You were the one who brought up free will--people willfully choosing to obey or disobey.  You wished somehow to deny or deflect the obvious fact that an omniscient creator of everything would necessarily be a willful creator of evil.

And you make the rather old and obvious mistake that evil is a thing to be created, as you can't answer what evil smells like.

Now you seem to have forgotten your own point.  God does not need to turn a blind eye to evil, since thwarting evil would not compromise anyone's free will.  Frustrating the intentions of evildoers is not destroying the rebelliousness of their thoughts, and God could perfectly well send miscreants off to hell without actually letting them fulfill their wishes against the innocent.

This isssue seems to overlap greatly with DB's in another thread so I will give the same response I gave him: As moral evil is always ultimately caused by the choices of a person or people. As such choice and free will is the central issue. To blame God for evil you only have two options-either God needs to remove man's free will so he can't choose to commit evil or God must judge a person for wrong doing before he commits the evil act. The former is an even greater evil commited to mankind in reducing us to mere puppets, and the latter forgets that God is not obligated to do so.

You can say "God should thwart evil or frustrate it." all you want, but the reality is that if He were to do so every human being would be wiped out a long time ago. As we all sin by our own free will eventually, we'd all be sent to Hell immediately. It gives no option of redemption, and your yammering about how we don't get more than one chance for redemption shows you to be contradicting on this point, as the reason God doesn't send miscreants off to hell (which is everyone) is precisely because we are given one chance to not go to Hell. What if one miscreant repents and does an incredible amount of good afterwards? If that is even remotely true (and it is) then there is nothing wrong or contradicting about God allowing people to choose to commit evil and carrying them out, and not judging them immediately or preventing them from commiting evil acts beforehand.

Yes, that is rather the point.  If beings--people or demons--choose to disobey God, why does he need to let them carry out their misdeeds against victims before sending them off for punishment?

Your asking why a parent doesn't discipline his children immediatly, when they haven't done anything to deserve it yet? Your defense of a human parent isn't omniscient doesn't work as the fact that every child disobeys their parent at some time or another is a fact of life.

It is as if there were no crime in attempted murder, only the actual successful carrying out of murder.  It makes no sense.  As an omnipotent, benevolent being, he should be in a position to thwart any misdeed and punish the miscreant.  Yet evil exists.  That does put your religious convictions in a bit of a tough spot, don't you think?

Nope. As I've thoroughly answered this above, and your notion is flawed as sin is not restricted to actions, but also can be even one impure thought, and thus blows your "not destroying the rebelliousness of their thoughts" out of the water as even rebellious thoughts have the same effect as murder. You seem to forget that intent is just as much apart of morality and sin than any physical action.

I see.  And how is it that humans cause natural disasters?  You can't blame everything on human-caused climate change, you know.  Sometimes accidents happen.  Or do you buy the argument that hurricane Katrina was sent by God to punish licentious behavior in the French Quarter of New Orleans?

As it is clearly stated in Genisis because of Adam and Eve's choice to disobey God, it had ramifications on all of creation. Everything was made perfect, but when they chose to bring corruption into the world it allowed imperfection into all of creation as well. Thus is why whenever the question of natural disasters is brought up in the Bible, and asks "Why couldn't God prevent it?" it makes very clear that there is a deference between actively causing a disaster, and impassively allowing it because it all goes back to Adam and Eve's choice.

Your appeal to blocking natural disasters is useless anyway. For one if your going to advocate that natural disasters are an evil which God should prevent, that says there is an objective moral standard of morality over creation. And that can only be true is there is a God who has an authority over creation (obviously human beings don't). Secondly you forget that an incredible amount of good can be done thanks to natural disasters. As suffering by natural disasters can happen to anyone it can cause people to have a great deal of empathy for one another, and helps us reexamine our lives to see the flaws that exist. Again it goes back to an incredible amount of good that can happen after an "evil" is commited.

[I still don't understand how you rationalize the "one chance" idea.  Why would God only give us one chance to redeem ourselves?  Is he operating on the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid)?  Would it fatigue an omnipotent being to give us as many chances as we needed to clean up our acts?  Or is it just that you are running out of coherent arguments to sustain all the inconsistencies in your religion?  I think the latter.

As you advocate that God shouldn't give any miscreants any chances, it's more the fact that you are being inconsistent with this. God doesn't have to give us any chances. That it's only by His grace He  gives even one (that chance being one lifetime where every day is many chances) is more than we deserve. The arguement that the President gives a pardon and then the released criminal goes back to jail, why doesn't the President give him another, is absurd and laughable.

Severe and irrevocable punishments achieve two results for society.  First, they serve as powerful object lessons to deter others from engaging in the same behavior.  Second, they remove very dangerous people from society, thus preventing repeat offenses.  Now is a good time for me to ask again why you think God doesn't intervene to prevent the victimization of innocents.

Strawman as we were speaking in the context of the individual person found guilty. And my above statements clears your question right up.

You missed the point.  My point was not that Christians deny that God is a social being.  Quite the opposite.  All gods are modeled on human behavior, which is highly social.  My point was that such transparent modeling makes no sense in the context of a solitary being that exists independently of all physical reality, let alone a social life.  Yet you act as if God could only share the desires and goals of social beings such as ourselves.  To me, this is further evidence that gods are nothing more than figments of human imagination.

Sntjohnny was right, you don't understand the word transcendant. And while such human characterization can easily be found in other mythology (Zeus was a lech), for Christianity it's more the other way around as God described in Christianity is so unlike us in that His purity frightens us, He is above manipulation, and first are last and last are first to Him, and let's not forget how the Trinity is often denounced as one of the most illogical concepts Christianity advocates. When considering all that it's hard to imagine Him being a product of man's imagination a few thousand years ago.

But this is indeed another strawman by you Cop, as we were talking about how love and loyalty fit in and is shown by our obedience, and not sinning. Since you say it only makes since to a social beings and then admit God by Christianity is a very social Being, the only conclusion is that your trying to be shifty.

What strawman position have I attributed to you?  It seems that you just use the word reflexively whenever you disagree with someone.

Sorry. I must have picked up some bad habits while talking with you.

You did attribute a strawman position to me, however--the idea that individuals only behave selfishly.  Social behavior requires mutually-beneficial sacrifice.  Selfishness is behavior that harms social interactions.

"I'm selfless in order to be more selfish." is the contradicting evolutionisitic nonsense I was talking about: "Our loved ones nurture and protect us, because that enhances our ability to survive hardships." And it's this strawman that you've taken where punishment only makes sense for how it benefits our society (and as it benefits society it benefits us individually), that I was refering. It's clear your line of thinking is "I'll sentence this murder to death because it's ultimately-in-a-round-about-way better for me." and then attribute that same motivation to God who can't be threatened by mere creation. Ignoring it's the self-evident fact that a murderer is guilty of murder and thus the only reason necessary for punishment that I've been advocating.

OK, I think that the pattern is established, and we can just move on.  I suspect that you are largely incapable of conceding any point, so I do not really expect concessions when your arguments collapse.  You agree with me that punishment serves two purposes:  deterrence and removal of danger to innocents.  However, the concept of hell cannot be seen to easily support either purpose.  So you call those effects "secondary" and claim that the "primary" purpose of punishment is just to fulfill your intuition that it is self-justifying.

Oooh, you were doing so well, till you fumbled the ball with the last two sentences, and advocate yet another strawman. A) You've already acknowledged how Hell does serve as a deterent, and then brush it off as human invention because it does, showing your contradicting behavior. B) The fact that you call 'deterence' the main point while have failed with such laws where even a speeding ticket should be given severly harsh penalties if deterrent was the main point, that shows how wrong you are. As I've consistently advocated (and given how your basic reading skills are lacking I'll help you out further Cop): It's the self-evident fact that a murderer is guilty of murder and thus the only reason necessary for punishment that I've been advocating. As such Hell is justfied as a punishment for sinners by the self-evident fact that they are guilty of sin, and don't accept God's pardon.

I don't see a contradiction there, but I do see a straw man.  I do not call what Christ did "meaningless".

As for Christ's sacrifice, I have presented my reasons for considering it meaningless in our modern context,

You did. You most certainly did.

But it is technically false that I reject either Christ or God, since I do not concede that either being is real.  I can no more reject them than you can reject Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.

Since you reject God (and laughably Christ) as real, you reject Christ's sacrifice as punishment for mankind's sins and rising on the third day as a meaningful event that actually happened. For someone who has been debating Christians a long time, I shouldn't need to tell you the John 3:16 to be the summarization for salvation. Clearly as a positive atheist you don't "believe in him" as you reject both's exsistence. As such the only alternative is to reject Him. Like I said you contradict yourself. And I'm almost insulted by the fact that you think I'd buy this "I accept the concepts." excuse.

