If God is all powerful...

[CMike]

...Why does it makes babies with cancer, or retarded, or deformed, or in pain, or even with all of that together? Is god not capable of a perfect creation? Is it a punishment of some sort?

Should a God conform to your parameters of his form? Why would he? Could making God in your own image have disappointed you?

Best guess? God created it all. All of it was good. Perhaps it was all even perfect. Then the rest of everything happened. What I'm talking about is personal responsibility both on an individual and species level. Where I'm going with this is God made things--us included--then we messed it up/are still messing it up. In my opinion we need to take responsibility for most all the bad things you mention, not blame them on God. That's the biggest cop-out of all time. We need to take responsibility for misuse of free will, much the same way society holds us to standards defined by laws of other men.

It's all so constraining isn't it? This belief in God.

But if god created it all, why did he create imperfect humans? And you never answered why god made cancer, retardation...? Why didn't it give us a free will that wasn't fucked up?

Because then they would be robots and they could never get closer to GD

 

[night_son]

But I did answer. We fucked it all up. Our scientifically engineered society twisted it all to shit--including disease, defect, etc. We fucked up free will. God didn't. Now if we could only swallow that ultimate pill of shit responsibility for our own actions. Actions resulting in the consequences you question.

No, but why did god make it so we could **** everything up?

Free will

Personal responsibility for choice is as impossible to accept as the consequence. If a jailor chains you to a wall can you steal an ear of corn from the fields outside the prison wall? Say the jailor sets you free. First thing you steal some corn and consequences ensue. The farmer can't meet his tax to the dickhead palatine so his family is put to death. Is the Jailor responsible by proxy of setting you free for your crimes against self or others?

Perhaps we'd all be happier if God had kept us chained.

God could have given us free will without all the fucked up stuff. He chose not to. Why?

Wouldn't be free will then, would it? It'd be conditional freedom.

It would be free of bullshit, the ultimate freedom. So why wouldn't god give that to us?

The only ultimate freedom is death; otherwise known as freedom mainlined. The undiscovered country. And death is freedom from responsibility. Perhaps what you seek is a return to emergence from the womb. Even then comes the yolk of personal responsibility to cry when hungry or starve is the consequence. You already possess the maximum free will. Do what you like, when you like, how you like. Just don't blame God for the consequences. Perhaps we are consequences of God's act of creation and he just wants to correct things for the record.

 

[Taz]

See, you think you just made a great point, but you just established the vanity, fecklessness, and immorality of God. God isn't a "peer", the way you describe him. You describe him as powerful and our creator. An entity that would create sentient creatures and then leave them to suffer if they don't believe in him without a shred of evidence is evil. Period.

By the way, you left out lots of horrible things that happen to people that are not their fault...by design, of course. Are those things humns' fault to? Please explain how. You can start with, oh...genetic disease.

And..
Go!

So you think that he should force you to want him in his life?

This is like being a man, with a wife who is having sex with every single guy in the neighborhood but you. A wife that does everything she can to cause you pain.

You would stay with such a woman? And pay her bills? And pay her car payment, while she screws everyone but you?

It's easy for people like you to say G-d should love you, even if you hate him, and that he should take care of you, even while you attack him, and reject him.

Little different when you are on the receiving end.

Again you paint god as an equal, or a peer. With that comes the judgment he deserves, which is that he is a vain, evil tyrant. Should a world leader or even a coworker act the way god does, demanding fealty and worship under penalty of suffering, you would consider that person to be awful. Are you sure this is the god you want to flaunt? That's the problem with your reasoning.

So, let's abandon that line of reasoning, as it embarrassed you greatly. Instead, let's get back to considering god to be much more.powerful and wise than are humans...akin to a parent, and his children. A parent would attempt to inhue their children with the tools to do what is right...in this case, as you say, worship the parents and give them in conditional love. Instead, god gaveGod gave himans sentience and powers of reason...then demands fealty and belief, under penalty of suffrring, without a shred of evidence.

It's truly evil and nauseating. Peddle your evil god to someone else.

You still are completely characterizing.

If G-d demanded something, you would have no choice but to give it.

He's not demanding anything. So the entire premise of your argument is utterly false.

God is demanding that we follow a book or burn forever.

Which God? What book?

Christian god, the Bible.

