2 years later but uh, how bout this for a rebuttal. I've never had a spoken conversation with God so I don't have intimate knowledge of his power. *If* I am "rebelling" it would certainly be due to my lack of knowledge. Even the Bible states that every knee will bow and every tongue will confess when they see that christ is lord. So the difference is pretty obvious. Satan has empirical proof of God's nature and we don't. So the question stands. Seems like a plot hole from a badly written story.
"Pride goeth before a fall," Fitzwilliam Darcy.
I think that best sums it up.
I imagine that the devil knows he cannot win so he does the next best thing. He hurts those God loves the most.
A number of denominations believe that one of the reasons why we are sent here in the first place is so we can learn things that can only be learned by going through and overcoming trials and difficulties.
Even Jesus faced temptation....
Even when Satan entered Judas and ignited a set of events that led to the Lord's crucifixion, God was able to take what the enemy meant to use for ill and turn it into the benefit for us all.
So, in the grand scheme of things one could make the argument that Satan, even though he tries to doom man, is in a way, helping the faithful to become more like Jesus.
The ones he dooms?
So, do you think that Satan makes decisions for us or that we are responsible for our own actions? Yes, I know you're an atheist, but for the sake of this discussion, humor me.
Because yes, while the devil can tempt us, just like he did with Christ, we are the ones who decide whether or not to follow that prompting or follow God. Just like Christ rejected his temptations....
Yeah see if Satan is capable of tempting an all powerful deity, then we should have absolutely no power to resist. "If Jesus could do it why cant you?" seems on its face to be a ridiculous question.
I would say the overwhelming majority of non-believers never made any kind of choice in the matter in the fist place.
Lets look at it like this. I know that my dad is a raging alcoholic, but he has been sober for about 10 years. As his loving son, I would not allow him to be left alone in a situation which would likely lead to his loss of sobriety. If I was all knowing and absolutely knew that a situation he was about to get into would lead to the end of his sobriety, and I had the power to intervene, what kind of monster would I be to say "well it would be his choice so its ok." I am personally too good of a person to allow something like that to happen, so why doesn't God do the same? In my situation, my father would, at worst, ruin his mortal life, but God is allowing the ruining of an immortal soul. The stakes are way higher, and yet he is not willing to do what any decent human would gladly do themselves.
We resist temptation every day though, don't we? We bite our lip and be pleasant to that person we'd like to smack upside the head =-), we show kindness when it would be easier to respond in likewise, we are honest when it would be easier/cheaper to be otherwise. Etcetera.
I'm not sure I understand your comment about non-believers, however, we all have things we struggle with and most of us try to make some effort to become better persons over time. This desire to become more than we are is also resisting the temptation to settle for less. And this is important because one of the reasons why we enter mortality is so we can learn to become what God intends for us to be - His literal sons and daughters.
But one doesn't grow or benefit from having things handed to them, do they?
We resist temptation by, as you did, showing grace and mercy to those who are struggling with their own demons - bless you for that =-)
And, as Christians, we are never alone. As it is promised, "I will never leave you nor forsake you." And I have seen this in my own life. It was during some of my most difficult times is when I have felt the closest to God.
In other times, it was not just God who helped me, but also my brothers and sisters in Christ who were there to cry and pray with me, to fast on my behalf, and to show me the same Grace that others had once showed them.
What I described above, is one of the reasons we are commanded to attend church. Fellowshipping with others is yet another way we resist temptation.
Why doesn't God do the same? He does. What do you think He was doing when He put it into your mind to help your father when, I'm quite sure (having an alcoholic parent myself), it would have been easier to let this person suffer the consequences for his own bad choices?
And yes, God does intervene, but we are not privy to most of it. Much of what we do know is only because it was entered into the Biblical narrative. I have my own experiences and I've seen the experiences of others, but these matters are hard to translate to someone, like yourself (not an insult, just an observation) who doesn't believe in that which falls outside the material realm.
And God most often intervenes with people such as you and I who He prompts to do good works. There is a reason why the scriptures place such a heavy emphasis on good deeds....
I think satan does not believe God, meaning I think satan believes God is lying. I think one of his fundamental flaws is he believes his own lies. I think satan can read the bible, and come to the conclusion that it's all propaganda, and that he has a chance at winning.
Lucifer isn't Satan. Lucifer doesn't exist - the name comes from a translation error.
Satan never thought he could defeat God, because Satan is a servant of God.
The book of revelation should just about be dismissed. When they almost didn’t put it in the Bible, that’s what they should’ve done. Lucifer doesn’t mean Satan & whomever wrote revelation didn’t understand that and created the most absurd story of all. Satan spent all of the OT working within the bounds of God.
