Wortfish wrote:

Perfect freedom means the freedom to kill, to injure to steal

Here's the bit where you need to explain, not just blindly assert, why it is good to have the freedom to kill, injure and/or steal.

Wortfish wrote:as much as it means to love and do good. If you don't have a choice, you are not free.

Another ludicrous false dichotomy. Me not being free to harm others, doesn't make not free to do other things.
I would gladly give up my freedom to steal, injure and kill if it meant that no-one could.

Wortfish wrote: A place where only joy exists is called "heaven/paradise" by some people.

FIFY. Don't make categorical statements based on silly generalisations.

Wortfish wrote:
However, this place is populated by folks who have experienced pain and suffering on earth and so can now appreciate the joy they experience in the company of loved ones.

And I guess Elisabeth Fritzl can now properly appreciate sex and motherhood because she suffered all those years right?
FFS.

Wortfish wrote:

Oh dear, false analogy time. No one is harmed if god prevents suffering. That's kind of the whole point of preventing suffering.

Spiders cannot exist by eating grass. They are predators by nature. By denying God the right to create predators,

He doesn't have that right.

Wortfish wrote: or allow their evolution, you would be denying his creative expression.

Wortfish wrote:

This is pretty sad. You're prepared to make just about any excuse to explain away the endless problems with this god thingy. He's OMMMMMMMMNIPOTENT. Say it with me. OMNI...POTENT. If he wanted fewer flies, he could have just preset them to the number he wanted. If he had wanted spiders to just be cool, he could have created them to not need to eat anything. Do you mean to tell me that he never thought of these things? Am I cleverer than god? Some god...

Yes, God is defined as omnipotent. But that doesn't mean he can do things that are logically incoherent like cease to exist or create square circles.

It is not logically contradictory to not create carnivores, or create species to not have to eat.

Wortfish wrote:
Also, it doesn't mean the natural world is omnipotent. We all need energy according to natural laws.

It also does not mean that black sphere has evolved to a purple parallel.
But neither is relevant to the price of fish.

Wortfish wrote:
That means we need to eat things to survive.

Bullshit. We need to because God created us that way. Since he's omnipotent he could have also created us without that need.

Wortfish wrote: So, God may be unlimited and infallible but his creation is limited and fallible.

Again, only because he deliberately made it so, he set his creation up to fail in anguish and needless suffering.

Thomas Eshuis wrote:
Another ludicrous false dichotomy. Me not being free to harm others, doesn't make not free to do other things.
I would gladly give up my freedom to steal, injure and kill if it meant that no-one could.

Thw whole point of freedom, my dear fellow, is that you are allowed to make mistakes, including doing harm to yourself and others. You can't jump off a cliff and expect God to suspend the law of gravity to save you from falling to your death.

FIFY. Don't make categorical statements based on silly generalisations.

Paradise is the place you think God should have created for us all if he is benevolent and omnipotent. But paradise only makes sense if we have experienced the evils we have been delivered from.

And I guess Elisabeth Fritzl can now properly appreciate sex and motherhood because she suffered all those years right?
FFS.

There are many ways of addessing why someone has suffered. Some, like ex-England manager, Glen Hoddle, would claim that "what you sow is what you reap". She may have been paying off a karmic debt from a previous life. Others may be made to endure suffering because it ennobles them and makes them appreciate the life they have - most great works of literature involve the hero enduring great suffering before triumphing. It may just be something that defines the human condition.

All of this just becomes an argument from personal incredulity and ignorance. A benevolent God may have his own inscrutable reasons for allowing us to suffer and experience pain. As Jesus said to Peter, when he tried to persuade him not to be crucified, "you think as men think, not as God thinks" Matt 16:23. Again, when Jesus is asked by his disciples why a blind man was born blind, whom he would restore sight to, he answered "It was not because of his sins or his parents' sins.This happened so the power of God could be seen in him." The point here is that God has his own reasons which we may never understand.

It is not logically contradictory to not create carnivores, or create species to not have to eat.

I think it is logically contradictory to suppose that a carnivore - a flesh-eating animal - could exist without the need to eat flesh. One thing that I find interesting is that many carnivores are scavengers of dead corpses rather than killers. They perform the action of an undertaker than a murderer.

