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Why god let's bad things happen

Snowday

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"Trinity" emphasizes the idea that "Father" and "Son" are metaphorical

Hi, there. Just a quick correction. What I've quoted of your post is not, for many or maybe most Christians, the standard interpretation of the Holy Trinity, at least not according to the Nicene Creed. Some, like the Pentecostals, do emphasize God's oneness, but this view is actually very close to a heresy condemned by the early Church: Sabellianism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabellianism). You yourself may hold this interpretation, and if so, I completely respect it. My impression of other Christians is that they are fuzzy on the Trinity and possibly prefer it that way.

As a Roman Catholic, I subscribe to the ideas of St. Thomas Aquinas, that the Trinity is how God relates to Himself. See the spoiler for a quick summary.


But I agree with everything else you wrote.
 

erg

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Good things would have no value if bad things didn't exist. Moreover, what seems a "bad" thing could turn out to be a good thing once the big picture is seen.
 

Paisley

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Evil is an expression of our lost identity and relationship with God. We were created in the image of God and we were never meant to live for ourselves at all, but in constant love relationship with God. In order for God to fully express himself to us, God allowed us the choice of good or evil, causing us to become torn between the two, and slaves to what we do not want to do, but being a good God, both just and merciful, he revealed His justice and mercy to us through the cross of Christ, and by believing in Christ, God removes our evil nature or sin nature through faith in Christ, and restores our identity and image as sons and daughters of God, and increases our relationship with Himself.
 
Last edited:

uumlau

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Hi, there. Just a quick correction. What I've quoted of your post is not, for many or maybe most Christians, the standard interpretation of the Holy Trinity, at least not according to the Nicene Creed. Some, like the Pentecostals, do emphasize God's oneness, but this view is actually very close to a heresy condemned by the early Church: Sabellianism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabellianism). You yourself may hold this interpretation, and if so, I completely respect it. My impression of other Christians is that they are fuzzy on the Trinity and possibly prefer it that way.

As a Roman Catholic, I subscribe to the ideas of St. Thomas Aquinas, that the Trinity is how God relates to Himself. See the spoiler for a quick summary.


But I agree with everything else you wrote.
Yeah, I was mostly emphasizing the issues in the early church w/r to the Arian heresy, that the Father and Son were two distinct beings, that the Father created the Son at a particular time, as opposed to the God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God, Begotten, not made, of one being with the Father. Having Jesus be some kind of demigod was too close to the Greco-Roman version of things, where Hercules is the son of Zeus, and therefore has powers that normal men do not, but Hercules is a lesser being than Zeus, and so on.

I sort of think of the Trinity as facets of a gem, or sides of a die, where limited beings such as we can really only relate to a single facet/side at a time, but they're all part of the same essence.
 

Mole

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Yeah, I was mostly emphasizing the issues in the early church w/r to the Arian heresy, that the Father and Son were two distinct beings, that the Father created the Son at a particular time, as opposed to the God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God, Begotten, not made, of one being with the Father. Having Jesus be some kind of demigod was too close to the Greco-Roman version of things, where Hercules is the son of Zeus, and therefore has powers that normal men do not, but Hercules is a lesser being than Zeus, and so on.

I sort of think of the Trinity as facets of a gem, or sides of a die, where limited beings such as we can really only relate to a single facet/side at a time, but they're all part of the same essence.

When I have asked Christians for a rational explanation of the Trinity, at first they try. After all, Roman Catholicism teaches faith and reason, so at first they think there is a rational explanation of the Trinity. But when they try to give a rational explanation of the Trinity, they fail. And they fall back on it's a mystery. And this is the official teaching: the Trinity is a mystery.

Hinduism worships Ganesh, the God with the head of an elephant, while Christians worship the Trinity, the God with three heads. Both are equally preposterous.
 

Lark

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When I have asked Christians for a rational explanation of the Trinity, at first they try. After all, Roman Catholicism teaches faith and reason, so at first they think there is a rational explanation of the Trinity. But when they try to give a rational explanation of the Trinity, they fail. And they fall back on it's a mystery. And this is the official teaching: the Trinity is a mystery.

