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re: So The Same "God" That Allows Pedophiles To Run Rampant In His Churches Is Going To Assist
Posted on 3/3/25 at 3:00 pm to Azkiger
Posted on 3/3/25 at 3:00 pm to Azkiger
quote:Not all of God's powers.
So your scenario presumes I don't have God's powers?
quote:I'm not critiquing God, I'm critiquing you. You make it seem that you know better and are more morally pure than God is. I'm trying to get you to answer a moral question about whether or not it is acceptable to take the life of an innocent child (in the eyes of everyone else) when you know that by doing so, you would be preventing much more suffering. You still aren't answering it.
If yes, why is this hypothetical relevant to a critique of how God uses his powers?
Do you not like it when emotional arguments or examples get proposed to you? I at least acknowledge the emotional difficulty of these truths, but am still willing to interact with them.
1
Posted on 3/3/25 at 3:24 pm to FooManChoo
quote:
I'm not critiquing God, I'm critiquing you.
You're critiquing my critique of God by trying to put me in a box God isn't within.
If God was powerless to stop a child bring being born, and that child, if allowed to live, would grow up to be a Hitler-like figure and kill countless people, then yes, God killing this child would be viewed in a completely different way.
But lets go back to Noah's flood to see how weak your attempted comparison is.
1.) God is all powerful, and doesn't have to kill the child in order to prevent this outcome (he could simply not make the child).
2.) We're not talking about a single individual. We're talking about quite literally every single baby/child on earth.
Yes, of course, if you change the scenario the opinions change. But your scenario is nothing like what I am critiquing.
quote:
You still aren't answering it.
Because I'm conflicted.
If the only way someone could prevent that amount of suffering was to kill a child, I wouldn't blame the person either way. If they followed Kant's moral framework and didn't the child, I'd respect that. If they followed a Utilitarianism framework and killed the child, I'd respect that as well. It's a tough situation to be in and I'd pity the person burdened with that decision and judge them with grace.
This post was edited on 3/3/25 at 3:26 pm
Posted on 3/3/25 at 3:37 pm to Azkiger
quote:I don't believe the Bible teaches an absolutely free will, but a will bound by sin, influencing even our desires that lead to our choices. Even so, you can direct a person to do something in accordance with their own desires if you know them well enough, don't you agree?
If he didn't have to account for free will, sure.
quote:Death is pretty consistent. Is justice not served when two people are put to death for their crimes but one opts for the gas chamber and another opts for the firing squad? Or, are those circumstances that don't dictate whether or not justice was actually served?
Logic dictates that perfect justice would dole out perfectly consistent punishments.
quote:Lady Justice is blind when it comes to fallible human beings who aren't omniscient. We have to try to figure out the truth as best as we can, and so justice demands impartiality. God is an impartial judge in that He doesn't look at a person to see if He likes them of if they can do something better for Him than anyone else and therefore gives them an easier time. His election is based on His pure love and divine will, not based on anything in us.
Criminals shouldn't be treated with the same neutrality? Lady Justice shouldn't be wearing a blindfold?
God knows the truth and His justice is perfect, whereas human justice can err. Analogies only go so far, in other words.
quote:Again, you are making an emotional argument, not a logical one. There is no logical problem with what I said regarding justice being served. You seem to have been banking on an emotional appeal, where I would admit an injustice simply because I didn't like the outcome. Not liking an outcome doesn't mean it isn't true.
This is the sort of pretzels Christians have to ultimately put themselves in in order to keep believing.
Posted on 3/3/25 at 4:08 pm to Azkiger
quote:Yes, because you are critiquing God for actions without understanding or accepting His character, nature, and actions.
You're critiquing my critique of God by trying to put me in a box God isn't within.
quote:I'm glad you agree.
If God was powerless to stop a child bring being born, and that child, if allowed to live, would grow up to be a Hitler-like figure and kill countless people, then yes, God killing this child would be viewed in a completely different way.
quote:It is very much like it.
But lets go back to Noah's flood to see how weak your attempted comparison is.
