I want to be loved
I want everyone to be loved
I want life to be fair
I don't want to cease to exist forever
I want everyone to be happy
I don't want people to suffer and die and fight
I want people to all get along and love each other
Nobody should be killed maybe not even an ant

Everybody does, honey
But some of us have to be content with jacking off to yaoi and eating rests of food from garbage

>>40619703 (OP)
“And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.” (Revelation of John 21:4)

“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’ den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” (Isaiah 11:6-9)

But the ant thing is just retarded.

>>40619731
You know you could be an ant to somebody else

>>40619731
I want universalism to be true
No hell and no annihilationism

>>40619731
If ants are conscious and Live mostly good lives where they experience more wellbeing then suffering I don't want them to die plus I don't want people to lose their innocence

>>40619742
It's God's way or the highway.

>>40619748
which God

>>40619748
https://youtu.be/l482T0yNkeo?si=T3zRA8CEMymjHYBR

>>40619703 (OP)
God wants that too and he’s on his way.

>>40619749
“Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” (John 14:6)

>>40619703 (OP)
shift over to 5d with us

>>40619761
What is this 5D meme?

>>40619759
all the amount of evil and all the different types of evil in the world seems to suggest a god which didn't incarnate

>>40619772
Non sequitur.

>>40619777
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kjvbELWxSMk&pp=0gcJCcMJAYcqIYzv

3 Evil
The world is filled with horrifying, gut-wrenching evil. Billions of sentient beings die every second. Thousands of children die of preventable disease every day. For billions of years, animals have been suffering and dying—in numbers we cannot fathom, across time scales we cannot fathom.

Such a thing is obviously incompatible with the existence of a perfect God.

Are the aforementioned things bad? Is the world a worse place because it has cancer in it? Is it worse because it has malaria and genocide and starvation and predation? Anyone of remotely sane ethical persuasion would have to obviously answer yes. The theist, however, is tasked with explaining why a perfectly just, merciful, loving, and powerful God fails to intervene to stop these horrors. He could stop them with a thought, make it so that no child has to starve to death in her mother’s arms merely by saying the word. Why doesn’t he?

The theist doesn’t merely need to think that each of the world’s apparent evils are secretly so good that they shouldn’t be abolished (after all, if they should be abolished and God can abolish them, why doesn’t he?) They don’t merely have to think that it would be wrong of God to have intervened to stop COVID or 9/11 or the Nazi Holocaust. They must think that God couldn’t have set up the world in any better way. Not only does some great good come from the holocaust that makes it so that God should not prevent it, God apparently—in his infinite wisdom and majesty—could not have achieved that good in any other way.

Could any proposition be more absurd? Could anything be more ludicrous on its face than the notion that there is a good reason for babies to get cancer, for animals to starve, and for natural disasters to ravage the world claiming countless lives? Could anything be more ridiculous than the idea that these are uniquely required for some greater goods?

>>40619814
What are the odds that the ideal mix of evils for our growth and character building would happen to be those randomly churned out by indifferent natural laws? If there was a God who was designing the laws, aiming at the good, he wouldn’t make the laws uniform across the entire cosmos! He wouldn’t make the ordinary goings-on of the world utterly indifferent to value, so that whether gravity pulls some object down is wholly independent of the moral consequences of it doing so. If an ethical person was creating the law of gravity, he would not direct it to bring objects down if doing so results in them fatally falling on the head of a baby.
This is the core problem with every theodicy. While perhaps some theodicies can explain why some evils might be conducive to greater goods, it would be utterly and wildly inexplicable if the optimal laws for bringing about those goods are indifferent to value. In addition, such a view simply strains credibility. Is it really plausible that the world wouldn’t be improved if God had stopped any of the particularly gratuitous instances of suffering? Is it really plausible that if God had done a secret miracle—never discovered by anyone—to make COVID never infect humans, the world would have been a worse place?

The standard theodicies, for this reason, are inadequate.

The free will theodicy, for instance, may explain why we are typically allowed to do things that harm others. But it cannot explain natural evils and it cannot explain why we are given strong desires to do evil things. Things would be far better if the rapist never had the desire to rape—if no one ever had a desire to torture small children in sheds. It similarly cannot explain why we are given the power to do even very terrible things to each other.

>>40619819
The soul-building theodicy claims that evils exist to strengthen our characters. How, pray tell, does the small child who starves to death in her mother’s arms have her character strengthened? How does the old lady with dementia who slowly wastes away have a stronger character as a result of her suffering? The notion—that must be believed by proponents of this theodicy—simply strains credibility that there are no instances of evil that are better prevented by God and that the best laws for soul-building would be ones that function with total indifference to the extent to which their behavior affects soul-building.