Hinduism worships Ganesh, the God with the head of an elephant, while Christians worship the Trinity, the God with three heads. Both are equally preposterous.

I honestly dont believe that you've actually spoken to anyone offline about this at all.
 

Zangetshumody

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God let's bad things happen to us in order for us to be mentally and spiritually stronger and sometimes, he sees weaknesses that we do not even know. Sometimes because of our own wrong doing.
It is also to test us whether we are loyal or not. Sometimes we take things for granted and it makes us evaluate our own choices in the past with an open eye.

God is a mystery in philosophy, but to the subjective perspective, and psychological account in the affairs of people, there is an account of God to be understood, that doesn't render a neat metaphysical system, because the onus falls onto deliberating action, and not external conditions of limitation. Anything is 'possible', even science tells us a spoon could 'magically' begin to levitate, there is nothing to prevent it from doing so, its just highly 'unlikely' for it to occur when God is taken to be Statistical in character. And yet we as entities, have the power to remove liberties away from Statistical possibility (in general, our actions shape and offer controls to the environment, or at the very least, command to our mental filter of perceptions), we can delimit the nature of 'outcomes' by our works, depending on the wisdom and character of those deliberations, and how these works correlate and communicate with whatever else is active within the theater of our actions' grasp.

A key part of deliberation then, is knowledge of action, with a corresponding knowledge of err on being acted upon: if you've ever experienced the shift in your soul after uncovering aspects of nescience within your belief-system, you will realize that limitations of freedom stem from knowledge claims that [by necessary implication] encumber the mind in a way that degrades the potency of deliberation, in the delivery to a reconciliation. This natural tendency for people to execute their intentions and queries, is consequently confused when succumbing to a culture that doesn't understand and teach the fundamentals and structure of free-thinking in the context of the full breadth of psychological processes/capacities— where being demented and cognitively abused is part of the bedrock of acculturation, which has in recent times only been exacerbated by the "liberal" and permissive approaches that simply structure disorientation into the process of attrition that the young endure; there is no substitute for understanding the mind and maintaining its health with communication that doesn't entice delusional paradigms that seduce with power, yet taste of incarceration by the development of an 'adulthood' that cannot escape its own consequence, even if the liberal fashion is to defer these shortcomings onto a collective-sin (which in my view, is the darkest manifestation of a psychologically-opaque-fascism, perpetrating a blind spiritual engagement with the self [where the self is regarded as an agent in the narrative of a world authority, merely a cog for this Leviathan of morality,— abolishing the task of individual deliberation, with the promise of imaginary redemption, vicariously bestowed onto a unified model of society (I could go on about how these models aren't even conceptually functional, its like a religion of believing in "square circles", they can say the words, and they except their opponents to construct it for themselves, or it just proves how oppression their being by refusing to manufacture the "square circles" as the threats of destabilization escalate to hasten the redemption by delusional-collective-expectation]).
 

uumlau

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And you think this makes sense?

Considering that most atheist attacks on Christianity aim for the "Invisible man in the sky" version of God, it's helpful to point out that "invisible man in the sky" is nowhere in the Bible. You can, however, argue that the Trinity doesn't make sense. Lots of people, many Christians included, have done so over the years.

This is one of those things that makes debates and proofs kind of pointless. If you get a Marxist, a Keynesian and an Austrian economist all debating their various models of the economy, what you'll see is that they're all attacking straw-men versions of the others' models. The straw men are necessary, though - the actual models require that you adopt the frame of mind of the person using the model. If you regard another's frame of mind as nonsensical, it is remarkably difficult to create a non-straw-man version of the models created via that frame of mind.

tl;dr - the Trinity answers theological questions that atheists would never bother to consider in the first place. The only reason that this is a problem is that they then create simplistic theological models, knock those down, and then wonder why those who believe in much more sophisticated theological models remain unconvinced.
 

