I hope you all had a fine Sunday. Lurking has lately became a pastime of mine and I keep finding gems that the best I can do is to share with you. It is with this in mind that I share three posts; two good ones and one not so great. First, the great posts
In absolving god from hell, the author presents three scenarios why god cannot be absolved from the responsibility of hell and why the christians who believe anything different from this are not aware of the contents of their bible or do not know about the god as portrayed in their good book. Go read it!
Do atheists have faith is a question that most of us have addressed in one way or another but seems to raise its ugly head whenever you are engaged in a debate with a theist. I wonder most times whether the people saying this have just come out of an ant hole and can’t help themselves or whether it is the best line of attack they can think of? Go read it and the comments are as interesting as the post 😛
And for the not great post, a question is asked why does god allow suffering? which apart from making the wrong assumption that there is a god, tells us there is some grand reason, a reason we don’t know why god allows us to suffer. Â The good catholic tells us
There was only love and harmony between man and his Creator. When man sinned, he destroyed the harmony that existed between all things and gave up his protection from suffering and death. Man’s world was no longer pure since it experienced the frustration of original justice.
Before we delve into this matter deeply, isn’t possible that a god who is claimed to have created the universe by saying let there be couldn’t use the same invocation to end sin in the world? The christian apologist wants us to buy the line that sin of A & E, two personages who didn’t grace our planet, was so great that the best their god would do was to banish them from the garden of Eden, have guards at the gate and then curse the land from whence they were to get food and on top of that curse childbirth! Is it that christians consider just small portions of the picture or they look into the picture and then decide to ignore the parts they don’t like? And what justice is it when for the first crime, if the bible is to be believed, is punished in a way that no parent I know of would do to their children? What is the christian understanding of justice?
Is it remotely possible that the theists who write some of these posts don’t read anything else? How would they keep repeating the same free will defense to absolve their supposed god from all responsibility? Let us for a brief moment posit that god was offended and decided to punish man, why for the life of me, should a cow deliver its calf in pain? What sin did a cow commit if ever there were any cows when Adam was naming animals in Genesis 2?
I don’t know about you, but I find no beauty in a toothache or in having a migraine, so this statement
 We believe that there is an element of beauty in human suffering because it came from God
really doesn’t address why we suffer. It devalues human suffering and pretends that a god, whatever it means for the believer, who is so separated from us would know what it means to suffer. To even say there is a beauty in human suffering because it comes from a god either fails to recognize there is suffering that as far as we can possibly tell serves no purpose. Besides, it paints a god who, for lack of a better word, is a sadist and capricious. For tell me, what loving parent would allow children to die of starvation while he watches? What kind of parent would stand and do nothing when a small baby is abused or sacrificed as they did among the Aztecs? What god if ever there was any such thing stand and watch men and women burnt at the stake in his name? Please don’t tell me about god! If there are any gods, they are not lovers of men. And I don’t need to suffer as a reminder of my impending death, no, the death of others is enough knowledge enough, adding suffering to the picture makes no sense at all.
I don’t know how when I have a toothache my friend also feels the pain. Unless am missing something, how does one interpret
[…], when one of us suffers, the rest of us also feel that suffering
and is this really what we want? I guess not.
I think these people who purport to speak for god really have a great job to do. They have to show us why their god, who we are told intervened in men’s affairs, have in the last thousand of years decided to STFU and let men run roughshod over each other, killing, rapin’, maiming each other without even a hint of a cough from this said god? Am interested in knowing why the religious apologist doesn’t find their god to be ultimately responsible for evil in the world either by commission or through negligence. In fact I dare say that if a god as described in the bible were to exist, I would volunteer to try it for cruelty, murder, genocide, negligence and encourage the jury to bring a verdict of guilty with the highest possible punishment! Thank goodness, there are no gods!
Random thoughts 