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[taylorson]

Last Saturday I saw an advertisement for a vineyard church in Cambridge on the commuter rail so I decided to give it a whirl. The visit was awkward and brought more light into an already well lit room on how I feel about God in general. My goal was to get involved with a group to expand my social circle and help out the community as well.

Comments

[taylorson]

I agree that it would be simpler to manually change your views, as I have already done myself, however my argument solely lies with those who do not wish to change those views, i.e. God is omnipotent and perfectly good. My definition of a perfect entity does not allow situations with meaningless suffering (physical torture, rape, oppression, etc.) that only end in eternal torment of a soul. I believe God to be imperfect. To imply that he is perfect is a smack in the face to all those burning in hell for bullshit reasons (the reasons being defined by those whom I disagree with.)

I agree with your 3rd paragraph, however that only takes into account that God isn't omnipotent. Otherwise he's observing pain and doing nothing about it in those situations that do occur. I would define stepping in when you have the power to doing something about it as goodness, so negation of God's goodness could in fact be painful.

tl;dr I disagree with preaching that the omnipotent Christian God is perfect when obviously he is not. Eternal damnation is a flaw. Think of something better God.

We are in agreement with what COULD be but we disagree about our subjective and objective mixture of definitions on things like perfection, what it means to be good, and how shit goes down.

[evanthered]

[taylorson]

I can agree with you that some people are content with their suffering or that good things can come from it.

I'm glad you delved more into how you view this with your example because I was having some trouble deciphering what you meant earlier. This is exactly the problem I have with such Atheists (well anybody actually) that would aruge in this manner. My solution to the problem would... well IS to think like the well-fed ethicist, but not mention my thoughts to the person out loud and help them the best I can. I can think one way but not be a douche about it (not saying that you were saying I'm a douche but I would agree that the WFE is a douche in this scenario).

Now if he so asked me what I thought about the situation, then I'd shove it down his throat.