Ojian

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You can, however, argue that the Trinity doesn't make sense. Lots of people, many Christians included, have done so over the years.

Yep, that would be me. I consider myself a Christian, and I think that the Trinity doesn't make sense. I was just questioning the quoted statement that was contrasted to what you labeled as the "Arian heresy". The 'Trinity' description makes less sense imo.

tl;dr - the Trinity answers theological questions that atheists would never bother to consider in the first place. The only reason that this is a problem is that they then create simplistic theological models, knock those down, and then wonder why those who believe in much more sophisticated theological models remain unconvinced.

Pardon, but what questions does the Trinity supposedly answer that atheists wouldn't bother to ask in the first place?
 

citizen cane

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OP: By 'bad things', do you mean the punctuation in the thread title?:D
 

Avocado

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The same reason gravity lets the earth pull things toward it.
 

Avocado

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God is a mystery in philosophy, but to the subjective perspective, and psychological account in the affairs of people, there is an account of God to be understood, that doesn't render a neat metaphysical system, because the onus falls onto deliberating action, and not external conditions of limitation. Anything is 'possible', even science tells us a spoon could 'magically' begin to levitate, there is nothing to prevent it from doing so, its just highly 'unlikely' for it to occur when God is taken to be Statistical in character. And yet we as entities, have the power to remove liberties away from Statistical possibility (in general, our actions shape and offer controls to the environment, or at the very least, command to our mental filter of perceptions), we can delimit the nature of 'outcomes' by our works, depending on the wisdom and character of those deliberations, and how these works correlate and communicate with whatever else is active within the theater of our actions' grasp.

A key part of deliberation then, is knowledge of action, with a corresponding knowledge of err on being acted upon: if you've ever experienced the shift in your soul after uncovering aspects of nescience within your belief-system, you will realize that limitations of freedom stem from knowledge claims that [by necessary implication] encumber the mind in a way that degrades the potency of deliberation, in the delivery to a reconciliation. This natural tendency for people to execute their intentions and queries, is consequently confused when succumbing to a culture that doesn't understand and teach the fundamentals and structure of free-thinking in the context of the full breadth of psychological processes/capacities— where being demented and cognitively abused is part of the bedrock of acculturation, which has in recent times only been exacerbated by the "liberal" and permissive approaches that simply structure disorientation into the process of attrition that the young endure; there is no substitute for understanding the mind and maintaining its health with communication that doesn't entice delusional paradigms that seduce with power, yet taste of incarceration by the development of an 'adulthood' that cannot escape its own consequence, even if the liberal fashion is to defer these shortcomings onto a collective-sin (which in my view, is the darkest manifestation of a psychologically-opaque-fascism, perpetrating a blind spiritual engagement with the self [where the self is regarded as an agent in the narrative of a world authority, merely a cog for this Leviathan of morality,— abolishing the task of individual deliberation, with the promise of imaginary redemption, vicariously bestowed onto a unified model of society (I could go on about how these models aren't even conceptually functional, its like a religion of believing in "square circles", they can say the words, and they except their opponents to construct it for themselves, or it just proves how oppression their being by refusing to manufacture the "square circles" as the threats of destabilization escalate to hasten the redemption by delusional-collective-expectation]).

I can accept "God" as a sociological and psychological phenomena, but I seriously doubt there is a conscious being out there that is just like us and that sits in some heaven judging everything. The "God" of Spinoza and Einstein is more likely, but I dislike the word "God" since it is too easily confused with a popular Abrahamic Deity where I live that people think tells them to hurt others. If I do refer to it, I refer to it as the universe. The universe is an impersonal thing, but it is still amazing in a way.
 

Zangetshumody

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[MENTION=18694]The Wailing Specter[/MENTION]

Moses to God:
But who should I say sent me to Pharaoh?

God to Moses:
Say "I am" sent you.

Moses to God:
<argues>

God to Moses:
Say that, "I am that I am", sent you.


