“God,” who supposedly created all aspects about humans, their nature and the world and already knew in advance everything that would happen including humans eating from the tree of knowledge: and who’s fault is that?
It’s like writing a bad computer program and then being mad at it when it crashes.
Getting XCom flashbacks. I’d set up a breach team on the door, and send the rest of the squad round and up that drainpipe so they can drop down from the roof. But best go around the back of the cars so as not to activate through the window.
The actual truth if you believe Christian theology. Angels AND God are fully capable of changing things, but free will is sort of like the Prime Directive in Star Trek if you want to be charitable. Uncharitably, we’re God’s play things and only a tiny fraction of the most loyal will see true reward.
The vast field of ambiguity between those two points is … kinda’ the point in why there has been so much quarrel even between Christian sects.
No, the christian god its not just capable of changing things, it is omnipotent. That means it could change things without interfering with the free will.
Literally any plans, any kind of tweaks, no matter how small or how far in advance he’s playing it. If you alter events or shift things to your end goals, you have destroyed free will.
The point about being omnipotent vs free will is… if he does ANYTHING to change our fate, he’s corrupting free will, which is supposed to be our greatest gift.
The entire concept of an omniprescient and all powerful being is nonsensical as described by Christians. A being LITERALLY CANNOT be all knowing, all kind, and omnipotent. Not if our reality is involved.
That is why there is so much debate over the nature of god and “good”. As described, it is literally impossible, so it becomes incredibly subjective.
if he does ANYTHING to change our fate, he’s corrupting free will, which is supposed to be our greatest gift.
Not really, unless you consider that every interaction with anything interferes or “corrupts” our free will. If I plan on playing a game, but a friend of mine says “dude, don’t, you’ll regret it, it fucking sucks”, and I decide to not play, did this friend corrupt my free will?
Your analogy is a little broken. God wouldn’t be simply telling you not to. God is literally changing what you want to do, or any other number of “omnipotent” actions that are not possible by someone not omnipotent.
The concept itself is incompatible with reality that operates like ours. Ours has clear, obvious, demonstrable, and repeatable rules. If those rules change, we literally cannot tell.
Omnipotence is quite literally a pointless point when there is literally NOTHING that demonstrates power beyond the existing rules. There is literally nothing that breaks causality in our reality. Our reality and existence is quite literally incompatible with omnipotence as described in the bible.
Yes, but such a universe is still fundamentally incompatible with Christian (and most other) religious teachings.
There would be absolutely NO point in praying or asking for help in a universe with absolute free will, yet that is exactly what Christians (and many others) teach. It shows up all over in how they treat others and civil policy.
It’s why they’re so pro punishment: You make a choice to do bad things, you had free will to choose not to, so you must be bad. It’s not completely broken logic that they use, but it is absolutely not a self-consistent set of rules.
Strictly talking the logic of it, if you’re omnipotent, then you have the power do do anything, and that includes the power to do flagrantly self contradictory things, defy logic and still be logically consistent.
The “if you’re omnipotent” part is a pretty big “if”, but it’s not inconsistent to say that “anything” includes the ridiculous.
I mean… Not really. Paradoxes don’t actually exist. Causality itself would fail to work if literally inconsistent things could be magically made consistent. It’s fundamentally not how the universe works. Literally. What you ask for could exist, but not in a universe that behaves like ours. It is fundamentally incompatible with what is observed.
Yes, completely and fundamentally incompatible. Even if God could start up a billion universes with a billion rules … ours doesn’t work like that. It’s like a game character saying, “yea well the devs could totally make this RPG a FPS game!”
Is the possibility true? Yes. Though for no reason the game character will ever comprehend nor be able to ever observe. It is fundamentally a pointless point that adds no new information to the equation.
We’re discussing logical consequences of a thing, not if the thing is possible in the first place.
You don’t have to talk logical consistency to rule out “all knowing and all powerful” if you’re just looking at how things work in reality.
In reality, you can’t be all powerful or all knowing. Done, end of story. It’s impossible on the face of it.
In the hypothetical where something can be all powerful, then the power to do whatever, even in a universe that behaves like ours does, is consistent.
The power to do anything includes the absurd, inconsistent, and contradictory.
Logic requires cause and effect. If you break cause and effect, logic means nothing.
If you keep logic, then again: Paradoxes don’t actually exist. At the end of the day, something is true or it’s not. If you’re dealing with something both true and not true, you are literally and quite directly dealing with something unresolved. We fundamentally do not observe unresolved things.
