Is God evil for allowing all this pain and suffering exist in this world?

For you.By you claiming i have an attitude of victimhood you are guily of what i said above…Either you can take it back or we can keep going like this .But since you claimed something which is not true that i have not to put up with just know that from now own my replies wont have any gracious dialogue in it nor sugarcoating.
Ill keep it flat and simple

Nick, when some writes “personal experience,” I think it’s a natural tendency to think the writer (you) sees something harmful that came from those experiences.

You described your response as “criticizing harshly.” You call me an old man; I don’t think we know each other. You state I’m “offended” and use “irony and ignorant arguments” You write that I exhibit “obnoxious behavior” and that I “deserve all the “hate” you get.” I don’t think of myself as a victim, though there are plenty of Christians who do; and plenty of non-Christians, ex-Christians.

I’m not asking you to change your opinion. If you’re sharing your opinion on this forum, I want to understand what’s behind it.

That was for @Terry_Sampson .If you see on the right corner of the response it has his name and photo.Are you for real right now?

Nick, I’m glad to know you don’t think of yourself as a victimhood. That was my perception; I retract it.

Nick, I missed the “Terry” reference. I’ll look for that going forward.

Am I for real right now? Yes, I think so. I’m not trying to offend, convert, or corner you. I want to understand.

Thanks,

Nick, I’m happy to go to a private discussion, if you prefer. Thanks for sharing some of yourself.

Dennis

Forgot to paste that above. Read them and the go ahead and understand what I mean by agnostic antitheism. There is atheistic antitheism although I guess this sounds stupid to you as well. Anyway I don’t have to argue with you. My time is precious wasting it on a fundamentalist who has a life crisis because some guy on the internet hurt his feelings over his religion. Big LOLS.

I had a peace of mind when you were absent and ignored me. Can you do that again pls?

I forget a lot of things but I won’t forget that priceless joke.
Here, kid, rather than directing me to a page that doesn’t have “agnostic antitheism” on it, here’s a page that has “agnostic atheism” on it: Agnostic atheism
I searched it, but in vain, for “agnostic antitheism”. Perhaps your eyes can find it? :rofl:

And yet, here you are, dancing with me. Thanks.

Are you talking to @boendennis again? You certainly aren’t talking to me, although you may think you are. And if that’s the case, then you’re more confused than I thought: Nothing you say hurts my feelings.

What? Is your finger broken? You can put me on your “Ignore” list.
P.S. Hope you find that piece of mind that you seem to have lost.

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Alright Grandpa see ya!!!

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Good luck with that. Our mutual acquaintance faces a dilemma: "Should he hate God, or folks who believe in God, or both?

And:

So, either God is omnipotent and allows pain and suffering, or he isn’t omnipotent and cant’ stop it.

Since God is, according mainstream Christianity, the Creator of all things, he shouldn’t have given humans free will to begin with. Ergo I conclude that our mutual acquaintance thinks God’s first mistake was to give humans free will.
God’s second, and concurrent, mistake was creating humans who can and do sin.
To be a perfect, God should have created moral robots: automatons incapable of sin.
That’s why our mutual acquaintance hates God.
Why, then does he hate Christians who believe in and worship such a god? Precisely because the god they believe in and worship is either impotent or the author of sin. We are worse than fools, in his opinion We don’t come close to meeting his standards and as he says:

Not only is Nick’s desire for an absurd God and/or an absurd universe unusual, to say the least. It’s discriminatory. You don’t see him complaining about Judaicism or Islam.

Terry, I don’t know you or Nick. My suggestion to you is the same as my suggestion to Nick. Please stay aware of the “gracious dialogue” the BioLogos seeks to achieve, both on this forum, in its podcasts and gatherings, and - as far as I can tell - on very personal and intimate levels.

Thanks.

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Yes. Yes it is. And I admit it😉

  • God in absolute control is the same kind of trivialization as dreamer omnipotence.
  • Cessationism effectively transforms Christianity into Deism and “God is dead” Nietzscheism.

And these are really two sides of the same coin, for the watchmaker God making a machine to control, might as well BE dead for all the relevance such a thing would have to the living of our lives. Atheism makes more sense to me than these.

So I refute both of these to say that God created for an authentic relationship which is NEITHER control NOR non-involvement. This is confirmed by the creation of life making its own choices because only a relationship is served by such a creation. And as the Bible clearly shows, this opens the door for the possibility of considerable disappointment – as much a part of an authentic relationship as suffering and death is a part of life.

And thus God is sovereign because the world is according to the reason He created it – relationship not control nor non-involvement.

You might say that God’s control is inversely proportional to the degree in which He is successful. For if we throw away our free will to enslave ourselves to sin then His desire for relationship would naturally use it to seek our liberation.

His strategy might change but not His objective.

More hurt perhaps but I am not so sure about more angry. Have you read the communist manifesto and talked to Marxists? It and they hardly even made much sense. This was not cold rationality. It was all about anger and hatred because of some very real abuses of capitalism. These former believers didn’t put together armies to slaughter people by the millions like the Marxists did.

I guess. I’ve never talked to a known communist and personally find it a dull, failed theory. Then again unchecked capitalism is really starting to get ugly with legions of homeless unable make a decent life. I was so disappointed when took a class from Martin Jay called Intellectual History of some range of years only to find it chock full of Marxist drivel. At least I learned there was nothing there of any interest to me.

But your perspective may be skewed by having however briefly held a godless POV without first having been raised a Christian. My perspective too is unusual in having wondered out the back door of religion before I was literate. All I remember is having sung This Little Star of Mine. But I’ve talked to any number of online atheists who seemingly had to fight to get away who report feeling betrayed and angry. But I don’t think I’ll publish any findings based on my erratic sample space.

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Tim Keller wrote a good book (that’s almost a given ; - ) called Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just that deals with it well.

Well I am certainly not going to agree that my perspective is “skewed,” but I will grant that I came from such a different way of looking at things that it is difficult to make comparisons.

Does your use of the word “godless” refer to any perspective other than fundamentalist Christianity? I was certainly raised quite irreverent and skeptical. It wasn’t atheist but agnostic, where God was simply a big question mark.

I think my parents study of psychology taught them to avoid some parenting mistakes and while I may have embraced Christianity, there is much that I appreciate and emulate in what they did.

Is the “fight to get away” and “feeling betrayed” about their struggle with their own “Christian” worldview or a struggle with the intolerance of their family and community? I would think it is the reactionary perspective which is skewed.

The latter is the hearsay I often encountered.

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