long winded fool

Well, according to the Bible, when the soul isn't preoccupied with the body, it can concentrate on greater things such as love and reason. (This is where we get the value of fasting.) Suffering isn't good, but worrying about suffering isn't either. Caring about oneself and others is good thing. Worrying about oneself or others is being preoccupied with the physical and prevents true love and reason. I agree with you that suffering isn't always the result of an evil action. I disagree that suffering itself is evil. I've given a situation where a loving Father can allow his child to endure suffering even if He has the power to stop it without contradicting his loving nature. I understand your viewpoint that God isn't needed. I'm showing that arbitrary suffering can (and indeed must) exist simultaneously with a loving being capable of eliminating it. Once again, I'm not proving God. I'm refuting the claim of contradiction.

That's a nice way of putting it. All suffering ought to direct all people to a correct decision regarding the ultimate matter of accepting Christ, just like all other feelings. What is Christ? Christ is truth. Suffering ought to direct us away from falsity and towards truth. Christ is Life. Suffering ought to direct us away from death and towards life. Christ is humans loving one another. Suffering ought to strengthen our love for one another. Christ is self-sacrifice for the good of others. Suffering ought to direct us to selflessly endure it so that others won't have to. Not all people react this way to suffering. Suffering directs some people to greed and fear. All people have the free will to be directed to God when they suffer. Some choose to be directed into themselves when they suffer. This has no bearing on God's love. It has to do solely with human love. If we love ourselves more than anyone else, we are choosing to reject God. God isn't "not doing a very good job," any more than a father isn't doing a very good job when he asks his adult daughter to stay away from the jerk but allows her to date him anyway.

The Old Testament is full of allegories and symbolism. Things such as the Garden of Eden and The Flood and Sodom and Gomorrah are all figurative stories containing deeper truths. They tend to "echo" (or prophesy) in different ways the purpose and fate of Jesus. He even says that those Pharisees who took the OT at face value didn't see the forest for the trees. The OT is all about Him. He represents the 'New Covenant.' Unless you are a "fundie," the Biblical stories don't have to be literal to contain truth. If you demand the Bible to be taken at face value and refuse to think abstractly, it is easy to contradict. Once you allow for metaphors and parables, it is not so easy. Since it is clear that, from a literary standpoint, it's meant to be read as a poem, even the things that are presented as literal need not be taken literally. I cannot defend the literal fundamentalist position. I'm assuming the Bible is figuratively true and refuting claims of a contradiction. Since this is Christianity's best argument, this is the argument one ought to assume when debating it.

If all actions lead to A (not suffering) how can we have the free will to choose between A and B? This portion of the PoE relies on a contradictory assumption. "If God is all powerful, he should be able to do contradictory stuff like take away bad things and still give us the choice to choose between good and bad." God can't make a rock so big that even he can't lift it, he can't make a mistake, and he can't allow free will without the possibility of evil. If He eliminates all evil, free will must logically go with it. We don't have to experience evil. We have to be able to experience it if we so choose. If he prevents this, he eliminates our freedom to choose. As long as someone, somewhere decides to choose evil over good, evil must exist and God can do nothing about it as long as He desires the existence of freedom of choice. Therefore, a benevolent omniscient God cannot allow us a free choice regarding whether or not to follow Him (choose Good) and eliminate the existence of suffering and torture which to us makes a given act evil. Humans have already proven that they are capable of eliminating suffering and torture in certain instances. As we grow intellectually, our ability to eliminate suffering increases. Ironically, humans could also, in theory, effectively eliminate evil by collectively choosing Good absolutely all the time. The possibility of Evil would still exist, but it would never manifest if everyone happened to only choose good. God, on the other hand, can't eliminate Evil, (assuming that He desires us to have free will.) God can never make us be good, but we can choose it.

