In reference to God's goodness in the face of hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Jose, a Christian asked me this question:
Q: "Why is God obligated to help someone who rejects Him?"
A: Who is obligated to help someone who suffers? The person who cares the most, who also has the most power or financial ability, has the greatest obligation to help a person who suffers, especially if that person's life depends on it, and especially if it demands so little from the helper.
So God has the greatest obligation to help the ones who suffer.
If someone only helps others based on tit for tat, where helping others has strings attached, then that person isn't a giving person at all. Hell, the worse person in the world can abide by that.
Of all the beings who could alleviate this suffering God could have had the greatest impact by stopping the hurricane dead in it's tracks before it materialized. No one would know he did anything, should he want to keep hidden from us.
If a god supposedly created the universe with its laws then s/he could even perform a perpetual miracle and keep all hurricanes away from us. But s/he's either lazy, uncaring, powerless, or doesn't even exist.
If you want to see the kind of faith the biblical god demands then look no further than the story of Job.
Job's story is fallaciously being used to offer comfort to believers in the midst of the terrible suffering caused by hurricances Harvey, Irma and Jose. "God knows what he's doing" they say, "even if we don't understand his mysterious ways, because his ways are loving and kind."
The lesson however, isn't about God's love or kindness toward us. It's not meant to provide any comfort to us either. The real lesson is that god reserves the right to bring as much suffering into our lives as he wants, even to kill us, for whatever reason he wants, and we are not to question why. We are to have blind unquestioning faith that he has the right to mistreat us at will. He can do whatever the hell he wants to us simply because he's GOD. We're simply to take what he dishes out. It doesn't matter if we're good or not either. This lesson is missed by almost all believers.
A review of David Fitzgerald’s Jesus: Mything in Action
Christians Aren’t Going to Blow the Whistle
A famous atheist once railed at me for giving a damn about the “Jesus Question”—that is, whether or not Jesus existed. It’s not a relevant issue—so he said, and it’s a waste of time to devote any energy to it. Really? Since about two billion people are obsessed with Jesus, it doesn’t hurt to find out if their obsession is warranted—especially if we suspect that something isn’t quite right. Religiously-biased scholars, as it turns out, have done their best to maintain a cover-up—of course,
they don’t call it that; so okay, they’ve been sincere, pursuing their agenda without guile. But they have been covering up: the case for Jesus is deeply, sadly flawed.
A couple of years ago, I published a blog post showing that if one accepts the explanations offered by apologists like William Lane Craig for some of the terrible things Yahweh commands, then one should want there to be as many abortions as possible. Since these explanations — or excuses — recently came up in the comments section here, I decided to re-publish that post. The conclusion is of course not meant to be taken seriously, but it does follow (with a few minor assumptions that would be unreasonable to deny) from the screwed-up views of these apologists.
As a sort-of follow up to my previous post, one more comment related to the problem of evil:
According to some believers, God can do anything – and that means literally anything. He can make square circles, married bachelors, and even non-Catholic Popes! In these people's opinion, to say that God is omnipotent is to say that logical impossibility is no obstacle to his power.
Why in the world do they believe such things?
Sometimes even Sunday school kids have the presence of mind to ask, “But where did God come from?” To which the assurance is always given, “Well, God has always been there.” But rarely do the kids—or even the adults—ever ask, “But how do you know that?” How do you KNOW that about God? Without the evidence it’s just another assumption—one of so many that derail religious thinking. Bertrand Russell punctured this lazy conjecture when he pointed out that it’s just as easy to believe in a universe that has always existed—as it is to believe in a god that has been around, uncreated, forever.
I've said this before when it came to Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 Indonesian tsunami. If there is an omnipotent God then he could have snapped his fingers to stop hurricane Harvey from materializing at all. If this requires a perpetual miracle to keep the earth in its proper place around the sun, or whatever, then so what? Aren't lives more important? Plus, if Harvey didn't happen then God could remain hidden, for some mysterious reason. We would never know he intervened. It's not asking God to alleviate all suffering, only the most horrendus kinds. It's obvious that if he's omnipotent he just doesn't give a damn. Christians are now boasting how they're helping victims, but the one who cares the very least is the God who could"ve stopped it but didn't.
Next time you say "God is good" think Harvey, Houston and Osteen!
So how’s that working out for you?
On the Facebook page that I maintain for my book—and for the promotion of atheism in general—Christians sometimes drop by, commonly to make angry comments. My own policy on Facebook, by the way, is that I never go onto Christian pages or sites to advocate atheism—
ever. To me that smacks of bad manners…akin to me walking into a church on Sunday morning to argue with the preacher.
One comment that falls into the
God’ll-getcha-for-that category was offered by a Stuart C. “So, let's see what the author does when he needs YHWH's intervention when he gets an aggressive cancer.” I suspect that even the most dim-witted believers can sense that Stuart is on thin ice here. We’ve all known devout Christians who have succumbed to cancers, despite prayer marathons to get YHWH to pay attention.
The problem of evil is well known: How can there be an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good god if there is evil? The kind of reply most theists give is also familiar to most: Evil is not incompatible with God provided there is some reason for allowing that evil – for instance, in order to prevent something even worse happening. It is only gratuitous evil – evil for which there is no moral justification – that would pose a problem. And most theists appear to be confident that one cannot show that gratuitous evil exists. No matter what example one brings up – whether it’s that of a disease, a war, some natural disaster, or what have you – they think there is some possible explanation as to why God might allow it.
I think it’s actually pretty easy to show that there is gratuitous evil, however.
…and their die-hard apologists—who look SO familiar
On the evening of 30 October 1938, CBS Radio’s The Mercury Theatre, broadcast a dramatization H.G. Wells’s novel
War of the Worlds. The program was presented in the form of news bulletins, and many listeners became terrified: It sounded, for all the world, like a Martian invasion was under way.
Orthodox Christianity holds that those who don’t “make the cut” end up suffering for all of eternity, and this has of course been the cause of much criticism of the religion. Something that is rarely considered, however, is what this doctrine says about Christians themselves. For the Christian must of course view the eternal suffering of sinners as justified. And yet, by the moral standards most of us accept, eternal punishment is never justified – much less for individuals who aren’t really evil. Perhaps some would consider that kind of suffering as appropriate punishment for Hitler or Ted Bundy. But what about all the average non-Christians who end up in hell – people like your neighborhood atheist or Hindu? An orthodox Christian must be in favor of eternal suffering for such individuals as well. If he were to witness their being thrown into hell fire on Judgement Day, he would have to find that perfectly proper and right. Does this mean orthodox Christians are evil?
