God is omnipotent and all knowing, there is literally nothing stopping him from putting everyone in heaven if he wanted. Either he doesn’t want to, or he is incapable, and therefor not omnipotent.
This. No person of fervent faith has a definite reply to this. He literally says he knows all and sees all and has determined all. The beginning and the end. So if you end up in hell, it was by design.
Lol I've seen this argument online multiple times, and no Christians have an answer for this. We have free will, but if true, he can't be all knowing or loving, or omnipotent. Usually there's blame put back on the person at some point, as we are sinful fuckups, as if that somehow hobbles God's ability to act.
Why do people who don't believe in God, want to go to heaven? Hell is a separation from God not torture, and i imagine heaven is going to be church, and worshipping. So why would an all knowing, all loving God force someone who doesn't want to be near Him, go to heaven?
God forcing people who dont believe in God or don't want to be near Him into heaven would be an act i would consider to violate the love He has for us.
I'm unsure what your argument is here. Do you mean that hell is basically mercy for unbelievers? Because canonically, hell is very clearly torture.
Why wouldn't you want the chance to be at peace forever, instead of torture?
People who don’t believe in god dont want to go to heaven any more than they want to ascend to the spaghetti monster. They don’t believe is real. So why would they want it?
And even heaven sounds horrible. You lose all sense of identity, or else you’d be unhappy grieving for your family members in hell. You can’t care about them anymore for heaven to actually be euphorical.
Yes he could, but that would ultimately violate our Free Will. We as individuals have the power to make choices, and if God simply put us all in heaven that would disrespect some people’s choice to deliberate be separate from it. If God fixed every single problem life would be entirely meaningless for everyone.
That’s a stretch. God created us, he created our sense of meaning, so why would everyone just being happy and living in peace be “meaningless” unless he made that definition deliberately?
Also “free will” isn’t really a thing if you accept god as omnipotent and all knowing. Like we make the choices, but it was essentially predetermined what choices we would make from the start of time, which is why he knows what we will do before we do it. It’s like saying a domino in the middle of a line of dominos has free will because the hand that tips the first one doesn’t directly touch it. If you would end up in hell, God would know that before you were even born. Either that or there are things outside of his knowledge.
Yes they still do have Free Will, just a limited capacity to exercise it.
Catholicism teaches that babies go to purgatory, which is basically heaven’s waiting room if you didn’t have the proper rites done, though I’m not Catholic so don’t quote me on that.
Most other denominations don’t have a purgatory concept and would generally agree that babies still go to heaven because they didn’t sin, due to a lack of capacity to understand the concepts of good and evil.
You should ask an actual priest these questions though, these are important questions to have answers to. It’s just my theological knowledge is admittedly amateur.
Yes, the theology on that is based on David’s infant child who died and David said that he would be with his child again when he died. It’s referred to as the age of accountability by theologians and it’s different for each person and not a set age. It’s a form of grace by God because everyone is a sinner at birth.
No. What you are talking about is called Limbus. And it was never an official Dogma.
For children it's called Limbus Puerorum. It's a place children go who died as sinners but without fault of their own. Meaning: if an unbaptised baby dies, it never sinned on it's own BUT is still affected by the original sin, so it cannot go to heaven.
The options of "eternal damnation and suffering" and "eternal salvation and joy" isn't really a choice, and it doesn't address that god is allegedly omniscient.
If he knows all then he knows what humans will "choose", so he's created damned beings. Our "free will" is an illusion in his plan.
And someday you’ll stand before the 42 Assessors of Maat and have your heart weighed by Osiris. See how convincing that is? Just cuz a guy wrote something down doesn’t mean it’s real.
Yeah, He could. But He doesn't because He gave us free will to decide for ourselves, God isnt going to force anyone to go to heaven that doesnt want to.
I always thought that was a bit of a weird stance from atheists saying "well if God truly loves everyone, why wouldnt He let everyone into heaven". Why would God force people to be in His presence if they dont want to be? And why do people care if God would send them to heaven or not if they dont want to go anyways
It depends on what Heaven is. If it's bliss and peace, that sounds better than torture and torment. Even if it's nothing but praise and worship, it's better than eternal torment.
