What do they mean by " God's Plan"?

God has plans for those who are His that is Believers who love, honor and respect Him. Things that are good happen to people who are evil, not all the time do calamity happens to them before they die. Take Castro, if he died without accepting the Lord but he put to death someone who did, who in the long run has a worse fate? The Believer will spend eternity with Christ while Castro will not have it nearly as well, so what would all the riches and mammon do for him? Sometimes bad things come to those who are doing evil because they breed it in other people who deal it back to them. People getting killed, disasters, loss of life, stealing, malice, and the likes are not part of God’s plan but are a byproduct mostly of man’s evil heart and sinful nature, basically man is getting what he bargained for, God is not going to micromanage part of things and not all of it. Because we have free will He be hands off (as many like) so if disaster strikes them, it does. To some of His children He might prevent disaster, but there is always a purpose for it, either to show the world the miracle He will work through it, or to get the person’s attention because their heart is right, but they are screwing up.

The idea, as I understand it, is that in order for this to be the best of all worlds, it is necessary for some people to suffer. Supposedly, if you understood God’s master plan it would all make sense.

I do not defend this idea. I am an atheist and to me the statement is equivalent to what happens happens. Sometimes people will say that good and evil people will get what is coming to them in the afterlife. If that is the case, it still does not explain why evil can go unpunished in this life and why good people suffer.

You can believe there is a god and blame/give credit. Or you can learn to think more rationally and have less fiction in your life, but if you want to believe in supernatural things like tarot or horoscopes, I’m not the person to talk to, sorry.

You should behave righteously as it is the correct way to behave. The circumstances of your life are not relevant. Whether you believe in God or not also does not matter.

I find the insistence that terrible occurrences are “God’s Plan” is incompatible with the insistence that God is all-good and all-loving.

An all-good and all-loving god would not give small children cancer or cause wildfires to sweep through two of the states that house some of the highest relative populations of his own most fervent followers.

A teacher used to say to me, “Fair is a weather condition.”

It’s a good motto.

“It is all a part of God’s plan”, if it ever had any decent meaning and explanation, is today pretty much a nice way to say “I’m too lazy/incompetent to deal with this and do something”. (I imagine God saying “No, it’s not my plan, shut up.”)

People face some situations that they can’t help (or won’t help, depends on the situation) and console themselves that it’s how it’s supposed to be. God is someone usually depicted as an entity that knows better than you, so if God decided it should be that way, he knows why he did it, therefore there is no reason to act smarter than God and oppose the current situation.
It’s basically a way to console yourself and wash your hands from everything, but not really say “I don’t want to deal with this”.

I don’t like that phrase, seems like distancing yourself of what you could’ve changed. A lame, kinda shabby excuse.

As for the rest: who cares if Bob has better than you? It doesn’t affect your life in any way, now does it? Therefore, fuck Bob, he doesn’t care about you, so there is no need to care about him. Live your life the way you believe is good and righteous, and focus on helping the ones who have it worse, not better than you. Instead of being jealous of Bob that has a three-floor house, why not try to help Jenna that sleeps on the street?

It means that the person who says “it is god’s plan” is reciting mumbo jumbo because that person doesn’t understand something. In short, it’s a cop-out.

The second piece of the ‘god’s plan’ comment, by the way, is “and who am I, a lowly mortal, to understand god’s plan?”

“It’s god’s plan” is on par with “It is what it is”, and both phrases are full of despair and inaction.

We actually become stronger through suffering (unfortunately…or fortunately, depending on how you look at it.) Think how things would be if we never had to struggle with anything, never had to work for anything, and then suddenly got hit with a big hardship or tragedy. It is our past life experiences that make us who we are, that strengthen us to deal with much harder things in life further down the road.

I don’t know what you believe, but have you never had a situation that seemed horrible at the time, but then ended up working out much better than you would ever have imagined. For us believers, we believe that God, who is omnipotent can see a much larger scope of things than we ever could, so that what may seem horrible to us was really for our benefit. Sometimes we find out later how things actually worked out better, but sometimes we don’t.
It can make it very frustrating to see justice in this world.

