- #71
Mumeishi
- 219
- 0
Originally posted by redrogue
Here's another way of looking at it. It's off the deep end, but here goes...
Suppose God created evil (in the form of Satan, let's say), the opposite of himself, to give us a choice. If there were only good in the world, we couldn't exercise our free will. For this to happen there would need to be an opposing force, so He created evil. But I believe mankind as a whole allows the suffering because we continue to make the *wrong* choice, resulting in negative consequences to our actions.
Free will, remember?
Why would he want to give us freewill? Particularly since he created our relatively bad, weak, ignorant nature. That's just irresponsible. The result is predictable - there is nothing free about it.
Also, its not a fair game since the rules are unclear - regions without Christianity are damned (how do people who were not exposed to Christianity have a 'choice?'), as are people who (rightly) don't have a belief in god because belief (and thus even faith) is unjustified - those people cannot force themselves to believe in something they simply don't and which they don't realize they ought to have faith in.
And the 'choice' of Christianity is just one among dozens of (presumably false) religious belief systems. He has made a good job of disguising Christianity as another superstitious cult worshipping nonexistent spirits. Why would he go and do a thing like that? Why do you have faith in this tribal Hebrew god Yahweh and not in Vishnu, Odin or Ra? Why do you reject them and 'turn away' from them?
I find it hard to believe that people find this credible. Do you *really* think this makes sense? Even if there was an all-powerful, benevolent superbeing who made the universe - is this *really* what he would do? - a being who knew how to create perfect creatures like angels and a perfect place like heaven - he would create imperfect creatures and surround them with temptations and various arbitrary obstacles in the way of blind faith and allow them to suffer and inflict great harm on one another, then vastly reward those who unquestioningly accepted the Christian belief system and tortured those whith inquiring minds who asked questions and asked to be shown along with those who were never exposed to Christianity.
Do you really believe that. It just looks like a self-propagating belief system to me.