Bullshit. We need to because God created us that way. Since he's omnipotent he could have also created us without that need.

In the case of plants, they generate food by using sunlight and air. But, unless you are suggesting that all organisms use photosynthesis, eating others for food becomes necessary and, at least for us, a very enjoyable experience.

Again, only because he deliberately made it so, he set his creation up to fail in anguish and needless suffering.

As I mentioned before, we live in an imperfect world, not a failed one. We aren't bombarded by asteroids every day or at risk of being murdered by giant griffins at every turn.The suffering we endure is at an acceptably "finely-tuned" level.

Wortfish wrote:

Fallible wrote:This god thing of yours is OMNIPOTENT. That means he is all powerful. If he had wanted to construct logic and the universe differently so we all felt joy all the time, he could have done so. If he had wanted us to have perfect freedom and also have everything decided for us, he could have set things up that way. Once again, he is OMNIPOTENT. Honestly, is this the best you can do?

Perfect freedom means the freedom to kill, to injure to steal as much as it means to love and do good. If you don't have a choice, you are not free.

I can't instantly teleport home when I'm off from work. I don't have that freedom. I can't travel naked in a vacuum. I can't lift a mountain. I don't have perfect freedom, nothing has perfect freedom, we don't require perfect freedom in order to have some sense of freedom. If we do, then by virtue of the fact that we are constrained in lots of other ways from taking certain actions, we are not at all free.
But that would be ridiculous to claim. Just because we might be prevented from taking certain morally abhorrent actions doesn't mean we don't have any freedom.

However, this place is populated by folks who have experienced pain and suffering on earth and so can now appreciate the joy they experience in the company of loved ones.

There is no amount of joy a person can experience that would be justified by being taken prisoner and raped by your father in a basement in Austria for 20 years.

If your view of the concept of heaven is that the evils suffered on Earth are somehow offset by even greater goods in paradise, then the most moral action a person can take is to prolong and intensify the suffering of the people they love as much as possible, since supposedly God will tip the scales in a compensatory way once they die. In other words, to sacrifice your own eternal happiness and wellbeing and condemn yourself to hell, by causing the most amount of intolerable agony and suffering on the largest possible number of people, so that they will get even better experiences for an eternity in heaven.

Child rapists, torturers and atrocity-orchestrating tyrants are now the most moral people who ever existed. The best possible thing you can do is to get lots of children then torture them to death over a prolonged period of time, but eventually kill them before they lose their intellectual and moral innocence. That way you guarantee their ticket to heaven as they never get to personally sin, while also making sure they ride 1st-class due to how much they suffered in life.

Rumraket wrote:
If your view of the concept of heaven is that the evils suffered on Earth are somehow offset by even greater goods in paradise, then the most moral action a person can take is to prolong and intensify the suffering of the people they love as much as possible, since supposedly God will tip the scales in a compensatory way once they die. In other words, to sacrifice your own eternal happiness and wellbeing and condemn yourself to hell, by causing the most amount of intolerable agony and suffering on the largest possible number of people, so that they will get even better experiences for an eternity in heaven.

It doesn't work like that. Just because you suffer doesn't mean you will be compensated or rewarded for enduring your suffering. As I said, you may be suffering because you were evil in this life or in a previous one. However, the fact is that any suffering you experience is temporary compared to the promise of the hereafter. Inflicting harm and suffering to others doesn't help the perpetrator, and is condemnable regardless of whether it makes the victim a better person.

Wortfish wrote:

Rumraket wrote:
If your view of the concept of heaven is that the evils suffered on Earth are somehow offset by even greater goods in paradise, then the most moral action a person can take is to prolong and intensify the suffering of the people they love as much as possible, since supposedly God will tip the scales in a compensatory way once they die. In other words, to sacrifice your own eternal happiness and wellbeing and condemn yourself to hell, by causing the most amount of intolerable agony and suffering on the largest possible number of people, so that they will get even better experiences for an eternity in heaven.