Here’s a simplistic example: Ever been stuck in traffic, and end up getting where you were going late? Frustrating, isn’t it? But did you ever find out later that if you had been further along in traffic, you would have been involved in a perhaps fatal accident?

Look how many stories there are of people who should have been at work at the World Trade Center on September 11th. At the last minute something came up that delayed them or detained them. Don’t you think many of them were frustrated, annoyed, etc. at the time when that happened? Imagine how they felt later when they found out they may very well have died that day if their day had gone as planned.

The point is, many times we have no idea what is going on in the bigger picture, when in all actuality it is working out for the best. Whether you believe this is God’s plan for you or not, many of us know that things happen for a reason. And as for good things happening to “bad people”, yes, that is frustrating, but it often balances out, although, again, we can’t always see the end result. That’s part of sin being brought into the world…that not everything is fair and right. Hope my long answer helped, whether or not you believe in a higher power.

Here is a video about how science works against ‘God’s Plan’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNWWrDBRBqk

It’s a way for people who want to believe in poetic tales to console themselves. If a young child enduring a brief, painful life afflicted with brain cancer in “God’s plan” then God is an excessively cruel tyrant.

Agreed with @Seek. If God is all powerful and He loves us, then there should be no plan. Why is there a need for one? Why do people need to suffer if life is a gift? Why does he fuck with us like this?
It’s like when they say that because Adam and Eve fucked up, then why does the rest of humanity have to suffer the consequences? I wasn’t there, I didn’t fucking grab no forbidden apple, I didn’t fuckin get sweet talked by some dirty ass snake.

So this means God either isn’t all powerful, or He’s not all loving. Or that He just ain’t real.

@Lonelyheart807 yes thnk you for taking the time to answer. I believe in God but sometimes so many things happen to me that i wonder why and I wonder if he is on my side… I make me also sometimes I feel like this saying is almost like the one people say to basic looking people (that what matter is who you are on the inside) to make us feel a little better about ourselves

I hope I end up seeing why this happened to me because its been years and I still struggle :/

Thank you also everyone who took the time to answer, seems like not many are belivers of God

I understand where everyone’s opinion is coming from

Maybe it could be karma, our ancestors did so much shit that we are still paying for and it becomes a vicious circle where a fuck up has a fuck up child, this fuck up child keeps messing up the world and now millions years later there’s so much stuff done that it’s just not pure anymore.

It would be so much easier if we knew was really was

We have never had it so good.

It’s just a euphemism for “fate”. Whatever the tag, they all result from the urge to satisfy ourselves that random events are somehow “directed”.

@Lovefirst

Oh there’s karma alright, but it’s not what most western people think. Most westerners think “karma” is some mystical force that punishes the bad and rewards the good. Fits in with Judaeo-Christian notions of divine intervention that most of us just can’t shake even if we’ve shrugged off the Judaeo-Christian fables (it’s hard to entirely divorce oneself from such deeply ingrained cultural influences).

Easterners view karma as, essentially, cause-and-effect. The word itself means “action”. This works on an individual level, of course. It’s easy to spot the connection between, say, jumping someone’s fence to cut through their yard and getting bit by their dog as a result. Or orchestrating a terrorist attack then getting gunned down by the military of the nation that suffered that attack. That stuff’s easy to connect. But it also works on a collective level, society, the planet, as a whole. And it’s not always easy, or even possible, to draw the connections. The world is as it is because each and every one of us, every living thing on the planet, each with its own, mostly self-interested, actions, shape the world every second of every day with our actions. With every single thing we do we plant seeds that come to fruition somewhere at some point (and we rarely know or understand when it does).

Thank you also everyone who took the time to answer, seems like not many are belivers of God
You would have better luck finding a game hen alive after being the a den of starving wolves for three days than find many Bible believing Believers here, sorry to tell you, that you have landed in atheist central. The Lord has only good thoughts and plans for you, if you read your Word you will know to expect trials, what does James 1:2–5 tell you? To me it says if you can’t be tested you can’t be trusted.

