Rape, murder, war, horrific disease, and all the other “adversity”
I mean, you’re talking about this as though some Divine Agent actively is making one person sexually assault another. Or kill another. Or cough on one another.
If you don’t want to live in a world full of rape, I would suggest you start by not raping anyone. Grabbing someone by the hair, pulling them into the ally, violently forcing yourself on them, and then saying “God made me do it!” is the most cynical shit imaginable.
“What you’re asking for isn’t a Utopia, it’s the heat death of the universe.” I dunno about you but all I’m looking for is a little less genocide, maybe a bit fewer hungry children, maybe some consequences for well-known pedophiles.
I mean, good news? We’ve been emerging from a state of nature for thousands of years and we are absolutely reaching an apex of civilization such that genocide and famine are at an all time low. Meanwhile, pedophilia and rape and murder are increasingly reviled rather than celebrated or tolerated.
But, again, your parents’ generation watched a thirty-year-old Prince of Wales become betrothed to a 16-year-old girl and clapped like seals. God didn’t make the English Monarchy do that.
God didn’t set up Little Saint James and stuff the Lolita Express full of post-Soviet block easily exploitable teenage refugees.
God didn’t initiate the Nakba or perpetuate a running genocide against the Palestinian people for the next 80 years. Neither did he kick off the German Holocaust or the Armenian Genocide. He didn’t spread the Spanish Flu during WW1 or factory farm in such dense conditions that COVID erupted onto the public in 2020.
All this shit is the direct result of human activity. Human ingenuity. Human passions. Human biases. Human politics.
I guess if there is no horrific suffering in the world we won’t evolve.
You can wave your hands and bemoan the existence of heat waves and hurricanes, then blame The Divine for building a universe in which some bad things happen to some living beings some of the time. But then you’re obligated to posit a world without heat waves and without hurricanes. And good fucking luck. That’s one hell of a balancing act.
You can posit a world in which bad things happen but we just don’t notice or care. But where does that end? Is suffering better if we’re blind to it? Not to get too Biblical, but you eat from the Tree of Knowledge and you begin to see the world more clearly. Language, society, historical memory, the capacity for science and engineering - they’re all double-edged swords.
You could be a microbe right now, with absolutely no conceptualization of who you are or why you’re here or what the universe outside a few centimeters looks like. And would that make you happier? Is that your Utopia? A few hours or days of existence mostly eating until you’re fat enough for mitosis. Is that your idea of a good time?
At least then you wouldn’t know enough to blame God for anything, right?
So then this all powerful God isn’t smart or powerful enough to make a universe in which suffering isn’t necessary. Seems pretty limiting for an all powerful, all knowing being.
Do you also make justifications for billionaires that destroy the world? Because you’re putting quite a bit of energy in to justifying something that is supposedly beyond comprehension. Wouldn’t the more honest answer just be “I don’t know.”
You don’t have to be that smart or that powerful for humans to worship you as a God. Humans have worshipped their richest local neighbors. They’ve worshipped big animals. They’ve worshipped rocks.
Do you also make justifications for billionaires that destroy the world?
Justify what?
I’ll blame Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg for a big new Data Center sucking up my neighborhood’s utilities.
I won’t blame them for the existence of malaria or the eccentricities of particle physics.
you’re putting quite a bit of energy in to justifying
Am I? It seems like you want a Magic Rock to blame for all your problems.
You’re engaging dishonestly and changing the subject entirely. No comment was made on what humans worship or why, every comment was directed at a supposedly all-powerful God.
You made an argument that this all-powerful God was constrained by physics. Then it cannot be an all-powerful God.
That’s the argument against creationism and religions with all-powerful deities.
Magic rock to blame for all my problems? I honestly have no idea what you’re getting at here. Theists blame magic for their harms. Atheists accept it as blind consequences in an uncaring universe. You’re literally assigning theistic beliefs on atheism.
