During a conversation on Maurice Broaddus's messageboard I was asked what question I would ask God that if answered would satisfy me. I'll answer that here, but I also wanted to ask you guys what questions you would ask God if given the opportunity? If you could spend ten minutes with the Supreme Being, the progenitor of creation, the author and architect of all that is, the first cause, what would you say?
If God were to come down from the heavens right now I guess the first logical question would be...
"Prove to me that you are God, the creator of the universe."
If he or she or it somehow managed that trick the next question would be...
"Which religion is the correct one? How are we supposed to live? What is the right path?"
And if he, she, or it was successful at answering that one the next one would be...
"Why is there so much pain and suffering in the world?"
Coupled with...
"Why are we all here? What is the purpose of life? Why did you create all of this?"
So what answers would I expect? What could God possibly say to me that would make all of this nonsense seem somehow less nonsensical, less cruel and tragic and absurd?
I guess I would like to know that all of this served some mutually benificial purpose. That we were not just here at the whim of some capricious megalomaniacal egotist/sociopath to fulfill his all-consuming need for aggrandizement. I would like to know that millions of innocent children worldwide didn't suffer and die for nothing. That it was for a better reason than God throwing a temper tantrum because the toy he created didn't do what he wanted it to do. I would want something better than "It ain't my fault. I just created you." which I feel is truly the most cowardly response I've ever heard and again, not something we would accept from anyone but God. If some terrestrial inventor tried to use the freewill argument for why one of his inventions went off and slaughtered a couple dozen people we probably wouldn't buy it. He'd be slapped with millions of dollars in civil suits and maybe even a few manslaughter charges for willfully negligent homocide.
"You mean you created something with the capacity for violence, gave it the emotions of rage, hatred, envy, lust, selfishness, and greed, gave it the power and moreover the will to assault, rape, and murder, yet you expect us to believe that you were surprised that it went out and killed people and that it isn't your fault because it has freewill? Um...lock his ass up please and throw away the damn key."
We tend to understand that the inventor is ultimately responsible for the actions of his or her invention right up until we start talking about God and then we suddenly absolve him of all responsibility and blame it all on the creation which did not author it's own nature. An answer like that wouldn't do it for me. I'd need to hear something with a little more integrity than that. If God said, "Hey, I did the best I could but I fucked up. My bad." I'd probably except that. I wouldn't worship his ass, but I'd except that answer. I'd except it a little more if he promised to make it up to me in the next life. Maybe by blessing me with a harem of twenty virgins like those Arab terrorists claim Allah is going to hook them up with for blowing up Christians, Jews, and Capitalists.
I would like to know that even the daily grind, the day to day struggle for the simple commodities of existence, food, clothing, shelter, water, at its end served some greater purpose, led us to some greater reward than the grave. That we were created for more than just to work, eat, shit, fuck, sleep, repeat. "Because I was bored" probably wouldn't cut it.
The reality is that life is a bitch and then we do die. So I would have a hard time singing the praises of any being that couldn't or wouldn't answer these simple questions. So what question would you ask? If you could ask the creator anything what would it be?
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- Wrath
- I am a writer, former fighter, former MMA trainer, husband, and father of three. I fought professionally for 9 years and trained fighters for 6. I may look mean as hell and write some gruesome stuff and am capable of beating most fools within an inch of their lives but I'm actually a nice guy. Really, I'm a Teddy bear. I am a humanist who believes in man's responsibility to his fellow man and that too many do too little for too few. I've been publishing for 10 years. Succulent Prey was my first mass-market release followed by The Resurrectionist. If you have a taste for extreme fiction with socio-political and philosophical messages that push boundaries, break taboos, and leave you thinking long after the book has ended then check out Teratologist co-written with Edward Lee, Poisoning Eros co written with Monica O-Rourke, my short story collection,The Book of A thousand Sins, His Pain my novella from Delirium Books, Hero my novella with J.F. Gonzalez from Bloodletting Books, Population Zero from Cargo Cult Press, Yaccub's Curse by Necro Books, and my latest, Everyone Dies Famous In A Small Town published by Thunderstorm Books.
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20 comments:
I would like to tell you that all of the questions (sept the 1st one) you could have read in the Bible. GOD bless "U".
