I think Im an atheist.

[ulthar]

But truthfully, I really don't know, I think there could be something out there-- but then why does it allow Ethiopian babies to have it so bad?

This is a question that appears a lot in discussions like this:  "If there IS a God, why does he allow x?"

The problem I have with the premise of the question is that we are making a human judgment through our human lens on what happens in the world.

There are many answers to this question.  I don't think it as cut and dry as saying, "If there is a God, he'd have the world operate as WE think it should." 

The short answer is "who knows why he allows Ethiopian babies {or anyone else} to suffer." 

[Nukie 2]

But truthfully, I really don't know, I think there could be something out there-- but then why does it allow Ethiopian babies to have it so bad?

This is a question that appears a lot in discussions like this:  "If there IS a God, why does he allow x?"

The problem I have with the premise of the question is that we are making a human judgment through our human lens on what happens in the world.

There are many answers to this question.  I don't think it as cut and dry as saying, "If there is a God, he'd have the world operate as WE think it should." 

The short answer is "who knows why he allows Ethiopian babies {or anyone else} to suffer." 

That's a good point, but if this divine being allows this suffering without it working out for the best in the end, it's just something I can't accept.

[Doggett]

If you only think you're an athiest* then you're agnostic.

But if you are an athiest, welcome to the athiest club ! 

*man hug*

Only got one shot at living so make the best of it !






*I'm only an atheist when it come to organised religion. It woudn't surprise me if there was something big throughout the universe (other than my ego), but I don't think it operates with a belief system.

[indianasmith]

The problem of human suffering is deep and complex and has no easy explanation.  Much suffering is frankly self-inflicted, which falls under the general category of "free will" - that God will not intervene when mankind chooses to commit harm to his own kind.  Not a particularly satisfying answer.  I will say that, in THE CASE FOR FAITH, Lee Strobel has a chapter dedicated to this question - if God is good, why is there so much suffering allowed in the world?  The chapter is an absolute masterpiece.

Here is the answer I give my students when this comes up.  It is in the form of a (true) story.

When I was young, my sister owned a cat named Annabelle Lee, a beautiful calico who loved to play with household trinkets.  One night while we were gone to church, the cat saw my Dad's rod and reel in the garage - with a shiny "Devil's Horse" fishing lure hanging from it.  The cat batted at the dangly lure, and one of the three treble hooks snagged her paw.  The harder she jerked away, the deeper the hook bit.  She clawed at the lure, trying to get it loose, and snagged her other front paw on the other treble hook.  By now she has torn the garage all up - stuff is knocked over, fishing line is wrapped around here and tangled with everything.  In her agony, she tried to CHEW the lure off her front paws and managed to get the last treble hook snagged in her cheek.   We came home to a terrified, wailing cat and a demolished garage.  My Dad told my sister to get a towel and some tin snips.  The only way to get the hooks out was to push them in past the barbs till they emerged from the cat's skin, clip the barbs off, and then pull the hooks out.  Even mummified in two beach towels, the cat managed to claw my Dad up pretty good before he finally cut and pulled the last hook free.  Then she disappeared under the house for three days to heal up, and never quite trusted my Dad after that.
   That's humanity.  We are stuck in a broken world - that WE broke - full of sin and misery and suffering, and all our efforts to free ourselves only entangle us deeper.  When God uses events and circumstances we cannot understand to try and pull us out of the mess, all we perceive is that we are being hurt further, and we blame Him and lash out at Him.  But, when His plan has worked itself out, we will find ourselves free to heal - and free to accept or reject Him.

That's how I see human suffering.

[Nukie 2]

The problem of human suffering is deep and complex and has no easy explanation.  Much suffering is frankly self-inflicted, which falls under the general category of "free will" - that God will not intervene when mankind chooses to commit harm to his own kind.  Not a particularly satisfying answer.  I will say that, in THE CASE FOR FAITH, Lee Strobel has a chapter dedicated to this question - if God is good, why is there so much suffering allowed in the world?  The chapter is an absolute masterpiece.

Here is the answer I give my students when this comes up.  It is in the form of a (true) story.

