I watched Bill O’Reilly’s show last night on Fox News. The Big Mick was going on about how the successful ditching of that plane in the Hudson River, and the rescue of all on board, must have been a miracle.
I’d be curious to see O’Reilly’s mailbag on that. Somewhere out there in TV-land there must have been someone watching who’d lost a loved one in a plane crash. That person would surely have been thinking to himself: “Wait a minute here, pal. My wife was as worthy of life as anyone. She was a loving wife and mother, a patriotic and hard-working citizen. Why didn’t she deserve one of these miracles your God hands out so capriciously?
Don’t religious people understand that when they talk like this, they are implicitly insulting people? This planeload of people was deserving of God’s attention and a subsequent miracle, but that one wasn’t? Why?
And above and beyond that, to the point Heather has made at least once: If God is so darn capricious in His judgments, how exactly is life with Him different from life without Him? The randomness of events like this doesn’t prove there is no God, but surely it proves that there might as well not be.
I don’t think this a very productive line of argument, as it tends to rely on people being churls. The only place it plays well is among the already de-converted.
A better point to raise is the insult to the pilot, his crew and their skills implied by the invocation of the miraculous. If God did it, what need for courage and competence?
Oh it’s very productive. See lots of people feel that way when the zealots do their god talk stuff. And Bill O. is a prime example.
“The Big Mick”? Is that really the discourse-level that you encourage for your blog and for its discussions? (On the slim chance that you speak a different language than I do: The New Shorter Oxford lists several meanings for ‘mick’ and says derog derog derog.)
This line of reasoning is similar to the one that initially led me to question my previously taken for granted association with religion. My son was seriously injured in an accident and we were haunting the ICU waiting room between the infrequent and short visits allowed.
A group of women, well-meaning, I’m sure took advantage of our presence there to preach the usefulness of faith. I felt like I’d been slapped in the face when one told me that “it was God’s will”.
And, yes it is also an insult to the skill of the pilots and crew, as well as to the skill of the designers and builders of the plane, which held up well, allowing the pilot to utilize his years of training.
Why doesn’t anyone mention that it was God that downed the plane and the skill and training of the crew that undid God’s handiwork. Or what ever permutation necessary to point out that its all BS. God could have just steered the birds away, but no, its a “miracle.” This is like the guy whose wife and children were burned alive in their home and people saying how it was a miracle that he survived. I’m sorry but I want no part of a God that burns my wife and children alive and then I’m supposed to thank him for the “miracle” that I wasn’t home? Give me a break.
This line of reasoning is similar to the one that initially led me to question my previously taken for granted association with religion.
On further thought, as well as your post, I have to admit I was wrong. I was more or less thinking from my own POV, and I had hashed out the logical implications more than the emotional ones.
When asked why God would capriciously save this batch of people and not that one, the illogic goes something like, It’s not capricious, since God knows what He’s doing, and only He understands His future design. Well, can you disprove this? Gotcha!, any way you look at it!
Hindu theory of karma explains this beautifully.
I always feel a little bad for the rescuers who risk their lives to save someone, only to have that person thank God for their survival!
Also, I remember a story once when some nut started shooting people in a McDonalds. One victim reported that he prayed not to get shot, but then he was shot, so he prayed not to get shot again! So apparently God was telling him that while He could prevent the shooting, the poor guy was going to have to take one bullet and then God would put an end to it.
That ole God. What a prankster. Throws a flock of birds in front of an airplane just to see what will happen. When the expert pilot makes a great save He just steps in and takes all the credit. What a douche.
I like the “Big Mick”. He is quite entertaining and I am one of his fans. Although I agree with him only about 50% of the time, I do think that he is fair and reasonable with the people he disagrees with.
Bill, and every single reporter I’ve heard and read, is just another member of the clueless press. As a pilot (private, not airline nor military) the level of ignorance is just maddening. The NYT claims “airliners are not meant to glide” (pure hooey – they do it every time they land), others describe this as a “crash” or the plane “falling into the river”, and others call it a “miracle”.
No, this was a seasoned pilot, trained by our Air Force to fly F-4 Phantoms, following aviation’s rule #1: Fly the plane. He used his training, his knowledge of energy management, and took full advantage of the conditions and resources available to him. His crew and the passengers followed the procedures which have been learned at the cost of other accidents. That is what saved lives on the Hudson, and giving credit to anyone or anything else cheapens what they did.
Calling it a “miracle” in the vernacular sense of “man, were they lucky” is one thing. But give Sully and the crew their due. They simply did what pilots are trained to do, and did it well. And good on ’em for it.