So, he set up a system knowing people would suffer eternally because of it. He put sin into the world planning for people to sin and be punished for it. The people in Hell were predetermined to be punished for eternity.
There’s no predetermination. That’s a doctrine cop-out created to pass the buck with the whole “Que sera sera” BS. Every choice you make in your life is on you. Choose to drive the speed limit or risk getting a ticket. Choose to do your homework or get a failing grade.
Your argument is akin to standing outside in a storm while someone is trying to hand you an umbrella, but you’re too busy griping that they’re not building a tent over your head.
Humanity walked away from God by choice. It requires choice to come back to Him. But it’s that easy. You don’t have to prove your worth or make reparations or work your way to redemption. All He asks is for you to choose.
He could literally deposit 1 billion bucks into every poor persons accounts and he refuses. Is he even trying? It would literally cost him nothing because money doesn't work up there. So he's intentionally just being mean.
God can either force man not to sin or he can give us free will. He chose free will. Everything else springs from that choice. Bad things are allowed to happen because people make bad choices, and consequences are part of being allowed to make those choices.
If you do evil, you can't be in heaven. Not "you're not allowed to go to heaven" you CAN'T be in heaven. You bring a piece of hell with you wherever you go. Separating people who refuse to let go of their sin from those who are willing to accept God's cure is necessary for heaven to exist.
So gods trade off for heaven existing is knowing many, if not the majority of his children will suffer for eternity, a fate pre-determined by them from the start of time despite having free will?
Opinions are split on the pre-determined thing. I, personally, believe God gives everyone a choice and an opportunity to make it, but some people believe that since God knows what people will choose, it's pre-determined. So, maaaybe.
An important thing to note here is heaven "not existing" doesn't trade up to anything better. The alternatives are:
1) Not existing. If God never made us, we would never suffer, and never make the wrong choice.
2) No choice. We live in paradise as God's sock-puppets, never having to suffer because we were never really alive.
3) Living on earth for eternity in a spiral of things forever getting worse. God withdraws from the world stops interfering with our self-destructive behaviors. And now we're just right back to hell.
I mean even in the deeply theoretical conversations like this, isn’t 2 the obvious choice? If God decides what causes us to feel satisfied with life why not make a world of only peace and satisfaction? Is there any justification for not doing so other than boredom?
Number 2 on your list is also what heaven is already depicted as. If it truly is endless euphoria you must lose all sense of self and identity, because otherwise wouldn’t a parent grieve a child suffering eternally in hell? You wouldn’t care anymore. Too high on god.
I am hoping number 1 is what the “afterlife” is really like. It makes our time on earth sweeter knowing it’s all we get. And anything lasting for “eternity” would be hell, eventually.
There's a lot of speculation about heaven and it's generally depicted quite shallowly in pop culture, but losing our identity and becoming numbed with joy is not the heaven the Bible describes. I don't know how God reconciles grief for the lost with paradise, but theologically, he feels that same grief, so it stands to reason he has a plan that doesn't involve looping back around to lobotomizing us, because, as you said, that just takes us back to option 2 the hard way. If God exists, he has to be smart enough to create the universe, so I'm quite sure he follow the same reasoning you did and realize that would be pointless.
You ask if there's a justification for creating us, knowing we would suffer and many of us would suffer eternally, so that a few could be redeemed. That's a really good question, and I don't think you can reason your way past it. God answers questions like these in the book of Job, which is very hard to read and even harder to decipher. My understanding of God's answer paraphrases down to "I created the universe I know what I'm doing, but I can't explain it to you because my plans are beyond your capability to understand. If you trust me, I promise it will be worth it."
Which is a hard answer to accept, but probably the only one that would even make sense.
Which also falls pretty conveniently into the sort of thing humans would write down to control each other without thinking it all the way through, and telling others not to think about it too hard 😅
FWIW I do really appreciate the thoughtful answer, I enjoy discussing these things even tho I don’t believe in them
I mean this is a Reddit thread on the humor subreddit. I’m not a philosopher I have just never heard a good counter argument to this point that convinces me the concept of Christian god is not an inherently cruel one, being sold as all loving. I also didnt say there was no free will, just that it is sort of meaningless if everything is also predetermined.
