As with most followers of Abrahamic faith, particularly Christians, they look to some great deity in the sky to lead and guide them, not taking any responsibility unto themselves.

As for diseases.. why must it be your gods fault? Ever consider it's natures way of trying to cull the herd? No?
As for wars, famine, crime etc etc, these are things of man not the Gods.

The Gods are no more responsible for the worlds woes than the snow is responsible for falling on the ground.

Honour the Gods, yes, but do not kneel and scrape, asking for favours and then cast blame upon the Gods when things don't go your way.

 

no mention of beings medling in....

Human affires here or genetic splicing,missing dna strands which would exsplain missing limbs in some beings or even extra limbs or even extra strands in some peoples dna,I think I will revissit this thread at a later date I mean these things must be able to be calcurlated there must be a reasonable awnser out there somwhere or maybe it is better to blame just one person or being for all the mess anyway I'm black what the hell could I possibly no about life or comming into being....

 

But if God is all-knowing and all-seeing, he should have been able to predict man's actions and not be surprised at the exercise of free will, n'est-ce pas? And why would God have intervened in human lives a few thousand years ago and then stopped doing it? What changed?

Why do newborn babies die? Why do microbes exist that kill human beings indiscriminantly? To believe this is all part of some cosmic plan seems to me to be delusional to the extreme.

 

I concur with everything on here however angles do to have free will. Look at where Satan came from. Satan was an angel once the very highest angel to God. However he made the choice to not follow God and decided to be his own "God".

 

I'm no bible scholar, but does the fallen state of man come from the book of Genesis? The part where the talking snake convinces Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge, from where upon god banishes Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden. This is the incident responsible for original sin, and therefor God being a dick and punishing mankind.

Because you know, all the stuff in Genesis can't be reconciled with with science.

 

Zorasterism and the Problem of Evil

The persistence of the suffering of the just has long troubled thoughtful Jews and Christians, while giving militant atheists an excuse to attack both religions. Zorasterism, which is native to Iran, does not have this problem. According to Zorasterism God and Satan are of equal power, and struggle with each other. Zorasterism encourages the virtuous to live virtuously, so that they can help God in His struggle.

I think the replacement in Iran of Zorasterism by Shiite Islam was very unfortunate, because Zorasterism is a more interesting religion. To the best of my knowledge, the suffering of the just does not concern Moslems.

In the Old Testament the Jews attributed their collective suffering as a nation to disobedience to God. In the book of Revelations Christians attributed the persecution they suffered from the Romans to Satan. In the Dead Sea Scrolls Satan plays a greater role than he does in the Old Testament and the Apocrypha. This indicates that first century Jewish and Christian thought were influenced by Zorasterism.

 

Job, and the Problem of Evil

The problem of the suffering of the just is most profoundly covered in the Old Testament in the book of Job. In this book Satan is described more fully than elsewhere in the Old Testament. The book begins when God and Satan enter into a bet to see if Satan can cause Job to experience enough suffering so that he will join Dr. Sam Harris, whose video begins this thread, and curse God.

Although Job does not curse God, he does ask God toward the end of the book why He allowed this to happen to him. God does not explain, but asserts his power. In effect he says, "I did it because I wanted to. You better not complain."

Many non Fundamentalist Bible scholars believe that the first edition of Job ended there. In other words, God is not all good, but He is all powerful, so it is dangerous to anger him.

This ending was inconsistent with the evolution of Jewish theology, so an ending was added in which God restored to Job what he had lost, and more, and thanks Job for his faith and obedience.

Passages in Proverbs and Psalms assert that the virtuous are rewarded in this life by wealth, while the sinful suffer poverty. The Republican Party has adopted this philosophy. It is countered in the prophetic writings, who blame poverty on the predatory behavior of the rich. According to the prophets one of the reasons the empire conquered by King David declined and fell was that God was angry by the way the rich oppressed the poor.

 

If you go back and read the post again you notice that I mentioned that God used to get involved directly in human affairs but humans have short memories. The results of his interventions were never permenant and in the end humans would very soon return to thier own ways, and eventualy demand another sign or wonder. God isnt in the habbit of proving himself all the time...its not his job. His job is to be God and the job of the people is to have faith. Faith by definition is the belief in things unseen...and in many cases unproven. He proved himself once and that should have been enough but it never was. So he simply stopped doing it.

As for having seen the results ahead of time...thats a question I would like to ask him myself. In the mean time I am willing to sit back and figure he knows what he is doing. As for the existance of all the nasty things in our world, that was the result of mans disobediance resulting in God simply letting nature take its course without his intervention. Its realy not a cosmic plan so much as a consequence. What happens when you leave a fire unattended?

As for being delusional...meh...maybe. But I like it that way.

 

But that suggests that God is petulant and vindictive. A man was disobedient thousands of years ago (even though God supposedly created man and should have had the foresight to know that it was inevitable), so God chooses to punish him and his innocent progeny forever. Those aren't qualities you would admire in a man...why would you admire them in a god?

 

Yes, the fallen state of man does come from Genesis. Man disobeyed God and was cast out of the garden. God turned his back on man and the world he had created and let nature take its course. Thats where we get all kinds of nasty things like famine, deseases, plagues, disco music and boiled okra. Since that time the world as we know it has been in a constant state of deterioration, in no small part thanks to man kind and our wonderful inventions like war, greed, the internal combustion engine, coal fired power plants, plastic, nerve gas, nuclear weapons, over farming, pharmasuiticals, Justin Bieber and Ugg boots.

