Ask Lemmy

1. The test was, in my humble opinion, bullshit, which Job correctly pointed out. His family was killed to win a bet with Satan, a bet that God didn't have to take on since he knew the outcome already from being all knowing. A bet with an entity that he created and has power over, and should have nothing to prove anything to, or at the very least he could just pull that "Don't question me bro" stuff on Satan himself and spare Job all the suffering and needless death of his family. God teaches us that material wealth is ultimately meaningless, yet uses it as a reward for justification for his torture. If any human did that same test on another, we'd call them a monster and lock them up.

2. Yeah, like I said, Jesus was the only thing that seemed to make God stop directly fucking with us in so many horrific ways, since he realized how much it sucked once he actually experienced it himself from our perspective (which an all knowing being shouldn't need to do, lending more credence that he isn't all knowing).

The baby thing: That's very clumsy way of dealing with the baby problem. Your screenshot literally says "we don't know how, but the babies will make it since God is loving!" That's what I'd call a Deus Ex Machina, because the alternative would make God seem so unbelievably cruel and evil that we have to assume that all the rules the Church came up with don't apply in those situations. By the same logic, we can start to assume that God may bend the rules for all sorts of things that would otherwise seem cruel to us; Gay family members who were otherwise very good people, uncontacted tribes, people/family who went to other denominations, unbelievers that are really moral otherwise, the billions of people who were born and died before Christianity was invented, etc. It's a get out of jail free card to smooth over the nasty bits.

Buuut.... that solution does unfortunately bring us back to the baby killin' problem: if God makes exceptions for unbaptized babies, then really the most logical thing would be for every single parent in the world to commit infanticide to ensure they get into heaven, as letting them grow up gives them the chance to lose faith and sin, resulting in burning in agonizing hell for literal eternity. Under those rules, killing at birth or with abortion is clearly the safest option to save your loved ones and deprive Satan of more souls. And the parents doing the killing would still be able to get into heaven by asking for forgiveness before they themselves died. Obviously actually doing that would be heinous and insane, but technically only from the perspective of a non-believer, since a believer could quite reasonably believe they're saving as many people as possible from eternal torture.

3. You'd think someone losing faith would be one of those times where direct speech would be opted for. But your answer also means that yes, all those people claiming to have casual conversations with God and Jesus on how to fix their marriage were indeed lying or delusional (and if delusional, then they are very unlucky that they were also born into the wrong denomination, as that delusion will ensure that they never question if they are in the wrong religion)

4. If I were to somehow desire to become religious again, I can't say the denomination that most consistently covered for and enabled pedophiles would be the most appealing, not to mention the long history of corruption and exploitation of people's fears for their dead family members within the Catholic church (I know the rest of the video is about the Church of England, I only refer to the beginning of the video that talks about the Catholic church).

And I'd like to ask you this: How did you determine that the Catholicism was the best and most correct denomination?

When you were old enough to understand critical thinking and had a good grasp of world history, did your parents sit you down and say "Alright, here's some research material on all the world religions covering their differences, practices, history, beliefs, etc. Take some time to go through each one, and see which speaks to you the most before deciding", or, as I suspect is more likely, did your parents teach you their own inherited religion at a young age, one that happened to also be popular in your region of the world already?

If it's the latter; isn't it a little convenient that the one true religion that will actually get you into heaven happened to be the one that's native to your geographic area, and your parents just so happened to be raised in that one true religion too?

But how can one truly know their particular religion is the one true one out of hundreds, when the followers of every single one report that God has talked to them, and they feel absolutely convicted in their feelings that they are in the correct religion, despite each one laying claim to being the only correct one? Is every other religious person deceiving themselves, or is that feeling of God that they have communicated with a Satanic being?

As an example, there are currently around 2 billion muslims on earth, about 25% of the population, all of which are Muslim because their parents were Muslim. 99% of those people will die as Muslims, which means God created a world in which billions upon billions of people, regardless of how good they were on earth, will burn for eternity because they were unlucky enough to be born in the wrong geographic area, to the wrong culture, all the while fully convinced that they will make it into heaven. I can not imagine such a supposedly loving God creating such a cosmically horrific scenario. If that scenario were described in a fantasy book, we would assume they are the villain.

And another issue; You mentioned that praying is only effective, or able to alter things, if it is in God's will. That brings with it some very troubling thoughts. It's safe to assume that most of the prisoners in Unit 731 were religious, some of them Catholic. Surely they must've prayed to God for protection from the horrific experiments subjected to them, yet all prisoners were experimented on and killed.

Likewise, it is probable that countless Jews prayed to God to spare them the horrific deaths they would experience during the holocaust. Yet millions were killed horrifically regardless.

One can only conclude then, that all of that torture and all of those deaths were, in fact, God's will. This is a difficult pill to swallow, which is likely why so many believers can only offer the "He works in mysterious ways, it is unknowable" handwave, quickly absolving Him so we need not suffer the pain of the cognitive dissonance which would come from actually grappling with those thoughts.