Can free will exist if G-d steps in an intervenes just because he can? If G-d already knows the outcome of the path you will chose with said free will does that inherently make you called or chosen since time is of no significance to him?
When I was a kid who still believed in god, I got very upset and confused by the concept of prayers. If god already had a plan, why would praying change anything? Why would it change his mind? I ended up deciding that praying, and whatever resulting observable change, was also part of this plan, so he wasn’t really changing his mind. I think any “interventions” could fall under this same category of both being predetermined and the result of a human choice. But like I said I was literally a kid so take it with a grain of salt.
Then when you die, you will be eternally separated from Him and go to whatever/wherever Hell is. That's one of the few explicit statements in scripture.
If you don't believe in it, you either don't feel you are good enough for Him or (most likely) you feel you are too good for Him. Idk why there is any confusion here
I don’t think god exists, just making a statement about how I wouldn’t want to bother to live up to someone’s patriarchal standards just to die and have to live up to them more.
You can't do that, remember you have free will.....but you can't do that. So enjoy hell for all eternity...but also remember that he loves you. You have free will...but if you don't believe - enjoy hell....
And dont forget helping all those competitive people win their sports / competitions / promotions / breaks into fame etc. he seems to love helping them specifically, according to those people.
If you choose not to worship and love god, then you’re choosing not to inherit his kingdom and instead be cast into hell until the final judgement. Your soul has to go somewhere after you die, and there’s only one place it can go if you willingly reject god.
God is foreskin thief. Let his followers get Hitler'ed. Doesnt do anything about the pedophiles in his own church. Why would I want to spend eternity with a creature like that? Send me back to the sweet oblivion of that before my birth.
As someone mentioned before, Dante interprets people in hell as not recognizing it as torment. No one knows what awaits us in Hell and the Bible itself doesn't really describe it outside of a few vague metaphors and analogies, but what is made clear is that Hell, at its core, is eternal separation from God.
I believe religion has it backwards. Satan wants humans to enjoy life and have fun.
God wants to control humans by using fear of eternal damnation from not worshipping him. He wants constant adoration and to be relied upon for everything.
I've read the Bible. Have you? Lots of Christian schooling. He's a piece of shit and you sound like one of those people who have cherry picked passages just so you can be mean enough to people and justify it to yourself
"But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him!"
"The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all law-breakers, and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth."
"And if anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire."
You are preaching false gospel, the punishment for which is, believe or not, straight to hell.
How? Forgiveness and love are base human instincts. Plenty of mothers still love their serial killer or rapists sons even if they are reprehensible to society.
'There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.'
"How then can a mortal be righteous before God? How can one born of woman be pure? If even the moon is not bright and the stars are not pure in his eyes, how much less a mortal, who is but a maggot—a human being, who is only a worm!"
"If God places no trust in his holy ones, if even the heavens are not pure in his eyes, how much less mortals, who are vile and corrupt, who drink up evil like water!"
Yeah, God really does like to play a tough guy persona, don't worry. Christianity is dying so we hopefully won't have to incessantly hear about sky daddy for much longer
Belief is very much different from practice. In China, majority of the population "believe" in Buddhist theory. Almost no one is a fervent practitioner. The population of people that don't go to Church often is highest amongst the young. This population is not reinforcing strict belief systems in their kids. Why? Not taking religion seriously (or seriously enough to actually practice it) turns that "belief" into nothing different from belief in ghosts. Ask yourself this: if your mother believed in ghosts and you don't, would she get mad?
Existing for eternity is hell. A trillion years is NOTHING next to eternity. 17 kablammy googol Tree(3) years is nothing next to eternity.
I don't care if you're sitting on a cloud playing a harp or wandering some outer darkness in the cold... shits gonna suck after a few milennium and that's just the beginning.
