Issac I am going to try to get to you, but after I post this response I got things I need to do.
On what basis would you assume God does not want suffering?
Suffering with no purpose, and when you have no control over your environment so you can't end the suffering is just pain.
Pain for the sake of pain, means whoever created the rules of the universe is a dick.
Now your response is why I hate the limitation of language, we don't have enough words in any language to describe all the nuances of our thoughts. At the same time words have multiple meanings so one person meant meaning A and the person listening may though he meant meaning B.
When I say Good cannot exist without Evil I am not doing a duology philosophy such a Zorratorism or the Wheel of Time beliefs. I mean Good is Good and !Good means the lacking of the qualities of what make Good=Special.
To put it another way I am not talking Good vs Bad, but instead Pure vs Inpure. For example if we assume clean means lacking bateria then unclean means possessing bacteria.
If Good is the presence of God (which I do not believe in) then Evil is the lack of presence of God.
Suffering is not the only way to find Grace but it is one of the ways we do find Grace.
It is a common belief in the Catholic church both in the written liturgy and the traditions (and thoughts) of the Church. For example Roman Chapter 5 verses 1 to 10. I am summarizing and this is not a direct quoting you can look that up.
- God saved us by giving us his son
- Jesus allows us to have a relationship with God
- We should rejoice in our sufferings, for our sufferings give us character and hope
- From hope we find faith and with faith we find the Grace of God
- Remember God has already saved us, there is nothing worse than the hell of not knowing him
- Since nothing can compare to not knowing God, and Jesus suffering at the cross is so much more than we will suffer. Jesus is so much more holy than us for he sacrificed everything for the most "unclean", and in doing so he made us right with God.
- And through this covenant with God, Jesus, and Ourselves we can find God
- Thus our sufferings should give us hope and have us find grace, for it reminds us how far we fallen, and how through Jesus he raises us up.
Now this is on another hand complete and utter bullshit.
A child may not know why his father beat his mother, but no amount of sin the mother performed against the father is worth such a punishment. There is no debt that can justify this action. The child has the right to judge the father, even if he does not have the knowledge of the crime.
Animals are beings blessed with the ability to feel and to suffer, yet cursed (or blessed from another point of view) with the ability to not know why they are suffering.
“We weep for a bird’s cry, but not for a fish’s blood. Blessed are those with a voice.
God is supposedly infinite and he can hear the cries of all his children including the cries of the animals. How can he allow them to suffer so much, when he is all powerful? The animals have no control (limited control) over their environment since they lack the upper regions of the brain that humans have that allow them to change their environment to the state we can. Animals lack both the voice to cry out in pain, they lack the mental capacity to know why they are in pain.
And this is not just animals, this is also human beings. What about the unborn? What about the mentally retarded? What about the people who are blind and mute and thus can not communicate with the world around them, trapped in a dark room when the whole bright world is outside? What about the young children who have no control over their destiny, they just can react to the world and their parents? What about the depressed man who wants so much for suffering to stop but he is unable to do so for he is trapped in the prison of his own biology!
I do not believe in God, for I do not think he exists. But if their is a God I would refuse to worship him. No God of mine would create a world with so much injustice.
I would use my voice, a voice that if there is a God said God has granted me. I would use my voice to curse his name. I would struggle with God just like Jacob did with God in Genesis and Job did in the book of Job. I will curse God name and list the wrongs God has done me and the world I see. I will not end my struggle with God till God has made right what he has taken from me. And this is what God does to Jacob, he blesses Jacob and gives Jacob the name Israel. Job is blessed with twice as much as he had before. Now in Job God returns Job to greatness but also effectively compares him to an ant for the ant can not God's plan. I do not care to know God's plan it does not concern me. The pain and joy I suffer in life, and everything I see around me, which I touch with my empathy, that concerns me. And Jacob and Job only repent their blasphemies against God when God blesses them and makes them whole.
Some people will call me heathen, for I think I am above God, I am more moral than him. I do not care for morality and rules and regulations, I just want justice. With my empathy that God has blessed me I see a broken creation. A creation broken not just by man but by the lack of God finishing his creation.
God is either an abusive or negligent father.
I can respect people who have a different opinion of me, but I can not respect God.
And my right to criticize God does not come from my voice which God may or may not have granted me. It comes from the harm God has performed against me. The design of his plan does not matter, it still does not erase his sin.
Thank You.
