Okay so they are being punished for their lack of faith. A faith that relies on a realization that God did not provide? We can keep circling this. If God intervenes how does this issue get reconciled?

People are punished for their sins. Your objection is that you don't believe in Christ, therefore, your punishment is based on something else, your ignorance maybe, but you are still judged for your sins.

Biblically, God cannot be with sin. If your sins are not forgiven, you cannot enter heaven.

The reason why you are "saved" is because God/Jesus came into your life right? Does that mean you are just luckier than others who did not have this experience?

I see what you're getting at now, didn't understand you before.

We're not going to get to the bottom of this anytime soon, it's been long debated. The doctrine of election is a bit of a paradox. Calvinism vs Arminianism won't be settled anytime soon.

One thing though, what's stopping you from believing in God, in seeking God? I don't know your history, obviously, but who's to say that God won't give you some sort of experience in the future? Believe in Christ, and he will save you.

Yeah I figured it's been debated about so no need to continue it.

I do believe in God and have had a similar experience to what you have had. I interpret it differently than you do is all. It's just the shaming and fear based aspect of Christianity is really unsettling; not just on an emotional level but I feel strongly that it's the complete opposite of what spiritual practice is about.

I didn't mean to shut down the conversation, just that I don't know the answer to that question. Not sure anyone does. I lean slightly towards predestination myself, but only because I did nothing to get me where I am, quite the opposite in fact.

I'm not sure I agree with you about the shaming and fear. It might be an issue of motives. If you do things out of love because you care for people, I don't see that being wrong. After all, if you believe that people need to believe in Christ in order to be saved, you would want to warn them, wouldn't you?

I think the coolest part of Christian theology is salvation by faith. If you don't believe, you are granted everything you DO believe in (aka- a godless world).

There is some question here of what "salvation" means. As in, some use it more in the sense of transcendence to heaven, or alleviating the condition of sin, or closeness with God, and so on. But that is quite a bit different from physical benefits in the physical world like being given food for the starving. Setting aside the former (as in I won't comment on the morality or aesthetics of having a hell vs heaven divide and the like), if you believe in these earthly ramifications, then I say that they do not meet my earthly standards of morality. Indeed, choosing whether to feed starving children based on whether they are a member of the right tribe sounds more reminiscent of the worst aspects of humanity that we most strongly condemn than a "cool" godly benevolence.

And if you do believe, no matter what you've done in your life, repent and you'll be completely forgiven of every sinful act, and welcomed into the kingdom of God.

<no matter what you've done!>

That's cool?


Theists sometimes criticize secular justice systems since people will inevitably get away with a crime occasionally - "Where's the justice in that?" And yet under the divine justice system, the "perfectly just God" provides no justice at all!!!

I think I do understand your argument. Aren't you simply saying that (assuming god) we can't know what God knows, and because of that it's pointless to speculate on his motives or reasons? But, it seems that Christianity starts there but then leaps from that to 'but we know he's good by nature and therefore can't sin, therefore what he does that appears sinful in fact isn't because of some assumed good motive/reason'.

It's that second part that I consider to be special pleading. We can't know what god knows, but equally, we can't know that he is essentially good by nature, particularly if we are not biblical literalists, no? I'd say that the simplest explanation for God appearing to be capable of doing bad things is that God is capable fo doing bad things and the 'mysterious ways' defence has never been sufficient for me as an explanation for why the things that God does that seem bad, actually aren't bad.

This was much better. It is carefully stated and makes sense.

This is basically correct. Our focus should be on the good or evil of our actions, not on trying to determine if God is good, evil or non-existent based on what we can observe. Given the nature of the question, our information is simply inadequate to draw a rational conclusion.

This is also pretty close imo. Christianity is a religion and has as an element of faith that God is fundamentally good. Your desire to invalidate that element is what is flawed. It is a valid assumption. It is impossible to deal with the ultimate question of God without making assumptions.

It is not special. It is simply an assumption that is different from yours. And before you argue "I do not assume there is no God", think about it. If you live your life as if there is no God, then you are effectively making that assumption. You are simply not admitting that to yourself. But you should. You should always recognize exactly what you are doing when you act.

Simplest is a difficult thing to truly understand and argue. Also, it does not tell you what is true. However, one could argue that it might be better to assume that there is a God and that He is good. That is another subject of course.

For the purposes of this discussion, I'm assuming God is real. I agree with you that the OP list is not exhaustive and so I'm focusing on the 'can God sin?' part. Since I know the Christian answer to that question (No he can't, because he's necessarily and exclusively good by nature), I'm working backwards to understand the logic behind it. I'm not trying to invalidate it, just understand it.

I don't get why it's valid. It seems the validity is assumed as part of an argument.

If, generally, it's a sin to commit genocide, it seems reasonable to say that God has sinned when he has committed genocide. To then claim that God is the exception to that rule, by introducing the favourable and unverifiable characteristic of 'exclusive goodness' seems like the very definition of special pleading. And, even if we could show that God is capable of good, it doesn't exclude that he's capable of bad, I'm questioning this assumption that he's only capable of good.

If you're not a biblical literalist and can't simply refer to the bible, how do you justify believing in the exclusive 'goodness' of God? If you can't, then how can you reasonably assert that it allows Him to be the exception to any rule on what constitutes sinful behaviour?