1.) God is all powerful, and doesn't have to kill the child in order to prevent this outcome (he could simply not make the child).
2.) We're not talking about a single individual. We're talking about quite literally every single baby/child on earth.
Yes, of course, if you change the scenario the opinions change. But your scenario is nothing like what I am critiquing.
1) If all human beings are guilty before God, why is it wrong to kill one in justice rather than to prevent the birth of one for the same end? God could also have prevented all sin from occurring altogether, but then that would have prevented His ability to demonstrate His love and goodness by showing mercy to those who don't deserve it. If God is not wrong to take the life of a guilty creature, then why does it matter if He does so rather than merely preventing them from being created in the first place? God doesn't owe anything to His creatures.
2) The numbers do not make a difference. Putting to death 100 traitors or 1 doesn't change whether or not justice was meted out by the King. You, again, are operating from the position that those who died were innocent and not deserving of death, and therefore it was unfair or unjust for God to take the lives of the innocent. Biblical theology disagrees with your premise: no one is innocent, all our gulity, and no one does good.
To take this back to the Hitler baby analogy: the Bible says the whole earth was filled with wickedness where everyone did what was right in their own eyes. This meant that the population of the earth was filled with people who rejected their creator and lived at enmity with their neighbors, performing evil acts according to their own desires. The assumption here is that even the children of those wicked parents were being raised to do the same things. If all of Germany during WWII gave their full-throated support for Hitler and supported and/or contributed the genocide that he was performing, wouldn't you think it may have been justified to drop a nuke on Berlin, even if it meant killing women and children who were all supporting or being raised to support that evil? We did it to Japan, after all, and I'm sure not all of the victims were fully supporting the Emporer.
If the outcome of letting even the children live was that more and more evil would be produced in the earth, then why is God evil or immoral on killing them in the womb during the flood along with their parents? It also prevented the conception of many other children that would have been conceived had the flood not occurred.
So even with the flood, we see that God knew the hearts of all the people, saw that they were wicked, could have foreseen the wickedness that they would have performed if He let them live, and decided to judge them with the flood. You see that as purely evil, but I'm trying to show that the baby Hitler analogy is at least partially analogous, making it more of a grey issue for the unbeliever, and a completely justified and good action for the believer who recognizes God's moral purity and the sinfulness of humanity.
quote:That was my goal, actually. I wanted to present a moral dilemma with an emotional component to demonstrate the absurdity of the critiques people make against God when He is all-knowing, all-wise, good, and just, and we are fallible with limited knowledge, wisdom, and goodness. It's easy for us to say that God is evil when we don't know all ends and purposes. My child used to think I was a mean parent when I punished them for doing something they shouldn't have done, but they also didn't always understand or accept that the punishment was for a greater good. We act the same way towards God.
Because I'm conflicted.
quote:I can respect that answer because it is trying to wrestle with a moral difficulty.
If the only way someone could prevent that amount of suffering was to kill a child, I wouldn't blame the person either way. If they followed Kant's moral framework and didn't the child, I'd respect that. If they followed a Utilitarianism framework and killed the child, I'd respect that as well. It's a tough situation to be in and I'd pity the person burdened with that decision and judge them with grace.
We don't have the authority that God does to take a life. Since God created all things, He owns all things and has the right to govern all things as He sees fit. It's why the image of the potter and the clay vessel are used in the Bible to describe God as the one who can make a vessel for His own purposes, one for good use and one for bad, and the clay has no right to question the potter in this way.
If God has the freedom to end any life He chooses the way He chooses because all are guilty before Him and King and Judge, then we have no right to question Him. If He chooses to end one life in order to save others, or to allow the ending of many out of His justice, then who are we to judge the Judge? Our limited minds can't begin to see the purposes for all that happens, and yet we are quick to call God unjust and unfair, even evil, because we don't personally like what He does or what He claims to do.
Posted on 3/3/25 at 4:34 pm to FooManChoo
quote:
I don't believe the Bible teaches an absolutely free will, but a will bound by sin, influencing even our desires that lead to our choices. Even so, you can direct a person to do something in accordance with their own desires if you know them well enough, don't you agree?