Dante fleshed out and embellished a core belief of the Catholic religious doctrine of his times--that hell involved perpetual physical torment.

Don't care. If it's not advocated Scripturally, it has no baring on the discussion of what Scripture (how did that word get there?) advocates Hell to truly be.

Your entire argument now seems to hang on splitting a hair--whether deterrence can be considered "secondary" or "primary".  Since your support for that contention seems based on merely repeating the claim over and over, I don't feel a need to continue that discussion.

Problably for the best then, as your entire arguement has been one strawman after the other. You have been found insuficient in showing how "deterence" is the primary purpose, and as not caring as Hell is truly advocated as being, in the end all your found to be is argueing a strawman against an unsupported misconception.

Arrrrrgh. I get half way through my response and then my computer closes my window. 

I suppose that part of the problem here is your refusal to acknowledge God's responsibility towards the victims of evil.

God's responsibility towards the victims when the perpetrators who commited the acts are the ones responsible. Tantamount to saying that the parents of a rapist has some responsibility to the victim for his choice and actions. You're honestly sticking with that?

You see it just as a question of the "free will" of the evil-doer, because the paramount issue for you is punishment of wicked behavior.  But your argument loses all sensibility when you try to bring in "free will" without properly defining it.  That opens the door to all sorts of equivocation on your part over just what free will is.

Choice. There you go.

God foresees an evil act against a victim but does nothing to thwart that act.  Here's the problem, though.  The victim's free will is compromised by God-permitted evil.  You seem horrified at the idea that God's intervention would somehow make us "puppets", but prevention of crime does not turn anyone into a puppet.  It merely protects innocent people from exercising their will without the interference of criminals.

In Adam and Eve's case it was precisely that the only means to prevent evil was to interfere with free will.

What exactly is your problem with God's intervention?  Do you think that he would not know of evil in the minds of his creations because they didn't actually get to carry out their intentions?  If he can read the minds of people, then he doesn't need to put up with the victimization of innocents.

It's the fact that evil is in the minds of all human beings that makes no one 'innocent', that eludes you.

 

Who are you rooting for in this imagined scenario?  The perpetrators or the victims?  Your god seems preoccupied with catching out evildoers whose existence he knew of before he created them.

I have to say DB is doing a better job than you, and he's still falling short of the mark. Read my response to him.

Again, none of this makes any sense at all.  It is truly eery that you can't see the problem that the existence of evil poses for your religious views.

More like the fact that evils exsistence is evidence for God's exsistence, that vexes you. The issue of evil has always been a self-defeating one for atheists. For more on this click here:

http://www.str.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5350
http://www.str.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=6023

You keep forgetting that God doesn't ask "what if" questions.  He supposedly already knows all outcomes of all actions.

I was asking you, but as He knows the outcome it means He is in the best position to know whether the good outways the bad. As such we can be reasonably confident that it does.

So he can simply know that a person will end up in hell or heaven because, like sntjohnny's metaphorical "Author", he writes the script that they must act out.  Unlike the human experimenter, he does not need to perform the experiment in order to discover its outcome.  You, being human, cannot see the future, and that is why your argument makes sense only for beings of our sort, who are ignorant of all future outcomes.

Not entirely true, as simple facts of life allow us to indeed know the future in a general sense. It's why your 'parents aren't omniscient' point fails, because it's simply a reality that a child will sin and misbehave at some point in life.

Nonsense.  You seem to grasp the point that parents are not gods.  Parents do not know the future.  Therefore, I am not asking why parents don't discipline children for future acts, which they could not know about.  Only a god can discipline an individual for acts not yet committed. 

See my response to DB about this.

If parents have a reasonable belief that a child will misbehave in some way, then they take steps in advance to thwart the behavior.  You seem to like this parent analogy, but you don't follow it through.  Even by your own analogy, God is behaving in bizarre, if not malevolent, fashion by not taking action in advance of the misbehavior.

Not really, as my example to DB showed that when the only means to prevent evil is to perform an act of even greater evil, then there isn't any contradiction with God not bailing us out of the consequences of our own actions.

For example, if a parent sees a reasonable possibility that a child will run in front of a car, that parent takes steps to prevent the act.  If the parent lets the car hit the child, then the parent would be guilty of negligent homicide.  Do you grasp the principle I'm trying to get across here?

Sure. Unfortunately it fails. Because what your advocating is more along the lines of your parents actively thwarting and intervening from you being able to smoke or eat unhealthy food at your current age. In such a case, it's more about not allowing you to make your own decisions as an adult and suffer the consequences for it.

I understand this perfectly and have been trying to get you to think through the consequences.  Sin has consequences for others--those I've been calling "victims"--so it is not just about punishing wrongdoers.  You act as if God is performing some kind of experiment to discover the character of his creations, but your own definition of God as omniscient precludes his need to do that.

It's more along the lines of going through the motions. You can't accept or reject God till you actually do so. In the case of Hell, that is a consequence that only applies to the perpetrators of sin, i.e. everyone. And your 'victim' analogy seems to miss some rather obvious sins like consentual unmarried sex, simply lusting after another (goes back to how even thoughts have the same effect as actions), worshipping idols, etc., not much 'victimization' in those.

You think that God somehow destroys free will by intervening to stop evil, but his intervention no more destroys free will than the intervention of any being does.  Worse, as a Christian who believes in miracles, you actually must acknowledge that he DOES intervene in human affairs from time to time, but somehow that doesn't destroy anyone's free will.  Christians pray for God's intervention, but irrationally excuse his lack of intervention on the grounds that his non-intervention is actually doing us the "favor" of conferring free will on us.

Frustrated are we? One wonders what's the point of the possibility of commiting evil if God is responsible for not constantly stopping it. How can one choose to do something if God must always stop it? And if you'd paid attention to those interventions in the Bible, you'd notice that there was a constant theme of evil already being perpetrated. In which case there is no contradiction, because free will was already exercised.

Well, primitive peoples, in their ignorance of natural causes, did have some excuse for believing such nonsense.  Part of the point of religion back then was to explain the inexplicable.  In the modern era of scientific explanation, such an attitude is downright inexcusable.  The fact that you continue to embrace the doctrine doesn't surprise me, but it does sadden me.  That is one of the really detrimental aspects of Christianity--its continuing to preach the doctrine that people are collectively guilty for the acts of their ancestors, so God had to make a part of himself a "scapegoat" so that we could be cleansed of our sins.

Are you done with the condescending chest thumping, or do you need another post or two to get it out of your system? And I seem to recall somone not too long ago admitting and even advocating that sin has consequences for others. Can't remember his name at the moment.

On the second point, I do not see misfortune or evil as necessary in order for people to be secure and well-behaved.  Indeed, there is no reason to believe that more good results from a natural disaster than harm.  Once again, you forget the victims.

Being secure doesn't cause evil in and of itself, but one can clearly see how it leads to arrogance (much of atheism exsists on this). Ever watched the movie 300? THe Persan king was secure in his power and invincibility.

And there is every reason to believe that more good can come from a natural disaster. Acts of heroism, barring up under suffering, charity, compassion, etc. are all virtues that can only exsist when there are victims or even sin. And they are often seen after a natural disaster or act of evil. What Ghandi did wouldn't mean much if evil acts never occured.

I am not taking the position that an unlimited god operates in the same way that limited humans do.

Then what's with all the 'a parent/society punishes for such and such a reason' points you've been argueing?

This is not about what God has to do, but what might be the reasonable explanation for what you think he does do.  In this case, you offer no explanation as to why there need be only "one" chance.  Presumably, God, being omnipotent, doesn't get tired or frustrated (although Christians often attribute such human weaknesses to him).  So this kind of "GOTCHA!" mentality at the time of death makes utterly no sense at all.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh I swear Cop. Between you and DB my sides are beginning to hurt. 'God doesn't get tired or frustrated' indeed. I seem to recall many acts of judgements that says quite the contrary. The emphasis in the Bible being that He is long-suffering. Not infinitely-suffering.

God could just as well give someone an infinite number of lives to get it right, which is roughly what Hindus believe.  Their concept of a waxing and waning "karma" charge through many lifetimes can be silly, too, but it seems to make much more sense than the Christian one-time-only-deal approach.  Their idea is that miscreants get reborn into a better or worse life, depending on how well they can rack up the karma points through dharmic ("moral") behavior.

I'm quite familiar with what Hinduism advocates. But seeing how you recognise that God doesn't have to give us any chance then it's clear the amount of chances He does give is entirely His perogative. The major flaw of 'infinite number of lives' being that we can go on sinning infinitely without any fear of an ultimate judgement. And that doesn't jibe with a just God.

As I've pointed out, the Hindu religion had the concept of a triune god (trimurti) centuries before Christianity, and they may well have introduced the idea to early Christian cultists.

