Why me? or Why this person? is a natural question for anyone in cases like these and I am sure that atheists have no monopoly on them. We here, I think, have the luxury of not having these issues as an immediate personal concern and can discuss this more dispassionately as it were.
Well, I have two disabled children, so arguably I'm not as dispassionate as some on this, but I have the luxury of not actually believing any of this, so any anger is hypothetical because I don't think there is anyone to blame.
The issue is always going to arise where you have a person like God who can intervene. Sometimes, unless they are revealed to us, we aren't going to know the reasons.I.e. Unless you tell me, I don't know the reason why you do things.
In the classic depiction of the Christian deity - and it's typically the Christian depiction that I'm calling out because of where I live - God is not, though, just someone who could intervene - God isn't the guy in the trolley problem who's trying to choose whether to pull the lever, he's the guy that tide people to the rails and set the trolley in motion. God
created these situations. It's explicit in the act of creation, given what we know about how time works, that God doesn't just create a start point and set the world running, all timeframes exist in parallel, so creation is creating all of it. My children didn't come out disabled because of the way the world developed according to the Christian model, God deliberately created a reality in which my children had those disabilities as part of that act of creation.
Then again though, you aren't really asking questions, you are asserting that people are being singled out and that they are being singled out for punishment and there is ''no reason'' for it.
So after some thought, given that these are fair issues to raise if not to assert as you have. I think I can make a stab at each.
I don't think it's an assertion, I've shown my reasoning - you can question that, obviously, but this isn't just an accusation pulled out of my arse and smeared onto the web.
There is a story/ report in the bible where Jesus is discussing with a group why people are killed in shocking circumstances. Jesus chooses two contemporary instances, firstly a mass death through murder of a group of Galileans and secondly the death of 18 in a tower collapse in Jerusalem. The crowd posits that the deaths were punishment for particular sins. Jesus says no. And that strongly suggests no singling out, that the deaths were due to human evil and the natural outworking of the laws of nature, that those who died were no more deserving of a death penalty than people who survive.
Except that, as I've shown before, that 'human evil' is part and parcel of creation, those were choices that God must have made.
Thus the Biblical Jesus disagrees with your thesis and conception of God.
If we take the book at face value, that God wants to wash his hands of it is neither here nor there.
Not to mention that God has provided, if you think he has meted out the disease, the cure and the will to overcome these scenarios...
What's the cure for amputation? For autism? For Tourettes? For MND? How do people born into places without developed healthcare like sub-Saharan Africa or the US access those cures that do exist? God created all these scenarios, knowingly.
but of course the Christian conception of God is different from yours.
It's not quite the situation where you can ask three Christians and get four or five depictions - part of the issue with this kind of discussion is that you're fighting against a constantly moving set of goal-posts. You address Calvinism and some Eastern Orthodox inspired theologian thinks you're straw-manning their depiction.
As an extra here I think the new testament, when Jesus and others speak prophetically, talks dramatically of mothers watching their children living through times where they would wish the children were not alive . My parents passed on but thinking about it I can imagine how it could have been should they have lived through and died of Covid but that is an aside and not the focus of this post.I think you may again be asking for an alternative universe here one where you can reject and ignore yet still enjoy the benefit.
I'm not asking for an alternative universe as such, I'm saying that notionally alternative universes were possible, even if they're universes where a different set of people suffered more or less - why this one? What's the justification for any chidren going through this in the first place, but notwithstanding that what's the justification for MY children going through that.
Are all religions offering the same thing and salvation in the same sense? I don't think so.
No, different religions take different stances, but they aren't claiming an all-loving, all-knowing, all-powerful uncontested creator deity who, with all those possibilities, chose wasps with a life-cycle that involves infesting children's eyes with their eggs.
Why is there no post mortem salvation? Philosophers would argue it's because there is no more acting rather existence is being instead.
I have no idea what that might even start to mean.
Is this biblical? The Bible does talk of a sin which cannot be forgiven either in this life or the next ...
Who gives a shit if it's Biblical, is it moral? Is it justifiable? Even if there were explanations in the Bible, and it doesn't seem that there are, are those explanations fair? Are any of the explanations morally acceptable?
and that is about as far as I seem to be able to go.
And that's where my problem arises - not with you specifically, but with that situation. You've dropped what appear from the outside to be a couple of deep-sounding on the surface but ultimately hollow talking points, but there's no rational case there, there's no plausible explanation for why this might be the case. It's just hand-waving and 'god works in mysterious ways' before the church goes away and either does nothing significant (fine) or starts campaigning to deny rights to people - don't ask me about the problem of evil, I have someone else's marriage to try and block because it's not enough that I can't justify the evil already in the world, I have to go try and add to it.
O.
