Recently a comment was left on an old post, Omniscient God, by Twitter user @TastesLikeYou. Comments often go un-noticed and I thought this one deserved a bit more publicity so I reproduce it here as a guest post, by kind permission of its author (who I am sure would like more followers on Twitter).
It was a reply to a previous comment by another American friend of mine, who unfortunately resists the temptation to comment any more.
Panda.
Regarding a couple of your points :
"But as your child grows you
realise that you can not bail them out every time they get in trouble
that they must learn to do it them selves or suffer the consequence.
Same is true of God the Father, sometimes even though we pray and ask,
the predestination is for us to suffer."
It's fine for you to
praise the work of God in your little ivory tower and ponder his
mysterious ways but give a thought to the reality of life out there.
Because,
oh, if only God WAS that reliable to protect us until we reach an age
where we could indeed stand on our own two feet. But every day (amongst
other daily atrocities), your God watches paedophiles abusing children,
children dying from starvation, hospital wards with diseased and dying
youngsters, etc but he does .... nothing!
So he foresees the
moment of horror, witnesses it in real time too and yet, in most cases,
brings no relief to the suffering. Predestination? Sounds pretty tough
that he has predestined this.
How can you possibly praise a god
for his great works when he shows no compassion to those who are in no
position to accept or reject god? How can he possibly be expected to be
glorified when he his heinous crimes scream out over the pages of the
Bible and across the timeline of human history?
"Why are atheists so obsessed with proving that God doesn't exist anyways?"
Because
if I can prove to people that God is unlikely to exist in the format
that humans attribute to him, we will keep religion out of our
government, schools and other areas of life that have no place to be
infiltrated by followers of myths.
I was a fervent Christian for
many years and I panicked at the thought of questioning the bible and
his word. But actions speak louder than words and, to be blunt, God was
found severely wanting on 'action'.
Kind regards.
@TastesLikeYou
p.s I must add, that his choice to ignore the pleas of the innocent are backed up in the bible :
"Job 9:23 When a scourge brings sudden death, he mocks the despair of the innocent."
Perhaps he is just plain nasty after all.
On that last comment about the god of the Bible, especially the malignant thug of the Old Testament, being nasty, it sometimes seems to me that the earlier books of the OT contain strong echoes of a specifically evil god, as though they were originally ABOUT an evil god.
ReplyDeleteIt was a major strand of Gnosticism, which pre-dates Christianity, that 'reality' is a Satanic creation designed to mislead us away from the wholly spiritual God. Gnosis was knowledge (of the true path back to this spiritual realm).
In some later descendants of Gnosticism, like the Cathars or Albigensians, Jesus, and John the Baptist were regarded as Gnostic teachers - an idea supported apparently by the suppressed 'Gospel of Judas' (hence also the domonisation of Judas).