Can God actually "die?"

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

And this raises other questions as well. Like the whole idea of Satan waging war on Heaven. Why would Satan bother if God is omnipotent and could just will the forces away without even having to move?

You have to understand Satan first. In the original Jewish source material, Satan was a powerful angel at God's side who would play games with God like fucking around with Job. Then people came to discover that the scriptures were full of Jewish nonsense once the Jews got around to editing things and compiling it into the Bible. So we found that Satan was best described as the very creator of this world, but still subordinate to an entity we might call "God". Satan's sin is of course pride, so he thinks he can either win, or impress God so much that he'll get a promotion. And why shouldn't he think that given that he is the ruler and creator of everything that physically exists and is on speaking terms with God (God lets him torment people like Adam and Eve, Job, and Jesus--it's all for the sake of honing our souls)?

In fact, one of my problems with a lot of fiction (including classical mythology) in general is that it tends to treat gods as if they're just people. This is one place where you can see the limits of human creativity in those days--they tended to imagine Gods or whoever working just like a human would. So you get Greek stories of Hades wanting to bang Persephone, or Chinese mythologies saying Heaven is basically just China but the government is now set in golden buildings on clouds and a lot of historical figures live there. Or any of the millions of stories that show the afterlife as being run basically like a corporation.

The problem is, we humans work that way for very easily observable reasons. We want to bang because we have a biological desire to procreate, which is arguably necessary for the propogation of our species. Gods are already immortal so they would have no reason to fuck. But uncreative humans just assume "we fuck, therefore Gods must as well."

And this goes back to the whole "God dying" thing. Again this seems like just uncreative humans assuming that because we can die, that clearly God (or at least a god) can as well. Which maybe in some pantheons is valid. But applied to the Christian God, it makes no sense whatsoever.

A god by definition can't be truly supreme. That's stuff the Jews stole from nearby tribes that goes back to the Sumerians and how each Sumerian city had a patron god and later empires had a national god. The Assyrians had Ashur, the Babylonians had Marduk, the Philistines had Ba'al, and the Jews had Yahweh. It's ultimately based on their misguided belief that an ethnic group is nothing but slaves of a single god. No, a truly supreme god is indistinguishable from the universe itself, and we are simply another facet of this being. Thus a "god" can be defined as a higher entity than a man, who is not confined to the laws governing man as an entity but in many ways is similar. People cannot comprehend gods because they are not from our substrate, that's why they try and understand them by the culture they live in. However, in many ways this can come close to understanding the reality of gods.

Man when you put it that way Christianity sounds really fucking stupid.

It's actually the single most logical form of morality out there. My only problem with it is that there's no evidence that Bible God exists and Christianity is true.

Why is it impossible for Evolutionists and Standard Creationists to realize that Evolution can be a natural process of God's Creation? Do people really think that God hand-built each and every animal on Earth before teleporting them down to the planet, or is it more likely that he created the infinitely complex machinations that would interact over eons to bring forth the existence of that animal? It seems to me that YECs unironically believe that God is an old man in a white robe who wears sandals and watches the Earth on a very big TV.

If you believe in God, you must believe in the Bible, therefore why would you doubt that God designed every life form as described in Genesis? Not believing in the very first chapter of the Bible and the subsequent chapters which establish that yes, it's literally 6 days that happened around 6-8,000 years ago mean you might as well question and handwave everything else in the Bible, including Jesus's resurrection. If the Bible is actually the word of God, then evolution is categorically bullshit and every sign of evolution can be explained as God testing our faith.

 

[The Ugly One]

Yeah, God razed Sodom and Gomorrah and killed their inhabitants instead of willing them to stop being degenerates. And that's a good thing, not because killing people is good but because everything God does is good by definition.

But he did get them to stop being degenerates.

 

[Tablet County]

It's actually the single most logical form of morality out there. My only problem with it is that there's no evidence that Bible God exists and Christianity is true.

So your only problem with Christianity is that the very foundation of the entire system is bullshit.
Man when you put it that way Christianity sounds really fucking stupid.

 

[Thomas Talus]

it's literally 6 days

That's not what the original Hebrew requires, the word rendered in English as "days" does not strictly imply a 24-hr unit of time.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

So your only problem with Christianity is that the very foundation of the entire system is bullshit.
Man when you put it that way Christianity sounds really fucking stupid.

