What does it say? I agree God can’t. He can’t even demonstrate divine intelligence unequivocally. Although a radically inclusive country carpenter as a whole might still be the closest to a smoking gun.
Fromm book description:
Author Thomas Jay Oord says God’s love is inherently uncontrolling. God loves everyone and everything, so God can’t control anyone or anything. This means God cannot prevent evil singlehandedly. God can’t stop evildoers, whether human, animal, organisms, or inanimate objects and forces.
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Not according to the Bible.
Not in the natural world, no, He can’t. In the next He completely prevents evil outcomes and heals all evil. It’s the least He can do!
Well that’s our mistake isn’t it? And when you say Bible. I don’t see Him directly preventing much (British understatement) evil in the gospels and Acts.
I never said he stopped all bad stuff or even most bad stuff. But looking at the Bible we can see God/Jesus stopping evil-doers, control wild animals, heal diseases. (As well as causing some bad stuff as well!)
Yeah, again in the relatively real NT world, compared with the fantasies of the OT, I’m not aware of God in Heaven doing anything much unless God on Earth asked for it. A few were healed through the Apostles. That’s it.
It’s entirely down to us.
And then there were the multitude of the incarnational George Müller’s answered prayers and co-instants.
The OT is a mix of the historical and the non-historical. As is the NT, actually. In the church lectionary, the readings from the OT relate to the NT readings. This past Sunday the Gospel reading was the story of the healing of the 10 lepers. We also heard the OT story of how Naaman was healed of leprosy. It very well may be that this story is historical (with some post-production additions).
There was suffering and death long before any mythological fall. I envy the Christians disconnected from reality who think the garden story brought both into the world. It is also absurd to think babies suffer today because some literally ignorant woman was convinced to eat a magic fruit by a talking snake. Klax asked for a response that didn’t blame the sufferer. Christians have a tendency to blame the sufferer when senseless evil happens or resort to the unsatisfying “God works in mysterious ways.”
Suffering is a part of reality and the way God made the universe. But that is neither the time nor place for theology. For me the only answer is Jesus. He suffered with us. God gets it because He went through it. He Himself was nailed to a cross and thought it well worthwhile. Beyond that the problem of evil is largely insolvable and little more than philosophical babble. Words…words led out into battle with other words… The common theological fabric softeners reek of confirmation bias. But a worldview with eternal senseless evil that lacks justice is worse than one with temporal senseless evil with eternal justice.
All we can do is be there for people in the face of tragedy.
When he was 15 and a prisoner at Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel watched as three Jewish scholars put God on trial for indifference to the suffering of his people — and found him guilty. After the verdict, Wiesel has said, there was silence, and then the participants all sat down to evening prayers.
Vinnie
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Sounds a bit like the book of Job.
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I love it when people put God on trial 
or refer to Eve as literally ignorant.
Whilst physical death logically predates the fall this can not be said in the same way for suffering. Logically speaking the problem of evil is a consequence of the fall as eating from the tree of realisation of good and evil is what leads to our perception of believing to be able to judge between good and evil. Not to realise this blatantly obvious argument is missing reality. How could you suffer if you had no judgement if something was bad? Even pain can be part of pleasure and some people drive that to pathological levels but it is not evil, but a useful sensation.
To talk dismissively about the story of the fall is clearly a matter of literary ignorance as it shows the inability to read a piece of literature in its context. I call it the poetic description of puberty, as it is the same process we use to take on ownership of the self by making our own moral judgements when rejecting the authority of the parents over the self. It is beautifully written in a way that even the illiterate can relate to it, because their language is not as dominated by literal interpretation. Its just the Disney generation that struggles with it.
It is odd to see how modern society is using suffering as virtue signalling, to claim victimhood to appeal to the love of others. However, it is not to be loved as in being given what we need, but to be given what we want.
This seems to me as an easy scapegoat way to justify evil. Again a father can love his child but not in his mind would let him hurt someone else.
Can he control us? Yes he can he is God if he exists. Does he or have already planned something for every single one of us? Nobody knows.
Your argument falls really short here. I understand that you want to justify God and I don’t want to blame him too but sometimes it feels impossible not to. God has some responsibility in this
Very well said. Some they’ll even hit you with the “well God has a special plan” or “let your worries to God and all will be good” bs. Like it’s some short of thing. Then we have the Christians preying on people’s feelings and hardships. Prosperity gospels ,miracle healers you name it.
Giving false hope in the name of the almighty .
And some even believe that what theyr doing isn’t wrong and it’s in fact right.
