Could we say that God suffers from tragedy fatigue? Can we really call god evil?

One could argue, with much gusto, that God is nowt but a massive troll

@ucme Why? How so?

@Sneki95 Getting hundreds of millions of people to believe in not only your existence, but faith enough to insist in your all compassing power, without any evidence whatsoever…etc.

@ucme But I am not referring on whether one should or should not believe in God. I am referring to the nature of God. It’s not important if it exists or not, but what is the image of its from the religious texts. Imagine as if we are discussing about a literature character. It’s not important if it is real, but how is it represented.

You forget about all the good stuff that happens each and every day. God is the almighty balance scale of our universe. Believing in a God thankfully teaches us to have good morals, be kind and loving towards each other and the world itself that we live in. The bad shit gets all the press and good deeds barely see the light of recognition and IMO rightly so. We should do good because it is the right thing to do and not to get the atta boy pat on the back the way God wants it to be too.

So although God deals us some pretty crappy things to endure, but also gives most of us lots of things to feel good and smile about. As long as there are people alive in the world there will be good vs evil…the Yin and Yang of our eternal world.

@Sneki95 – I would question whether God cares at all. It’s not a question of God being fatigued – it’s one of humans expecting something unrealistically.

I figure that God deals with the big stuff—planets, physics, evolution: stuff on that level. God is a macro-level planner. The problem is that humans expect a micro-manager, low level sort of god that they can whine to.

People are expecting the wrong thing from God, and therefore are disappointed. That’s not god’s fault – that’s mankind’s…

Most monotheistic religions also say that god is all powerful, which to me is supposed to indicate that he is capable of doing anything. If someone knows about everything and can do something about evil but simply chooses not to, I cannot reconcile that.

Of course, organized religion probably has at least some of their facts wrong. Though I don’t believe in a god at all, your god sounds more likely to me than the Christian god, for example.

God is evil.
Not because he allows bad things to happen despite his power, but because he actively endorses evil.
He endorses slavery, murdering gays, murdering unbelievers, the subjugation of women, treating them as property and forcing rape victims to marry their rapists, and even child sex slavery.
Not to mention the mass murder and genocide he committed himself.

Well, I know how a Jesuit would answer this. They spent a lot of time thinking about the mysteries of god. Evil is all about challenges, opportunities to overcome and in doing so, we become better people and from a practical view, that’s the only real choice we have—to become better people. He leaves no other acceptable option because hell isn’t acceptable. And small tastes of hell can be found here on earth to remind us of that.

Although I’m no longer with the Church, I find nature, including human nature and all natural law serves the same purpose. We really have no choice but to improve our lot, with all the personal and societal challenges that come with the pressures of a growing population on a planet with limited resources. When we think we do have other options than becoming better people, it slows down our progress, sabatages our journey to being more godlike, our tortuous and often euphoric trek toward the impossible goal of perfection. The agony and the ecstasy.

I believe that our universe is like a giant video game to God. You don’t feel sorry for harming video game sprites (characters) . Or being careless about death. I would be charged with war crimes if what I did in a game was real. Our best hope is that God is raising us like a beloved potted plant, or a zookeeper for a human sanctuary.

“God,” if there is one, is bored to death and cannot die to end the eternal boredom.

@Mariah But…..uh…..........oh. ( ._,)
But then again, why exactly did it chose not to help? Is it because of it’s sadism or did we actually deserve not to be helped? There is a difference between “I ain’t gonna help these little shits” and “These people are simply beyond help. I would just waste time trying to get some common sense into them”.

@ragingloli Did God itself proclaim these things, or did humans write it down and explained it as “god’s words”? I guess that depends on religion. But the very idea of a monotheistic god: all seeing, all knowing, being everywhere at every moment, knowing everything that happened and is happening, and may happen in the future. Does being like that makes you evil by default? Can we even grasp what god has to deal with?

@Cruiser I guess so. That would make God indifferent then, neither evil nor good. Or living in perfect balance.

@RedDeerGuy1 Well, that is some sort of fatigue, right? Or, at the very least, God sees us as we see ants. That doesn’t make God necessarily evil.

@Espiritus_Corvus That seems interesting.

Well, if he suffers from tragedy fatigue, the cure is simple. Stop causing tragedies.

@Dutchess_III Is that what you would also say to a human with such a condition? “If you are numbed down by bad things that happen to you, sop them from happening.” But if the patient is “numbed down”, why should s/he want to stop anything? It shouldn’t affect them at that point, shouldn’t it?

And how is God even supposed to stop tragedies? That would nullify the free will, wouldn’t it? We create evil among ourselves (most of the time). If God had to intervene, it means it would have to force us or posses us in order to stop us from creating tragedies. Free will goes out of the window there…

The argument is that God is not human, so you can’t compare him to a human.

It’s really ridiculous how people “Praise God,” and give him all the credit, when good things happen. Obviously they believe he controlled it, had a hand in it. But he doesn’t get the blame for the bad things that he should have just as much control over.

@Dutchess_III So God doesn’t have any control over good either?

@Sneki95 I think labeling God as indifferent would be the furthest from the truth of a deity that juggles the trials and tribulations of the epic battle of good vs evil on a minute by minute basis. As a parent I can personally attest to just how damn difficult it is to manage the wants, needs, desires and temptations of offspring from infant to young adult and I only had 2 to worry about and IMO why we call God God, because only a true God could manage 6 billion souls at any given moment. Also why in Genesis he created Sunday’s day of rest so he could get a much needed break.

