How can people argue for the existence of a benevolent God when events like the Armenian genocide, Rwanda, Holocaust...

How can people argue for the existence of a benevolent God when events like the Armenian genocide, Rwanda, Holocaust, the bubonic plague, or disasters like Katrina happen all the time? I don't understand the level of mental gymnastics that it would take personally

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God works in mysterious ways :DDDDD

Because God for most people is also an idea rooted in the foundations of existence, not just morality. Unmoved mover etc.

As for the morality argument, if you've been through some amount of suffering in your life and

If atheist: cant understand why people would want a crutch for trauma in the form of god.

If theist: can't understand why people would be disenfranchised from the idea of God after going through pointless suffering.

Then you fail at basic empathy.

Mental Gymnastics are sometimes necessary when dealing with trauma.

That's just not true. Most people think if him as personal jesus talking in their ear giving them blessings

People are awful and generally deserve misery. God is benevolent because he forgives.

Why would a perfect God create such an imperfect creature?

Do you want free will or not?

God is capitalist

Nah, not really.

Because all of creation is cursed (Romans 8:22 ) and Satan is currently in charge of the world (2 Corinthians 4:4 and Matthew 4:8–9). God acts a referee from time to time until the events of the end time. Back when Jesus freed a man from demonic possession, the demon asked Jesus why did he come to bother them before time (Matthew 8:28-29).

He left Earth for us, human kind wanted freedom and he gave us Earth. Not for him to play Sims with, for us to take care of. It was humans hands carrying out these genocides, this Earth that gave birth to natural disasters.

>Most people
Oh yeah? Have you asked them all? Only protestants believe in "personal Jesus"

Maybe God just doesn't give a shit and left to go pay attention to some other planet.

God is the typical bay area beta male that refuses to discipline his problem child

How in the face of evil can you not believe there must also be good, and that good must come from a source that is good, lest all be evil?

because he gives them a reason to act self-righteous and snobbish towards anyone not of their faith

To be fair, god is a Sadistic, self-important bully towards mankind, like a kid with a magnifying glass burning ants for the lulz.

Is there anything that suggests that God is supposed to be benevolent?

I don't understand why people think God would be benevolent.

Death is brought into the world by mankind. Sin is what corrupted what would be a perfect universe, but God already saved it and healed it, victory was defeated on the Cross. All that's left for us is to follow Christ and wait patiently. God has a different relationship with time than we do.

death was defeated*

β€œIs God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?” Epicurus

To be fair, the god of your imagination is described as such, not the one true God. Luckily for all of us, the god of your imagination does not exist.

Good and evil are just subjective points of view, things that were absolutely considered evil in the past have become accepted and commonplace now.

There is no objective morality, literally everything is subject to interpretation, theres nothing to stand on

*necessarily

Really?

First, false quote.
Second, God is ready, willing and able to eradicate all evil, and will, as He said He would, when He said He would, and how He said He would.

Not on your timetable, and not on some Greek pederast's timetable.

Consider yourself fortunate for having such an upbringing that you can say this unironically.

This, theres no right or wrong, just popular opinion,.

See, without God, there is no objective basis for morality.

So you pretend there is no God, which of course leaves you without any objective basis for morality, from which you surmise that morality does not exist.

And yet morality exists.

I do, I consider myself fortunate beyond all reasonable measure

Because God is the God of Leviathan and Behemoth.

Benevolent doesn't mean "give the kids cheat codes in a complex aesthetic-moral simulation". It means that God is benevolent in the terms that a universal/multiuniversal constructor can be benevolent.

> Most people think if him as personal jesus talking in their ear giving them blessings

Not most people. Only the pompous, the self-righteous, and the utterly stupid.

Because part of the perfection of nature is allowing smaller parts to negotiate their fate through learning and manipulation of other parts. The worst type of God would be one who would just make everything good again.

>MUH PETTY HUMAN MORALITY SHOULD CONCERN A GOD BEYOND MORALITY
Holy fucking shit atheists are so damn stupid.
Not an argument. Evil is a thing that will end, but it will not end until we know it well.

>pretend
I have never had a vision or learned any secret that would lead me to believe in an all-powerful benevolent force controlling all existence.

I have, however, witnessed human nature and recognize the probability of human religious experiences being the product of a biased and indoctrinated mind.

