How God works (Introduction)

by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Tuesday, January 15, 2013, 18:41 (4120 days ago) @ dhw

Actually, look close. I said the absence of pain would be because we would be educated on how to avoid it. There is actual scriptural evidence that implies that the world not be 'perfect' in the since that nothing bad will ever happen, but rather that the bad would not be allowed to continue. Take it however you like, but whether it is some form of nanny state where we have advisers warning us off before we do something stupid or because we are educated to the level where we do not make the mistakes that lead to pain, the absence of pain does not mean the absence of the possibility of pain. -
> DHW: (Paraphrased)We are all just here to dance for God's amusement because he was terminally bored.
> -Well, if God did create us for endless entertainment, don't you think he would want to avoid the endless frustration of dealing with a bunch of whiny, ignorant, violent, hard-headed assholes? If that was his sole purpose, why let the simulation survive beyond the point where it grew tedious and started to cause him pain?(See numerous references to God being hurt in his heart over our actions...doesn't sound like much fun or good entertainment to me.) We don't continue to watch movies that make us feel like crap unless we have a bad case of Stockholm syndrome. We don't play games that become too tedious, frustrating, boring, or hurtful. That is why I disagree with your speculation. It may 'fit' on the surface, but it doesn't make it past the first round of examination when we begin to question motives. More importantly, if all of this were just a simulation for entertainment, why care at all what happens? Why care about being worshiped or any of the other stuff? It would be more entertaining to see what kind of crazy gods the people came up with because you knew the truth and they didn't.(See The Invention of Lying and The Life of Brian)--> DHW: I am delighted to be alive, I accept the conditions under which I am alive, I accept that evolution happened, and I cannot imagine another arrangement for an evolutionary process. I am sceptical, however, of Tony's image of God, and of your idea that God preprogrammed evolution right from the start to produce humans, since this conflicts with the higgledy-piggledy bush. I am, however, delighted that you have switched from this idea to: "It is as if God said let's throw everything at the fan and see where it lands..." We need a scenario that will fit in with whatever we know of the world. It may not be true, but it has a better chance of being true than one that runs counter to what we know. I have no idea why you think a non-anthropocentric version of evolution would deprive man of his dominance, his free will, or ... in some cases ... his gentle personality.-My image of God is that of a parent figure(which is why I used a parent figure in my previous illustration). The mom in that illustration certainly didn't WANT to see her child get hurt, and she just as certainly CARED and TRIED to stop them from doing something stupid that was going to hurt them. But the child had mind of its own and didn't listen. -Parents, on a much much smaller more fallible scale reenact the biblical representation of God all the time. We KNOW something is going to hurt our children, we TRY to teach them how to live correctly, but at the end of the day we have to let them learn on their own for a time before they are ready to listen. As Mark Twain so eloquently put it:-"When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."-Everything I see fits this context without exception. The world was created the way it was because it had to be. The Father new the dangers of the world and was willing to teach us. He gave us a warning that we ignored, and it we got burned. So, he tried to teach us how to deal with the burn, and we ignored him and it blistered. So finally, he figured that he would allow us to come to our senses, and in the mean time he tried to make provisions for us so that we didn't completely screw ourselves. -In the future, we will either have become ready to listen, or have completely rebelled, and he will deal kindly with those that are ready to listen. Not sure what is so difficult about that.

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What is the purpose of living? How about, 'to reduce needless suffering. It seems to me to be a worthy purpose.