Amaleq13

Even if you are taught that harm certain others is right? You seem to have completely missed the point that being taught something from a very young age has a dramatic and significant impact on your ability to freely choose to do otherwise.

Regardless, free will discussions belong in a different forum than BC&H. Philosophy maybe? You'll have to actually define your terms, though.

TomboyMom

Yes. Among others, the Jains taught this, and still do. Furthermore, they live it, which many Christians do not, such as the thousands of Christians who slaughtered my ancestors for no reason other than their steadfast refusal to accept Christ as their savior. To the Jains, who so welcome and tolerate other religions that in some places in India they maintain Hindu temples, this would be unthinkable.

TomboyMom

Gamera: My gripe is not with suffering in general, and whether the world is better off with or without suffering. My gripe is with a God, whether real or fictional, who orders his followers to commit atrocities. The world is better off without such a God.

EthnAlln

And that is precisely why I find it strange that anyone would struggle so hard, introduce so many ad hoc hypotheses, to avoid a simple conclusion that the world is not the creation of a benign, loving creator. Everything that Gamera has said about free will, people making choices, etc., works perfectly well in a world where "God" is irrelevant. The whole concept is just excess baggage, particularly when keeping it requires so much mental-gear-stripping cleverness in argument, in order to justify the texts that supposedly reveal this god.

TomboyMom

Alright, Gemara, as I understand your argument, it is that:
People back then were terribly violent, and frequently killed people from other groups in war.
Yahweh "went along" with this custom, in order to "separate" the Jews from their neighbors.
This enabled him to prepare them to receive Jesus' message.
Jesus' message, which was both new and unique, included loving your enemies, as well as your neighbors.
Which was a good thing.

I think we've shown that Jesus' message was neither new nor unique; you do not. Your view, in that regard, btw, is a minority one, not just in this forum. However, the second step is also odd. Why did Yahweh have to command the Jews to slaughter babies, in order to prepare them to receive the message that they should love their enemies? That seems odd, to say the least.

And why do you think actual Christians have, as a rule, done such a lousy job of loving their enemies? (Unless you consider mass murder to be a form of love?) Please do not resort to the No True Scotsman fallacy.

cajela

I must say that Gemera's remark that we wouldn't exist in a better world with no thieves because we are capable of stealing reminds me of an old joke/urban legend. It's funny & cute, have a look.

http://www.snopes.com/military/reinwald.htm

I might be equipped to be a thief, but I'm not one.

Even so, I cannot see any reason why humans having free will should require the existence of ichneumon wasps, not to mention cholera, smallpox, anthrax, plague, typhus, leprosy etc.

EthnAlln

Yes, but I doubt if it's of any use to debate that with Gamera. If this major premise (no plagues, no people) is demanded to preserve faith, it will be retained, even though it is utterly beyond any empirical or logical proof, and indeed nothing at all can count as evidence for or against it.

aa5874

How can Yahweh be cruel when He doesn't exist? Yahweh cannot cause or prevent anything. He does not cause or prevent natural disasters, He does not prevent or cause diseases, He does not cause or prevent death, He does not cause or prevent life.

Yahweh has never carried out any action that affected the Human Race. No person living today can point to any action of Yahweh, none whatsoever. No book has been written by Yahweh, no school, no hospital, nothing has been built by Yahweh, but the absurd say He drowned the whole world.

Yahweh is fiction of the highest order, only in the fictitious world can a God, the so called Yahweh, exist.

Quetzalcoatl

So according to you Yahweh does not exists, neither does his son Yeshua

Oh! I get it that’s why Yahweh did all those mean things he was exercising his moral freedom and any being with moral freedom MUST do evil.

EthnAlln

I think you've hit it, and it's probably the reason this thread belongs under philosophy. Saint Thomas Aquinas had a long discussion of what God's freedom means. By definition, God is morally perfect, so his freedom somehow cannot entail the possibility of his doing evil. So, in what sense is he free? And in what sense are human beings created in his image, since we *can* do evil? The Saint is puzzled by this. His modern apologists attempt to claim that he was joking when he dealt seriously with the logical consequences of his assumptions. I don't think so. When he considers the question of how a cannibal is to be resurrected (since his body is at least partly formed from the bodies of other people---the angelic doctor considered the extreme case of a cannibal who had never eaten anything except human flesh---he evidently believed there were such people), he is dealing with a genuine logical difficulty, and there is no reason to think he would have inserted a in his text if he could have.