TaleSin: Oh, that's a much more loving picture of the Flood story. Desperate people clawing at the Ark, holding their infants above water as they slowly drown... of course, they are already weakened by the savagery of the lioness who attacked them ...
You’re just not going to give God a break, are you?
Who said the lioness attacked them? As for the infants, do you think their deaths resulted in their destruction? There’s either a God or there isn’t, right? If there isn’t, then all life and all death is meaningless. It doesn’t matter if we’re babies or crabby old people with canes, bad breath and hemorrhoids.
If our spirits come from God, we aren’t infants when we inhabit the bodies born into mortality. In fact, there are numerous cases where people who have lost infants visit the spirit world and are surprised to see the spirits of their little children as adults in the realm of the spirits. Once they are born and die, they return to God and are fully entitled to be resurrected in the first resurrection and inherit the Kingdom of Heaven.
So either way it works out. In fact, infants not only die in a state of complete innocence, they don’t have to endure the hardships of mortality and they inherit the Kingdom of Heaven. But whether infants live or pass on is strictly God’s decision. We’re not to make it, either through sacrifice or through abortions.
Defender_Of_Truth: Adding one ridiculous fairy tale on top of another makes it MORE plausible? This 'account' only makes God seem worse.
The key word, here, is “seem.” But you really don’t know, do you? Either God is a “fairy tale” or He’s a bloodthirsty murderer; and you’re qualified to judge the entire matter on nothing but snapshots of events we only have the faintest knowledge of. But if He is a fairy tale, then all this debate is meaningless. One monster can murder a thousand infants in this life and do it with the most malicious hate imaginable and it’s meaningless, just as all our lives are meaningless.
He callously used these creatures, that were about to be murdered by Him for no reason at all...to prevent people from trying to escape the slaughter with their families?
Murder is a strong word there, chief. If we’re going to use it, perhaps we ought to define it. In your opinion, what is murder? If there is a God, then he must be a murderer, you say. My own beliefs, of course, vary. If we all existed before we came to this world as mortals, it stands to reason that we did not come as a result of force. Believe it or not, God respects peoples’ free agency, and Satan was denied that opportunity because he rebelled, and he took a third of our brethren with him. When we come to this earth, we thereby agree to the terms of His judgment. And when we depart this earth, we immediately return and all of our sufferings become moot. In fact, the scriptures say that the Lord wipes the tears from every eye and that not a hair of our heads will be lost. Everyone, no matter how miserable or hideous he or she may have been during mortality, will be resurrected. And as Origen said, “everything we did in life [or on earth] will be made clear [or plain] to us.” But if all this is correct, then you are making judgments you are not qualified to make. And if you don’t know for a fact that you’re correct, then you’re just taking pot shots at believers, and nothing they can say will mitigate the actions of their God. And of course believers don’t all believe the same thing. But what we do agree on is that God is Just, Kind, Loving and Merciful. If He condemns infants to Hell for eternity, then He’s not any of the above. And if He arbitrarily forces His creations to undergo a torturous life for nothing other than His own selfish desires, He can’t honor a person’s free agency.
It is a shame that religious beliefs can cause people to both ignore those feelings, whilst at the same time inventing a God that embodies such a callous disregard for suffering.
Once one invents a God that is 'just', and yet sees the lives, health and emotions of living creatures as expendable or irrelevant because of the long term benefits (imagined or otherwise)... Then any and all acts of cruelty and murder could be either justified or dismissed as unimportant.
It’s one of the tenets of scripture that the Adversary not only wanted to take power that wasn’t his, he stands as an “accuser” of all things God does and how He does them. Jesus is called “our Advocate with the Father,” and Lucifer is known as the “Accuser of both man and God.” If you are also going to accuse God, then unless you’re able to know His thoughts, intents and purposes, you’re just taking potshots. And it seems no matter what people believe of God, you never lose a chance to come back and make even more accusations.
But let’s face it. You can attack God in any way you wish because you see Him as some sick invention hardwired into man’s brain in his barbaric and curious past. You, too, accuse us of ignorance, beliving the atheist’s creed that science can explain any question, eventually, that might lead us to a belief in God. That way, animals are the mere casualties of chance when they die. What I want to know is what atheists get out of this relentless and visceral hatred of God? No matter what I, or others, may say, He’s always the vicious psychopath in the sky who loves blood and murder, yet preaches peace. And nothing, it seems, will ever change your mind.
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