I do not have super powers. I do not have any extra senses that allow me to discern the nature of reality beyond what my senses tell me. And from a lifetime of receiving sensory input, I use my logic to surmise that the probability of any moral force governing human affairs is infinitesimally low. Therefore I proceed from the most logical stance available to me, going off what my senses have reported to me. And that stance is that he idea of an all powerful god is just as likely as a stalk of yellow celery running the universe: i cant prove it doesnt, but I'm reasonably sure it doesnt. Like I said, I dont have superpowers.

>if any man made horrors happened to people, than God didn't and he's a meanie.

>another god doesn't exist/is a meanie because of what people have done thread

God literally said that he left the Earth for us to use, but this isn't his kingdom, but Satan's world. Anything bad that has happened in human history, has always been human's fault. Human's have free will, and free will can enable people to do what they want, whether it be bad or not. God gave us free will so that he was weed out people who aren't actually truly believing in him and follow his words.

It is also stated in the bible that natural disasters will increase in frequency, which is signs that the tribulation is coming.

Deconstruct your modern fable, man. None of that shit is real.

>human nature
Fuck off back to /r/eddit with your bad memes.
>i do not have a superpower
>admission of empiricism
>'i use logic'
Holy shit you are stupid.
>MUH REASON!!!!!!! ITS CORRECT BECUZ I SED SO!!!! I HAVEN OS UPERPOWER BUT IF I THINK REAAAAAAAAAAAALY HARD THEN I CAN FIGURE OUT AAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNNNNYTHING!!!!!!!!!!!
Eat a fucking brick, you prick.

>*tips fedora*

Way go avoid making any kind of argument.

>MUH REASON!!!!!!! ITS CORRECT BECUZ I SED SO!!!! I HAVEN OS UPERPOWER BUT IF I THINK REAAAAAAAAAAAALY HARD THEN I CAN FIGURE OUT AAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNNNNYTHING!!!!!!!!!!!

You didnt really read a single word I wrote.

Masterful argument, youve changed my mind completely. Jesus, how could I have been so damnably WRONG?

Glad we can come to an understanding
*teleports away*

I did, you did not read your own shitpost because you're too busy sucking your own dick.
>arguments are good
Bad meme, take to /r/eddit. I am not here to ARGUE, I am here to reproach YOUR LAME ATTEMPTS AT ARGUMENT.

No kiddo, you cannot claim logic exists as an empiricist. No kiddo, you cannot claim to have 'no superpower' but claim that 'MUH REAAAAAASON' is anything but impotent navel-gazing.
No kiddo, there is no human nature. That's humanist babble. You claim to be 'unbiased and unindoctrinated' but believe in this garbage. Holy shit, your entire post is just 'look im so humble BUT IM REALLY FUCKING SMART'. Find a brick and eat it.

>undergrad boy rages against intellectual consensus for ego-purposes.jpeg

When you encounter evil, and you will, hope it is at a time when you can change your mind.

Exactly. You pretend there is no God, for your own petty reasons.

>intellectual consensus

Because without the existence of these genocides, how can we ever fully know the joy and the grace of god? Fundamentals of good and bad are relative. For a great good there must be a great evil. God gave great good, however this means great evil shall exist as well.

Check mate atheists.

>doesnt believe in reason or logic
>uses a computer

Because the modern view of the world, and religion, is that because we exist we should be the main hero of our story. Try telling a peasant from the middle ages they're as important as nobility et.c.

God is righteous. An all-righteous being cannot accept unrighteousness which is what humans became after the made the first sin. God is also forgiving and Love. It is impossible for unrighteousness to connect to righteousness, so God put himself in flesh and became one of us. He became one of us so that we can seek righteousness and know righteousness. He traded pride and honor for humiliation and mockery by those that killed him (Jesus). Now we can grasp righteousness although it doesn't make us righteous beings.

>like a kid with a magnifying glass burning ants.
Grow up.

disasters like katrina and the plague have happened throughout history, and the plague itself happened nearly a thousand years ago and wiped out half of Europe's population, events like genocides aren't just due to a single person with free will but happen because of cultural outlook and memetics and are very big and complex events.

the jews who founded the christian religion also don't believe in the devil iirc in the same way as christianity

>muh consensus
Not an argument, sorry child.
>PPL AGREE THAT MEANS RIGHT

To be fair, you didn't give him an argument to take part in. You just did the typical fedora thing by only saying "le myth. God isn't real hahaha".

You didn't do anything put insult and insults do not deserve anything respectable.

I said that all available information I have discourages beleif in a benevolent all powerful god. I admit i cannot prove it doesnt exist but all he available info leads me to believe he doesnt exist.

