God is all benevolent and all powerful

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Pretty sure rape and murder don't cause natural evils such as Alzheimer's, or cancer.

those aren't natural evils tho. That's just a force of nature that happens to befall us humans

well, duh, what is freedom?

Since when does being benevolent mean eradicating evil. You don't see Philanthropists going to Africa and gunning down the Warlords

Maybe The Bible was intentional lies and God is just a dickhead in reality who likes causing misery randomly

>It's just a test, bro. Haha. It's just faith.

Question for our christian friends: is it correct to say that God is benevolent and just?

>benevolent
I meant mercyful

You are a creature. Don't you ever dare ask why God did anything. It's not your place. You are wholly contingent upon God. Your ability to use logic, even your very existence, are gifts that you do not deserve. You should be a mere aspect of oblivion.

And here you are complaining about discomfort and suffering.

It's as if a dog were to say to its master, "Why didn't you put dirt all over the floor so I could pee anywhere?"

In all seriousness though, goodness and benevolence do not mean "bestows limitless joy on all sentient creatures." You're imagining what you, a human, would do if you were God, instead of realizing you're a human. Humans vainly wish to be God, and each of us would have as our first decree: "All creatures are in Heaven for eternity!"

Clearly God does not think that's such a good idea, since that's not the reality we live in.

The meaning of suffering is a problem for you to deal with. It's for you to struggle under and over. Get over it. Stop bothering God with your egotistical desire to be endlessly comfortable. And stop treating him like a bad guy for disagreeing with your pipsqueak, infinitesimally small grasp of the world.

>god is benevolent and all powerful

Several philosophers believed he was only benevolent, not all powerful.

>The reason why he allows these evils is to make us stronger and more virtuous as a person

This does not follow from the first two. There are also these other possibilities:
e.g. Evil is not actually evil. It all makes sense in god's plan, we perceive it as evil because we see it from a human, partial perspective.

God is in principle incapable of understanding the suffering entailed in mortality and imperfection. If he is a limitless, ageless being, his perspective is entirely foreign to the human condition and cannot be called upon to justify that condition. Divine attributes don't solve the major philosophical problems at all, they complicate them.
Of course, some interpret Christ as having fully experienced human suffering, but I don't think this jives with any mainstream form of Christianity where he is always taking part in the divine essence, making his acts, again, entirely alien and unrelatable.

t. brainlets who have never read the Bible.

Jesus addresses this very point in the parable of Dives and Lazarus. The relevant bit is Luke 16:27-31:
>Then he said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldest send him to my father's house:
>For I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment.
>Abraham saith unto him, They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.
>And he said, Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent.
>And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.
Supernatural witnesses will not persuade the truly cynical. No, doubting Thomas was not truly cynical. God has already sent the most convincing supernatural witness of Christianity there is, the Holy Spirit. If the world will not hear the Paraclete, neither will they be persuaded, though an angel came down from heaven.

>God is in principle incapable of understanding the suffering entailed in mortality and imperfection

That contradicts omniscience (so long as we're playing the attributes game).

>Divine attributes don't solve the major philosophical problems at all, they complicate them.

I completely agree. As many have pointed out, we know God primarily by what God is not. Listing the attributes of God positively is a dangerous exercise which will always end in contradiction or some sort of agreement that God transcends human logic (God does transcend human logic).

>Supernatural witnesses will not persuade the truly cynical. No, doubting Thomas was not truly cynical. God has already sent the most convincing supernatural witness of Christianity there is, the Holy Spirit. If the world will not hear the Paraclete, neither will they be persuaded, though an angel came down from heaven.

Yeah sorry, that's a bullshit argument. The vast majority of people would convert to Christianity if they personally witnessed an angel coming to Earth. Saying that the whole enterprise is worthless because some potential guy would never believe it, makes no sense.
But most importantly, the case for Christianity is not conclusive, people spend literally decades studying to decide which monotheistic religion makes the best case. Assuming they choose Christianity, then they have a huge existential crisis about whether to go Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant or whatever. And please, don't pretend this is an easy choice, there are serious historical debates about this. "Lel your heart will tell you what to do" is a childish copout.