My position on abortion has nothing to do with my religious beliefs, or no more than my support for the basic human rights to life, liberty and property. Religion is so associated with the cause of opposition to abortion, because it is convenient to demonize causes with association with religion in our society (hence the reluctance of atheists to concede their belief in an absence of a deity is as faith-based as my own belief), and as in the case of slavery, it falls on religion to defend the rights of people against materially-motivated abuse. I don't oppose abortion because unborn babies are god's little cherubs, I oppose it because it is impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a human fetus is NOT a human being. You can legislate its status away, and you can count a slave as 3/5 of a person, but that does not make it so, nor justify the murder of such a person by one who purports to have the right, through the misapplication of the three great natural rights.
I will not pretend religion plays NO part in my position, because it is also religion that informs me that ANYONE's life, liberty or property are sacrosanct. There is no objective material evidence that a black person is the intellectual equal of a white person, or vice versa. There is a lot of circumstantial evidence to significant differences between the races. My belief in their moral & spiritual, and by extension necessity of legal, equality is founded entirely on my belief that they are created by God in His image, with an immortal soul. Just as my obvious and inherent material and objective superiority over my siblings does not diminish our equal standing in the eyes of our parents, neither do such superficial criteria as SAT scores or skin tones alter the reality of our equality in the eyes of God. If the materialists can come up with a better argument that does not rest on the irrational acceptance of a value system or non-disprovable beliefs, I have yet to hear it. The inevitable end of taking materialist attitudes to their logical extreme is a prison camp in Dachau or Kolyma, because in the end, in strictly material terms, it eventually comes down to "them or us." And we've succeeded in elevating ourselves to the level of those beasts who abort their species in utero.
Note the common denominator in the example you cite - the natural abortions are the result of males who want to get laid. That's also the human motivation, with NARAL doing its level best to conceal polls which reveal that supporters of abortion in the general public are predominantly men.
The difference between man and beast is not very significant to an honest materialist, because without religion and the spiritual, there is no way to elevate man above that level. That's how we do it - we recognize that there is something more, something better about a fellow human that precludes our terminating his life out of personal convenience, whether because he and thousands like him are obstructing our agenda, or because he and millions like him have unappealing characteristics that we don't want in our gene pool, or because he personally is an obstacle to our accumulation of material resources or reproductive opportunity. In the latter case that person one might wish to kill could be dating the woman of your choice, or occupying her womb, or tying you to her material well-being by an atavistic need (and socially enforced) to support your offspring. The mice and lions can have all the abortions they want. They are never going to spare each other's lives to remove thorns from paws or chew through nets. That's something only humans can make the choice to do, and that's why we don't kill each other, in the womb or out.
I actually agree with most of what you wrote here. Though I disagree on the conclusion.
I will not entertain the possibility that some races are superior or inferior to others. That said I will definately agree that all humans are not equal and that people in populations are born with different capabilities. To not recognize this is to be blind.
I will also agree that animals who lack the capabilities to make rational thought are incapable of doing what I would call EVIL. Now when I say EVIL in this definition I am not talking Good or Bad, or Pure and Unpure. I am talking about how one being willfully takes from another and creates suffering that is unjust. That being has been wronged and nothing can make it truly right again. That is EVIL.
A mouse on the other hand who kills another mouse's childrens in the womb, merely did something that was bad or tragic. A mouse is incapable of rational though. In this case with the Bruce Effect it doesn't even require a direct action on the part of the mouse, it just happens for the mouse has no control over his pheromones. There is no responsibility or culpability for the mouse.
If there is any responsibility it would be with the one who created such a system in the first place, and to my knowledge there is no God and some suffering is just tragic and there is no purpose. Or if there is a God then he is merely a dick for allowing this to happen. Sure God may have some master plan that explains why that mouse babies needed to die so the other male mouse can get laid. There may be a reason, but even if there is a reason those unborn mice were still wronged! They still possess a debt they should demand from the one who is responsible. They should be mad at God, and if they had the voice and the mind to cry out his name they should be damning it forever until they are made whole.
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The jewish belief (not the christian belief) originally saw not as a state of being (this is a christian belief) but instead as an act. Performing this tragic or evil act incurs a debt. Jewish thought also offers believes in different types of sin depending on the culpability of the person and how the sin. Sins against the law intentionally, sins against the law by accident, and sins against the law but the person has no knowledge of the law. Sin in Jewish thought had to be made up for in the closest way possible, as well as asking for repentance, as well as a pledge to try your best not to sin again, and to teach others of morality. Why does God seek to apply these rules to me when I can not apply the same rules to him?
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Finally I believe you can come up with a morality without coming up with religion or without a relationship with God. The source of such a morality is empathy, something similar and connected to love. I can find love for my fellow man without having empathy with God. Remember there were two different repentance holidays in Judaism. Erev Yom Kippur (eve of day of atonement) where you ask your fellow man for atonement and Yom Kippur when you ask god for atonement. Erev must come first, for you can not respect God till you have clean yourself. How then can I respect God till he has clean himself and made the world right?