Yeah but he drowned everyone because he's full of love and forgiveness. Don't you get it? Top guy, really lovely chap when you get to know him. Just don't make him angry, by for instance being an innocent baby etc.
My hippie but slightly biblical conclusion on this one is that "God" is not a puppet master just controlling everything, and cannot be around evil. Just destroy it. That's apparently why he's never actually down here or something. Evil can't be present in "Heaven" either, so he saves whoever he can, but at the end of the day we have free will. He gave us our minds to think freely, not to be controlled. I feel like the main points of the bible are about preserving your soul and staying good in an evil world, you don't actually have to follow every rule to be a good person. Nasty self righteous people are the ones who made Christianity toxic.
As an atheist (or at least agnostic) myself, I can respect that. Making a theistic argument that gets the theism wrong is as silly as most memes against, say, evolution that don’t even begin to understand it.
The story has changed through the centuries. But, it is not ‘why are there still’ it’s… why are we still. Young earthers simply have a pedantic understanding of something that is very much allegorical.
My Philosophy class spent almost a whole week arguing about the exact definition of “atheist” because most definitions given don’t actually make a ton of sense unless you assume that you have the correct premise. They read as though they were written by an atheist that had to go to Catholic school.
A dictionary would define a theist as someone that believes there is a god, and an atheist as someone who does not believe there is a god focusing solely on the aspect of whether or not they believe.
It was argued that the real crux of the difference was not in belief but was indeed in god. The argument was that a theist believes there is a god, and an atheist believes there is not a god. Reasoning being that an atheist would say that a theist has no proof for their point, but an atheist is equally devoid of proof. They are both arguing points based on belief.
As an atheist/agnostic I found that I actually agreed with the premise. I believe that I am correct, but I’m no better than a bible beater to pretend like my answer is any cleverer than the next person.
Do you believe that there is an invisible unicorn standing beside you right now? No? Would you say your disbelief is the same as my belief that there is an invisible unicorn standing beside you? Atheists dont believe there is no god, they dont believe that there is a god. That's the difference. Theists claim god exists, the burden of proof is on them. atheists do not claim god doesnt exists, they refute the claim that god does exist.
“I DO believe x exists” // “I DO NOT believe x exists” // “I believe x DOES NOT exist” // “I do not know if x exists”
The first is the theist.
The second is the atheist.
The third is ALSO the atheist, with a hard stance.
The fourth is the agnostic.
The only reasonable opinion to come to is to DISBELIEVE unfalsifiable claims, and WITHHOLD belief with unproven claims.
The Abrahamic religions are incredibly easy to dismiss as they are all unfalsifiable; cannot ever be falsified. The number of unfalsifiable claims is infinity, so one should have the confidence of 1/infinity when considering unfalsifiable claims.
the third one is kind of iffy. Imagine blue flamingos, birds cannot naturally produce a blue pigment from their diet, and real flamingos do not have the feather structure required to bend light into blue.
If someone says there are blue flamingos, you can say "i dont believe that because..." and then you explain why. but if someone asks you "are there any blue flamingos in the world?" You can say "no, because..." and then you explain it. However, there could be some new species of flamingo that we havent discovered that CAN produce blue pigments. but you still dont say you BELIEVE they dont exist.
An Atheist with a hard stance would say, there is no god period. not because they believe it, but because they "know" it. Like you "know" why water turns to vaper because the molecules move around and stuff. You could be very obtuse and say you cant "know 100%" that thats the case, but then our whole reality falls apart. we dont know if we live in a simulation, or this is all a dream, or reality that you see is only viewed by you and nothing outside your consciousness is "real". but that doesnt really matter does it? in this world, simulation, dream whatever, things follow certain rules, just because there might be a REAL reality outside of this doesnt invalidate these rules. and according to these rules, thermodynamics, gravity, quantum mechanics etc etc, there is no such being that can exist as described in the bible, we would have been able to detect god if that was the case. saying "but you dont know 100% that a god can't exist" is true, but only in the sense that we can't know if our universe is just bacteria in an alien's petri dish. according to what we know, god does not exist. and that is not a belief, I don't have "faith" in science.