>God is all knowing
>He knows all of our decisions and choices because he has perfect knowledge
>Somehow we have free will

What did God mean by this?

>apologetic mental gymnastics

They might convert to Christianity intellectually, but would they repent? Abraham in Jesus' parable is talking about more than just acknowledging what is true, but living in accordance with God's will.

(not the guy you're quoting)

If God wanted everyone to be a Christian, then everyone would be a Christian.

My heart seems to tell me that we aren't supposed to work out the problem of religious diversity, or even whether we should be Lutheran or Catholic (or Buddhists for that matter). It comes down to a choice we make, a choice we will never quite understand but which we must make. There is no neutral position here. Being agnostic on the question of denomination/faith is taking a position.

Seen in this way it's not terribly different from any other intellectual problem we can't fully solve (which might be all intellectual problems).

I would urge you to take this away from the domain of discourse too. We have lives to live. They need to be tended to with urgency. We can't step outside of the world and solve some intellectual problems that will allow us to step back into it with sure footing. The uncertainty of our path will never dissipate, but we are not allowed as creatures to sit still. Every moment we are consciously alive we are acting, and acting in such a way that has moral consequences.

>God allows free will
>Gets angry when people disobey him

The human ability to know things clearly exists, but must be understood against God's "knowledge."

The human ability to act clearly exists, but must be understood against God's infinite potentiality.

The human ability to make decisions clearly exists, but must be understood against God's perfect control of creation and transcendence of causality.

You are God. "Yahweh" means "I am". You are the universe.

>The human ability to make decisions clearly exists, but must be understood against God's perfect control of creation and transcendence of causality.

This still doesn't answer the dilemma.

You have an arbitrary choice between A or B. God's omniscience and perfect knowledge know that you will pick A. He also knows what will happen after you pick A. You feel like you have the freedom to pick between A or B, however, and you decide to carefully weigh your options.

Unless God has imperfect knowledge or you can somehow overcome God's foreknowledge of your choice, you are not going to pick B.

The illusion of free will is created with an omniscient god.

oh for fucks sake you'd better be joking

Bullshit. Supernatural witness is the ONLY thing that will persuade the truly cynical.

Because unlike humans today even God knows that struggle is essential.

the kingdom of god is within you, bitch
thats the entire fucking idea

Men are made in the image of god, god is made in the image of man. One cannot exist without the other. Men are gods, and the notion of a higher spirit is likeable to the SuperEgo of Freuds studies. God is a collective conscious made by man so as to make all men strive for a higher level of existence. There will always be suffering and illness. It is up to man, the creator of god, to use their higher consciousness to stamp out these evils. It is up to man to become god.

>Hmm, I'm gonna create these guys with free will so they can choose to worship me
>Lemme just put them in this perfect garden of perfect
>Let's see, how can I exert my will...
>Got it! I'll tell my creations, who don't know anything about morality not to touch this arbitrarily placed tree which would give them knowledge of morality
>Just gotta make sure I put the tree front and center so they know not to touch it
>And if they touch it, I'll be REALLY mad at the entire human race for all of eternity
>I'll just let Satan chill out in the garden for a bit too because I was kind of a dick to him
>Golly gee this is a brilliant plan
>*Humans eat the apple*
>WTF HOW COULD THIS BE HAPPENING I COULD HAVE NEVER FORESEEN SUCH THINGS THIS IS ABSOLUTELY NOT WHAT I HAD INTENDED

God legit needs to hire an outside consulting firm regarding his managerial decisions.

I'm not, so what's your problem?

The problem here is that you're using a kind of mathematical certainty and structure when the objects in question are nothing like numbers.

Now I'm not opposed to arguments such as, "Tom is a bachelor therefore Tom is unmarried."

