Reply to We don’t know if there are gods, or a God

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[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]

Hear Hear!![/quote]

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