There aint no god, if there is may she strike this thread DEAD

[whatthehey]

95. I think you're missing the point

1) How many people run from cops who they cannot see, cannot hear, cannot touch and cannot detect? Cops who are not immanent in the natural world even? The cop analogy is silly because, unlike gods, we know they exist and they only affect concerns for accountability when we know they are in a position to arrest or punish. Running from the accountability of God for nonbelievers would be like running from an otherwise empty crime scene because we saw the movie Robocop and think it's going to burst through the wall. I think believers just can't quite internalize what disbelief is. There is absolutely no difference to me between the threat of hell and the threat of a stocking full of coal from Santa if I'm a naughty boy, or the threat of being reincarnated as a slug in my next samsara stage. They are exactly, 100% analogous to me. I know they are not to you and it may even be an unsettling or offensive thought to consider, but it's the truth. How much do Hindu concerns for a negative reincarnation affect your ethical choices? That's exactly (unless you are a rather unusual believer) how much concern I give to accountability to God.

2) Not sure of the point here. Even for those who are not caught, the accountability of the judicial system is a genuine concern. They know they can be caught and convicted. That's why they try not to be. This is the inverse of the above point. We know cops exist. We certainly don't run in panicked flight from cops who are not there and cannot see us, but neither do we shoot people in crowded places wearing a nametag then sit down in front of a CCTV camera holding up "you can't take me pigs" signs until they arrive. Well, sanity and desire to live as a given. Cops and prisons are a systemic deterrent to antisocial behasvior, but they are so only because we have real world data and experience, hopefully at second hand, of arrests, convictions, and punishments. Divine accountability is not a concern to nonbelievers. Judicial accountability is.

3) I may need to clarify. IF you have any concern for accountability to the Xian god, then you would rationally choose Christianity regardless of your sins, because Christianity offers a path to repentance thence salvation. Nonbelievers have no concern for repentance because, by definition, we don't believe there's anybody there to repent to, or to save, or indeed barring a few Buddhist atheists, anything to be saved from. Deathbed conversions of well known atheists are common glurge but nigh universal lies. it does however have an interesting corollary to point....

4) Without trying to cause offense, this idea has always flabbergaasted me. Correct if you could my understanding..

God, all knowing and all powerful, created a species he knew would fall from grace, and could have created them differently, even retaining free will. He created, obviously with no duress or imposed necessity as who can force God, the means of temptation to that fall and an eternal punishment to apply to that fall. He imposed that penalty on descendents of those who fell in perpetuity regardless of their own personal virtue or failings, and who were never given the choice to fall from grace or not initially. He then waited for many hundreds of generations before giving people a chance to be saved, by believing that he incarnated himself as a sacrificial atonement to himself, essentially "killing" only the human incarnation of a homoousian omnipotent being in a way which, while certainly painful to humans at least, hardly approaches the fate of Robert-Francois Damiens who lacked the consolation of being the divine creator at the time of his demise. And if we, another hundred or so generations away, do not accept this despite many competing claims about eternal verities and with zero empirical evidence to choose between them, then we are condemned to eternal infinite punishment?

That's not the way believers like to put it, but is there any incorrect statement there (and do note I'm not at this point using belittling and dismissive cultural analogs tempting though that is)? If there isn't, exactly how terrible was the fall, how culpable was created mankind, how unforgivable should it be for those who never fell, how awesome was the attempted remedy on God's part and how reasonable is the case that we should accept that remedy from evidence limited to fairly typical Near Eastern mythology? And much more germane, how reasonable is the punishment which is infinite and irrevocable? This is worse than Kafka. God is not just withholding evidence of the charges to Joseph K, he is withholding evidence that there's even a judge and a court to try him, and then saying that once he is dragged into court, there is no chance to seek mitigation or clemency (that corollary BTW - I would surely seek repentance were I given credible empirical evidence that there was anybody to repent to and be saved from. The idea of being a martyr for atheism at the Pearly Gates would be insane).

That's what makes God as Christians typically describe him a vicious loathsome monster. He made us designed to fall when he could have designed us to choose grace in the first place, placed temptation in our path knowing we would succumb, built a hell he did not need to build to punish every human for the fall of some (but he loves us), went millennia before giving us hope and then hid that hope in humdrum syncretic folk tales with no real evidence (for anybody not alive in 1st Century CE Judea), and then sends us to that infinite eternal punishment for not guessing right which religious claims to follow in a few scant decades on Earth, giving no second chances once his very existence is proven to us.

Again how am I wrong here? Again how is that not monstrous evil? If you really want to posit an admirable, let alone worshipful, God, you have to suggest a God who offers universal salvation after appropriate contrition when contrition is proven applicable. A very few believers go this route but most don't because that only makes Christians special for a short blink of eternity.

ETA final reminder - my complaints about hell are complaints against the fictional construct of a loving god offering infinite punishment. I have not the slightest twinkle of belief that either exists in reality and live my life entirely as if they did not.