It doesn't work like that. Just because you suffer doesn't mean you will be compensated or rewarded for enduring your suffering. As I said, you may be suffering because you were evil in this life or in a previous one. However, the fact is that any suffering you experience is temporary compared to the promise of the hereafter. Inflicting harm and suffering to others doesn't help the perpetrator, and is condemnable regardless of whether it makes the victim a better person.

A previous life?? Wow!
How many "previous" lives have you had, exactly?
...
You remind me of "Boopsie" in the Guardian cartoons!

DavidMcC wrote:
A previous life?? Wow!
How many "previous" lives have you had, exactly?
...
You remind me of "Boopsie" in the Guardian cartoons!

I'm just going by what Glenn Hoddle ( a Christian) believes about reaping what you sow.

Thomas Eshuis wrote:
I would gladly give up my freedom to steal, injure and kill if it meant that no-one could.

That's basically the point of human society and law in a nutshell...

None of Wortfish's explanations are evidence of God's existence. They are simply the same excuses we have always heard; rationalizations and ad hoc defensive volleys from an exhausted baseline strategy.

One wonders how individual freedom works in heaven, where there is no suffering, no sin, and things don't unanimously agree to go around metabolizing everything else.

Religious snake-oil peddlers tell us we are whiners and babies for complaining about God's creation. In truth, it is they who are whiners, complaining about the universe as we find it. Any universe that contains sentient beings will present those beings with a variety of conditions and experiences, which must unfailingly fall on a continuum of pleasantness. We accept this, but religious whiners must label everything Good and Evil, Righteous and Sinful. And is it God who tells you and me how all this works?

Fuck no. He is impotent to get his point across without the intervention of Wortfish, his many scattered prophets, apologists, and boy-buggering priests.

These fucking gods! I swear, they all have spokesmen. Next time God tells one of his fucking spokesmen to tell me how the world really works, I'll ask the talking purple kangaroo in my basement if it's correct, and she'll tell me to tell them to tell God to go fuck himself.

Wortfish wrote:

Thomas Eshuis wrote:
Another ludicrous false dichotomy. Me not being free to harm others, doesn't make not free to do other things.
I would gladly give up my freedom to steal, injure and kill if it meant that no-one could.

Thw whole point of freedom, my dear fellow,

Stuff the patronising bullshit Wortfish. I'm not your dear fellow.

Wortfish wrote:is that you are allowed to make mistakes, including doing harm to yourself and others.

Why is that a good thing?

Wortfish wrote: You can't jump off a cliff and expect God to suspend the law of gravity to save you from falling to your death.

Why not?
You need to actually present sound arguments Wortfish, not spew a pile of blind assertions.

Wortfish wrote:

FIFY. Don't make categorical statements based on silly generalisations.

Paradise is the place you think God should have created for us all if he is benevolent and omnipotent. But paradise only makes sense if we have experienced the evils we have been delivered from.

Mindlessly regurgitating a point already refuted only serves to demonstrate intellectual dishonesty.

Wortfish wrote:

And I guess Elisabeth Fritzl can now properly appreciate sex and motherhood because she suffered all those years right?
FFS.

There are many ways of addessing why someone has suffered. Some, like ex-England manager, Glen Hoddle, would claim that "what you sow is what you reap". She may have been paying off a karmic debt from a previous life. Others may be made to endure suffering because it ennobles them and makes them appreciate the life they have

That you think this a good thing, tells me all I need to know about your moral compass.

Wortfish wrote:
All of this just becomes an argument from personal incredulity and ignorance.

Eh no. It's a point of you performing increasingly disgusting feats of mental gymnastic to square your god in the circle that is reality.

Wortfish wrote: A benevolent God may have his own inscrutable reasons for allowing us to suffer and experience pain.

That's a cop-out.

Wortfish wrote:As Jesus said to Peter,

We have no evidence whatsoever what Jesus said to anyone.

Wortfish wrote: The point here is that God has his own reasons which we may never understand.

And that's still a cop-out.
If I were to beat my hypothetical kids, I can't get away with it by claiming it's for reasons the judge will never understand.

Wortfish wrote:

It is not logically contradictory to not create carnivores, or create species to not have to eat.

I think it is logically contradictory to suppose that a carnivore - a flesh-eating animal - could exist without the need to eat flesh.