And I see you once again show a Divinci Code mentality when it comes to history. The major problem beign that the trimurti only shows up in the 4th century. If the trinity concept of Christianity predates the Hindu one, it would seem that the influence was the other way around. As Christianity reached India in the 1st century, I'd say it's the other way around.

The fact that the Trinity needs no source to be found other than the Scriptures, is very telling of such an arguement. 'Father' and 'Spirit' is littered throughout Scripture, and Luke 22: 66-71 makes very clear that Christ declared Himself the Son of God, and was what incited them to crucify Him in the first place.

If I'm shifty, then you are dodgy. :p

Ha! I think I may make a sig. out of that one.

God has social attitudes because humans, who have created imaginary gods as aids to understanding and manipulating reality, have social attitudes.

Or it's the other way around in that we have social attitudes because God does and He made us in His image. If the exsistence of God can be seen through other evidence, like Intelligent Design, then all this stems from is that the Designer is indeed a personal God. Your rather imaginitive historical arguements are always worth a laugh Cop.

I don't see a contradiction there, but I do see a straw man.  I do not call what Christ did "meaningless".

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I wasn't calling Christ's behavior meaningless there, but the concept of scapegoating as a means of expiating sins.  Christ didn't "do" his own crucifixion.  It was "done" to him.  By your lights, I suppose, the Romans had the free will not to crucify him.  But, if they hadn't, we wouldn't be "saved", would we?  Hmmm. 

Now I am insulted. You honestly think I would fall for this equivocation that you rejecting Christ's sacrifice as meaningless, then say you accept his behavior? When the whole notion of accepting or rejecting Christ is centered around accepting or rejecting His sacrifice? Pitiful.

And as Christ was God, He indeed had the ability to escape crucifixion if He wanted to. So He did indeed chose to go through with it. And Luke 23:24, indeed shows that the Romans had free will on the matter. It's another example of how tremendous amount of good can occur from acts of evil. In this case, the most far reaching and greatest amount of good ever in the exsistence of creation. That God chose not to resist the evil act of torturing and killing One who was truly innocent in every way, in order that all may be saved from Hell. 

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I didn't say that I rejected the existence of Jesus, but that I doubted his historicity.  I'm quite open to the possibility that some real man or men gave rise to the myth.

Then you reject Christ as portrayed by the Gospels (as that's what questioning His historocity means), if you want to quibble. Your still rejecting Him in the only way that concerns going to Hell: That He is Lord, and died for our sins, and ressurected on the third day.

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I do reject the existence of gods, but that is not the same as rejecting the gods any more than rejecting the notion of Santa Claus's existence is rejecting Santa Claus.  I still like the old guy, even if he is imaginary.    Anyway, I don't really care whether you buy my point.  I still think it worth correcting your usage of the word "reject".  I do not "reject" imaginary beings in the sense that you were using the word.

I'm using the word in the only way that matters concerning Hell. Your simply equivocating, as you obviously accept the notion of God, otherwise you couldn'[t argue against it.

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Actually, I cited a link to scriptural justification, but you just ignored it.  Tsk.  Tsk. 

It was your point of what Dante fleshed out that I was refering. I know very well it can be advocated by cutting and pasting scripture. However the notion doesn't stand under the vast weight of the body of Scripture that speaks about Hell. Ezekiel 33:11, Mark 9:47-48, 2 Thessalonians 1:7-10 being the most prominent as they show Hell to be a seperation from God of our own choosing.

You are right.  It makes no sense to blame the parents of a rapist for his actions, although I can imagine a circumstance where it would be appropriate.  If the parents knew when, where, and against whom their offspring would commit those rapes and still did nothing, then they would be responsible.  Would you at least be willing to concede that point?

And here I thought you said: 'I am not taking the position that an unlimited god operates in the same way that limited humans do.' Must have imagined it.

You forget one critical detail in such a circumstance, and it's a fact that I have pointed out to DB as well, it is a fact of life that all children will commit some form of evil in life: lying to get out of trouble, insulting or hurting another's feelings, etc. etc. and children are obviously not precluded from this. We know this in advance. Particulars details are ambivilent to the issue of responsibility.

Like I said to DB, we obviously have the power to stop this additional evil to the world by killing off every child. We have the foreknowledge and are able, but we don't. SO to say God is responsible for the evil we choose to do, you must advocate that a parent
is responsible for any evil that his/her child does even into adulthood. Given your distaste for collective responsibility, it's clear your contradiciting yourself.

How so?  He already interfered by creating them and giving them rules to obey.  And he knew in advance that he would be disobeyed, but he let it happen anyway.  And he actually got angry at his poor creations for having done exactly what he knew they would do.  Again, it is like the carpenter who knows he's going to wack his thumb with a hammer, wacks his thumb with his hammer, and curses the hammer and the nail for his own clumsiness.  You're honestly sticking with that? 

I can see your sticking with strawmen and equivocations. As creating a being with free will, and giving them rules to follow in no way interfere's with free will. On the contrary, it allows free will to exsist. There is no choice to disobey a rule when there are no rules. And your analogy falls short as the whole point of giving A&E free will was so that they would not be mindless tools/puppets.

Who do you think you are, the Shadow?  You are simply parroting what your religion has programmed you to believe.

Oh Lord, your resorting to "You're brainwashed!" now? I can easily say the same about you.

The fact is that people exhibit a wide range of behavior throughout their lives.  Some are capable of great evil--the "Hitler" factor--and some of great good--the "Gandhi" factor.  It is utter rubbish to think that some kind of cosmic Big Brother has decided to punish us all for our evil natures unless we behave like slavish sycophants towards him.

I see the condescending chest thumping still needs a few more posts. And it's exactly because we're capable of either, where God is justified to punish us. Hitler was just as capable of great good as Ghandi, and vice versa. The choice is ours, and like all choices they have consequences.

I have read your responses to him, and your repsonses there are no better than they are here. 

Excellent! Then I can not be accused of inconsistency. 

See my earlier response to your response.  And, if you think that you had a response to that, you missed the other response in the other thread.  My gosh, this technique really works well, doesn't it? 

See my above response that covers your previous and current response as well as the response in the other thread. By jove, it does indeed! 

What nonsense.  You would have us believe that Christians who pray for God's assistance are praying for him to commit an evil act.  You have never shown that God's intervention would undermine free will, and your "parent" metaphors suggest the opposite--that such interventions are necessary for the well-being of the child.

My parent metaphor was only on the issue of punishment. It's the fact that you are attributing them to this seperate topic of free will that reveals this to be a strawman.

There is ample evidence from scripture that people never have really believed that God's intervention compromised their free will.  The Free Will Defense has been used as an excuse for divine silence for centuries, and it has only ever been convincing to those who were already convinced.  It is painfully obvious that God has an even better reason for not interfering to thwart evil.  When you don't exist, you can't interfere.

Problably because once mankind fell from grace, free will was already exercised. And your "God doesn't stop the ball from dropping then He doesn't exsist." type of example is hilarious in it's outragesness. We don't thwart evil either. God doesn't have any obligation to thwart evil, on the contrary most of the time we sight acts of evil that let us know evil is real instead of some abstraction, but the Bible makes clear that God is just and so judge's all perpatrators. The sentence without excepting redemption is Hell.

I find it rather funny to here an atheist rant of how 'evil' non-interference is, when remembering how Star Trek was the height of non-theistic virtues where the prime directive was *gasp* non-interference and held it as a virtue.

Huh?  I wasn't talking about free will, and that concept won't do you any good here.  We were talking about responsibility for a tragic outcome.  The child is exercising its free will here, but the parents would bear the greater burden of guilt for neglecting the consequences of the tragedy that they could have prevented.

And in my example you would be exercising your free will with smoking, and the outcome between getting hit by a car would be exactly the same, if not even more unpleasant. You're still advocating it's your parent's responsibility in the same situation. I hope you don't have kids.

Now you were the one to bring up the parental metaphor in order to rationalize your god's behavior.  I feel it perfectly fair to use the same metaphor to point up some weaknesses in your reasoning.

Relating to punishment, like I said above that your now dragging the issue of responsibility into this is what shows your arguement to be a strawman. And in your analogy as I hope the child would have been properly informed to not go near the road, disobedience would indeed be the child's responsibility. Thus it would be very much appropriate for him to be spanked. 

Sex is not sinful, let alone an "obvious sin".

There's that lack of basic reading skills I've come to expect from you Cop. as I clearly said unmarried.

It makes no sense that the creator of everything should be concerned over how we achieve orgasms, especially since he supposedly designed the urges into us.

He also designed a proper outlet for those urges along with it. This goes back to the issue of God being a very Personal God, who has a very keen interest in what you do, as He basicly knows evey thought you ever had and will have, and every act you ever have done and will ever do.

