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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If there were a god children would not die or suffer.

If there were a god, there would be no child molesters in church, which by the way is the number one place that heinous act happens.[/quote]

Two responses:

First, really on the first example, just because we can’t think of the reason doesn’t mean there isn’t one.   My dog doesn’t understand 95% of the things that I do during the day — and yet there is a perfectly rationale reason for why that’s the case.   The dog just can’t see it. I believe that we relate to God in a similar way.

On the second example — we live in a fallen world where there is sin and evil.  The fact that people do horrible things doesn’t disprove the existence of God — in fact the entire Bible is premised on the fact that sin has corrupted the world; that because of this separation between man and God everyone needs a savior; that the gulf is so wide between us and God that we cannot bridge it ourselves no matter how “good” we are; that rather than destroy the ugliness of humanity, God sent his own Son into the world to pay the ultimate price for all of our sin; that He did so on the cross, which was the most humiliating way for anyone to die at that time; and that he was then resurrected to prove that he was the Son of God; and we are all saved not because of what we do but because of our faith in Him.  Because he was the perfect substitute, through faith, you get the perfect record of Jesus and are reunited with God.

I know lots of people don’t believe that.  OK.   But it is at least a system of belief that absolutely acknlowdges the premise of evil, explains why people do truly evil things, and yet also offers a path of redemption for everyone who engages in evil.  It certainly makes more sense to me than the world is just a random place and bad things apparently happen for no reason at all.  It also makes a lot more sense to me than the traditional view of every other world religion — be good, do good, follow the rules, maybe it balances in the end and you make it to heaven (sadly, this is what many Christians think too).

You can say — well, I’m not a child molester, I’m not truly evil.  But if you take an honest inventory of your life, there are all kinds of ugly things you have done.  Everyone has.  All of us are a hot mess.  There is very little that separates priests from prostitutes when it comes to the motivation of the heart.

I say this as someone who was in fact the subject of highly inappropriate sexual contact when I was in high school through the husband of a trusted teacher.  Despite a surface that looked highly successful, the incident left me very confused, hurt, and angry for a long time.  It was also a contributing factor to my own behavior that hurt other people as an adult — an affair in my first marriage, a tendency to lie out of shame, a draw to addictive behaviors and compulsions to escape uncomfortable emotions including the trauma from high school.

It was only as my second marriage was on the verge of collapse and I realized that my successful career was not going to change my heart that I started to look into deeper places for real answers.

And it was only after I became a Christian and accepted the above as truth that I saw a path for change, growth, and redemption — that was the moment when I actually began to get over what happened to me and became a new person.  Not in therapy, not through reading self help books, not through sitting aimlessly in church services over the years.   I did all of those for years to no no avail.

It was only when I truly studied Christianity (and NOT the messed up MAGA version that dominates today unfortunately in many churches) — and became a real Christian — that I discovered a transformed heart.

[/quote]

I am not wanting to undermine your experience and the pain you have gone through, but I do want to point out some of the flaws in your reasoning.

If you start with the premise of an all-powerful, all-knowing Creator, then the “fallen world" isn't a tragic accident he’s trying to fix, it’s a scenario he authored. If God designed the system, it designed the capacity for the very evil you’re talking about.

Why did God create us with a nature he knew would fail, label that nature "sinful," and then says it’s the only one who can save us from a punishment it devised. A truly perfect designer shouldn't have to resort to a blood sacrifice to fix a "glitch" in its own creation.

The whole atonement through Jesus’ sacrifice is highly problematic from a moral standpoint = the idea that you can transfer your sins to someone else and have them punished in your place. In any human court of law, we would call it a gross miscarriage of justice to execute an innocent person for the crimes of a murderer. If God’s sense of justice requires a blood sacrifice to satisfy his own glitch in the system, it suggests a deity bound by primitive legalism rather than one defined by unconditional love.

Rejecting the idea of original sin doesn't mean we don't have explanations for why people do bad things. We have psychology, neurology, and sociology, real-world tools that help us understand trauma and behavior without needing a metaphysical evil to explain it.

Doing good simply because it helps a fellow human being, without the hope of an eternal reward, is a much more grounded and honest way to live than expecting belief in a savior to bridge a gap that shouldn't have been there in the first place.
[/quote]

I am the person who wrote the response.

I appreciate all these points and used to make these same arguments myself but there is a glaring hole in this way of thinking — if there is no God, then there
is truly no such thing as evil.   If we really just came to exist because millions of years ago some fishes learned to live on land and we have been evolving ever since — and there is NOTHING else to the world — then we really do live in a world where the strong simply eat the weak all the time and there is nothing morally wrong with that.   In that worldview, all of society is based off of social constructs — we have drawn the lines in some places in our modern western societies but why not draw them in other places like other cultures did in the past?

And yet, I know in my heart, that there IS such a thing as evil, mainly because I have experienced it.   And so ultimately I had to seek answers elsewhere.

I don’t agree with the point that substitionary atonement shows that God doesn’t have unconditional love.   Quite the opposite.   It shows that instead of just sitting around in the clouds letting us all rot he came into the world and at infinite cost has made it right.  When Union soldiers went off to the Civil War and fought to end slavery — or the Allies soldiers fought the Nazis — when they died, we rightly call them heroes.   It’s the same principle here.   Jesus is the hero of the story of humanity.

Of course, could God have picked some other way?  Yes, perhaps.  Why he chose this way is part of the mystery.

[/quote]

DP, I don't need God in order to explain horrible things that people do to each other. I still don't think you understand the dichotomy that the PP was trying to explain to you. If a god is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, etc. and created all good and all evil, why would he create us knowing that we would fail and need salvation in order to achieve eternal life? An all loving god would not set us up to fail. An all loving god would not give infants cancer. An all loving god would not kill millions of children in a war. So either your god is a selfish, petulant, jealous god or he doesn't exist and we humans do all of those things to each other. [/quote]

If there is no God — then there are objectively not “horrible” things.   There are things that you find offensive in your modern western society because of the social constructs surrounding you.  Other societies can look at all of the things you just cited and come up with many reasons why these are not bad things.  They are only “horrible” because you know in your heart they are wrong and you only know in your heart that they are wrong because there is a higher moral law, however much you want to deny it.

As to your other point, the most logical answer is that God did not create us to be his little robots.  Just think how strange and bizarre that would actually be.   Instead, he gave his creatures free will.

Does the Christian worldview have holes and things that we cannot fully explained?  Of course.    But so does every other worldview.   All you can do is look at the world and compare it to your life experiences and make a determination as to how you think the world is ordered.  I try to respect people who have a different perspective.  None of this is easy when you really start thinking about it.

I was very dismissive of religion for a long time but that was because I had not taken the time to actually study it.   I fashioned myself a smart and thoughtful person and yet looking back on it now I realize I hadn’t given this much serious thought at all.  My views evolved once I did.

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