It is also pretty insulting to the pilot. His skill at the controls played no small part in bringing that plane down safely, and trying to pin that on a man in the clouds is to discard the real hero.
So, if you follow this logic: God killed thousands of people today when he chose not to bless them with a miracle…
@bla
So God knew ahead of time that those birds were going to fly into jet’s engines and instead of stepping in and moving the birds to another location, he waits for a catasrophe to step in? I don’t understand this God.
Oh come on. You said the other day that “so help me God” was inoffensive because it’s a harmless way of saying, “I really really really mean it!”
Using “wow! what a miracle!” in the way whosit did on the broadcast, is the same thing. It’s just a code for “I don’t even know how to express the unlikeliness of this spectacle!” What’s the alternative? 6 billion people carefully expressing the unlikeliness of fantastic events in studied statistical math? Yuk.
I’m not much of a believer, but this is too thin-skinned of you; usually (it seems to me), you’re the one telling others, “Don’t be so thin-skinned.”
I wonder if people who engage in petitionary praying realize how illogical petitionary praying is not just by rational standards but by their own theistic standards? For example: I pray for a salary increase. I don’t get it. I shrug and say, “It was God’s will that I didn’t get the salary increase.” So why did I bother to pray for one? What’s the point of the petitionary prayer to begin with, if the outcome is already pre-determined by God?
It’s the same thing in this situation. If the pilot and crew hadn’t been so superb, and the resulting crash had killed everyone on the plane, would that have been God’s will? And what did He have against the people on the plane? Why does God “save” one planeload of people and not another?
And furthermore, if everything that happens is preordained by God, why bother to do anything at all? It’s in God’s hands, isn’t it?
Naaaah!
You don’t understand, that’s pretty simple:
If it’s good it’s God at work, if it’s bad it’s evil men.
Especially the ones of “wrong faith” and even more so the atheists.
May be the bastard atheists even prayed for the geese to hit the plane.
Huh! I wonder which kind of prayer they use?
But Kevembuangga, God is supposed to be not only omnipotent, but far more powerful than evil and evil men, right???? (Unless you believe in the Manichean heresy, if I understand correctly what the Manichean heresy is.) So therefore God should be able to supercede or nullify the acts of evil men. Right? Right?
So therefore God should be able to supercede or nullify the acts of evil men.
May be he takes some days off once in a while.
Didn’t he do that the seventh day?
If I may generalise from my own experience–I would guess that many people, religious or not, feel some sense of having been protected when a potential disaster just misses him. Several months ago I almost ran into traffic in Washington, DC, having idiotically succumbed to New York City impatience with red lights on a street whose traffic patterns I didn’t know. At the last minute, I checked myself from running across the street, right before the cars came on. At that moment, staring at the possibility of bones and flesh crushed under five tons of steel, one feels: “Phew, that was close! Thank you, something or other, for the protection.” But a moment’s reflection reveals the solipsism that Bradlaugh mentions involved in attributing the avoidance of disaster to divine solicitude rather than to dumb luck. Some people, it appears, either don’t engage in that reflection or come up with one of the strained justifications for God’s capriciousness mentioned above.
I feel relieved if I escape something horrendous. Perhaps even grateful, but not to any one entity–just grateful to have escaped. I don’t think I’ve ever, even as a child, had the feeling that any supernatural being was looking out for me. Possibly that’s because I wasn’t raised in any religion, unlike a lot of people who become agnostics or atheists in adolescence or adulthood. I never had a core of faith to abandon.
Even as a child I was terribly taken aback by news footage of people being interviewed in the aftermath of a flood or a tornado or a hurricane. Inevitably someone who had escaped the disaster relatively unscathed would talk about how God had saved him or loved him or kept him safe. And I’d think to myself, “Then God must have really hated your next door neighbors, whom he obliterated.”
Susan,
“Possibly that’s because I wasn’t raised in any religion, unlike a lot of people who become agnostics or atheists in adolescence or adulthood. I never had a core of faith to abandon.”
You are so fortunate. Because it is my observation that, that is exactly the kind of damage that childhood indoctrination inflicts.
You can give up the outward belief in religion, but there is a core of “spirituality” that reasserts itself, particularly when there is danger or fear. Once implanted in your mind those “trust in God” memes are incredibly hard to drive out.
That is why I have always believed that giving up religion is a two-generation process. The first generation makes the rational decision to abandon faith; but only the second generation is finally free of the childhood conditioning that predisposes to “spirituality”.
