There’s no indication that God would be good. In the Bible, David did something bad so God had 10 of his wives raped as punishment. He ordered genocide, specifically including that suckling children were to be killed. He does a lot of bad shit. Maybe he’s real and he’s a Trump supporter.
God could still exist. It just means that either he isn’t benevolent, isn’t all-powerful, isn’t all-knowing, or some combination thereof.
God doesn’t care, or God doesn’t know.
If he knows, but does not care, then he is not good.
If he cares, but does not know, then he is not god.
If this is part of the plan, then God is evil.
Or God do exists and is the ultimate villain, the fucking last boss of Life™
The world is not fair.
Have you considered the possibility that God is an incompetent moron?
Religion of any ilk is a mental illness.
God’s interests are confined to the ocular, he doesn’t do lungs.
Existence of evil isn’t proof that [the Christian] God doesn’t exist, for a variety of reasons, some less obvious than others. Although it’s still very unlikely that he does exist.
Which is generally irrelevant, because faith is entirely separate from objective facts. You don’t need to consider the hypothetical existence of God to be a true fact in order to be a good Christian. To ‘believe’ in him means something else completely, but depending on your language it might not make linguistic sense (assuming it makes sense at all, but that’s a separate discussion).
The same is, however, not true for Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity (stupid ass name), Mormonism, or some others. Mostly because they have nothing to do with Christianity, and are just… well, scams.
Catholicism, and most other Christian denominations, use Christianity in a similar fashion to the Nazis using swastikas.
The main idea of Christianity is that earthly life is essentially an entrance exam for the next, true life. You live your life as best you can, then you’re judged afterwards, and if you pass - you go to heaven, which is supposedly a paradise free of evil.
So evil (or what we generally consider to be ‘evil’) being omnipresent does not prove anything in the context of Christianity. The crucial part is whether or not evil exists in the ‘next life’. Conveniently, we’ll never know until we reach it, so it’ll probably never be possible to prove anything on this topic.
I’m not sure if it’s still possible to track where it all started, but to me it seems quite likely that precisely this idea of ‘true life’ or ‘soul’ being disconnected from physical, observable, empirical reality is where all our troubles with capitalism started.
If this life is largely meaningless, and the real one starts after we die, then sooner or later some people will just do whatever they want. And if humans are the only ‘intelligent’ beings, or the only beings with souls (Christianity + later Enlightenment philosophy), then mass destruction of nature is morally sound.
Then add focusing on accumulation of capital, as well as industrial machinery, and you arrive where we are today, pretty much.
You don’t need to consider the hypothetical existence of God to be a true fact in order to be a good Christian.
Other than the fact that according to the Bible you need a personal relationship with God in order to be a Christian and spend eternity with God.
The main idea of Christianity is that earthly life is essentially an entrance exam for the next, true life. You live your life as best you can, then you’re judged afterwards, and if you pass - you go to heaven, which is supposedly a paradise free of evil.
See above, according to the Bible, no one will be judged good enough based on how they lived their life and the only hope of getting to heaven is a personal relationship with God, by which Jesus’s death in the cross can pay the outstanding debt owed from your life that you yourself cannot pay.
This is an extreme oversimplification, and a literal interpretation of obviously symbolic and allegorical texts.
Just like ‘giants’ doesn’t refer to literal giant people, ‘relationship with God’ can mean several dozen different things, depending on the context.
Allegories and symbols are very common in religious texts. To treat them literally misses the point.
These texts also tend to repeat the same points multiple times, or overwrite them altogether (countless occurrences in the Bible), with broader context in entirely different sections of the texts, if at all present.
Annotations usually help with this, but it depends on the translation and version of the Bible you’re reading.
Keep in mind I’m by no means advocating for or defending Christianity or any other religion. This is purely about theology, as well as reading and understanding religious texts. It’s a fairly complex topic, regardless of if you’re religious or not.
God is obviously malevolent. All of his conservative representatives being evil should be a clue.
I think it makes more sense to say Yahweh is malevolent. It started off as a god of thunder and war, and when the ancient Judeans moved from a polytheist pantheon to a monotheist model, that’s who the groups that won had chosen as their god.
But yeah, name a single diety directly responsible for more death and destruction? It literally pits 3 and a half groups that worship it against each other! To generate war. To generate death. It feeds on death and pain.
Obligatory:
Gonna save this one
if you look at how cancer develops
that doesn’t need God… that just happens here on earth as a random lottery / your life choices
And not from corporations poisoning us…
that’s life choices. these corporations produce nothing but for people
Mysterious ways, brah. Mysterious ways.
Maybe heaven exists and god takes the good there early as a reward.
Do you mean the designer, omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent, creator, Jehovah, or the lord god that gave that gave us viruses, deadly bacteria, genetic diseases, parasites, , volcanos, earthquakes, blindness, cancers, floods, droughts, starvation, meteorites, death from lightning strikes, pestilence, holy wars, tidal waves, asbestos, infant mortality, trachoma, life threatening radioactive elements, solar flares, malaria, smallpox, despots, dictators, slavery, mass extinctions, ice ages, trachoma, hare lips, cleft palates, animal sacrifices, infant genital mutilation, mental illness depression, bilharzia and anxiety, autism, Parkinson’s disease, Hansons disease, hernias, the appendix, compacted wisdom teeth, acne, dementia and complete morons?
The beginning of the biblical worldview is that everything was created in harmonious order, but then everything was fractured by us and broken bits now cause almost all of what you mentioned. God did give us the appendix though, and we think we’ve figured out why a few years back, it seems to hold a backup of the intestinal bacterial that can restart it if it gets wiped out.
Not to take away from your beautiful comment, but wasn’t there recently some research that the appendix might actually be beneficial? It had something to do with storing a copy of gut bacteria that can be re-seeded into the gut if needed. (I’ll post a link if I come across the study again.)
It was ages ago, Wikipedia links to a paper for 2009 and another review paper in 2016.
you forgot omnipresent.
If God is everywhere, then he’s up your ass too.
He didn’t give us anything. After he kicked us out of paradise it was pretty much “figure it out” apart from Noah and Christ (Moses was delusional).