Why do you consistently fail to adress the point being made?

Wortfish wrote: One thing that I find interesting is that many carnivores are scavengers of dead corpses rather than killers. They perform the action of an undertaker than a murderer.

You're once again dodging the point: Why did god not just make us so we don't have to consume other living beings to survive?

Wortfish wrote:

Bullshit. We need to because God created us that way. Since he's omnipotent he could have also created us without that need.

In the case of plants, they generate food by using sunlight and air.

Again, because they're designed that way, according to your logic.
Why doesn't god create them with the ability to survive without nourishment?

Wortfish wrote: But, unless you are suggesting that all organisms use photosynthesis, eating others for food becomes necessary and, at least for us, a very enjoyable experience.

Stop making shit up and presenting it as facts Wortfish.
You have not demonstrated this to be necessary.

Wortfish wrote:

Again, only because he deliberately made it so, he set his creation up to fail in anguish and needless suffering.

As I mentioned before, we live in an imperfect world, not a failed one.

As I told you before; explaining a situation does nothing to rebut the point made about that situation.
Why did god create an imperfect world for us to live in?

Wortfish wrote: We aren't bombarded by asteroids every day or at risk of being murdered by giant griffins at every turn.The suffering we endure is at an acceptably "finely-tuned" level.

Stockholm syndrome, again.

Wortfish wrote:

Rumraket wrote:
If your view of the concept of heaven is that the evils suffered on Earth are somehow offset by even greater goods in paradise, then the most moral action a person can take is to prolong and intensify the suffering of the people they love as much as possible, since supposedly God will tip the scales in a compensatory way once they die. In other words, to sacrifice your own eternal happiness and wellbeing and condemn yourself to hell, by causing the most amount of intolerable agony and suffering on the largest possible number of people, so that they will get even better experiences for an eternity in heaven.

It doesn't work like that.

According to the bible it does.

Wortfish wrote: Just because you suffer doesn't mean you will be compensated or rewarded for enduring your suffering. As I said, you may be suffering because you were evil in this life or in a previous one.

You do realise that Christianity doesn't preach reincarnation?

Zadocfish2 wrote:

Thomas Eshuis wrote:
I would gladly give up my freedom to steal, injure and kill if it meant that no-one could.

That's basically the point of human society and law in a nutshell...

Yup.

pelfdaddy wrote:None of Wortfish's explanations are evidence of God's existence. They are simply the same excuses we have always heard; rationalizations and ad hoc defensive volleys from an exhausted baseline strategy.

One wonders how individual freedom works in heaven, where there is no suffering, no sin, and things don't unanimously agree to go around metabolizing everything else.

Religious snake-oil peddlers tell us we are whiners and babies for complaining about God's creation. In truth, it is they who are whiners, complaining about the universe as we find it. Any universe that contains sentient beings will present those beings with a variety of conditions and experiences, which must unfailingly fall on a continuum of pleasantness. We accept this, but religious whiners must label everything Good and Evil, Righteous and Sinful. And is it God who tells you and me how all this works?

Fuck no. He is impotent to get his point across without the intervention of Wortfish, his many scattered prophets, apologists, and boy-buggering priests.

These fucking gods! I swear, they all have spokesmen. Next time God tells one of his fucking spokesmen to tell me how the world really works, I'll ask the talking purple kangaroo in my basement if it's correct, and she'll tell me to tell them to tell God to go fuck himself.

Yes, Free Will creates a host of problems for christian ideas.

In my view, Heaven with Free Will will quickly become depopulated.



Excuse the low production values - early days of YouTube!

Wortfish wrote:

DavidMcC wrote:
A previous life?? Wow!
How many "previous" lives have you had, exactly?
...
You remind me of "Boopsie" in the Guardian cartoons!

I'm just going by what Glenn Hoddle ( a Christian) believes about reaping what you sow.

Oh, so you're another person who interprets "past lives" in a purely metaphorical sense, rather than in the literal, re-incarnation sense. I've encountered this verbal trick once before on this site.

Wortfish wrote:

Fallible wrote:

Going silent for months is not going to make anyone forget what you failed to understand the last time, so trotting the same failure out again isn't going to get you anywhere.