 

[Taz]

Again you paint god as an equal, or a peer. With that comes the judgment he deserves, which is that he is a vain, evil tyrant. Should a world leader or even a coworker act the way god does, demanding fealty and worship under penalty of suffering, you would consider that person to be awful. Are you sure this is the god you want to flaunt? That's the problem with your reasoning.

So, let's abandon that line of reasoning, as it embarrassed you greatly. Instead, let's get back to considering god to be much more.powerful and wise than are humans...akin to a parent, and his children. A parent would attempt to inhue their children with the tools to do what is right...in this case, as you say, worship the parents and give them in conditional love. Instead, god gaveGod gave himans sentience and powers of reason...then demands fealty and belief, under penalty of suffrring, without a shred of evidence.

It's truly evil and nauseating. Peddle your evil god to someone else.

You still are completely characterizing.

If G-d demanded something, you would have no choice but to give it.

He's not demanding anything. So the entire premise of your argument is utterly false.

God is demanding that we follow a book or burn forever.

No, that's not how this works.

You are going to burn for your own sins, yourself.

That's on you. Like a wife that chooses to cheat, chooses to destroy her marriage, like a man who chooses to not go to work chooses to be poor and impoverished...... you are sinful and evil, and will pay for your choices yourself.

That's 100%, on you. No one else. Not G-d, not your mother, not society.... just you.

G-d, and his book, are offering you forgiveness for your evil actions. If you accept that, and admit your evil and cruelty, he will forgive you, and offer you freedom from your evil, and salvation in Heaven after this life.

You are making the choice. Just you. You can choose to have G-d in your life, and reap the rewards.... or you choose to not have G-d in your life.... and... whatever you get is whatever you get.

Let me put it another way..... do you think a judges who puts a serial rapist and murderer in prison for life, is a tyrant? Or did the serial rapist and murderer, make their own choice in what happened to them, by choosing to engage in rape and murder?

You..... YOU... are the one making the choice. G-d will not force anything on you. You make the choice about what your eternity looks like.

Actually, there's more proof for re-incarnation than there is for a heaven or hell.

And you can choose to believe that if you wish. But don't say G-d is demanding anything, when you are making all your own choices as to what you believe.

But what god will do if it is real shouldn't depend on whether I believe or not. And even if i don't believe in gravity, it still has an effect on me. Your god doesn't have any effect on me if I don't believe?

 

[Taz]

God is demanding that we follow a book or burn forever.

Since your OP simply attacks the concept of God which book would that be?

*****SMILE*****

Any religious book.

 

[Taz]

...Why does it makes babies with cancer, or retarded, or deformed, or in pain, or even with all of that together? Is god not capable of a perfect creation? Is it a punishment of some sort?

MLK responds...

We are never to think of God's power in terms of what he could conceivably do by the exercise of what we may call sheer omnipotence which crushes all obtacles in its path. We are always to think of God's power in terms of his purpose. If what he did by sheer omnipotence defeated his purpose, then, however startling and impressive, it would be an expression of weakness, not of power. Indeed, a good definition of power is "ability to achieve purpose. This applies to the power of a gun, or a drug, or an argument, or even a sermon! Does it achieve its end? Does it fulfill its purpose?

We must realize that God's power is not put forward to get certain things done, but to get them done in a certain way, and with certain results in the lives of those who do them. We can see this clearly in human illustrations. My purpose in doing a crossword puzzle is not to fill in certain words. I could fill them in easily by waiting for tomorrow morning's paper. Filling them in without the answers is harder but much more satisfying, for it calls out resourcefulness, ingenuity, and discipline which by the easier way would find no self expression.
Similarly, to borrow an illustration from William James, eleven men battle desperately on a field, risking falling and injury, using up a prodigious amount of energy, and when we ask why, we learn that it is to get an inflated, leather covered sphere called a football across a goal. But if that is all, why doesn't someone get up in the night and put it there? Football games are not played to get a ball across a goal, but to get it there under certain conditions, in a certain way, with certain results in the lives of those concerned. Power to get the ball across the goal is to be interpreted in terms of purposes and only makes sense in the light of those purposes. Action, then, which defeats purpose is weakness. Power is the ability to fulfill purpose. No one knows what it cost God to refrain from intervention when wicked men put his beloved Son to death. But the restraint was not weakness. The Cross became the power of God unto salvation.

