They’re actually fine with children dying because it means they get to go to heaven early, plus the adversity it causes their loved ones is beneficial. I’m serious, they told me this when I asked as a kid.
Then why do they want medical treatment, when their injuries bring them closer to their end goal: heaven?
Yes, why is it that religious people aren’t completely logical?
There are a few religions that refuse forms of medical treatment. I agree with what you’re saying, but it isn’t unheard of
Something something suicide leads to hell.
Better question is why wouldn’t parents immediately sacrifice their newborns on the Blood Altar? I can only go to hell once but I could sire many children and give them all a guaranteed ticket to heaven. Actually, I could even take a shortcut and blow up a maternity.
… now that I think abkjt it, I guess some fundamentalist lunatics have probably already done it, and now I’m sad.
This is one of the many reasons why I don’t get their arguments against abortion. An abortion is just a baby’s e-ticket to heaven.
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scripture says the soul enters at its first breath.
Do you remember where this is said? I grew up in a church and remember a lot of the rhetoric about how sacred life is and blah blah blah, but I don’t specifically remember that part. I’d say knowing that scripture would help me convince people that their views are incorrect, but let’s be real, these people don’t want their minds changed.
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The Torah notes a child who does not survive thirty days after birth does not get full funerary rites (a grim implication of infant mortality of the age).
Dan McClellan notes the current positions on the point of ensoulment come from Greek positions: Conception (Platonian?), Quickening (Aristotlean?) and birth (Epicurean? It’s all Greek to me.) For most of Christian history, the quickening was the standard (about 22 weeks). The conception became popular after the 1970s when abortion access was made accessible and the controversy was used as a rallying point to unify Christians to conservatism as a voting bloc.
Where does it say the soul enters at first breath?
Genuine question, I wanna bust that shit out and have a citation ready.
God wouldn’t kill a child unless he was preventing evil
Every child with cancer is someone who would grow up to be worse than Hitler
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Well unless history has someone worse
Some would argue for Japanese atrocities during ww2 or Mao/Stalin
Vlad the Impaler seemed pretty mean
This is why the pagan/Roman/greek gods made a lot more sense. They were all arseholes who didn’t care about you.
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Woah don’t you know god is LOVE that is why he created hell to love his “children”.
Oh sure, when God sure it it’s great, but when I trap my exes in a basement and spray them with a hose until they say they love me I’m a “freak” and a “monster”
Yea because its a small punishment you can do for uh what a lifetime ? Try torturing them eternally and then get back to me loser then i will obey you like a slave because logic.
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I thought the last one’s gonna be “— Gays? — I dunno they kinda appeared all by themselves”
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I always remind people, if there is a god that made humans then he/she/it also made Adam AND Eve, and Steve, and Genevieve. He/she/it made all of us, gay, straight, or sideways.
Oh man, I forgot all about that Kirk Cameron banana video with “Ray Shine” or whatever his religious propaganda porn name is. Good times.
religious propaganda porn
“Oh yeah baby, repent harder! Condemn those sins of the flesh! He’s second COMING!”
“god’s plan… god is testing them… god is testing ME!”
Epicurus’ Paradox, beeyotch!
No problem, when kids die of hunger they go directly to the heaven and live there forever WO hungry and eating everything they want…
And the reason God couldn’t have just put conscious souls directly in paradise is because shut up, that’s why
god works in mysterious ways… 🙏🤞
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The ultimate cop-out. Anything good? God. Anything bad? Free will. Nevermind, like, children with leukiemia.
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Are you by any chance familiar with Stockholm Syndrome?
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You’re on an atheist board, preaching…
Stockholm syndrome describes the psychological condition of a victim who identifies with and empathizes with their captor or abuser and their goals.
I hate the greedy, destructive society we’re in, but I also see how people have leveraged faith as a platform to make things the way they are.
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Nice strawman.
No I reject the imperialism, but am powerless against it alone. Human rights are important, and the concept of every vote counting? Seems solid, too bad popular vote lost in the U.S. election a lot lately
Dictators are awful, and they lied about their parties intentions. Do you not realize… they were lying fascist dictators?
Are your legs tired? You’ve been jumping to a lot of conclusions.
I don’t see how the opposite is not correct: god gave us the means to do evil, that we couldn’t do without him. But it is the free will of evil people that turns the ability into reality
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You’re not going to convince anyone on an Atheist thread, because we’ve heard the dogma before and have used logic and reason to come to our own conclusion instead of blindly having faith. Ironic that you’re encouraging blind faith while trying to sprinkle logic into your argument.
Both people you mentioned are humans. According to the bible, they are both evil because all humans are born into sin.
You also cannot say all good things are from God for so so many reasons. But the most obvious one is that you don’t know god, and you don’t know their intentions. What we DO know is that either evil came into existence without God, and God isn’t powerful enough to stop it. Or god allowed it to exist. Or god created it themselves. So which one is it? Also, god has free will so why is their free will good but ours is evil?