You pretty much covered the questions I would ask.
Thanks for your comments RC but I would suggest to you that you are wrong about the bible having these answers. There's nothing in the bible that would prove to anyone that Christianity was the true path as opposed to Budhism, Hinduism, Islam, or the worship of women who wear latex and carry whips. There's nothing in the bible that explains why there is so much suffering in the world except "It's not my fault. It's man's fault. He has freewill." Which is bullshit and shows a total lack of integrity in my opinion. There's nothing in the bible that says why we are all here except to suffer and die and then go to heaven which leads inevitably to the question, "Why do we need to suffer first? Why aren't we all just born into heaven?" No reasonable explanation given. I know you've been told all of your life that the answers are in the bible but read it sometime. It ain't so.
Ya know, I claim to be a Christian but I'd probably be asking those same questions.
Esp. about the worship of women with whips. ;-)
If you are talking about God creating robots that will do His bidding, then your agrument about holding inventors accountable stands, but if you are talking about God creating human beings with free will then it doesn't. Plus, you are only seeing the deficits, humanity has done a lot of good too. Plus, what would you put in place of free will? If you remove all the evil in the world you also remove freedom. So do you want to be a slave, even if it is for a good and kindly "Massa"? I don't think so. You and I don't roll that way.
I don't expect for one minute for this reponse to satisfy you, Ijust simply disagree with you. But here is the bottom line, anyway you cut it, whether you believe in God or not, humanity has really messed things up. In the end, we can only blame ourselves. We get what we deserve. It is not so much God judging us, it's just the age old truth of reaping what you sow.
Just so you know, I don't believe in God so I believe that man is responsible for everything we have done in this world good and bad. My point is simply that if you do believe in an intelligent creator than you cannot absolve him of responsibility for his creation. Even if you did not claim that God was all-knowing which Christians do though many other religions do not, you would still have to place the lion share of the blame on the creator. If you believe in an all-knowing all-powerful creator than freewill is simply an illusion. The concept of freewill with is completely incompatible with the concept of an omniscient creator. If God knows all than he knew everything you would ever do from birth to death before he ever created you, therefore he created you in order to do those things since he had the option of not creating you knowing that you would sin. There's really no way around it. Freewill is an illusion (i.e. a lie) if the creator is truly omniscient. Him saying, "You have freewill but yet I know everything you will ever do because I authored your very nature and furthermore I am omniscient," and then saying, "But still everything you do is your fault even though I knew you'd do it when I created you." Reduces God to some weasely character trying to shirk his responsibility and place blame on everyone but himself. But since not all religions even make the claim that God is all-knowing I will simply say that to say the creator has no responsibilty for the actions of his creation flies in the face of common sense. You create something that does evil you cannot then say it ain't my fault and I would suggest to you that we would not accept that kind of backwards logic from anyone accept our religious leaders.
And since there are many people on this planet who would find the idea of harming other people completely outside their nature, who simply do not have the will towards violence, who still possess free-will the idea that you have to have destructive tendencies in your nature to make you free does not hold water. If you can make some good-natured people without them being automatons than you could make all people good-natured without them being automatons. The fact that some people are born with natures that predispose them to evil somehow doesn't make them automatons but if they had natures that predisposed them to good that would? Come on now.
This is a very interesting thread, as both a fighter and devout Catholic I would respond that I believe that freewill is not an Illusion, but rather the essence of the argument. In creating us God does not just absolve himself from responsibility for our actions, but rather he has left us with a set of guidelines upon which we should adhere. Our Failure to adhere (Sin) is not his responsibility, any more than then say a mass murderers parents are responsible for his actions.
“Placing the lion share of the blame on the creator” seems to me to be more of a cop out, the world is what we have made it, we “Mankind” that is, are ultimately responsible not only for our own actions, but the state of the world as a whole. We are primarily responsible for most of the suffering in the world, and our indifference to those in need only highlights our failures.
In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility as are the consequences of those choices.
“What we are is God's gift to us. What we become is our gift to God.”
Any way I appreciate what you say even if I disagree. If you are interested Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote very extensively about these issues way back in 1252, you should check it out, I doubt it will change your mind, but it is interesting.