MLK was a blow hard who beat up white women for kicks.

Maybe, maybe not. You don't have perfect knowledge of that either. But either way, it doesn't change the answer.

You lack perfect knowledge why God would create the world he did, so you attempt to fit God into your limited and flawed way of seeing things.

westwall nailed you.

westwall nails taz...

westwall is such an imbecile I don't even read what he posts, he's always off point, even more than you. You'd have to sum up his point for me to respond, and I'll show you that he missed the whole point of the OP.

 

[Taz]

...Why does it makes babies with cancer, or retarded, or deformed, or in pain, or even with all of that together? Is god not capable of a perfect creation? Is it a punishment of some sort?

We don't know what GDs plan is.

So you don't know. Got it.

 

[Taz]

...Why does it makes babies with cancer, or retarded, or deformed, or in pain, or even with all of that together? Is god not capable of a perfect creation? Is it a punishment of some sort?

Should a God conform to your parameters of his form? Why would he? Could making God in your own image have disappointed you?

Best guess? God created it all. All of it was good. Perhaps it was all even perfect. Then the rest of everything happened. What I'm talking about is personal responsibility both on an individual and species level. Where I'm going with this is God made things--us included--then we messed it up/are still messing it up. In my opinion we need to take responsibility for most all the bad things you mention, not blame them on God. That's the biggest cop-out of all time. We need to take responsibility for misuse of free will, much the same way society holds us to standards defined by laws of other men.

It's all so constraining isn't it? This belief in God.

But if god created it all, why did he create imperfect humans? And you never answered why god made cancer, retardation...? Why didn't it give us a free will that wasn't fucked up?

Because then they would be robots and they could never get closer to GD

How so? Having a non-stop good time and being cancer free makes one a robot?

 

[Taz]

No, but why did god make it so we could **** everything up?

Free will

Personal responsibility for choice is as impossible to accept as the consequence. If a jailor chains you to a wall can you steal an ear of corn from the fields outside the prison wall? Say the jailor sets you free. First thing you steal some corn and consequences ensue. The farmer can't meet his tax to the dickhead palatine so his family is put to death. Is the Jailor responsible by proxy of setting you free for your crimes against self or others?

Perhaps we'd all be happier if God had kept us chained.

God could have given us free will without all the fucked up stuff. He chose not to. Why?

Wouldn't be free will then, would it? It'd be conditional freedom.

It would be free of bullshit, the ultimate freedom. So why wouldn't god give that to us?

The only ultimate freedom is death; otherwise known as freedom mainlined. The undiscovered country. And death is freedom from responsibility. Perhaps what you seek is a return to emergence from the womb. Even then comes the yolk of personal responsibility to cry when hungry or starve is the consequence. You already possess the maximum free will. Do what you like, when you like, how you like. Just don't blame God for the consequences. Perhaps we are consequences of God's act of creation and he just wants to correct things for the record.

So in your religion, you're only good when you die. Accept your lot in life because you'll be rewarded when you die. A perfect con man's game.

 

[night_son]

Free will

Personal responsibility for choice is as impossible to accept as the consequence. If a jailor chains you to a wall can you steal an ear of corn from the fields outside the prison wall? Say the jailor sets you free. First thing you steal some corn and consequences ensue. The farmer can't meet his tax to the dickhead palatine so his family is put to death. Is the Jailor responsible by proxy of setting you free for your crimes against self or others?

Perhaps we'd all be happier if God had kept us chained.

God could have given us free will without all the fucked up stuff. He chose not to. Why?

Wouldn't be free will then, would it? It'd be conditional freedom.

It would be free of bullshit, the ultimate freedom. So why wouldn't god give that to us?

The only ultimate freedom is death; otherwise known as freedom mainlined. The undiscovered country. And death is freedom from responsibility. Perhaps what you seek is a return to emergence from the womb. Even then comes the yolk of personal responsibility to cry when hungry or starve is the consequence. You already possess the maximum free will. Do what you like, when you like, how you like. Just don't blame God for the consequences. Perhaps we are consequences of God's act of creation and he just wants to correct things for the record.

So in your religion, you're only good when you die. Accept your lot in life because you'll be rewarded when you die. A perfect con man's game.

