Llyricist

To avoid repitition I shall adopt all of the other responses, in many cases they contain what I was trying to get across before anyway, But I'd like to emphasise these:

In the case of the Christian group harming another Christian group. If we assume you are right that the aggressors are in the wrong, why is it that the group that DID NOT make the mistake is the group that is suffering? Your loving father analogy hinges around a person's learning the bad consequences (to themselves) of a wrong act. If the pacifist group, after suffering the harm, decides the harm is because of their own mistake, they may take up being physically aggressive, which you say is somehow an objective wrong from reading the Bible Meanwhile, the group who actually DID make the "mistake" suffers NO consequences and goes merrily on their way believing themselves to be right. Hence the contradictory nature of the argument.

The other thing I'd like to emphasize is that there is no Objective reason for anyone else to assume that your interpretation of the Bible is superior to anyone elses. The people that feel the Bible justifies harming those that they see as blasphemers or not "True" Christians have just as much backing in the Bible as you do in aserting that a Christian shouldn't harm anyone. They just smooth out the contradictions in the opposite direction.

By the way, that was known as the "No True Scotsman fallacy" read up it HERE . Interestingly enough the wording in the example is almost exactly the wording you used.

Llyricist

oops, I missed scombrid's first reply. Dang he put's things clearly, and I'll just say that he encapsulated everything I have been trying to get accross much better than I could

long winded fool

Very thought provoking responses. Scombrid seems to have addressed most of them in his initial response, so I'll deal with his/hers alone.

What if the hypothetical father tells his daughter at some point in her life to never do anything that makes her feel uncomfortable and to follow her heart to happiness. At another point, he tells her that the guy she wants to date is a jerk and that if she dates him she will probably regret it. When the girl goes to make her decision, she remembers her father's advice and decides that not dating the guy (who she doesn't believe is a jerk) would make her uncomfortable, and that dating him is following her heart and will make her happy. Is she following her father's advice? Is she being willfully disobedient? Is it her father's fault that his advice has lead her to make a mistake? Shouldn't she have thought critically about these two wise pieces of advice instead of assuming that they were inherently contradictory and that she just had to choose one and go with it? And remember, we as reasonable and objective onlookers can see that these two pieces of advice are not contradictory, but the girl doesn't see it. She doesn't understand how to remove her rational self from her desires and be objective about her situation. Her complaint about her father allowing her to choose suffering would (or could, at least) ammount to essentially the same complaint addressed in this thread about the problem of arbitrary suffering. We would be analogous to the confused daughter and God would be the all-loving and all-wise father. Since the girl's father can knowingly allow her to suffer without undermining his unconditional love for her, the God of the Bible could too, given the analogy stated.

I agree with your point here. I think most religious types fall into this category. Where I disagree is that the God of Bible must necessarily lead one into this category. While people put Him there all the time, the nature of the God of the Bible in full context is such that this conflicting set of parameters wouldn't logically apply. In other words, the God of the Bible, when all is taken into context, has a different nature than the God of the popular, contemporary religion of Christianity which takes certian qualities out of context with others, even though contemporary Christianity claims to be based on the Bible. If my daughter follows my advice to do what makes her happy and gets abused for it, have I abandoned her? Isn't my advice still there for her to use how she wants? If my twelve daughters all follow different parts of my advice and ignore other parts and come into conflict with each other, and if I fail to physically put a stop to this conflict, must this indicate a failure on my part? Is this really abandonment? They may see it that way, but they will learn from the mistakes that I told them not to make but didn't prevent them from making. They will learn to love each other by their own choice, not mine. True free will.

Not necessarily. My daughter doesn't know the complete truth about what I think she ought to do, even though I may clearly communicate it to her. All people filter reality through their own value systems. If my daughter values her insecurities more than my advice, she will not listen to it even though she hears it. Because children are their own persons, a good mother and father is no guarantee that the child will grow up good. Conversely, while bad people are sometimes the offspring of bad parents, they are not always. How is this possible? Free will. As long as free will exists in every person, bad things can still come from good relationships. If free will is required for true love to exist, and God is truly loving and creates people who are capable of true love, then free will must exist, therefore bad things must be able to happen to good people. They needn't be actualized, but they must be accessible.