As for God being a dick and punishing mankind...we are responsable for 99% of our own punishment. God didnt create Justin Bieber, we did.

 

It would suggest that, however there is another half to the story. The fall of man was precipitated by another event that we know absolutly squat about. That was the rebellion in heaven where by Lucifer decided that he was better than God decided to screw things up for the rest of us and in the process took a third of Heaven with him on his merry quest to conquer God. We have no idea what sort of conflict is going on surrounding that and frankly, much like the civilian population in any third world country torn appart by civil war, we get to spend our lives dodging the AK-47 bullets and mortar attacks while two forces fight for control. We have no idea what sort of impact, if any that has on the day to day goings on here.

As for Adams progeny being innocent...Children arent held accountable for thier actions until they reach the age of reckoning which in Jewish tradition is 14. Up to that point we are all considered by God to be innocent. After that however we become responsable for our own actions and you would be hard pressed to find a 14 year old that is anything but a big ball of sin (yeah, I know it sounds stupid but seriously, find me a 14 year old that measures up to the level of rightiousness that is biblically demanded to be considered without sin.)

Alot of argument is made regarding suffering here on earth but nobody mentions the paradise that awaits the millions of chldren that will die this year and the uncounted number that have died throuout history. The simple fact is that we will all suffer at some point in this life and its not going to be pretty. I am in and out of nursing homes every day and the level of misery is see is staggering. Someday, thats going to be me sitting in a wheel chair staring out of a window drooling on myself while the leftovers from my lunch puree slowly congeal on my chin and I harken back to the days when I could walk and eat real food. We are either going to suffer coming in or suffer going out but there is one sure thing...we will suffer. On the bright side if you die young you dont have to pay as much in taxes.

Since the vast majority of the suffering that people speak of regarding children is the result of human endevors such as wars for oil, wars for diamonds, wars for drugs, wars for power and wars for religion, isnt it safe to assume that the real evil assholes are humans? I am pretty sure God didnt start the wars in Iraq or Afganistan...that was George W. Bush. And while he tried to blame it on God, Jesus was pretty specific about not being violent. I am also pretty sure that the crap going on in Mogadishu wasnt started by God but by warlords struggling for power.

I am also pretty sure that the overfarming that resulted in multiple catastrophic droughts in Ethiopia wasnt Gods doing either. They were warned repeatedly by hundreds of farming experts from Europe and the U.S. that they were over farming and that the results would be bad. Ethiopia use to export most of the food supply for Africa and they made alot of money in the process. Overfarming however caught up to them.

Blaming God for the ills that befall man isnt a very productive practice in the long run because in every case we can look and see that somewhere in the background was a human being manipulating something in an effort to start shit for his own bennefit.

 

There is no god - this is a fact.
"Evolution is not a theory, it is a fact".
Pope John Paul III

 

If you make the statement that Satan is a creation of humans, then you might as well throw in there that God is a creation of humans as well. Due to both being mentioned in the bible, and stories regarding both and their history.

 

There was no Pope John Paul III, you mean John Paul II. Also, he did not say that. He said that it is aparent to him that the theory of evolution by natural selection is more than a mere hypothesis. While, since then, the Roman catholic church has had no problem with evolution, the church is far from monolythic. There are plenty of creationist catholics. It also seems clear that pope Benedict isn't so happy with this conlcusion and would like to walk back some of John Paul II's complacency.

 

Something atheists and Christians should all get behind...

C.S. Lewis is one of the most important, modern Christian apologists. He wrote, "A man who said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic, on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg, or else he would be the Devil of Hell. [...] Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher."

Those who say that Jesus was not devine, but a great guy or a moral teacher trade their integrity for diplomacy. They're just dead wrong. For example, not until Jesus meek-and-mild does the concept of hell enter the Judeo-Christian doctrine. He teaches his followers to forsake all posesions, not to save or be thrifty, but to trust only in god. I am very glad that Christians and those who claim to follow Judeo-Christian morality do nothing of the sort. A true Christian, by any humanistic standard, would be far from good. Critics call on the old testimate atrocities ad-nausium, but I hope atheists can learn that they need no such easy pickings. The new testimate is no less atrocious as a moral guide then the old.

 

Evolution and creationism arent necessarily mutualy exclusive. While there has been no concerted effort to properly reconcile the two the idea that God set things in motion isnt all that far fetched in the greater scheme of things.

Interestingly, the evolution/creation debate has very little to do with anything in practical terms regarding the bible. It does make a great thing to argue over and dilute the message though.

 

Well that is not entirely true. Evolution refutes the bit in Genesis we were discussing earlier. To accept evolution means disregarding the creation story in which Adam and Eve disobey God, and bring forth the fall of man. Refuting this is significant, as Jesus, who was without sin, died on the cross as the ultimate redemption for the sin of humankind; "For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive"

So basically, if you're a Christian, and you don't take the first bits literally, the whole premise which the religion is based on becomes falsified. Which is why the fundamentalists don't like evolution being taught to kids.

 

Didn't god "create" everything? Or just the good bits?

 

No evidence for god. Stories in DC or Marvel comics do not prove the existence of Superman or other superheroes, and so the bible doesn't prove god. Christianity is a slightly modified selective adaptation of prior pagan beliefs, Hinduism, and mythology from the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Sumerians, etc, etc. The similarities of prior beliefs that predate christianity are astounding.

There is no fucking god. Get the fuck over it.