive to us non-omniscients.[/quote]
Well thanks for being aware that a logical connundrum even exists!
Most immediate question to your proposition is: why couldn’t the all-knowing, all-powerful God accomplish this plan for good without including any sort of evil or pain?
Pain is good. Everybody knows that. Pain sensors exist so that we won’t hurt ourselves.
If Hitler had not come to power, non of us younger than 60 would have been born. It’s called sensitive dependence on initial conditions.
Omnipotent, Omniscient and Omnibenevolent are terms from screwed up medieval theology. They attempt to describe. The only legitimate attributes are appophatic:
ie God is indescribable. Tell me who said got is Omnipotent? He can’t break his own laws.
Also, evil for a thousand years is nothing compared to eternity.
Evil is real, but tell me what it is. Tell me something that is evil. Death is good. Pain is good. Evil is emptying yourself of God so God is not omnipresent. He allows people to empty themselves of Him.
BTW the Roman Catholic Church had a theology at one point (don’t know if still-it’s hard to keep track) that God was present in Christian marriage except during the act of sexual intercourse. Well, birth control is another issue.
Prof X: you’re misrepresenting what I’m saying. What’s presented in Job isn’t just the problem of evil. It’s not merely a result of the fact that evil must exist for us to (not that I buy this, anyway). It’s God giving Satan explicit permission to screw with a guy’s life. It’s not “man doing bad as he has free will” or some kind of general punishment, it is God deliberately screwing up the life of someone he acknowledges to be upstanding and “fearing”, for seemingly no reason.
I’m getting quite fed up with Christians challenging me on how much of the Bible I’ve read. I fail to see how reading the rest of it will somehow eliminate all the contradictions in the bits I’ve read so far. However, I suppose I may have to bite the bullet and just read it cover to cover if only to remove this annoying “trump card”. I’ve read most of Genesis, Job, and most of the gospels, as well as lots of different bits and pieces (some suggested by atheists and some by Christian friends), and I can’t possibly see how the rest of the Bible could reconcile what I’ve already read.
[quote]Right Side Up wrote:
God’s concern is your soul, and your spiritual interaction with Him.
I’m sure the burn victim would appreciate God reevaluating his concerns.
[/quote]
I just wanted to end this by commenting on this one statement. Who are you to decide what is best for someone else? Should Stevie Wonder HAVE to have the ability to see for there to be a God? What if none of those songs would have been written if he did have that ability? Do you think those songs have had some positive influence on the world, even if you don’t listen to his music exclusively? How “bad” is it that he is blind? It is a ripple effect and everything effects the greater good regardless of how tragic you view a singular event in time. You may not be able to see where that ends, but do you really need to for it to have a positive long term effect? I brought up the book of Job. Many only focused on the pain…as if they completely ignored what happened afterwards.
His point was that the physical body is not of the greatest concern…and to anyone who believes in God, it should also not be the greatest concern. The greatest concern should be for what lives eternally past any singular negative episode. An atheist, however, is only forced to believe in the here and now. You have to. Any concept of greater good would logically be beyond you. Why not leave it at that…Unless you even have doubts about it?
A concept of the greater good isn’t “beyond us”. That’s both patronising and insulting. It’s perfectly possible to have a well-defined morality with no reference to God, besides which, just because we don’t believe something, it doesn’t mean that it is “beyond us”.
There is that assertion that you can have perfectly good set of morals w/o God…
Interesting that this keeps coming up, don’t ya think ?
–blak
[quote]blakjak wrote:
There is that assertion that you can have perfectly good set of morals w/o God…
Interesting that this keeps coming up, don’t ya think ?
–blak[/quote]
Yes, it is. Let me quote you something from the “atheists only please”
thread:
[quote]gdm wrote:
Pray tell, how would people who believe that souls are a fairytale have a standard of morality from which to exact judgement? Does the concept of a “scammer” have any merit in this type of world? Could one’s life be more important than another’s?
Should the sadddlebags of guilt have any weight there? And immorality?
Take a lesson from Dostoevsky: “If there is no God, all things are possible.”[/quote]
I strongly disagree with gdm here. Morality is not dependent upon the belief in a higher power. It is dependent upon a feeling of empathy towards your fellow man. You do not need God to feel empathy. Make sense?
On what randman wrote:
Well, monkeyballs. I’m just gonna have to try harder next time. Sorry to disappoint you. It’s not like I’m trying to be a comedian or anything. You guys are the silly ones.
[quote]lothario1132 wrote:
gdm wrote:
Pray tell, how would people who believe that souls are a fairytale have a standard of morality from which to exact judgement? Does the concept of a “scammer” have any merit in this type of world? Could one’s life be more important than another’s?
Should the sadddlebags of guilt have any weight there? And immorality?
Take a lesson from Dostoevsky: “If there is no God, all things are possible.”