I must disagree with the statement, "God could step in and show them His will without hurting their free will." According to the Bible, which is where we're getting our premises about God I'm assuming, God has stepped in and shown everyone His will without harming their free will. To expect more is necessarily to want the decision to be made for you. "God could convince me if He really wanted to." In the same way, I could "convince" my disobedient daughter to obey me if I really wanted to. The problem is, at some point, the word "convince" transforms from wise advice into the kind of "convincing" they do in the mafia. Presumably, every human being of every race, religion, or creed, has all the advice they need. They can't possibly get any more, because the advice is loud and constant in the form of the consience and the ability to think rationally. To "need something more" would be analogous to the girl wishing her father would just have grounded her so that she wouldn't have chosen to date the jerk. So she wouldn't have to think for herself, in other words. He could have, but her freedom to choose would have been undermined and both she and her father would have been less than truly unconditionally loving in their actions.

Llyricist

LWF,

Nowhere in your post did you address the problem of the consequences not being connected to a mistake, or rather someone suffering the consequences of someone else's mistake. from whence does the learning come in the example I spelled out? I must admit scombrid covered this quite clearly in his post but you managed to gloss right over it and not address it at all.

And to suggest that people just don't try hard enough to understand the "true nature" of the Bible is to forget that God supposedly designed us, so he is responsile for the very deficiency that creates this problem. This is where the human father will get a pass, because he can't control exactly what his child's makeup will be, whereas an Omnimax god better be able to.

Let's never mind the psychotic that can't reasonably be expected to be able to make such a choice, or the mentally more deficient than you that can't even be expected to comprehend the complexities of the God you believe to be behind the Bible.

And the consequences people suffer for the "mistake" of living on a not perfectly stable planet, with unstable and violent unpredictable weather patterns, deadly viruses and cancers, etc... etc...

Llyricist

After re-reading my post I noticed I used an unfortunate choice of words. I did not mean to imply LWF was mentally deficient, I should have said people less mentally capable. Sincerely, I was just thinking in terms of the deficiency of understanding when I formulated that statement.

I apologise if it was misconstrued as a put down.

Radorth

I don't agree. Parents have what amounts in practice to total control of both environment and behavior- enough that the analogy is sound.

Rad

Stephen T-B

I don’t know where Radorth lives - except it’s not in the same world I’m in: “Parents have what amounts in practice to total control of both environment and behavior...”
What?
I can tell you that my parents did not have total control of my environment or my behaviour, and they could not possibly have done unless they’d kept me half-starved in a cage, only giving me a scrap to eat or a sip of water when I did exactly what they wanted .
I can tell you I did not have anything like total control of my own children’s environment and behaviour.

Along with the statement that people are to blame for the disasters which befall them because they “choose” to live in dangerous places, and the statement that some of the world’s ills are caused by over population (perhaps he’s forgotten that one of his god’s specific instructions was to “go forth and multiply”?) this is one of the daftest pronouncements I’ve seen here at Infidels.

Dr Rick

If he's omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient, he'll have made her heart perfectly, so it will guide her perfectly.

If it's he that made her wrong despite his omipotence, definitely. On the other hand, if he is not omnimax, then the fault may not be his.

It depends a lot upon whether or not you foresaw that this would happen, didn't want it to happen, and had the power to stop it from happening.

If you are not omnimax, then the answer is no.

So if someone expects god to do just a little bit more, like say, put up big billboards overnite in every neighboorhood that announce his advice for the day, how exactly is that "necessarily" wanting a decision to be made for that person?

Radorth

Read any psychology book and get back to me.

I know. Everything is God's fault, no matter how stupid our choices. Right? He made us stupid.

Don't be inane. Just because we obeyed one single commandment....

That would be your response immediately above I'm afraid.

Overpopulation would be God's fault as well.

Judging by your post, I'd say the oft made atheist call to "personal responsibility" is a bunch of hot air. Certainly in your case it is.

This kind of thinking backs up my belief that those in hell will choose to go and remain there, because, if God exists, they will continue to rebell and inanely blame him for all problems, even those they caused directly.

Rad

Stephen T-B

I don't blame god for any single thing, Radorth.
God is no more to be thanked because the sun shone on me today, than he is to be blamed because yesterday I got drenched.

And if you really truly do believe that everyone in the world chooses to live where they live, as I say, the world you live in is not the same as the one I do.
People live where they have to - unless, of course, they are rich and are not dependent upon the land from which they eke a pathetic living, as is the reality for about 80 per cent of the world's population. And was, until comparatively recently, a reality for about 99.9 per cent of the world's population - which was a great deal smaller than it is now.
And on the subject of over-population, the UK and the Netherlands are among the most densely-populated states in the world. And they are doing quite nicely, thank you. Big populations do not equate with poverty and starvation. You do, of course, know that. Don't you?

PS I have read child psychology books. But not, apparently, the same ones that you have. I also know very many parents of very many children and that "controlling" parents can have very dire effects upon their children.

I sometimes wonder if you submit these posts and think: "that'll get ''em going."