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I am religious and believe in free will

70 (27.6%)

I am religious and do not believe in free will

10 (3.9%)

I am not religious and believe in free will

113 (44.5%)

I am not religious and do not believe in free will

61 (24%)

Total Members Voted: 249

[Rolan7]

I'd love to believe in the Abrahamic god, because I am... that sort of follower, but I still don't see any reason to do so.
And since nonbelief leads to being threshed in the eternal fire, I feel like this system of beliefs is kinda mean.

[Rolan7]

I have nothing more to say.

[Frumple]

Eh, I've been pretty appreciative of some of the older gnostic or whatever beliefs for a while now, the stuff that posits that a lot of the biblical works are in fact a sort of test. Much of what they describe isn't just mean, it's outright sadistic or flatly evil, and heavily contradictory with the general message of love and whatnot. It makes a sort of sense if it's not just wrong, but intentionally wrong, there to teach folks that when given a choice between a message of goodness and message of cruelty, the latter should be discarded.*

It's kinda' Wittgensteinian in a sense, the bible being a ladder to use to reach the truth of a loving god, and then discarded when no longer necessary or helpful. There's a similar sentiment in the whole "if you meet buddha on the road, cut them down" dealio.

*I mean, it's obviously an astoundingly piss-poor way of going about it in practice, but I appreciate the metaphorical hustle there more than most understandings of abrahamic holy texts, heh. Incompetent is at least an upgrade from malicious, yeh.

[Eschar]

I've had similar thoughts.

Notice that there's not even a way to be sure any religious work isn't a test. If a supernatural being wanted to communicate clearly, they'd presumably provide a way for us to know for sure.

[Rolan7]

I... hesitate to suggest the Cathars (yet again).
Mostly because we will never know what they might have been, because Abrahamic religions are fundamentally about literally killing to death anyone who does heresy.

Except maybe in the early Jesus church?
Sure went hard anti-heresy pretty quick though.

(For anyone not aware of the Cathars, they were a cult that believed that Jehovah was evil and Jesus was the path to a pure salvation
...
...

...
dot dot dot
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anyway they got murdered by Catholics.)

[Rolan7]

Would Jesus be judged for accepting anyone who heard this message?
Obviously not.

[McTraveller]

Eh, I've been pretty appreciative of some of the older gnostic or whatever beliefs for a while now, the stuff that posits that a lot of the biblical works are in fact a sort of test. Much of what they describe isn't just mean, it's outright sadistic or flatly evil, and heavily contradictory with the general message of love and whatnot. It makes a sort of sense if it's not just wrong, but intentionally wrong, there to teach folks that when given a choice between a message of goodness and message of cruelty, the latter should be discarded.*

Can you be specific here? I've seen statements to this effect somewhat often, but for the life of me I don't know how any actions by God in the Old Testament can be taken as mean, sadistic, or evil unless taken in a massively different context or with a specific set of assumptions.  The "sadistic" part especially intrigues me, because I can't think of any time in the Old Testament where God is portrayed as enjoying dishing out wrath. There's at least two specific instances where He's attributed with something like regret.

[Naturegirl1999]

Eh, I've been pretty appreciative of some of the older gnostic or whatever beliefs for a while now, the stuff that posits that a lot of the biblical works are in fact a sort of test. Much of what they describe isn't just mean, it's outright sadistic or flatly evil, and heavily contradictory with the general message of love and whatnot. It makes a sort of sense if it's not just wrong, but intentionally wrong, there to teach folks that when given a choice between a message of goodness and message of cruelty, the latter should be discarded.*

Can you be specific here? I've seen statements to this effect somewhat often, but for the life of me I don't know how any actions by God in the Old Testament can be taken as mean, sadistic, or evil unless taken in a massively different context or with a specific set of assumptions.  The "sadistic" part especially intrigues me, because I can't think of any time in the Old Testament where God is portrayed as enjoying dishing out wrath. There's at least two specific instances where He's attributed with something like regret.

what about the time he tried to kill all of humanity? Or the time he almost got Abraham to kill his son on the altar?

[Frumple]

Can you be specific here? I've seen statements to this effect somewhat often, but for the life of me I don't know how any actions by God in the Old Testament can be taken as mean, sadistic, or evil unless taken in a massively different context or with a specific set of assumptions.  The "sadistic" part especially intrigues me, because I can't think of any time in the Old Testament where God is portrayed as enjoying dishing out wrath. There's at least two specific instances where He's attributed with something like regret.

