God won't lift a finger to help you.

by nicolaou 75 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

• 

  nicolaou

  Sea Breeze: @nicolau,
  I stated my case rather succiently, which you failed to address. If you have a better solution to the problem of evil than what Jesus offers, then why don't YOU present that in a new topic?

  Pathetic diversion. We were discussing Gods refusal or inability to come to the aid of people with specific illnesses or those in imminent danger. Try to focus.

  You have no way of knowing if this is true or not, (my claim that God won't lift a finger to protect you from an assailant or rapist) especially since you are an atheist.

  Well excuse me but women and children, and to a lesser degree men, are raped and assaulted daily. That God didn't protect any of them proves my point. I DO know.

  As you already know, the answer to evil is to either judge it or take away our free will, make us robots and prevent the possibility of evil. Over and over a man who predicted that he would die and raise himself from the dead, while he was dead, said that there would be a personal judgment for everyone. That is God's answer to the problem of evil. You just don't like it, even though you have no clue of a practical and acceptable alternative.

  Wipe the spittle away Sea Breeze. That was just an incoherent, fundamentalist rant. Societies of all faiths and none have developed systems of justice for millennia. None of them are perfect but humanity does try. Unfortunately, evil will always be with us - anyone who claims otherwise is delusional.
  

  Building on this ignorance, you "reason" that faith based addiction programs are a waste of time since evil still exists.

  Actually no. Faith based addiction programs DO work. Faith IS powerful. But the credit for the success of these programs belongs to the individuals who engage with them. Doctors sometimes prescribe placebos. The patient doesn't know this but has faith in his doctor and the 'medicine' supplied and hey presto!; His condition improves.
  
  Faith is a placebo.
• 

  DesirousOfChange

  We were discussing Gods refusal or inability to come to the aid of people with specific illnesses or those in imminent danger.-- Sea Breeze

  Once again we have:

  

  As I stated in the original string of posts that was hijacked,

  I would love to see EVIDENCE.

  At one time (as a devout JW) I truly believed in God answering prayers. I was many times convinced of my own prayers being answered (getting the result that I wanted).

  If you have enough confidence then do as Elijah did (1 Kings 18). Slaughter a bull and place it on an altar and wait for [your] God to consume it with fire (without you striking the match). Are you convinced you would get the same result as did Elijah? Or, would your God leave you standing as Baal did to his worshippers?

  PUT UP OR SHUT UP!
• 

  TonusOH

  I agree with the idea that the only way to deal with the problem of evil is to either judge those who commit evil acts, or to limit their ability to commit evil acts. A secular society can only do these things to an imperfect degree.

  An all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful deity, on the other hand, could easily have created a human society populated by intelligent beings who could not commit evil acts, or even entertain evil thoughts. What is the downside of this scenario?

  The only possible outcome of allowing evil is that people suffer, both in the moment and for an eternity afterwards. What is the benefit of allowing people to think evil thoughts and do evil things?
• 

  liam

  Is there an All Knowing Benevolent, Omnipotent God?

  1. I'd argue that nature of life on Earth and the course of human history makes it impossible to accept, that a "perfect, benevolent, omnipotent, omniscient God, who is ruler of the universe. and originator of all life"……...Actually Exists.

  2. Unless, of course, perfection includes attributes like being cruel enough to create para-sit-ism and animal pre-dation, ……

  3. As well as being uncaring enough to let countless humans and animals throughout history and beyond, suffer lingering illness, exploitation, victimization, and disaster.

  4. Pain and suffering have happened daily on this planet since the first living things evolved nervous systems. The rise of self-awareness simply made it more profound.

  5. What kind of perfect, benevolent, All Powerful GOD would let that happen? It defies all reason that there is a God of Love in charge of it all.

  6. If you were a Perfect, benevolent, omnipotent, omniscient,...just like God, knowing both what will happen, and understanding what a rape victim feels, or knowing what someone dying of cancer feels, or the anguish that someone feels as they watch their family starve to death, …... Could you really shrug it off as not your problem if you had the power to help them?

  I couldn't.

  7. Could you yawn and say "Oh well, it'll all work out eventually when I resurrect the good ones.?"

  8. Not me, I couldn’t do that. I can’t see one child starving to death and do nothing, or a mother dying of cancer and not step in to try to help. Yet millions upon millions of children have starved to death and millions of mothers have died of cancer leaving the father and children to fend for themselves.

  9. Yet we believe a Perfect, benevolent, All Powerful, All Knowing God that loves us..Exists. It makes no sense.

  10. Why fall in love and have a family, and work hard to care for them and love them with all our heart, if we know that eventually it will all be taken away by force? And we know for a fact that the billions before us experienced this same tragedy, and No God intervene to help anyone.

  11. If your answer is free will, then I say, Screw free will. If me as an omnipotent God, and stepping in to alter the thought process of people like Pol Pot, or Hitler….and save millions upon millions of lives? …..Hell yes I'd do that.

  12. In fact, since I'm all powerful I'd see to it that such violent ideation never arose in anyone's mind in the first place.

