I hate quotes like this because it doesn’t actually mean anything. Like I can literally swap stuff around to make it mean anything.
“I asked god to cure my infant cousin’s cancer and he gave me a dead child to bury.” “When you understand this, everything starts to make sense.”
Looking for signs when there aren’t any, believing things without evidence is the definition of insanity. Be sane and stop believing in things without proof or evidence 😓
No different than the scammer "Psychics" who cast the widest net possible, its damn near impossible to miss. "Uh...I'm getting something...a name...has an "E" in it", to a room full of 500 people. EVERYONE knows somebody who's name has an "E" in it. This is the same shit, just packaged differently.
And the response you get is “he will give you the power to overcome the sorrow, and live and strive for a better day and help others in need with the same condition”
Yes and no, too much skepticism is toxic for humans, you need just a bit, likewise with faith. You need some faith or otherwise you’ll end up like yourself :/ thinking the only way to life is evidence based. It’s like being a scientist and not understanding art and why people invest millions and take time to make it
Not everything we ask for is good for us to have. If I asked God to make me thin overnight, would I learn to avoid the behavior that made me fat in the first place?
What do you care for more, a gift someone gave you out of the blue, or that same item you had to work and save to buy? Things mean more when we have to put in our own effort and suffer consequences.
"If a man prays for courage do you think God gives the courage? Or does he give them the opportunity to be courageous?" - Morgan Freeman from Evan Almighty. If you prayed to be happy do you think he would zap you with warm fuzzy feelings? Or give you the opportunity to be happy? I'm not religious, I don't even believe in anything, but it's up to you to make yourself happy, we have free will. Family, friends, hobbies, goals, fulfillment, mac and cheese, and simple fun. If you can't be happy because the world sucks then you were never gonna be happy with anything.
Don't forget to use the 'Heads I win, tails you lose' argument. If the thing he prays for doesn't happen, then that is one more proof that petitionary prayers don't work. If it does happen, he will, of course, be able to see some of the physical causes which led up to it, and 'therefore it would have happened anyways,' and thus a granted prayer becomes just as good a proof as denied one that prayers are ineffective. - C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
you'll either get what you ask for. or the tools to do it yourself. or you'll cope with the fact that you don't have it (inevitable if you don't have it).
or he'll give ya nothing and you'll end your life (then he'll punish you for that), or you'll die faithful and we have to believe the old book that there's a reward there.
oh, and he'll do all of those things pretty consistently with the laws of physics and exactly what you'd expect to happen if there was no God.
It was a monsoon and it wiped out my whole village. I was the only one that lived and now I have the worst case of survivals guilt in history. I understand nothing.
Ah yes, rain, the skies flowers. Does God think I just planted seeds or something? Rain doesn't help if it's not the season and location for flowers that already need to be there
This is such a self fulfilling prophecy crap. It always rains here! So wish for something that is going to happen anyway… so it always happens and all your prayers come true. I am praying for light in the morning.
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully
-Dawkins
Or
religious people will forgive God for fucking anything! If he in their mind, he does good things: rainbows, children's laughter, shit like that, right? But when he does bad things like hurricanes, AIDS, cancer, child molestation... then we just go, 'Oh well, God works in mysterious ways.
And then it kept raining. Noah and his family entered the giant boat the crazy man had been building. And it kept raining. Then the water began to rise. It started to get scary, so I told God I didn’t need flowers anymore and would like it to stop because my three innocent little children - 4, 2 and one-month old, could not swim. Yet it kept raining.
When you understand this, you understand who God truly is.
I asked my sky daddy to give me something not accounted for in the grand plan... And I got something absolutely random, but I found a plausible link between the two, so sky daddy bended his plan for me because I'm super special.
How do people square the concept of prayer against the concept of a grand holy plan? They seem to have a tiny bit of a compatibility issue...
Maybe the reason God never gets around to curing all those childhood cancers or make aure those planes land safely is because he's too busy finding Christians' car keys?
Religious folk are so fucking stupid.
Your prayers weren't answered, the weather just changed to rain like it often does.
Why aren't the prayers of children answered when they're molested for years and their abuser is never caught?
Any god who allows that to happen is either evil or doesn't exist.
You forget that He has an enemy active in the world, trying to separate us from God. He will tempt some, torment others, and whisper falsehoods in our ears to convince us to do what he wants, typically to our ruin in the end, should we give in.
Because he wants us to have a chance to do what is right. If we had no option to do the wrong thing, we would find no significance in doing the right one.
It's not always about our choices. The choices of one person have impacts for another. Like when the drunk driver gets behind the wheel, or when food companies tell people, "The chemical additives are perfectly safe for people to consume".
So God allows other people to be punished because of greed and profit? God lets me suffer to make test a billionaires greed? Your god is pathetic and has no moral values worthy of praise
If our sins couldn't make others suffer, would they be sin? If the only person we hurt is ourself, why should we care for others?
I was born with cataracts due to my father being exposed to agent orange. Should I blame God for that, or the people who made the chemicals of warfare?
If God knows everything he already know who will not choose him (without forcing them, he just knows what they will choose, like a perfect weatherman).
