If God Has A Plan For Everyone, Then Why Is It Planned For Some People To Be Non-Believers?

Any thoughts? If eternal damnation is the fate of non-believers, then why has god made some people to be non-believers (in his image). The mind we have is the one god gave us, and god has a plan for the mentally ill as well. What is the plan for non-believers and what part do they play in god's plan?

 

God gave us Free Will.

 

We form beliefs through the assimilation of information from our environment. What we learn as a child serves as seeds for new information to get compared against, categorized and stored, eventually leading to a complex understanding of reality. Why is it planned that some people will be born into a life that exposes them to information from their environment leading to the formation of their belief (or lack thereof) in a divine entity?

 

Can anyone prove the existence of free will? Isn't it something of a grand illusion? For example the subconscious mind enacts decision making a fraction of a second before the conscious mind is aware of them.

If there is a God I don't believe such an entity has individual plans for us.An imputed God would exist largely in absentia,and may not even be much concerned with the plight of humans.

 

Because he likes turtles.

 

Goddess told him to...

 

Under Judeo-Christian-Islamic beliefs, the unbelievers get a rough deal indeed. And since the idea is that God is omniscient, he knows in advance who they are.

 

I hate these questions. The obvious answer is there is no God, or if you prefer to believe in God then the answer is God isn't a puppet master.

 

or if you really insist on believing in pre destination then you just believe in a really fucked up, sadistic God who doesn't act very god-like

 

While I think creation and evolution are gifts from God, I do not believe any God has time to manage our lives. What we like to call free will is the last vestiges of our born instincts. It's our most personal self. While I don't personally believe in hell or satan, I have trouble buying the golden gates as well. Seems more to me like we'd all just become soul stuff and flood the cosmos.

Eternal damnation is a concept used by the church to maintain control over kings and their subjects. It has been the greatest con job humans have created. If God has a message for you, it will come in due time. A church is powerless to rush the process. All they can do is cash in on it.

 

I am no expert in theology but from what I know of the mythology ranging from Zeus, Hades and the Greek Gods, to certain Egyptian Gods, to Kali the Hindu Goddess, acting sadistically is by no means an uncommon trait of Gods.



Response to ace_k: Some philosopher's have diverged quite a bit from the common depiction of God as like a metaphysical 'Simon Cowell' of our life's deeds found in Judeo-Christian religions.

A particular philosopher whose ideas I think you may find appealing is Spinoza. He essentially suggests God as 'Divine nature' and consisting of all attributes found in nature, basically being an indivisible entity which consists of all of nature.

Some copy and paste ideas:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spinoza/#ThePolTre

 

I'm just about out-Godded...

 

Harry Truman used to say he'd never answer "iffy" questions, but I'll try. I believe in universalism in which nobody is damned. I believe that we make our own heaven or hell on this earth. As you suggest, all humans are made in the image and likeness of God. God seems to be into diversity. Indeed, Freeman Dyson, not a theologian but a physicist and mathematician of some renown, said that:" the laws of nature are constructed in such a way as to make the universe as interesting as possible." I think God finds the universe more interesting with atheists and agnostics than without them. My own reading consists about equally of religious and atheist literature. Some of my Christian friends find that odd, but all of those books are about God, and contemplation of God in Her infinite complexity requires viewing Her from a variety of perspectives. Saint Justin Martyr, one of the first Christian apologists, said that "those who live according to reason are Christians, even though they are accounted atheists." Pope Francis seems to feel the same way about it. I mentioned this at a church meeting just last week and was told not to say this to atheists because it might offend them, so I offer my sincere apologies if anyone is offended. I know atheists who seem to be living more exemplary lives than some Christians, particularly than the self-righteous Christians who are essentially Latter Day Pharisees. But all are reflections of an aspect of God.

 

why shouldn't it be? at least my belief, they're not automatically doing any harm. to themselves or anyone else.
but i also don't believe, whatever god or godlike beings might exist, micro-manage at all.
if there is such a thing as some kind of a divine plan, it works statistically, like the universe we live in does in reality.
it wouldn't be about micro-managing individual lives.
the only thing any kind of a god would accomplish trying to do that, would just be to frustrate itself anyway.

 

Evidence overwhelmingly suggests that Free Will is an invention of the human mind and does not correspond to any factual reality. One the one hand, we have empirical science demonstrating over and over that at whatever level you observe reality, that reality functions according to principles which are deterministic (even if we don't understand the principles themselves, ie quantum mechanics or climate, this is a matter of computational power and modeling strength), and on the other hand, coming out of buddhist mindfulness and neurology, is the strong suggestion (to say the least) that there is no real seat of the soul, no causal agent within our beings, but that we are distributed systems (ultimately across the whole universe) engaged partly in a simulated sense of focal being by our nervous sytems.

Free Will imagines that inside us is "something that makes decisions" in opposition to an outer universe which is doing it's own thing. But the line between the outer universe and us is only conceptual, and we are very much something that does its own thing (whens the last time you decided how your neurons would fire?). Contemplative methodologies point at the fact that there doesn't seem to be a thinker of thoughts, only thoughts being thunk. From two directions we come to the same conclussion; moving from outside in, we find that we are as much a collection of stuff obeying laws as everything else, and from the inside out, we find that we are empty of any causal agent and are more akin to weather patterns having achieved mental models of ourselves which we identify with (overly, to our detriment).

 

I don't think there is a god with a plan...How could little sweet soft bunny rabbits who twitch their noses and cuddle be eaten by big fox in a plan with a god you or I would believe in?

 

When you're surrounded by rabbits who destroy your crops, a fox makes perfect sense. Unfortunately the process is not always so simple. But it's pretty clear from the evidence of evolution that it is indeed a process. Having eaten a few rabbits myself, I can't blame the fox.

 

Yeah, but then with that kind of thinking ...what is the plan to destroy and eat mankind who is ruining the earth like you say rabbits ruin crops and breed like crazy?

I just never place myself above other life forms....I guess.....

 

I don't see how free will excuses anything. God ought to be smart enough to know that if he gives people free will, some will be damned. So it is God damning certain creations from the get-go, just because he can. And through this, God discovers that somebody truly loves him. (Those people who are just afraid but profess to believe...that's not real love, either.) God has contrived this whole mess in search for a few buddies, as if God needs reaffirmation of his perfection from piddly little humans. I would hope that those buddies help to salvage the rest of humanity, proving humanity is capable of appreciating the beauty of God despite the ugliness of God.

 

Well said, you expose a hole in the idea of intelligent design. As with many of the other commonly attributed qualities of God, if we are presuming a conception of God that gives a damn, 'Intelligence' seems to have to be re-imagined to a variety that is not readily apparent and not of the same/relative nature to that as human intelligence.

Much as it is with other attributes of God, I find the ability for mere mortals to 'out-think' God in terms of creation unsettling. If we arrive at the conclusion the Universe has to be 'constructed' this way in order for say certain laws of nature to work the way they do, then I think we're left facing a conundrum in which relaxxx asserted in another thread, God has become necessarily constrained and for me that prompts the question by what?