It is conceptually, definitionally, not compatible with observed reality. “Observed reality” literally cannot reference such things. The question itself is nothing but a thought experiment that far too many people fail to execute.
free will is sort of like the Prime Directive in Star Trek if you want to be charitable
This is a hilarious way of putting it, and as someone who hasn’t been all that steeped in christianity to be very familiar with it, that actually told me a lot 😄
That’s only the kind and charitable interpretations. There are ample stories of God directly murderizing people just for disobeying a direct order.
IMO, it’s all complete codswallop that’s been misconstrued off of the simple recordings of history and an attempt at passing on wisdom about which rulers were good and why.
After all, all it takes is some narcissistic piece of shit emperor to declare they shall be referred to as “god”, and no other rulers will even be recorded as having a similar honorific … and bam. God as described in the Bible suddenly makes perfect sense being a fickle piece of shit because he’s just a bastardized history of seemingly good rulers dealing with completely different problems in completely different ways.
Now, I don’t think that’s all of it. There is obviously much spirituality and baby’s first philosophy wrapped up in there, too.
God as described in the Bible suddenly makes perfect sense being a fickle piece of shit because he’s just a bastardized history of seemingly good rulers dealing with completely different problems in completely different ways.
This isn’t even all that far from the popular hypotheses about the history behind some of the stuff in the Bible, but the reason why the God of the Bible seems so damn fickle is that it’s likely an amalgamation of two different early Israelite / Canaanite gods: El and YHWH aka. Yahweh (and that name probably sounds familiar. Guess why!) If you’re interested in history, check out the book A History of God by Karen Armstrong, a nun-turned-atheist-historian. It’s an extremely interesting look into the prevailing hypotheses about the history of the 3 Abrahamic religions.
Now, it’s been a while since I read that book or about this in general so I’m not 100% sure I’m not mixing Yahweh and El up, but I think in general the ones where God goes all “FUCK YOU IN PARTICULAR” to some person or nation are El. In general in the “Elohist” passages that descend from stories of El, God is described as something really abstract or non-human, such as the burning bush. Also, interestingly the name still pops up in the (Hebrew-language) Bible in various forms.
In the “Yahwist” passages, God is described in a more personal and intimate way, and again if I remember right Yahwew is the more laid-back “facet” of the Biblical God. Interestingly the OG YHWH really hated farming and farmers, and there’s a general theme that farming and soil are somehow connected to evil, and you can see some that in the Bible; Cain was a farmer, for example. My own pet hypothesis for this is that that dates back to the agricultural revolution, when conservatively minded people would absolutely have thought that that newfangled woke farming bullshit is going to destroy society, and this sense of farming as a source of evil could have gotten incorporated into religion. Yahweh is also why depictions of God are forbidden.
Historical regional rulers did, however, affect eg. which god was favored, or what was part of the official religion, and on top of that a lot of the stories of different rulers and even some of the prophets in the Bible are essentially self-insert fanfic for some king or another.
If we’re going to take the Bible as stories that are somewhat partially true, I’d like to imagine that God as described was or is a supernatural nth dimensional being that allows for the manifestation of the human conscience in our moments of greatest suffering, but upholds a disassociative desire for a greater justice or harmony that can appear to many as an almost alien destructive nature and the tendency to punish, while another aspect or being above us, perhaps the same one, is basically a chilled out stoner who enjoys being lazy, exploring mushrooms as food, but doesn’t like the idea of farming and sedentary lifestyle.
free will is sort of like the Prime Directive in Star Trek
That’s a really apt comparison because they play fast and loose with the prime directive all the time, using it as an excuse for inaction while flagrantly disregarding it whenever it suits them
The great irony is, the Prime Directive is to try and control the emotional overreaction of humans and is indeed often ignored by Star Trek for supposedly moral reasons… It is terribly ironic that it makes such a perfect analogy to how God, a supposedly far superior being, is described as acting in the Bible.
In Star Trek, it’s ignored to help people. In the Bible, it’s ignored because God is having a bad day and needs to lay down some punishment without being labeled a massive hypocrite because daddy do no wrong.
Depends entirely on the religious sect. Some believe we live happily ever after in a similar condition but in paradise, some believe the believers get ascended to godhood, literally able to create universes.
It is an entire spectrum of fantasy, and that’s just the Christian sects.