Like a submarine. I need to go silent for months and periodically resurface to listen to the communications here.

Why do you?

This god thing of yours is OMNIPOTENT. That means he is all powerful. If he had wanted to construct logic and the universe differently so we all felt joy all the time, he could have done so. If he had wanted us to have perfect freedom and also have everything decided for us, he could have set things up that way. Once again, he is OMNIPOTENT. Honestly, is this the best you can do?

Perfect freedom means the freedom to kill, to injure to steal as much as it means to love and do good. If you don't have a choice, you are not free. A place where only joy exists is called "heaven/paradise". However, this place is populated by folks who have experienced pain and suffering on earth and so can now appreciate the joy they experience in the company of loved ones.

Heh. None of my loved ones are believers, so even if by some weird happenstance I were to find myself in heaven, I certainly would not be experiencing joy. I would be extremely depressed at the thought of being separated from them for eternity.

You don't get how this works, do you. Either that, or you very much want to give the impression that you don't get how this works. You are not recognised here as an authority on what freedom means. This being the case, you need to provide evidence for your views regarding freedom, not simply make more assertions. Not that it really matters. Despite your self-professed stealth reading, you have spectacularly failed over a number of months to cotton on to the fact that every single claim you make about the way the world is set up can be totally swept aside by three words, namely 'God is omnipotent'. All you do in response to these words is to make yet more assertions about how certain things are not possible. This is because that is the only place you have to go.

I have asked you previously how long you wish to continue circling this particular mulberry bush. The answer appears to be very long. Very well.

If God wanted to, he could have set the universe up so that one can have perfect freedom without freedom to kill, because...(drum roll) HE IS OMNIPOTENT.

Oh dear, false analogy time. No one is harmed if god prevents suffering. That's kind of the whole point of preventing suffering.

Spiders cannot exist by eating grass. They are predators by nature.

I'm trying my best here, but it seems that you are still struggling to understand basic ideas. Tell me what would help you to grasp what I'm saying. Bold font? Pretty colours? I notice later in your post you go on to drag out the tired 'God is omnipotent except when it could mean bypassing logic [which he created]' 'argument'. All the more ironic that you appear so willing to eschew logic in your defence of him. If God prevents suffering, that means God prevents any living being from suffering, spiders included.

And a-stultifyingly-boringly-gain, God is omnipotent. Spiders cannot exist by eating grass because God designed them that way. They are predators by DESIGN from your viewpoint. God chose to make their survival dependant on the suffering and death of another species.

By denying God the right to create predators, or allow their evolution, you would be denying his creative expression.

Aww, poor God. Imagine little old me being able to deny him the right to create predators. This is like Stockholm Syndrome. You are willing to come up with any old shit to defend the indefensible, and hang what it makes you look like. With every word you type, you reinforce my view that this God of yours is so pathetic it's really very lucky for him that he doesn't exist, because if he did he'd be in a perpetual state of being unable to do things. That sounds pretty much like a failing human being to me. As I said, what a shit god you have there.

This is pretty sad. You're prepared to make just about any excuse to explain away the endless problems with this god thingy. He's OMMMMMMMMNIPOTENT. Say it with me. OMNI...POTENT. If he wanted fewer flies, he could have just preset them to the number he wanted. If he had wanted spiders to just be cool, he could have created them to not need to eat anything. Do you mean to tell me that he never thought of these things? Am I cleverer than god? Some god...

Yes, God is defined as omnipotent. But that doesn't mean he can do things that are logically incoherent like cease to exist or create square circles.

No, no - you are confusing 'that doesn't mean...' with 'it would completely sink my lame argument if...' Do you really think we are this stupid? How offensive. Who do you think came up with logic? According to your world view, I mean. Who was it? The word 'omnipotent' is quite specific. It refers to unlimited power. You know - power WITHOUT LIMITATION. To be frank, it is beyond me why you think you are qualified to explain God to anyone, given the tenuous grasp you appear to have on the party line.

Also, it doesn't mean the natural world is omnipotent. We all need energy according to natural laws. That means we need to eat things to survive. So, God may be unlimited and infallible but his creation is limited and fallible.