Sadly, I am only a first-generation secular myself. I too had a religious upbringing.
Daniel, it may also have to do with the religion in which a person is raised. Acquaintances of mine who were brought up nominally Protestant (meaning their parents might have taken them to church occasionally, and paid lip service to belief in God) have much less of a problem than do very strict Roman Catholics I know who now profess to be atheists or agnostics. I don’t know any ex-Protestants who manifest the kind of rage and bitterness against their denominations than your average lapsed Catholic does against the Roman church. It’s the favorite topic of conversation of some of them: how awful the church is, what damage it did to them, how much they hate it. It makes me wonder if some of these people aren’t still in the grip of Catholicism, and in denial about that, or refusing to acknowledge it. If you truly don’t believe in God, and have totally washed your hands of Catholicism, why the need to obsess about it?
I think it’s true that some religions are much more intense and calculating in their indoctrination than others. I am an ex-Catholic, although a post-rage one, LOL.
I also have a suspicion that it’s a bit like language. We have an innate predisposition, which is probably genetic. But there is a certain age when there is a special susceptibility to learning language or religion.
In the case of language it is very young – tots. In the case of religion it seems to be around seven years to puberty. Those are the years of tribal indoctrination. At around puberty you get Bar/Bat Mitzvahs, Confirmations, Boys are initiated as tribal warriors, etc.
“If you truly don’t believe in God, and have totally washed your hands of Catholicism, why the need to obsess about it?”
Because there is a difference between rejecting a thing, and removing its influence over you.
It’s not so easy to wash your hands free of a substance that stains. My guess is that their obsession with how evil the Catholic Church is helps to keep them free of its lingering influence within their minds.
It’s a matter of balance. Strong biases require strong reactions to counter them.
If this was a “miracle” then leave it to internet satire to give us a term for the other stuff…”tragicle”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-vhyqx_Duc
In all of your tsk-tsking of Christians and their religion, did it ever occur to any of you to understand what you are complaining about?
[1] Why are you surprised that the survivors of a ditching that could have gone horrible wrong call their good fortune a “miracle” and thank God for it? They are profoundly grateful and so ground that gratitude upon the bedrock of all they believe is true: God. This is human nature in operation. (However, I make no brief for the poseur O’Reilly and his high-decible buffoonery.)
[2] If you knew just the basics about Christianity, you would know that a genuine miracle is a sign from God. God doesn’t hide his signs, especially in extraordinary events that have natural explanations. If you knew that then you’d be able to tell O’Reilly in terms of his own religious beliefs why he is dead wrong. As for others who called the successful ditching a miracle, there are of course many Christians untutored in their faith, but then most people were using “miracle” as an overwrought intensifier for a good outcome when the worst was expected. Not much theology there to complain about.
[3] Again, if you knew something about Christianity, you wouldn’t leap to such unwarranted conclusions that a person expressing gratitude to God for his survival is a slight against those who made that survival possible. A Christian believes that God is all-good, therefore without God there is no good. Obviously, the pilot who had both the skill and the presence of mind to pull off a textbook ditching is a good. Yet none of you in your peevishness about Christians ever mentioned that thanking God was thanks for that pilot and the rescuers who saved everyone aboard the ditched jetliner. If you were less ignorant about the religious beliefs of Christians, that likelihood would have occurred to you.
[4] As for petitionary prayers and trusting God, you can ask God for anything you want, but you will not get what impedes your salvation. For instance, you want to win the lottery. If you get it, you thank God and then act upon the boon you received for the good. If you don’t, then of course you conclude that it wasn’t God’s will and He expects something else of you. (In other words, God isn’t Santa Claus.) That may even be some suffering for your financial profligacy to open your eyes to how you have enslaved yourself to money. Either way you trust God in His response to you, but you are not to be passive in that response. You are to act upon it.
[5] Yes, the successful ditching brings up the Problem of Evil, which Christians do need to square with an all-powerful and all-good God. Of course, they have been doing that over the past two thousand years. But, the sophomoric self-satisfied declarations that it can’t be done, again demonstrate ignorance of what you criticize. Meanwhile, it doesn’t appear to have occurred to you that non-believers, atheists in particular, have the opposite problem to resolve, the Problem of Good. What is the naturalist explanation for good?
