by cofty 2596 Replies latest jw experiences
Caliber - If my analogy is too harsh please explain why?
Imagine that scientists developed a pill that would eradicate all unwelcome memories and create a feeling of bliss.
How would you judge a scientist who imposed the most horrific suffering on millions of people, as unwilling subjects of his experiment, but who gave all of them one of the magic pills when it was over?
And how about this...God says he wouldbt test us more than he could bear...when God allows a man to molest and murder a little girl....then the mother or father can not take the pain and anguish...and the mother or father kill themselves....whos learned empathy? The familywhose survived the dead ones? Seems an extremely cruel way to teach emoathy and compassion....ay?
Its a fair point DS211 but I would like to keep the topic more narrowly focussed on "natural evil".
That way we can avoid the complexities of the free will defense.
Nothing like a heavenly lobotomy to make an eternally happy subject. Forget all that nasty stuff from the past, which we shall never speak of again!
Sorry guys i was a few pages behind lol didnt realize how many more pages there were
your point has been answered in full but you couldn't be bothered to read the thread before you jumped in with your smug platitudes.
Which point? This one?
For those who once claim to have believed... you do remember that Christ SAID there would be earthquakes and famines, and pestilence, and wars, in various places... right? He said it straight out. So how can you be surprised to the point of losing your faith when there are earthquakes and famines, and pestilence and wars in various places (and all the results of those things, including tsunamis)?
You said:
Earthquakes are not necessary. They are caused when plates get stuck. It would have been trivially easy to design a world exactly like this one but without earthquakes.
It would have been trivially easy to design a world without earthquakes... hmm... is a scientific statment backed with the science to show how trivially easy this would be, and that this world would still support life? Could you provide some supporting evidence? I would be interested in that, thanks.
Tammy - The mechanism of earthquakes is very well understood. They are casued by the sudden release of energy at a plate boundary.
Are you saying your god is incapable of solving this engineering problem?
Nothing would change. Plate tectonics would still work as it does now, but where one plate is forced against another plate they just wouldn't get stuck.
Trivially easy for a god.
What a pathetic, impotent god you worship.
So, in other words, you don't know what the consequences might be and/or how that energy might be released anoher way, etc, etc.. You just like to say that God SHOULD know... without considering for a moment that He DOES know and HAS DONE and IS doing what needs to be done for His children.
Thanks.
If earthquakes no longer existed, but death, disease, etc, still did... would you then conclude that God is loving and might exist? Or only if there was no death and no suffering at all?
Just curious what your bottom line might be.
Peace,
tammy
Cofty said- Are you saying your god is incapable of sorting this engineering problem? Nothing would change. Plate tectonics would still work as it does now but where one plate is forced against another plate they just wouldn't get stuck. Trivially easy for a god.
Unfortunately, that's not so, since the Bible says a bronze-age Jehovah God was apparently confounded by new-fangled iron-age technologies and weapons of war, like those insurmountable iron-age chariots:
“And the Lord was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron.” —Judges 1:19
Of course, this passage was written in a time before Jehovah God had become omnipotent, omniscient, omni-everything character that Xianity evolved Him into becoming in the form we see today, the deity with the mostest.... But as the scripture and this very thread shows, believers learned the fine art of creative excusiology from their Jewish ancestors who wrote the Tanakh, and are attaining about the same level of success at apolegetics today as they did in the past.
Adam
Tammy - Lets play along with you for the moment and pretend that it is impossible for an almighty, wise creator to find a way for two tectonic plates to move over each other without getting stuck. However stupid that makes you god sound, let's pretend for the sake of argument that he really is a well-meaning dumb-ass.
You still have the original problem. On Boxing Day morning 2004 an earthquake occurred under the Indian Ocean. A small wave began to spread out that was destined to become a massive tsunami and kill a quarter of a million innocent people.
Your god observed this and did nothing.
As for your second question I have answered it twice already in this thread. I am not using the tsunami to assert that god doesn't exist. I am arguing that theism has no answer to the question of natural evil as illustrated by the Asian Tsunami. We have looked at 15 different theodicies so far and found them all vacuous.