Ah, hilarious. We know the natural world isn't omnipotent, dear, no one suggested it was. You are pretty much hell bent however on missing the point by a country mile that your God, having created every single thing, including logic and 'natural law', had free rein to design everything in whichever way he wanted, and as such, the natural world is limited and fallible BECAUSE GOD SPECIFICALLY SET IT UP THAT WAY.

It is a weak sort of god that needs ignorant humans to defend it.

It seems Wortfish has submerged again.

Fallible wrote:Why do you?

My preference is to lurk, but it becomes necessary to engage sometimes.

Heh. None of my loved ones are believers, so even if by some weird happenstance I were to find myself in heaven, I certainly would not be experiencing joy. I would be extremely depressed at the thought of being separated from them for eternity.

You would find new loved ones. Anyway, once their brutal ordeal in the fires of hell is over - and they are purged of their sins - you will be reunited with them.

You don't get how this works, do you. Either that, or you very much want to give the impression that you don't get how this works. You are not recognised here as an authority on what freedom means. This being the case, you need to provide evidence for your views regarding freedom, not simply make more assertions. Not that it really matters. Despite your self-professed stealth reading, you have spectacularly failed over a number of months to cotton on to the fact that every single claim you make about the way the world is set up can be totally swept aside by three words, namely 'God is omnipotent'. All you do in response to these words is to make yet more assertions about how certain things are not possible. This is because that is the only place you have to go.

Just because God is omnipotent, doesn't mean that he has to create a world as we would wish it to be. And if he permits human and natural freedom of action, through which we give so much value to, then he also permits suffering to occur as that is the inevitable consequence of freedom of action.

I have asked you previously how long you wish to continue circling this particular mulberry bush. The answer appears to be very long. Very well. If God wanted to, he could have set the universe up so that one can have perfect freedom without freedom to kill, because...(drum roll) HE IS OMNIPOTENT.

All you are doing here is whining why God didn't create a world without suffering. I have argued that, in the case of heaven/paradise, he may well have done. However, for the joy of heaven/paradise to have any meaning, there has to be a world where we are put to the test and can learn the value of good and evil and experience all that there is to be experienced.

I'm trying my best here, but it seems that you are still struggling to understand basic ideas. Tell me what would help you to grasp what I'm saying. Bold font? Pretty colours? I notice later in your post you go on to drag out the tired 'God is omnipotent except when it could mean bypassing logic [which he created]' 'argument'. All the more ironic that you appear so willing to eschew logic in your defence of him. If God prevents suffering, that means God prevents any living being from suffering, spiders included.

And, being omnipotent, God is able to create spiders and predators. But he can't create predators that don't predate. That would be logically incoherent which is not included in the meaning of omnipotence.

And a-stultifyingly-boringly-gain, God is omnipotent. Spiders cannot exist by eating grass because God designed them that way. They are predators by DESIGN from your viewpoint. God chose to make their survival dependant on the suffering and death of another species.

Yes, and they serve a purpose in the ecosystem of controlling fly populations. If there were no predators, the flies would overpopulate and destroy their own environment. Yours is an argument from ignorance about the greater good that God is concerned about.

Aww, poor God. Imagine little old me being able to deny him the right to create predators. This is like Stockholm Syndrome. You are willing to come up with any old shit to defend the indefensible, and hang what it makes you look like. With every word you type, you reinforce my view that this God of yours is so pathetic it's really very lucky for him that he doesn't exist, because if he did he'd be in a perpetual state of being unable to do things. That sounds pretty much like a failing human being to me. As I said, what a shit god you have there.

Spiders have every much a right to exist as you do. If a spider kills and eats you, then perhaps God has decided that it is time for you to move on to another plane of existence where you will learn new things.

This is pretty sad. You're prepared to make just about any excuse to explain away the endless problems with this god thingy. He's OMMMMMMMMNIPOTENT. Say it with me. OMNI...POTENT. If he wanted fewer flies, he could have just preset them to the number he wanted. If he had wanted spiders to just be cool, he could have created them to not need to eat anything. Do you mean to tell me that he never thought of these things? Am I cleverer than god? Some god...

Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. It isn't possible to have predators that don't predate, and it isn't possible to allow freedom and deny the exercise of it at the same time.

