Why is there a God that wants to punish us?

Ugh, that awkward moment when your sarcasm failed...

 

Psalm 53:11 says “The fool says in his heart that there is no God.” After reading your comments, I rest my case. You just proved the Bible is unequivocally true.

 

I hate it when that happens!!!!

 

Actually you've managed to mis-quote me, but then I don't go for 'fairy stories' either - I read good books, like 'Das Kapital' and 'State & Revolution'

 

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.

Is that the god meant by OP?

My conception of the Christian God is that, when we die, He gives Everyone what they loved most in life, for all Eternity. The kicker is that eternity is an infinite journey..... and only God is infinite. So if you love God more than anything else, you are well-provisioned for your eternal trip. But if you are equipped with only finite supplies for an infinite trip, it won't be enough. It's going to be a bad trip.

Twilight Zone did a great episode about this called A Nice Place To Visit.

 

Fascinating take!
And all you have to do love God more than anything else and your neighbor as yourself.

Really? Is that too much to ask for everlasting love?
Peace, harmony, and love in the world as a result.
Why the heck is there any backlash for this?

 

Why has humanity been engaged in endless horrible wars? Why do a few have so much and millions and millions have so little? Why haven't humans realized and accepted the known and obvious differences in the human milieu? Has love of a god stopped humans from beheading , torturing, killing,raping other humans? What kind of god allows this to continue? If a god designed humans, why not design us as perfect creatures to begin with? WTF?

 

Ah, the questions all men have asked for millennia.

 

Possibly because God doesn't work that way. The God who is all knowing, all powerful and all just may be a metaphor for what the Lakota call Wakan Tanka (Great Mystery). The God who is responsible for the multiverse may be operating according to an entirely different agenda than we suppose-- by autocatalytic processes and natural selection. Instead of thinking of God as a bearded Dude in the Sky, it might be more fruitful to use metaphors from M-theory and the Theory of Everything. The integrated complexity of our finely tuned universe suggests the operation of intelligence, but possibly of a computational kind that takes actions to maximize goals which might be beyond our comprehension.

 

And I repeat my question: ..... and your evidence for the existence of this most malevolent supreme being is ???

 

Did I say "malevolent"? So judgmental! It is what it is. My "evidence" for such an entity is the observation of an amazing degree of integrated complexity and fine tuning in the universe and a "joyful bet" (Martin Luther) or "crapshoot" (Lilroy J. Oldster) on a Higher Power to give it some meaning and purpose. And a conversion experience (moment of clarity, psychotic break, etc.) I chose to act on. Your turn-- for belief in your god--Dialectical Materialism, isn't it? According to Stephan Courtois, Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, human sacrifices to that god included:
USSR -- 20 million
China-- 65 million
Vietnam -- 1 million
North Korea -- 2 million
Cambodia -- 2 million
Eastern Europe -- 1 million
Latin America -- 150,000
Africa -- 1.7 million
Afghanistan -- 1.5 million
Communist movements, parties not in power -- 10,000

Now I'd call that malevolent!

 

There isn't a God that wants to punish, create or just allow disaster, or works in mysterious ways, it's all made up, some innocently but mostly made up to control the "flock"...."thou shall live my way and make me rich"

 

Mebbe so, inter alia..

 

Seriously, right? All the evidence shows that we have full-scale warfare before we invented writing. It's about time we cut it out.

After millions of years of poverty, only a few of us have made it to prosperity. It's time to pull the rest of humanity up to higher ground.

In some cases, yes.

Would you rather spent eternity with true friends who love you - or robots who hear and obey? Only way one to do it: give them free will.

 

Someone messed up with me then. Nobody got rich and I'm out of control!

 

I got an entire universe of evidence. Unless you believe that, once upon a time, there was nothing... and then the nothing exploded... and became everything... and invented the New York Hustle... and everything is really nothing.... and we are all nothing... and there is no difference between life and death... and there is no difference between eating dirt and a spoonsful of tasty Cherry Garcia.... and why even get up in the morning and smile at the sunrise anyway? Sounds like a real drag.

 

Above and beyond what I posited earlier, why and how is there anything such as that which can obviously be observed as having been created, including endless space and the objects within it.? Any creation would therefore require a creator, would it not? If that is axiomatic, I would then have to give credence to the idea of a creator. And I do. Just. not. anything. that. humans. have. concocted.
I suppose that makes me an agnostic of the first order. I do not posses the hubris to declare that I know what the actual truth may be.

 

Yeah, well keep taking the tablets, you might in time get better.

 

I don't think it's something that can be reasoned into. Trying to understand an infinite being with our little ape brains would be like trying to fit the ocean into a beach bucket. In fact, I would suggest that a God that is fully comprehensible to the human mind is almost certainly not God. An infinite God will always be mysterious to a finite creation which is great for us if we are truly beings with beginnings but no end.

For something like certainty to occur, the infinite being would have to reach out directly and give the finite critters a high five. It would be the experience of that high five that would carry the created forward in faith. As in "I don't know everything about him, but someone definitely gave me a high five.... and maybe I'm supposed to pass it along." If we experienced an infinite being directly and fully, it would probably be the most frightening experience of our short lives. It makes sense to me that he wouldn't just appear like the jump scare to end all jump scares, but he'd give us plenty of time to warm up to the idea first.

 

Times up!