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So do you thank God when the doctor fixes you, or do you thank the human who actually relied on science, and other existing, real philosophies, and sciences, to you know… Actually fix you?
Prayer and God have no place in society. Have trust and faith in your fellow humans, and we may all actually stop hating each other one day.
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Famines have been around for a lot longer than humans, as have causes of faminine, such as blight and volcanic winter.
And whatever free will we have (whether God-given or otherwise) isn’t enough to overcome our instincts for dominance hierarchy and exclusionism, which figures into the (decades old) bullying crisis, An Oklahoma official calling Nex Benedict filth (and their kind, all trans gender persons, I infer). It also keeps billionares from using their ill-gotten gains to actually engage in large public-serving projects without turning them into capitalist enterprises.
As Stephen Fry noted, bone cancer in children is a pretty dick move. Unlike the plot armor (or tone armor) of our stories, children are disproportionately represented in mortality of disasters and epidemics. If God created everything then God is responsible for everything.
For us naturalists, on one hand we’re captains of our own destiny: only we can reach for the stars and cure famine and warfare. On the other hand you can endeavor to teach a dog calculus and run head first into upper limits, and so it might be with us naked apes. As much as we want to imagine ourselves as galactic civilization material, we may just be simple hunter gatherers trying to bat out of our league.
And when we perish from pollution, disaster and ultimately famine, our gods die with us along with our mathematics and symphonies.
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Think again.
I’ve thought about it plenty, thanks.
Why do you think this? Why do you assume these to be given?
Because the same problems reoccur time and again, and we don’t try anything new. You might be able to point to an outlying incident, but that doesn’t change the trend.
There might be a solution in sociology. The same science that shows us voters will vote to harm rivals sooner than they’ll vote to help themselves out. The same science that shows how and why people spend their rent money on microtransactions and bad bets. The same science that shows how a nation go from detaining degenerates to mass execution in a matter of a couple of years.
We might work out a trick to get our school administrators to rethink funding massive contact sports programs rather than school lunches, but for the time being, we don’t have that, and we’re not figuring it out, and then there’s people like you turning to scripture like homeopathy. You might say one person sinning is a choice, but when hundreds of millions behave contrary to their best interests, that’s a flaw in the system.
And that’s before we look at the specific history of how Christianity was repurposed into the pro-America, pro-capitalist, pro-property ideology that has elected officials disparaging dead high-school students.
But feel free to expect miracles in the future, if that’s what you need to do. I’ll base my expectations on the common behavioral trends, not the outlying data points. It’d be nice if I’m pleasantly surprised, but I don’t expect it.
An “all loving” god would let people die like flies.
I’m atheistic myself, but I agree with you that much of what causes such horrific outcomes is the result of shitty humans doing shitty things to each other.
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There’s nowhere in the bible that it states God’s purpose is to ensure no children ever die, bad things never happen, and no calamity ever befalls us. I’m atheistic myself but I just think people have this weird idea that “god” is supposed to be this overarching protector who ensures nothing bad can happen. Where does that idea come from? The God of the old testament is a viscious homocidal maniac and kills people all the time, and creates havoc for them also. Why do bad things happen to good people? Because nowhere does it state that God’s job is making sure they don’t.
While you absolutely have a point you have to consider how people — specifically theists — portray God.
God is supposed to be this warm, loving father of everything that will send you to Paradise if you’re nice for a couple of years and worship him (probably a kink of his, idk). If you don’t, yeah, you go to hell or something else happens to you depending on the specific type of Christian that you’re talking to but overall, churches, flyers, songs, people that ring your doorbell at 8am on a Saturday… they all make God look like a good thing.
Trust me I’ve pulled the “but doesn’t the Bible say…”-card many times. They always have some dumb excuse to make God look like a good guy. I think it’s fine to talk about God not only in the way he’s described but also in the way he’s perceived (not actual perception of course) and advertised, which is usually way more positive.
Well that’s true and I’m aware that god is portrayed as a loving kind father of everything (so long as you do as he expects, that is). And it kind of makes sense, if you’re going to worship something, you’d want it be something benevolent with good protector vibes.
But, it’s quite obvious from the war and misery we experience that if god’s job is to keep us happy, he ain’t very good at it. I think, if there is any force out there that can (in the broadest sense) be called a “god,” it is probably far from benevolent and very far removed from what we do on earth day to day. So instead of “in god we trust,” I prefer to think “I trust in other people and myself.” I mean, ultimately it’s on us to create the kind of world we live in no matter what.
The last one on the right side could’ve been like “Oh, they were just unbaptised”.
Oh they’re just Palestinian children. (or african, israeli, or some other heathen group). Besides, where does it say again that God is supposed to make sure everyone is safe and happy and nobody dies? Didn’t he flood the earth and kill every man woman and child except Noah and his incestuous children? Thanks for making the world safe for white nationalists and blessed CHRISTIAN children, Kirk Cameron.