Oh boy... here we go with a copy-paste from
Christian Answers. Let's dissect this irrational, nonsensical bullshit point by point, shall we?
This is one of the most difficult questions for Christians to answer.
It sure is... and something tells me that after we're done dissecting the wall of text you copy-pasted, we won't be any closer to an answer, let alone a good answer.
The “problem of pain,” as the well-known Christian scholar, C.S. Lewis, once called it, is atheism’s most potent weapon against the Christian faith.
Hardly. The most potent weapon is the most trivial one: one single question. "Define what the term 'God' providing attributes that we can use to understand what this entity is. Ready? Set! Go!"
All true science and history, if rightly understood, support the fact of God. This evidence is so strong that, as the Bible says: “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God” (Psalm 14:1).
LOL... yes... if "rightly understood" "true science" and "history" support the "fact" of "God." Can you define "God" for us? Just so we know how to "rightly understand" "true science" and "history" so as to make sure it supports him.
Photo copyrighted.
Good thing you didn't reproduce it without authorization here, then...
Most atheists, therefore, without any objective evidence on which to base their faith in “no God”, must resort finally to philosophical objections. And this problem of suffering is the greatest of these.
No. Most atheists without any objective evidence on which to base a faith in God - or even a definition of what they're supposed to have faith in - simply see no point in faith/belief. Atheists don't assert God exists. Christians do and so the burden of proof is on them.
That is, they say, how can a God of love permit such things in His world as war, sickness, pain, and death, especially when their effects often are felt most keenly by those who are apparently innocent? Either He is not a God of love and is indifferent to human suffering, or else He is not a God of power and is therefore helpless to do anything about it. In either case, the Biblical God who is supposedly one of both absolute power and perfect love becomes an impossible anachronism. Or so they claim!
It's not what atheists claim. Either the Christian God is a god of love and mercy or he isn't. It's not surprising if you can't tell us which Coach; apparently, even your deity isn't sure...
This is a real difficulty, but atheism is certainly not the answer, and neither is agnosticism.
Nice try. Atheism doesn't claim to be the answer - or even
an answer. And most atheists don't think that the question "why do bad things happen to good people" requires an answer, since the question is loaded to begin with: it assumes a guiding force.
This is proved by the mere fact that people normally try to hang on to life as long as they can.
They do, don't they? Which raises the interesting question of "why". Why do Christians do that when the after-life is so very much better and more preferable to them? They get to hang out with the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, and they can have all the cotton candy they want!
Furthermore, everyone instinctively recognizes that “good” is a higher order of truth than “bad”.
What does this even mean? What's "higher order of truth" and how is "good" higher than "bad" on this scale?
We need also to recognize that our very minds were created by God.
Objection. Assumes facts not in evidence. But let's see what comes next...
We can only use these minds to the extent that He allows, and it is, therefore, utterly presumptuous for us to use them to question Him and His motives.
In other words: "
Your puny mind cannot possibly comprehend God so don't even try - and if you do, it's an insult to God and you're questioning him. Who are you to question God you foolish little ant?"
This is the religion you claim to follow? A religion that requires that you don't use your brain and you don't ask questions? Ask yourself, why would your God endow you with intellect only to, then, require you to forego its use?
“Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Genesis 18:25).
So far he seems to be doing a piss-poor job. Why would you assume any differently going forward?
“Shall the thing formed say to Him that formed it, why hast Thou made me thus?” (Romans 9:20).
Yes, why not?
We ourselves do not establish the standards of what is right. Only the Creator of all reality can do that. We need to settle it, in our minds and hearts, whether we understand it or not, that whatever God does is, by definition, right.
And that's your problem. You assume that things like "right" and "wrong" come from some mystical, supernatural source. Therefore, an action can be right one time and wrong another, depending on the whims of this mystical, supernatural source.
Having settled this by faith, we are then free to seek for ways in which we can profit spiritually from the sufferings in life, as well as the blessings. As we consider such matters, it is helpful to keep the following great truths continually in our minds.
You haven't settled anything.
There is really no such thing as the “innocent” suffering.
