• SippyCup@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    God doesn’t care, or God doesn’t know.

    If he knows, but does not care, then he is not good.

    If he cares, but does not know, then he is not god.

    If this is part of the plan, then God is evil.

  • RattlerSix@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    There’s no indication that God would be good. In the Bible, David did something bad so God had 10 of his wives raped as punishment. He ordered genocide, specifically including that suckling children were to be killed. He does a lot of bad shit. Maybe he’s real and he’s a Trump supporter.

  • mechoman444@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    You’re asking an existential question: why do bad things happen to good people? I would wager that this has been a subject of philosophical debate for as long as humans have existed.

    Ultimately, I think it’s the wrong question.

    What you’re experiencing is a form of confirmation bias. You expect bad people to live and good people to die, and that expectation is shaped by societal conditioning and the beliefs you’ve been exposed to throughout your life.

    In reality, cancer, for example, affects a relatively small percentage of the world’s population at any given time, although that percentage still represents a tremendous number of people.

    You’re seeing it affect people in roughly the proportions you’d expect. The problem is that the people you pay attention to tend to be the ones you believe shouldn’t be affected by it, while those you believe should be affected often aren’t.

    We tend to perceive these events as unjust because we expect the world to operate according to some inherent sense of fairness. Unfortunately, nature doesn’t make that distinction between good and bad people.

  • Bubbaonthebeach@lemmy.ca
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    3 days ago

    Another reason on the list that I do not believe in God such as God is portrayed in the Bible, Torah, Koran, etc. If there is a God, I don’t think it cares about life on Earth. It may have created the beginning of everything somehow but I don’t think it micromanages what happens on Earth or even cares one way or the other.

    • spankysalmon@fedinsfw.app
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      4 days ago

      With the way Christians and similar preach? Yea, God’s a psychopath and so are they.

      Though there are several theologically sound explanations, especially if you truly believe “God” is beyond or bigger than our universe.

      Basic believer: “God works in mysterious ways”. Sure, that Harlequin baby only ever had a miserable existence, but that’s because their soul didn’t need to experience a full life! Sure, your school teacher only ever did good works and then got ran over by a truck, but God thought it was her time!

      More logical theology: God is bigger than the universe. He sees the whole thing. If something bad happens, then it is merely a wrinkle, or if you believe in divine guidance, it’s a tragectory change to something better. Either way, God’s not helping you, because what you want makes for a worse over-all universe. Or, if you want to be more literal about it, maybe God doesn’t necessarily have the power to truly magic something. Maybe he cannot instantly change an exact, single detail about this universe, yet created it, could destroy it, and has enough control to drastically change things? Like a video game dev seeing how their Sims playthrough plays out.

      Deeper theology: We’re here to be tested/checked/validated/etc. God said he gave us the answers, not that he’ll do the test for us. Besides, if we were instructed to take care of something (like Earth, or your personal life), why in the ever loving FUCK would you expect someone else to do the job you were told to do? Nobody is going to be happy to have to step in to fix something you fucked up, especially when they were the ones who put you on the job to take care of it in the first place.

      Deeper science fiction: How would such a great being even begin to care about the individualities of creatures even lesser than ants to him as ants are to us? It’s not hard to imagine someone caring deeply about their creation, but not really caring about exactly how the tiny details come out for every single detail. Like a single piece of glitter falling off your child’s art piece, an individual life is meaningless so long as the whole picture remains.

      Mix and match those views to your heart’s content, and I’ve heard all of them and more growing up in a church. Bunch of intellectually weak clowns unwilling to admit religion is just Baby’s First Philosophy…

        • spankysalmon@fedinsfw.app
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          4 days ago

          Not sure of too many other opinions I’ve directly heard, but what kind of belief do you want to hear more of? (I know I said I heard more dismissive/excusive beliefs, but I don’t remember them in any representative fashion; it was thankfully years and years ago!)

          • ChunderBustickles@piefed.nz
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            3 days ago

            I’m just struggling with my own slow process of discarding faith and found the arguments useful… I don’t have a particular direction or anything

            • spankysalmon@fedinsfw.app
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              3 days ago

              Ahh I see. Yea, it’s a whole whirlpool of ad-hoc and circular logic… It always boils down to, “It’s correct because I was told it’s correct!”.

              I can understand community and wanting to be a good person, but there is SO much garbage piled on top…

          • ChanchoManco@lemmy.zip
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            3 days ago

            Maybe one where god is plainly evil, and other similar to the last one: it was only a creator that put things in motion and it’s long gone now.

            • spankysalmon@fedinsfw.app
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              3 days ago

              The old Cainites, Cathars, Marcionites, and other similar Gnostic sects quite directly believed God was the bad guy. (or at least the physical world and its creator; it gets weird in some of them…)

              Lots of variations on why and who and bla…

    • hansolo@lemmy.today
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      3 days ago

      I think it makes more sense to say Yahweh is malevolent. It started off as a god of thunder and war, and when the ancient Judeans moved from a polytheist pantheon to a monotheist model, that’s who the groups that won had chosen as their god.

      But yeah, name a single diety directly responsible for more death and destruction? It literally pits 3 and a half groups that worship it against each other! To generate war. To generate death. It feeds on death and pain.

  • kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    God could still exist. It just means that either he isn’t benevolent, isn’t all-powerful, isn’t all-knowing, or some combination thereof.

    • Skeezix@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      In any decently run universe this guy would have been out on his all-powerful ass a long time ago.