Which is one explanation for why it happened if the Christian God is real, but what about the other gods, like Allah? Islam doesn't have an 'original sin' concept.

Thinks...

Uh, just answered my own question....

So, does anyone think that this adds weight to Allah being real?

I think my post that you quoted responds to this. I mean, this is just a repeat of your OP which is what I was replying to.

Well it certainly looked to me that Sim City should have been boring for my brother, but I was also hoping you would be able to think deeper about this and imagine it being boring for the residents of Sim City as well. All my points still stand.

By changing my OP to apply only to deadly hits on occupied schools it works. At least for several centuries of no such calamities. He does have several standard deviations of wiggle room.

Biblical miracles were done when everybody was a believer in something supernatural. The bad guys just believed in the wrong supernatural things. Or perhaps they believed in God and rejected him anyway. Nowadays though most unbelievers disbelieve in anything supernatural and in fact point to that disbelief as the reason they are atheists. I assume that is why theists nowadays sometimes claim that God makes sure that he doesn't show irrefutable evidence of his existence. He doesn't want such acts to be the sole reason those atheists become believers.

Your third point basically leads to choosing #3 on my list. And #3 should not be that hard to choose if you are a theist. Any terrible event inflicted on an undeserving person because he is in some sense collateral damage can be made up for in the afterlife.

I don't think that orthodoxy is in total agreement with the "man broke it" and now we suffer. I'd like to hear what the Roman Catholic approach to this is as I am unsure.

On a side note, but important to me, Man never had a chance against Lucifer, nary a chance.

You think that the residents are better off because they can't totally eliminate a few categories of catastrophes such as tornados hitting schools? You think that the miniscule increase in boredom would be a hardship they wouldn't trade away and be better off for having done so?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1321686.html

Tragedy drives innovation. And maybe God did already reduce the suffering some and this is the result.

I find it strange that you don't think it is okay to slightly inconvenience dark skinned people in airports for the greater good but you are willing to see children die to very slightly increase the chances that it will provoke an invention.

Said differently, even if I were to agree that hardship is an acceptable tradeoff to encourage innovation how can it be justified if it is spread so unequally? You speak as if people are cells in a body rather than individuals. The parents of killed children will not be consoled because someone invents a better tornado prediction device.

Jesus Christ.

Pat votes #3. Where is the poll?

I have some comments on this.

I think this last paragraph is wrong. You of all people should realize that. If tornadoes consistently threaded their way through populated regions while somehow always just missing schools, movie theaters, etc. where there was a concentration of children, there is no doubt that scientists would notice. Not by the path or any unexplained deviation of the funnel, but by the amazing consistency of what was not hit.


Pending a response to my first point I think that concealment is still on the table.

This does not seem consistent with the concept of God so it really is a subset of 4.

Possibly.

Excepting concealment, there is the test of human faith required. Remember that the children killed are actually not harmed under the assumption that there is a God. They are with God and therefore presumably better off. The test is for us to recognize that and not turn our hearts against God in our understandable pain and despair at our loss.

I wonder a bit if you are ever concerned that in attempting (I presume) to use this tragedy to turn people away from their faith, if you are committing a serious sin?

I concede this as an option, but not that it is shown to be the option.

I played SimCity and turned off all the disasters because it was a tedious side game to administer to the fires and the floods and have to end up redoing your layout for no other reason. If I wanted to rebuild something in a different way I would load an old version of the map or make a new one.

If you're making a sculpture, do you ruin it periodically because it's boring when you have it the way you want it?

He can't be long for meeting his maker. :/

I don't see how the 2 are related. How I think people should behave is not the same as how I think God or nature should behave. Surely you can see how the differences between humans and God are such that we should and do approach situations differently, right?

Yes, in this situation I've been speaking of humanity as a whole. It's unfortunate that the individual pieces being manipulated are individual people, but I fail to see how this is an attack on my position and not just a neutral observation.

1) It would be very obvious if everytime a tornado comes near to a school, it would change all of the suddent its direction or if it would all of the sudden lose its power.

