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I Googled "Why does God hate me?" and what I found was disturbing.

MAC0

Y.N.W.A
SF Supporter
#41
I always feel religon is more about controlling the people than reality

as for if there is a god i dont see him hating any individual person especially when you consider some of the people who have lived Hitler Stalin and the like

if he was going to hate anyone it would be those people
 
#43
It's valid to struggle through these hard topics
All I can do is offer my perspective

Suffering is crucial when it comes to the cross
It's interresting that Christianity in the west is declining, but increasing in poorer countries
Yet faith increased in the west again during Covid
People are much more likely to turn to God during suffering
And people who find Christ in adulthood in the west is usually people who went through a lot of suffering
I know that from myself

People in pain can relate to a suffering God
A God who went through more suffering than we all will combined
See first 2 minutes of this video


But not only that
All the worlds sin, pain and suffering was poured onto him on the Cross

Then ofc there's the issue of free will
Free will requires us to be free
Free to love or free to hate
You cannot have love if it's not free
If we weren't free to choose, we would be robots
Imaging you were dating a woman
After 6 months your dad tells you that he's been paying her to date you
How would you feel?
Love has to be a free decision
Most suffering on this earth is caused by our free will
 
#44
I always feel religon is more about controlling the people than reality

as for if there is a god i dont see him hating any individual person especially when you consider some of the people who have lived Hitler Stalin and the like

if he was going to hate anyone it would be those people
People have used religion to control people
But what's interresting is that they always have to change the bible or exclude sections of the bible, to do so
 

LumberJack

Huggy Bear 🐻
#45
Necromancing this thread because this is a super important topic. The question is a long, long running concern within the philosophy of religion, known as the problem of evil/suffering. It is a logical structure called an "inconsistent triad," meaning a set of three ideas such that no more than 2 can be true simultaneously. Problem of Evil, then is:
  1. There is suffering
  2. God is omnipotent
  3. God is benevolent
An argument that attempts to reconcile this triad is called a Theodicy (defense of God). Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy
Obviously, there is suffering. It would be very difficult to refute this. With that in mind, more than a few theodicies posit the idea that God is still omni-benevolent, but God has a much larger perspective, and allows evil for some greater good long term. The free will argument, above, is one, as are many of the justifications I see here already. Personally, I don't think the free will argument works. The existence of free will, in and of itself, has been debated for millennia, and is yet to be settled. Personally I am skeptical but that is more in the Philosophy realm than Theology.

However, if we assume for now that we do have free will, it still gets murky in that I would ask why create moral agents in a situation where they have to compete with one another? I am aware of no armed conflict that cannot be described as a tug of war over resources. There are often many other motivations involved, but capturing wealth seems to be always present. There are other situations where doing something that is generally immoral is actually the optimal response. If God is omnipotent, why not create a world such that we have free will, but not moral dilemmas?

The best I could come up with on short notice is that, perhaps God is Omnipotent, but not necessarily Omnipresent. This goes against much of Western dogma, but another theological argument is that we wouldn't know joy without suffering, or anything else without its opposite, so suffering exists because the big guy wants us to feel joy and happiness. So, let's go with that. If we only know things by their absence, then how can we be aware of God's existence without some experience of God's non-existence? In that way, we can find suffering in the same places as the absence of our deity. I don't find this particularly satisfactory, though. IDK. Please feel free to flame me; Sometimes I learn the most from people who find me irritating.
 

Licorice

Well-Known Member
#46
another theological argument is that we wouldn't know joy without suffering, or anything else without its opposite, so suffering exists because the big guy wants us to feel joy and happiness.
I've always found this an interesting argument. If we never knew any suffering, we would still experience happiness and pleasure - nothing but happiness and pleasure, in fact - but we wouldn't know that what we were experiencing was happiness and pleasure. So what seems to matter here is not just that we're happy, but that we know we're happy, and we can't have this knowledge unless we also have the knowledge and experience of happiness' opposite, suffering. It's essentially the sin of Adam: eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Leibnitz argued that in fact a world with evil in it is the best of all possible worlds, because a world with evil in it also contains more good than a world without any evil in it. He was a devout Christian, and his logic was based on a number of assumptions that most people today would find questionable, to say the least.

 
#47
the sadist dog part makes a lot of sense to me, maybe this is why sadists do so well in this world and get away with so much, cause they are like the one who started all this, if dog exists
 

JMG

Pink Sponge Summer Queen 💖🧽🦉👑
#48
Not sure if there’s anything I could truly add to this topic, and I don’t claim to have read “all” the posts, I did read some of them though, and found them all fascinating and interesting.

I too do sometimes wonder about the supposed “rules” of the world, universe and life and why it all has to be the way it is. Why does there have to be “suffering” for us to know joy, peace, love and happiness? Why does there have to be dark for there to be light? Why is that the supposed “nature of matter itself”? I would really like to talk to whoever it was who decided that those would be the rules. I hope someday that we will in fact have a way of knowing those things.
 

Reality

SF Supporter
#49
I couldn't read this thread in it's entirety. I have been watching someone who was born into a missionary family, a devout Christian who deconstructed. I'm at the point where I give up my belief in the Christian God, or any God. I'm hoping this link might help someone. If not it's fine, nobody has to listen to it. He has been on youtube I think for almost 2 years. I like how he starts and delves deep into scripture and doesn't cherry pick anything. Here goes for one of his videos.

 

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