Add a comment

Angry, that was probably the dumbest comment I have ever heard. One would not need to abolish Good for there to be no evil because if there was nothing but pure good, there would be no evil within the good to abolish.

ya no sh*t (thaedderz)

While I do agree that good and evil are subjective so therefore this doesn't really hold any sway, 5'd for simplicity.

Because of sinners. That's why.

Korf41: Does Free Will really matter if we have rules we MUST follow?

win

Well there's the whole "God will let you do whatever you want. You just go to hell for it." I mean, you can do other than he "commands" in terms of the commandments, but if you actually consider the logical implications of omnipotence and realize that an omnipotent got implies an efficacious will (whatever he wills, happens, necessarily. Nothing that he doesn't will happens, necessarily.) Existence is an extension of an omnipotent will... nothing can be that is not directly caused by him.

You don't have to follow the rules, you choose not to break them because of the consequences. By all means, break them if you want.

"You don't have to follow the rules, you choose not to break them because of the consequences. By all means, break them if you want." Yeah read what I said and you'll realize that this either implies that God does not exist or that God is not omnipotent (and, thus, is not the Christian god).

Let's just go back to loving Mother Earth.

everyone can believe what they want to believe, and if you change you religious views because of a YTMND, that is sad. Also this new version of FireFox rules!!!

Wrong, please educate yourself. Read "The problem of Pain" By C.S.Lewis because it answers this.

The only God is max and he is only omnipotent on one planet in cyberspace.

""Huh? The Bible says whatever you pray for, you shall have it. Too much work too look up where it's said." The stipulation to that was if it is in God's will. People who know the Bible and understand God's laws would only truthfully ask for things that they know God would grant them. Thus when I pray for a little extra energy in the morning to get out of bed, I get it, whereas when you pray for a toilet made out of solid gold, your YTMND gets downvoted." ANSWER THE GOOD AND EVIL PROBLEM.

Because what we may see as evil, He may see as something else. Everything for a higher purpose and all.

I do not usually vote at all on sites such as these, but in this case I will have to make an exception as to prevent disproven sayings ending up in U&C...

"Because what we may see as evil, He may see as something else. Everything for a higher purpose and all." The bible talks about evil. You can't get away from it. The bible talks about an evil serpent. You lose. There is evil. Thus, the problem of evil. If someone can actually bring up a good rational argument to solve the problem, let's hear it. Malebranche, a Christian rationalist, attempted and, according to most philosophers, failed. Spinoza was a Christian and... became a pantheist...

"So why are christian people suffering from cancer not miraculously healed?" Because it is not in God's will that those individuals be cured, it is the will of the individuals who want to live. What we judge to be evil in the short term may ultimately all be part of God's plan to create a greater good. So, for example, a grandmother dies of breast cancer, her grandchildren grow up to find the cure. A woman is raped in an alley, she gives birth to a Nobel peace prize winner. Etc.

COYOTEJACK the problem of evil is REAL. The bible mentions evil. THUS, you must account for GOD to be both OMNIPOTENT and ALL GOOD and somehow allow evil to exist.

You can't get around it by just throwing out the word "free will" without rationally proving that it does not conflict with omnipotence, as is to be expected.

C. S. Lewis was a fiction writer. I don't really think you're going to find any solid logical proofs anywhere near his writings. You can go and reprint it word for word, but I am not very confident that it will hold up to any sort of scrutiny.

KORF41: "the problem of evil is REAL. The bible mentions evil. THUS, you must account for GOD to be both OMNIPOTENT and ALL GOOD and somehow allow evil to exist." FIRST of ALL, CALM the F*CK down and STOP with the IMPASSIONED TEENAGER random CAPITALIZED words TYPING. 1. God is omnipotent, you are not. Thus God is a better judge of good and evil than you are. 2. Free will is the alternative to living slavery, wherein all actions would be scripted to avoid us all struggle and hardship.

"What is the point of finding a cure of a disease a higher power supposedly can cure?" Because we are here to make our own choices and live our own lives. Would you prefer life as a mindless automaton if it meant no one had to die, suffer, or work?