What about any amount of free will? Because that's all it would take to cause a miscalculation and create a scenario where someone isn't precisely where they need to be during a tsunami event that affected millions of people.
quote:
Death is pretty consistent.
That's about like saying receiving a paycheck is pretty consistent. Though, I doubt you'd accept that line of logic if your boss decided to pay you only a dollar this next pay period.
You can word it however you want, but equal is equal. And if a perfect being is making everything perfectly equal, a 2 year old suffering from a terminal illness isn't the same as a serial killer living happily into their 80s.
quote:
God is an impartial judge...
So why the wildly varying punishments when we're all guilty of the exact same thing?
quote:
Again, you are making an emotional argument, not a logical one.
So you don't think there is a logical argument to be made that if a 20 year old is convicted of murder and assigned a life sentence, waiting to put him in jail at 85 is purposefully avoiding the life sentence?
It's purely a "I don't like the outcome" argument, and not a "well, that's not really the purpose of serving a life sentence" argument?
If you do you're just being dishonest.
This post was edited on 3/3/25 at 4:48 pm
Posted on 3/3/25 at 4:47 pm to FooManChoo
quote:
Yes, because you are critiquing God for actions without understanding or accepting His character, nature, and actions.
What context am I missing that would justify someone killing a child to obtain a greater good if there's an option to simply not make the child and accomplish the same greater good?
quote:
If all human beings are guilty before God, why is it wrong to kill one in justice rather than to prevent the birth of one for the same end?
A perfectly good God would only tolerate suffering to a point where the most good is obtained. Any suffering past that point would be gratuitous and not allowed. Hence the Problem of Evil.
It would be no different than using radiation to treat cancer and cause suffering if you could just give someone a pill to cure it with no painful side effects. Radiation in this instance would be immoral, it'd be unnecessary suffering to obtain the greater good (curing cancer) when there was a painless option available.
quote:
The numbers do not make a difference.
So there were millions of baby Hilters? Okay...
quote:
If all of Germany during WWII gave their full-throated support for Hitler and supported and/or contributed the genocide that he was performing, wouldn't you think it may have been justified to drop a nuke on Berlin, even if it meant killing women and children who were all supporting or being raised to support that evil?
Great question. Is there also a bomb we could drop that would only kill the adults? Because if so, then yeah it'd be immoral to choose to kill children.
quote:
It's easy for us to say that God is evil when we don't know all ends and purposes.
"It's easy to say that serial rapist is evil when we don't know all ends and purposes."
All we can operate off of is what we know. Maybe there is context that justifies that serial rapists behavior. Maybe God really did tell him he had to do what he did or an army of baby Hitlers would do unspeakable things to the world.
Or, you know, we can call a ball a ball and safely deem that person horrible.
Posted on 3/3/25 at 5:11 pm to Azkiger
quote:God is a lot smarter than we are, knows are hearts and minds better than we know ourselves, and can direct the steps of others a lot better than we can our own.
What about any amount of free will? Because that's all it would take to cause a miscalculation and create a scenario where someone isn't precisely where they need to be during a tsunami event that affected millions of people.
I can't tell you exactly how He does it because I'm not God and He doesn't lay out exactly how He does all that He does. I can just say that we see how people influence other humans to make decisions all the time without violating their wills, and God can do so much better than we can do to His power and knowledge.
quote:I probably wouldn't accept that for my paycheck, but the reason why I wouldn't is because my employer and I agreed that I would get paid at a certain cadence each month, so to alter our agreement would not sit well with me. That's not what happens with justice. The judge and I don't work out an agreement on the timing of everything. If I break the law, the judge determines the sentence, not me.
That's about like saying receiving a paycheck is pretty consistent. Though, I doubt you'd accept that line of logic if your boss decided to pay you only a dollar this next pay period.
quote:Equal justice is equal, but I disagree with your definition that equal justice means the exact same outcome in every respect every time.
