Didn’t god punish us and condemn us to eternal suffering for attaining free will?
Among other things, that’s always been my gripe with Christians saying “I’ll pray for [X]”
Like…isn’t everything that happens supposedly god’s will? Wouldn’t praying for something else to happen be like you saying you know better than your infallible god?
Violence and cruelty are only evil if god didn’t say they were OK.
Sometimes children need to be culled. The reasons are far too advanced for us to understand, just trust the process.
“Watch me destroy this man’s whole life and completely get away with it”
The whole Job story pisses me off.
God should know the outcome yet still gets in a pissing contest with Satan to ruin some guys life. Why?
And then gives him a ‘replacement’ family in compensation and somehow we’re supposed to believe it’s all better.
I remember sitting in Sunday School as a kid and everyone around me is talking about how good a story this is and how Job ended up even better off than he was before, but all I could think about is God deciding to murder my family and then thinking that some strangers would just replace them.
It’s just so… alien. Creepy Eldritch being playing with humans like we’re dolls. It was terrifying to me and I couldn’t understand why the people around me didn’t see it that way.
It makes a lot more sense if you look at the Bible as a religious fanfic subreddit, and its writers as early 2010s creepypasta authors (think Jeff The Killer). The writer was probably pissed at Job and wrote the story to vent (the biblical equivalent of drawing someone as a soyjak).
American Christian: … if I live and act like a shitty human being, hate everyone, try to make as much money as possible, no matter who it affects and I get away with it all without consequences … it’s because God allowed it and it’s part of his plan. My shitty self is allowed by God and shouldn’t be stopped or prevented. If you say something against me, you are blaspheming God’s plan and you will burn in hell forever and ever and ever, amen.
I never found freewill and omnipotence incompatible
Imagine you’re God. You are omniscient, so whatever decision you make no matter how complex you can see all of time with and without that decision.
It’s like looking at the trajectory of a mars landing — it’s complicated, but you can plan it out and see the whole path.
So in my head God goes ahead and makes some choice, being omniscient he sees all the outcomes and individual trajectories of our lives, but from our vantage point we still have the ability to choose and make decisions, God just knows what the full arc looks like. It’s relative. There’s nothing incompatible there.
That being said, I’m atheist/agnostic. I’m an egalitarian and I believe if there is a god it would be asinine to judge us for our faith instead of our actions.
The alternative would be sentencing billions who never learned of Christianity to hell or purgatory for reasons outside their control. That doesn’t make sense to me.
