Yup.
The teachings of Christianity don't make any fucking sense. (Unless you're willing to gaslight yourself for a lifetime.)
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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Now now, don't discount free reign to also gaslight others for a lifetime as well. And judge and shame others too. It's great for complete assholes.
I think that's part of the appeal: the ingrained superiority Christians feel.
Not just Christians, that's a common thing with any cult, be it for a person, a country, etc.
That's the point of religion. Trick the brain into thinking everything is going according to plan so that it gives out the happy time drugs instead of the "you need to wake the fuck up and do something about this" drugs. The religion pushers get their cut, and everyone thinks their happy.
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If you read the Bible with a purely objective mind and come away thinking God is the good guy in the story, I have some serious questions about your morality and ethics.
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Did god not have the power to give us free will without also giving us evil?
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Had the power but opted not to: god is himself some part evil
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Didn't have the power, did the best he could with the tools he had: god is not omnipotent.
Pick one.
Going by the Bible, it's both. He acted with malice and proved himself to not be omnipotent many times.
Jod introduced the idea of freewill to the board.
Lucifer said "That's a bad idea, chief. Free will would ruin them."
Jod cast him out.
Humans fucked everything up.
Jod sent his CTO, Jesus to try and fix it. It went poorly.
Lucifer said " I told you so"
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I think it’s a misread to say it gave us evil. The garden is portrayed as being a paradise with a tree of knowledge. The man and the women, as they self-identified themselves to be, were both allowed agency to be themselves and be blessed without the burden of knowledge, so long as they did not eat the forbidden fruit. Both the man and the woman independently made the conscious decision to break the rule given to them to not eat the fruit of knowledge. The actual sin was both the man and woman breaking their covenant with God, through the eating of the fruit. My take on this is that story is meant to show that God can help you and will help you, but if you choose to go against his will you have the face the consequences of that decision on your own. However, you can still seek forgiveness for your decisions and even be forgiven, but this doesn’t magically put everything back to the way things were before.
The story is more or less a cultural device to explain good and evil from the perspective of the early Israelite society. The story itself is rippled throughout the Bible in this way: God gives instructions, the people follow the instructions at first but then grow complacent, bad things happen because people stop following God’s instructions, and then one of the leaders of the tribe of Israel steps in to help get people back on the right path of following God’s instructions.
I’ll add that functionally Genesis is three serparate creation stories that were pulled into one book. Culturally, the early Israelites borrowed some of the elements of other creation stories of their time seen in other cultures such as the Babylonians. The first creation story is the seven days, the second is what we know as the story Adam and Eve, and the third was the story of the great flood.
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You have the freedom to choose God or face an eternity of unimaginable suffering.
No good god would make an unlasting punishment. if you have forever, then even Hitler, Dahmer would have enough time for a finite punishment. Even the worst people in the world don't deserve a unlasting punishment.
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What shits me is Christians (and Jews and Muslims, but it's mainly Christians who do this) who just handwave away the problem of evil. Like fine, I can accept that some evils might arise as a result of human decisions and free will. Things like wars and genocides are done by people. It's difficult to swallow even that much with the idea of a god who supposedly knows all, is capable of doing anything, and is "all good", but fine, maybe free will ultimately supplants all that.
But what I absolutely cannot accept is any claim that tries to square the idea of a god with the triple-omnis with the fact that natural disasters happen. That children die of cancer. You try telling the parents of a child slowly dying of a painful incurable disease that someone could fix it if they wanted, and they completely know about it, but that they won't. And then try telling them that person is "all good". See how they react.
I find religious people who believe in the three omnis after having given it any amount of serious consideration to be absolutely disgusting and immoral people.
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I think you can have this same dilemma as an atheist as well. I'm personally agnostic as I don't have the knowledge to make a decision.
If we are all just atoms moving/reacting, surely everything we'd ever do would be predetermined by the initial reactions/vectors/forces at the big bang. I know there's quantum randomness and stuff, but it's possible that's all calculable and we simply don't have the means to calculate it. If that's the case, IMO we still have freewill because we can't predict the future, and it's still worthwhile to move forward doing our best to be good people.
My take is that there is no free will, but that this fact is irrelevant and we're all better off just behaving as though we do.
At least here in the US, a person's zip code of birth is a huge indicator of their success and life trajectory. That, to me, would seem to indicate that free will is bullshit.
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Or in other words, “free will” is a macroscopic effect arising from the fundamental laws of the universe. Like most everything else we deal with.
Like… temperature doesn’t really exist, it’s really just an average of kinetic energy of particles. But that doesn’t stop it from being a useful concept!
