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Is it moral for God to punish us?

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Gnostic Bishop
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Is it moral for God to punish us?

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Is it moral for God to punish us?

Is it moral for an all-knowing and all-powerful God to set in motion a history that he designs and then condemns others for?

We live in a history that God has set up and is fully responsible for. God, punishing man, who can do nothing but follow God’s plan and the nature God has put in us, is having innocent people suffer for the wrongs God himself has pre-destined and which cannot be altered.

For example.
God chose to have Jesus sacrificed. God, in his planning book would also have decided who would kill Jesus. There would be no way for that man to not kill Jesus or God’s plan would fall off the rails and in this case, we would not have a messiah or scapegoat to ride into heaven.

Some will say we have free will but as shown in the example above, Jesus’ killer could not refrain from killing Jesus without derailing God’s plan. Further, to pre-destine any one action or condition within a history changes all other conditions and pre-destines all conditions within the plan. Think the butterfly effect.

Having said the above and having shown that we have no free will if anything is pre-destined, I think it would be quite immoral for God to judge or punish us for being and doing exactly what he pre-ordained for us in his plan. We have no choice and to punish us is immoral.

Do you agree?

If not, why not?

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DB Roy
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Re: Is it moral for God to punish us?

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I think it was Thomas Paine that ridiculed the Christian salvation scheme "as though mankind could be improved by the example of murder."

I've always wondered why Christians exhibit such a stupid fear of Satan. If he runs hell and that is the place where bad people go to get punished for their badness then doesn't that make Satan good? If a serial killer who tortures and murders innocent women and girls is never caught, shouldn't he be punished in the afterlife? And if Satan is the one who does the punishing, why should he get such a bad rep?

It's the same with Judas. If Judas was supposed to betray Christ and then spend eternity in hell in order for God's plan to work, then shouldn't Judas be hailed as the greatest man that ever lived? His sacrifice was far greater than Jesus's and completely integral to God's plan, absolutely necessary.

Rather than asking in mankind has free will, we should ask if God has free will. If he knows everything that's going to happen then that includes his own actions. Otherwise God is a mystery to no one but himself.
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Re: Is it moral for God to punish us?

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DB Roy wrote:I think it was Thomas Paine that ridiculed the Christian salvation scheme "as though mankind could be improved by the example of murder."

I've always wondered why Christians exhibit such a stupid fear of Satan. If he runs hell and that is the place where bad people go to get punished for their badness then doesn't that make Satan good? If a serial killer who tortures and murders innocent women and girls is never caught, shouldn't he be punished in the afterlife? And if Satan is the one who does the punishing, why should he get such a bad rep?

It's the same with Judas. If Judas was supposed to betray Christ and then spend eternity in hell in order for God's plan to work, then shouldn't Judas be hailed as the greatest man that ever lived? His sacrifice was far greater than Jesus's and completely integral to God's plan, absolutely necessary.

Rather than asking in mankind has free will, we should ask if God has free will. If he knows everything that's going to happen then that includes his own actions. Otherwise God is a mystery to no one but himself.
Many good thinkers have shown for many years now that the Christian myth makes no literal sense yet half the world still sticks to such an idiotic and immoral creed.

I can appreciate why, as tribal or hivish people, we want to belong to tribes like Christianity, but I cannot understand how such a stupid set of beliefs ever took hold and was not rejected for moral as well as intellectual reasons.

Do you have any insight for me as to why intelligent people did not reject it?

Other intelligent people have been doing so when death was not their reward for doing so.

It has been hundreds of years now.

Or are we in the growing minority right now only deluding ourselves?

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DL
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DB Roy
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Re: Is it moral for God to punish us?

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I bought a booklet a few years back by Harry G. Frankfurt called On Bullshit, a rather scholarly treatment of...well..bullshit. Her are some quotes from it:

“The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These "anti-realist" doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.

"But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial -- notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.”

