I was so busy following the disaster in Japan that I couldn’t even crack open my bible. So let’s just ask the believers to explain how a compassionate God could do something like this.
Discuss.
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I hope that this is a lesson to all .. I am the Unintelligent Designer.
I do, however, manifest myself in other mysterious ways.
I am that I am.
I wonder what Fred Phelps has to say about it. He was all over the Indonesia quake/tsunami saying it was god punishing them.
Pudpuller was a couple days ahead:
Jesus’ words
This “Drumbeat” thread at The Oil Drum has a bunch of links to stories on the nuclear disaster unfolding in Japan.
Be sure to glance at the comments — commenters are typically scientists / engineers and energy industry people — very enlightening.
Drumbeat Special Edition: Fukushima Thread
We believers don’t have to explain how a compassionate God “could do something like this”, because He didn’t –not in the sense you imply. God didn’t wake up the other day and decide to create a devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan that would kill lots of people. Natural disasters aren’t a sign of God’s wrath nor some divine whim.
It is true that they are part of the amazing universe God created. Should God have created a universe without earthquakes? The world really would be quite different –both literally and figuratively– without them. Do you really think God should have created a system where nothing bad ever happened? And if so, is it just that bad things should never happen to humans, or any creature? Should every living thing be immortal in this world? Would that really be better, or just a different kind good and bad mixed together?
I realize that many enjoy poking fun at fundamentalists, but when you treat their rather simple-minded literal interpretations as definitive of all religion, you’re being as simple-mindedly literal as they are. Just because their image of God is rather puny & unpleasant doesn’t mean God actually is puny & unpleasant.
Finally, do keep in mind that God actually does inspire & motivate many of those who have been saving lives, among both those participating in rescue efforts now and those whose work over the last years and decades prevented even greater damage and casualties.
@5
Belief in Me is fine.
Belief that what I do is good, is another thing.
I am that I am.
p.k dick teaches us that god is an autistic child.
You could have used a parable of forbidden fruit in correlation to nuclear energy.
I’m goin’ with a plate of spaghetti.
It seems to me that the Humanistic perceptions of “diety” are always couched in the language of philosophy simply because the need to rationalize the ever present fears of childhood that never go away with some people. That “monster in the closet” really is that fear of the mind. That imagination, that random and rather self-oriented creativity that all children develop as they gain experience with their senses.
Sight has a huge portion of the brain reserved to process the information, as does sound, and touch. The need for people to actually feel things before they can understand them is what defines their reality. For a child, any sound can mean danger, any visual input can be perceived as a potential threat. That shadow on the wall, that creak of a house settling. Such inputs to the brain can be hallucinated, and children DO hallucinate, but that perception is all based on their own lifetime experience, of which children really have little. As they grow older, they realize that that late night creak is just that, a door moving in a slight draft, or the house settling with the change in temperature, and they learn that there is nothing to fear from such sounds.
There are a lot of people who really cannot place into their own consciousness that which cannot be “touched”. It cannot exist unless they personally can lay hands on it. So they reflexively reject anything that their own senses do not perceive directly.
The problem with dogmatic belief systems is, they define that tangibility in the perceptions of their environment based on what others say they have perceived. Such people tend to be basically very gullible, and easily deceived. It is for this reason why so many active flim-flam artists, the con-men and snake oil salesmen, devote much of their efforts to learning the lexicon of the immediate language of the current dogmatic paradigm. It is easiest to run a scam when you know the lingo of the people you are running the scam on.
The language used within fundamentalist religious organizations is very simplistic, rather easy to pick up on, has many similarities between groups, and the individuals within such groups tend to be already preconditioned to believe the most articulate and charismatic individual within that group. This is why such individuals can move from group to group, fleecing each one until somebody starts to ask certain questions, then the con-man simply moves on to the next group, easily assimilating merely by understanding the lexicon and the patterns of perception that the relevant linguistic traditions attempt to describe.