Or take the archon abandonment theodicy—a favorite of this blog. This theodicy suggests that the reason that the world is filled with grotesque horrors is that there are powerful angels who could have prevented the world’s evils but didn’t. God allows such a state of affairs because setting up a world where archons can make a great difference to our well-being allows us to closely connect with the archons. In the worlds where the archons don’t screw up, it creates connections that last forever and thus are worth all of the world’s evil.

This theodicy very clearly fails.

Put aside the fact that the theodicy posits powerful wizard demons with no evidence. Normally the fact that your theory has to posit magical beings to explain the data is seen as a cost of your theory. Few would have been impressed by Newtonians suggesting that demons explain the perihelion of mercury.

But putting that aside, why in the world would God make the demons be the only thing sparing us from great suffering? The theodicy can perhaps explain why there are archons who can make a great positive difference to our well-being. But why make it so that if the archons abandon us, most creatures on Earth will live short lives of intense suffering. God could make such creatures vast difference makers without making us miserable wretches in their absence.

>>40619806
If you need that long to get your point accross, you probably don't understand it yourself.

>>40619826
It’s particularly surprising that the world where the archons don’t intervene appears blind and indifferent. This is a rather striking coincidence. While it makes sense God might allow the archons to intervene, why the hell would the world where they don’t look, in its ordinary functioning, exactly like an atheistic universe? Why would there not be any agents that appear to be working?

It would be especially surprising that none of the archons would help us out. But if some of the archons are helping, why don’t we observe them?

Why doesn’t God simply give the archons a strong desire to help us? He wouldn’t force them—he’d just make them psychologically disposed to help us. He can do that. He is God. He could make the archons more motivated to help us than humans are motivated to have sex and eat food.

In addition, God could simply give the archons the belief that our lives will go badly if they don’t help us but not actually make their lives go badly if they don’t help us. It seems that what matters in helping others is how much sacrifice you give for how much expected benefit. Pulling a child out of a burning building produces no less objective-list benefit if, unbeknownst to the person who pulls the child out, the child would have been saved later by someone else. Thus, God doesn’t actually have to make the world horrendous if the archons don’t intervene—he could just make them think it’s that way.

>>40619832
Lastly, the argument assumes that objective list theory is right. If hedonism is right or desire satisfaction theory then God could simply make creatures with maximal pleasure or fulfilled desires. This is especially problematic because objective list theory is very implausible.

Thus the argument assumes:

There are archons.

Libertarian free will is right (otherwise the archons would just help us out).

Objective list theory is true.

The archons for some reason don’t make their existence obvious.

The world absent archons is filled with enormous gratuitous suffering—rather than merely being absent in certain goods.

The world absent archons doesn’t appear to be presided over by any agents.

God for some reason needs us to be in actual danger—rather than just having the archons believe we’re in danger.

Each of these assumptions, however, is quite doubtful. They range from somewhat dubious to ridiculously unlikely. Even if we give each of them a generous 1/3 chance of being correct, the odds they’re all right is 1/2187. Very unlikely!


Suppose one simply knew that God existed. Would they really expect a world as bad as this? This world? The one where thousands of children die every day, where nearly every organism who has ever lived has died after just a few days or weeks? If an angel proposed that God would make such a world, they’d be laughed at—and not invited to all the cool angel parties. The only reason anyone seriously entertains that this world is made by a perfect God is because they have status quo bias. They can’t imagine just how much better a world that God would actually make would be.

>>40619835
Another common reply to the problem of evil is skeptical theism. People claim that God might have all sorts of unknown reasons for allowing evils. But this is woefully inadequate. While God could, of course, have reasons we don’t know about, the odds that the optimal mix of goods would be brought about by blind and morally indifferent laws is very near zero. In addition, provided you think that, say, we can be confident that the holocaust was a bad thing, you should think that we can be confident in some ethical judgments—despite the suite of unknown reasons. The odds God wouldn’t have moral reasons to prevent a single one of the world’s suite of horrors are very low.

I don’t just think the problem of evil is a consideration against God’s existence. I think it’s single-handedly, overwhelmingly decisive. Theism does not withstand the problem of evil. Not even close. Theism requires one to believe a great absurdity—that all the world’s evils are for the best. That one who could prevent rape, slavery, genocide, starvation, hunger, torture, and each of the million other distinct and horrendous evils shouldn’t do so. That is almost too absurd to contemplate.