Nor does it make sense that there be a taboo against creating idols to represent gods.

As the Bible makes clear, God will not share His glory with any other, much less a thing He created. Credit where credit's due.

The fact that there are some "sins" that have no victims is beside the point.  The point was that God appears to ignore the free will of victims in order to grant the chance to perpetrators to disobey his will.  Again, this makes no sense.

This raises an interesting question on who the victims are. Since the fact is that everyone is a perpatrator, then it stands that the first 'victim' to ask for God's interference is the first one up on the chopping block, as the 'victim' has 'victimized' another.

Why should God prevent the atheist's home from being burglarized, when 4 times a week he's on a forum ranting against His very exsistence? God is ultimately the only true 'victim' of humanities sin, as every sin is just as much a crime against God as anyone else or when it seems to only effect ourselves.

Yes, one does wonder what the point of committing evil would be if God were constantly there to thwart it.  That could really make evildoers frustrated and unhappy.  So it must be a relief to you, in reading your Bible, to notice that God lets the evil happen before doing some smiting.

Why not ask God to shine our shoes, dress us, and clean behind our ears as well? It would make lazies happy. One wonders where our responsibility is in all this.

And it does make the smiting more clearly justified, but then it would show that an omnipotent God somehow felt threatened by needing to stamp out evil. Which doesn't jibe with being omnipotent.

He must feel bad that there were innocent victims, but not having victims would thwart his greater sense of justice when he finally got around to the smiting part, which often included genocide against the innocent as well as the guilty.   

Aw. We're back to that old hogwash are we? The major hole in this rather embarrasingly transparent attempt to appeal to emotion more than reason, would be the fact that we are all sinners, and death is the equal consequence of it. How when and where, is pretty arbitrary.

You don't need to go to a cartoonish dramatization of an ancient battle to evoke that image.  We have US military adventures in Viet Nam and Iraq to demonstrate the stupidity of arrogance.  But natural disasters are supposedly "acts of God", not human-caused disasters.

Hehe. There's an important distinction between actively causing, and passively allowing. The latter is what natural disasters are more often than not. As an atheist you would no doubt point to the condition of the Eath being the cause of natural disasters. And it's precisely that human's caused this condition within creation that the Bible constantly advocates.

I doubt that Gandhi (please note correct spelling) would have agreed, but, as long as we are exchanging images from fiction, you remind me of Sir John Mortimer's Rumpole of the Bailey, a fictional criminal lawyer who always raised a glass of claret in the company of other lawyers and judges to toast the criminal population, whose existence gave employment to criminal lawyers and judges.  For some reason, his company would always find that toast a little embarrassing to drink to. 

Couldn't make an intelligent response, so you had to take a snipe, huh? Problem with that, is since an act of heroism can only occur if some evil action exsists, it demonstrates an even greater virtue. There has always been a distinction between someone merely saying "I'll take a bullet for you." and actually doing it.

When you look at something like an earthquake or tsunami, the toll in human suffering far outweighs the few good stories of luck and heroism.  You seem to have dug yourself into a rather macabre hole--the justification of bad outcomes on the grounds that they provide us the opportunity to thwart even worse outcomes.

  You, who have constantly admitted to human perspective being limited next to the perspective of an all knowing God, now presume to know what the outcome is (with eternity it isn't needed to be immediate)?  I'm afraid I can not fit into that hole, as you already occupy it.

To establish the fact that punishment is not its own justification, as you seem to think.  It always has a purpose.  What we are trying to do here is fathom the purpose of hell from the perspective of an omnipotent, omniscient god.

Fullfilling justice, as those guilty of sin are deserving of punishment by the self-evident fact that they are guilty and didn't except God's way out.

Sorry, but I have a hard time imagining how an omnipotent being could experience any suffering at all, since, by definition, nothing can thwart its will.

I would relook the definition of 'omnipotence' then, as 'all powerful' doesn't have anything to do with being unable experience suffering. On the contrary it makes the suffering that much more meaningful as being all powerful can only means He could go through it by his own volition. Which is what Christ did, as He suffered for us.

It is clear that you are trying to evoke sympathy for the "long-suffering" god, but all you can evoke from me is awe at the extent of your obstinate inability to perceive the logical dissonance.

Right back at ya, with evil being evidence for God's exsistence rather than against.

You mistake me if you think that I am questioning the right of God to do anything.  Obviously, by your lights, he can do anything he pleases.  I am questioning his reasonableness in doling out one-shot-only chances at salvation. 

Which pretty much reveals what kind of god you want. Rather than punishing sin justly, you advocate God should say "Well darn." then pick us up, dust us off, and pat us on the head, and send us back on our way like a senile grandpa. Give me a break. 

And you don't understand Hinduism at all.  Dharma (righteous behavior) dictates that one accept one's place in this life.  That gives one a positive karma charge, which leads to a more exalted life in the next round. The ultimate goal, of course, is moksha--release in the form of pure enlightenment.  Hinduism, like the Abrahamic religions, has a carrot-stick approach to behavior modification.  It's just not a one-shot-only deal.

Which is why it's wrong. Since sin is considered to be an act only against oneself in Hinduism, the only consequence is to oneself. Seems to ignore that it also effects others. Since there is nothing to say why one need reach such a goal if one prefers misbehavior, and can thus do it for eternity. 

Nonsense.  Trimurti, a Sanskrit word, goes back to the earliest forms of Hinduism, and it did not always refer to the same three gods.  The modern version refers to Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva.  The earliest triad was comprised of Varuna, Mitra, and Aryaman. 

As Hinduism has no consistent orthodoxy throughout it's history, the triad of the time of Alexander can refer to simply three seperate gods, as was the case with Egypts pagan religion. Since you admit that it clearly went through modifications by the 4th century's Trimurti, it's not to hard to imagine the possibility that the Christian Trinity got picked up along the way in the 1st century. Especially if the Gurus didn't want to lose converts to the compitition.

These concepts would have filtered into the West since the time of Alexander, who made a strong impression on northern India.  "Mitra" was related to the Persian god, who gave rise to the popular Mithraism mystery religion in Roman times.  Christianity and Mithraism were rival cults, and they mutually influenced the each other's rites and traditions.  So, the possibility exists that Hindu mysticism had some impact on Christian thinking.  It would have been a concpet that pagans were familiar with.

Hehehehe. Pagans yes, which is why it's familiarity makes it more likely that it was the Hindu's who were on the influenced side of things. You seem to forget that the Jews were rather a strict and zealot people. Which is why Christ and Christianity was persecuted.

And I see your still espousing the cute 'Mithra copycat' idea. Well here's a link to help you out: http://www.tektonics.org/copycat/mithra.html

If you are going to aim insult and ridicule at others as freely as you have here, you need to develop a thicker skin.

Pot. Kettle. Black.

Even taken as fiction, I find many of Christ's sayings and recommendations to be perfectly sensible, so I don't agree to your strawman claim that I "reject" him.  The only thing that reject is the supernatural mythos that has been built up around the legendary figure. 

Then you reject Him, as He was just as clear on Who He was as He was with His teachings and behaviors. It's the fact that it's clear your employing the fallacy of what C.S. Lewis always warned: He either was Who He said He was, or He was insane. I find it insulting that you think I wouldn't see this. Cutting and pasting only shows your excuse for what it is.

Not only do I fail to find this macabre story as touching and noble as you do, but I can only marvel at your insistence that it makes sense.  It was God who supposedly required the sacrifice in the first place.  Nobody forced him to require it.  But gods had always demanded sacrifices of their worshipers.  That is how people manipulate gods to do their bidding--by sacrificing valuable things, including even human lives.  For our more modern God not to send people to hell, all he had to do was stop sending them to hell.  The sacrifice was totally unnecessary, since there is nothing that we have to sacrifice that could possibly be of use to an omnipotent being.

Our love for sin, seems like a sacrifice that a Holy God would want. Like I said above, it's clear what you want isn't a just God meeting out justice, as that is what not sending people to Hell amounts to.

Would you say that you "reject" the Easter Bunny in the same way that you say I "reject" Christ?

I reject the Easter Bunny for anything than what it is: a product of our minds. You obviously hold God and Christ (as described by the gospels) in the same posistion, which is why you "reject" them for being what They are: really exsisting.

OK, that's where I get off the bus. You accuse others of cutting and pasting scripture, but you do not hesitate to pull out your own clippers and glue.  Don't tell me that there is no scriptural justification for hell.  Go argue with Catholics about it.  After all, they do have some history and credentials that seem to give them the right to call themselves Christians.

There's that lack of basic reading skill that I've come to know and love from you again Cop. As clearly you failed to note what "most prominent" of examples means.