Finally, I write none of this to proclaim how smart, insightful, and wise we Christians are in the practice of our faith. (For the most part we aren’t.) Rather I am saying that you can’t get Christians to listen to what you have to say if you don’t know what you’re talking about when it comes their beliefs. Furthermore, serious discussion requires that you address the strongest arguments of your opponents not the weak ones of the untutored and the apathetic. (Of course, I am assuming that such discussion is desired, otherwise all of this combox nattering amounts to nothing more than a non-believer circle jerk which accomplishes nothing other than to deepen bias and ignorance.)
Bill: You make the point that petitionary praying is fruitless if we pray for things that will impede our salvation, and you cite as an example praying to win the lottery. Well, why would winning the lottery necessarily impede salvation? But that’s a minor point. I seriously doubt that most petitionary praying is done for trivial reasons. In fact, I think most of it’s done on behalf of other people. Suppose I’m a parent with a three-year-old child who’s been diagnosed with leukemia. I pray that the child be cured. The child dies. How would the child’s survival have impeded my salvation? How would a salary increase, if I needed it to better feed, clothe, and shelter my family, impede my salvation?
Caledonian: I think you’re quite right. I suppose a strong reaction is required. But in some cases I know, the obsessions seems to have taken over people’s lives.
Bill: A further point about the naturalist explanation for the existence of good. I can’t speak for all naturalists, but my explanation would be that a civil society–i.e., one made up of people who don’t run around robiing, raping, and murdering each other–has, historically, worked far better and lasted longer than one in which people are permitted to be evil. You could call it enlightened self-interest gained through experience. If I don’t rob or murder you, you’ll return the favor and we’ll both be much the better for it. And the law will make an effort to catch up with transgressors and administer some sort of punishment.
Susan:
I don’t think petitionary prayer is fruitless. God answers all prayers, however, He doesn’t always answer them as we would prefer. In all cases we called upon to trust in His perfect wisdom over our own limited wisdom that God’s response is the best one for our salvation.
Hence, a winning lottery ticket that would bail out an overspending petitioner may temporarily relieve him of a financial problem, but it does not prompt him to cure his profligacy that has made money his idol. So he doesn’t receive a divinely ordained ticket; moreover, such a ticket would have unjustly denied the prize to the person who would have won otherwise. The petitioner must then determine why God didn’t answer him as he wanted and act accordingly.
However, if a petitioner is in financial straits mostly beyond his own making and asks for an increased salary is another matter. If his (understandable) distress over his finances is interfering with his life in Christ, God may well grant his petition. In return the petitioner needs to respond by doing only good with his new salary, working harder or smarter to merit it from his boss, and now that his financial burden has been lifted rededicating his life to Christ. Then again, maybe God doesn’t answer the prayer in this way, because he wants the petitioner to look beyond a salary increase as a solution to his woes and open his eyes to greater opportunities.
Of course, there are those very serious petitions to God in which we ask for a life to be saved. God will answer those as He does lesser petitions. We know that God does not save all lives. This may be because what is at stake is not the petitioner’s salvation, but the salvation of the one who may die soon. No doubt the petitioner will suffer when the loved one dies, but God will help each and every one of us to bring great good out of suffering. For example, we have all seen this many times, when a parent of lost child will organize to lessen the suffering others in a similar situation. It’s a hard answer that doesn’t go down well in today’s America of the fat, dumb, and happy; but it is one that explains why such terrible losses can be redeemed.
What it comes down to, Susan, is that God is not Santa Claus. God will always give us what we need not necessarily what we want. In this way, all of our petitions succeed, but then we have to act to make good on what God has given in response to our prayers.
Caledonian,
“My guess is that their obsession with how evil the Catholic Church is helps to keep them free of its lingering influence within their minds.”
I don’t think it’s just Catholics, by any means. Also I don’t want to suggest that the danger is just one of relapsing. I have seen many examples of people who give up one superstition only to fall under the influence of another. There is a certain aspect of “religiosity” that is translatable.
Once your mind has been exposed to it at a certain depth, there is a serious risk of being drawn into another cult, even if you never go back to the original one.
The mind of the religiously-indoctrinated, particularly I think, those exposed in the critical formative years of childhood, is permanently altered.
That’s why really ridding yourself of it forever takes two generations.
Bill, you make an interesting ppoint when you say that “what may be at stake is not the petitioner’s salvation, but the salvation of the one who may die soon.” It’s hard for me to see how a very young child could have committed so much wickedness in his or her lifetime as to merit an early and hideously painful death. If a two-year-old-boy dies of Tay-Sachs, after having suffered horribly during his very brief life, was God saving the child from some worse fate? Did God know that the Tay-Sachs sufferer would grow up to be a monster, and so cut his life short very early so that the child achieve salvation? And given that the Tay-Sachs sufferer was almost certainly Jewish, since most Tay-Sachs victims are Jewish, was he, as someone born into a religious tradition that does not acknowledge Jesus as the savior, entitled to salvation through Christ?