That's one way to read my post. Here's another:

I was using death as a non-religious qualifier for the absence of responsibility and comparing it to a state of freedom from everything--including consciousness, obviously. How can one be either good or bad in death, at least as provable from this side of the end of biological life?

What is accepting one's lot in life? Laying down and taking it on the chin? No one claims that's the best way to live. However, let's say you believe in God as an idea held in the minds of billions of fellow humans. Through their belief God becomes real and physical as their beliefs (bullshit or not) are manifested through actions which effect anyone standing in their way will suffer (observe millennia of human history). Right or wrong, does not accepting your lot in life mean defying God himself somehow in protest, thus attempting to fight authority in all forms? Could fighting God be the same as fighting a part of yourself extant within you since conception?

Secular or tainted by dogma, laws stand in contradiction to ultimate freedom and free will. By comparison of your questions in this thread aren't you also asking why laws of men enacted and enforced against your personal freedoms are not free of things you don't like? Is a law which legalized use or disposal of a chemical that caused cancer not just as culpable of a crime against humanity as the failures of God you insinuate in this thread?

Blame of consequence for actions of self on some other entity is the perfect con.

 

[Taz]

God could have given us free will without all the fucked up stuff. He chose not to. Why?

Wouldn't be free will then, would it? It'd be conditional freedom.

It would be free of bullshit, the ultimate freedom. So why wouldn't god give that to us?

The only ultimate freedom is death; otherwise known as freedom mainlined. The undiscovered country. And death is freedom from responsibility. Perhaps what you seek is a return to emergence from the womb. Even then comes the yolk of personal responsibility to cry when hungry or starve is the consequence. You already possess the maximum free will. Do what you like, when you like, how you like. Just don't blame God for the consequences. Perhaps we are consequences of God's act of creation and he just wants to correct things for the record.

So in your religion, you're only good when you die. Accept your lot in life because you'll be rewarded when you die. A perfect con man's game.

That's one way to read my post. Here's another:

I was using death as a non-religious qualifier for the absence of responsibility and comparing it to a state of freedom from everything--including consciousness, obviously. How can one be either good or bad in death, at least as provable from this side of the end of biological life?

What is accepting one's lot in life? Laying down and taking it on the chin? No one claims that's the best way to live. However, let's say you believe in God as an idea held in the minds of billions of fellow humans. Through their belief God becomes real and physical as their beliefs (bullshit or not) are manifested through actions which effect anyone standing in their way will suffer (observe millennia of human history). Right or wrong, does not accepting your lot in life mean defying God himself somehow in protest, thus attempting to fight authority in all forms? Could fighting God be the same as fighting a part of yourself extant within you since conception?

Secular or tainted by dogma, laws stand in contradiction to ultimate freedom and free will. By comparison of your questions in this thread aren't you also asking why laws of men enacted and enforced against your personal freedoms are not free of things you don't like? Is a law which legalized use or disposal of a chemical that caused cancer not just as culpable of a crime against humanity as the failures of God you insinuate in this thread?

Blame of consequence for actions of self on some other entity is the perfect con.

"Through their belief God becomes real" Um... no. Millions of kids believe in Santa Claus. Their belief doesn't make Santa real, no matter how thin you slice it.

 

[night_son]

Wouldn't be free will then, would it? It'd be conditional freedom.

It would be free of bullshit, the ultimate freedom. So why wouldn't god give that to us?

The only ultimate freedom is death; otherwise known as freedom mainlined. The undiscovered country. And death is freedom from responsibility. Perhaps what you seek is a return to emergence from the womb. Even then comes the yolk of personal responsibility to cry when hungry or starve is the consequence. You already possess the maximum free will. Do what you like, when you like, how you like. Just don't blame God for the consequences. Perhaps we are consequences of God's act of creation and he just wants to correct things for the record.

So in your religion, you're only good when you die. Accept your lot in life because you'll be rewarded when you die. A perfect con man's game.

That's one way to read my post. Here's another:

I was using death as a non-religious qualifier for the absence of responsibility and comparing it to a state of freedom from everything--including consciousness, obviously. How can one be either good or bad in death, at least as provable from this side of the end of biological life?

