God is Not Complicated

Just easy to misunderstand.

Simple things by definition aren’t easily misunderstood.

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It’s pretty convenient and happens a lot in theology

God saves people from car accidents, bullet wounds and and plane crashes, so we know He personally effects outcomes for humans.

The fact that He chose not to let Hitler into art school, for have him fall and hit his head the coffee table to get rid of him means He chose to allow this to happen to the Jews.

They must have been full of personal growth. Yay!

I have never met anyone who has claimed God has saved them from a car accident, a bullet wound, or a plane crash. You must know some very interesting people! Why don’t you believe these family, friends, and acquaintances of yours when they relate to you personally their personal story of God’s saving power?

God does not interfere with free will, and He allows most things to play out naturally.

What course do you think the world would have taken if not for Hitler? You seem to think he was the only one of his time who thought to do what he, in fact, did. Study history. There were many. Hitler certainly did a lot of damage. Had there been no Hitler are you positively certain that no one else would have risen to do even much greater damage?

I came from a family of ten. My parents taught us kids that if we could create a mess, then we had it within ourselves to clean up after it. Mankind created a mess. Mankind has the ability to clean it up. Best way to avoid future messes, or bigger messes, wouldn’t you agree?

You have never read about people claiming that God must have had something to do with a person’s unlikely survival of an accident of some sort? Here are some examples.

There are many more. If God does not do this…then why pray at all?

I never said Hitler was the only horrible person in history. There were many. It’s one example of God allowing horrible things to happen.

It seems quite pointless to ask God for anything if He never interferes, correct?

Kind of a strange claim that God is deistic, coming from a Christian. But this is the normal game. Suffering gets pigeonholed into free will. This is nice and convenient because that means we don’t talk about the suffering from asteroids, weather, earthquakes, plague, etc.

Suffering is a primary component of reality on Earth. If there’s no suffering in heaven, then the suffering on Earth is unnecessary outside of some grand design by God.

Sounds complicated

I am asking you what you have heard personally from people you know. I am saying I have never met anyone who has credited God for saving them from a bullet or a vehicular accident.

You seem to be presenting the idea that God manages world affairs, airplanes, and bullets. You would not be alone in this as the Old Testament presents God as managing the affairs of the nation of Israel. Jesus presented a different concept, and that is the concept that I see at work. Jesus said that God is like a Father to each of us.

Instead of supporting a trickle down effect where things start from the top (say a nation) and trickles down to individuals, Jesus presented the idea of yeast, something that begins very small and then spreads throughout the whole loaf.

What I notice are the small ways God works within our lives, and how our lives grow from there. Jesus was sent, not to call nations, but to call individual sinners, the lowly, and from there, with the lowly trying to overcome sin in their own lives, we look forward to times when there are enough that a national sin isn’t ever as great again.

Do you propose that if God had somehow stopped Hitler as a child, there would have been a trickle down effect and there would have been a huge decrease in individual sin?

The first and foremost Commandment warns against false Gods. The God you are proposing is a false God. This may be why you rightly reject such a god.

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Consider God’s plan:

The state of Israel would never have been established if the US had not felt guilty about what happened to the Jews during WWII, and as the most powerful country after the war, facilitated the creation of that state and supported it ever since - which would not have happened if Hitler hadn’t risen to power.

There is a difference between bringing good out of evil…and planning what is evil.

But God did plan “Evil” so that “good” would come of it

The Jews needed that impetus to get back to Israel, and there was only one way to do it. Set up the evil enormity of Hitler and WWII so that after the war the US, as the most powerful country in the world since all the others were still reeling from the war, would feel so guilty after seeing the enormity of the “Jewish solution” that they would facilitate the creation of Israel, and arm it and support it ever since.

The Jews (and Gypsys, et al) who suffered during the Holocaust ended up in heaven, so it wasn’t really evil.

So He does interfere with the natural world.

Well I guess we best thank God for Hitler then!

What makes you think God is so impotent that He could not manage your imaginary trickle down effects?

No. This is just another example of the ever shifting definition of God according to what’s convenient in the current argument.

God is never responsible for the suffering of humanity. Yet, he’s responsible for all creation, created in his image.

Complicated

If it was a human that was capable of stopping hitler and decided not to, they would rightly be criticized. But since God is all good and can never do wrong, by definition, well, i will need to come up with a complicated workaround

Are we comparing this to an ecosystem? De-composers are different from the seeds/eggs that give birth. Are you saying that God created the good people whose purpose is to birth produce good deeds and likewise He created the bad people to produce evil?

Or, are you saying that God wanted Jews to have Israel, so He moved His puppets around to create the situation where Jews were given that territory?

Either way, that may be an atheist view of what a few of them imagine believers say God is or does, but it is not actually the view of God most believers hold.

I guess heaven’s gonna be a bummer.

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As Abraham Lincoln used to say, Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be. Probably the same is true of the afterlife. :wink:

Sounds like Earth and this reality is all there is, given this thread.

Heaven doesn’t sound much different.
Suffering is required for joy.

It’s almost like the notion of a singular omnibenevolent God makes no sense