There maybe could have been another. Don’t you think it’s depressing that God saw all the possibilities and out of all the outcomes he said"Yeap cant avoid it". It’s honestly depressing to me to think that. So I think there might have been another way
Agreed.
Care to explain further?
That also good
The story is fictional. We have said it a million times.
I really do hope God and life put you trough some ■■■■. And I mean gutter. So you can revaluate the things you’ve said. These words come from people like you who has never had a significant incident in their life that even made them question God. Either you are a fanatic or haven’t been trough nothing so your faith haven’t been shaken
Paul didn’t seem to think it was a mere “poetic description of puberty.” So your comment equally applies to him and your interpretation of the garden myth is as dismissive of Paul as I am of the fairy tale itself. It also dismisses the pseudonymous author writing in Paul’s name that blames Eve.
Real progress can’t be had when Christian’s play word games to salvage broken theology instead of letting go of it completely. Would you say animals feel pain but don’t suffer?
Suffering: the state of undergoing pain, distress, or hardship.
That has all existed on earth for a very long time. We have cancer, natural disasters like hurricanes, droughts, tsunamis, death and disease. God is responsible for all of them. If those never caused suffering before a mythological garden then I don’t know what that word means anymore. And if the fall is just a “poetic description of puberty” God is responsible for the fall as well because we have no control over our biology or how the world runs. Genesis 1 makes it unequivocally clear the form and function of reality is due to God’s providence and care. God is as much responsible for pain and suffering as He can be said to be for the air we breathe. If we want to talk about literary ignorance, that is not exactly the most obvious reading of Genesis 2-3. But it is inescapably where your interpretation leads.
Vinnie
It’s odd to see a Christian saying such things. Just to be clear what’s ‘virtue signalling’: “an attempt to show other people that you are a good person, for example by expressing opinions that will be acceptable to them, especially on social media”. The expression is often used to imply that the virtue being signalled is exaggerated or insincere. Source: Cambridge Dictionary/Wikipedia.
So are you saying that victims of all kinds of abuse didn’t really suffer, or did, but now are using it to gain sympathy in an unfair way? Or perhaps they didn’t even suffer in the first place and are going for the ‘sympathy vote’ anyway? Just suffer in silence and put up with it, eh?
@NickolaosPappas I agree with your take on this
That just makes no sense to me. So if we show love to those who suffered, that’s not really love, because they don’t really need it? I wonder what would Jesus do.
Either he is unable to have empathy or has never been a victim of any sort. Injustices are sometimes skipped on some people. Life’s unfair.
@marvin I assume is a privileged one.
Anyway I just hope he goes trough gutter sh@@t challenges. So he could learn one or two things.
Maybe then he could change his mind
If I’m mistaken I’m sorry and maybe he can clear up the missunderstanding . If not there’s no reason to keep going
As a person who has been trough some things that have left scars I won’t go into further because I’ll get mad eventually.
Marvin I hope you never go trough these things man. I hope you never find any injustices. I hope you never see any evil yourself. I hope the best in your life.
Ignorance is indeed bliss.
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thanks for your best wishes. if you go through the untimely loss of a loved to pancreatic cancer which is a painful way to go, so thanks to God for morphine, one can try to blame it on God to fail and the unjust world he created and blame him for not answering ones prayers and take it as proof for his inability to change reality according to ones wishes - or you can thank him for the time he gave you to be together and ask him to help you to live reality according to his wishes.
I have to admit being privileged for having encountered the possibility of death for myself and came out fairly unscarred. I definitely know that I can not take any credit for that myself. Every time I had my scull reopened to fix my CSF leak I had to sign for accepting the risks and leave my fate to the hand of God and after the 3rd operation resulted in an anaphylactic shock and the amount of scar tissue around some of the nerves the risk of trying to fix the leak has become too high. So far I have only God to thank for not having had complications as the leak draining through my ear has resulted in an interesting biofilm living at the outlet of my eustachian tube so I definitely have a lot to be thankful for.
With regards to suffering I find that a lot of people who experience suffering overcome it through their faith. They do however base their expectation of fairness on the creation of a fair world. I wonder how if one accepts the unfairness of the world in the light of ones conviction that there is no God who created a fair world how one can reason ones state of suffering? After all it is a discrepancy between expectation of reality and perceived reality. So perhaps you can help me out here.
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you clearly struggle with my post. The problem of modern society is the declaration of suffering victimhood for reality not to be what one would like it to be in order to obtain support for what you want.
First of all sorry for your loss and your situation. I truly feel. But no one who experienced suffering wouldve said the things you did. It doesn t.ake any sense
As it should have been
So you admit yourself God played some role?