“During the great tribulation, Gog of Magog’s forces may try to assault us in our homes. But we can take comfort in knowing that Jesus and his angels are aware of what is happening and will defend us”
Ex JW here. This is depicting one of the steps in their equivalent to the Rapture. It goes something like this:
The UN activates as a full world government, and decides to destroy all religion (if you know the slightest bit about the UN, you can see how absurd this is before we get to anything else)
After clearing out everything else, the UN suddenly realizes that Jehovah’s Witnesses are still around
They attack JWs (what OP’s picture depicts), but God intervenes to protect them supernaturally
Jehovah wins and tosses Satan in a deep pit
Earth is transformed over 1000 years into a paradise. Nobody dies, and previous righteous people are resurrected.
At the end of that, Satan is let out again for a final judgment of humanity
Satan is killed off for good. Any human survivors live forever on a paradise Earth.
Gog of Magog comes from Ezekiel 38. From the New World Translation: "The word of Jehovah again came to me, saying: 2 “Son of man, set your face against Gog of the land of Maʹgog, the head chieftain of Meʹshech and Tuʹbal, and prophesy against him. 3 Say, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord Jehovah says: “Here I am against you, O Gog, head chieftain of Meʹshech and Tuʹbal. "
Then, the term pops up again in Revelation 20: “7 Now as soon as the 1,000 years have ended, Satan will be released from his prison, 8 and he will go out to mislead those nations in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Maʹgog, to gather them together for the war. The number of these is as the sand of the sea.”
So Gog is basically another term for Satan in this reading. Though Ezekiel seems to be talking about a people from a specific place.
As a side note, “But we can take comfort in knowing…” is a common phrase in their writing, and I get a little twitch every time I read it.
Yes 100%. Born and raised. You grow up your entire life thinking the world is going to end in a few years. Why goto college if the world will end and it won’t serve you in the new system? We grow up in terror, see a storm out the window… Is it Armageddon? Constant fear.
Not to mention the fear of being exiled from your friends and family if you “sin”. My childhood was lost because I didn’t get to celebrate Christmas or Halloween, or goto my friends house from school, or watch Harry Potter or play Pokemon. Instead we went to church twice a week, went knocking door to door at least once a week in the heat and humidity, and did book study once a week where we read their literature and answer simple minded questions about it. Sundays were non-existent because we spent the entire day partaking in those activities.
Shit, I had no idea. That sounds like a fairly anxiety-inducing way to live.
Around the Cretaceous period when I was in elementary school, I had a classmate who was in the JW and their life did sort of seem pretty drab compared to the rest of us, at least based on what they talked about, but I guess it’s no surprise that they didn’t much venture into the whole Armageddon thing for example, being 7–9yo at the time.
It is anxiety inducing, it’s hard to even realize it because they always keep you busy. And they discourage you from having friends outside the religion and teach you that people outside have miserable lives, they only do drugs, drink alcohol and have sex. Anyone outside is only nice to you because they want to take advantage of you.
Youre taught to be scared of the outside world so you never explore it and realize that normal people really are just normal and most people are actually very friendly and want to help each other, and are a million times less judgemental than other JWs.
It’s like the “anti drug education” a lot of us had to sit through as a kid. WHERE THE FUCK ARE THE FREE DRUGS I WAS PROMISED DEALERS WERE HANDING OUT???
Yup, that’s their whole outline of the end days. Supposed to happen in the lifetime of people alive in 1914, and there’s a whole thing about how they’ve managed to extend that deadline.
Some religious folks believe that at the “end of days” everyone who doesn’t follow the NWO religion or doesn’t have the mark of the beast will be persecuted. If you look very closely you can see the family in the house if praying with their heads down…. meanwhile these are the same people attempting to self fulfill their own prophecy by integrating religion into government
Also these people, who are so adamant in their beliefs that the State is out to get them (or will be in the near future) are almost always in favor of militarizing police and giving them more power in general, if not straight up pushing for it.
Some religious folks believe that at the “end of days”
I’ve legit heard arguments along the lines of “you shouldn’t care about climate change because the rapture’s going to be any day now. The fact that scientists are still advocating for bullshit like eliminating fossil fuels instead of repenting shows that they’re working for the devil trying to drag you to hell with them.”
The people inside the house look like they all have dark hair. Maybe in the original it’s angels guiding and protecting righteous immigration cops while they’re arresting dangerous illegal immigrants (ie flashbanging toddlers)?
edit: nope lol it’s jehova’s witnesses: “During the great tribulation, Gog of Magog’s forces may try to assault us in our homes. But we can take comfort in knowing that Jesus and his angels are aware of what is happening and will defend us”
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