When I was young, my sister owned a cat named Annabelle Lee, a beautiful calico who loved to play with household trinkets.  One night while we were gone to church, the cat saw my Dad's rod and reel in the garage - with a shiny "Devil's Horse" fishing lure hanging from it.  The cat batted at the dangly lure, and one of the three treble hooks snagged her paw.  The harder she jerked away, the deeper the hook bit.  She clawed at the lure, trying to get it loose, and snagged her other front paw on the other treble hook.  By now she has torn the garage all up - stuff is knocked over, fishing line is wrapped around here and tangled with everything.  In her agony, she tried to CHEW the lure off her front paws and managed to get the last treble hook snagged in her cheek.   We came home to a terrified, wailing cat and a demolished garage.  My Dad told my sister to get a towel and some tin snips.  The only way to get the hooks out was to push them in past the barbs till they emerged from the cat's skin, clip the barbs off, and then pull the hooks out.  Even mummified in two beach towels, the cat managed to claw my Dad up pretty good before he finally cut and pulled the last hook free.  Then she disappeared under the house for three days to heal up, and never quite trusted my Dad after that.
   That's humanity.  We are stuck in a broken world - that WE broke - full of sin and misery and suffering, and all our efforts to free ourselves only entangle us deeper.  When God uses events and circumstances we cannot understand to try and pull us out of the mess, all we perceive is that we are being hurt further, and we blame Him and lash out at Him.  But, when His plan has worked itself out, we will find ourselves free to heal - and free to accept or reject Him.

That's how I see human suffering.

So Jesus was wrong to do all his humanitarian deeds?

[lester1/2jr]

God lets bad things happen to good people because thats what bad things are. If bad things happened to bad people they would be good things.

You get drunk and drive and you kill an innocent person. if you only killed real a***oles there would be no discincentive to not drive drunk and the whole world would be out of whack.

[Doggett]

God lets bad things happen to good people because thats what bad things are. If bad things happened to bad people they would be good things.

Although a bad thing happening to a bad person is still a bad thing.

You just feel less bad as you don't sympathise with a villan as much.

[Nukie 2]

There's a difference between " a bad thing happening to you" and living a festering sh*t-hole of a life.

[lester1/2jr]

There's a lot of bad in the world and it doesn't spread itself out evenly. man is born free and in order to taste that most delicious freedom we need to have the possiblity of all this horrible stuff too.

the book of Job deals with alot of issues similar to this.

Why didn't God stop the plane from flying into the twin towers? because the plane HAD to fly into the towers. We had to know our government wasn't capable of protecting us and we had to know the muslims want us out of their countries and that we aren't immune to the problems we help create and on and on.

these are all simply signals that we must read. They aren't actually good or bad in that sense.

[RCMerchant]

I'm Agnostic-which seems to be saying " I'm Clueless"...which is about right...as far as what makes the world go round. I have my own ideas...but they seem more at place in the plots of comic books than in a serious discussion on religious or scientific theory. But they work for me....for a while.
So-yeh-ok-I'm an Agnostic.

[The Gravekeeper]

My thoughts on the "why does God let bad things happen to us?" are thus: whether something is good or bad is a matter of perception and time. Bad things can lead to good with time, as much as it initially hurts. War hurts like hell and is an absolutely terrible thing...yet it's often led to period of great innovation that resulted in technology that improved our lives.

I also believe that whatever being may be out there, we're not the only species this planet was made for and I honestly believe that the divine has taken a hands-off approach to the universe. Whatever happens to us is ultimately our responsibility at this point. I suspect that for some people that's a much more terrifying prospect than any Hell.

[HappyGilmore]

Thing is, I'm not so terrified of Hell as most others are.  I'm completely content with that.

The biggest fear is the fear of the unknown.  Nobody, faith or not, knows what happens once we pass.  Sure, our various faiths tell us what happen.  But to know if that's true or not, is the answer begging to be answered.

Logically, we just end up in a box in the ground.  But there's a part of me that wants it to be more than that and I'm scared it's not.

[indianasmith]

In response to Nukie's question -
Of course not.  Jesus'  healings and exorcisms were to give us a preview of what will be accomplished in the end, when evil is eternally banished and God reigns supreme.  Also, they demonstrated the Divine Power that lay behind his message.  After all, anyone can SAY "I am the Resurrection and the Life."  Only Jesus could call Lazarus forth from the tomb.