Such linguistic behaviors have been very well documented in teenage peer groupings, and in military organizations which are mostly made up of immature post-adolescents anyway. People who never had the chance to develop into mature adults naturally without focusing too intensely on one social paradigm or another. That life experience is delayed, often permanently.
You can create fanatics quite easily, when you control the language, and the perceptions of what that language describes. One not even needs to be too specific.
L. Ron Hubbard proved that rather conclusively.
#6, I think that was Popeye that said that.
Thank you Sharon for speaking up for many of us who believe in God and use their belief to try to make the world a more compassionate place.
Versus a “practising” atheist that tries to convert and influence and ram their “UnGodly”
beliefs down everyone’s throats.
Please don’t call us anymore and preach your “UnGodly” beliefs.
Signed,
Prefer peace to ramming beliefs
Sharon @5:
Us “practising” atheists don’t need a god or any kind of deity to be inspired to help others. We are fully capable of being inspired without the threat or cajole of an all powerful, all knowing, and all perfect creator. One who created a somewhat defective world inhabited by somewhat defective creatures.
So your “God” explains nothing to us, nor do your convolutions to somehow make sense of a random universe with natural disasters.
Bottom line is: you faith in “God” does more harm than good.
@13 When exactly did believers admitting that science is real become a convolution? I must have missed that.
Also, I think you misinterpret what inspires believers. I for one am not inspired by “fear” or “cajoling” but rather the example of Christ. The ultimate goal for many of my fellow believers in the Christian faith (perhaps less so with evangelicals) is to live out his example of loving our neighbor as ourselves and loving God. Many religious and non-religious alike share this basic tenet. Obviously since people are imperfect and religion is a human institution, religion has not always been perfect at doing this either. This says less about God than about people.
To me, Christ was an example of radical hospitality. It’s something I strive for and is part of what has me constantly examining my actions and inactions for ways that I can better live out that calling to be a better person towards my fellow human beings. Seems you could learn a thing or two about treating others from a place of inquiry and hospitality, rather than a place of condescension.
re 10: You’re a suppressive person. 30 lashes with a wet noodle for you!
@5
A lot of your fellow believers would take issue with this.
Sharon,
I think you need to see the other side … Does my commentary here mean that I do not respect your beliefs? No. As long as the beliefs remain personal and do not include anything that denigrates others.
Unfortunately, Chrsitianity has a long record of harming others.
This is especially hard on those of us who are Jews since the central tenet of Christianity seem to be that the Deity sacrificed his own divine son because our worship was wrong. Christians have gone so far as to rewrite OUR bible to suit their beliefs.
As one, small example, the title “Christ” means messiah and OUR first Messiah was the persian King Cyrus, not Jesus. How do you imagine it feels to be assaulted with the idea that Jesus, whose action led to deaths of millions of Jews, was OUR messiah?
There is more. My ancestors WERE the pharisees decried as evil by the roman text. They, the pharisees, first used passive resistance against the Romans (as in give unto Caesar what is Caesars) until they had to fight for our survival in the Jewish wars.
With that history, asking us to respect Christian beliefs and especially the idea of Messianic Jews, is pretty hard too take.
I would have a lot more respect for Christian faith is I felt Christianity had a sense of guilt for all the evil they have done.
@16
Very true and this is one of the major concerns with fanaticism in any form.
Just as some people decry the fact that middle of the road peace-loving Muslims aren’t driving the publicly shouted voice of Islam, the ‘Christian’ public voice is being driven by hate spewers who blame every natural disaster on people they want to hate – feminists, homosexuals, atheists etc.
Unfortunately, peace, love and understanding don’t raise the ratings quite like pointing a finger at the other, so I doubt their will be a change any time soon.
* please note that Christian in quotes is because any hate-spewing at all is kind of antichristian.
I know that all good people will meet in the afterlife because Christianity is a religion of suffering and redemption.
I can’t wait to meet Muriel, my mother’s best friend in highschool, and my dad’s good buddy, Stan Rokicki.