Kierkegaard is a genius, and a Christian, and says that there are blatant contradictions throughout the bible but believes that these are only there to give doubt as to the existence of god. Without doubt, he believes, faith is meaningless. The guy is, honestly, a genius, but he uses irrationality as a measure to enhance his faith. I won't, and I'll accept his claims that the bible has plenty of contradictions (including this one). Read Kierkegaard and stop the apologetics (and theodicy).

"Because we are here to make our own choices and live our own lives." That and we have rules we MUST follow or perish.

Alitheas... Are you serious? Life like that would render everything meaningless... We would learn no personality defining lessons and would be more ignorant then the most richest uninformed person that is born into wealth and has their entire life set up for them with no worries whatsoever. It is good that God knows most people would never want that (and I am betting all people would not if it actually happened)

"... YES." Then you'd also sacrifice any pleasure life could bring you, and nothing would have value. If all food tasted delicious to our subjective judgement as it stands now, no food would taste delicious. If the weather was always a sunny 75 degrees outside, we wouldn't even notice. Everything would be bland, everything would be scripted and predictable, life would have no purpose. Personally, I strongly believe that hard work is its own reward, not because I'm a masochist, but because it allows me

to relax in my beanbag chair and fire up the ol' X-Box. If I didn't work hard, I wouldn't appreciate the value of my possessions, relaxation time, or sense of accomplishment and well being.

Korf41, like I said, I cannot find this book right now on the internet and cannot recall the exact words he wrote... Please stop wasting time. Just find the book and read the entire thing and you will understand.

coyotejack: Well wasn't that Heaven which you just desribed? Life after death?

"to relax in my beanbag chair and fire up the ol' X-Box. If I didn't work hard, I wouldn't appreciate the value of my possessions, relaxation time, or sense of accomplishment and well being." Atheism doesn't prevent you form doing any of this! Christianity does. You guys love to prove your own religion wrong, it's fun!

What? You just made a bunch of assumptions you cannot backup. Not rational? And just how the hell would you know? You assume the book is the same as other books?

"Well wasn't that Heaven which you just desribed? Life after death?" A spiritual life, not a physical life. It's not like a cartoon, where you go walk around on a cloud, pet unicorns and get chocolate from a chocolate tree. It's a lot more ephemeral than that, and there's a lot of speculation about exactly what to expect. The Bible is very vague about its description of heaven.

"What? You just made a bunch of assumptions you cannot backup. Not rational? And just how the hell would you know? You assume the book is the same as other books?" I could go ask a professor if he's read the book and ask him to give an analysis of it, but I don't really expect much out of a fiction writer. Nor do I expect much out of someone who isn't a philosopher and isn't held in any regard as a philosopher. Christians like him because he's preaching his own crowd... aside from that...

"The Bible is very vague about its description of heaven." It's not vague about the problem of evil. Please try to reconcile it. I bet you can't! Get on topic!

"We weren't talking about atheism. We were talking about whether it would be preferable if God created a world without hardship." And, like I said, what you said you were doing is logically impossible given that God is omnipotent and all good. Thus, the Christian conception of god is flawed. The atheist conception, which is to say the lack of a dogmatic belief system, accomodates actions that you could deem as "good" and "evil" as do many other religions. But, not Christianity.

"It's not vague about the problem of evil. Please try to reconcile it. I bet you can't! Get on topic!" I did, you danced around it. God's a better judge of good and evil than Korf41, the militant atheist debating on a YTMND comments section. Thus God allows what God deems good to exist, not what Korf41 deems good.

"So Hell is good how?" Hell is just consequence and repercussion. It's an eternal feeling of woe and lament for acting against God. If nothing has consequence, why act according to God's law?

And by the way, do you happen to be creationists who don't believe in evolution?

And so God is a God of love, self-love.

"Hell is just consequence and repercussion. It's an eternal feeling of woe and lament for acting against God. If nothing has consequence, why act according to God's law?" I'm not acting against god. I'm acting according to reason. If god exists, god gave me reason. If god exists, he is obviously not the Christian god because he would be a logical contradiction. I have no reason to believe that god doesn't exist, but I have no reason to believe that god exists. Thus, I withhold my belief.