I think this quote sums up nicely why intelligent people can believe bullshit. They inherently distrust science. Some go to church and swallow church dogma. For instance, it is popular in some Protestant churches to teach evolution EXCEPT that humans were made by God--everything else evolved the way science says but human beings did not. I've met a large number of people who believe that, people I thought would be too intelligent to fall for that. Science has rendered nature empty for them so they fill the void with bullshit. Sincere bullshit.
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Re: Is it moral for God to punish us?

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I would not say that they distrust science. A sick believer will go to the hospital, not to his church or mosque.

I think it is more fear of standing alone as that goes against our tribal natures.

It is quite hard to be a black sheep or a goat among sheep. We like to go with the flow and not against it. We naturally like to make friends and not enemies.

If you look at the stats, they show that believers, even if they are only deluding themselves, seem to have less stressful lives than non-believers and the above might be why.

The reason you gave has merit but I do not think the average believer is that bright. Not that they are stupid, don't get me wrong, but I don't think they think that deeply as they might lose some friends and that goes against their/our hivish or groupish natures.

Many of us seem to have a fear of death and religions cater to that fear and may well be the only or main reason religions have been able to be as long lived as they are. The religions all lie but the theist sees it as a pleasing lie and people sell their intellect for that good feeling.

See it as a good way to shut kids up in a pleasant way when there is a death in the family. It is much easier to tell them that the dead go to a nice place than nowhere at all.

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DL
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Re: Is it moral for God to punish us?

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Gnostic Bishop wrote:I would not say that they distrust science. A sick believer will go to the hospital, not to his church or mosque.
That's really neither here nor there. We are all culturally conditioned to go to the hospital regardless of whether hospitals are sound or whether they practice quackery. People once thought blood-letting was legitimate medicine. i'm talking more about convictions. Someone who thinks the earth is 6000 years old and evolution is a delusion might still go to a doctor when sick but his convictions are anti-science.
I think it is more fear of standing alone as that goes against our tribal natures.
Certainly for some people. But that doesn't fully explain why people believe in bullshit because I've seen people raised by good sensible parents turn into raving idiots. I've met more than one neo-Nazi who told me his family disowned him after he became one. Didn't stop him from believing in bullshit and there's no bigger load of bullshit than that stuff.
It is quite hard to be a black sheep or a goat among sheep. We like to go with the flow and not against it. We naturally like to make friends and not enemies.
You don't necessarily make enemies so much as you make new friends. And some people enjoy shocking people and intimidating people.
If you look at the stats, they show that believers, even if they are only deluding themselves, seem to have less stressful lives than non-believers and the above might be why.
I can't find anything about that. What I'm reading is that religious people tend to live longer than non-religious people. Then again, my father was non-religious and died at 85 in a nursing home and his body racked with Parkinson's. He hated that home and I don't blame him a bit. He'd have been better off to have died a few years earlier of a heart attack or something. Also, people who live in religious countries tend to have shorter lives than those who live in non-religious countries. You will live longer than someone in the Sudan. But a Japanese person is more likely to outlive you and nobody is religious in Japan while Americans still tend to think, for some reason, that religion is important. My uncle Hiro (who has never been to the States) even told me, "Only old men in Japan are religious." Then again, maybe those old men outlive the non-religious old men over there. Then again Uncle Hiro is an old man and he's not religious and he's doing great.
The reason you gave has merit but I do not think the average believer is that bright. Not that they are stupid, don't get me wrong, but I don't think they think that deeply as they might lose some friends and that goes against their/our hivish or groupish natures.
The average believer is probably not that deeply religious. The deeper of a believer you are, the more nihilistic your outlook life is likely to be because most people around you don't share your convictions or are even outright hostile to them. They tend to believe that science has assaulted their world-view. They want to believe that at their core is a great glittering, golden light and science says, "Nope. Just intestines full of digested food." And you get into quantum physics where the very material world created by their god has no objective reality and it's too much. They flee back to the safety of Dark Ages.
Many of us seem to have a fear of death and religions cater to that fear and may well be the only or main reason religions have been able to be as long lived as they are. The religions all lie but the theist sees it as a pleasing lie and people sell their intellect for that good feeling.
But that answers why people believe in bullshit.
See it as a good way to shut kids up in a pleasant way when there is a death in the family. It is much easier to tell them that the dead go to a nice place than nowhere at all.
I've never told my daughters that we either go anywhere or go nowhere at all. I don't know that either is true. They asked as young children and all I replied was, "I don't know. No one knows no matter what they say. No one knows." And they were happy with that answer. My oldest told me that my answer never bothered her and helped her realize that people are full of shit when they talk like they know. No one knows.
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Re: Is it moral for God to punish us?