I said I have no power above any other persons to distinguish the true nature of reality, so I am forced to rely on my sensory input, using logic to help me reach the conclusions I have reached. I didnt say my logic was infallable, I didnt even say it was correct, I said that going by what Ive learned from observation, I dont think a god exists.

I reached my conclusion by examination of available data. Deists reach THEIR conclusions not with logic, but feeling. "I have felt the love of the Lord" or "I feel Him with me", etc. They dont base their belief on anything other than wanting to believe, regardless of any evidence presented them.


Also, typing in caps like that make you look like an edgy teen, dont be so eager. Rational discussion has no place for such "emotional" retorts, though I realize that asking for rational discussion here is like asking for a ham sandwich in Mosul.

People agree because it's true you dipshit. You can hate on science and empiricism all you want, I did the same thing when I was a freshman studying philosophy. But the reason why there's a consensus about empiricism is because it fucking works, the only way to deny that is by being willfully obtuse

>the jews who founded the christian religion
Right, which is they they do regular rituals to Molach and shit, right?

>petty

How is using all available info and empirical evidence "petty"?

>discourages
According to your superpower?
Stop humblebragging you absolute faggot.
>true nature of reality
Are you stuck in the fucking Enlightenment? No such thing exists.
LOGIC CANNOT EXIST IF YOU CAN ONLY RELY UPON SENSORY INPUT. LOGIC IS THE FUNCTION OF THE SENSE-REASON. You're essentially claiming that you're correct because you're correct.
Evidence doesn't exist, it's a bad meme. Take your bad memes back to /r/eddit.
>WAAAAH WHY ARENT YOU PLAYING BY MY REDDIT RULES THAT WORSHIPS A SENSE EMOTIONS ARE BAD BECAUSE IM A REEEEEEEEEEEEL MAN AND HAVE A POWDERED WIG
Eat a brick, teleiophile.

>youre essentially claiming youre correct


More proof you didnt even read what I said, youre just spouting entry level college freshmen arguments trying to seem clever.

im out

>ITS TROO BECUZ I SED SO
simply epin
>IT WORKS
Not a valid truth-judgement.
I'm an actual empiricist by the way, science is not empirically sound. It processes experience and claims that to be accurate.
>consensus
Circlejerks are not a valid truth-judgement.

You're a fucking tool. You still are a freshman, clearly.
No kiddo I read your argument fully, it's terrible. Why are you getting so upset over me seeing what it really is?
>IF YOU DISAGREE WITH ME THEN UR LE FRESHMAN AHAHAHA
Sophist.

>How can people argue for the existence of a benevolent God when events like the Armenian genocide, Rwanda, Holocaust, the bubonic plague, or disasters like Katrina happen all the time?

>God is the typical bay area beta male that refuses to discipline his problem child


youtube.com/watch?v=NzXeghkkzDw

One insecure (former) philosophy freshman spotted! Did you drop out because everybody else, including the professors, mocked your incredible naivety.

Oops.
For:

>molach

the fuck is this bullshit?

the jews founded christianity, christianity was originally a jewish sect that split off and became practiced by the romans with pagan influences.

Sure, bad things do happen. But what about sunsets and the smell of rain? That's why I believe in God

>Jews and Romans disliked anyone who said Jesus was the messiah.

>I'm an actual empiricist by the way, science is not empirically sound.
this is some next level autism

No, it's far from that.
Science cannot be empirically sound because it examines. The act of examination, recording, and so on, makes the experience being recorded or whatever no longer an experience.
Observation becomes the consideration of observation, which becomes the recording of the consideration of observation.

>Science cannot be empirically sound
Ok, but science still lets you create machines based on those observations that actually work in reality. Science also allows you to make mathematical models that predict physical phenomena in the universe that are unobserved, and then turn out to be real. Just because you personally have this idiosyncratic definition of what "soundness" is doesn't mean science is wrong or bad.

You're doing neither.

Again, all of the available information that you have is not what you are using to come to the conclusion you hold true.

You are aware of the existence of the universe.

That fact alone demonstrates to you personally that there is a Creator.

When they left worshiping God and worshiped demons, they were punished. Severely.

Don't blame the evils of men on god
Blame men

>work
>reality
Ideological statements; nonexistent. You're presuming the existence of two things that are not empirically sound.
Science is wrong and bad and belongs on the pyre along with its cult.
'prediction' is based upon poor bendings of epistemology. Of course, that's all what science is: disgusting perversions of epistemology, avoiding all of its own and neighboring conclusions, assuming pragmatism and empiricism are valid (they require assumption of themselves). Mathematics is the same sort of 'IF I THINK REAAALY HARD IL LFIGURE IT OUT' sort of nonsense.