Or take the six-year-old Christian girl who vanishes while standing on the corner waiting for her school bus. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people pray that she will be found safely. Ultimately her corpse is located, and forensic investigation and an autopsy reveal that she was raped vaginally and orally and sodomized repeatedly, tortured in other ways, and finally murdered. If God needed to cut her life off early to ensure her salvation, couldn’t he have done so a bit more quickly and mercifully?
And…if God cuts off the lives of potential monsters or evil-doers early in order to ensure their salvation, why did he not spare us Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Saddam Hussein, and other assorted butchers of millions?
The upside of the “two generation” thing is that you sometimes meet people in places like UK and Scandanavia who are what I would call “deep seculars”. Second and third generation seculars.
It’s not just they are not personally religious; They find religion itself inconceivable. Their entire culture has become “post-religion”. Religion is known, if at all, only intellectually.
It’s like religion has become a branch of archaeology.
It applies only to foreign or ancient cultures.
Sorry to serial post, but I wanted to cite this.
Some of the research of sociologist Dr. David Voas at Manchester U relates to this generational aspect of religious decline in Britain. Link
Doesn’t that perspective conflict with the notion that God gives us all free will? If He will protect a child from damnation by their future evil self by killing them off young, why doesn’t He do that for all of us? Why does Tay-Sachs kid get a free pass to eternal bliss, and the rest of us risk a lifetime of mortal temptation?
Man, theodicy sure is silly…
Bill Tingley:
I don’t think petitionary prayer is fruitless. God answers all prayers,
Interesting, how do you know?
Daniel Dare
It’s like religion has become a branch of archaeology.
It applies only to foreign or ancient cultures.
Couldn’t this be what civilisation is about?
🙂
“Interesting, how do you know?”
Because he classifies ‘silence’ as an answer. If something notable happens after a prayer, that’s a response – and if nothing notable happens, that’s also a response.
He can’t lose… in the sense that there’s nothing below rock bottom.
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Susan:
When I stated that it may be the terminal person and not the petitioner whose salvation is at state, I was thinking of an adult who needs to get his act together before his demise in the sense that “nothing concentrates the mind more than a noose”.
As for innocent children whose lives are near the end because of natural or moral evils, I am not persuaded that God intervenes every time a child survives in an unlikely circumstance and has abandoned all those who die. Furthermore, the death of an innocent is not a punishment. As Christians reckon, it is a release from this fallen world to an eternal life of joy.
The questions you ask are worthy ones, but a complete answer is difficult without pulling together important principals of Christian religious belief. That sort of discourse doesn’t lend itself to the combox, especially here with all the mindless sniping of non-believers too ignorant to know what they do not know.
Kevembuangga:
Interesting, how do you know?
Through reason sans doubt.
Caledonian:
Because he classifies ’silence’ as an answer.
Use a little commonsense here. Silence to a request is an answer. It means no. We all know this. Ask your wife to do something extraordinary for you when she knows that your request is foolish, harmful to you or others, or lacks merit. If she responds with silence, you’ve got your answer.
Susan:
A further point about the naturalist explanation for the existence of good. I can’t speak for all naturalists, but my explanation would be that a civil society–i.e., one made up of people who don’t run around robiing, raping, and murdering each other–has, historically, worked far better and lasted longer than one in which people are permitted to be evil. You could call it enlightened self-interest gained through experience. If I don’t rob or murder you, you’ll return the favor and we’ll both be much the better for it. And the law will make an effort to catch up with transgressors and administer some sort of punishment.
I take your point and don’t disagree that people can and do choose to do good out of enlightened self-interest. However, your answer begs the question because it assumes what is at issue: Good exists in an entirely naturalist universe. What is the naturalist explanation for why murder, rape, and robbery are evils and that a society which polices against these evils is good?
I can understand prudence. I choose not to murder a rival, because his associates will launch a vendetta against me. But that is not a choice to never commit murder, but not to do so in this instance. Similarly with personal preference. Maybe I find murder an ineffective way to resolve problems and commit myself against it. Maybe my preference is grounded in fear that I cannot defend myself in retaliation for committing murder. That explains why I will not murder as a matter of principle, but does nothing to explain why anyone should also do so.
