There are some interesting questions/implications lurking behind this.
Is God working towards the betterment of humanity? If so, I suppose letting this one random guy drown could somehow help better humanity. BUT, it implies that every single nasty thing that happens on earth is part of a path towards the “betterment of humanity.” Because remember, God is omnipotent and omniscient, which necessarily means that nothing can happen without his approval.
Your statement makes it sound like God had no part to play in creating or stopping the flood, and now he is just in the situation where he has to decide what to do with Roof Guy. Implication: God is not omnipotent.
Assuming God is omnipotent and omniscient, it means that every bad/evil thing that happens has been approved by God (since he could easily change it if not). Implication 1: God is not very benevolent, since he is sponsoring every evil act in the world. Implication 2: God could have set the universe in motion and then stepped back and watch it unfold, without meddling in human affairs. This also means he is not very benevolent, since he of course knew how it would all play out, and decided to do it anyway. It also means there is no free will, since everything was set up at the beginning to unfold as desired. It would also mean that any religion viewing God as someone who answers prayers, talks to people, etc. is flat wrong.
If letting Roof Guy drown is for the betterment of humanity, then it implies that it is impossible to understand the mind of God, what he wants, anything like that. This notion of “we can’t understand God’s mind” seems almost certainly true, since … what are the chances that we can really understand the mind of an all-powerful, all-knowing being? That type of mind wouldn’t be remotely similar to ours.
Painting God as omnipotent quite simply creates huge problems if we try to make any sense of that being.
And the whole notion that they are the oppressed victims. Like, no one is threatening to throw you into a detention center if you don’t get vaccinated. Why would you even go there in your mind unless it’s being spoonfed to you by all the RWNJs on tv?
As for naked, well, this god did whoinp up clothing for Adam & Eve.
Note he did not create them, he sat down and sewed animal skins together. A most peculiar act for someone alleged to be able to create entire universes by snapping his fingers.
That doesn’t work in the joke, though, bc if someone is expecting Superman to save them, they very likely are expecting a flying guy in tights and a cape to swoop in. But no one I know who has faith in god (full disclosure, I do not) truly expects some berobed sky god to swoop down. They all know that “god works in mysterious ways,” after all.
My main point, which I think you get, is these covidiots think “if god wanted us to wear masks, they’d be growing on our faces,” but they don’t think god could have made it possible for us the have masks to wear. Idiots.
And honestly, the anti-shoe argument actually has some scientific validity. Shoes actually distort the shape of the human foot and cause knee and back problems in addition to foot problems. And yet, I don’t see all those protesters going barefoot?
“If God wanted us to cover our mouth and nose he would have made us that way,” says woman wearing eyeglasses and clothes.
__
Well, lady, we are all born naked, so here you are, defying god’s will.
A lot of these RWNJs love to quote parts of Leviticus in order to justify their own racism, homophobia, misogyny, etc. A lot of 'em ignore this one, though:
27-28 I forbid you to shave any part of your head or beard or to cut and tattoo yourself as a way of worshiping the dead.
and, of course, this one:
33 Don’t mistreat any foreigners who live in your land.
34 Instead, treat them as well as you treat citizens and love them as much as you love yourself. Remember, you were once foreigners in the land of Egypt.
So, it is incompetent at best & malevolent at worst.
Ah, so it can justify the punishment it has already decided to mete out.
Sounds like malevolent narcissism to me. Seems vaguely familiar, for some reason. but I don’t see where any entity that demands worship is entitled to it.
No.
It’s a small boy with ant beds, a magnifying glass, & a sunny day at his disposal.
That’s what the various publicity departments want everyone to think.
Surely she isn’t wearing those glasses to correct her vision? Why didn’t God make the eyes good?
One of the tenets of the religion I grew up with was disallowing people with vision problems to wear corrective glasses or contacts. You were supposed to pray for your eyes to be healed by God.
Of course, this was enforced with logical inconsistency.
Using a magnifying glass to read your Bible? All good.
Using your rear view mirror where objects may be closer than they appear? Just fine.
Using binoculars to hunt or birdwatch? Super cool.
Some uses of curved glass would send you to Hell, but other instances of it were no problem.
This was one of the many reasons I broke away from the church at a young age. My love for reading science books quickly drove a logic wedge between me and that particular religion.
Most of what I’ve seen in the biblee (esp the old testament crap) proves that their god is a violent, bloodthirsty thug. The new testament crap made me wonder what sort of parent would let their child be crucified?
It’s regarded as a settled problem in several theological traditions. E.g., “God initially filled the universe, leaving no room for anything else, so he breathed in to make space for that which isn’t God”. Often a metaphor of reflection is used (like Indra’s web, or God creating man “in his image”): for God to have created anything at all means he must have set it outside of himself, if only in a temporary sense. Chance and free will are not gaps in his coverage; they’re experiments that he allows to play out, knowing that whatever happens, it all reverts to him in the end, so he hasn’t risked anyone but himself in the final accounting.
Of course, this is all within the fictional context where God exists. If you draw conclusions from that about what is going on in day-to-day reality, you have other problems.
We have choices taken away all the time. There are so many things people aren’t free to do. There are hard limits to what we can do and where we can go. We don’t really get to decide what gender we are, who we are attracted to, what our personality is like, whether we are able-bodied or mentally ill or so on. Most of us spend a significant portion of our life laboring for someone else because it’s the only way we can get food. And some people never even get the chance to do that much, thanks to things like the pandemic we are discussing.
Why is it the only “free will” that ever comes up in these religious discussions is the freedom to make choices that hurt yourself or others around you, and not all the things we would actually like to do with our lives? It makes it feel like a very useless thing to have…like the free market conception of freedom where everything is good because if you don’t like what the corporations dictate to you, you can always go starve to death. Hooray.
At some point some evil Nazi will develop a vaccine – or more likely say they have a vaccine – to eliminate, I dunno, progressive thought, or atheism, or whatever, and RWNJ will for sure mandate detention centers for those of us who don’t want one.
It’s how American conservatism works – hate something that benefits non-RWNJs or society in general, scream about it constantly, trash the place because that thing exists… and then develop or promote something evil that’s the exact opposite and enforce all those wild fears you had while screaming and trashing the place.