No, no - you are confusing 'that doesn't mean...' with 'it would completely sink my lame argument if...' Do you really think we are this stupid? How offensive. Who do you think came up with logic? According to your world view, I mean. Who was it? The word 'omnipotent' is quite specific. It refers to unlimited power. You know - power WITHOUT LIMITATION. To be frank, it is beyond me why you think you are qualified to explain God to anyone, given the tenuous grasp you appear to have on the party line.

No. Omnipotence does NOT mean having no limitations whatsoever. God creates laws that need to be obeyed, even by himself. By creating a universe, he imposed limits on his own actions. Just because a king can kill all his subjects, doesn't mean that he would ever be in a position to do so.

Ah, hilarious. We know the natural world isn't omnipotent, dear, no one suggested it was. You are pretty much hell bent however on missing the point by a country mile that your God, having created every single thing, including logic and 'natural law', had free rein to design everything in whichever way he wanted, and as such, the natural world is limited and fallible BECAUSE GOD SPECIFICALLY SET IT UP THAT WAY.

We live in an imperfect world, imperfect because it cannot be perfect like God is. Hence, we shouldn't expect everything to be 100% joyous.

The problem with typical 'Intelligent Design' arguments is that only a limited being would need to design anything to accomplish a goal.

Would people need to design planes if they could fly? Or design cars if they could simply wish themselves from place to place?

Obviously the god who has to cobble together the half-assed systems we see in the world is far from perfect - far from all-powerful, far from all-knowing, and far from all-good.

ETA: intelligence and design are responses to severe limitations and no indication of infinite power and knowledge.

Wortfish wrote:

Fallible wrote:Why do you?

My preference is to lurk, but it becomes necessary to engage sometimes.

You have just restated your position, rather than answer the question about that position.
Why do you need to engage sometimes?

Wortfish wrote:

Heh. None of my loved ones are believers, so even if by some weird happenstance I were to find myself in heaven, I certainly would not be experiencing joy. I would be extremely depressed at the thought of being separated from them for eternity.

You would find new loved ones.

How do you know this?

Wortfish wrote: Anyway, once their brutal ordeal in the fires of hell is over - and they are purged of their sins - you will be reunited with them.

What did they do to deserve being burned in the fires of hell?

Wortfish wrote:

You don't get how this works, do you. Either that, or you very much want to give the impression that you don't get how this works. You are not recognised here as an authority on what freedom means. This being the case, you need to provide evidence for your views regarding freedom, not simply make more assertions. Not that it really matters. Despite your self-professed stealth reading, you have spectacularly failed over a number of months to cotton on to the fact that every single claim you make about the way the world is set up can be totally swept aside by three words, namely 'God is omnipotent'. All you do in response to these words is to make yet more assertions about how certain things are not possible. This is because that is the only place you have to go.

Just because God is omnipotent, doesn't mean that he has to create a world as we would wish it to be.

Thank you for demonstrating you don't know what omnipotent means.

Wortfish wrote: And if he permits human and natural freedom of action, through which we give so much value to, then he also permits suffering to occur as that is the inevitable consequence of freedom of action.

This bullshit has already been rebutted multiple times, once again demonstrating intellectual dishonesty on your part.

Wortfish wrote:

I have asked you previously how long you wish to continue circling this particular mulberry bush. The answer appears to be very long. Very well. If God wanted to, he could have set the universe up so that one can have perfect freedom without freedom to kill, because...(drum roll) HE IS OMNIPOTENT.

All you are doing here is whining why God didn't create a world without suffering.

Nope, pointing out a flaw in your position.

Wortfish wrote: I have argued that, in the case of heaven/paradise, he may well have done. However, for the joy of heaven/paradise to have any meaning, there has to be a world where we are put to the test and can learn the value of good and evil and experience all that there is to be experienced.

And another PRATT.

Wortfish wrote:

I'm trying my best here, but it seems that you are still struggling to understand basic ideas. Tell me what would help you to grasp what I'm saying. Bold font? Pretty colours? I notice later in your post you go on to drag out the tired 'God is omnipotent except when it could mean bypassing logic [which he created]' 'argument'. All the more ironic that you appear so willing to eschew logic in your defence of him. If God prevents suffering, that means God prevents any living being from suffering, spiders included.