We might think we're talking about a real flesh and blood person here, Tom, but we're really talking about a logical distillation of Tom (in this case merely a thing that can be or not be married).

We cannot plug God into logical arguments because we distill God into things like "An object that knows an agent's choice ahead of time."

God is not that anymore than Tom is a thing which is either married or not married.

God transcends human reasoning (We do not know, for example, how to make a world or how anything can possibly make a world), but can be accessed, gradually, through lived suffering, through decisions made in real life, through love, through analogy, through scripture, through metaphorical renderings in traditional frameworks (symbols, icons, architecture, stories etc.).

This is all we can do. God has bestowed upon us a reasoning capacity sufficient to do mathematics/logic, but insufficient to ever make perfectly true statements in language.

Our refusal to keep this in mind when considering God can easily lead us to twisting arguments in order to arrive at a perspective which serves our own interests: namely, God does not exist because x,y,z (even though we could just as easily construct paper arguments that God exists because of a,b,c) and therefore I am not accountable to anything but myself.

because god helps those who helps themselves you lazy unthinking faggot

The resurrection of Christ is the greatest supernatural witness to have ever occurred. How many skeptics did that convince?

what consequences do you think that would have? Ive had very religious experiences both on shrooms and lsd but I havent gotten to try dmt yet

Our worldviews are probably too divergent to dialogue, but from where I'm standing (with the understanding that "the universe" is all that manifests of God) the statement "I am the universe" seems ridiculous.

In the first place, you must have noticed by now that you are subject to the universe, that you and your body and its actions account for an extremely minor portion of its activity, that you are often at its whim, that you cannot control anything outside of your skin etc.

I'm just curious how one reconciles such experiences with such a statement as "I am the universe."

>the kingdom of god is within you, bitch

well isn't that an odd sentence

Reddit legit needs to learn to not take the Bible literally

evil does not exist as a separate entity you mong
it is simply the absence of God

>God transcends human reasoning
So how do we know anything about him? How do we know how to worship him? Should we even take lessons from a God that we literally cannot know? Do our prayers actually make him angry? Is tragedy his way of showing love?

Right? I mean, some of them even think that Jesus was a literal figure and not metaphorical.

Think about it, if I am not the universe, then what am I? I am the universe in the sense that a wave is a part of an ocean.

>god was literally a gardener, planting shit around with his old man hands
>"apple"
just fucking end yourself just do it

how many people actually witnessed it?

I did, it was pretty cool

Me. It was sweet. Just as Freiza was getting ready to kill Vegeta, Jesus appeared in this big flash of light and beat the fuck out of Freiza

>So how do we know anything about him?
Faith
>How do we know how to worship him?
Faith
>Should we even take lessons from a God that we literally cannot know?
Faith

Reason isn't your only mental faculty, I hope.

dang it i missed that one
any clue when the next one is?

>God legit needs to hire an outside consulting firm regarding his managerial decisions.

21st century post

I'm really glad I opted out of apologetics after 2 years of chasing the religion meme. It's all bullshit in the end, and I say that as someone who enjoys medieval theologians and would still recommend them in your readings of western philosophy. Just don't make my mistake, and focus on interpreting them historically. There are very good reasons why these forms of reasoning were abandoned in the modern era, however contemporary writers are shit at presenting that and you really need to get into thinkers from, say, Bacon to Marx for a thorough refutation.

On a more emotional note, the period when I was trying to follow Catholicism was marked by pretty big anxiety and constant daily evaluations of my thought process, to the extent that I feel is simply unhealthy. There is something pernicious about the whole thing, no matter how harmless it can be presented by Christians today. You can't masturbate without committing a mortal sin that damns you forever without sincere regret, you can't think forbidden thoughts, you have to struggle to achieve this illusory concept of faith that nobody can define, you have to have a relationship with God, whatever that means... I think there simply must be a kind of personality that finds these things intuitive and reasonable sk somehow but for the rest of us they are baffling and impossible to hold seriously. I can say that I sincerely tried, but it just doesn't work for me and I don't believe in it at all.