I've been saying there is every scriptural justification for Hell. I'm saying what the Bible describes Hell to be does not fit with Dante's or the Catholic's classic notions (assuming most still hold the view), as you have to take everything in how it describes Hell.

You did not answer the question, and I would really be interested in your response.  Please give me a straight answer.  Will you concede that point?  Yes or no.

It's quite clearly a loaded question that deals with being an accessory. Unfortunately for you it's one I've already delt with. Specific sense or general sense, we obviously have the foreknowledge that our children will commit evil. If that's enough to condemn God, then you must condemn every parent for their child's sins.

You didn't imagine it.  I'm not the one taking that position.  You brought up the parent metaphor, so I felt it fair to explore the relevance of that metaphor.

Clearly you are, given how your entire reasoning with the analogy is that God is only justified when his reasoning is aligned with ours, and then dismiss it as a product of our minds when it is.

Still, you raised a specific case about rape to make your point.  You felt it would be unfair to blame the parents of a rapist for the crimes of the rapist, and I agreed with you that it would be unfair.  I gave you a straightforward response.  Why can't you do the same for me?

Because it's one I have gone over. But I'll do so again: The primary flaw with such an analogy is that there are moral things one can do to prevent it. With God the only way to not allow Adam and Eve to commit evil was to remove their free will. And clearly when the only means to prevent evil from happening is to commit an even greater evil, it is not contradictory for a loving and just God to prevent it.

No, I don't advocate that, and it would be an obvious strawman to claim that I would.  It is legitimate to take into account the differences, as well as the similarities, between God and humans.  Correct? Clearly, nobody advocates the death penalty for imaginary crimes.  However, God is not like a human in that respect.  Being omniscient, the crimes would not be imaginary for him.  He would know of their future occurrence, and he would be in a position to block them at the time they were about to happen.  Am I not correct about that?

You forget that God is not obligated to do so. And as we have covered if God can use a temporary act of evil to bring about an extrodinary amount of good, then it is even more consiistant for Him to not thwart evil. You sight God knowing of future occurances, but seem to forget Him knowing of the future consequences (including long term consequences).

Free will is the freedom to choose.  I think we agree at least on that much.  The problem is that our choices are not random.  They depend on what outcomes we desire, and we cannot consciously choose our desires or our circumstances.  If one has the desire to commit murder, it is possible to choose not to murder, but only if one has some more compelling desire not to commit the murder.

Not all circumstances can be chosen. Circumstances that are the result of our choices obviously can be. You choose to drink and drive, then crash and end up in a wheel chair, the circumstance you find yourself in is most certainly a result of your choice. Your closer on the mark with desire, as the Bible is very clear that man's heart is bent on wickedness.

Now, there is a slight logical problem with your concept of free will, because you believe that God knows what choices we will make.  From our perspective, our choices are free.  From God's, they cannot be.  There is no chance that we will do something he does not expect.  Am I not correct about that?

This kind of objection is easy to refute: simply look the other way.

What I mean is that your objection only looks at future events. Look at past ones. We know from the past Hitler chose to do what he did, Columbas chose to do what he did, and Gandhi chose to do what he did. These events can not change, as they are fixed, but our knowledge of their choices doesn't determine their choices. Similarly as God is outside of time as a whole, His foreknowledge of future free choices doesn't make them any less free. It's simply knowledge held by God prior to the choice, just as our knowledge is held after the choice.

I enjoy a good TV show, but Star Trek has never been among my favorites.  I cannot take any SF story seriously in which there is noise when things blow up in a vacuum.  I have always regarded their moral insights to be akin to their scientific insights.

Well with an infinite number of universe, there must be one where Star Trek is real and sound does travel in a vacuum. 

You are trying to weasel out of a very important aspect of punishment--whether or not the punishment is fair.

Well it's an aspect the Bible is very consistent on: You recieve the treatment you gave. The Bible is full of verses describing fare treatment-eye for an eye, reap, what you sow, etc. etc. In fact much of when the Bible does describe Hell it's done so in relational terms. Take Luke 16:19 for example. You'll note no mention of screaming and wailing during the conversation, much to Dante's disappointment.

In your effort to rationalize hell as a punishment, you have likened God's behavior to that of a parent, who cannot be held reponsible for the future behavior of a child. I have been very consistent in pointing out that the reasons for not holding a parent culpable cannot be reasons for not holding an omnipotent, omniscient creator culpable.

Yes, and your objection has been shown to be consistently flawed, as you hide behind foreknowledge, but have been shown that we too have foreknowledge.

We do, in fact, hold parents responsible when their negligence leads to death or injury of the child.  We expect parents to intervene to prevent harm when they are knowledgable and able to do so.  You exempt your god from that same responsibility, and I would like to know how you justify that exemption in your own mind.

Several flaws with this. One being that if the parent warned the child of the consequences and the child still chose to play in the yard, then the parent is in no way held responsible of negligence.

The other flaw in this is that death and injury aren't evil in and of themselves. Like I said in our previous discussion death is a bit incidental from God's perspective as we all die. And God need not save us from harm when it's our choices that cause harm to ourselves and others. If a child wants to play a contact sport, then injury is to be expected. But I've never heard anyone saying it was evil for the parents to allow their kid to play.

Clearly you have not been paying attention if you haven't seen that preventing free will as the only means of preventing all evil from occuring, and thus commiting an even greater evil, is what justifies God not preventing it. Once Adam and Eve sinned, we all inherited a sinful nature.

At present, it appears to me that your strategy is to avoid thinking too deeply about the issue and not to let yourself get pinned down.

Funny, as it appears your strategy is to beat up strawmen, make loaded questions, and deny how reasonable this is.

And I clearly was referring to sex outside of marriage, the same as you.  Don't be obtuse.

And clearly it is sinful, as sex is spiritual in it's essence of intimacy. Unmarried sex is the kind that avoids intimacy, and causes the act to be perverse. And no, saying "We're in love." doesn't let anyone off the hook.

You still aren't making sense.  That does not explain God's interest in anybody's sex life. You called it an "obvious sin".   There is nothing obvious about it.  Why should he care how we achieve orgasms?

Because clearly if He designed man and woman, then He designed sex as well. Like I said above it's an intimate and personal act. If it's designed it requires a very intimate and personal God. A personal God has a very keen interest in what you do, and so has a very keen interest on how you use what He designed.

Again, why should God care about whether we worship him or any other god?

He's the only One worthy of it.

It does him no injury.  You make it sound like this enlightened, transcendent being has trouble transcending the petty ego-driven emotion of jealousy.  If he were so interested in being loved and adored, he ought to have done a better job of getting word of his existence out to everyone, not just a small tribe of desert bedouins.

Still venting I see.

But here we have the classic mistake of thinking worship for God is to satisfy some sort of ego. However what may be ego for us, isn't for God. Praise is to commend the worth of, and thus worship (worth ship) is the highest form of praise. We know this because when a person does a cirtuous act, they are worthy of an appropriate amount of praise for it. God by His very nature is the embodiment of virtue. Idols are things that have no virtue in themselves. Therefore worshipping God is often called the highest form of good, as it gives the highest form of praise as the most appropriate amount to the most appropriate Being worthy of it. This isn't hard to see as Christ often healed the sick, and did not only demonstrate His power, but also His love, mercy, and compassion. Interestingly He wouldn't be able to do so if there wasn't anyone sick.

Really.  Who do you think a murdered baby has victimized?  You act as if crimes committed against people are always justified.  Is this where your Christian morality has led you?

Actually the issue is where does the murdered baby go from there? Heaven or Hell? If Heaven, then that would further demonstrate in allowing a temporary act of evil to result in good consequences for the baby.

You seem to have worked yourself up into a frenzy over how atheists have victimized an omniscient, omnipotent being by the vile acts of not believing in him and not worshiping him.  Are we dealing with God's wrath here, or yours?

Hehehe, as my tone has been quite lighter than the rather condescending one you have ranted throughout this discussion, I'll let you take a guess. And here you were asking me for straightforward responses, when you dodge the question and point raised here.

You act as if God's intervention to save a single innocent victim--say a baby about to be tortured and murdered--would obligate him to change the baby's diapers.  I think the parents would be grateful enough to provide diaper service for intervention on the life-threatening issues.

You act as if God is obligated to prevent mankind from making it's own choices and recieving the consequences. These arguements of yours touch my heart. Sadly for you my mind remains unaffected. Which is telling on how much you rely on emotion.

This isn't necessarily about his feeling threatened.  Please remember that God is also supposed to be "omnibenevolent".  He loves his creations and wants there to be fairness and justice for them.  Lack of action doesn't jibe with omnibenevolence.

This entire thread got started because of God's action against sinners: they are judged and sentenced to Hell. This jibes very well with a God who wants fairness and justice. It's simply not the kind of action you want from Him.

