Wizardry

Everyone:

The tone of this thread is getting a bit nasty. If this thread is to stay open, it should improve, now.

Thank you.

long winded fool

Agreed. We're just slinging accusations now. I agree to disagree and have nothing more to add unless someone posts a relevant question that hasn't already been addressed.

Llyricist

The Question was: how can a "loving father" god allow his children to harm each other?
Nobody said he couldn't, that wasn't the point in question.
Your hypothesis consisted of an omniMAX god That feels compelled (for some unknown reason) to allow us to be "morally free" to choose between his way and to turn away from him, and that turning away from him is the cause of all human suffering. AND that this god behaves as a loving father allowing us to learn from our mistakes.

If I need to, I will be happy to fish all the way back through this thread and quote you directly.
A loving God's children inflicting harm on other of his children is what needs to be reconciled. More specifically, people that have chosen god's way hurting other people that have chosen god's way. (assuming the hypothesis you elaborated in this thread.)
Yes it IS logically possible for evil to exist with an omnimax deity, but you haven't demonstrated it with your hypothesis, Dr Rick demonstrated it with Radorth's hypothesis (actually a well known hypothesis) What hasn't been reconciled is the "loving father" characterization with the evidence that Christians inflict suffering on other Christians on a regular basis.
I brought up evidence that there were people that used their moral freedom to choose god, but had their free will subverted. Which contradicts your hypothesis that free will is more important to god than minimizing suffering. Your response to the evidence was to assert that they must not have actually chosen God's way because that would contradict your hypothesis. This is invalid reasoning any way you look at it.

I also invited you to demonstrate how anyone can learn anything from the "mistake" when one Christian group harms another Christian group. And the only thing you could do was assert that their MUST be something that can be learned because that's what your hypothesis says.

And this where the main argument still stands.

From there it degenerated and you seem to have lost all track of where we actually stood and are now falling back on the "logically possible for an omnimax god to allow evil" argument. Okay, but that leaves the OP unanswered.

On edit: Furthermore, the reason my "solution" seems unformulated and mysterious is because I haven't offered one. Though it should be obvious that without an omnimax god, there IS no prolem of evil to be reconciled.

long winded fool

Good, let's get back to the topic. So it boils down to: How can God as a loving father allow Christians to harm other Christians? The simple answer is: He can't because this can't happen if Christianity is the teaching of Christ. People who call themselves Christian can harm Christians, but calling oneself Christian is not necessarily being a Christian. Can I be my own grandfather? No. Can I claim to be my own grandfather? Of course. It is impossible to knowingly inflict suffering (evil) on other people without sinning. A "Christian" who is sinning is failing to be a Christian. He or she is missing the mark. They may think they're being Christian, but they are mistaken by their own fault. They can repent of their actions, realize their mistake, and be forgiven, but the fact remains that sinning is equivalent to failing in the eyes of God.

So a real (perfect) Christian cannot inflict evil on anyone. Humans are not perfect and can fail. The question then seems to move to: How can a loving father allow his human children to fail? The variable of free will solves this. God has given good advice to be taken or discarded like any loving father would. Like a father, God could physically prevent his children from making a mistake, however because of the necessary existence of free will, the loving thing to do is to allow mistakes to be made. They aren't necessarily of the father's making, but they can be viewed as his responsibility if he has the ability to prevent them. God can prevent them and doesn't and in doing so is being a loving father in the same way that I can physically prevent my adult daughter from dating people who aren't good for her but don't and this is being a loving father. I can only give her advice. It's not my business as her loving father to protect her from suffering even though I could. It's my business to love her and to teach her how to protect herself. She can only learn if she's willing, therefore even perfect advice can only convince those who are willing to be convinced. If she chooses suffering, the only loving thing to do is to give her advice. I cannot physically prevent her from making this choice and still be considered a loving father. Her ignoring my advice doesn't automatically equate to my advice being "not good enough." Because of free will, the best advice in the world can be unconvincing to those who choose their own selfish desires over their father's advice.