I strongly disagree with gdm here. Morality is not dependent upon the belief in a higher power. It is dependent upon a feeling of empathy towards your fellow man. You do not need God to feel empathy. Make sense?[/quote]
Lothario,
To quote the late President Reagan: “there you go again” sucking me in to another one of these threads. And how? By cross-quoteing me from my brief interjection on another thread where my sole intention was to fascilitate for you the freedom you requested and that a libertine atheist such as yourself so rightfully deserves. Now, I’m responding here, which will result in a repartee from you, and the reverberations threaten to leap off the electronic page and affect mankind forever. See what you did??!!
Read the Dostoevsky quote again. Of course empathy can exist in a world without God, and so can a myriad of other human emotions. The problem is (which I thought was clear in my other response) in an atheistic world you can’t logically argue that empathy is moral or immoral for anyone other than yourself. You have become your own god, so to speak, so whether you want to open a door for some young lass or you decide to smash her in the face with it (which I suppose would be antithetical to a lothario’s code of conduct), what would it matter other than that it would make you feel bad since your code of morality dicates that you don’t do such a thing? And what if I was an atheist and thought differently, would I then be immoral?
You have, in a word, chaos, no standards of right and wrong and each person behaving the way he wants to behave.
But I have to admit this: If you have convinced yourself that empathy is a part of your self-created morality I applaud you, because it is part of mine to.
The difference is God provided mankind with a set of rules which I follow wholeheatedly since I have objectively concluded he is real, Jesus was who He said He was, and He really did resurrect from the dead.
My sincere hope is that He touches your heart, and soon.
[quote]gdm wrote:
lothario1132 wrote:
Lothario,
To quote the late President Reagan: “there you go again” sucking me in to another one of these threads. And how? By cross-quoteing me from my brief interjection on another thread where my sole intention was to fascilitate for you the freedom you requested and that a libertine atheist such as yourself so rightfully deserves. Now, I’m responding here, which will result in a repartee from you, and the reverberations threaten to leap off the electronic page and affect mankind forever. See what you did??!! [/quote]
Yes, I dragged a quote from you from another thread into this one, and I said as much before I did it. And that’s because your quote is pertinent to what we are discussing now, as well as to the intent of this thread. Really, I see that there is no such thing as the problem of evil, because evil is a subjective perception in our minds that differs from person to person. And this is the essence of the question of morality… is it individual, or is it a global concept?
Now we are finally agreeing on something, and it’s a nice feeling. That’s right. You get to make your own rules, you get to make your own life and your own choices. You get to pick what you care about. I know some folks who care very little for other people, while in contrast, I am exactly the opposite. Am I any better than the guy who doesn’t give a crap? That depends upon your point of view… something else that is individually defined.
[quote]You have become your own god, so to speak, so whether you want to open a door for some young lass or you decide to smash her in the face with it (which I suppose would be antithetical to a lothario’s code of conduct), what would it matter other than that it would make you feel bad since your code of morality dicates that you don’t do such a thing? And what if I was an atheist and thought differently, would I then be immoral?
You have, in a word, chaos, no standards of right and wrong and each person behaving the way he wants to behave.[/quote]
I don’t know about becoming my own God, but I am responsible for my own behavior, and I do take pride (if that’s the right word) in the fact that I am able to be helpful to people, both strangers and friends alike. Everybody knows what I mean here: it’s that good feeling you get from doing something for somebody just to be nice. That’s the reinforcement I get to keep on doing things the way that I do them. Seeing the commonality between all people, and being able to empathize with them is what those of us who are free from religion use to base our concept of what’s right and wrong. “Do unto others, etc.” is a pretty elegant way of summing it up, I think.
You see? I don’t have to fear hellfire and damnation – I act the way I do not to get some prize at the end of the game or to avoid eternal punishment. I act out of the care I feel RIGHT NOW. Because the present is the only real thing we ever have… the past is gone, and the future is unreachable until it becomes now. Sorry to get all metaphysical on ya here, but this is the best I way I can think of to get the whole “lothario mindset” across to you.
[quote]But I have to admit this: If you have convinced yourself that empathy is a part of your self-created morality I applaud you, because it is part of mine to.
The difference is God provided mankind with a set of rules which I follow wholeheatedly since I have objectively concluded he is real, Jesus was who He said He was, and He really did resurrect from the dead.
My sincere hope is that He touches your heart, and soon.[/quote]
Thanks for the sentiment, man. But really, I’m doing fine and will continue to do as best as I can while I can, and I don’t need a God to be able to. Maybe you can’t see that, maybe you can. Either way, thanks for being civil. I’m trying to be less of a smart-ass because I’m seeing that most folks hate when I call Jesus a hippie. Oh well. No reason to piss people off for the sake of pissing them off, I guess.
[quote]blakjak wrote:
There is that assertion that you can have perfectly good set of morals w/o God…
Interesting that this keeps coming up, don’t ya think ?
–blak[/quote]
You mean that you can have a perfectly good set of morals w/o BELIEF in God?
I think that as long as you act morally then somewhere you still believe. (although I’ve still yet to see a disproof of the “no such thing as a selfless act” argument.