You can word it however you want, but equal is equal. And if a perfect being is making everything perfectly equal, a 2 year old suffering from a terminal illness is the same as a serial killer living happily into their 80s.
Being put to death on a Tuesday instead of a Wednesday like my cell mate isn't an act of injustice, but you seem to think unless all aspects of the sentence are exactly the same in every respect, then injustice has occurred.
Would it be an injustice to delay an execution one month because the electric chair needed repairs? What if governor decided to take a look at the case for a bit and determine if a commutation was in order? If he decides against it but it delays the execution for a while, is that injustice?
quote:We aren't all guilty of the exact same thing. We are all guilty of Adam's sin by imputation and representation, but we all add to his sin our own actual sins, and those vary in kinds and degrees. Even so, God, as the judge and as the victim (all sin is an offense against the holy God who made us), can determine what He deems as just in each scenario, whether that be someone dying at 8 or 80. And even with that, those who suffer in Hell will suffer infinitely worse than anyone on Earth, no matter how or when they die, so from God's perspective, taking an 8 year old is no different than an 80 year old, at least in some sense. Our death is the same no matter what the sin, but how and when we experience it may differ according to God's just decree.
So why the wildly varying punishments when we're all guilty of the exact same thing?
quote:Ah, I see I misread your previous statement about a murderer spending life in prison and then dying there, not being sentenced to death with a delayed execution. My apologies for my mistake.
So you don't think there is a logical argument to be made that if a 20 year old is convicted of murder and assigned a life sentence, waiting to put him in jail at 85 is purposefully avoiding the life sentence?
It's purely a "I don't like the outcome" argument, and not a "well, that's not really the purpose of serving a life sentence" argument?
If you do you're just being dishonest.
One thing to consider is that while the analogy is to the human justice system, it doesn't work exactly the same way in every respect. God isn't putting people in prison to keep them from committing more crimes.
In the scenario you provided, I would say there's a miscarriage of justice precisely because a "life sentence" is intended to keep the convict off the streets from the sentencing forward until their death in prison. However, God set no stipulations about timing and "freedom" regarding the convict in the divine scenario, and the justice He would seek is for Himself. If justice demands the life of a sinner, then He is free to execute justice whenever and however He sees fit, and it is not miscarriage of justice to delay execution for a time in order to show mercy to some. The convict/prisoner/condemned is not owed anything at all except the punishment for the crime(s).
Posted on 3/3/25 at 5:21 pm to Azkiger
quote:The justification is the neither of those scenarios is objectively better or worse than the other. God is free to create and to destroy, for whatever purposes He wishes.
What context am I missing that would justify someone killing a child to obtain a greater good if there's an option to simply not make the child and accomplish the same greater good?
Perhaps He deemed it better to provide the joy to the mother as a temporary sign of grace to her before her death? God is not just free to show justice, but mercy, and every breath a sinner takes is a mercy that is not owed to them.
quote:If God determines that such suffering is necessary to bring about the most good, who are we to argue? You can't possibly see how such suffering would bring about a greater good, or perhaps even any good at all, and so you see this as a problem with evil, but I don't.
A perfectly good God would only tolerate suffering to a point where the most good is obtained. Any suffering past that point would be gratuitous and not allowed. Hence the Problem of Evil.
It would be no different than using radiation to treat cancer and cause suffering if you could just give someone a pill to cure it with no painful side effects. Radiation in this instance would be immoral, it'd be unnecessary suffering to obtain the greater good (curing cancer) when there was a painless option available.
All God needs to do to overcome the problem of evil is to have a sufficiently good cause for it.
I've said it many times before but the problem with evil for the atheist is that there no rational standard for the existence of evil in that worldview, even if you see things with your own eyes that you would describe as "evil".
quote:In a sense, yes. Each sin against God is far worse than millions of murders of human beings because God's holiness and value is infinitely greater than any human. God is perfectly just to end the life of a child to prevent greater offense to Himself if He chooses.