No, of course not. There's no such thing as the “innocent” suffering. A
one year old little girl dying of cancer isn't “innocent” and didn't suffer.
The millions of children in Africa, dying of starvation aren't “innocent” and didn't suffer. I could go on quoting...
You offend me Coach. You offend me just by copy-pasting this fucking bullshit. And you should offend every rational human being for saying and believing this bullshit.Since “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23), there is no one who has the right to freedom from God’s wrath on the basis of his own innocence.
Ah yes... sin. The great weapon of Christianity. The weapon with which Christianity keeps its children in bondage. The noose on the neck of everyone - a noose that's there by birth - by the virtue of being born. I've quoted this part of Ayn Rand's writings before; time to quote it again:
Damnation is the start of your morality, destruction is its purpose, means and end. Your code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice. It demands, as his first proof of virtue, that he accepts his own depravity without proof. It demands that he start, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not.
It does not matter who then becomes the profiteer on his renounced glory and tormented soul, a mystic God with some incomprehensible design or any passer-by whose rotting sores are held as some explicable claim upon him - it does not matter, the good is not for him to understand, his duty is to crawl through years of penance, atoning for the guilt of his existence to any stray collector of unintelligible debts, his only concept of a value is a zero: the good is that which is non-man.
The name of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin. A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man's sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man's nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code.
Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, but with a 'tendency' to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game with loaded dice. It forces man to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape. If the tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of his choice, his will is not free.
What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge - he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil - he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor - he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire - he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy - all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man's fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was - that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love - he was not man.
Man's fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin. His evil, they charge, is that he's man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives. They call it a morality of mercy and a doctrine of love for man.
As far as babies are concerned, and others who may be incompetent mentally to distinguish right and wrong, it is clear from both Scripture and universal experience that they are sinners by nature and thus will inevitably become sinners by choice as soon as they are able to do so.
Your ideology is vile and contemptible - see the above quoted text for the proof.
The world is now under God’s Curse (Genesis 3:17) because of man’s rebellion against God’s Word.
A very loving God, your God. He curses his creation for doing what he knew they would do...
This “bondage of corruption,” with the “whole world groaning and travailing together in pain” (Romans 8:21-22), is universal, affecting all men and women and children everywhere. God did not create the world this way, and one day will set all things right again. In that day, “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain” (Revelation 21:4).
Even if God didn't create the world this way, why doesn't he change it?
NOW, not some future day. Oh, wait. I forgot. You're not supposed to ask questions of your Lord. Only to obey and worship.
The Lord Jesus Christ, who was the only truly “innocent” and “righteous” man in all history, nevertheless has suffered more than anyone else who ever lived.
Did he now? He suffered more than a
girl who suffered horrific burns when she was only six months old? He suffered more than a
victim of a horrible acid attack? More than
Sgt. Travis Mills who lost all his limbs in an IED attack?
Again. You offend me. You revolt me. You are a disgrace and a pitiful excuse for a human.
And this He did for us! “Christ died for our sins” (I Corinthians 15:3). He suffered and died, in order that ultimately He might deliver the world from the Curse, and that, even now, He can deliver from sin and its bondage anyone who will receive Him in faith as personal Lord and Savior. This great deliverance from the penalty of inherent sin, as well as of overt sins, very possibly also assures the salvation of those who have died before reaching an age of conscious choice of wrong over right.
Yes... he did all this for us - to save us. Sounds amazing, until you realize that he's, supposedly, saving us from
himself.
With our full faith in God’s goodness and in Christ’s redemption, we can recognize that our present sufferings can be turned to His glory and our good.
Yes... your god is very good. He lets children suffer and starve, infants to get horribly burned and disfigured or die of cancer, women to be raped or disfigured, and men to be brutally maimed or killed.
Your God, if he exists, is full of something. Love isn't it.
Thus, God is loving and merciful, even when, “for the present,” He allows trials and sufferings to come in our lives.
Yeah... no biggie. What's a bout with cancer. Or the pain of a child dying. God is so loving and merciful! How can you believe this shit?
I'll close by repeating: Joe, you offend me. And those who believe this bullshit you pasted offend me too.
