On the day they are born, you tell them they are already a bad person.
Some of your children are poor or happened to be born in a dark corner of the room, so you allow them to go without health care and suffer horrible diseases.
The diseases they suffer from were of your own invention.
You decide to create chaos to "test" them, and send an earthquake to destroy their home.
One of your daughters and son in law move away, become rich and happy while failing to adore you, so you destroy their entire city with a volcanic eruption.
You tell you favorite children to make war with your least favorite children.
When you get angry with your favorite children, you kick them out of their home and send them to a foreign land as slaves.
In your anger, you have your daughter stoned to death for suspected adultery.
You refuse to speak to them directly. Instead, they must meditate and attempt to read your mind.
In your genius, you created the brain to use psychology so they can't tell whether you are talking to them or they are imagining it.
Rather than guiding him directly, you give your sons a book written in an ancient language containing rules which can be interpreted several ways. Despite the confusion it creates, he is expected to follow it to the letter.
You allowed many of your children to be enslaved by the others and told them to obey their masters, even though they treated them badly.
You force your favorite children to give you a portion of their earnings, even when they lack food to eat.
You use the profit to promote yourself to your least favorite children, so you'll get to take their money also.
You label some of your kids worthy of love and tell the others they are evil for swearing.
The children have never seen your physical form, but are forced to idolize you and love you without every having physical contact.
If they don't honor you as you feel they should, you throw them into the fire pit to suffer forever.
You say your purpose is to teach them to be more like you. They all learn to follow in your footsteps, and teach their children as you have taught them.
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My Friend
ReplyDeleteI think you have oversimplified this Problem of Pain. Our existence is not about pleasure, it is about growth. The Greek Philosophers understood that this life is meant to prepare us for the life after and to the best on my knowledge Socrates was not a good Christian and Plato did eat meat on Fridays. Aristotle observed that those virtues most worthy of development would only be fully developed in conflict. Adversity is the thing that creates the dialectic in our lives that forces us to decide what kind of beings we will become. This is not about whether God or Allah or Gitchi Manitou is good or not because he relieves us of all pain and suffering. It is about whether a path toward perfection has been prepared. All religions on earth understand we are of two natures and that "god" was required to show us how to reach perfection. I do not think the burning pit of hell is to be the focus but rather are we becoming more perfect.
Another issue I have is that you are willing to hang God out for being so cold and uncaring but you give almost no blame to us. God set this thing in motion and decided not to micro-manage us. So who is more to blame for the baby with brain cancer, god who told us to love one another, to work together, to care for the earth like stewards, or mankind, who pollutes the earth, fills the mother of that child with toxic chemicals, spends trillions on war and does nothing to find cures for fatal diseases? You seem to be very thoughtful so honestly ask yourself about each specific problem, just pick a specific problem and then ask is god to blame or could mankind throughout the ages have changed this. We blame God for problems but we as a race have been here for tens of thousands of years and look what we have done, we can conference call all over the world, we can watch internet porn in 10 different languages but we cannot provide clean drinking water to the world’s population. I don't think you need to recur to God to find someone to blame for our problems that is just scapegoating, we can simply look in the mirror. I don’t know what kind of Christians you knew before but they were decidedly the wrong kind. Remember what Christ said about his return, he would find very few true followers. Maybe what we see as “the church” is nothing more than a lie.
jweaver111@hotmail.com