Saturday nights, but idk, the season is kinda over anyway. After Jesus got wished back and killed Freiza, he just like... disappeared. I hate when the writers bring back a dead character because they’ve written themselves into the corner.

Saturday nights, but idk, the season is kinda over anyway. After Jesus got wished back and killed Freiza, he just like... disappeared. I hate when the writers bring back a dead character because they’ve written themselves into the corner.

God told me on August 7th, 2018, Jesus will rise out of the ocean near the Faroe Islands.

Your opinion on peterson please.

Humans are the source of all evil by virtue of their free will which god gave us in his benevolence

Over 500. 1 Corinthians 15:6.

Haven't read him, haven't seen any reason why I should bother. I'm definitely not part of his audience, I read conservative thinkers occasionally to broaden my views but I'm pretty comfortably far-left. From what I've seen he seems to make a caricature of critical theory and blames it for everything. I guess I'm open to recommendations for any goos essays or books he wrote.

Right, you exist in the universe and are a (very, very) small piece of it.

That is quite another thing from "I am the universe" and amounts to a completely obvious and uncontroversial observation "we exist in the world."

>So how do we know anything about him?

I think I already addressed that in the second half of the sentence you green texted.

Evils or not, there really isn't a good reason to keep those things around if you're a good god.

>Supernatural witness is the ONLY thing that will persuade the truly cynical.

youtube.com/watch?v=XaQ8_N0O5jk
Literally miracles happen all the time in the modern day, but people STILL refuse to admit them as real.

>Why can't he just make us strong and virtuous from the beginning?

t. brainlet who never read the Bible

We were created perfect as God, and knew not the concept of sin when we were first made. It was only when Sin was first made by man did all manor of suffering arise along with the degeneration of our bodies.

Pretty sure whoever wrote that couldn't imagine cameras being invented. To compare an event whose only evidence is "dude trust me I was there look at my short story" to an angel showing up in a major city where cameras and live streams would expose it to billions of people is disingenuous. Now would be the prefect time for any God to show up and convert billions.

And then would you repent? Or would you write it off as a clever stunt or piece of street magic?

Holy fuck, are you idiot new atheists not yet finished brutalizing the mangled corpse of theodicy? This argument was hackneyed in the 18th century

Depends. If thousands of videos get posted and it shows up on live streams you can't really argue against it not being real. It just opens up more cans of worms such as why haven't they arrived sooner, how accurate is the Bible, and why did they appear now since there must've been a cause. More questions need to be answered. Unadulterated faith isn't something I'm capable of and never have been.

>existence
>gift

Because of your great sin and hostility,
you say, “The prophets are crazy
and the inspired men are fools!”

you're not as clever as you think you are, whether or not this post is bait.

Question for the miracle believers ITT: how do you refute Hume's argument against them? Mere probabilistic speculation?

Oh great, another religious argument, I'm sure this will go nowhere like it always does. I am religious myself, but let me ask you all something I find interesting. How do you feel about the fact that there are more than one religion? What do you think about the people who believed in ancient Greek religions, or other current religions? All of them speak as certain about their own religion as you speak about yours.

How does Hume's argument refute the fact that I've seen them?

why should i be in any way, shape, or form convinced by David "I'll believe it when I see it" Hume?

Anecdotal evidence is not an argument. It cannot be refuted.

I'm not talking about convincing you. I'm talking about convincing me, thus refuting Hume's argument as far as I am concerned. That was your question, after all.

Neither am I. You have convinced yourself with what I can only call "anecdotal" evidence, because you have relayed your acceptance of this evidence in the form of an anecdote. Of course his argument couldn't refute an ardent belief of yours. That was all I meant.