@17 Another way to look at may be as follows:
Originally God created the earth and everything else and put Man into it. Man then proceeded to pretty well screw things up, so God brought the Great Flood and destroyed it all, but only after making Noah build a big, funny-looking boat and save enough mating pairs of all the animals (including humans) to start all over.
Over the next few millenia, Man pretty well made a mess of things again, so this time God tried coming among us in recognizable form and let himself be brutally tortured and killed, in hope that we’d at least pay attention long enough to get the message that we’d gone a little overboard. Seems that didn’t completely fix the problem either.
I’m solidly agnostic. For Me, your beliefs will vary, but for me, it is hard for me to believe in a christian God that is personal where everything is part of his design and everything happens because he is explicitly doing it.
Granted, the physical rules of the universe feel created. Like ice getting bigger and lighter when it freezes, unlike most other solids. But the things that happen, like earthquakes, and childhood cancer seem to be just natural phenomena. Acts and concepts like war and torture and social darwinism are definitely seem man made. So I can believe in an impersonal god who created the universe and stepped away and let it run as it may. Because a benevolent personal god that seems to punish the innocent far too often and to be so cruelly random is impossibly hard for me to believe in.
If faith in God or Allah or L Ron Hubbard works for the religious and brings them comfort, I’m glad they have that ability. It just doesn’t work for me.
Religion, i.e., organized irrationality, is the problem.
What an individual believes — meh.
But organization and evangelism lead inevitably to murder and tyranny.
I note that the the edit function is back!
Art @20:
So much for the concept of an all knowing and all powerful God. Sounds to me like he’s just making it up as he goes along.
Do you honestly believe that crap about the animals on the ark? Sure seems like an omnipotent, omniscient God could have come up with a little cleaner solution to the problem than that. Noah’s story is a bit dodgy, but since it was clearly plagiarized wholesale from the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Biblical writers can be forgiven for stealing material that doesn’t really make much sense. On the other hand, it is a mildly interesting story for children.
The torture scenes of the New Testament are far more plausible. There is certainly no shortage of historical evidence that lots of folks were tortured and killed for some pretty trivial offenses, often religious in nature. But here again, it sounds like God doesn’t really know what he’s doing.
At any rate, the little drama was a dismal failure and accomplished nothing except to establish a whole new brand of priesthood and make them fabulously wealthy at the expense of the laity.
As mentioned above, your tales of a God explain absolutely nothing, and are of no use in contemplating the tragedies unfolding in Japan & New Zealand. I’m much more inclined to believe that Santa Clause was getting some bad reports from the elves on all those folks along the Pacific Rim and decided not to wait until Christmas serve up some coal in the stocking.
Loving Me is like loving your newborn child. .
All you can do is see My promise and work with Me to make a better world.
@24 Many religions believe that we are “reflections” of our creator-not necessarily in a personified-supreme-being form like Michealangelo painted on the ceiling, but as an assemblage of forces somehow organized to make things exist as they are and happen as they do. Like that creator, it pretty much seems like we’re making all this up as we go along.
God only gives you the gift of life; it’s up to you to make the most of it.
“God only gives you the gift of life; it’s up to you to make the most of it.”
I no more “give” you life than I create nuclear physics. The rest of your aphorism is correct.
I am that I am.
Unkl Witz @24
nope. I am all powerful, all knowing AND good too. BUT, being good does not imply I choose to do good.
tle cleaner solution to the problem than that. .
Not any more than what is happening in Japan as we speak. Do not mistake My actions for what I teach you to do.
Hardly My fault unless you think I killed Jesus? Well, yes I did. I also killed MLK and the millions of Jews, Gypsies, and Gays you call the Holocaust. I am good, but I do not do good. That is YOUR job.
I am that I am.
As the Jesuits at Seattle University taught me, such natural disasters are the Will of Allah.
Shit happens, everybody.
Life, the life force goes on.
That’s it.
You know, there probably isn’t an afterlife. In Alan Watts’ words, “This is it.” Sure hope there’s something better on the other side, but there may in fact be no other side!!