Just about any of the major stuff, the floods, the plagues, and so on, had a great deal of avoidable suffering and slaughter of the innocent/undeserving involved, just as kind of a baseline thing. I'd have to take time (I ain't got right now, being on lunch break) to pull it up, but pretty sure more than one of the conquests commanded/stated-to-be-blessed-by the christian god involved some pretty goddamn nasty shit, too. Revelations is its own can of worms.

Sadism might not be a perfect word for it, but when someone goes out of their way to cause pain and suffering, or do stuff like cause the widespread death of children, repeatedly, there's not many better ones available, y'know?

[McTraveller]

Ok right, those are the canonical examples. My first assertion stands - I AM did not "enjoy" those destructive acts.

What is missed though is that within the construct of Abrahamic religion, there is no such thing as "innocent/undeserving" people. Even children - all have been tainted.  The worldwide destruction is because it's better to wipe everyone out that let people continue abusing each other.  Look at why the flood occurred: independent of whatever you believe about nephilim, the cause of wiping out humanity with the flood (for example) was because humanity was abusing itself and the world around it.

I think what people end up with is "If it's not possible for God to create people with free-will without suffering, isn't that inherently bad that God created anything in the first place?"  That is, there is an explicit assertion that the act of creation itself was evil or bad because it couldn't (wasn't?) done without the possibility for suffering.

This is an honest question and at least gets at the core - is it even possible to have a "good" god if that god created a universe which can support suffering in the first place?

[Naturegirl1999]

Ants within a colony tend not to fight amongst themselves, compare this with human countries, they can enter civil wars, fighting amongst themselves. If I were to create a race that I was sure wouldn’t fight, I would probably make it a hivemind. There was a Rick and Marty episode where a hive mind called Unity took over a species, thus stopping a race war happening planet-wide

[Grim Portent]

This is an honest question and at least gets at the core - is it even possible to have a "good" god if that god created a universe which can support suffering in the first place?

I would kind of expect a god who has a moral philosophy to make a universe which functions on that morality, down to the animals and plants. The presence of suffering in the natural state of animals and plants is indicative of a deity who isn't moral, or has a moral compass so alien that they are immoral by most human standards. As above, so below, as the old alchemists would say, the state of the world reflects the state of the heavens. The existence of suffering implies a god powerless to stop it, or who considers it an acceptable situation.

For example, if I were to meet a god that claimed to have made the world, I would ask it to explain why parasitic larvae eat living things from the inside out, why lions start eating their prey before it's actually dead, why dolphins torture porpoises, why the duck penis?*

If it's answer was that it made the initial conditions and then just left it to run like a closed terrarium, I'd consider it amoral, but not immoral. A moral deity would have intervened to undo the suffering caused by it's design.

Most other answers, ones involving active intervention, omniscience and so on, would result in me concluding that the god was either immoral, a lunatic, or operating on a morality so alien it's of no relevance to my own decisions.


A god of the nature found in Gnosticism would get a pass from me, because it doesn't have the power to prevent material suffering despite wanting to.


*'Why the duck penis?' is a fundmental moral question to my mind.

[McTraveller]

A moral deity would have intervened to undo the suffering caused by it's design.

:

 or operating on a morality so alien

Christianity says that god did intervene, but the suffering was undone in a different way than people want it to (it addressed eternal separation from God, not earthly "pain") - which also ties into your other observation, that even the Christian God does operate on a morality quite alien from our own.

I think some of this is also that God's attributes aren't simply "good" vs "evil" (moral/immoral, etc.), but also include things like justice and holiness.  For example, can you have justice without suffering / punishment? What does that mean? Holiness simply meaning "set apart" - can you have God be set apart if it's just subject to the same standards as the rest of us?

It's telling in many ways, whichever views to which you subscribe, that the Abrahamic and Christian "original sin" is humans thinking they are god, defining good and evil for themselves.

[ZBridges]

This is an honest question and at least gets at the core - is it even possible to have a "good" god if that god created a universe which can support suffering in the first place?

This is a fundamental problem that others have tried to answer over the years.  Explanations of various degrees of credibility have been offered, collectively called theodicies and defenses.  Here's a summary of some of the most well-known arguments.

[Naturegirl1999]

Humans didn’t define good and evil according to the Bible, the fruit did. Why was knowledge of good and evil stored in a fruit, which could not act on it? This brings a new question to me, since the knowledge was granted to Adam and Eve after they ate the fruit, did the fruit have thoughts too?