2) As till today everyone sooner or later dies, you must elaborate what you mean with 'saving'. If you mean everyone should die after he has become 90 years old, than you must elaborate the difference between dying as a child and as an old person. And even if god agrees that no one dies before he has become 90 years old, who guarantees that we don't want to extend it to 91 years... 92 years 920 years? What I mean is: time doesn't exist anyways. 90 years pass by as fast as 10 years and as fast as 10 milli seconds. Everything that has an 'end', its 'beginning' is already its 'end'. Otherwise how could it ever end?
Suffering ends with giving up. The word 'Muslim' means: Someone who did give up. Giving up means: accept your fate as you don't have any power to change it. And this means stop planning your next second. Cause next second doesn't exist, and you can never predict what it has in its pocket for you.
As soon as someone gives up planning: happiness enters.

god is not a cosmic child playing with his train set of creation. therefore this thread is bollocks.

How do you know?

First, consider the Philosophical solution to suffering in a world created by an omni3 God whereby this world was created because it is both a good world and the one and only best possible world - for reasons perhaps incomprehensible to us. I believe that solution is considered a valid one by many philosophers, even if somehow unsatisfying for us. Under that solution, all your ideas for how God ought to tweek the world in ways that seem like good ideas to you, become tautologically failures. Under that solution, the world as it is is the best world possible. Any tweeks you might make can only make it a less than best possible world. So this is a possibility you have not listed.

Putting that aside, there is also a view whereby God created this universe from beginning to end from his timeless perspective, in one fell swoop so to speak. He did this with perfect knowledge of everything that happens at every time. And he created it all the way he wanted it. In this view there is no need for God to tweek anything about Nature. If he were to have wanted tornados to miss schools he would have made it so at the time of creation. He would not need to tweek Nature midway through the history of the Universe to make it so.

Putting that aside as well and following your premises, why should we think that it would be so much more important for God to save the schoolchildren rather than other people? I don't think that's so obvious. If God wants his interventions to stay hidden then saving only schoolchildren seems like a poor way to do it - especially when there are all sorts of other people who I'm sure would also like to be saved. If staying hidden is a priority for God then a much better method would be to scatter his life saving interventions with as much diversity as possible. Who knows, maybe that's exactly what he's doing. Maybe he's already saving as many as possible for him to remain hidden. You just don't notice so you insist he ought to save some more. But he's already maxed out. Who knows, maybe he's already intervened and tweeked nature half a dozen times to save David Sklansky's life - probably because he enjoys your books.

/following your premises.


PairTheBoard

God supports the broken window fallacy ldo

But he is not saving as many as possible to remain hidden. I don't see statisticians stating that tragedies are right on the lowest end of what is expected.

Why are these the only four options?

Shouldn't we consider that it is possible that God does care, and does have the power to intervene, and chooses not to intervene?

Which brings up another question: How could a God that cares and has the power to intervene but chooses not to intervene truly care? Perhaps this second question merits discussion.

It is because god wanted those children to be with him, he didnt want to wait until they died naturally at 80+ years old he wanted them NOW. 80 years is a long time to wait for an entity that exists outside of time ldo.

See what happened was even though god knows everything, like everything that ever was/is/will be, this time he forgot that he wanted those children, then was like aghh man i want them to be with me now! So even tho he could change time with the blink of an eye and no one would ever know, he choose to create a disaster, so 1, he can have those children with him right now and 2, so humans dont get bored on earth with all the cool stuff to do, and the news reporters have a job etc..

So anyway dont worry about the children that died, they are with god, cool. We are less bored, cool, and the grieving parents can rest assured that their children are with good now, in fact they should be happy and thankful that the good lord took them.

That's a tricky twist, but how well does the logic really hold up? First, if statisticians noticed that tragedies were consistenly at the lowest end of what is expected they would conclude something's amiss. If they had an expected range for tragedies they would expect the rate of tragedies to vary over that range. If the rate instead held at the low end of the range the statisticians might come to suspect divine intervention preventing normal variance. Maybe God can do it in some way that fools those statisticians, but keeping tragedies at the low end of what is expected would not be it.

Furthermore, it might be that statisticians figure whatever the tragedy rate is is what it's suppose to be. So they would never notice anything amiss and God could intervene an unlimited amount without bothering them. However, statisticians are not the only people paying attention. If God were to intervene without limit some people would wonder why we're so lucky. The rumor would spread that it must be God intervening. So God can not intervene without limit and still stay hidden. And we have no idea how much intervention it would take to pass the critical point that sets off enough people to blow his cover. So there's no reason, on these grounds, to think God isn't maxed out already.

It's very hard to track down all unintended consequences. Just because you've looked and found all you can doesn't mean you've found them all. I don't have to find more to tell you there may be more.



PairTheBoard

he told me