Theists, why does God allow suffering.. (page 54)

sir82

cofty,
The president of the USA knows what is good and what is bad. HE is running the show not you..

So far, this is the leading contender for non sequitur of the year.

What I mean to say( alluding to my previous post and explaining what I meant by a similar statement in that post) is that the president of the USA (for argument sake) or any other sovereign ruler or government entity can define what is good and what is bad not you. The definition of good or bad can mean that he can drop a nuclear bomb destroying animals and people and whatever he wants. Is that bad to you? Like the president of the USA or any other ruler for that matter, God has his good reasons for what he does and what he allows including animal suffering. Is that bad? You are not running the USA or the world for that matter.

Viviane

Ugly or Just?

Ugly. Your god can't resist killing babies and innocents to satisfy his bloodlust. What a monster you worship.

cofty

any other sovereign ruler or government entity can define what is good and what is bad not you

No he/she can't.

God has his good reasons for what he does and what he allows including animal suffering.

What are they?

Is that bad?

Yes. Your god is a moral monster. You seem to be arguing for morality by divine fiat.

WheninDoubt

People regardless of their stance to be pro or con, cannot reconcile the concept of theism.

Theism, in the field of comparative religion, is the belief that at least one deity exists. In popular parlance, the term theism often describes the classical conception of God that is found in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Sikhism, Hinduism, and Satanism. The term theism derives from the Greek Theo’s meaning "god".

The rules are changed constantly to accommodate their argument. In the case of animal cruelty, the provocation and contempt of a bad heavenly God is just to obscure the difference from the God of this sinful world. Whether man sins against man or the animal kingdom against each other or man against animal, vegetation, water, earth, or air, is an inherited trait by sin. Therefore sin continues without intervention since scripture shows even with a higher presence it amounts to the same thing, the inability of man to make changes. So then the cruelty to animals falls under the realm of man and its sinful counterpart of this world, no matter how it’s spun.

cofty

Whether man sins against man or the animal kingdom against each other or man against animal - Whenindoubt

Except the question has nothing to do with man's cruelty to animals.

The point is that almost every creature that ever lived during the millions of years before Homo sapiens appeared, died a painful and death from predation, starvation, exposure, parasites and disease.

Why did your god - who Jesus claimed cares for every sparrow - design a world to maximise suffering?

Would you like to try addressing the actual question now?

Village Idiot

@ cofty: "Why did your god - who Jesus claimed cares for every sparrow - design a world to maximise suffering?"

It's really simple. A talking snake told a naked lady to eat a fruit and share it with a naked man with a missing rib then all hell broke loose. Lions stopped eating grass and started devouring baby lambs; tyrannosaurus stopped eating palm trees and started munching on Brontosaurs; Galaxies started crashing into each other and we started having discussions such as this.

Now think of all the cruelty down below where a gazillion species are having their planets getting ripped out of their stars orbit plunging into a freezing death or a fiery one from two stars crashing into each other.

Overlapping Galaxies NGC 3314

defender of truth

[These will be the right posts. I,m sorry, Simon.]

"any sovereign ruler or government entity can define what is good and what is bad, not you.
The definition of good or bad can mean that he can drop a nuclear bomb destroying animals and people and whatever he wants."

Fisherman...
Your reply to the issue of how a loving God can allow animal suffering is that
'God can kill or cause suffering to anyone he wants to, including innocent animals,
therefore he is right to do so.' ?

Apparently, to Fisherman and so many other believers..
Might = Right.

Strangely enough, most believers in the Biblical God would usually disagree with that philosophy
(think of Hitler and his views of what was 'good' and 'bad'),
except for when their concept of a 'just and loving' personal God is being questioned.

'But God can kill any people or creatures that he wants to, because he is God.
Whatever he does is right, and he has the right to do it because he has the authority!' is what believers (those who defend the concept of a loving God) essentially say.

Matt Dillahunty responds to that argument much better than I could..
(Please watch this, it's only 8 minutes)

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ecYTgCrVhGM

defender of truth

Whenindoubt said:
"Whether man sins against man,
or the animal kingdom against each other, or man against animal,
vegetation, water, earth, or air, is an inherited trait by sin. Therefore sin continues..."

You seem to keep saying that animal suffering
(specifically that of animals harming and killing each other in various ways)
only happens because the world and all those living on it are either 'sinful', or affected by Sin.

If 'sin' is the answer, then why does evidence exist that animals hurt and killed each other millions of years ago, long before mankind supposedly brought sin into the world?
Here are two examples for you, but then you'll have to do your own research:

"Entelodonts lived in the forests and plains where they were the apex predatorsof North America's early Miocene and Oligocene, consuming carrion and live animals and rounding off their diets with plants and tubers.

They would have hunted large animals, like the cow-sized artiodactyl Eporeodon major, and the sheep-sized cameloid Poebrotherium wilsoni, dispatching them with a bite from their jaws.
Some fossil remains of these other animals have been found with the bite marks of entelodonts on them."
"Entelodonts, sometimes nicknamed hell pigs or terminator pigs, are an extinct family of pig-like omnivores endemic to forests and plains of North America, Europe, and Asia from the late Eoceneto early Miocene epochs (37.2—16.3 million years ago)"
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entelodont

"Scientists working on fossils from Kangaroo Island, South Australia, have found eyes belonging to a giant 500 million-year-old marine predator that sat at the top of the earth's first food chain...
It is considered to be at the top of the earliest food chains because of its large body size, formidable grasping claws at the front of its head and a circular mouth with razor-sharp serrations.
Supporting evidence of this predator's dominance includes damage to contemporaneous trilobites, and even its fossilised poo (or coprolites) containing the remains of its prey...
The existence of highly sophisticated, visual hunters within Cambrian communities would have accelerated the predator-prey 'arms race' that began during this important phase in early animal evolution over half a billion years ago."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111207132908.htm

Caedes

Fisherman,

What I mean to say is that the president of the USA or any other sovereign ruler or government entity can define what is good and what is bad not you. The definition of good or bad can mean that he can drop a nuclear bomb destroying animals and people and whatever he wants.

By that definition every despot and tyrant in history is allowed to define that their actions are 'good', that is an astonishingly low bar for your god to reach. Mind you considering the moral turpitude of your god it will be in good company.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history

So which one of the genocides listed do you think was the most benevolent? The holocaust? The killing fields of Cambodia perhaps the Srebrenica genocide.

Theists, why does God allow suffering..

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