Then other naturalists will claim that what we generally deem as good is a product of evolution. The problem with this is that it explains nothing. The same claim can also be used to explain why we do evil — viz. men murder rivals and rape women to produce as many children as they can. Furthermore, any product of evolution is not transcendently good, it is simply a fact. Finally, if evolution does control the “good” and “evil” we do those labels have no permament meaning, for if conditions change, evolution may drive us to become savages who protect their interests only through murder, rape, and robbery.
So the naturalist’s Problem of Good means identifying the strictly natural source of transcendent good that endures and so is not merely an expedient or a matter of convention.
“not transcendently good,”
Who said that there is a such thing as a “transcendently good”? That you presume that “good” describes something transcendant and enduring is not a naturalist’s problem as much as it is your own myopia.
Silence to a request is an answer.
Not necessarily. It can also mean you are only talking to yourself. It can mean your phone is out of order. Maybe you haven’t paid the account. Maybe you are dialing the wrong number.
Bill: I think the naturalist explanation for “good” behavior would be that very early on, rational humans saw that it served the interests of the group far better than “evil” behavior. I believe that religion was invented for two reasons–the first to explain, if you will, phenomena that were inexplicable at any given time, and second, and more importantly, to codify and reward good behavior and codify and punish (or hold out the threat of eternal punishment for) bad behavior.
Another point about transcendent good–and I may appear to be undercutting myself here, but I’m not–is that notions of what constitute good among devout Christians have been flexible rather than fixed. It’s a tedious and obvious example, but take slavery. At one time, many Godly folk espoused it. Some Islamic societies still do.
I appreciate your extended responses to my queries, but you’ve evaded the issue of why God chooses to inflict hideous pain on some innocents. I understand that Christian doctrine views death as the gateway to eternal joy, and thus should be embraced–but again, if God wants to take a three-year-old into heaven, why make the child suffer hideously beforehand? And what makes one three-year-old more worthy of salvation than another?
Bill Tingley
Through reason sans doubt.
Excuse me but we haven’t seen any “reason” from you yet.
Belief into any kind of supernatural is the ultimate dormitive purported “explanation”:
from the 1673 Moliére play Le Malade Imaginaire (The Hypochondriac), wherein a doctor explains that opium is a soporific “quiat est in eo / virtus dormitiva / cujus est natura / sensus assoupire” (”because there is a dormitive virtue in it whose nature is to cause the senses to become drowsy”). Explanations along these lines answer questions truthfully but vacuously.
Thus, claims that “God did this”, “God want that”, are neither “statements” nor “explanations”, just empty blather devoid of any meaning.
I do understand however that people can be fooled by their own feelings of transcendence.
A total disregard for actual evidence comes indeed very handy to justify any horrendous nonsense.
Read the saintly words of the Papal legate Arnaud-Amaury at the Siege of Béziers:
… Arnaud’s love of terror and killing was perhaps above average, even for a senior churchman. It was he who was responsible for the mass burning alive of “many heretics and many fair women” at Casseneuil”, for the massacre at Béziers, where some 20,000 men, women and children were killed in an “exercise of Christian charity”, and for the immortal words “Kill them all. God will know his own”. He was also responsible for the siege of Carcassonne, and for the seizure of Raymond-Roger Trencavel, Viscount of Carcassonne, Béziers, Albi and the Razès during a truce – leading to the fall of Carcassonne. He arrived at Minerve just in time to engineer the deaths of 140 people whose lives would otherwise have been spared.
(Sorry for more knowledgeable readers, I have to repeat the links, they have slipped down the blog)
Susan:
I appreciate your extended responses to my queries, but you’ve evaded the issue of why God chooses to inflict hideous pain on some innocents.
You’re welcome, Susan. To answer your question: God doesn’t. All suffering flows from exercising our free will to do evil. This includes natural evils such as disease and disaster, because our evil has weakened our bodies so that they can no longer endure such calamaties.
Furthermore, God allows us to do evil. If He didn’t we would have no free will; just the capacity to do as He commands.
Then, from the evil we have freely chosen to do, Gods brings about a greater good which serves us better than if He chose to eliminate all of our evil acts.
Grant Canyon:
That you presume that “good” describes something transcendant and enduring is not a naturalist’s problem as much as it is your own myopia.
Of course. A naturalist who says there is no such thing as good and evil has effectively dispensed with the Problem of Good. In fact, I think that’s the only reasonable position a naturalist can take. But doing so requires the naturalist to take a rather bizarre view of human nature and chuck aside as nonsense the routine experience of good and evil by billions of human beings.