Why do such weak and lowly creatures such as humans need trials, and how are they expected to pass them?

Well if it’s a sword fight though, I can win that.

God’s plan means that sometimes bad things happen even to good people for a reason. It may not be a reason you see or understand at the moment but in time it will unfold as it was meant to be. Of course God gave us free choice and that can throw a wrench into things for our own lives, but think of it as nudging us in the right direction. There are several things that has happened in my life that I thought were bad or wrong and although I still remember the pain of it, it did shape me into the person I am now, and has only made me stronger and given me the strength to help those weaker than myself. Strength I didn’t even realize I had if it weren’t for the bad times that I had to pick myself up from.
If you want to try to figure out why certain things happen, then play the what if game. I thought once. What if my father didn’t die when I was 18? What if I wasn’t a geeky teen between 12 and 17? What if I wasn’t picked on during those geeky years by the cool kids? There are a ton of moments in my life that has guided me to be the person I am today. Some were very sad but some pushed me to better myself. To live in the moment at times. To dare new things. To live a life with little fear. To learn as much as I can. To not let others take my compassion away. So in essence. My trails have shaped me and I’m happy with who I am about 98 percent of the time. The 2 percent convinces me I can be better. And maybe that is what God is trying to tell me. I can always be better.

@Hypocrisy_Central I’m not an atheist. But where better to come to confirm your faith than among the wolves as you put it.

If you were picked on as a teen by bullies, then that was part of God’s plan to turn you into what you are today. Said plan needed bullies, so God put them in your way, planting the seed of malice in their hearts. That is not free will, because if it was, then they may not have picked on you.
If God is real and He has a plan, everyone around you is not merely necessity. Not that one would learn this much through the stories of The Bible. Just how many babies died when Herod went apeshit going after Jesus? I refuse to worship something that makes its creatures suffer, even if He exists.

@Berserker It’s also quite possible that he simply doesn’t stop cruelty that happens in the world because it is of our own making and we are giving him way too much credit for all the ills of the world. Cruelty is something of our own choice and free will. We choose cruelty sometimes as individuals and sometimes by simply being passive. Just look at all the people who voted for Trump even after hearing months of his hate speech. Whether one believes in God or doesn’t one thing can’t be denied. We all bring about our own misery as the human race that is becoming less humane by the day. Religion could completely stop existing and people will always find a new reason or the same old reason to be cruel to one another. Just look at Trump. He has every reason in the world to be generous and kind. Yet he is far from that. It isn’t because of religion. It’s because he’s a con man.

@Pandora , Let me see if I understand you properly. If good things happen to good people it is because of God, but if bad things happen to them it is because of bad people.

@Pandora Religion could completely stop existing and people will always find a new reason or the same old reason to be cruel to one another.

We’re in complete agreement here. Man has never needed religion to skullfuck his fellow man. It is in our nature, the “reasons” merely giving said nature a cause. Which makes me wonder why God would create us this way.

Is Trump part of the plan? How is God to orchestrate His plan if we have free will and run amock? Jehova’s Witnesses believe that the evil in the world happens because of The Devil. Well God created Satan, why doesn’t He stop Him? He could. None of this even needs to happen.
Back to Trump, if I believed in God and that there was a plan, I would have to believe Trump was meant to be president. I mean we’re talking about the leader of a country here, if God has a plan then there has to be some limit to free will. Not that I imagine this could be calculated in any way.

Who knows, perhaps Trump is the next savior. Look what they did to Jesus, they nailed him to a cross, so why would Trump not ne hated.

Disclaimer; I am not a Trump fan, and were I American I would not have voted for him. The above is a mere example of a point I attempt to illustrate.

^ Which makes me wonder why God would create us this way.
I guess He could have made us like gold fish, or dogs, or even flies, where we as humans would be slave to innate instinct and lack any creativity, empathy, or anything that makes humans unique. We would for the most part be carbon copies of each other all following the same basic blueprint and only coming together with the opposite sex by way of some hormonal trigger and nothing more. Yeah, I guess to some He could have made us that limited and they would like it better if they even had the ability to think that complex.