@Sneki95 You’ve been asking tough questions, many too tough for me to answer, but I think I actually have a good answer to this one.

I just re-read my post. I don’t think I made it clear that as an athiest—one who has found in natural law a synonym for what the Jesuits call God—when I used the word “our” in the second paragraph, I meant humankind as one organism. But of course it all starts with each individual to work toward the betterment of humankind, which includes caring for the earth and it’s integrated systems in which we are just as integrated—we are the organism of humankind interacting—whether we recognize it or not, with the greater systems.

What most of the religions call an omniscient, omnipresent God is, to me, natural law. Natural law is ever-present, always at work and if you stand in it’s way—such as despoiling our environment—there is hell to pay either immediately or eventually.

And what the Church refers to as “sins against God” are in reality transgressions against humankind. In this, one despoils the organism of humankind specifically. Breaking any one of what are termed the Ten Commandments will create a negative reaction in the organism. These aren’t laws handed down by God, these are laws of human nature. Take a person’s spouse, or even obviously coveting them will disturb the immediate social environment—as will jealousy and envy. Stealing will do the same. It disturbs our necessity to get along.

Thou shalt have no other Gods before me? I like this one. Try ignoring nature, or convince yourself that anything else is more powerful—money, personal influence, attempting to bend the land to the human will—and see what happens. That rule really does belong at the top of the list.

Individual acts such as rape and murder have repercussions far beyond the victims in how it affects the loved ones, the families and their structures and future relationships. Even the psyche of perpetrator of such an act is affected. These individual transgressions impact the organism. Just picking up one’s litter has an affect of setting an example to others. Leaving your immediate environment a better place than which you found it is simple, easy and good overall policy of making the world a better place.

I think the Jesuits and many others—once stripped of their fire and brimstone—have it right, but are just using archaic ideas as to what god actually is. They are wrong about where the power lay. It doesn’t live in some intangible super-being who we hope will hear our prayers. It is very tangible and is right here, right in front of our faces all the time. It is something we can touch, observe and ultimately learn to live with in harmony. I think that if more people found the opportunity and the time to spent more time observing natural law, this would become glaringly obvious to them. I believe Einstein, a man who spent his life studying nothing but natural law, saw it this way as well.

This is all just some shit I think I’ve figured out on long voyages while alone surrounded by unpredictable seas weather. It’s a great place to think.

@Sneki95 I know that at least some sects of Christianity use free will as their argument against this line of thinking. He allows bad things to happen because he doesn’t infringe on our free will. So man is the cause of all evil. Doesn’t explain earthquakes or cancer though.

Hypothetically, if there is a ‘loving God,’ that listens to prayers, and witnesses what occurs to us , and has the power to help us, then this ‘entity’ is the embodiment of ‘evil.’

It seems entertained by misery,and horror.
I picture God watching rape, murder, torture, genocide etc ,on a Huge TV, and masterbating with the tears of the innocent .Laughing heartily as it watches a baby ripped from a mother’s arms.

No fatigue there. Otherwise it would make the world better. It made this world to watch us suffer.

My religious and spiritual views have varied throughout my life, and continue to, and I try to keep my views open-ended; I’m even open to the possibility I could be wrong about whether there’s a god or not. Perhaps what’s much more difficult than trying to ‘prove’ whether there’s a god is with trying to define it. With this in mind I’ll write the following.

Many people claim that if God exists – and is benevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent – there should be no suffering and evil. Some theologists claim that natural evil needs to exist to create an equilibrium so that ‘good’ or love can be defined and appreciated. This is speculative, but perhaps (speaking hypothetically) God knew that by giving its creation freewill, evil would inevitably follow. Maybe this was its way of having people understand unconditional love through their own freewill rather than creating drones – I don’t know. It’s not just monotheistic religions that empathize the latter, but so do New Age and some versions of eastern and western mysticism as well. Personally, I have problems with this view; because in order for the idea of necessary evil to work, it either needs to pre-determine who’ll be criminals or not, or create requisites that almost guarantee that chaos will exist.

Philosophically, I find gnosticism to make the most sense. Gnosticism – sometimes referred to as the forbidden religion – is actually based on the concept of misotheism. Gnostics believe that the evil demiurge is the God of the Old Testament, and that because this creator is flawed so is its creation. Gnostics also believe in what’s called the Unknowable God, named as such, because only through self-realization along with seeing through the illusion of the evil demigod can this god be known. Gnostics believe that Jesus taught about this Unknowable God, and not about the evil demigod (or Yahweh).

Though some things here are up for debate, I personally think the latter view of God makes more sense (about most things) than the former view. There’s nothing loving about nature, where animals tear each other apart just to survive, humans almost becoming extinct 74,000 years ago, etc. However, maybe God isn’t omnipotent and omniscient, and is still evolving through us (not referring to religions based on monism).

Either way, I don’t feel one can answer a question like this with black-and-white logic. I think all theists (inclusing myself) should ask ourselves not only tough questions, but consider various possibilities. Does God (assuming it exists) hurt when we hurt, does God actually feed off of our hurt, or does God even care at all?

@Sneki95 God is no more responsible for good, or evil, than Zeus is.