There is no significant distinction between actively causing and passively allowing, since God presumably actively caused the universe to be the way it is and knew all outcomes in that universe.  The only thing laughable here is your pretense that God somehow isn't responsible for what he did.  Just because you set up a bear trap in your front yard, that does not mean that you are not responsible when the neighbor's kid steps on it.  Of course, unlike God, you would not know that the kid would step in it when you set it up, but even that ignorance of the future does not absolve you of culpability.

Not if I took the child, showed him the trap, and set a very clear warning. If the kid still chose to mess with it then it's very much the kid's own fault, even though I'm passively allowing it. Oh my, that's exactly what God did with Adam and Eve. What a coincidence. 

You still don't get it.  You seem to have your values turned upside-down by your need to defend the indefensible.  Disasters, whether natural or man-made, cannot be morally justified on the grounds that they provide opportunities for heroism and martyrdom.  Again, you evoke the image of Rumpole drinking a toast to criminals for the good that they do--providing him with employment and a career.  Forget about all the misery and suffering they cause.

And you seem to think in a very immediate sense. What one may call 'not being able to see past his nose',  as you clearly ignored my post about your presumption. What has sntjohnny said about your hubris Cop? 

Here is the logical problem with your reasoning.  God cannot logically go against his own nature.  If he is omniscient, he cannot logically make himself ignorant of anything.  If he is omnipotent, he cannot logically make himself powerless against anything.  The ability to suffer requires giving up omnipotence, and God cannot logically do that.

Alright prove it.

Above, you pointed out:  "...it would show that an omnipotent God somehow felt threatened by needing to stamp out evil. Which doesn't jibe with being omnipotent."  When people suffer, they feel powerless and helpless, but God cannot ever be in such a position because, as you say, it "doesn't jibe with being omnipotent".

Battered wives and rape victims feel powerless and helpless. What do we often say to help them: "You have the power to do something about it." Seems you miss a very clear distinction between suffering because one is powerless, and choosing to suffer. Kidney patience go through the latter all the time, as they chose to suffer through painful tests and the after effects in order to donate their kidney to someone in need of it.

Now, that is a great sig line for an atheist.  Orwell couldn't have said it better. 

Display it in more forums you visit. It may make an actually thinking atheist research the subject and show how evil can only exsist if there is a God. 

I still see some weaseling going on in your answer.  Can you just give a straightforward answer before you try to explain your reasoning?  Yes or no:  Do you "reject" the Easter Bunny in the same way that you say I "reject" Christ?  If you don't want to give a straight answer, you don't have to, but I did want to offer you the opportunity.

My answer does not change, as I've clearly went through this several times. As a positive atheist you clearly reject Christ for being who He is, and what He did as being meaningful. Which is exactly what matters in pertaining to Hell. As an atheist who has been debating Christians a long time, it's inexcusable for you not to know what this means. The only possibilities are that you're either being intentionally dense, or you really are that stupid. I'm thinking more of the former myself.

Again, I see this as a dispute that you have with Catholics.  You seem to admit that there is scriptural justification for hell.  You just object to other people's interpretations of how to depict hell.

Yes, I object to wrongful interpretations. And after further research on the matter, I've found that my depiction to be the traditional one many Christians (and Catholics) have held for centuries. The other not occuring until after a lot of cultural baggage was attached to it.

You did not "deal with" this question.  Parents do not have foreknowledge that their children will commit evil, so I am a bit puzzled as to why you cling to that nonsense.  Parents are not omniscient.  If you had a serious response to this question, you would have made it by now.

I have replied to this defense of yours several times. The fact is omniscience has nothing to do with it, as knowledge that a child will commit evil is simply a fact of life. There has never been a parent alive who has had to say "I had to teach my kids to misbehave." Like much of this discussion, it's a prime example of how logical arguements don't have much coerscive power as sntjohnny said. You simply deny I've dealt with it when I have.

Earlier you claimed that parents, like God, had foreknowledge that evil would be committed.  Now you give a completely different response--that God permits evil in order not to compromise free will.

This is as good an example as any as to the fact that you aren't paying attention or even trying to as I have said nothing contradicting. I have said constantly that God stifling free will because He knew we would commit evil is equal to a parent killing his child simply because he knew the child would commit evil. To hold God responsible is to hold every previous generation responsible for the next one's. It's quite clear that you contradict yourself with your rants about the Bible teaching collective responsibility while you advocate for it.

This Free Will Defense (FWD) argument fails on so many levels.  We both know that, according to scripture, God has and does intervene from time to time.  God gets credit for good things that happen, but no blame for any of the bad things.  In any case, you have never made it clear how God's intervention would compromise anyone's free will other than that of the miscreant, whose will, in fact, ought to be compromised.  Humans intervene to stop evil, and that thwarts the will of evildoers.  You have never quite explained why it would be a bad thing to do that, since, according to believers, God does occasionally intervene.

Go back to my previous responses. The fact is you can not find one intervention by God that was not made after free will was exercised for years and against constant advise to repent in many cases. And the fact that He doesn't prevent an evil act is in no way contradicting when the same Scripture makes clear that a temporary evil can be used by God for a greater good result.

I have not forgotten those points but you have forgotten that God sometimes does intervene to thwart evil.  Your argument, at best, is that God can't always intervene because of some general principle that free will (of evildoers, at least) must be preserved.  Your entire argument falls apart on that basis, because it is only a general argument that God should never intervene at all.  And it is, perhaps, also an argument that humans ought not to try to prevent evil, because, after all, they would be compromising the "free will" that God has declared sacred.  That is, to intervene to thwart evil would actually be working against God's will.

And clearly you have (rather conveniently) fprgotten that thwarting evil isn't the perogative of a just God. His perogative is to judge us for it. Enter Heaven and Hell.

Well, this runs you smack into some of the logical contradictions traditionally associated with omniscience and omnipotence.  Either God can intervene in human affairs or he cannot.  Omniscience suggests he cannot, because he knows everything, including his own future behavior.  Omnipotence suggests he can intervene, because he can do anything he wills.  If his will cannot change, then he lacks free will.  If he has the ability to change his mind, then he lacks omniscience, because there would be a point at which he was of one mind and another point at which he was of another.

Hahahahaha. Oh Cop. You and cutup are simply too funny with your 3-step-refuting-God arguements. You should get with DB and discuss this position, as he is of the mind that if God chose to replace Adam then we wouldn't be in this mess. Your objection with omniscients falls a part due to the fact that as answered above a choice that is 'fixed' and known doesn't make it any less free. Prior to creating the world we can logically see that God chose to give mankind free will and He chose to create a world where events eventually play out to His purposes. That takes both omniscients and omnipotence and because it was all of His choosing, we can see He does indeed have free will. I would suggest you read Alvin Plantinga's God, Freedom, and Evil sometime.

Not if the parent could have had good reason to suspect a danger to the child.  That's not how it works.  Unlike a parent, of course, God would know whether the child would obey or not.  So God would bear even more responsibility for the individual's action.

The fact that a parent warned a child would be evidence to the fact that danger was indeed suspect. You can tell a child not to touch a hot object or it will hurt, but if the kid chooses to do so then getting burned is entirely on the child. Your foreknowledge defense has been shown to fail for a variety of reasons numerous times in this debate. A parent simply has to know his kid, or the general mindset of kids to know what the outcome will be. In fact, it's often better to allow the child to make the mistake of getting burned, as it appropriately teaches the child the consequences of such actions. Another very appropriate reason for why God need not thwart evil.

If parents have a reasonable suspicion that harm will come to the child if allowed to play--e.g. if the child is a hemophiliac or has a broken bone--and the parents ignore the potential danger, they are responsible.  Unfortunately for your argument, parents can be guilty of negligence, and, by analogy, so can God.

You forget that when the parent warns the child, then they can not be held to negligence, as it would be the child's fault for not listening. Which is exactly what God has done and continues to do. People simply don't listen, but instead spout nonsense like "God doesn't exsist.", "It doesn't hurt Him so it's not sin.", or "He's responsible." 

I see no obvious "design" in sex of the type that you describe, and it is a complete mystery to me why anyone would see that as a concern of God.

Not surprising since athiests don't "see" much of anything with their heads always cast down on the ground.

I can easily see where it is a concern of the people who use god-belief to either get more sexual gratification for themselves (e.g. Joseph Smith, David Koresh, Warren Jeffs, etc.) or to control the behavior of others.  With the advent of reliable birth control, it makes perfect sense for taboos surrounding sex outside of marriage to be relaxed.  That your god has a reason for concern in this area is simply absurd.  If he were really concerned about the human race, then he might notice that population growth is out of control and that most of that growth comes from married people, not promiscuous women and homosexuals.  Most births in the world are not out of wedlock.