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That's not a dilemma for atheists because atheists aren't the ones claiming there's an omnipotent being guiding everything.
Also, you can be both an atheist and an agnostic. They cover different things. I'm fairly certain you'd consider yourself an atheist in regards to the sun god Ra.
I'm mostly agnostic to it almost all of it. For all I know, the ancient Egyptians were spot on.
I'm convinced it's impossible for us to determine whether there are two gods or not.
I'm a diagnostic.
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I think you can have this same dilemma as an atheist as well.
I'd like to hear your opinions on how you think so (truly). The way I see things, Atheism is only the answer to a single question: do you believe in any gods? If "yes," you're a theist or deist. If "no; I don't know; not currently; maybe one day," then you're an atheist. It's not a philosophy or a comprehensive worldview, and it can't possibly answer deeper questions.
What you're referring to in the latter half is Determinism and Compatibilism (Determinism + free will). Science is currently leaning pretty strongly towards Determinism, but since Compatibilism doesn't add much more to the idea, it's also still a candidate possibility.
It's very likely you could calculate every chain reaction from the Big Stretch up until now and maybe even into the future. Whether we have the ability to affect or disrupt those chains might be a matter of philosophy.
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Well, since this is a religious discussion, I'm a Christian. It's always God.
Job 1:6-12 very clearly shows God granting permission for Satan to test Job.
1 Kings 22:19-22 shows the "court in heaven" and God soliciting ideas from spirits for enticing Ahab to attack Ramoth Gilead, where he will die. When a good suggestion is made, God grants permission.
Exodus 10:1-2 states clearly that God hardened Pharaoh's heart to not let the slaves go, so that God could display his "signs" (plagues).
Satan is a liar, and the father of lies.
Romans 9:19-21 NIV
One of you will say to me: “Then why does God still blame us? For who is able to resist his will?” But who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? “Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’ ” Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for special purposes and some for common use?
Wow, sounds like a cruel deity that's definitely not worthy of worship.
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What’s the use of being god if every run-down schmuck with a two dollar prayer book can come along and fuck up your plan?
- George Carlin
I don’t think many Christians would actually argue for that first point tbh. It’s not something Biblically portrayed as one of God’s gifts. Free will is portrayed as something that was given conditionally, but taking from the tree of knowledge and specifically eating the fruit of knowledge is known as man’s first sin in the Bible.
I think it’s a bit of a metaphor for a parent wanting to shield their child from the harshness of reality, but as the sheltered child grows older they often want to know more about the outside world and in doing so become exposed to the cruelty. This was my own experience with religion growing up. A teacher of mine one day sat us down and pleaded the above with our class, as many of us grew to see through the veil of how reality looked.
In retrospect I think some things about the world make sense to not be told about, depending on one’s age. However, I think other things should never be hidden, have been hidden, or done in other cases.
Side note: I think the idea of God’s plan is for people to hold love for one another. Lots of people lose sight of what they are called to do and how they are to act though. They’re called to love their neighbor as their self, called to love their enemy, and called to forgive others for their transgressions. I personally think people are called to do good works in conjunction with holding faith, as people are called to act righteously in this life.
Don't worry, they don't read the Bible, and especially don't read the old testament.
They believe they have god given freedom of action
I don’t think many Christians would actually argue for that first point tbh.
Then truthfully, I don't think you've had this conversation with many christians. Every single one immediately defaults to that point when confronted with the horrors god would be responsible for if god is in control.
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"I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, 'George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.' And I did, and then God would tell me, 'George go and end the tyranny in Iraq,' and I did."
- George W Bush
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/bush-god-told-me-to-invade-iraq-6262644.html
He sounds like Elwood from The Blues Brothers. "We're on a mission from God."
Church dilemma - knowing the will of God vs affirming that God's ways are inscrutable, According to convenience
I’m tempted to give the actual theological answer here but I have a feeling it will not be well received lol
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Satan: Hey, i only do Black Metal bands and orgies, all other things are with the other bloke
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No matter how well you point out the paradox (if God knows everything that will happen, free will doesn't exist, because everything is predetermined, just like a fully written book), a significant portion of christians will simply ignore and keep circling between "but God gave us free will" and "God knows everything"
That is exactly true. Life is only about 3 things: food, reproduction and dealing with boredom. Humans add so many colours to that, that it looks like we do more than those 3 things so that's where you might see free will.
I like to think of why people suffer or God allows it like this. Even if you don’t think there is a plan, 70 years on earth vs an infinity of bliss is a good deal.
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