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Stephen Fry on Confronting God After Death
- Thread starter ponpo
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HiredN00bs
Banned
It cracks me up when people laud the Bible's stories as metaphors to live by. No matter how you read it, there are awful, backwards, and wicked ideas which it advocates.
Oh man. Fuck the debate. Gay Byrne's reactions, this gif
I genuinely can't remember laughing this much in years . If that gif isn't a standard reaction gif for the next decade there truly is no god.
The shock, the contemplation, the resignation.
Why do we know they are both trials by God? Why does the trial even need to be of that kind? If anything "First World Problems" show that people struggle through trials relative to their situation. Why do things exist with the purpose having a beneficial purpose also need to have complementary and antagonistic purpose. Are people gifted by god to endure worse trials and struggles? Is that an arbitrary blessing to come out the other side with even greater glory. Why is one person's trial obvious while another persons may not be. Was cancer made an affliction upon humanity so that it would be a great struggle to work towards? You say why not blame the human brain and not God? Well if we are God's creation then does he not feel responsible for creating the human brain in such a way that people are afflicted by mental illness. Suffer from learning disabilities. That the solutions to the world's problems are highly abstracted away and the brain isn't designed to cope with them in a natural manner. Oh but God has merely made us all different with our own talents. Such that if we find ourselves with the wrong trials and struggles we are doomed to fail them. While others are in the prime position for their struggle? Or maybe God sees all struggle equal, yet he has made us so our experiences are so unequal so incredibly asymmetrical that we wouldn't possibly experience the world in a light that painted everything equally. Without even deny God, and working with your assumptions. This line of thinking really does not make sense.
Gay Byrne ugh.....what a self righteous smug asshole...........(He made getting a driving licence a little bit harder than it needs to be. Also got a good government position job because he use to be a talk show host. Dem qualifications ay)
On topic...what kind of answer did he want to a question like that, a short one?.....Cereal
On topic...what kind of answer did he want to a question like that, a short one?.....Cereal
Forceatowulf
G***n S**n*bi
I've never met Suge Knight, but I still wouldn't piss him off if I was at his mercy, ya know, considering his reputation and all.
And the Christian God has a pretty bad reputation, bruv. Makes Suge Knight look like a fucking choir boy.
You don't need to meet people who are famous for being pieces of shit to know it's better to not get on their bad side.
I'm sorry, but I'm still not buying what people like you are trying to sell. Comes off really phoney *shrug*
heliosRAzi
Banned
I agree. But we're not disputing evolution, we're disputing an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God. If God is all of those things, then our world should not and would not exist as it is today. We don't have eye-eating insects because God loves us. We don't have candirus because God loves us. We don't have war and famine and disease because God loves us. We have all of those things because God does not exist.
Want the simple answer? I think religion is a complete and utter load of bollocks and I find it laughable to believe in any of it. I will never meet god, because...well.
Believe what you want, but thats my personal view. I don't care what others believe in - they can believe what they want, no matter my view on it.
GrizzleBoy
Banned
Or maybe there actually is a god.
And the problem is that religion at its root is basically mankind telling mankind about God, instead of God telling people about god.
Now, we know mankind is an asshole. Supposedly so much of an asshole that even an eternally loving God would kick us out of a heavenly garden to suffer for thousands of years. We're literally that bad according to some holy texts.
Would you believe a book written by a species of people God thought so untrustworthy that even an eternally forgiving, all loving God could no longer allow them to remain in the garden of Eden? Would you believe his word as the word of God?
Because I routinely have a hard time trusting the words of men as the words of God.......
Moff
Member
again, the whole question of judgement or trials is evil, exactly as fry put it.
if there was a future civilization that would let people suffer to judge and try them (and in the process killing and torturing millions and billions of them) to see if they are good enough to enter their city. would you not call those people evil tyrants?
Neuromancer
Member
I don't know how you do it.
soul creator
Member
"It's different when god does it though, and mysterious ways"
That seems to be what it always comes down to. Even when reading all the fancy academic/theological arguments trying to defend it, that's ultimately still the end result. Well, either that, or redefining words like "good" and "evil" to mean the complete opposite of what they normally mean when people communicate.
On another note, Here's a short list from wikipedia of the usual defenses. I'd actually be curious to hear from people which one they think is the best argument for answering the problem of evil. They all seem to have blatantly obvious flaws that I notice 2 seconds after reading them, but I'm a baby-eating, fedora-tipping atheist, so what do I know.
Dragon1893
Member
Holy shit, lol.
Awesome answer. Laughed so much at the interviewer's reaction.
