What if I told you no one is going to hell?

That's basically the Hindu concept of reincarnation, applied to souls. Your soul keeps returning to Earth until you attain enlightenment over many lives' worth of experience and understanding.

 

And?

 

And that might be of interest of people reading the thread.

 

Oh hahahaha

 

http://www.spiritscienceandmetaphys...hy-does-he-allow-evil-and-suffering-to-exist/

This is a link I would love you to read minstrel. This is somewhat of a philosophical response of the omnipotent God

 

The concept of hell has holes in it. Do all dead babies go to Hell since they never had a chance to accept Jesus as their personal savior? And if babies get a pass and go straight to Heaven, what is the cut off year? 4? 5? 12? Also, does a starving child in Africa who's never heard of Jesus go to hell when he or she dies? Also, does a guy who is an an atheist but a loving philanthropic man or woman go to Hell while a mass murderer who found Jesus on Death Row goes to Heaven after the electric chair? Doesn't make sense to me.

 

I read it, but I didn't find it compelling. It basically boils down to the same cliches, "God has reasons, which we cannot fathom. Besides, free will."

It's clearly aimed at people of faith who question why god would let bad things happen--you need to already have faith to accept that sort of answer. It's not very convincing to someone who doesn't have faith and needs more than, "God has reasons that make sense to it even if not to us."

 

Let's get simple...

Let's say you are 8 years old. For some silly reason you decide to put your hand in a pot of boiling water. You get severe burns and cry for a few days.

From your action, which we can assume God would also think is a bad idea, you learn that sticking your hand in a boiling pot of hot water just burned the fuck out of your hand. If God knew what was good for you, I bet you would argue he would or even should stop you from putting your hand in boiling water. And at that time you blast God for allowing it to happen. But I would bet your left nut that you won't put your hand in water again.

I believe God "does allow things to happen" even if it seems sooo evil. Not because he's some psychotic puppet master, but to allow our free will to teach us how to be more human, alive and compassionate.

Now if God made some "perfect world" and constructed a system without "evil" or "sin" then how will we learn and grow? And mainly, how could that be "free will"?

 

How did the victims of the Holocaust learn and grow? These examples seem a bit facile when they're of trivial overall importance with a morale to the story, like Afterschool Specials. When it comes to serious, hardcore suffering, these cliches fall a lot flatter. What are children born to poverty in Africa learning as they starve? Is it character building to never know anything but misery and then die?

And I've already explained several times how free will can exist alongside "perfection" or "lack of evil." If god is omnipotent (by the classical definition of the word), it's certainly logically possible to construct a universe in which people don't suffer and still have free will. If god is not omnipotent, then we're talking about a very different concept.

 

That was my first thought after reading mags' post.

 

This is funny and why your argument is flawed. We are talking about true free will. As for the victims of the Holocaust, they are at peace. Life on Earth is just a minute to the grand scale of eternity. As terrible as the event is, that helped others learn to grow.

But you are wrong about perfection and free will being able to coexist. It isn't logical. If God intervened, then we truly don't have "free will". And as the writer of the article I provided said "stop thinking We are some little pet". The moment God stops us every time we do something evil, is the moment we lose our free will.

And you believing that lack of evil can happen, yet you haven't once observed a society without sin, is quite a bold statement.

Blaming God for actions of man is no different than seeing a child blaming a bully for hitting some kid and saying "well he looked at me funny"

 

As my personal debate with a good friend, atheist and physicist wrote me, after I sent him the same link:

I agree. The argument IS weak because man is trying to pass blame as a method to disprove God. It really doesn't work, nor does it support what we've observe already.

 

Mags - I can get behind your thinking on this. It is a most positive and loving concept and makes a great deal of sense to me. One thing for certain is that we'll never know how this plays out until it does! In the meanwhile, go Blazers

 

GO BLAZERS!

 

Sorry, I was on my phone last night and missed much of what was debated.

As I read back, this is the base of your argument right?

1.) If God exists, suffering does not exist.
2.) Suffering does exist.
3.) Therefor, God does not exist.

You also site "omnipotent" as the tool in which you head this debate. And you are agreeing that we can reference the Bible, since we are talking about the Christian view of their God.

With that, I would respond...

You are using only one, maybe two parts of God's description, but there are three explained in the Bible.

1.) Omnipotence: Ultimate power to act
2.) Omniscience: Infinite knowledge
3.) Omnibenevolent: Perfectly good

So according to your logic, you are trying to "Disprove God" because we have suffering.

So in my rebuttal, I will outline my response...
1.) If God exists, he must be Omnipotent, Omniscience and Omnibenevolent
2.) God is Omnipotent, omniscience, Omnibenevolent
3.) Therefor God exists.

And yes, suffering is a trying argument, as you explained: "Well being all powerful, he could design a system where suffering could not exist". But the boundaries of being "Perfectly good" also binds God from not "interfering with the decisions of man". So designing a system that will only give man the option to only do good (by using his power of omniscience) is an interference with "free will". That goes against his perfect goodness (lying about giving us a choice is just one example). Human nature, from how we can observe in today's world, is not free from "sin". Man chooses to do wrong and God cannot interfere because he is "Perfectly Good".

You've brought up the holocaust as a reference, which only explains the true nature of man in the worst way possible. If God, possessed Hitler and forced him to not kill Jews, he would be lying, which would go against "Omnibenevolent".

That goodness cannot allow him to force us to do what we choose to do.

God can try his best to motivate us to live without sin, but the choice is clearly ours. God's omnibenevolent must allow us to decide for ourselves.

So your argument: If God exists, suffering does not exist is a weak argument and can be easily refuted.

 

God doesn't have to intervene in our choices to create a world without evil choices, as I laid out above.

God would need to be classically omnipotent and omniscient, though, which PtldPlatypus feels isn't something we should assume.

 

No, I haven't made any argument even close to that.

 

Actually your "laid out" claim is refuted.

1.) if God knows the intentions of man to sin, then making a world without the temptations of sin and giving free will is not compatible

 

You haven't?

 

If humankind, created by god, has an intention to sin, then god created humankind with that intention and thus has already intervened, meaning humankind has no free will (by your definition of what free will means). The only way this whole interpretation even begins to make sense is if god made humankind with no intentions/inclinations one way or the other.