Of course. Christianity would make a lot of sense if there was any actual evidence that a long-dead Jewish preacher is the literal son of the god of the Jews.

That's not what the original Hebrew requires, the word rendered in English as "days" does not strictly imply a 24-hr unit of time.

But it can also mean literally 24 hours, and it's clear from the narrative that it most makes sense as six literal days. Why would God make plants and trees (day 3) before there was a sun (day 4)? It makes sense if the plants and trees only have to endure darkness for one day, but makes a lot less sense if they have to endure thousands or millions of years. Christian writers since the age of the Church fathers also affirmed the world is only 6-8,000 years old. Even the Talmud says it's only about 6,000 years old. Practically no one who believed in the Bible, Jew or Christian thought the world was millions of years old before the Enlightenment and the beginnings of science worship.

 

[I'm Retarded?]

Yeah, God razed Sodom and Gomorrah and killed their inhabitants instead of willing them to stop being degenerates. And that's a good thing, not because killing people is good but because everything God does is good by definition.

well, the idea is that God doesn't fuck with free will because that would defeat the purpose of creating humans in the first place. humans are free to choose to be cool or retarded and are rewarded or punished accordingly, and also, the Bible never explicitly says this part, but judging by how God acts, human life is less valuable than humans assume it is. it kind of makes sense when you look at it from the perspective of physical life being just a blip on the scale of timeless spiritual existence, it's basically the vibe check before you get sorted into your respective afterlife. but we're retarded by design, because free will would be less meaningful if we knew every consequence of every decision before we made it. so we only perceive time as an ongoing present, and a side effect of that is that we don't know anything about shit that hasn't already happened to us or that isn't picked up by our limited sense perception. so, since nobody alive has experienced the afterlife (unless you believe the handful of head cases who claim to have visited it and returned), everything we know and take for granted is tied to this temporary state of being alive, making the idea of death terrifying. but to a being like God, life and death are just stages of the sorting process. the people of Gomorrah were fucked up, they weren't going to stop being fucked up (I assume), and their fucked-up-ness was so bad that it was fucking with everyone around them (the Bible passages mention that - paraphrasing - a great outcry had been raised against them), so, why not just send them where they're going anyway? then everyone else can get on with their lives without being gang-raped to death by a town of perverted loonies.

now a question that is raised by this, I feel, is why God is so selective with his intervention. in the Bible accounts he seems almost opportunist in his targeting of sinners, often using them as a foil to bring attention to himself or enrich his chosen people (such as when he gives them Canaan to conquer in order to establish the land of Israel). I guess one possible explanation is that there's no real point to interrupting somebody's natural journey to death unless a Greater Purpose can be made of it, which is usually some form of demonstration of God's power or mercy or spiritual authority or whatever.

the other question is... why doesn't he do that shit now? and the answer to that one is uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh that's just how it works, idiot.

 

[Agamemnon Busmalis]

My mortal brain can only see two possibilities: Either Satan was so high he ignored all logic, or else that characterization is also the fault of a faulty human author making shit up.

Pride more than anything, he didn't want to serve God and rebelled against him for that reason. People who are arrogant and prideful, or blinded to reason from other causes, make mistakes like this. It's how Crassus got himself killed.

As for the Tree of Knowledge... its only in the Bible we hear that God commanded them not to eat. For all we know, in reality it could've been more like "hey, if you eat this you'll have to move out of the garden, just FYI" or perhaps God even wanted them to eventually eat the fruit and the whole Garden was essentially a safe "front yard' of sorts while mankind was in its childhood stage, and all the stuff about it representing a downfall was nostalgic storytellers being all like "man we used to live in this awesome garden and everything was good, until your mom ruined it for us!" similar to how people nowadays look back on the eighties and nineties.

I think there's an argument you can make that the sin that led to expulsion from the Garden wasn't so much the act itself but how Adam and Eve tried to conceal it from God after the fact.

Before they ate of the tree they didn't have the kind of moral knowledge necessary to understand the full gravity of what they did, but afterwards they had that understanding and by intentionally trying to conceal it, they showed their full willingness to directly disobey God. Full knowledge and intent are two of the criteria for mortal sin (along with grave matter).