There isn't logic behind it because it is not a logical deduction. It is an assumption. It is built into the definition of the capital G God that you are assuming for the purposes of this discussion exists. By its definition, God cannot sin.

What I think you are only stipulating is that a lower case g god exists, some deity to whom we have not yet given many properties, in particular, not given it that key property that capital G God has: lack of sin. It is like you are assuming only an all powerful deity, but not necessarily an all good one, and then asking how you logically deduce that this deity is also all good. You can't, and nobody is trying to.

Very well said. I can add nothing.

Ok fair enough.

Justice is always provided for. I'm not sure where you get all of this from.

Christ taught that there were unforgivable sins.

This again seems like a lose-lose proposition. When God destroys a nation because he considers them wicked, people consider God unjust, but when he forgives people and doesn't punish them, again he is considered unjust.

The foundation of Christianity is that Christ has atoned for sins, if you accept the sacrifice. To consider some people more evil than others based on your own perspective is irrelevant. God requires all sins paid for, not just "bigger" ones, so even though you may not have murdered or raped anyone, you're just as guilty. You should be just as outraged at your own "small" sins, as you are about ones you consider bigger.

Does God not provide for starving children?

I have not even seen this established yet.

But I'm sure I can make the case that God has indeed provided the means for all, but man himself is the one causing this suffering.

However, children die every day, and from your perspective, that might pose a problem of evil. But this has never really been an issue from my perspective. Only God knows the heart of a man (or a child). Only God knows that if he feeds this child by supernatural provision, this child will one day get drunk and crash his car into a crowd of young believers. For me, the real problem of evil appears when Christ is nailed to the cross, or when a man of faith is struck down in the prime of his youth.

But RLK is on the right track there, I think. From God's perspective, such a loss may well be an overall win for the one who is struck down.

You say it is immoral for God to protect one group over another. I simply don't think it is. God doesn't have to house a devil next to me in heaven just because this devil existed. He is a devil, who chose to reject the divine grace. He is not protected under grace... by choice.

perhaps god has seen that this man of faith will one day get drunk and crash his car into a crowd of young atheists?

So really seems to come down to God can't sin because God can't sin, as I said earlier ITT and what RLK said (quoted below) seems unnecessary because whether we can know God or not, or see things from his perspective or not, is irrelevant because ultimately he can't sin anyway and the question was 'can God sin?'. The answer is simply, no.

IMO if we use God's assumed exclusive goodness of character to refute that God can sin (despite committing acts that appear to be sinful), it's special pleading, and if we just argue that God can't sin, therefore God can't sin, without even giving another reason for the conclusion, it's begging the question.

It's hard to be begging the question when an argument isn't actually being made.

The more appropriate description of the fallacy here is that you're presenting a form of strawman, which is a false representation of what others are saying.

Or maybe you just don't know the difference between an assumption and a conclusion. That problem would be consistent with your many presentations of your axiomatic disdain for religion.

No. Do you recognize that there is a difference between these two statements:
S1: A
S2: A => A

The former asserts whatever A is (in this case, that God exists where what we mean by God is an entity that is all powerful, all good, and by definition can not sin etc). The second of these asserts a vacuous deduction. What RLK is doing is S1. You have presented this as being S2. They are not the same.

Sometimes bad arguments have the appearance of looking meaningful (like they have an A => B ) but in actual fact B is just a repainted version of A and so one is correct to point out that their logical deduction is the vacuous A => A. But this isn't what is going on here. RLK isn't making a vacuous deduction, he is making a meaningful assertion.

Don't get me wrong, I think this notion of God is as ridiculous as you do. But if I am going to criticize it, I want to make sure that I am correctly representing what my opponents are actually arguing.

Problem of suffering not problem of evil, but anyways my objection is not that children die (as an atheist, I am happy with the aesthetics of a world where children die) but instead the asymmetric godly assistance provided to children or denied to them based on membership within a particular tribe.

I'm just human, so I can only judge things by my human emotions and my human understanding. Perhaps it is the case that children who die deserve it because they are devils. Maybe he will kill believers in a drunker accident in the future. Or maybe killing him now saves him much suffering and puts him more quickly into god's presence. I don't know. So I can only judge on what I see: precisely zero reason to think starving children of one tribe are any more deserving of ample godly help than starving children of another tribe. In fact, when humans make such judgements, it has resulted in some of the worst atrocities we have committed. Maybe what I think is an atrocity is a necessary purging of devils or whatever, but from what I have the ability to measure, it is immoral.

If this is the Christian God that is being speculated on, biblically he doesn't kill people for their future sins. You can see this through all the Judges God appointed, and later killed because they became evil. Saul is also a popular example.

Why even have earth if this was the case. Why not just skip ahead to where everyone is either in heaven or hell. Maybe God can and does intervene to stop future disasters, but the opposite is pretty visible in the bible.

Presumably you think that the correct perspective to take with regards to the truth of whether an event in this world is evil is God's perspective. That is, God's perspective is the perspective which matches with true statements about the morality of events in the world. If it is "absolutely ridiculous" for us to even speculate about whether an event is evil from God's perspective, this would seem very close to saying that we shouldn't speculate about whether it is true that an event is evil. This would seem to be in conflict with typical Christian practice and belief, so presumably you would want to avoid it. How do you?