It must surely be an astounding and terrifying world that you live in, that violates its own physical laws. I may visit sometime, if I get dementia

>this argument was hackneyed in the 18th century
Any Christian with good faith takes the Problem of Evil serious. You can't posture like you're too good for a debate just because you covered it in your intro to philosophy class. It's endured for a reason.

Hooray, you have found the three legged stool problem. You have to pick two from the following list: God is all powerful, God is all good, God is all knowing. Any of the three combinations make a lot of sense. All of the ways "around" choosing two legs are subterfuge to make you not notice that one of the legs is lowered.

If god isn't all powerful, then some evil just happens and god is sad about it. He tires to stop all the evil but can't quite manage it. Choosing to do good makes sense, because you are making gods job easier.

If god isn't all good, then some evil just happens. God might be a pretty nice chap to people that listen to him, but at some point he stops giving a shit. Doing good makes sense, because being on the right side of a omnipotent omniscient being is a good idea.

If God isn't all knowing, then some evil happens because of free will. He can't predict everything, and so some people choose to be pirates that rape babies and then eat them.

Trying to avoid picking a weak attribute results in questions like yours. Picking one solves the "Problem." If he isn't all powerful, then evil exists because it isn't a big enough deal for him to fix. If he isn't all good, then evil exists because he dosn't give that much of a shit. If he isn't all knowing, evil exists because he can't know everything and evil is an unexpected outcome of some good act.

Nice visual explanation:smbc-comics.com/?id=2292

The reason suffering and illness exists is because this place is a punishment, not a vacation home.

Gabriel is a made-up name. Secondly, any being that emanates a body here would have to remain hidden as it is not their job to help humans get back home. At least not directly with spoonfeeding.

Uh, all diseases are caused by what you ingest.

All this Bible non-sense is just rituals from people trying to get you to believe or argue against their bullshit. So you can end up reincarnating with them or reincarnating with someone else. It's a way of controlling knowledge and also a soul trap.

>avoided sin to avoid hell
>didn't avoid sin out of love for God

That was your first mistake kiddo.

Did you ingest a retarded person and that's why you're so retarded?

Aw, what's wrong? Did your soul trap 'knowledge' tell you something different?

>You just need to accept Jesus as your lord an savior and you'll go to heave t. the original Martin Luther

>Be Jew and get Holocausted
>Go to hell

God created difference because something without difference is God. Evil is a necessity of difference. A better question is why God created the world to begin with.

>but makes the table ugly
What an amazing argument.
Christ, I knew SMBC is a terrible comic, but I didn't expect this even from it.

There's a fourth option:

That God is all powerful, is all good, and is all knowing, BUT in his interactions with his Creation he is limited by that Creation. So when the Bible says that all things are possible through God, it means that only those things that are possible are possible through God, which includes miracles. Why else would miracles happen so rarely, if not because the opportunities for such full goodness are limited by the physical contraints on Creation? God does as much good as He can without compromising the structural integrity of the universe.

Pic related is heretical but it's the most common example that mirrors what I've just explained

>>Be Jew and get Holocausted
>>Go to hell
I'm pretty sure the "and get Holocausted" part is superfluous.

Wouldnt it be more disappointing if the creation could comprehend the masters intent, reasoning and mortality?

We're well developed fat encased nitrogen molecules after all

Here is an example of someone "not" breaking one of the legs. In this version you are bassically saying there is some limit on Gods power, making him not all powerful. Or you are saying God isn't all knowing, because if he was then he could have made the universe as he saw fit on creation. Or you are saying God isn't all good, given he could have made the universe perfectly on creation, but chose not to.

A god that is all three would not be limited by "structural integrity of the universe." As I said, most proofs are trying to distract you from the leg being shortened.

This is way older then SMBC, it was just a convenient visual aid.

>objective morality

This

Reframe your question OP to this:
>Creator of video game wants to make player have fun and enjoy game
>Yet he puts all sorts of challenges and puzzles and mysteries and difficulties in the game
>The reason is because he wants the character to grow and progress through the game

Why can't he just max our stats from the beginning?