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No argument on this last. Truth is always the best.

I still attribute the existence of religions to our hivish natures.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T64_El2s7FU

If you consider our hivish penchant to be in a group and add in Freud and Jung's Father Complex which pushes us to lead those groups, this explains what we do and why we do it quite nicely.

It also explains why this type of map exists.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV2VjdpVonY

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DL
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Re: Is it moral for God to punish us?

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I think the hivishness of religion is definitely true. I don't buy the "it always comes down to the individual" argument because humans have NEVER been anti-social as a whole. We have always lived in tribes and, as these tribes expanded, we replaced "tribe" with "nation." And what does the word "nation" actually mean? It derives from the Latin natio or womb. So our nation is a protective womb in which we are enclosed or, more to the point, a hive. The queen lays the eggs and the workers hatch and toil for the good of the hive and to protect the queen. So different nations are simply different hives. JFK expressed the same view when he stated, "Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country." Every ant and bee colony runs on that very principle although it has been ruthlessly whetted by extreme utilitarianism into "Work or die."

Then if you look at the human body, what are we each but hives? In the beginning, there were little individuals cells. Then those cells realized, "Hey, if we mass together, we'll increase our chances of survival." That's why we exist. We are individual cells that have massed together. We are a product of the process of cells massing to survive. Some animals as the Portuguese Man O' War, a type of jellyfish, show us what we were once like. Their tentacles are long chains of separate animacules with different capabilities that work in unison so that the entire composite organism can survive. Each of these animacules can survive individually but they choose not to. Further down the evolutionary scale, these animacules bonded so tightly that they formed a protective wall that we call tissue because those cells found bonding so advantageous that there was no need to even require the capability of individual survival. However, in our gut, we still have individual cells or bacteria living in us. We cannot live without them and so we have formed a symbiosis--we offer them shelter and sustenance and, in return, they break down our food so we can digest it and get rid of the waste. In the stages of pregnancy, see this whole scenario played out--we start off as a single cell which divides into multiple cells to form the hive.

Ant and bee colonies are a single composite organism whose cells are not bonded and can actually move independently of the others. Yet each of these "cells" or workers is composed much tinier cells that are not independently mobile but form tissue that composes the body of the worker cell. The overall colony then has a mind of its own or what beekeepers call "the spirit of the hive." When cells group together for survival, a new, larger mind is formed that guides the overall organism. In bee colonies, this spirit definitely exists (my brother and I are beekeepers who run our own apiary on his property which is out in the country) because each hive has its own personality distinct from the others. Some hives are incredibly assiduous in honey-making while other hives make only enough to get by and devote more time to hive maintenance. Some hives are downright lazy and will steal honey from other hives rather than make it themselves. I mean, they do make honey but not enough to survive so they steal honey from other hives. They're just lazy is all.

So it is with humans, our consciousness arose because we are a composite creature made up of billions of cells that long ago gave up the ability to live independently. Yet, do you mourn for each cell of your body that dies? No. You're not even aware of it. Every cell in your body is geared toward the survival of the colony--you. Your consciousness is the spirit of your hive and provides overall guidance. What's fascinating is how complex our spirits have become. Which makes me believe that matter was never the purpose nor the primal constituent of the universe but consciousness. So cells don't simply group together to survive, they group for the chance to lose their individuality to become something greater, something more aware. You always hear that about people who join religions because they want to be part of something greater. Well, there you go. It's the name of the game.

