Thursday, January 3, 2008

My cousin is confused

My cousin is a very religious person who cannot fathom the world without his precious deity. It shows in his response to my last post:
Admittedly, your reasoning makes my head spin. I am having a really hard time following your logic. I have come to the conclusion that we approach the whole question about the existence of God from such different positions, that it is like we are speaking two different languages.

This doesn't surprise me. He has never been in a position to think outside the Christian mindset so this kind of logic is foreign to him. I wrote back and used a family scenario when a parent treats one child as special and yet ignores the other child and tried to get him to think of God in those terms. In other words, why would God treat some people better than others for no obvious reason. Here's part of what I wrote, which you may recognize as the problem of evil:
My point is if God is the loving, benevolent, omnipotent deity that Christianity claims he is there shouldn't be any evil in the world. Since there is evil in the world in the form of horrible diseases, genocide, wars, criminals, etc. then it makes sense that either God doesn't exist or he doesn't care. For me the world looks like there is no Christian God.

The Christian answer to this problem is free will. But inserting free will into the equation doesn't answer the question. So what if he gives us free will, just remove evil from the world. God can figure a way to remove evil while still having free will. He is all-powerful, right? Problem solved again, but curiously he doesn't do this.

So when we discuss criminals and you say "I believe as long as a person is alive, there is hope for them. I believe that God can work miracles and can redeem anyone at any time, thus there is always hope"
then I have to say "Really? Being omnipotent, benevolent, and he loves us, why are there criminals anyway? Just create all of us as good, law abiding people." Viola! Problem solved!

Since that doesn't happen to every criminal then I have to conclude that either God doesn't exist (as defined) or he doesn't care.

I won't delude myself in thinking I'm going to reach him this time.

3 comments:

Protium the Heathen said...

Good answer SS.
It can be difficult to get through the thick shell of delusion sometimes.

Hope you had a great New Year :)

tina FCD said...

But...but....it's god's mysterious way, who are we to question god??

Sean Wright said...

A little bit at a time, slowly sowing seeds of doubt.

He doesn't understand your logic because he knows you are making sense and he's fighting against his religious conditioning.