What is accepting one's lot in life? Laying down and taking it on the chin? No one claims that's the best way to live. However, let's say you believe in God as an idea held in the minds of billions of fellow humans. Through their belief God becomes real and physical as their beliefs (bullshit or not) are manifested through actions which effect anyone standing in their way will suffer (observe millennia of human history). Right or wrong, does not accepting your lot in life mean defying God himself somehow in protest, thus attempting to fight authority in all forms? Could fighting God be the same as fighting a part of yourself extant within you since conception?

Secular or tainted by dogma, laws stand in contradiction to ultimate freedom and free will. By comparison of your questions in this thread aren't you also asking why laws of men enacted and enforced against your personal freedoms are not free of things you don't like? Is a law which legalized use or disposal of a chemical that caused cancer not just as culpable of a crime against humanity as the failures of God you insinuate in this thread?

Blame of consequence for actions of self on some other entity is the perfect con.

"Through their belief God becomes real" Um... no. Millions of kids believe in Santa Claus. Their belief doesn't make Santa real, no matter how thin you slice it.

Good point.

What do you consider real? Fall off a horse, bruise your knee. Is the bruise real? Whose fault is the bruise? Yours or the horses? Why didn't the horse provide a smoother ride? Why did you get on the horse in the first place knowing a bruise was a possible outcome?

What drives the global kids-get-toys mass market each Christmas season? Is it really the birth of Christ, the spirit of an entity no one can illustrate sufficiently into your definition of reality, or is it manifestation of the belief of millions who shop for toys and lie to their children that a guy's coming down the chimney to deliver them but only if they've behaved all year.

I follow what you're saying. The putting to the sword of thousands of Saracens by the collective beliefs of thousands of Christians cannot be proof one God or the other exists. So if God is not to blame for the massacre, who is? The Crusaders who killed them, that's who.

Therefore, end of the day, is God alive and/or real because he is an idea living in the minds of billions, or is God something else? Santa Claus exists but in so far as we adults know, only as an idea inserted into the minds of children. So what defines real? Only the end product of the idea translated into the material, or is the abstract idea just as real?

 

[Andylusion]

You still are completely characterizing.

If G-d demanded something, you would have no choice but to give it.

He's not demanding anything. So the entire premise of your argument is utterly false.

God is demanding that we follow a book or burn forever.

No, that's not how this works.

You are going to burn for your own sins, yourself.

That's on you. Like a wife that chooses to cheat, chooses to destroy her marriage, like a man who chooses to not go to work chooses to be poor and impoverished...... you are sinful and evil, and will pay for your choices yourself.

That's 100%, on you. No one else. Not G-d, not your mother, not society.... just you.

G-d, and his book, are offering you forgiveness for your evil actions. If you accept that, and admit your evil and cruelty, he will forgive you, and offer you freedom from your evil, and salvation in Heaven after this life.

You are making the choice. Just you. You can choose to have G-d in your life, and reap the rewards.... or you choose to not have G-d in your life.... and... whatever you get is whatever you get.

Let me put it another way..... do you think a judges who puts a serial rapist and murderer in prison for life, is a tyrant? Or did the serial rapist and murderer, make their own choice in what happened to them, by choosing to engage in rape and murder?

You..... YOU... are the one making the choice. G-d will not force anything on you. You make the choice about what your eternity looks like.

Actually, there's more proof for re-incarnation than there is for a heaven or hell.

And you can choose to believe that if you wish. But don't say G-d is demanding anything, when you are making all your own choices as to what you believe.

But what god will do if it is real shouldn't depend on whether I believe or not. And even if i don't believe in gravity, it still has an effect on me. Your god doesn't have any effect on me if I don't believe?

Ironically, I pretty much agree with everything you are saying. It's always interesting to me that two people can look at the exact same things, say the same things, and then come to opposite conclusions.

You are correct. What you believe, ultimately will have no effect on the outcome.

A criminal may not believe in justice, may not believe in law enforcement, and may not believe in judgement. But when they drag him off to prison, whether he believes in such things will not matter.

Just like whether you believe in gravity or not, will not matter when you step off the edge of a cliff, and fall.

Whether you believe in life after death, will not matter after you die. If it is real, then you will face it, whether you believe it or not.

Whether you believe in being judged for how you lived your life in that after-life, will not matter once once you die. If it is true that your actions in life will be judged on their merit, you will face that whether you believe in it, or not.