>malebranche
kill yourself

God exists, but He is a malevolent being torturing his creations like a little kid shaking the art farm he got for his birthday.

How are natural disasters caused by humans?

>being this triggered by the conclusions of your ideology
Enjoy your cannibalizing frankenideology! Yeah! I can believe that all knowledge is rooted in experience AND believe that there exists and I know of a knowledge-validator force that is metaphysical and independent of experience! Yeah! It just werks! .It doesn't matter if my epistemology is as flimsy as sand, it werks and for SELF-EVIDENT reasons that means I'm right and everybody else is just a stupid CHRISTIAN that believies things without EVIDENCE and PROOF and other things that mean nothing in my sand-epistemology!

Holy shit, do you not see how painfully Platonist you sound?

>do you not see how painfully Platonist you sound?
weeeew bro you sound like a huge faggot m8. i really hope this is at least a neckbeardy attempt at humor and not a symptom of your mental illness

Prove all of those things aren't evidence of benevolence

Most natural disaster are part of reality,deal with it,it happens
Some "natural" disaster are caused by mans tinkering with the world with polluting and yada yada yada

>Most natural disaster are part of reality,deal with it,it happens

This doesn't answer the question because it's a reality that God created. Where is the benefit in purely natural disasters that bring death and suffering on millions of innocents?

>Some "natural" disaster are caused by mans tinkering with the world with polluting and yada yada yada
Rising sea levels, the break down of the ozone layer etc aren't really what I'm getting at here because they're attributable to humans.

Simone Weil and process theology have the only somewhat satisfying theodicies I've come across.

In the former, imperfection in the universe is the byproduct of a transcendent and perfect all creating anything. It's not that it's intentional, it's just necessary, or natural. Anything that isn't God can't be perfect. (I think that's what she means.) In the latter, God is not omnipotent i.e. it can not coerce human beings. Traditional theists are against process theology because to them a God who isn't omnipotent isn't worthy of worship. The question to traditional theists would be: Why would you rather have a God who can do something about evil and doesn't?

You can always go with skeptical theism if you get too agitated trying to figure out the problem of evil.

Or you can wrestle with the absurdity by assuming that God is, essentially, a giant asshole.

Without suffering, there would be no compassion. And whatnot.

>This doesn't answer the question because it's a reality that God created. Where is the benefit in purely natural disasters that bring death and suffering on millions of innocents?

God probably has a good reason for it

> Armenian genocide

didnt happen

they invert real morality by inventing an infinite god layer that diminishes human suffering to zero in comparison

but really its an effective defense mechanism against acknowledging widespread and unavoidable suffering, rationalize it away

If people did not have the ability to choose to do evil, goodness would mean nothing. The virtuous of the saints would be reduced to a mechanical process no more worthy of awe than your is computer.

You Believe to be more than the ants that you have crushed Many times in your life?

It's shit thats just happen

Reality doesn't exist.
Stop projecting onto God.

>reality dosent exits
Maybe in your a religion lady,

God is wicked.
To purify his will he sacrifices Himself through the Logos.
Justice restores the original order of a system, making Him pure as he once was.

Same, so I became a deist

You're going to tell me that the Egyptians knew the circumference of the globe, unknowable at the time, and plotted out lat. and long. in units that didn't even exist yet, so as to perfectly position a pyramid within this matrix to match up with the speed of light, which was unknowable at the time, as measured in still more units that didn't even exist yet?

>Reality doesn't exist.
That which is, is not.
Deep.

Isaiah 48:10 I have refined you, but not as silver is refined. Rather, I have refined you in the furnace of suffering.

The holocaust never happened.

join the LGBT

>killed by capitalism
It was killed by the niggers with weapons.

Time passes differently for the being that created the world and all life. For him, humans are a bewildering anomaly that he can't even begin to keep up with. It was only three days ago that he noticed these weakling, hairless bipeds killing off the mega fauna he worked so hard on. He tried to restore order with the Toba Eruption, but we survived. It was about twenty minutes ago that he tried to slow us down with the black death, but it was barely a speed bump. Ever since we figured out germ theory a minute and a half ago, he's REALLY started to panic. We're piling up by the tens of millions every second, almost all mammalian biomass is now humans or livestock, and he's regretting that ape side-project he started last year. God hasn't fucked up this bad since a couple years ago when he fumbled a pebble and it landed on the Yucatan.

TLDR; While all of human history is an immensely long time for us, for God it's just been a very bad day.