Sounds like you're agnostic, like me, Korf.

Atheism is a faith based religeon. You have to believe something unprovable and believe it entirely based on your own faith. You belong to the church of atheism.

What?? Did you read what I wrote at all? I hold no organized faith, nor do I declassify science or evolution. The beliefs written in the bible are a way for mankind to explain the unknown. One engulfing desire of humanity is the need to explain everything, and we did so through religion. We now have a better understanding of things, so we can use science to explain. The ultimate question though is "Why?", and this can never be explained through science.

If you consider yourself to be governed by the laws of science and the ideas of philosophy, you HAVE to say there is a possibility that God does exist, and there is a possibility that God does not exist. We don't have the proof either way, so to say either God does exist or God doesn't exist takes an amount of faith, hense believing something you can't prove. It is fact that Atheism is just as much as a religion as Christianity or Islam.

to have some sort of order about the universe. Like the fact that there were about 1 billion and 1 parts matter for all 1 billion parts anti-matter, and that imbalance makes all the matter we exist with today. The method that higher elements are created, how elements past iron are made from collapsing stars, the life of stars themselves, the mathmatical gravitational constant of the universe, and i could go on for days. Everything is so fine tuned in the universe, it just seems too orderly to be chaos.

Although, I might agree on appearing atheist by making a Ytmnd called 'Why God Doesn't Exist', well I'd make a 'Why God Exists' if there wasn't one already. One thing I have thought about is that if we took away all life in the universe, exactly all life, what would be the point of the universe? There would be noone and/or nothing to experience it.

Arguing that everything is so fine tuned and gives the world such order so there must be a god is great. If everything were chaos there could be no life. Thus, we would not be alive to think about it. If gravity repelled instead of attracted then matter would be relatively equally spaced throughout the universe and no compounds, planets, life forms, anything would form. So to say, "why is it so orderly" is a bad question when the answer is "the reason you can wonder why it is so orderly is because it is"

To say that life magically formed on this planet is to disregard that half of the history of the world was lifeless, that humans have developed in the equivalent of a minute in the world's life. It took a long time for life to develop to the point it is at currently. If the first lightning bolt had hit a pool of matter and formed the correct compounds for the first biological compounds to form and soon after (relatively speaking) life had formed it wouldn't mean anything different. It's just probability.

to prove that god cannot exist, this does not seem a tenable position, rationally. Thus, people who are strong atheists are likely either doing so on blind faith or flawed reasoning unless they can rationally prove otherwise. Weak atheism, on the other hand, is the belief that there is no reason to believe that god exists. This is different from agnosticism which is the positive assertion that it is impossible to determine whether or not god exists. Many philosophers, including Bertrand Russell...

I have no reason to believe that unicorns exist. This is not to say that unicorns do not exist either here or anywhere else in the universe and this certainly is not to say that it is impossible for unicorns to exist or impossible to determine whether or not unicorns exist. IT is not a belief at all. You cannot say that I have faith that unicorns do not exist. I in fact lack faith in anything pertaining to unicorns and lack any belief as to the existence of unicorns. A weak aunicornist is not crazy.

Why does existence exist? People say that it is in God's nature to exist. Existence is a part of God's essence. If someone is going to argue for this, why not argue for the simpler explanation that existence is part of existence's essence. If something exists that is because it exists. That's a simple explanation. I have no reason to believe that matter has ever been created or destroyed. Now, matter isn't as simple as we thought it to be 100 years ago... antimatter is some crazy stuff...

an infinite posthistory, and this is supposed to prove that the present is impossible. It's not very complicated to refute, however. Draw a timeline. Put an arrow one each end pointing to infiniti and place a dot wherever you like. Call that dot now. It is possible.

For the sake of being brief, I'll only touch on one thing you said. "this position [agnostic] is as untenable as strong atheism." I don't see it as something that could be defended or refuted at all, but more along the lines of a consession into the fact that arguing either way for the existance of God or against the existance of God is simply just futile. I see it as the only factual choice on this topic since basicly it's saying "I don't know, you don't know, and we will never know, so why bother".

Great Quote and Thanx for the Upvotes on my sites.