 

[Power Ranger Monster]

Yes he could, and He can also resurrect afterwards. He will come and go as He pleases.

 

[skykiii]

So your only problem with Christianity is that the very foundation of the entire system is bullshit.
Man when you put it that way Christianity sounds really fucking stupid.

The key phrase is "when you put it that way..." A lot of what Save the Loli is saying sounds like bunkum to me. Satan created the world? You have to believe in the Bible to believe in God? What hogwash is this?

the other question is... why doesn't he do that shit now?

Obvious answer: Because God does not need to.

It's like raising a child: early on you might have to put safety covers on the electric outlets, but by the time the child is ten, if they're still retarded enough to stick a fork in there, they have it coming.

Same deal with God. A lot of the almighty's bigger demonstrations were early on when mankind was still learning, so it probably made sense to have bigger demonstrations. Then God starts preferring more subtlety.

Another possible explanation is that if God kept doing the big things again and again, they would stop being meaningful and become routine, and perhaps even inspire a sort of dependency. Again, look at children: kids who have everything handed to them or done for them tend to have no idea how to handle life the minute they're asked to actually handle things themselves. Same for cultures.

One thing that is a problem with a lot of religious groups is a lot of times, they have no concept for why something is bad outside of a vague feeling or "because the Bible says so," which of course for many people rings hollow--its essentially an Argument to Authority after all. A lot of the modern shit we're putting up with now though, is giving us an actual concrete experience we can refer to in order to flesh out and justify our morals. Suddenly being anti-sexual degeneracy (to use KF's favorite talking point) suddenly becomes a lot easier when you have an actual decade where you can actually remember their atrocities. That's real, that's visceral, and for many its a lot more meaningful than "because this line in Leviticus said so-and-so."

And on that note, I have noticed a small but growing reaction of people looking at the Bible and realizing "wow, they had this shit figured out thousands of years ago." It's amazing how what once seemed silly now makes a lot of sense when you've spent a lot of time seeing the opposite extreme.

 

[I'm Retarded?]

Obvious answer: Because God does not need to.

It's like raising a child: early on you might have to put safety covers on the electric outlets, but by the time the child is ten, if they're still retarded enough to stick a fork in there, they have it coming.

Same deal with God. A lot of the almighty's bigger demonstrations were early on when mankind was still learning, so it probably made sense to have bigger demonstrations. Then God starts preferring more subtlety.

given that most of Old Testament Jewish history is them constantly being thrown in and out of slavery because of their chronic failure to just follow the simple rules God gave them, while sending prophets and heroes and kings and all sorts of shit to perform miracles and bolster their faith, which only seems to last about one generation before everyone starts fucking up again, it seems to have more to do with God just getting tired of the whole Chosen People thing. he sent Jesus down to tie it off and rearranged some things upstairs instead of wasting his time hand-holding a bunch of retards who don't really seem to appreciate it anyway. that is, if you believe the New Testament is canon.

And on that note, I have noticed a small but growing reaction of people looking at the Bible and realizing "wow, they had this shit figured out thousands of years ago." It's amazing how what once seemed silly now makes a lot of sense when you've spent a lot of time seeing the opposite extreme.

you're absolutely right dude, it's fuckin insane we let dogs get away with fucking our women instead of killing their asses

 

[Quarterback Rex Grossman]

Shit like this is why the Preacher show was so gay. God and the devil being neurotic faggots who can be shot and killed is fucking stupid and you're a faggot too if you think that's even remotely interesting.

 

[Lone Wandering Courier]

You want to know what's kind of fucked if you follow abr*hamic logic? Everything happens because sky daddy wills it and that there is a plan for everything and everyone, including children being gang raped by niggers. If you press any f*ndie on this point, they may say well no that was the d*vil's doing. So either it is g*d will to allow the d*vil possess niggers to gang rape children OR the claim that everything happens according to g*d's will is a lie. Of course this original claim also is contradicted by the fact that f*ndies still claim that humans have free will. Either humans have free will, or everything happens because sky daddy says so (or the the d*vil posses them). I mean there's all sorts of areas where the "logic" of religion contradicts itself but this is an area that sticks out

 

[Whatevermancer]

well, the idea is that God doesn't fuck with free will

Can free will even exist when God knows every choice you'll make even before you're born?