  13 .And I could also see to it that no one ever felt like complaining about my rule.

  14. I'd make sure animals could find their nutrition in a way that didn't require some other animals to be torn apart pieces and eaten alive.

  15. I'd avoid creating organisms that slowly starve to death, or eat a host from inside out.

  16. I could do all that and more with my Omniscience.

  17. If I could do that and I’m not perfect, and I’m not the personification of love, why is it that a perfect God who is the personification of love, Can’t do that?

  18. Because the answer is there but we don’t want to admit it because of what it implies.
• 

  DesirousOfChange

  The cognitive dissonance must be extremely painful that believers have only once recourse:

  
• 

  Halcon

  Liam -Not me, I couldn’t do that. I can’t see one child starving to death and do nothing, or a mother dying of cancer and not step in to try to help. Yet millions upon millions of children have starved to death and millions of mothers have died of cancer leaving the father and children to fend for themselves.

  9. Yet we believe a Perfect, benevolent, All Powerful, All Knowing God that loves us..Exists. It makes no sense.

  The fact that God doesn't align with what you believe God should be does not mean he doesn't exist.

  If God is truly all knowing, it automatically sets him apart from our own very limited comprehension of reality as human beings.
• 

  Beth Sarim

  God wont lift a finger to help you?

  Try telling this to JWs in Malawi in the 1960s & 1970s & convince them otherwise.

  Please read Crisis of Conscience by Raymond Franz. 2018 edition.

  Great book. Readily available on amazon.

  🙂
• 

  nicolaou

  Halcon

  The fact that God doesn't align with what you believe God should be does not mean he doesn't exist.

  This is true. It's also irrelevant to the discussion we're having. By all means, let's assume God exists.

  Why doesn't he lift a finger to protect rape victims and abused children? Even I with my "limited comprehension of reality as a human being" can see that that isn't right.
• 

  Halcon

  Why doesn't he lift a finger to protect rape victims and abused children? Even I with my "limited comprehension of reality as a human being" can see that that isn't right.

  It isn't right because we assume we know what and why God is thinking and doing or not doing. When we assume this, we proceed to demand an explanation.

  As a believer myself, I am faced with a greater dilemma than you (a non believer) in trying to reconcile this problem. And the closest I can come to it is the fact that I simply don't comprehend enough. I may never understand enough. But I accept this. I accept that God is a superior being to me and knows or comprehends the issue to a much greater extent than I.

  This of course isn't anything new, it's what the scriptures repeatedly state. That we are not the same as God.
• 

  liam

  Halcon

  The fact that God doesn't align with what you believe God should be does not mean he doesn't exist.

  Sorry for the misunderstanding Halcon.

  I never said God doesn’t exist. What I said was;

  Is there an All Knowing Benevolent, Omnipotent God?

  I'd argue that nature of life on Earth and the course of human history makes it impossible to accept, that a "perfect, benevolent, omnipotent, omniscient God, who is ruler of the universe. and originator of all life"……...Actually Exists.

  I actually do consider that there was or perhaps there is a Creator.

  But not one like Christians describe. Which according to them, God is the biblical God YHWH or Jehovah. And that he is Totally Perfect, and the epitome of Love and Compassion.

  On the other hand, there’s actually a lot of possibilities of who or what the Creator is or was.

  1. The Creator could have been a Being who was powerful enough, and intelligent enough to create life, but not immortal. And he created life on earth and then died. Leaving us to fend for ourselves and figure it out.

  That actually would make sense and explain a lot. Scientist that study human population have said that in 1AD there was about 200 million people in the entire world. There was far less before AD. But around 1800 AD humanity finally reached 1 Billion.

  Why did it take thousands and thousands of years before humanity reached 1 Billion? Because the trail of humanity has been one of ignorance, trial and error. Humanity didn’t get a “Manual” on how to live and avoid death. Our history is fill with millions of humans starving to death, freezing to death, being burned alive, falling to our death, eaten by animals, dying of disease, and so on.

  Little by little humans had to learn by trial and error on how to survive in a harsh world. How long did it take to finally figure out how to make fire? How many lives did it take to learn how to swim? How to build shelter and move out of the caves?

  We have been on our own from the very beginning. But something changed in the 1800s. We started discovering technology, medicine, anatomy, industrialized farming, electricity, plumbing, steel, and what that accomplished is that humans weren’t dying anymore needlessly. We weren’t freezing to death. We were not starving as much, we were not dying as much as in the past because medicine was making big strides in curing the sick.

  But that’s not all. We are finally getting close to creating life. About eleven years ago humans created a liver with stem cells and put it in a woman and saved her life. Or was it a pancreas? Can’t remember exactly but regardless, Humans are learning how to create hearts, eyes, lungs, and other important processes that bring us closer to being Creators.

  In one of my College Classes, the professor told us to write several possibilities of who Created life. There were literally hundreds of possibilities written by all us students.

  Here’s one possibility shown in a movie years back, when I was still a kid growing up in the jw faith;

  The Creator was like Jesus, he sacrificed his life that other might live.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2Ht9I8ik_4