Memes

Now now, don't discount free reign to also gaslight others for a lifetime as well. And judge and shame others too. It's great for complete assholes.

That's the point of religion. Trick the brain into thinking everything is going according to plan so that it gives out the happy time drugs instead of the "you need to wake the fuck up and do something about this" drugs. The religion pushers get their cut, and everyone thinks their happy.

You could replace "God" with "Parents" to the same effect.

But arguing that a parent is evil because they see a child committing an error, know it is an error, and decline to intercede doesn't rationally follow. If you helicopter over your kids and intercede every time they make mistakes, they never develop into independent and mature adults. You also induce a lot of anxiety, as you're constantly interposing yourself between the child's desires and actions without the ability to convey the wisdom of your decisions. So the kid sees you as the harmful force, rather than the thing you're seeking to avert.

So what's a Parent/God to do? Do you puppet your child, never letting them stray farther than the length of a string? Do you lock your child in a padded ceil and hand-feed them every day? Do you hardwire their programming, so they can't deviate from your design, acting exclusively on a divine instinct?

Is that really what we consider "Goodness"?

There is also the Calculation Problem to consider. A God-like intelligence might be able to observe far more than a human without being perfectly omniscient. Similarly, they might be able to calculate probabilities more quickly and accurately without being perfectly prescient. If a Parent/God knows most of the things but is not omniscient, does that mean they are unworthy of your attention or the reception of wisdom? At the same time, is it the duty of a Parent/God to restrict the actions of the others in their domain to the things they can calculate in advance? This brings us back to the idea of the Child Prisoner or Brainwashed Child. You're safe at the expense of any kind of growth or personal liberty. God treats you like a farmer treats a veal calf - perfectly unspoiled through inaction.

And finally, there is the problem of Entropy. A God who can foresee everything and recognizes that Evil is inevitable. Is such a God responsible for this Evil simply because it can perceive it? Is such a God responsible for this Evil simply because it cannot prevent it? Is this flaw in God's power a reason to reject it as a source of virtue?

Consider Odin hanging from Yggdrasil, his eye plucked out in pursuit of a way to prevent Ragnorak. He is not all-powerful. He is not-all knowing. He is routinely makes mistakes and even acts out of anger, lust, or petty vengeance. He is fundamentally flawed as dieties come. And yet his primary goal and function - to prevent the end of the world - seems noble enough to justifiably cultivate a religious following.

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Going by the Bible, it's both. He acted with malice and proved himself to not be omnipotent many times.

I think it’s a misread to say it gave us evil. The garden is portrayed as being a paradise with a tree of knowledge. The man and the women, as they self-identified themselves to be, were both allowed agency to be themselves and be blessed without the burden of knowledge, so long as they did not eat the forbidden fruit. Both the man and the woman independently made the conscious decision to break the rule given to them to not eat the fruit of knowledge. The actual sin was both the man and woman breaking their covenant with God, through the eating of the fruit. My take on this is that story is meant to show that God can help you and will help you, but if you choose to go against his will you have the face the consequences of that decision on your own. However, you can still seek forgiveness for your decisions and even be forgiven, but this doesn’t magically put everything back to the way things were before.

The story is more or less a cultural device to explain good and evil from the perspective of the early Israelite society. The story itself is rippled throughout the Bible in this way: God gives instructions, the people follow the instructions at first but then grow complacent, bad things happen because people stop following God’s instructions, and then one of the leaders of the tribe of Israel steps in to help get people back on the right path of following God’s instructions.

I’ll add that functionally Genesis is three serparate creation stories that were pulled into one book. Culturally, the early Israelites borrowed some of the elements of other creation stories of their time seen in other cultures such as the Babylonians. The first creation story is the seven days, the second is what we know as the story Adam and Eve, and the third was the story of the great flood.

No good god would make an unlasting punishment. if you have forever, then even Hitler, Dahmer would have enough time for a finite punishment. Even the worst people in the world don't deserve a unlasting punishment.

Wow, sounds like a cruel deity that's definitely not worthy of worship.

My take is that there is no free will, but that this fact is irrelevant and we're all better off just behaving as though we do.

That's not a dilemma for atheists because atheists aren't the ones claiming there's an omnipotent being guiding everything.

Also, you can be both an atheist and an agnostic. They cover different things. I'm fairly certain you'd consider yourself an atheist in regards to the sun god Ra.

I think you can have this same dilemma as an atheist as well.

I'd like to hear your opinions on how you think so (truly). The way I see things, Atheism is only the answer to a single question: do you believe in any gods? If "yes," you're a theist or deist. If "no; I don't know; not currently; maybe one day," then you're an atheist. It's not a philosophy or a comprehensive worldview, and it can't possibly answer deeper questions.

What you're referring to in the latter half is Determinism and Compatibilism (Determinism + free will). Science is currently leaning pretty strongly towards Determinism, but since Compatibilism doesn't add much more to the idea, it's also still a candidate possibility.

It's very likely you could calculate every chain reaction from the Big Stretch up until now and maybe even into the future. Whether we have the ability to affect or disrupt those chains might be a matter of philosophy.

Don't worry, they don't read the Bible, and especially don't read the old testament.

They believe they have god given freedom of action

I don’t think many Christians would actually argue for that first point tbh.

Then truthfully, I don't think you've had this conversation with many christians. Every single one immediately defaults to that point when confronted with the horrors god would be responsible for if god is in control.

He sounds like Elwood from The Blues Brothers. "We're on a mission from God."