What matters, is not whether you believe.

If you are hooked on Heroin, you can believe that Heroin will ruin your health, or not believe that Heroin will ruin your health. It does not matter. Heroin will ruin your health.

And it's not because you refused to believe the doctors, that the doctor caused the drugs to destroy you.

Just because you don't realize the drugs are killing you, doesn't mean it's the doctors fault, and everything was fine until the doctor warned you that heroin ruins your health.

G-d is warning everyone that your sins are killing you. G-d offers a gift of forgiveness, to those who accept and repent of their evil ways, and will save your very soul for eternity.

But just 'believing' in G-d has no effect. The Devil and his Demons, all 'believe' G-d exists... still going to their eternal punishment for their evil.

 

[hobelim]

G-d is warning everyone that your sins are killing you. G-d offers a gift of forgiveness, to those who accept and repent of their evil ways, and will save your very soul for eternity.

But just 'believing' in G-d has no effect. The Devil and his Demons, all 'believe' G-d exists... still going to their eternal punishment for their evil.

Evil is a deliberate thing that requires a conscious decision to reject what is good. A person cannot reject the truth and embrace evil unless the distinction between good and evil is revealed to them.

When Jesus first appeared he said that if he had not come and spoken to them they would not be guilty of sin.

His claim was that they were following the law in the wrong way but according to Jesus it was not a sin until he taught them what the law of God was actually about and they consciously rejected the right way to follow the law and consequently God himself who made the truth known through Jesus.


In the same way, how can anyone be guilty of sin unless the right way to understand the teachings of the law is revealed to them?


Surely you don't base your ideas about what is sinful or not on what Jesus clearly identified as the wrong way to interpret and follow the law, do you?

 

[Taz]

It would be free of bullshit, the ultimate freedom. So why wouldn't god give that to us?

The only ultimate freedom is death; otherwise known as freedom mainlined. The undiscovered country. And death is freedom from responsibility. Perhaps what you seek is a return to emergence from the womb. Even then comes the yolk of personal responsibility to cry when hungry or starve is the consequence. You already possess the maximum free will. Do what you like, when you like, how you like. Just don't blame God for the consequences. Perhaps we are consequences of God's act of creation and he just wants to correct things for the record.

So in your religion, you're only good when you die. Accept your lot in life because you'll be rewarded when you die. A perfect con man's game.

That's one way to read my post. Here's another:

I was using death as a non-religious qualifier for the absence of responsibility and comparing it to a state of freedom from everything--including consciousness, obviously. How can one be either good or bad in death, at least as provable from this side of the end of biological life?

What is accepting one's lot in life? Laying down and taking it on the chin? No one claims that's the best way to live. However, let's say you believe in God as an idea held in the minds of billions of fellow humans. Through their belief God becomes real and physical as their beliefs (bullshit or not) are manifested through actions which effect anyone standing in their way will suffer (observe millennia of human history). Right or wrong, does not accepting your lot in life mean defying God himself somehow in protest, thus attempting to fight authority in all forms? Could fighting God be the same as fighting a part of yourself extant within you since conception?

Secular or tainted by dogma, laws stand in contradiction to ultimate freedom and free will. By comparison of your questions in this thread aren't you also asking why laws of men enacted and enforced against your personal freedoms are not free of things you don't like? Is a law which legalized use or disposal of a chemical that caused cancer not just as culpable of a crime against humanity as the failures of God you insinuate in this thread?

Blame of consequence for actions of self on some other entity is the perfect con.

"Through their belief God becomes real" Um... no. Millions of kids believe in Santa Claus. Their belief doesn't make Santa real, no matter how thin you slice it.

Good point.

What do you consider real? Fall off a horse, bruise your knee. Is the bruise real? Whose fault is the bruise? Yours or the horses? Why didn't the horse provide a smoother ride? Why did you get on the horse in the first place knowing a bruise was a possible outcome?

What drives the global kids-get-toys mass market each Christmas season? Is it really the birth of Christ, the spirit of an entity no one can illustrate sufficiently into your definition of reality, or is it manifestation of the belief of millions who shop for toys and lie to their children that a guy's coming down the chimney to deliver them but only if they've behaved all year.