This absurdity was pointed out quite convincingly by Stephen Law. Imagine an evil God—limitless in power, knowledge, and wickedness. Such a being’s only motivation was to bring about evil. Do you think there’s any chance such a being exists?

Of course not! The world has too much good for such a hypothesis to be even remotely tenable. Such a hypothesis is laughably ridiculous. But all the things theists say about the problem of evil could be equally said about the problem of good. One could similarly posit that the being allows good because this is a side-effect of giving us free will. That our flourishing allows greater spiritual decay, so that we can exercise the evils of betrayal and wickedness.

>>40619839
Such hypotheses, while coherent, are obviously absurd. But so is a good God.

Now there are two different versions of this challenge. The first one notes that obviously an evil God is disqualified by the world’s good. It claims that by parity, a good God is disqualified by the world’s evils. Generally theists just bite the bullet and say that an evil God isn’t ruled out by the world’s goods. If you believe this—that this world might be the creation of a maximally wicked being—I have a bridge to sell you!

The only half-decent reply I’ve heard to this challenge comes from Max Baker-Hytch and Ben Page. The core idea: it’s way more obvious that a torture would is worse than our world than that a bliss world is better than our world. A world where everyone was simply intensely pleasured all the time would not seem much better than the present world. In contrast a world where everyone was tortured all the time would seem obviously worse. Thus, it is claimed, this world is more obviously incompatible with maximal evil than maximal good.

First of all, I think this is quite doubtful. The reason we have this intuition is just because we can more easily grok how bad extreme suffering is than how good extreme pleasure is. If we had a better sense of how good experiences could get, we wouldn’t have this intuition.

Second, even if a mere bliss world wouldn’t be obviously better than ours, there are some conceivable worlds that are obviously much better. It’s as obvious that the best conceivable world is much better than this one as it is that the worst conceivable world is a lot worse than this world. It is obvious that a perfect being wouldn’t create this world, just as it’s obvious that a maximally terrible being wouldn’t create it.

>>40619841
The second version of the challenge is, in my judgment, also quite decisive. Even those who think an evil God isn’t ruled out by goodness tend to think that the hypothesis is implausible. But why should such a hypothesis be much less plausible than the good God hypothesis?

There are a great many replies, each wildly unpersuasive. Let’s explore them:

“A good God has a higher prior. Perfection is a real property while imperfection is not.” Reply: if perfection is a real, joint-carving property (rather than e.g. just the property of being maximal in badness) why not think that its opposite is equally a real property?

“A good God possesses all great-making features. An evil-God possesses mostly great-making features but then one random bad-making feature. This means that it’s very unlikely it exists—it’s a weird, arbitrary, and disjointed entity.” Reply: infinite power is not a great or terrible property. Whether it’s good or bad depends on who has the power. There’s no more reason to suppose that power is inherently tied with goodness than badness.

>I want
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ef9QnZVpVd8

>>40619842
“An evil God would want to deceive us. Thus, the evil God hypothesis is self-defeating, while the good God hypothesis is not.” Reply: First of all, if there are two hypotheses and one is self-defeating, they might still have equal probabilities provided they’re both low. For example, if at the start of the universe a leprechaun flipped a fair coin and then deceived everyone if it came up heads, you should have equal credence in it having come up heads and tails. Second, why would a good Got not deceive us? Potentially infinite goods are in the balance. Surely infinite goods would be worth a bit of deception. Third, there are parallel arguments for why an evil God wouldn’t deceive us as to why a good God wouldn’t. Perhaps by preserving our rational faculties we can more deeply betray others. Even if you think it’s slightly more likely a good God wouldn’t deceive us than that an evil God wouldn’t, this won’t explain why the evil God hypothesis is absurd and the good God hypothesis is reasonable. It might mean a good God is slightly more likely, but it won’t explain the massive gap in reasonable probabilities that theists claim there are.

Thus, I think the problem of evil—especially in its evil God variant—is single-handedly decisive.

4 More considerations
There are a great many facts about the world that fit poorly with theism. While theists can contrive an ad hoc explanation of any of them, none of their explanations are very impressive.

First of all, there’s the fact that God is hidden. If God existed, we’d all positively expect him to at some point show his face. It’s particularly striking that people go through psychologically devastating crises of faith that shatter their worldview and launch them into deep depression—but through all this, God never reveals himself.

>>40619848
Now, theists often reply by saying that if God revealed himself, those who rejected him would be more culpable. But why, pray tell, is God not capable of motivating the majority of people to follow him? Most people love their mothers, for instance. Most people try to help out their mothers. Why then could God not set up a world where people love him as much as their family?