Awesome answer. Laughed so much at the interviewer's reaction.
Dion Blaster
Member
So you telling him to fuck off wasn't an actual answer then?
This reads like a giant case of Stockholm Syndrome.
You need free will. But only for a few years and then you are judged for eternity.
soul creator
Member
*Additional Note: "free will" of murderers, rapists, deadly viruses, natural disasters, etc. apparently matter more to god than the victim's "free will" to, well, not die horribly.
It's an abusive relationship to the n-th degree.
Everything good was given to you by god and you better appreciate it.
All the world's suffering is our own fault.
The minds of people that look at this world and declare it the work of an omnipotent, benevolent god have been beaten senseless. And they love and worship "Him" for it.
Some are allowed Paradise after incredibly short lives. Others are "blessed" with long lives to give them every opportunity to make a mistake and be sent to hell. Completely fair.
I never said that. I said I would never get to do that because I would obviously never meet god.
Even that has to get old unless you're ego spans all known...anything.
Maninthemirror
Banned
And again without judgement and trial evolution itself would stop as nothing would struggle and everything would win. There would be chaos. That is not the meaning of human life as per Abrahamic faith at least
You're describing heaven. Heaven would be chaos, huh?
Maninthemirror
Banned
Without struggle you wouldn't have evolution as everything would win and ecerythng would remain stagnant. It is the struggle between different entities to evolve against each other which got us to where we are to even conceive of an evolution in the first place. At least The abrahamic faithful belief that this is only possible not by chance but because of a God which has brought humanity to a point of current existing where we now can conceive of making our life easier by during the very diseases we call as brought on by a so called evil god when in fact God is good and we should be thankful for our existence and the ability to overcome struggle and to ask for help when we don't think we can and pray that everything good that happens is a blessing and every bad thing is a lesson and a silver lining and pray that it's not a punishment but just the will of God
Maninthemirror
Banned
Heaven is the result of passing this place which is not physical in our sense of physicality and its a place where God says people due to witnessing God due to their actions in this world will be the good people who will only be near God. As per abrahamic faith the human sense cannot even conceive of what heaven will actually be like but put a metaphorical sense that it will be ultimate peace where the souls of people will be near God, the ending eternal place of our souls existence. In fact some abrahamic thinking also says that hell is everlasting in the human sense but it is like a hospital where people will be treated but for them will be a punishement like someone recovering from drugs struggled first and eventually the only one remaining in hell will be satan who will eventually succumb to the greatness of God as the last thing to do long long after everyone has passed
If that's true, there's zero reason to follow Abrahamic faith. I'd end up in heaven anyway. I'm curious what groups actually believe that. I haven't heard of such an outcome before.
Regardless, none of it is provable. If Abrahamic faith said your one purpose in life was to sacrifice one puppy to God on a daily basis and that's it, you'd be telling me to get with the program. None of it ever has to make sense. It was written long ago enough, it must be the truth. I say nah.
In nature things are causal. Particles influencing each other. So in the world of complexity, forms which are able to replicate in an environment give way to variation which becomes adapted. As an equilibrium is reached competition increases in the closes systems which gave way to those complex forms and a struggle between them begins to occur. There is no evidence that God must precede struggle. Struggle is emergent, and struggle between life gives way to dynamic that is viewed much differently than purely non-organic processes.
I tend to think that old world creationist are more rational, but they still have to smuggle God's roll into an entirely naturalistic explanation of things. So at least young earth creationists attempt to create a self-contained model. You seem to be smuggling in explanations like the former.
Basically your rationale is of the same kind that the Mu'tazilites had first noticed a problem in. That if God had to make life in a particular way, which is to say God did not create the Qur'an but God himself was beholden to it. Than their would be a second God. As this cannot be, God is the Unity of all things, God created the Qur'an and filled with his absolute Justice.
Still not sure why it's fair that I, "a descendant of Adam and Eve" should be punished for them eating out of the tree of the knowledge of good & evil (Why would a loving god create evil?) because they were tricked by a serpent (Also created by the abrahamic). This all seems very convoluted to make God appear like a very benevolent entity who watched his children fail when really he set them up to fail and then gave them the maximum punishment. And he couldn't just purify the next generation, no, he had to take his "justice" upon everyone!
Pandora's Pithos made more sense because Zeus wanted to punish humans, so he made the first woman curious and put temptation before her. Very similar to the garden of eden except nowhere does it say that Zeus was benevolent, and that he gave humans a fair deal.