[lester1/2jr]

Father Andrew Greeley had one of my favorite quotes about Jesus. In reponse to the idea that Jesus wasn't relevant anymore or those principles weren't relevent anymore, this was in the late 60's, he said "Jesus was irrelevent in his own time. He was so irrelevent he had to be killed".

That was kind of the vibe I got when I was camapigning for Ron Paul in 07 and 08 though obviously I'm NOT saying Ron Paul is a heavenly being or something. The media at one time had no idea what the things we were talking about meant, at the same time they went above and beyond to not cover us.  Maybe they just thought we were nuts and disliked us for THAT reason who knows.

Greeley talked about how in Jesus time the big issues were the Roman occupation, when the end of days were coming and which was the best interpretation of biblical law. Jesus came and was like the kingdom of God is at hand. That other stuff is smaller than small.  It was just politics and talk. He was like, we are going to LIVE this NOW.

We are not in slaves, so things aren't provided for us. It makes the posiblity of a terribile life possible but also a great life. Slaves get fed and clothed but they can't do what they want. Those are the choices we have.

[Flick James]

I love this quote from John Malcovich's character in In the Line of Fire:

"God doesn't punish the wicked and reward the righteous. Some die because they deserve to and some die simply because they come from Minneapolis. It's random and it's meaningless."

Now, that last bit makes this a typically nihilist statement, and not that interesting. But the rest of it states beautifully how much our life on earth changes and contradicts the notions of religious texts. It also points out one of the aspects of religious faith that has always annoyed me. Religion desperately wants to control people, and so according to revealed religion, God punishes the wicked and rewards the righteous, but because we can't see this happening in our world, then the religious rebuttal becomes "Well, it doesn't happen here, it happens in the afterlife." Likely story. You see that in Christianity and Islam bigtime, if in different forms. Buddhism takes this concept of retribution in a different direction. Karma can affect you in this life, or be put off into a later life. So in this case the retribution for sin goes forward AND backward. If you do something bad and it bites you in this life, well, then you had it coming to you, but if it doesn't, then you'll get yours when you come back in your next life (talk about covering your religious bets). Also, if you have bad things happen to you or you have a s**tty life, then you're paying for sins committed in a previous life. I don't buy any of it and it's just a way for people to exercise religious power to control people. It's a part of what our founding fathers were trying to get away from.

And then there's the fact that religions tend to just be plagiarized versions of things that came before. Today we view the religions of the ancient Norse, Roman, Greek, and Egyptian peoples as mythology. But for them it was very much religion. All of these essentially borrowed or even outright stole the Gods and religious concepts from the earlier civilization. This can even be seen in our modern religions that we should never (gasp) refer to as mythology. For example, there are just too many correlations between Jesus and the Egyptian deity Horus to be dismissed. Both were born of virgins by a supernatural power. Both had foster fathers. Both had their births announced by angels. Both were baptized in rivers. Both represented salvation to their respective followers and were even refered to as savior. Both had twelve followers. Both were in danger of being killed as infants and so their mothers had to go into hiding. Both performed miracles like healing the sick, walking on water, and raising someone from the grave. Both were crucified and have a cross associated with them. Both were supposedly resurrected after three days. There are other correlations, but that's a bunch already.

Religions have evolved over time, have had cultural contact with each other and profoundly influenced one another. Why not? Back then information travelled at a snails pace and there was no way that the people of a region would ever know that their beliefs were partly or even significantly plagiarized from the heathen peoples from 1000 miles away or 2000 years away.

These are just some of the reasons why I simply cannot put any more stock in Christianity or Islam as I do in Zorastrianism or the ancient religions of Egypt. It's all just recycled concepts of the supernatural from humanity. This is not to say that I don't recognize the importance of religion in the development of the human mind over many millenia. Religion allowed humanity to think in abstract ways in contemplation of the unkown and the mysterious. In many ways, religion is part of the reason we even have science, which also requires abstract thought. I simply don't accept the religious doctrines of the world as the "word of God."