So as with an insect colony, we humans then become as individual cells banding together to become something greater. These can be nations, races, civilizations, political parties or religions. We, in essence, form gangs each with our own special hand gestures, symbols, and modes of communication. And these gangs demand loyalty and sacrifice. In return, they gang offers protection and fellowship. But the true purpose hasn't yet been realized--no overall guiding spirit (what we call god) has arisen from any of these human composites, no spirit of the hive. To do that, we need to sacrifice our individual natures in order to become something greater and we have not been able or willing to do that. We seem to have hit a brick wall.

As for memes, maybe they are the Gnostics' archons. They get into minds and disrupt the flow of things. And maybe that's why humans have not been able to form meta-human consciousness.
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Re: Is it moral for God to punish us?

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During my college years I took philosophy and found myself questioning my religious beliefs. However, when I got involved in the Campus Crusade for Christ movement, I found answers to my skepticism. Their approach was simple and helped me rediscover my faith and not get confused by philosophical viewpoints.
Let me share some of the insights I found in regards to God and punishment. First, God is all LOVE. At the same time God is all JUST. He wanted us to choose to love Him. Therefore, He gave us free will. When we decided not to love Him (which is known as SIN), God knew being all JUST that there had to be punishment. But, since he loved us, He chose to become one of us in the form of Jesus Christ and die for our sins. It’s as simple as that.
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Re: Is it moral for God to punish us?

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Gnostic Bishop wrote:Is it moral for God to punish us? Is it moral for an all-knowing and all-powerful God to set in motion a history that he designs and then condemns others for?
Hi Gnostic Bishop. I have long pondered this great question you ask, and was pleased to see you raise it. I recently read a book by the famous German Jewish theologian Martin Buber, who died fifty years ago, in which he critiques the epistemic basis of your question, inspiring me to think about it further.

The problem you raise is known as theodicy, reconciling God’s love and power. Underlying this seeming paradox is the need to explain what we mean by God. If we start from your premise that God is all-knowing and all-powerful, then the sense in which such a God could exist is highly constrained. This problem of God can be assessed against the language of economics. Exogenous factors are those outside a system, and endogenous factors are those inside a system. An exogenous God, outside the universe, could exhibit will and intent, but more probably is purely imaginary, with belief in such a God a matter of psychological projection of human desires. An endogenous God, within the universe, understood as a way of describing natural observable reality, could be explained as an allegorical real meaning of the Biblical theory of divine order, but could not be a personal entity with will and intent.

Conventional religious mythology imagines God as an intentional entity with a personal will who directs history with an agenda of love for the world. However, if we think of God as the order of reality, then the sense in which God has will and freedom is problematic.

The analogy to the laws of physics is instructive. Laws such as gravity and evolution and motion are omnipresent and omnipotent, in that nothing has been encountered that is outside them. It appears most probable that the theory of God emerged from observation of the real ordered structure of physical reality. Anthropomorphic imagination then took this insight as the basis for an evolving meme, presenting highly attractive stories based on the false premise that the inanimate order of reality is animated by a personal controlling ethical being.

What I consider the most interesting question from your theodicy problem is whether there is any real sense in which natural reality is intrinsically good, and even anthropic. Human language reflects the nature of reality in symbolic form, especially in science and poetry, providing a coherent natural meaning for the old myth of man as made in the image of God. I believe it is possible to repurpose the old supernatural language into a purely natural modern scientific framework, reforming Christianity to serve as a basis to understand how humanity can reconnect to divine ideals of how our flourishing and prosperity and stability can align to the real meaning and purpose inherent in the natural universe.

This framework helps to explain the context for your question of the morality of punishment by God. Essentially, if we fall out of divine grace into ignorant corruption, we lose contact with our evolutionary purpose. This loss of enlightenment is what the Buddha defined as the cause of suffering. My view is that Buddhism is the real historical origin of Christianity through the monastic Therapeut movement, so to understand the deep ethics of Christianity we have to place it within this higher wisdom of enlightened religion.
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