Have a meaningful conversation of how an all powerful, good God can allow so much suffering. Either he isn’t good or he isn’t powerful.
Evolution is driven by adversity. Organisms experience stress, seek to relieve themselves of that stress, and improve upon their function iteratively over billions of years.
So is the all-powerful God constrained by physics or not? What argument, precisely, are you making? When the initial comment was to defend the belief in an all-powerful God.
I mean, you’re talking about this as though some Divine Agent actively is making one person sexually assault another. Or kill another. Or cough on one another.
If you don’t want to live in a world full of rape, I would suggest you start by not raping anyone. Grabbing someone by the hair, pulling them into the ally, violently forcing yourself on them, and then saying “God made me do it!” is the most cynical shit imaginable.
I mean, good news? We’ve been emerging from a state of nature for thousands of years and we are absolutely reaching an apex of civilization such that genocide and famine are at an all time low. Meanwhile, pedophilia and rape and murder are increasingly reviled rather than celebrated or tolerated.
But, again, your parents’ generation watched a thirty-year-old Prince of Wales become betrothed to a 16-year-old girl and clapped like seals. God didn’t make the English Monarchy do that.
God didn’t set up Little Saint James and stuff the Lolita Express full of post-Soviet block easily exploitable teenage refugees.
God didn’t initiate the Nakba or perpetuate a running genocide against the Palestinian people for the next 80 years. Neither did he kick off the German Holocaust or the Armenian Genocide. He didn’t spread the Spanish Flu during WW1 or factory farm in such dense conditions that COVID erupted onto the public in 2020.
All this shit is the direct result of human activity. Human ingenuity. Human passions. Human biases. Human politics.
You can wave your hands and bemoan the existence of heat waves and hurricanes, then blame The Divine for building a universe in which some bad things happen to some living beings some of the time. But then you’re obligated to posit a world without heat waves and without hurricanes. And good fucking luck. That’s one hell of a balancing act.
You can posit a world in which bad things happen but we just don’t notice or care. But where does that end? Is suffering better if we’re blind to it? Not to get too Biblical, but you eat from the Tree of Knowledge and you begin to see the world more clearly. Language, society, historical memory, the capacity for science and engineering - they’re all double-edged swords.
You could be a microbe right now, with absolutely no conceptualization of who you are or why you’re here or what the universe outside a few centimeters looks like. And would that make you happier? Is that your Utopia? A few hours or days of existence mostly eating until you’re fat enough for mitosis. Is that your idea of a good time?
At least then you wouldn’t know enough to blame God for anything, right?
So then this all powerful God isn’t smart or powerful enough to make a universe in which suffering isn’t necessary. Seems pretty limiting for an all powerful, all knowing being.
Do you also make justifications for billionaires that destroy the world? Because you’re putting quite a bit of energy in to justifying something that is supposedly beyond comprehension. Wouldn’t the more honest answer just be “I don’t know.”
You don’t have to be that smart or that powerful for humans to worship you as a God. Humans have worshipped their richest local neighbors. They’ve worshipped big animals. They’ve worshipped rocks.
Justify what?
I’ll blame Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg for a big new Data Center sucking up my neighborhood’s utilities.
I won’t blame them for the existence of malaria or the eccentricities of particle physics.
Am I? It seems like you want a Magic Rock to blame for all your problems.
You’re engaging dishonestly and changing the subject entirely. No comment was made on what humans worship or why, every comment was directed at a supposedly all-powerful God.
You made an argument that this all-powerful God was constrained by physics. Then it cannot be an all-powerful God.
That’s the argument against creationism and religions with all-powerful deities.
Magic rock to blame for all my problems? I honestly have no idea what you’re getting at here. Theists blame magic for their harms. Atheists accept it as blind consequences in an uncaring universe. You’re literally assigning theistic beliefs on atheism.
I did not make that argument
So is the all-powerful God constrained by physics or not? What argument, precisely, are you making? When the initial comment was to defend the belief in an all-powerful God.