Ronin

Which God?

Based upon what?

Amos

That's easy to answer Amie. Just as you are the incarnate daughter of your parents so are your children the incarnation of you and your husband and therefore the re-incarnation of your parents and grandparents to a greater or lesser extent.

The short waiting period follows from the above and the hell/heaven period of your life will become the effective change upon your childrens life and in its turn on the life of your childrens children. We agree with this in that we do pay for the sins of our fathers and forefathers thus also reap from the benefits of their virtues.

L. Noctivagans

Just? Just what? Just kidding?

joedirt490

Ok, for the sake of argument, let's say there is a 'christian god'. Now, we are all supposed to be judged after death, on our actions and beliefs in the physical life, to see whether we go to heaven or hell. Now, unless we are all born to the same parents, raised the same way, live the exact number of minutes, yada-yada-yada, how can we be judged the same ??? So NO-the question of 'him' being 'just' is impossible.:boohoo: -JD

Asha'man

The thing described as God in the OT is a murderous, bloodthirsty, sociopathic bastard. I can’t imagine a more unjust character in all the fiction I have ever read.

I have never heard a explanation for this behavior that made sense in any form or fashion.

diana

...because it seems like I always run into the argument that God is just and I'm just an unworthy human to judge him. Obviously, I have my values--which I consider just--but really...who am I to say what is right and wrong for the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End, From Everlasting To Everlasting?

While the "unjust" argument is particularly compelling for those Xns who walk away from their faith, it seems absolutely groundless when you get right down to it. I can't prove God is bad, except by my standards--as is the case with anyone. By the same token, Xns are stuck with the choice of accepting God's demonstrable behavior as just, disregarding their own instincts entirely, or simply write it off as "God moves in mysterious ways" and "We can't understand him with our puny human intelligence."

But I think those are just ways to avoid that person having to actually confront their own beliefs.

d

Selsaral

Before I defend this point of view, let me state that I find it absurd also. But you are misinterpreting it, god doesn't just reward those he punished/murdred, he can 'undo' any evil. I mean he can do anything, re-arrange time, anything, so he can remove their pain, and 'undo' the evil. Of course, he still committed the evil in the first place, which is what I argue, and the person who first argued this point with me at this stage fell back on 'well god can't commit evil, he is Good', which is where I left.

Arrogancy

If there is a God who is as wise/powerful as the God of the Bible (ie. Supreme Being), then what he does by default is "just" because he is God.

I've never got this reasoning - some people just cannot grasp the idea of a "higher power." If there is a "higher power" than the higher power is by default, "just," since he makes the rules. It's like a computer program saying that the programmer isn't "fair" because he removed a few lines of code in order to make the program run better. Huh? It would be the height of stupidity to assume that an imperfect creation would know as much as the one that creates it, we would never have the perspective to see the "big picture," so our ideas of "right" and "wrong" don't matter.

By the way, "eternity of tormet" is not a Biblical ideal. I'd appreciate if you distinguished between the Biblical God and the "bastardized" Christianity God from now on - the ideals that began much later in the Catholic Church. It was the Jewish and early Christian ideal that sin = death; the whole point of Jesus' sacrifice in Christianity was so that those believing would be redeemable from the state of death.

Shadownought

Ah, I see. So all the pain and suffering and murder and death throughout history never really happened, because God reversed it after the fact, and our history books are telling stories of things that did happen, but didn't REALLY happen? And I guess he messes around with our senses and memories to make us forget that that bad thing happened in the first place?

Oh, of course- God only undoes the evil for certain people who deserve having it undone, right? That explains why we know people do suffer, but it doesn't explain why, if the person doesn't deserve that suffering, God inflicted it on them in the first place! AAAGH!

philechat

Dear Arrogency:

No. If God is the "computer programmer" of the universe, there is no reason a value judgment (either just or unjust) would be attached to him. Hell--there's success and failure though (God kicking at the computer: "Damn, I screwed up again. So I would have to delete a few bad files and put those failed programs into the recycling bin, i.e. Hell.")

There, who is to blame if a file becomes bad? The computer programmer or the programed file?