I follow what you're saying. The putting to the sword of thousands of Saracens by the collective beliefs of thousands of Christians cannot be proof one God or the other exists. So if God is not to blame for the massacre, who is? The Crusaders who killed them, that's who.

Therefore, end of the day, is God alive and/or real because he is an idea living in the minds of billions, or is God something else? Santa Claus exists but in so far as we adults know, only as an idea inserted into the minds of children. So what defines real? Only the end product of the idea translated into the material, or is the abstract idea just as real?

An abstract ideal can only be real in the sense that it's a real abstract idea. It never changes to abstract fact unless science can confirm it. That millions of people in the US believe in "creation science" doesn't make it real either.

 

[Taz]

God is demanding that we follow a book or burn forever.

No, that's not how this works.

You are going to burn for your own sins, yourself.

That's on you. Like a wife that chooses to cheat, chooses to destroy her marriage, like a man who chooses to not go to work chooses to be poor and impoverished...... you are sinful and evil, and will pay for your choices yourself.

That's 100%, on you. No one else. Not G-d, not your mother, not society.... just you.

G-d, and his book, are offering you forgiveness for your evil actions. If you accept that, and admit your evil and cruelty, he will forgive you, and offer you freedom from your evil, and salvation in Heaven after this life.

You are making the choice. Just you. You can choose to have G-d in your life, and reap the rewards.... or you choose to not have G-d in your life.... and... whatever you get is whatever you get.

Let me put it another way..... do you think a judges who puts a serial rapist and murderer in prison for life, is a tyrant? Or did the serial rapist and murderer, make their own choice in what happened to them, by choosing to engage in rape and murder?

You..... YOU... are the one making the choice. G-d will not force anything on you. You make the choice about what your eternity looks like.

Actually, there's more proof for re-incarnation than there is for a heaven or hell.

And you can choose to believe that if you wish. But don't say G-d is demanding anything, when you are making all your own choices as to what you believe.

But what god will do if it is real shouldn't depend on whether I believe or not. And even if i don't believe in gravity, it still has an effect on me. Your god doesn't have any effect on me if I don't believe?

Ironically, I pretty much agree with everything you are saying. It's always interesting to me that two people can look at the exact same things, say the same things, and then come to opposite conclusions.

You are correct. What you believe, ultimately will have no effect on the outcome.

A criminal may not believe in justice, may not believe in law enforcement, and may not believe in judgement. But when they drag him off to prison, whether he believes in such things will not matter.

Just like whether you believe in gravity or not, will not matter when you step off the edge of a cliff, and fall.

Whether you believe in life after death, will not matter after you die. If it is real, then you will face it, whether you believe it or not.

Whether you believe in being judged for how you lived your life in that after-life, will not matter once once you die. If it is true that your actions in life will be judged on their merit, you will face that whether you believe in it, or not.

What matters, is not whether you believe.

If you are hooked on Heroin, you can believe that Heroin will ruin your health, or not believe that Heroin will ruin your health. It does not matter. Heroin will ruin your health.

And it's not because you refused to believe the doctors, that the doctor caused the drugs to destroy you.

Just because you don't realize the drugs are killing you, doesn't mean it's the doctors fault, and everything was fine until the doctor warned you that heroin ruins your health.

G-d is warning everyone that your sins are killing you. G-d offers a gift of forgiveness, to those who accept and repent of their evil ways, and will save your very soul for eternity.

But just 'believing' in G-d has no effect. The Devil and his Demons, all 'believe' G-d exists... still going to their eternal punishment for their evil.

"G-d is warning everyone that your sins are killing you. G-d offers a gift of forgiveness, to those who accept and repent of their evil ways, and will save your very soul for eternity." Jesus died on the cross for my sins, that bill is already paid.

"But just 'believing' in G-d has no effect. The Devil and his Demons, all 'believe' G-d exists... still going to their eternal punishment for their evil."

This statement is nonsense, well, unless you can prove it.

 

[Taz]

G-d is warning everyone that your sins are killing you. G-d offers a gift of forgiveness, to those who accept and repent of their evil ways, and will save your very soul for eternity.

But just 'believing' in G-d has no effect. The Devil and his Demons, all 'believe' G-d exists... still going to their eternal punishment for their evil.

Evil is a deliberate thing that requires a conscious decision. When Jesus first appeared he said that if he had not come and spoken to them they would not be guilty of sin.