I think babies not coming from homosexuals is a given. I don't see what population growth is much of a concern since "be fruitful and multiply" was a specific command of His. And if you say can't feed them or some nonsense like that I will laugh for a week straight.

And of course when the consequences of sin is visibly lessen it always makes the sin more easy to commit. "No one's watching so I won't get caught." has always been the mindset surrounding cheating, stealing, etc. as the consequence only appears to be removed.

Don't try to change the subject or weasel out of this.  You tried to justify suffering at the hands of miscreants on the grounds that we are all inherent sinners.  What sin has the baby had time to commit?  Your argument is absurd.

This goes back to the age old fallacy that sin is only an act. There are in fact 3 aspects of sin which man falls under- deliberetness (this would be acts and intents), inheretence (this is where our inherent nature to sin comes in), and finally imputation (which is where the baby comes in). The inheretence of sin is self-evident by the fact that once again you never have to teach a child misbehavior. Much like a genetic disease inherented from the parents, and no one rants against that.

Imputation is where people today and the baby come in. Adam was the first human, and thus the head of the mankind. As such all human beings are connected to him. This makes perfect sense, as a prime example would be how courts judge companys. If someone in a partnership had a partner making defective products then both holdings are liable. They are joined in the single entity of the company and courts make no distinction to those who contribute to the single entity. The baby is a member of the human race, and thus is joined to the same faults as the rest of the race ie we're all born in sin.

It is not the kind of action that a reasonable person would expect from a benevolent deity.  It is more than action of a somewhat cranky, unsympathetic human being.  Belief in hell tells us more about the anger and frustration of believers than of the god they believe in.

No it's the kind of action that a reasonable person would expect from a just and holy Deity as well as benevolent. Though it is also telling of how contradicting atheist's can argue. Complain, complain, complain.

You really can't get it into your head that God does not have the same limitation on knowledge that a human does.

As you can't seem to grasp that we have more knowledge than you like to admit. Funny how the 'cranky unsympathetic human being' is the one who advocates we're smarter than you seem to want to give us credit. At least when it doesn't show how 'modern' we are.

If you knew for certain that the kid would spring the trap, it doesn't matter what instructions you gave it.  The outcome would be just what you knew it would be, and you, not the kid, would bear the brunt of the blame.  Even if you did not know for certain that the child would disobey, you would still be criminally negligent in leaving the child near that beartrap.

Who said I left the kid near the trap? All I did was leave the trap out for a reasonable purpose and take the time to show it's location and instruct the child of the consequences. That the kid willingly goes near it and messes with it is still on him.

But I do agree with you that this scenario is analogous to the Adam and Eve story. 

Indeed it is. And I'm afraid for you, it's still revealing how free will being removed is the only thing left available. I sincerely thank you for helping me prove my point better Cop. 

If battered wives, rape victims, and kidney patients were omnipotent, they would be in a position where they had to suffer.  Just as an omnisicient being cannot willfully be ignorant of anything, an omnipotent being cannot willfully feel threatened or vulnerable.

Seems clear you're doing a lot of eqivocation on 'suffering' and as you seem to be switching suffering's usual definition of 'feeling pain' with being threatened or vulnerable. In which case feeling pain has nothing to do whatsoever with being 'all powerful' as power isn't a factor in feeling pain.

Once again, you lack the courage to just give a straightforward response.  Instead you launch into a personal attack on the one who asks the question.  It is painfully obvious why you do that.  You don't want to admit that my "rejection" of Christ is not the contemptible act that you make it out to be.  It sounds weird to say that one "rejects" the Easter Bunny, but that is the only sense in which I "reject" Jesus, God, Vishnu, and the Invisible Pink Unicorn.

Which is how you reject Christ as I've exasperatingly been saying from the beginning of this point. You don't accept Him as your Lord, but dismiss Him as a figment of man's imagination and patronizingly say you accept 'some of the concepts', which clearly isn't the same. Which is how you reject God's pardon as it pertains to Hell. Like I've been saying from the beginning-it's a matter of choice, and Hell is a destination you choose for yourself, despite every chance for the alternative.

That is non-responsive.  No parent has knowledge that its child will "commit evil", but you simply refused several times now to address the specific question:  Would a parent be culpable who had specific knowledge that its child would commit a rape, when and where it would happen, and the means to prevent it?  I can understand why that question would be a tough one to answer, because it doesn't make your god look very good.  Hoisted by your own petard. 

Au contraire it deals direclty with the heart of this issue. And sadly for you reality doesn't reflect your transparent proof by assertion. All a parent has to do is reflect upon their own childhood to know that their kids will commit the same evil's of lying, being mean, etc. etc. We see this behavior in children as early as kindergarden. The only thing you try to bring up is a loaded question about knowing the particulars, however we know for a fact that a child commiting evil is an inevitability.

Like I've said: You want to condemn God for allowing us to commit evil due to our own free willsimply because He knew in advance, then you can't do it without condemning every generation of man up until today along with Him. And as you clearly despise collective responsibility you contradict yourself.

That is a bizarre equation, but not totally unlike your other attempts to dig yourself out of your logical hole.  Your god willingly permits the suppression of the free will of innocent victims in order not to frustrate the free will of the perpetrators of evil.

Mostly because the so called 'innocent victims' are as much 'perpetrators of evil' themselves.

You equate this suppression of the evil-doer's will with murder, but God need not do anything other than restrain the evil-doer.  He doesn't need to kill him, nor does he need to suppress his free will in any but acts that would bring harm to others.  I've already dealt with your tortured logic on the matter of holding human parents responsible for the evil committed by offspring.

No you've brushed the logic aside, and are now claiming ignorance as a defense.

'Harm' is a four letter word with a lot of connotation to it. The fact is all sin causes 'harm' to others as well as yourself. The Bible never says 'the wages of this sin or that sin is death.' It says 'the wages of sin' in totality. God intervening on our free-will even in the case of acts is equivalent to a parent commiting a greater evil of killing their child to prevent him fom commiting an evil act. It's all or nothing.

Well, that is the question, isn't it?  If a god refrains from stopping evil that it is capable of evil, then how can it call itself "just" by failing to act?  How can a god who invents hell be considered just?  I'm not the only one to find that question a tough one to answer.  I know many believers who are troubled by it.  You would have us believe that you are not among them.

Nope, I'm not amoung them, because the entire point of Christianity is about God's ultimate act being successful. He gave his only begotten Son to die for our sins. Once again it comes to free will. He did not interfere with our free will to turn away from Him, and according to His loving kindness He gave us a way out of the eternal consequence. And consistent to His nature He will not interfere with a person's free will to not take His pardon if that person so chooses.

It should be noted that originally Hell wasn't made for us as it was for those fallen angels who rebelled. This is also why I am not amoung those who struggle with Hell's exsistence, because it goes back to my very first post in this thread: the purpose of punishment is punishment and is justified by the self-evident fact that those punished are guilty. Originally those guilty were only fallen angels, but when man fell also then it only makes sense for a just God to give the same sentence. The difference is that God mercifully gave us a way out.

Argument from authority.  If you could explain Plantinga's reasoning, you would do it here.  I don't argue with the claim that we perceive ourselves as having free will, but we cannot logically appear that way from God's perspective.  We cannot but behave the way he created us to behave.  Otherwise, he could not "create a world where events eventually play out to His purposes".

Rebuttal from laziness. This is exactly why I'm more inclined to copy and paste arguements as it makes brushing off recomendations to see well thought out arguements a harder.

As I addressed before the past events of the Holocaust, 9/11, the Kennedy assasination, Columbus crossing the Atlantic, etc. are all fixed from our perspective. However they were indeed freely made choices. Our knowledge of history is simply after the event, and thus God, being outside of time, simply holds knowledge prior to an event.

Arguing with you is certainly predictable.  Your memory can be counted on to conveniently forget that parents do not have foreknowledge, and they do actually prevent children from touching hot stoves when they see the likelihood.  This argument falls flat no matter how many times you repeat it.  Parents don't let their children play in traffic, either.  They don't actually allow them the freedom to harm themselves until they can be reasonably sure that the child will behave itself.

Good to see you've moved on from strawmen arguements, but it's not much of an improvement now that your going into proof by assertions. Parents do indeed have foreknowledge that their child will misbehave and commit evil, as it is a simple fact of reality. The rest of your arguement is such a ridiculous collection of absolute statements, I'm mildly embarrassed for humoring you this far. The fact that parent's don't remove a child's limbs and don't chain them to their beds shows they do indeed allow them to misbehave and harm themselves.

Your god is not a very responsible parent, because he lets his creations misbehave even though he knows exactly when, where, and how and even though he has the means to stop them.

Your a broken record Cop. as the same accusation can be said for all parents for allowing their kids to keep breathing.

