Wednesday, August 5, 2009

It's a Feature, Not a Bug

omnipotence, omnipotent, god, bible, christianity, christian, atheism, atheist, pagan,
Makarios explores what he essentially describes as a glitch in human design, a glitch that I would call a feature.

I stated in my last post, "Jesus didn't come to earth to establish a new religion. He came to bring healing to a broken relationship. The relationship was broken by disobedience BUT the disobedience was the result of a lack of, or perhaps even an inability to love our Creator as He is worthy to be loved. As with any relationship, when we love ourselves the most, we serve ourselves over and before those who we claim to love. That's too bad because one of our primary goals in life is to love God and to enjoy Him forever.

here's my problem with that. supposedly, our creator created us. if his entire goal is to be worshipped, and he made us for that purpose, why did he make us lacking or unable to worship him properly?

this just doesn't make any sense. god is omnipotent and omniscient. therefore, he knows how to make humans capable of worshipping him properly, and is capable of doing so. the fact that god did not make us capable of worshipping him properly means one of three things: (a) he is incapable of doing so, (b) he is unwilling to do so, (c) god did not create us.

(a) is an impossibility if god is omnipotent. if god is omnipotent, god as christians imagine him does not exist. this does not prove the nonexistence of any deity, simply the deity as imagined by christians. i don't really know if jews and muslims picture an omnipotent god or not. this leaves the field open for pagan gods, so win for you, my pagan friends!

(b) this isn't really worth spending much time on, because it automatically falls into the category of "ineffable", which is just another way of saying "shut up, that's why!"

(c) this option gets really weird really fast, and could possibly be a subheading of (a). Yhwh, the god of the christians, does exist, but did not create us. Either some other god created us, or abiogenesis did its thing, and Yhwh merely found us here. The purpose Yhwh put us to has nothing to do with the purpose we were created for (or the purpose we just don't have), hence all the troubles between humans and Yhwh. It's not our fault, it's not Yhwh's fault, humans are just a bad fit for Yhwh's needs. This option also requires that Yhwh is not omnipotent. Pagans win again!

It's the omnipotence, really. If christianity had not declared god omnipotent, we wouldn't have these issues. You don't have to explain the failures and limitations of a limited god, but with Yhwh, there's just no way around the logical gaps.

6 comments:

  1. A) Maybe I'm a dirty little minx, but, "enjoy Him forever" just sounds way, way too sexual for this context.

    B) My Modern Orthodox friend would tell you that G-d (she wouldn't spell it out) created us with free will, and that Choice is the point, not Perfection.

    *ducks from messenger-aimed bullets*

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  2. Cynical Nymph, thank you. Because I think the exact same thing!

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  3. i'm with Leigh - we win! yay!

    also with a lot of Hindus, if i understand correctly - we are all part of god, and in the end, our soul (whatever that is) rejoins the god-head. which, btw, may explain why there *was* omnipotence, but there isn't right now, since god is really weakened by there being so many pieces of It missing...
    which may also explain the point of "The Rapture" - god is about to have this thrown-down-celebrity-death-match, and needs more power, so It sucks up everyone ready to be, erm, sucked (NO NOT THAT WAY THAT IS NOT WHAT I MEANT WHY IS EVERYONE A FILTHY PERVERT!)[lol]

    (some days, i think we created god. not just made up a fairy tale, but that so many people believed so much that *poof* god came into existance. which is a sort of inverted solopsism, i think...)

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  4. Free Will also contradicts God, god, G-d, or YHWH. If "he" is all-knowing then he knew everything we'd do before we'd do it. No free will if he created us.

    Love does not equal obedience. Im sure my wife loves me but she doesn't always do as I ask her and vice versa. Im sure I love my parents but I didn't always do what they said. As a matter of fact there were times I disobeyed out of love towards people and my parents.

    Love=Selflessness

    Plus if the god of the Bible is all about 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 then letting or sending his "creation" to hell would be the last thing on his mind and since he is supposedly all powerful he has the option to not send us there but according to the Bible, does nothing about it. Some all powerful god.

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Forever in Hell by Personal Failure is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at foreverinhell.blogspot.com.