This is a false dilemma. How can suffering ever be in vain, and how does failing to learn one's lesson make the suffering one endures arbitrary and cruel? You still assume from the outset that suffering is punishment designed to make us turn to God. Because we ought to learn something from our mistakes doesn't make our mistakes cruel and arbitrary if we don't. Suffering is designed to tell us when we are in physical (or emotional) danger. Why would you assume anything else? The body is a temple. We ought to treat it as such. However, when the temple becomes more important than the God it is for, (in other words: when we feel that experiencing suffering is always evil because it hurts, therefore an all-good all-loving God ought to prevent us from suffering) the people lose perspective and begin fighting desperately over their temples and forgetting about their God. It's hard to turn the other cheek when your cheek is more important than anyone else's. Suffering is a fact of animal life. It is neither punishment nor reward. If the elimination of suffering is present in your motive for considering turning to the God of the Bible, you do not understand the nature of the God of the bible. 'God' doesn't eliminate or inflict suffering. Humans can do both by love and hate respectively. God is Love. Human instinct is fear, which is the basis for hate. Suffering can occur because of hate, but is not dependent on it. Suffering can be relieved with love but relief is not dependent on this either. There is more at stake than suffering and torture, as frightened as we are of these things.

There is no reward for suffering. There is reward for caring more about love than about how you feel physically. Suffering isn't "bad." It just hurts. Making people feel better is good. Making ourselves feel better is also good. Making people feel bad is bad, not because of the suffering itself, but because of the lack of empathy for that person. Treating others how I want to be treated is good. Doing otherwise is bad. Suffering does not make it bad. The lack of love does. The fact that it leads to suffering in some cases is irrelevant. It is tempting to say that all suffering must coincide with a lack of love, but I have shown that this isn't the case. Suffering ultimately means nothing from a biblical standpoint, despite your insistence to the contrary. Where your heart is in the figurative sense means absolutely everything. Suffering or lack thereof cannot harm one's soul. Attachment to one's material body at the expense of truth and love can.

scombrid

This is where we get the value of psychedelic drugs then as well then. Anything that alters your mental state must simply be temporarily removing the soul’s preoccupation with the body. Psychedelics actually do a better job than fasting (so I’ve heard). Although I’ve had some interesting experiences while hungry and sleep deprived.

Obsession with any one thing and/or preoccupation with fear are both bad in and of themselves and have nothing to do with a soul. Either will cause you to neglect some aspect of your life and lead to unhappiness. It doesn’t matter if your obsession is body image, porn, your job, athletics, etc… it will distract you from the rest of things in your life including interpersonal relationships.


Suffering isn’t necessarily the result of evil (It is a mere byproduct of being stuffed in animal bodies right?). Suffering isn’t itself evil. Therefore, suffering isn’t helping to guide us to either A or B. A in this life can come from evil or good acts. What then is guiding our choice?


But you said that suffering isn’t evil in itself and isn’t always the result of evil behavior. Therefore, I have to guess that suffering could be eliminated without eliminating evil or choice. Simply rejecting god could be the definition of evil without all the nasty trappings of animal life tied in. That rejection could be the one act that leads to suffering and then I might call suffering just. Since suffering just happens, it’s pointless and cruel. Seems that human life is nothing but a distraction of the soul and seems to have absolutely no purpose other than as a filter of good people from bad people. That’s an awful convoluted step for a being that knows our heart before the gametes even fuse. This whole line of logic is leading to the fatalistic view that this entire life where souls are trapped in animals bodies is some sort of torture.

You said that suffering isn’t meant to teach a lesson.

Suffering means nothing from a biblical standpoint then it’s in vain. Of course I didn’t start the argument that suffering was meant to teach a lesson. You did.

If evil acts were all that resulted in suffering, I’d call suffering just. If evil acts were all that resulted in suffering then we could freely choose between evil acts and suffering and good acts and not suffering.

We are not experiencing the soul. We are experiencing physical reality and making our decisions based on that experience. If suffering distracts us from a correct decision (remember, you’ve got one shot at the afterlife) it destroys the soul.