His claim was that they were following the law in the wrong way but according to Jesus it was not a sin until he taught them what they law of God was actually about and rejected the right way to follow the law and God who revealed it to him...


In the same way, how can anyone be guilty of sin unless the right way to understand the teachings of the law is revealed again?


Surely you don't base your ideas about what is sinful or not on what Jesus clearly identified as the wrong way to interpret and follow the law, do you?

Jesus died on the cross for our sins. So that bill is already paid. Thanks, brah.

 

[hobelim]

G-d is warning everyone that your sins are killing you. G-d offers a gift of forgiveness, to those who accept and repent of their evil ways, and will save your very soul for eternity.

But just 'believing' in G-d has no effect. The Devil and his Demons, all 'believe' G-d exists... still going to their eternal punishment for their evil.

Evil is a deliberate thing that requires a conscious decision. When Jesus first appeared he said that if he had not come and spoken to them they would not be guilty of sin.


His claim was that they were following the law in the wrong way but according to Jesus it was not a sin until he taught them what they law of God was actually about and rejected the right way to follow the law and God who revealed it to him...


In the same way, how can anyone be guilty of sin unless the right way to understand the teachings of the law is revealed again?


Surely you don't base your ideas about what is sinful or not on what Jesus clearly identified as the wrong way to interpret and follow the law, do you?

Jesus died on the cross for our sins. So that bill is already paid. Thanks, brah.

Nonsense. Jesus taught the right way to understand and comply with the divine commands that fulfills the promise of life.

Jesus died so that others might live. If you don't heed his advice you can't do anything but sin.

And you will pay the debt owed for your own sins until you have paid the last penny. Everyone is held accountable for themselves. No one can escape the hand of God either in this world or the world to come .

If a person accepts the revealed truth, acts on it, and rises to eternal life before they die they have already passed from death to life and are no longer subject to judgment. They have prepared for themselves a place in the world to come and will never know what it is to die.

If not, when they die, they will be judged according to their words and deeds. Some people will be given a shack, some people will be given a mansion, some people will not be given any place to be at all..

Thats the way the cookie crumbles.

 

[Damaged Eagle]

God is demanding that we follow a book or burn forever.

Since your OP simply attacks the concept of God which book would that be?

*****SMILE*****

Any religious book.

Not all religious texts consider hell to be a burning pit and in my case I don't have any specific religious text that I follow.

Seems to me that you're making general statements about God that don't hold true.

*****CHUCKLE*****

 

[Taz]

G-d is warning everyone that your sins are killing you. G-d offers a gift of forgiveness, to those who accept and repent of their evil ways, and will save your very soul for eternity.

But just 'believing' in G-d has no effect. The Devil and his Demons, all 'believe' G-d exists... still going to their eternal punishment for their evil.

Evil is a deliberate thing that requires a conscious decision. When Jesus first appeared he said that if he had not come and spoken to them they would not be guilty of sin.


His claim was that they were following the law in the wrong way but according to Jesus it was not a sin until he taught them what they law of God was actually about and rejected the right way to follow the law and God who revealed it to him...


In the same way, how can anyone be guilty of sin unless the right way to understand the teachings of the law is revealed again?


Surely you don't base your ideas about what is sinful or not on what Jesus clearly identified as the wrong way to interpret and follow the law, do you?

Jesus died on the cross for our sins. So that bill is already paid. Thanks, brah.

Nonsense. Jesus taught the right way to understand and comply with the divine commands that fulfills the promise of life.

Jesus died so that others might live. If you don't heed his advice you can't do anything but sin.

And you will pay the debt owed for your own sins until you have paid the last penny. Everyone is held accountable for themselves. No one can escape the hand of God either in this world or the world to come .

If a person accepts the revealed truth, acts on it, and rises to eternal life before they die they have already passed from death to life and are no longer subject to judgment. They have prepared for themselves a place in the world to come and will never know what it is to die.

If not, when they die, they will be judged according to their words and deeds. Some people will be given a shack, some people will be given a mansion, some people will not be given any place to be at all..

Thats the way the cookie crumbles.

"Everyone is held accountable for themselves. No one can escape the hand of God either in this world or the world to come ." How do you know this for sure? God tell you himself? Or you read it in a book written by sheep shaggers?