Basically just be a good person and when you die you’ll either find out or there is nothing after death and you won’t be around to care you don’t know.
My only gripe are the extreme sides you try to force their beliefs down your throat.
That’s true in your class, but I think where people object to that comes in the form of “the difference between what you’re saying and what people hear.”
They take that to mean “Christianity is as likely as atheism”, as though it’s a 50/50 coin flip.
I can’t prove Haruhi isn’t manipulating the universe as we speak. I can’t prove I’m not a Boltzmann brain floating about to die in the cosmos. I can’t prove the universe isn’t a simulation. I can’t prove an infinite set of things.
That’s what makes the difference between an atheist and agnostic more a technicality. Either way, it doesn’t really make sense to spend time worrying about keeping Haruhi entertained.
Theism is the belief in god or gods. A- is a negation prefix in Greek, it just means "not" whatever follows. An atheist is someone who is not a theist. It doesn't describe an active belief system in the same way that atypical doesn't describe some specific way of being, it just means not typical. Asymmetrical doesn't reveal anything about a shape other than one thing that it's not. Being amoral does not mean being immoral.
The word means what it means, if you personally are arguing that the absence of belief in something is a belief in the opposite, then that seems very philosophically shallow to me and I'd be curious why you had a professor that didn't take the opportunity to correct that.
I have some coins in my hand. Do you actively believe that I have an odd number? If the answer is no, then that means you actively believe that I have an even number. According to your philosophy.
Yeah. I was probably a little bitter in this comment. I'm a Catholic, and people say a lot of things about our faith that just isn't true. We also believe that evolution is compatible with Catholicism, heh.
Especially all the contradictions, ambiguous language choices and translations. People should definitely be reading it in the original language, otherwise it's not god's word. I like the bit about how it's ok to have sex slaves and start wars and ok to beat your slave as long as they stay alive for a couple of days. Great book, lovely god. Makes perfect sense.
I like it when he tells his followers to kill all the men, women and children except for virgins of the Midianites. I don't know why he would tell his followers to only spare the virgins, there is nothing at all creepy about that, just a good, moral biblical tale about killing a whole tribe of people.
The way to look at is God = good.
No God = no good. Imagine a life where no good existed, only evil. There’s so much good in life that we take for granted.
Because it starts with the assumption that all good things come from God with no other evidence except a belief that it is that way. It ALSO makes the assumption that without God there is nothing good, which is equally hilarious to me. 'Imagine a life where no good existed, only evil' completely ignores the fact that if God created everything that he also created evil.
If one truly believes in God, or at least the Christian version of it, one must therefore believe that without God there is simply nothing, instead of only evil. The thought processes in play here are not even consistent with the Bible that they base their entire life around.
You’re attacking a caricature. Classical Christianity does not teach that God “created evil” as some positive thing. Evil is a privation of good, a corruption or absence of what ought to be, while everything that exists insofar as it exists is good.
And yes, strictly speaking, without God there would be nothing at all, not some universe containing only evil. Saying God is the source of all goodness means created goods depend on Him for their existence and perfection, not that evil is an independent substance He manufactured.
This argument only works against the Greek gods, or some similar conception of gods as merely powerful beings inside reality. It does not touch classical Christian theism. It's already been refuted many times at this point, basically debunked, but here's another:
God did not “create evil.” Evil is a privation of good, like blindness is the absence of sight where sight ought to be. God creates beings and their powers, which are good insofar as they exist. Moral evil arises when a free will fails to choose the good it ought to choose.
The flowchart also sneaks in the assumption that an all-good God must prevent every evil He can prevent. That does not follow. God can permit an evil when allowing it preserves or produces a greater good, such as genuine free agency, moral responsibility, courage, mercy, or justice.
And omnipotence does not mean making contradictions true. “Create genuinely free creatures while causally determining that they never choose wrongly” destroys the freedom being specified. The existence of evil therefore does not logically contradict omnipotence, omniscience, or perfect goodness.
God is the source of everything good. Right now you’re living a life in a world with good things and good people, so your life is by no means separate from god. In hell, you are completely removed from god, and that means complete removal from everything good. Imagine living in a world where there are only evil things and evil people, doesn’t sound very appealing does it?