Dr Rick

You are refuting a strawman.

A "father" thart allows suffering in spite of his love does so either because his love is not perfect, his powers are limited, and or his knowledge is limited. The Christian God purportedely has no such limits. You have also not shown that arbitrary suffering "indeed must exist".

That analogy only works if the god has limits like the father does. We don't criticise a person for not beint able to act upon his limits, but we don't then claim he is omnipotent, either.

Logically, it does not have to do anything of the sort. You have not shown a logical contradiction between preventing evil and allowing free will; you've only asserted it.

Stephen T-B

Our “Loving” father (LWF will correct me if I’m wrong) is loving to the extent that he wants the best for our souls.
Our souls go to Heaven (the best option) if we obey his Law.
Prior to Christ, this meant obeying all the commandments imparted by god to Moses - and there were a great many more than ten.
Then Christ came along and simplified matters by saying the Law could be summarised as loving God and loving our neighbours as ourselves. This, as I understand it, was the New Covenant.
But as before, the reward for adhering to this abbreviated Law was not a better life, but getting to Heaven.
This is not a complicated notion, but the Bible hasn’t helped to clarify it.
First of all, very many of the OT stories illustrate the fact that those who don’t obey the Law are punished by God in the Here and Now. There are, I think, relatively few references to Abraham’s Bosom and the fires of Hell and it is, consequently, rather easy to draw the conclusion that not obeying the Law earns God’s wrath, with consequent sufferings in this life, and obeying it earns his pleasure, with consequent blessings in this life.

Now, if the stories of Wraths and Judgments are metaphorical, then why didn’t God get one of his prophets to mention this? Why didn’t Jesus mention it? He could have said something about it in his Sermon on the Mount, instead of adding to the general confusion with his statement, for instance, that the Meek shall inherit the Earth.
It shouldn’t even be possible to take the OT literally, because by doing so we lose sight of the fact that God is interested exclusively in the wellbeing of our souls and couldn’t care less about how we get on in this life provided we obey his Law. Hence his allowing hurricanes, floods, droughts, pestilence and disease which strike Believers and Infidels alike. (Warfare and murder, it might be argued, are what we do to each other as human beings, rather than what God does.)

Suffering isn’t even an issue with God, and I wonder if LWF isn’t concerned that a great many Christians are labouring under the misapprehension that it is.

long winded fool

Thanks for the summary. Sometimes I get so involved in the particulars that I begin to lose sight of the general argument. It is a concern of mine that some of those who think they are Christian are not really followers of Jesus, or at least are not hearing the full message for some reason or other. It concerns me not because I worry about their immortal souls, but because the beliefs they think are Christian do not coincide with the collective theme of the bible and the crux of Jesus' teaching. They think it does, but they miss crucial points. They think one thing but something else is actually the case. They claim to believe the Bible, but when you ask them to describe their beliefs, they describe something that isn't actually a part of the biblical theme. Their beliefs may be supported by out-of-context quotes from the bible, just as any belief could be, but they miss the real point and therefore as long as they do not understand the full meaning of the bible, they cannot honestly say they fully believe it. They may want to believe, but until they understand they can't. It is impossible to not be a 'cherry picker' unless one abandons the need for literal descriptions to be historically true and contemplates the deeper allegorical meanings. Like any piece of poetry, outside of the unscientific physically impossible occurances, what is the underlying message? Jesus did say that the Old Testament stories were symbolic. He said they were all about him. This is not literally clear in the fantastic "fairy tale" stories themselves, but it becomes clear when the stories are repeated using different characters and different occurances which all symbolize the same thing. This is why Jesus used parables. This encourages abstract thinking, which is a vital part of the 'Christianity/Judaism' taught by Jesus, if not the contemporary idea of christianity today.

