Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: haqihana who wrote (82099)	6/19/2000 11:40:00 PM
From: epicure	Respond to of 108807

ROFL I don't hate God. I don't even hate people. But I don't like most organized religion. And my what if's are just what if's. They are as likely as your what if's. But see yours don't seem to bother ME as much as mine bother you- I wonder why that is? See I don't need to put you on ignore. I guess I'm just a tolerant person and you're...well...I don't know....

To: haqihana who wrote (82099)	6/20/2000 1:39:00 AM
From: jbe	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

Haqihana, Your post seems to have been inspired by X's "what if?" post. If so, I think you may have misunderstood it. X asks an age-old and probably unanswerable question: What if God is atrocious? What if God likes atrocity and tragedy? I see no reason why one shouldn't believe that- and there is a lot more evidence for a horrible God that loves misery and death and despair, than there is for the opposite. The Gnostics, for example, believed that the Creator God (a degraded "emanation" from the One Source) was a demon, and that the world -- the work of his hands -- was inherently corrupt and evil. They clearly had their reasons for thinking so. Christianity developed a whole branch of theology -- theodicy -- in an attempt to explain the "Problem of Evil." This is a much greater problem for Christians, Jews, and Muslims than it is for polytheists or monotheists who believe in a limited God. That is because the orthodox view, in all three of these religions, is that God is both all-powerful and all-good. St. Augustine first posed the conundrum succinctly, but unfortunately, I do not remember his exact words. (I posted them here when this issue was being discussed many moons ago.) It goes something like this: "If God is all-powerful, then he can remove evil, but he will not. If he is all-good, then he wills to remove evil, but cannot." How, then, can God be both all-powerful and all-good? The argument that God left evil in the world so that man could exercise his free will has always struck me personally as very weak. If only the individuals who make the wrong choice suffer the consequences of it, fine. But life is not like that. More often than not, the innocent suffer for the choice of the "wicked." For example, what about the child who gets his leg blown off because somebody else started a war? And what about natural disasters? What "free will" do I have to resist a volcano that has decided to erupt all over me? What about people who are born mentally and/or physically defective? And it is hard to believe that a benign -- and all-powerful -- God would deliberately create something like a black widow spider, which is more reminiscent of the fantasy of a sick imagination. For a really impassioned discussion of the problem, I particularly recommend John Stuart Mill's "On Nature." As far as I personally am concerned, I much prefer the notion of a loving God whose power is limited, one who feels for humanity but is not powerful enough to avert all the evils that beset it. I find it logically and emotionally far more acceptable than the orthodox notion of an all-powerful God, who has to be the author of evil, while at the same time he is supposed to be all-good, which prompts men to ask why he allows evil. I don't think Job got a proper answer when he asked God why bad things happen to good people. (And giving him a whole set of new children did not bring back the children he had lost.) .