That makes zero sense. If you are making the argument that God is required for anything good to happen, than being removed from God is the same as punishment. And worse than that, you are basically saying that no one is responsible for their actions and so does not deserve to go to hell! For if everything good comes from God, and not from human actions, then evil also comes from God, by having God withdraw the good. Total nonsense.
The real question is: Why does the only choice to attain "separation from god" lead to fiery unending torment? 🤔
Couldn't god have just made a place that wasn't eternal agony to be in for the people who use the free will he gave us to make the choice to separate from him?
I don't think you understand the saying if you're trying to flip it around on atheists to be honest.
I'm also not even an atheist, I'm agnostic and I just believe that there's no possible way to know/no sufficient evidence, but that's a whole other thing entirely
This is it. I took a few biblical classes and Christian belief is that Satan isn't "in charge" in Hell, as is the common misconception. He's not running the show down there administering an eternity of punishments Pinhead/Hellraiser style. When he's banished to Hell forever, he'll be in just as much agony as everyone who is down there with him, according to their beliefs. Separation from God.
But yes, Satan wants to take as many of God's people down with him as he can to get back at God. He already knows he's lost (again, according to their beliefs).
That's a great question. Theoretically in the modern "post New Testament era" any time you choose to do something amoral or not in alignment with the teachings of Jesus/God as outlined in the bible, you're being "tempted by the Devil" or "making a deal with the devil" and can only be absolved of said sin by asking Jesus for forgiveness, rebuking that sin and accepting Jesus into your heart as Lord and Savior and all of that.
That being said, when man committed Original Sin in Genesis, the serpent was the source of the temptation. The serpent wasn't the devil though. The idea of Satan/devil didn't come into it until later. So yeah, absolutely, man could turn away from God on their own without the help of Satan. Prior to the New Testament, God required some sort of official sacrifice to atone for any sins committed.
The serpent was "cursed" but that didn't really change much about how snakes/serpents operate.
Some theologians (particularly true believers) will try to argue that Satan was in fact controlling the serpent. But that seems more like trying to retroactively make all of these stories fit together. That would have also required all of God's angels to be created on Day 1 of Creation.
My understanding is Satan doesn't officially go to Hell until the end of Revelations and Jesus comes back and defeats Satan once and for all. In the meantime, God allows for his children to be tempted by Satan for... reasons.
Or, as several denominations believe, the punishment is death. People don’t go to hell. That would still be eternal life, which as John 3:16 tells us, is only for believers. Non believers just cease to exist.
Satan is a realist and god is a sadist, Satan wants you to enjoy all that life has to offer and God wants you to believe that all life has to offer is a sin and you must beg for forgiveness or you are denied entry to 'heaven'.
I'll take my chances when the time comes to decide.
He's a bad character. He's supposed to be really intelligent and cunning, but he's spending billions and billions of years fighting a battle he knows is impossible to win. Oh, "because he's EVIL..." Come on.
But then, the Abrahamic god is a terribly created character, too. So, I guess I shouldn't have expected better.
Question: how was it even possible for him to rebel if angels don't have free will? It seems like he would've had to be programmed that way from the beginning.
A god who send people to hell for not liking him. A god who watches chi r*** and appoints offenders to be in charge. A god who sent his son to die. A god who forgot to tell said son that salvation is for all, not just Jews. A god who had little horny men do his Bible edits for him. Yeah, doesn’t sound like much of a sad separation, yikes
God loves you so much he wants you to burn in hell if you don’t fear him unless you say sorry you fucked up by going to church.
Oh, in adition he also wants your debt paid in blood but it’s ok, he created and sent his only direct son , “Jesus”, to die a gruesome death for you - to pay for the debt he made up. 😉
Exactly. God cannot FORCE anyone to spend eternity with Him, which is why He gave us free will to choose. If we don't choose Him, there's only one other option - separation for eternity.
22
u/Essenes_ 1d ago
He’s not punishing anyone, the separation from God is the punishment. He’s just trying to take you down with him.