I'm not defending the stereotypical modern christian thinking, I'm trying to show that what true Christianity/Judaism is in the context of the Bible makes much more sense than what most of us were taught in Sunday school. Contemporary christianity may be unable to defend itself against accusations of contradiction, but the "religious belief" taught by the Bible and elaborated on by Jesus in particular is not accurately represented by what we call christianity today. I commend those who show "christians" where they are in error. Anyone who can be reasoned out of their faith ought to be. This was Jesus' message in a nutshell. Don't believe something because you want to. Believe it because it's true. The notion actually taught by the Bible ironically is not affected by most atheistic arguments which successfully refute "christianity." The reason being, I believe, is that it was written with full understanding of these contradictions and each are intentionally and successfully addressed in some area. This doesn't mean that God wrote it. It does seem to indicate that the folks who wrote it were a lot smarter than most authors today. The fact that such a huge collection of books written and compiled over hundreds of years ties up its loose ends so nicely (again as long as one recognizes symbolism and allegory) shows that someone knew exactly what they wanted to say and either knew that it was true, or was aware of how to make it look true without leaving any major holes. I agree that in real life, we have no reason to assume "God." I disagree that one can merely use the words of the Bible to refute the possibility of God. The Bible is a solid piece of evidence for God. This doesn't make it true, but it makes it an unwise reference for an atheist to attempt to disprove God. Almost every one of the classic contradictions are the result of unbiblical principles assumed to be supported by the bible.

Llyricist

I see LWF is still demonstrating his rocket powered goal posts, automatic non-sequiter generator, and 12 gauge unsupported assertion gun.

I'd say something on topic, but I've tilted at that windmill before.

Radorth

On the other hand, when asked for a way to allow free will without allowing evil, we hear even more strained and illogical responses- some laughable. It is a good enough response for us to ask for such paradigms, and let the skeptics answer themselves, I think.

Rad

Stephen T-B

It has seemed to me for quite some time that believers in the divine float around in some lofty dimension, way above the heads of those with their feet stuck in the ground and their minds focused on reality.
Communications between the two species is ok as long as it sticks to mundane things, like what to have for breakfast and whether Leeds United will ever beat Manchester United, and what a nuisance the slugs are. But throw angels, souls, the POE, demons, gods and resurrections of the dead into the arena, and all at once there is a complete break-down.
This is wonderfully illustrated by Radorth’s last post.
He can state, with all sincerity “...when asked for a way to allow free will without allowing evil, we hear even more strained and illogical responses- some laughable.”
Laughable from where he sits up there on his cloud, but perfectly good sense to the stuck-in-the-muds 30,000 feet below him.
In the same way, many assertions of the Clouders are just as laughable to the stuck-in-the-muds.
And so it will always be: assertion and counter assertion zooming past each other and never actually colliding.
I suppose we fling ‘em around because it’s fun, but in the end it’s completely pointless. isn’t it?

Radorth

Well not really. It is you who has decided not to discuss the topic further, for I was attempting to get the discussion off the dime and counter a blanket, unproven assertion. I will sincerely listen to YOUR paradigm for how a good God would operate.

The plain fact is that most atheists have not thought through the issue of how God would practically prevent evil and allow free will. I have never heard a thoughtful and practical answer to this question because, I think, there is none. What we generally get is some incoherent nonsense which boils down to "an omnimax God can do anything."

Therefore I specifically and sincerely ask how a God we could all declare "good" would operate. I've never heard an answer which shows me that the respondent has thought it through.

Perhaps you have, or can supply a link to some site which does have a good answer. We can still disagree but this is the practical way to resolve the question.

Rad

Dr Rick

Everything is possible except that which is logically impossible. There is no logical proof that free will is contigent upon evil, nor is the absence of evil a contradiction to free will.

That one cannot describe something does not make it logically impossible. One may not be able to describe a singularity or an omnipotent god adequately, but that does not make them logically impossible.

Nor have you given one, but that does not mean that an all good god is an absolute logical impossiblity.

The plain fact is that most theists have not thought through the issue of how God would practically allow evil and love us. I have never heard a thoughtful and practical answer to this question because, I think, there is none.