 

[skykiii]

Shit like this is why the Preacher show was so gay. God and the devil being neurotic faggots who can be shot and killed is fucking stupid and you're a faggot too if you think that's even remotely interesting.

I never saw the show, I read the first graphic novel (this is the "Preacher" that's about the guy who gets this magic voice that can compel people to do his bidding, right?) and the original comic already came off like an angry thirteen year old ranting about how religious people are all mean because they won't let him watch porn.

Can free will even exist when God knows every choice you'll make even before you're born?

I know you're going to post on KF later, that does not mean I caused you to do it.

 

[Whatevermancer]

I know you're going to post on KF later, that does not mean I caused you to do it.

You don't know, you merely assume and predict. There was a non-zero chance that I would've been hit by a car or had a stroke and would never post on the Farms again. You couldn't have possibly known it.

 

[Thomas Talus]

Can free will even exist when God knows every choice you'll make even before you're born?

Difference in temporal perspective, God can exist outside of time and observe it the way you observe the horizon without your vision shaping the mountains.

 

[Str8Bustah]

Depends on the mythology. Christian God obviously cannot die, but some Norse gods had been killed, IIRC.

Why didn't God just will Satan away? Why did he place the tree of knowledge in such an easily reachable place if he knew that Adam and Eve would try to eat its fruit? Why did he get so mad at them when they did it, if he knew ahead of time they would do it? None of this makes sense, God works in mysterious ways, don't question it.

God doesn't will Satan away because, paradoxically, the pressure Satan applies is really good at helping Christians to remain faithful. A number of Saints have made it very clear that the only reason they became any good at prayer was because they were conscious of the devil jeering at them and used it as motivation to pray more deeply.

The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was actually meant to be given Adam and Eve at a later point in time after they had acquired wisdom and virtue, and had Adam and Eve not listened to Satan, then they wouldn't even had eaten the fruit of the tree until the time was right.

As for why God decided to do things in such a roundabout way, I can't possibly know for certain and neither can any of us, because we aren't God, but I would assume that God gave us free will because he wishes us to use that free will to foster a genuine love for him and for his creation, and us having the free will to chose to love God of our own volition (or not) likely came with a, quite frankly immeasurable number of problems that need constant attendance.

It's fine to ask questions about stuff, but not everything can be explained, and it's honestly prideful to assume everything must have an explanation. No-one knows how transubstantiation occurs, no-one fully understands exactly what occurs during confession, but we know that it works, so we just call it a mystery and move on.

 

[Whatevermancer]

Difference in temporal perspective, God can exist outside of time and observe it the way you observe the horizon without your vision shaping the mountains.

If time can be observed in such a way means that it's predefined.

 

[Str8Bustah]

If time can be observed in such a way means that it's predefined.

Not quite; you can't apply human perception of time to God. While it's true we were made in his image and our purpose is the Theosis that lets us attain godhood, until we're actually standing in heaven and wearing whatever crowns the lord has made ready for us, it won't be possible for anyone to grasp the mechanisms behind his creation.

Science won't work in helping this either because, like it or not, Satan holds a lot of sway over the fallen world (This is also the Lord's will as it's an excellent test of faith for his flock, though the Lord only lets him hold as much sway as the Lord deems necessary at any given point in time) which also means that Satan can very easily trick people or lead them astray into false doctrines. In short, without God to guide the way, we just get tricked constantly.

 

[Whatevermancer]

God doesn't will Satan away because, paradoxically, the pressure Satan applies is really good at helping Christians to remain faithful.

That's just an opinion, man. I've heard another opinion that God didn't destroy Satan to show humans how merciful he is and that everyone has a chance at redemption.

The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was actually meant to be given Adam and Eve at a later point in time

Is there a line in the bible that implies this? Cause to me it seems more like God was planning for Adam and Eve to disobey him.

As for why God decided to do things in such a roundabout way, I can't possibly know for certain and neither can any of us, because we aren't God

Yes, that's what I'm saying. "God works in mysterious ways, don't question it."

foster a genuine love

"Love me or you shall suffer for all eternity" doesn't sound like genuine love. But then again, who am I to judge, God is perfect, so he knows best what genuine love is.