And, being omnipotent, God is able to create spiders and predators. But he can't create predators that don't predate. That would be logically incoherent which is not included in the meaning of omnipotence.

Acting deliberately obtuse or what?
Fallible isn't talking about creating predators that don't predate, she's talking about not creating predators in the first place. IE that spiders aren't predators but herbivores.

Wortfish wrote:

And a-stultifyingly-boringly-gain, God is omnipotent. Spiders cannot exist by eating grass because God designed them that way. They are predators by DESIGN from your viewpoint. God chose to make their survival dependant on the suffering and death of another species.

Yes, and they serve a purpose in the ecosystem of controlling fly populations.

You're jus shifting the goalposts here. They have that role, because your omnipotent god created flies that needed to be curbed by spiders. He could've done otherwise.

Wortfish wrote:If there were no predators, the flies would overpopulate and destroy their own environment. Yours is an argument from ignorance about the greater good that God is concerned about.

Your is silly goal post shifting that does nothing to dodge the point being made.
God could have created flies that do not overpopulate.

Wortfish wrote:

Aww, poor God. Imagine little old me being able to deny him the right to create predators. This is like Stockholm Syndrome. You are willing to come up with any old shit to defend the indefensible, and hang what it makes you look like. With every word you type, you reinforce my view that this God of yours is so pathetic it's really very lucky for him that he doesn't exist, because if he did he'd be in a perpetual state of being unable to do things. That sounds pretty much like a failing human being to me. As I said, what a shit god you have there.

Spiders have every much a right to exist as you do.

Why?

Wortfish wrote:If a spider kills and eats you, then perhaps God has decided that it is time for you to move on to another plane of existence where you will learn new things.

That's not how Christianity works. More-over why can't God kill people peacefully?

Wortfish wrote:

This is pretty sad. You're prepared to make just about any excuse to explain away the endless problems with this god thingy. He's OMMMMMMMMNIPOTENT. Say it with me. OMNI...POTENT. If he wanted fewer flies, he could have just preset them to the number he wanted. If he had wanted spiders to just be cool, he could have created them to not need to eat anything. Do you mean to tell me that he never thought of these things? Am I cleverer than god? Some god...

Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible,

No, it means being able to do anything.

Wortfish wrote:It isn't possible to have predators that don't predate, and it isn't possible to allow freedom and deny the exercise of it at the same time.

This pathetic misrepresentation of Fall's point will only serve to hurt your credibility.
God can't create predators that don't predate, but he can create a world that doesn't need nor have predators.

Wortfish wrote:

No, no - you are confusing 'that doesn't mean...' with 'it would completely sink my lame argument if...' Do you really think we are this stupid? How offensive. Who do you think came up with logic? According to your world view, I mean. Who was it? The word 'omnipotent' is quite specific. It refers to unlimited power. You know - power WITHOUT LIMITATION. To be frank, it is beyond me why you think you are qualified to explain God to anyone, given the tenuous grasp you appear to have on the party line.

No. Omnipotence does NOT mean having no limitations whatsoever.

Except that it does.

Wortfish wrote: God creates laws that need to be obeyed, even by himself.

Blind assertion.

Wortfish wrote:By creating a universe, he imposed limits on his own actions.

How do you know this?
More-over that means he's not omnipotent.

Wortfish wrote: Just because a king can kill all his subjects, doesn't mean that he would ever be in a position to do so.

Except that it does.

Wortfish wrote:

Ah, hilarious. We know the natural world isn't omnipotent, dear, no one suggested it was. You are pretty much hell bent however on missing the point by a country mile that your God, having created every single thing, including logic and 'natural law', had free rein to design everything in whichever way he wanted, and as such, the natural world is limited and fallible BECAUSE GOD SPECIFICALLY SET IT UP THAT WAY.

We live in an imperfect world, imperfect because it cannot be perfect like God is.

How do you know this?

Wortfish wrote:Hence, we shouldn't expect everything to be 100% joyous.

There is no hence when you're just making shit up as you go along to get to your desired conclusion.