You know I look at this and I can think of few things more depressing than the broad implications of the Christian...

This is why Calvinism is simultaneously the worst and best. It stares down the void of moral luck and just kinda shrugs.

You've got to admire the dreadful honesty. Yes, according to "lowly human" standards that "don't have the full picture", God is an eldritch abomination of an all-powerful blinded idiot raging against creatures not even capable of possessing the knowledge needed to meaningfully defy him.

But hey. Kierkegaard wrote a cool thing about Issac on the mount so we have the teleological suspension of the ethical. wow. neat.

What is trying to say in a series of memes disguised as a sentence is that this shit is actually morally complex.

Society churns on the concept of limited self-determination. Sure, your circumstances give you a limited set of options, but personal agency is what makes justice, well just.

The concept of original sin takes us out of the intuitive stance of personal agency and forces us to think about some tough questions.

Does potential to fall count as a damning fault in lieu of actual misbehavior?
What does the age of accountability look like?
What happens when a large section of humanity never has meaningful contact with your preferred religion?
In the case of the above problem, are we really supposed to look at the terrifying clusterfuck that is the natural world and get some sort of monotheistic, structured moral system? Why?

So, it's a mess.

>personal agency is what makes justice, well just.

Yeah that's more or less what I gleaned from reading the bible. a great majority of the matter in it is entirely morbid.

If justice doesn't hinge on moral agency, that will lead to some fun and creepy implications that would create a society none of us want to live in. I hitch my post near consequentialism because I like to use my morality to influence my actions irl.

>that will lead to some fun and creepy implications that would create a society none of us want to live in.
Such as?

It's amusing the way you interpret natural consequences as "raging". Is gravity "raging" when it casts down those that attempt to fly?

I haven't been able to take western atheistic critiques of religion based on suffering seriously once I realized their atheistic worldview doesn't actually offer an alternative to the suffering it complains about, all it does is complain about suffering it links to the supernatural. Which would be fine I guess if they didn't simply accept the suffering linked to the natural world as natural and acceptable. I mean somehow the "problem of evil" magically ceases to be a problem and all the suffering becomes fine when they no longer believe in a god to blame suffering on.

Think about it, we're in here complaining about how most of the world is damned, but somehow the alternative belief that ALL OF THE WORLD is doomed to eternal futility (or at least until humans go extinct) and total annihilation is a morally superior state of affairs.

I for one argue that even Hell is better than total annihilation, and as justification for this claim, I cite the fact that the desire to continue experiencing existence is so strong the majority of people would rather endure a life of suffering than die.

>I mean somehow the "problem of evil" magically ceases to be a problem and all the suffering becomes fine when they no longer believe in a god to blame suffering on.
It's not "somehow", nature isn't by definition all good. The goodness of God is hard to reconcile with evidential versions of the problem of evil without recurring to very shaky types of epistemology, which isn't really a solution in the first place both because they're shaky and because it leads to skepticism when deciding on moral questions.

We can start with instances of this reasoning that are already a problem.

I think that one of the most widespread and casual ways that people use this idea of judge-worthy results being unattached to moral agency is how people tend to other crime and evil. There are "special classes" of humans that are dreadful enough to be criminals. Not us normal people! We ignore causes and existing instances of problems because we like to pretend that problem-causers are far away and don't look like us. Looking for particular "criminal classes" of people inherently and specially capable of evil leads to a plethora of bad judgement calls. It's a pretty basic way humans tend to mess up. It helps us ignore all sorts of fucked up things happening right under our noses, like child abuse as an example. Not thinking that awful people became awful because they made choices just makes us look for someone born to play the role. And the actual guilty parties aren't bothered.

A second example:

Social programs don't exist because people are nice! They exist because countries want to increase their literacy/GDP/average standard of living. Sometimes they do this by funding schools, with the assumption that this is a mill for producing useful and good citizens. Sometimes they do this by providing relatively less expensive preventative medicine to save on defaulted ER bills later. There are lots of ways programs attempt to give people choices to enter better (more profitable for the state) situations or stop fucking up (and costing the state money). If groups of people were just shitty piles of degenerates no matter how you tried to help, there would be no point to funding government programs outside of some sort of virtue ethics that are... expectedly absent. When societies decide that unlucky humans aren't worth investing in, this tends to end in unecessary suffering, lower quality of life, and sometimes death. I have a clarifying personal anecdote, but won't share the sob story if you aren't interested.

So, either of these examples taken to their logical extremes makes for a pretty shitty world.

People make choices. Shit happens because of choices and a morass of factors outside of personal human control.

"Moral luck" is where you can do something, and the consequences have more to do with chance than your action.

Judging people on chances isn't a done thing in our justice system when it's at its best. That is why the charge of manslaughter exists, and it is different from intentional murder.

Babies? Nah, all dead babies are in heaven r ight now.

You?

You would give anything to trade places with them in a thousand years.

>Babies? Nah, all dead babies are in heaven r ight now.
What age does one stop being a baby?

The problem of evil exists in a proposed theistic scenario only of you claim that your god is both all powerful and all good. If you're fine with a morally ambivalent god, or don't think there's anyone in control of the totality of the universe, there is no contradiction.

Atheists believe that the universe is amoral. It doesn't have a consciousness to enact moral deeds. It just... exists.

Now, people exist in the universe, and they can preform actions with moral weight. Hurricanes are not evil. Mass murderers are.

Yes, the limit of the age of accountability is another fun question.

People don't traditionally count young adults, but I think it would only be fair to judge people who are fully competent to evaluate consequences. And that feature takes a while to grow in.

>The problem of evil exists in a proposed theistic scenario only of you claim that your god is both all powerful and all good.
Not at all, as the "problem of evil" relies on the assumption that Man defines what is good rather than god. If you're willing to accept that the universe operates under different principles from what you personally consider to be morally acceptable there's no reason to complain about or reject a god that does so as well.

Yes, a claim for a just universe is definitely aided by defining good as "whatever exist currently, I promise."

Most people, when they wonder why so much pointlessly awful bullshit happens, don't rush to consider starving African children as a neat idea.

So retards don't go to hell?

This is what you fedoras do not understand.

If morality is subjective, there is no morality. If I think murdering other people's babies and eating them is good, then it is good.

Nobody who does not reach their personal age of accountability goes to hell. It's always going to be on a case by case basis, and you can know, for sure, that God makes good decisions.

yes, moral relativism is such bs

Others, though, who are generally motivated by the concept of their team flourishing with moral grandstanding largely as accessories, will be obliged to punish you. And this will be all your fault, little baby eater. Your choices.

Most people don't think so! Calvinists will say that it depends if god likes them or not, and you might be able to tell if he liked them based on how lucky and nice their short, painful retarded lives were.

Babies are rotting in the ground and in thousand years I won't think any more than I did before being born

There's a biological basis to morality, which can be warped to some degree through culture and mental illness, as it's not hard science but more or less intense feelings about various things. Because of this, it is possible to construct a framework that the majority of people will be okay with and that enables the majority of people to live a happy life.

Any attempt to move away from this will cause unnecessary suffering. Examples are the oppression of sexuality and women under Islam and the concept of thought crimes under Christianity.

Christian theology is a terrible mess of contradictions and straight up unintelligible nonsense (eg the trinity). I don't understand how smart people can analyze it and not feel intense cognitive dissonance. It's so overtly wrong. Watch the news for five minutes and you'll see pointless suffering, caused by a wholly good (?) god. Or go into your garden and look at a spider's web. A bear eating alive a screaming baby deer. That's the world your Jesus created? You must be mentally ill. Choose an arbitrary person on the street and he will have higher moral standards than that.