Again, you are dead wrong.  A parent can be judged guilty of negligence if he or she can be shown to have a reasonable suspicion of what would happen.  Your god allegedly has absolute knowledge of what will happen, so it bears a greater responsibility for the consequences.

Hahaha. Not when the means for the parents to stop their child is by killing him. And as has long been established interfering with free will and thus cosmicly raping humanity was the means for God to prevent evil. But since those acts are an even greater evil, it's held as being a good thing not to interfere.

Your position seems to be that God cannot intervene without compromising our will to choose to do evil, but you also think that we should believe he exists so that we feel compelled not to commit evil.  Is it not the case that those with the greatest faith have the least free will to choose?

Oh Cop. You were doing so well. But actually I believe we should believe God exsists because He really does. I believe that if one chooses to love Him, then they will simply be as consistent as possible in their choice to obey Him. It's more of a sign of greater commitment, then of less free will. Being human we will always feel compelled to commit evil.

There you go again with the doctrine of collective guilt for wrongful acts not committed, and your twisted idea that people are inherently evil is patently absurd.  Just because some people behave badly, that does not mean that everyone deserves to be punished for their bad behavior.

Thankfully we are not punished for others bad behavior. We are punished for our own bad behavior which we freely choose thanks to our inherently fallen nature. And since reality and man's long history of cruelty, backs me up on man's inherent evil nature, I think the burden of proof is on you to prove otherwise.

If what you say is true, should we not punish the children of parents who commit crimes?  Should the son of a man convicted of a capital crime also be put to death?  Your logic would seem to put you in that position.

Not at all, since those are sins of deliberatness which you not so surprisingly ignore the distinction between the two.

This doctrine of collective guilt is one of the most poisonous ideas to infect human minds, and the idea that retribution against an entire population for crimes imputed to some is the basic rationalization of those who commit genocide and oppression.

See, this is why your so contradicting in your vehement rants against collective guilt, but your entire arguement is to hold God and all parents collectively guilty. But I take great encouragement from the fact that you obviously can't refute the logic and reasonability of imputation, since your reaction is entirely an arguement from outrage.

Not if you know for certain that the child will step into the trap.  You keep omitting that one crucial detail.

No, I can know he'll step in the trap. It's still on him, as I did everything short of breaking his legs to stop him. If he doesn't respect my authority or my warnings, it's all entirely on him. The more you try to disprove through analagies Cop. the more my arguement get's stronger. 

Suffering and pain are damage terms.  God cannot be damaged.  Nothing can damage, cause suffering, or in any way harm an omnipotent being.  We feel pain because we are vulnerable.  Again, you impute human limitations to an unlimited being.

I've asked you to prove this before, and you ignored it. Clearly proof by assertion and equivocation is all you're left with in this arguement. Christ being fully God and fully man, could indeed feel physical pain simply by His choice to suffer for us, and God can in fact feel emotional pain just as we can. *insert typical Cop. rant about this showing God as an invention of man by attributing human characteristics to Him while ignoring that if man is made in His image it's more the other way around*

And now you know why Santa never brings you presents.  With your attitude, how could you expect him to? 

Yes, I don't want you to go to Hell. I'm a horrible horrible monster.

It is a simple, direct question that you refuse to answer.  Repeating your dodge is not going to change the fact that you refuse to answer it for the reason that I stated.  It blows your argument.

 :roll:Sure, despite the fact that I've been addressing your hiding behind the fact of God's knowing specifics for quite a while in this thread. The fact that you put it in the form of a loaded question is irrelevant.

Everybody is evil.  What a sorry, miserable bunch of creatures we are.  So everyone who is a victim gets what is coming to them, even newborn babies.  But we were created by a perfect being who has generously offered us a way out of being tortured by him in perpetuity, all because he arranged to have a part of himself tortured to death.  Makes sense, doesn't it? 

Well all good things must come to an end. Now we're back to the strawmen as we've been over for a very very long time Hell is not a torture chamber. I had hoped since you dropped that part of the discussion that you would have take the hint. Or even the issue of whether newborn's even go to Hell. My fault for giving you too much credit.

Being omnipotent, he can produce as many sons as he wants.  When a human's child dies, that child is gone.  When Jesus died, he went to live with his father.  This stirring story can only drum up sympathy in the mind of someone who forgets that his god does not suffer the limitations of a human parent, and that seems to describe you perfectly.

Actually it's the fact that Christ was not a limited human being is exactly the point. This brushing aside the sacrifice can only be done by someone who ignorantly fails to see in by doing so He removed Adam's imputation of sin and imputed it on Himself. Therefore we may have God's righteousness imputed on those who accept Him and avoid Hell. That He rose again does not make the torture and sacrifice any less meaningful just as much as someone taking a bullet for another isn't any less meaningful if the one shot happens to live.

Again, nonsense.  According to the Bible, God has been interfering throughout human history.  What is the point of a miracle if not to justify belief in his existence?

*snort* Not really interfering with a person's free will to believe He doesn't exsist, if I have to debate an atheist, is it? You'll problably say something asinine as this being evidence of Him not exsisting, but it's more evidence that you choose not to believe what is painfully obvious. Which is more a reflection on you than anything.

You put yourself in the position of explaining why God does not intervene while simultaneously believing that he does.  If his intervention compromises free will, then we have no free will.  In fact, according to you, we should avoid sinning in order to avoid punishment by God.  Basically, your faith comes down to a big 'GOTCHA!' game at the end of life.

*yawn* More and more strawmen. Despite the fact that has long been established such interventions are long after free will was exercise, and often gave people another chance to exercise it yet again. Heaven forbid, that we should avoid sinning simply because it's sin, and therfeore wrong.

It's clear you aren't argueing now, so much as ranting.

Honestly, I can't see an ounce of mercy in such a being.  You make him sound like a dreadfully incompetent creator.   Many modern Christians have ceased to take the Bible so literally precisely because it makes God look so cartoonishly petty.  It is probably a good thing that most Christians don't bother to read the Bible.  As Abraham Lincoln said, it is "apt to lead to infidelity". 

I'm starting to think the condescending chest thumping is just an inherent part of atheism. As you seem to show that it can go on for a very long time.

Don't project your own laziness on me because you wave your hand at an author and tell me to look up rebuttals to my arguments with you by searching for them in his works.  You've got chutspah.  I'll give you that. 

Yes I was indeed quite foolish to expect you to do any research into the subject. As I admitted above I gave you too much credit. 

Oh, right.  And don't forget that he also created every event and had the power to change any of them by his own "free will".  If you want to believe in such nonsense, that is.  As I've pointed out numerous times, we cannot have free will from God's perspective, only our own.  Free will only makes sense when one is ignorant of the choices one will make in the future.  God is not.

As I've established with the history analogy the belief that free will isn't really free unless it is unknown is a false dichotomy. A police officer can know what street a criminal will turn on to escape. That the officer has this foreknowledge in no way makes the choice any less free.

You have only yourself to blame if you allow a predictable tragedy to happen that you could have prevented.  Ditto for your god.

I'm loving your proof by assertion. It shows how you have little alternative to continue argueing as you want the kid to do anything and be absolved of responsibility so long as someone is knowledgable of his misbehavior (which is everyone). There's a description for a person who makes such an arguement: a child.

Since this entire discussion has become circular and repetitive, I'll let you have the last say. 

That's nice of you. Since you took to ranting more than argueing I felt this arguement was coming to a close anyway.

Isn't punishment also used to enforce justice rather than simple deterrence? If someone murders my daughter, they pay for it. It may deter them it may not...but that person will pay for it. Isn't hell the punishment for those who refuse to follow God (by not believing His revelation and living in a sinful state though they would not believe this)on a consistently free-willed basis?

And I admit, I may have missed someone talking about this in the post. I have been following it but have quite a migraine so if this has been addressed please move on to the next post.

I have been away from this forum for quite some time, so I did not see the above question(s) until today, and I didn't know the youtube video had been removed.
My position:
If hell is defined as "a place of separation from God," then I do not believe in hell. God is said to be "always everywhere," so ther can be no place where God is not. Therefore, there's no hell by the above definition.
If hell is defined as "a place of eternal torment as a price for sins committed while alive," then I do not believe in hell. It would be unjust to punish someone eternally ('beyond time's reconning'), for sins, however cruel, committed in the span of a few decades of life. It flies in the face of God being "Just."
Your opinion may vary, or you opinion may differ. We can discuss it if you like.

I agree that if "hell" should be defined as where God is NOT then "hell" doesn't exist.

I agree that SIN is not eternal as God is.. God is greater than sin and God desires greatly to go that extra mile with us simpletons... that is to forgive like he desires us simple humans to do.  But thankfully he can do that in ways we can never understand.

One point I would like to add here is your useless word of the word LOVE.  :)