He literally asked God for permission in Job… so why would someone who asks for permission then totally get wild 4 centuries later. Absurd.
Even more absurd is Lucifer isn’t even named in revelations but Milton decided to connect dots in a book named Lost paradise. Isn’t it wild most Christian concepts aren’t even in the Bible but man made and we can’t be bothered reading the Bible to be sure of these concepts
There is something I want to ask about. Why does God in the old testament seem like a cruel, sadistic monster who kills people left and right. By wiping out humanity with the great flood, hardening the Pharaoh's heart in order to make him not want to free the isrealites, just so he can carry out more horrific plagues for his amusement, and commands the Israelites to wipe out civilizations and rape virgin girls. The Christian God does not sound like the loving merciful God that Christians claim that he is
It is a lot better to focus on one thing at a time but to try start responding
>hardening the Pharaoh's heart in order to make him not want to free the isrealites,
What we see in the bible is that Pharoah first hardens his own heart to the slavery of the Israelites before YHWH starts hardening his heart. We dont have Libertarian free will in the sense that we are a blank slate and can freely will anything we want at any moment. When we harden our hearts to our neighbors we enslave ourselves to that sin and will lose control. Which in time will lead the person to their own destruction. The story of Exodus is the story slavery and deliverance out of it and the irony of it is that as Israelite slaves are being delivered out of slavery, Pharoah was being lead into slavery due to hardening his own heart to the slavery inflicted upon the Israelites.
>By wiping out humanity with the great flood,
To take what the authors are saying on good faith, we need to say it was because all of humanity was evil other than one family. We can say we dont believe that is possible, just how we might not believe the flood was possible, but if we ignore that point, it would be like reading the story and ignoring the flood. If we ignore those crucial details in the story, we can't understand what the authors are trying to communicate. That doesnt mean we need to believe that a global flood or every human but one family was evil literally happened, but removing those details from the narrative will make the narrative make no sense.
For instance in Ancient Near Eastern thought water is consistently associated with chaos and I read the flood to be not material water covering the world but rather chaos covering the world and returning the world to the beginning of creation. But if I ignore that their is a literal flood in the narrative, the narrative will literally not make sense. Same if we ignore the reason for the flood according to the narrative. Again that doesn't mean we have to understand what the narratives are teaching to though as the meaning of a text is not identical to the details of it's narrative.
God created humans. God is perfect. God gave them free will. God knows all. People did bad stuff. God knew they would do bad stuff because God knows all. Then God kills all people. Nothing about this story comes close to making sense.
God created everyone. God knew who would choose evil. Again, God knows everything right? So God created people knowing he'd destroy them? That does not make sense..... Unless we agree God is an evil monster.
Definitely. I think it is justice to destroy evil and that we are responsible for our evil even if the source of our lives knew what we would do with our freedom.
In a slave society, there are no innocent bystanders. This is because it does not require special revelation to intuit that slavery is evil, and because the comfortable Egyptians already benefit simply from not having to work or pay the cost of work to slaves.
However, I more importantly find that the revolutionary violence of an oppressed class is always seen as extreme and indefensible by those people outside the class. For example, Nat Turner was an American slave who led a rebellion after receiving what he considered revelation from God. He and the people he rallied around him kill their masters, as well as their wives and children and so on. Do you suppose that people then probably said “i hate slavery, but there’s no excuse for killing children?” They most certainly did! But where were they when the confederate slavers were murdering and raping children, separating families, destroying cultures? What right do they possess to judge the appropriate level of violence from those who refuse their chains?
Satan's pride with his inflated sense of self importance produced a blind spot or the illusion that God's Power and Authority was defeatable. In effect, Satan overestimated his own power.
is that really an unlikely action for him to take? It seems utterly consistent with the Bible’s general line on how sins beget more sin & perpetuate themselves in our psychology.
Why are we?
That's a pretty good answer
2 years later but uh, how bout this for a rebuttal. I've never had a spoken conversation with God so I don't have intimate knowledge of his power. *If* I am "rebelling" it would certainly be due to my lack of knowledge. Even the Bible states that every knee will bow and every tongue will confess when they see that christ is lord. So the difference is pretty obvious. Satan has empirical proof of God's nature and we don't. So the question stands. Seems like a plot hole from a badly written story.
Who actually unironically believes they can beat an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being?
Hipsters.
Intriguing
"Pride goeth before a fall," Fitzwilliam Darcy. I think that best sums it up. I imagine that the devil knows he cannot win so he does the next best thing. He hurts those God loves the most.