Where is this popular abrahamic deity of which you speak? Somewhere locked within some impersonal/personal dichotomy... ? And also you have it backwards, "he" is not just like us, we are like him. When you make the reference to "he", in any particular context, what furnishes it with substance and meaning? What standard have you imbued into the very notion of any contemplated 'he'... the religious answer is "yourself", because it has the same source likeness of whatever is taken for [the grammatical use of] "him"?

He went to the store to buy some flour...

He drove to the beach to go swimming...

He WAS made to sit and endure the afternoon lecture...

What do we think of him? What will we know about the 'he' without an ideal form of "him" to take the sense of meaning after? So we can know (categorically) what he might be like (and not just in some abstracted sense of nebulous description, but rendering a particular sense that includes a clear deliberation of narrative-interchange, that is carried by the might of character- at the source of the him;— the actuator of himself and all action). Character is unseen to the senses, and when source-character is coloured in the terms of temporal-significance, you lie with divergent understandings, inconsistent with unitary apprehensions of a quickening nature. [my first edit was lost to the website disconnect will try see if I can get a hold of that original treatment, because it extended this last point in a more elaborated fashion].

Gen 1:25 And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
Gen 1:26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
Gen 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
 

Bush

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With the way we're built, if major bad things (e.g. natural disasters, cancer, genocide) didn't happen, we'd simply set a new threshold. We'd be lamenting over why God allows people to stub their toes or allows us to run out of Scotch tape when we're wrapping a gift.
 

Totenkindly

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Good things would have no value if bad things didn't exist. Moreover, what seems a "bad" thing could turn out to be a good thing once the big picture is seen.

... and sometimes a bad thing is just a bad thing.

In fact, just because human beings are able to take a bad thing and make something good out of it, or perhaps just because you can find something good to derive from the outcome of a bad event, doesn't mean the event in question is suddenly not bad.

Why are events being labeled in a way to justify higher power? it's funny how humans have to weave together a story or explanation to make bad things palatable or seem "not so bad". Maybe we can just face them head-on and accept them as bad, while still working to stop them in the future or find something good to generate from what is left.
 

magpie

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When I see a fly trapped inside, hitting itself against a window, I don't feel moved to interfere. There is only one basic thing we have in common - we're both living things. But there's no shared experience, no real empathy. A fly's life is a flash in a pan compared to mine. So if I or you were the fly, what would possibly motivate anything to interfere?
 

erg

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... and sometimes a bad thing is just a bad thing.

In fact, just because human beings are able to take a bad thing and make something good out of it, or perhaps just because you can find something good to derive from the outcome of a bad event, doesn't mean the event in question is suddenly not bad.

Why are events being labeled in a way to justify higher power? it's funny how humans have to weave together a story or explanation to make bad things palatable or seem "not so bad". Maybe we can just face them head-on and accept them as bad, while still working to stop them in the future or find something good to generate from what is left.

You are right, sometimes a bad thing is just a bad thing. I know it won't help much to tell what I said to somebody who's wife just died of cancer, or to the millions of people starving in Africa, but I like to think that there must be a reason for it, even if there isn't.
 

Totenkindly

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You are right, sometimes a bad thing is just a bad thing. I know it won't help much to tell what I said to somebody who's wife just died of cancer, or to the millions of people starving in Africa, but I like to think that there must be a reason for it, even if there isn't.

In my experience, people have mixed responses to being told that something bad that just happened to them "has a purpose." (I guess I spent many many years in church watching people do just that kind of thing.)

Maybe there are a few who appreciate it or who do understand why someone would say that to mean well and appreciate the sentiment behind it. At the same time, some people will be furious when someone tries to tell them "there's a reason for this" when they are lost in their grief. What I see that is usually more appreciated is that people just want to know someone loves them, cares about them, and is there for them while they work through their loss and maybe later folks can find a way to transfigure the loss. Basically in a cosmos where we can sometimes feel very small, the only thing that we find that makes the emptiness/pain bearable is each other.
 
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