So there were millions of baby Hilters? Okay...
quote:Nope, no bomb to kill only adults.
Great question. Is there also a bomb we could drop that would only kill the adults? Because if so, then yeah it'd be immoral to choose to kill children.
All have sinned against God and fall short of His glory. Including children.
All are God's creations and He is free to do with them as He pleases. No one deserves life. No one deserves happiness. No one deserves peace.
quote:
"It's easy to say that serial rapist is evil when we don't know all ends and purposes."
All we can operate off of is what we know. Maybe there is context that justifies that serial rapists behavior. Maybe God really did tell him he had to do what he did or an army of baby Hitlers would do unspeakable things to the world.
Now you're changing from what God can do with His infinite knowledge, wisdom, power, and holiness to what fallible and sinful man does. It feels like you're getting frustrated and jumping the shark.
quote:Feel free to say what you want, but you don't have an objective standard to call anything evil. All you have is your own opinion at the end of the day. What you think is evil is irrelevant because it's just your own preference and opinion.
Or, you know, we can call a ball a ball and safely deem that person horrible.
Posted on 3/3/25 at 6:02 pm to FooManChoo
quote:
God is a lot smarter than we are, knows are hearts and minds better than we know ourselves, and can direct the steps of others a lot better than we can our own.
I can't tell you exactly how He does it because I'm not God and He doesn't lay out exactly how He does all that He does. I can just say that we see how people influence other humans to make decisions all the time without violating their wills, and God can do so much better than we can do to His power and knowledge.
What about any amount of free will? Because that's all it would take to cause a miscalculation and create a scenario where someone isn't precisely where they need to be during a tsunami event that affected millions of people.
quote:
I probably wouldn't accept that for my paycheck, but the reason why I wouldn't is because my employer and I agreed that I would get paid at a certain cadence each month, so to alter our agreement would not sit well with me.
While I'm not a lawyer, I'd expect the legal system to have timeframes from which life sentences must be served, of which wouldn't allow a life sentence to be delayed for 60 years.
If this comparison doesn't work, find a different one as you were the one who started comparing serving life sentences to a 2 year old dying of cancer and a serial killer dying peacefully of old age.
quote:
Being put to death on a Tuesday instead of a Wednesday like my cell mate isn't an act of injustice, but you seem to think unless all aspects of the sentence are exactly the same in every respect, then injustice has occurred.
A perfect circle is perfectly round, no deviations. We expect humanity not to be able to obtain perfection because that's not possible and all we can do is our best.
God's best is apparently trying to punish two individuals with death, but can't do any better than striking one down with crippling cancer at the age of 2 and letting the other one kill and drink and frick and enjoy life until he dies naturally in his 80s.
Forget perfect circles, he's making triangles.
quote:
Would it be an injustice to delay an execution one month because the electric chair needed repairs? What if governor decided to take a look at the case for a bit and determine if a commutation was in order? If he decides against it but it delays the execution for a while, is that injustice?
No, as both we and the world are imperfect.
Now back to my example. What if a judge decided not to jail a 20 year old murder until he was 85? That's not "doing your best in an imperfect world", that's purposefully treating people different. Forget a "perfect judge" that'd be a horrible and corrupt judge.
quote:
Even so, God, as the judge and as the victim
He is birthing people into existence without asking that soul if they want to be born into a world where they're worthy of death, but he's also the victim of that soul existing within the world he created them in?
God it literally hitting himself and bitching about it.
This where I get off. There is no common ground to be had here, and I'm not sure why I keep talking with you as if there ever could be.
This post was edited on 3/3/25 at 6:07 pm
Posted on 3/4/25 at 4:32 pm to Azkiger
quote:God knows all things perfectly. There is no miscalculation. You seem to be operating under the premise that God can make mistakes in knowledge, as if God can't know what a person would do ahead of time, or that He wouldn't know how they would react to some sort of stimulus He puts in their lives.
What about any amount of free will? Because that's all it would take to cause a miscalculation and create a scenario where someone isn't precisely where they need to be during a tsunami event that affected millions of people.