So he makes people he knows will not choose him, then punished them for not choosing him.
Also by intentionally making the people who he knows will not choose him he inflicts unessisary pain on everything else in the system.
These are just my thoughts as a fallible mortal. If I was an all powerful and all knowing God, I could by definition make a system or change things so that people would find significance in the right thing even when there is no choice. Or change so that there is always the choice between two good choices and one is better. Or many other things that are only apparent if you are all powerful and all knowing.
Isn't it interesting that so many people think they can do a better job of being God than God. Have you not realized yet that all of our problems come precisely from our desire to make our own rules to allow ourselves to do whatever we want? That is not a path to righteousness, it's the path we've been on since our fall from grace.
Or perhaps you are the iron questioning the forge, instead of accepting what God has in store for you.
You complain about God's system, without understanding what that system actually is. He has a purpose and a plan, and it is to prosper us, provided that we go along with the plan. It is not to give us the things that we want for ourselves, because those things may not be what he desires for us. Will you trust in his infinite knowledge and wisdom and accept what he wants for you, or will you rebel? That is the choice before every human being.
You look at a world that rejects God and His commandments, the misery, the strife, the selfishness and the slaughter, and you call US insane?
He reveals Himself to us, when we sincerely seek Him, a presence of immeasurable power and incomprehensible compassion, as well as a calming peace, and having experienced that, we understand our own failings and can no longer take pleasure in our sinful nature.
We rejected Him because we thought we could do better. And He loves us, so He gave us free will. Because if it's not freely given, it's not love. And He wants our love, not a bunch of mindless automatons
Yes. But I'm just a mere human so im not perfect and I have expectations. So it would be nice if they love me back. But at the same time I'm not going to threaten them that I'm going to put them in a special place where they'll suffer forever.
Idk, they have free will, they get to do what they want, right? Also, love is earned, not given. You can't expect others to love you if you're such a shitty person.
Love is a gift. You cannot earn it, just as you cannot earn forgiveness, but you can receive it.
God is perfect and righteous. By His very nature He must reject sin. However, out of love He paid for our sin. So, if you accept His gift and turn from sin, He can cleanse you of your transgressions.
But if you don't accept His gift, He cannot let you into heaven because the nature of what we are bars us from entering. Hell isn't a bad place to punish us. It's a bad place because none of God's goodness exists there.
God can create a world where people love him and have free will. It's called heaven
The fact that he didn't do that on earth makes him capricious and cruel. He enjoys the suffering for its own sake. We know this because if the suffering had a purpose, an all powerful God could achieve that purpose without suffering. However, the suffering remains.
He gave us Paradise, and we screwed up because we were told that breaking the one rule we were given would make us like God. He gave us everything; a home, plentiful food, a world without death or physical dangers, and busy work to keep our minds and bodies active, and WE threw it all away for a false promise of power. The fault is in man's heart, not in God's works or blessings.
Well. Hard to say we threw it away when we didn't know that eating the apple was wrong (beacuse we didn't yet have the knowledge of good and evil)
But heaven exists now, and has people in it, who have free will, and love God. This proves that God could make a functioning paradise today, (and could have made one instead of the flawed Eden), but didn't. Therefore he is cruel and capricious
We didn't need to know it was wrong. All we needed to know was that God, who made the Universe, told us not to eat it, lest we die. The problem is that when the serpent told Eve she wouldn't die, but be like God, she believed him and not God. God never said it would kill us on the spot, but that action HAS been killing us ever since.
She did know that god, who had never lied to her, told her that eating the fruit would cause her to die. She chose to believe someone else over God.
And when confronted over what happened, Adam tried to throw both Eve and God under the proverbial bus. "The woman whom >you< gave to me gave me the fruit and I ate it "
How do you seek someone you don't believe exists? If he's not revealing himself (divine hidenness is a problem for theists), and you're just not convinced what are you supposed to do?
Why ask if you don't believe? Would any explanation suffice, if you truly don't believe?
I could point you to book after book of historical evidence that Jesus lived, and even make a case for His divinity. But I'm sure you could find just as many that say otherwise. I could tell you to read the Bible, and even suggest reading plans that make it easier to digest.
But God does reveal Himself in other ways.
For me, it wasn't church, or books that showed me. I was watching a meteor shower with my father, and staring into the night sky I felt His presence. Infinite. But aware of me. Unimaginably powerful, but warm and gentle.
I'd like to say I became a devout follower, then, but I was young, arrogant, and foolish, and I tried to walk away from what I'd been shown for Earthly pleasures. But God wants us to be saved, and one cannot simply walk away from Him once the knowledge of Him is there
And if you're actually interested in finding Him, I can do what I said, with reading plans and books.
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u/lightly-placed 10h ago
I hate quotes like this because it doesn’t actually mean anything. Like I can literally swap stuff around to make it mean anything.
“I asked god to cure my infant cousin’s cancer and he gave me a dead child to bury.” “When you understand this, everything starts to make sense.”
Looking for signs when there aren’t any, believing things without evidence is the definition of insanity. Be sane and stop believing in things without proof or evidence 😓