It also strikes me as quite odd that knowing about God would make a person’s wrongdoing more culpable. Should this make Christians fearful of evangelization? Is God not capable of getting most people to follow him? Being exposed to the truth would seem to make a person’s punishment more fitting—because they know more clearly when they do wrong that they are doing wrong. One should not flee from the light of truth.

In addition, this reply is obviously ad hoc. If you knew God existed but didn’t know if he revealed himself, you’d obviously guess that he would. So this will clearly cut the probability of theism.

Second, why does God make creatures as unimpressive and wretched as us (credit to Sebastian Montesinos for this argument. I’m pretty sure that Montesinos hates me and thinks I’m a hack, but he’s a smart guy and worth reading). God can create an infinite array of creatures. On naturalism, you’d expect the creatures that exist not to be that impressive—to be whichever creatures happen to be thrown together by biology. On theism you’d expect wonderful, brilliant, godlike beings. Once again, the naturalistic prediction is confirmed.

Third, on naturalism you’d obviously expect death to exist. Nothing natural survives forever. On theism, there’s no reason for us to die. So once again, the fact that the world contains death is a confirmed theistic prediction.

what the fuck is this guy doing with these giant walls of text

>>40619878
If God is real it seems unlikely he is the Christian God

>>40619884
God is the One who sent Jesus to spread the good news of salvation.

>>40620038
Maybe

>>40620038
You can tell it's a muslim because to them violence is the answer and they don't accept Jesus as the son of God

bump

>>40619703 (OP)
God is real but Satan is the master of this world and his goal is to convince you that God doesn't exist so that he can drag you down to hell to burn with him in the Lake of Fire

>>40622168
Did you read the posts in this thread about the problem of evil specifically archons?
Archon basically means angel and Satan is a fallen angel

>>40622181
There's multiple posts so which one are you referring to

>>40622198
I think all three are relevant as well as possibly some of these links which go with those three posts
https://benthams.substack.com/p/everythings-an-emergency/comments

https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-archon-abandonment-theodicy

https://benthams.substack.com/p/lopsided-lives-a-deep-dive?utm_source=publication-search

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/40927250.pdf?casa_token=YKA6koAu5oIAAAAA:nUR5Vy5zDOrknsvYcY-SmHgcJS-9Y_1x1yfuozhDLbFdjdJdHdCh0ojIiVDJfVMxGPxXOHqHNTPETjn_SieIAkneAlKYbeN1p535FbksAjHVMLEs9Q

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/papq.12304

https://naturalismnext.blogspot.com/2022/12/why-im-atheist_6.html

https://naturalismnext.substack.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK3jVNbG2-s

https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-moral-knowledge-argument-for?utm_source=publication-search

>>40622168
>his goal is to convince you that God doesn't exist
No, his goal is to shape the character of your soul through opposition. He's just an instrument of your creator, the macrocosmic Mind.

>>40619703 (OP)
Based and peacepilled

>>40619703 (OP)
Well OP, you're in for a wild ride, because He does.

>>40622421
including convincing you and the rest of humanity that God doesn't exist

>>40619703 (OP)
So shine the light on the vampires. The whole system is vampiric.
They have always been the "useless eaters"
There is no truth in them.

>>40619878
>what the fuck is this "jew" doing being a neurotic loser?
kek this one isn't even me this time
you are such a weak little faggot it's almost endearing

>>40619703 (OP)
I can help you

>>40619703 (OP)
ANON how the fuck are WE going to bring a perfect god into an imperfect world?

We have to align a way through for when his son comes back. Only he can do what must be done(no, that's not you Nobody parasites)

That means us called are willing to die for his will and ready to put everything on the line for his future kingdom.

He reaches down to us all the time, the more we change the world for his good the better we can reach out to him. Everyone who's called is expected to do as their called to.

Grace takes the rest.

>>40619703 (OP)
God is real. You–and everyone–are loved.
Life only seems unfair because of our limited perspective to things, but God is just. No one ceases to exist, only our temporary, physical body, dies.
And everyone will be happy, get along and love each other in due time, sooner than you think. :) Though those who need more time to mature into more loving people are gonna do so elsewhere, as to not disturb the peace in this world.

>>40625412
You don't know if God is real, you fake ass nigga
https://youtu.be/l482T0yNkeo?si=V_0e55WFwusPjUwl

>>40619703 (OP)
Lord make haste to help you.