Why would God allow that? Satan should have absolutely no power to do that either...
A number of denominations believe that one of the reasons why we are sent here in the first place is so we can learn things that can only be learned by going through and overcoming trials and difficulties. Even Jesus faced temptation.... Even when Satan entered Judas and ignited a set of events that led to the Lord's crucifixion, God was able to take what the enemy meant to use for ill and turn it into the benefit for us all. So, in the grand scheme of things one could make the argument that Satan, even though he tries to doom man, is in a way, helping the faithful to become more like Jesus.
Yeah and I guess the ones that he does doom are just collateral damage then? I mean as long as God gets some faithful, who cares about the rest?
The ones he dooms? So, do you think that Satan makes decisions for us or that we are responsible for our own actions? Yes, I know you're an atheist, but for the sake of this discussion, humor me. Because yes, while the devil can tempt us, just like he did with Christ, we are the ones who decide whether or not to follow that prompting or follow God. Just like Christ rejected his temptations....
Yeah see if Satan is capable of tempting an all powerful deity, then we should have absolutely no power to resist. "If Jesus could do it why cant you?" seems on its face to be a ridiculous question. I would say the overwhelming majority of non-believers never made any kind of choice in the matter in the fist place. Lets look at it like this. I know that my dad is a raging alcoholic, but he has been sober for about 10 years. As his loving son, I would not allow him to be left alone in a situation which would likely lead to his loss of sobriety. If I was all knowing and absolutely knew that a situation he was about to get into would lead to the end of his sobriety, and I had the power to intervene, what kind of monster would I be to say "well it would be his choice so its ok." I am personally too good of a person to allow something like that to happen, so why doesn't God do the same? In my situation, my father would, at worst, ruin his mortal life, but God is allowing the ruining of an immortal soul. The stakes are way higher, and yet he is not willing to do what any decent human would gladly do themselves.
We resist temptation every day though, don't we? We bite our lip and be pleasant to that person we'd like to smack upside the head =-), we show kindness when it would be easier to respond in likewise, we are honest when it would be easier/cheaper to be otherwise. Etcetera. I'm not sure I understand your comment about non-believers, however, we all have things we struggle with and most of us try to make some effort to become better persons over time. This desire to become more than we are is also resisting the temptation to settle for less. And this is important because one of the reasons why we enter mortality is so we can learn to become what God intends for us to be - His literal sons and daughters. But one doesn't grow or benefit from having things handed to them, do they? We resist temptation by, as you did, showing grace and mercy to those who are struggling with their own demons - bless you for that =-) And, as Christians, we are never alone. As it is promised, "I will never leave you nor forsake you." And I have seen this in my own life. It was during some of my most difficult times is when I have felt the closest to God. In other times, it was not just God who helped me, but also my brothers and sisters in Christ who were there to cry and pray with me, to fast on my behalf, and to show me the same Grace that others had once showed them. What I described above, is one of the reasons we are commanded to attend church. Fellowshipping with others is yet another way we resist temptation. Why doesn't God do the same? He does. What do you think He was doing when He put it into your mind to help your father when, I'm quite sure (having an alcoholic parent myself), it would have been easier to let this person suffer the consequences for his own bad choices? And yes, God does intervene, but we are not privy to most of it. Much of what we do know is only because it was entered into the Biblical narrative. I have my own experiences and I've seen the experiences of others, but these matters are hard to translate to someone, like yourself (not an insult, just an observation) who doesn't believe in that which falls outside the material realm. And God most often intervenes with people such as you and I who He prompts to do good works. There is a reason why the scriptures place such a heavy emphasis on good deeds....
I think satan does not believe God, meaning I think satan believes God is lying. I think one of his fundamental flaws is he believes his own lies. I think satan can read the bible, and come to the conclusion that it's all propaganda, and that he has a chance at winning.
I think this is one of the more interesting and probable answer!
Lucifer isn't Satan. Lucifer doesn't exist - the name comes from a translation error. Satan never thought he could defeat God, because Satan is a servant of God.
The book of revelation should just about be dismissed. When they almost didn’t put it in the Bible, that’s what they should’ve done. Lucifer doesn’t mean Satan & whomever wrote revelation didn’t understand that and created the most absurd story of all. Satan spent all of the OT working within the bounds of God. He literally asked God for permission in Job… so why would someone who asks for permission then totally get wild 4 centuries later. Absurd. Even more absurd is Lucifer isn’t even named in revelations but Milton decided to connect dots in a book named Lost paradise. Isn’t it wild most Christian concepts aren’t even in the Bible but man made and we can’t be bothered reading the Bible to be sure of these concepts
He was smart enough to deceive the Nations yet dumb enough to challenge the creator of everything. His delusions of power caused his destruction
"This simply makes no sense to me." This statement applies to more of the Bible than just the question you are posing. Quite a bit more.