It's an all or nothing situation with God: either He has the knowledge, power, and wisdom to direct the steps of all people or none. If "free will" can thwart God's plans, then He isn't God.
quote:Where did I make that comparison, specifically? I went back and looked but couldn't find it. I did ask you if were unjust to give a life sentence for one person vs. the death penalty for another person, but I wasn't saying that's what God does. In fact, I've consistently referred to sinners as being convicted criminals deserving of the death penalty and have tried to stay in that lane when talking about how God deals with us vs. how the human justice system does. I'm happy to not talk about a life sentence because that's not what God gives us. God gives us the death penalty.
While I'm not a lawyer, I'd expect the legal system to have timeframes from which life sentences must be served, of which wouldn't allow a life sentence to be delayed for 60 years.
If this comparison doesn't work, find a different one as you were the one who started comparing serving life sentences to a 2 year old dying of cancer and a serial killer dying peacefully of old age.
quote:I contest your standard of perfection in this case. God has many reasons for what He does and doesn't do. Christianity teaches that there are different degrees of punishment and torment in Hell. Maybe not exactly like Dante's depiction, but Jesus clearly says that judgement will be worse for some more than others. Sin compounds punishment, and while death is death in this life (that's what we've been focused on in this discussion), eternal death and suffering in Hell will be far worse for some than others.
A perfect circle is perfectly round, no deviations. We expect humanity not to be able to obtain perfection because that's not possible and all we can do is our best.
God's best is apparently trying to punish two individuals with death, but can't do any better than striking one down with crippling cancer at the age of 2 and letting the other one kill and drink and frick and enjoy life until he dies naturally in his 80s.
Forget perfect circles, he's making triangles.
I mention that because God could actually be doing a merciful service to a child by taking their life and preventing a compound aggregation of sin and punishment in this life compared to the 80 year old, who has lived much longer, and sinned much more and far greater than the child, and therefore has heaped up more and more judgement upon themselves. And all this is with the assumption that neither the child nor the elderly adult are actually elected of God unto salvation, which death would be but a translation from misery in this life unto glory in Heaven.
quote:You might be right if God were limited to justice in this life, however a 65 year "delay" in executing eternal justice is hardly a blink of an eye in the light of eternity. It's why even these analogies don't fully describe the situation for God. I'm merely trying to show you a glimpse into God's judgement, but there is nothing analogous to God in our experience.
No, as both we and the world are imperfect.
Now back to my example. What if a judge decided not to jail a 20 year old murder until he was 85? That's not "doing your best in an imperfect world", that's purposefully treating people different. Forget a "perfect judge" that'd be a horrible and corrupt judge.
quote:Not at all. Humans do actually have agency in this. God creates humans for His glory and to worship Him, and we spit in His face over and over again. We want to do this. It's only when He condescends to save us by His grace that we actually begin to love Him, and yet even in our saved state, we continue to sin and offend Him. He's the victim in that He created YOU--Azkiger--to worship and glorify Him as your heavenly Father, and instead, you continually deny Him, insult Him, and live an offensive life against what He created you to do. Yes, He is a victim, and you don't care that you do these things to Him all the while pretending that it's no big deal.
He is birthing people into existence without asking that soul if they want to be born into a world where they're worthy of death, but he's also the victim of that soul existing within the world he created them in?
God it literally hitting himself and bitching about it.
If the biblical God exists, then your thoughts, words, and actions would be more than deserving of the punishment that you will receive for eternity if you do not turn, repent/apologize, and seek to obey God by faith in Jesus Christ. You will have no one to blame but yourself because you want to do the things that deserve that punishment.
quote:There isn't common ground. Your ignorance of basic theological truths means that we are talking past each other. I'm having to give a Sunday School lesson on the basic attributes of God, to which you are attempting to nitpick as if God is just like a human being. No wonder there is no common ground to be had. We are starting from two drastically different worldviews and presuppositions about reality.
This where I get off. There is no common ground to be had here, and I'm not sure why I keep talking with you as if there ever could be.
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