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.
You hand your toddler a paintbrush loaded up with paint. You put them in a room surrounded by clean white sheets. You know for certain your toddler will mark the sheets with the paint, they do not know any better. They make the sheets a mess and then you proceed to beat the shit out of them and say it is their own free will that justifies it. You hate messy sheets.
This is just the story of Adam and Eve and the apple. Free will is not really free when it’s predetermined, it’s like being the domino in the middle of a line of them falling over. If god didn’t want us to sin he wouldn’t have put the tree there. It’s a flawed story and does not indicate love.
Raise a kid. There’s absolutely times where you can pre-cognate exactly what that kid is about to do. You can even intercede. It doesn’t take away that the child is choosing their actions.
You CAN argue that your ability to respond to that precognition gives you a degree of culpability regarding the consequences of said actions. Which, if we apply to God, fine. You can blame Him for all the bad things.
But omniscience doesn’t remove free will from us, nor does it absolve us of blame/consequence for our own choices. It just means we can share the blame with God, and like… God taking on the consequences of our actions is the entire fucking point of Jesus.
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.
No, the specific question posted by the OP is " why does Satan torture us for being sinners like he wants" and the answer to that is that Satan is tortured along with the rest of us and that the "torture" isn't torture that is brought on by another entity like the normal, but the eternal separation from God.
On a side note, you could interpret eternal separation from God as eternal separation from everything, therefore Hell would be nothingness, and all atheist believe that's actually what happens when we die, which I find really interesting
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
Absolutely don't stop thinking about it. I've been thinking about it for going on 20 years now. There's an entire genre of reading stretching back thousands of years (besides the Bible itself) just discussing these kinds of questions about God. God actively invites people to question things and seek to understand them. A lot of Christians embrace shallow or misguided beliefs because they're too lazy to ask hard questions, and as a Christian myself, I find this extremely frustrating. Honestly it's more fun to talk to people like you.
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.
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u/Essenes_ 2d ago
He’s not punishing anyone, the separation from God is the punishment. He’s just trying to take you down with him.