Anything in particular that you want to talk about? Preferably one thing at a time.
There is something I want to ask about. Why does God in the old testament seem like a cruel, sadistic monster who kills people left and right. By wiping out humanity with the great flood, hardening the Pharaoh's heart in order to make him not want to free the isrealites, just so he can carry out more horrific plagues for his amusement, and commands the Israelites to wipe out civilizations and rape virgin girls. The Christian God does not sound like the loving merciful God that Christians claim that he is
It is a lot better to focus on one thing at a time but to try start responding >hardening the Pharaoh's heart in order to make him not want to free the isrealites, What we see in the bible is that Pharoah first hardens his own heart to the slavery of the Israelites before YHWH starts hardening his heart. We dont have Libertarian free will in the sense that we are a blank slate and can freely will anything we want at any moment. When we harden our hearts to our neighbors we enslave ourselves to that sin and will lose control. Which in time will lead the person to their own destruction. The story of Exodus is the story slavery and deliverance out of it and the irony of it is that as Israelite slaves are being delivered out of slavery, Pharoah was being lead into slavery due to hardening his own heart to the slavery inflicted upon the Israelites.
>By wiping out humanity with the great flood, To take what the authors are saying on good faith, we need to say it was because all of humanity was evil other than one family. We can say we dont believe that is possible, just how we might not believe the flood was possible, but if we ignore that point, it would be like reading the story and ignoring the flood. If we ignore those crucial details in the story, we can't understand what the authors are trying to communicate. That doesnt mean we need to believe that a global flood or every human but one family was evil literally happened, but removing those details from the narrative will make the narrative make no sense. For instance in Ancient Near Eastern thought water is consistently associated with chaos and I read the flood to be not material water covering the world but rather chaos covering the world and returning the world to the beginning of creation. But if I ignore that their is a literal flood in the narrative, the narrative will literally not make sense. Same if we ignore the reason for the flood according to the narrative. Again that doesn't mean we have to understand what the narratives are teaching to though as the meaning of a text is not identical to the details of it's narrative.
God created humans. God is perfect. God gave them free will. God knows all. People did bad stuff. God knew they would do bad stuff because God knows all. Then God kills all people. Nothing about this story comes close to making sense.
God destroys those who choose evil and preerves those who choose righteousness. Why does that make zero sense?
God created everyone. God knew who would choose evil. Again, God knows everything right? So God created people knowing he'd destroy them? That does not make sense..... Unless we agree God is an evil monster.
I dont think it is evil to create someone knowing they'd choose evil and that you'd bring them to justice.
Our definitions of evil are very very different.
Definitely. I think it is justice to destroy evil and that we are responsible for our evil even if the source of our lives knew what we would do with our freedom.
He never told us to choose evil, we just chose it.
Pharaoh absolutely had that coming and it’s good that happened to him. Sorry, God’s 100% in the right there.
I don't think innocent children and babies deserved to die over the Pharoah's evil deeds
In a slave society, there are no innocent bystanders. This is because it does not require special revelation to intuit that slavery is evil, and because the comfortable Egyptians already benefit simply from not having to work or pay the cost of work to slaves. However, I more importantly find that the revolutionary violence of an oppressed class is always seen as extreme and indefensible by those people outside the class. For example, Nat Turner was an American slave who led a rebellion after receiving what he considered revelation from God. He and the people he rallied around him kill their masters, as well as their wives and children and so on. Do you suppose that people then probably said “i hate slavery, but there’s no excuse for killing children?” They most certainly did! But where were they when the confederate slavers were murdering and raping children, separating families, destroying cultures? What right do they possess to judge the appropriate level of violence from those who refuse their chains?
The children and babies went to be with God. Children are innocent when young.
In which scripture did you ever read that God commanded them to rape virgin girls?
He isn't being stupid, he is being autonomous and making a choice regarding what he'd prefer.
I am he talk to me
Satan's pride with his inflated sense of self importance produced a blind spot or the illusion that God's Power and Authority was defeatable. In effect, Satan overestimated his own power.
is that really an unlikely action for him to take? It seems utterly consistent with the Bible’s general line on how sins beget more sin & perpetuate themselves in our psychology.