So then: God is all-loving, allows his children to kill each other, and is omniscient despite the fact that His advice is not enough to convince many people. As intuitively contradictory as this statement seems, the analogy above reconciles it. Are there any related contradictions that haven't been addressed in this analogy?

scombrid

This analogy requires that the child be willfully disobedient and experience consequences directly related to that disobedience such that a cause/effect relationship can be drawn. The girl in your example willfully disobeys her father's advice and faces a consequence directly related to that disobedience. This analogy fails when the subject has not received advice or has recieved wrong advice without knowing it and when consequences are unnattached to the action. Most fundamentalists, whether they're True Christians™ or not, are willfully following what they "know" to be the will of god. Even if they are sinning, this sin is not analogous to a girl willfully disobeying a father. They would do anything for god. Their failure to follow god is analogous to the father running out on the girl when she's an infant so she's raised in a crappy foster home. Then on meeting her in a brothel he is angry at her for making wrong decisions despite the fact that she was taught by her crackhead foster parents that it was an acceptible way to earn a living.

That fundamentalists exist that are "wrong" contradicts your view of god and freewill. They will to follow god but have been abandonned and the consequences of their actions end up reinforcing their worldview. The WTC coming down was a sign to some that god was on the side of the highjackers. The snake handler takes not getting bit by the rattlesnake as a sign that he's protected from getting bit. If he gets bit and survives, then he's convinced that god tested his faith and protected him from death.

Your model asserts that Muslims flying planes into buildings know The Truth™ about heaven/hell/Christ/right way to treat others but are willfully disregarding god's orders. You say that disobeying god is following your earthly desires. Their killing themselves in god's name is hardly what I'd call an earthly desire. Their truth is paradice for doing god's work. Ridding the world of us infidels is god's work. God could step in to show them his will without hurting their freewill. Their will is god's will, whatever they think it is. That God abandons them speaks poorly of god. He's either an asshole getting jolies off of these nits sending themselves and 1000's of others to hell. He's impotent to stop it. Or he's not there.

Dr Rick

It might if the father in the analogy was omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, and if evil must be possible for free will to exist, and if there was no alternative but for an omnimax god to make humans imperfect, and if evil (suffering) was only created by humans and not so often beyond human control as it is in the case of natural disasters.

scombrid

A question regarding sin and it's consequence. The girl that disobey's her father and dates a jerk suffers directly of that disobedience. What did children that got HIV from dirtly blood transfusions or improperly cleaned dentist equipment do to deserve that? Is an eight year-old hemopheliac a fornicator too? Maybe the Christian Scientists are right. But wait, Christian Scientists do seek dental care so that's not it. Did HIV, sent to punish fornicators, cause a little colateral damage? Surely an omniscient and omnipotent god could successfully punish the fornicators without catching children in the crossfire. You might argue that the suffering still exists because of the sin and that justifies it. But that's no reason to make a child suffer unless Radorth's hypothetical impotent god is at the helm.

emur

Exactly! God could make it clear to them that hurting other Christians is sinful, but he does not. If he did, then their actions would be willfully disobedient. Instead, we have God's silence, and so Christians do harm other Christians, not believing they are disobedient, but believing they are righteous.

Mel

Dr Rick

Theists might argue that the Christian God does communicate His will through the Bible, though the an objective reading of the book shows that the mesage is mixed. He supposedly tells us to love one another, turn the other cheek, and while condoning and sometimes commanding murder, rape, and genocide.

Stephen T-B

Who decides if god is good?
God?
So he let’s all your family be killed by Joshua’s army and when you ask “Why?” he says “‘Cause I’m good.”
Your judgment, of course, might be different. But then your judgment is subjective. God, on the other hand, knows that everything he does is good because he knows he can do no wrong.

And that, really, is the source of so many of our difficulties because people acting in the name of god can be certain that what they do is good, even if the people they’re doing it to don’t happen to agree.

In fact, looking to god as the fount of our morality is, as history shows, extraordinarily dangerous.

Did god tell Bloody Mary as she burnt Protestants “It’s wrong to do that. You must stop at once.”

If he did, he didn’t come banging on her door and shout it in her ear.

He chose a way of letting her know which would allow her to carry on - if she wanted to. And to carry on in the firm conviction that she was acting on god’s behest. And god, she believed , is perfectly good. She believed he can do no wrong, and that she was doing no wrong by burning Protestants at the stake.

Who DOES decide if god is good?