Pandora's Pithos made more sense because Zeus wanted to punish humans, so he made the first woman curious and put temptation before her. Very similar to the garden of eden except nowhere does it say that Zeus was benevolent, and that he gave humans a fair deal.
That's...nebulous. What's the higher power there for to you? If this realm is unfair and crazy, as you say, what's it's role? It clearly isn't in control.
I want to see you spin the Holocaust.
It is God's fault for creating cancer, not humanity's fault for having trouble curing it. It's not as if God made us technologically advanced from the start. How can you defend the suffering of so many ancient peoples who succumbed to cancer, measles, smallpox, etc.?
Also, if humanity cured cancer and got rid of all or nearly all disease, would that actually be bad? It would ease the suffering of many people, limiting their "growth" before their entrance to heaven.
And why do many people have to suffer for the flaws of others?
Yeah it's like a sex trafficking victim defending their pimp. Doesn't matter how much abuse I get, I know he still loves me <3
Don't forget to ask if heaven has free will if evil is necessary, but nothing evil ever happens there (besides Lucifer's rebellion). If heaven has no free will, makes you wonder what's all the hype about it in this universe.
God revealing himself to you eliminates free will, so there is none in heaven. Yet its super important to have free will on earth so we can determine who goes to Hell.
What is this higher power, what does it do, and what leads you to believe in it?
The higher power to me is the happiness And joy I feel in my heart which is just my expierence and may not ring true for you as we all are guided by our own expierences
and you just have to observe the physical universe to know it's all crazy
I'm definitely not denying things are crazy and unfair. Your higher power sounds a lot better than most!
Moff
Member
a father can teach his children to grow up without hitting them, a god should be able to do the same. not every struggle is cruel shit like bone cancer in children or the eye eating bacteria.
fry did not say "why is there no world peace?", he was specifically talking about extremely cruel examples which, if they are really intelligent design, can only come from the mind of a twisted madman.
we would have evolved perfectly fine without them.
speculawyer
Member
Or instead twisting yourself into a pretzel with mental gymnastics, you could just say there is no god and disease is the result of the natural arms race of evolution. Occam's razor.
This reminds me of my grandmother who was very Catholic but she would always tell me that everyone would end up in Heaven and that Hell wasn't real. It was just a threat so that people behave and try to be good and not evil. She believed God was all love and loved everyone, even the murderers, and that everyone would go to Heaven.
That's why she never forced her religion on her kids and she would always see the good in everyone, and everyone loved her. But i guess it had everything to do with her being a good person with a big heart and nothing to do with her faith.
Marc
Member
My word, what a guy Stephen is.
A national treasure, I wish he would form a party and run for 'Prime Minister'. I think the country would all vote for him.
Two things I would recommend people read about God's intentions and a way of interpreting them would be the Preacher graphic novel series and the Devils Apocrypha. Both offer up interesting ideas and the latter really attempts to almost 'prove' God by disproving him in a way. Good fun if you're an atheist who questions that stuff.
Wikipedia him? He is basically this generations oscar wilde in some ways.
He has been involved with so much stuff, from V for Vendetta, to Blackadder, to the recent Hobbit movies, the voice of Little Big Planet and the brother of Sherlock Holmes.
The guy is a total legend and ignoring his constant struggle with depression and weight, is for me what every human should aspire to be. He is intelligent, aggressively inquisitive about the world around him, highly respectful until the subject deserves none, appeals to the highest common denominator and basically if the world were run by people like him we would live in near paradise.
A national treasure, I wish he would form a party and run for 'Prime Minister'. I think the country would all vote for him.
Two things I would recommend people read about God's intentions and a way of interpreting them would be the Preacher graphic novel series and the Devils Apocrypha. Both offer up interesting ideas and the latter really attempts to almost 'prove' God by disproving him in a way. Good fun if you're an atheist who questions that stuff.
Wikipedia him? He is basically this generations oscar wilde in some ways.
He has been involved with so much stuff, from V for Vendetta, to Blackadder, to the recent Hobbit movies, the voice of Little Big Planet and the brother of Sherlock Holmes.
The guy is a total legend and ignoring his constant struggle with depression and weight, is for me what every human should aspire to be. He is intelligent, aggressively inquisitive about the world around him, highly respectful until the subject deserves none, appeals to the highest common denominator and basically if the world were run by people like him we would live in near paradise.
Well, she's more right than you'd think.
heliosRAzi
Banned
I don't believe in God or any other higher being, but seeing as Fry's argument is that an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God is contradictory to all of the pain and suffering that we experience in the world he created. If God is not one of those things, then he is not God.
Basically this:
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