"In creating us God does not just absolve himself from responsibility for our actions, but rather he has left us with a set of guidelines upon which we should adhere. Our Failure to adhere (Sin) is not his responsibility, any more than then say a mass murderers parents are responsible for his actions."
Welcome Steve. Thanks for participating in our little dialogue. I appreciate your perspective. The problem with the above statement is once again with God's omniscience. It does create a big problem for the freewill argument if God is all-knowing. Christian philosophers and apologists have tried to squirm out of it for centuries but there's just no way around it. Either God is all-knowing and created man knowing that he would sin and commit countless atrocities or he is not all-knowing and man's freewill just thoroughly baffled him. If God left us with a set of guidelines for us to adhere to but he was all-knowing he would have known that we wouldn't adhere to these guidelines which again makes freewill a lie. I'll use my Pepsi challenge example. If I create you with a preference for Pepsi and a loathing for Coke and then I give you the option of choosing one or the other, is that really a choice? What does it mean to say you were free to choose Coke when I knew damn well you wouldn't from the second I created you? Christianity claims that God is all-knowing, not sometime-knowing or mostly-knowing. That is what makes this argument fall flat.
I read St. Thomas Aquinas back in College. That's what I always find interesting about these debates. Everything I'm saying now was said then in answer to St. Thomas yet no one ever bothers to read the refutations. I don't know how anyone can hold a belief without understanding the arguments against that belief. There's a great book callled, "The Evidential Argument From Evil" that deals with both sides of the Argument from Evil pretty thoroughly. Some of the strongest arguments both for and against the freewill defense I've ever read. I apologize that I can't remember the author but I'm sure it's not too difficult to find.
The Evidential Argument from Evil - Nicholas Tattersall Read this a few years ago and found it interesting, some points are very similar to Douglas Adams argument in Hitcher Hikers Guide to the Galaxy
"The Babel fish is small, yellow and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from these brainwave energies to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centers of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-boggingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof for the nonexistence of God.
The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own argument, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white, and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."
Here is an interesting serious article I found on Wikipedia that argues both sides of the point
“With passive foreknowledge, if it were kept hidden, it would not invalidate free will in any logical or rational way. The individual choosing event X, would be making the exact same choices regardless of whether God knew the choices beforehand or not. God Knowing or not knowing the future [passively] would not alter the free will of individuals at all. The demise of free will would only logically come if God made His knowledge public in regard to the free will choice of individuals; this would therefore alter future free will, and make it an obligation.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theological_fatalism
Any way I must say that weather we agree or not, it is good to debate ideas and concepts with you, I find your points to be very lucid, and well thought out, your opinions seem to be formed from knowledge and research and not just any ideological rant, all in all the most enjoyable blog I’ve come across.
PS. I agree wholeheartedly with your “Generation of Pussies” post, it is sad, and I believe that the media has propagated the “Demasculinazation of America” every commerical presents men as slothful idiots incapable of rational thought, or purposeful action. Sad…
Thanks, Steve. I welcome your input on this blog. You too seem to have well-thought out opinions even if I'm not inclined to agree with them. I doubt I'll ever understand how anyone could be satisfied with the freewill argument. I was watching a documentary about child sex slaves the other night and that whole idea of it being man's fault and not God's fault kept going through my head and all I could think about was, "Yeah, but that ten year-old girl who's getting raped twenty times a day isn't praying for man to come save her. She's praying to God. And if God is either unable or unwilling to do so why would we sing his praises? Why would we even call him God?"
Thanks, though for your comments on "A Generation of Pussies". I should have a new Blog entry up tonight.
“With passive foreknowledge, if it were kept hidden, it would not invalidate free will in any logical or rational way. The individual choosing event X, would be making the exact same choices regardless of whether God knew the choices beforehand or not. God Knowing or not knowing the future [passively] would not alter the free will of individuals at all. The demise of free will would only logically come if God made His knowledge public in regard to the free will choice of individuals; this would therefore alter future free will, and make it an obligation.”
I know I should just leave it alone but to answer this one... the problem with this statement is that we aren't just saying that God is omniscient we are also saying that he is our creator. So if he created us and therefore authored our very natures and furthermore decided when and where and to whom we would be born his pre-knowledge of our destinies DOES pre-clude freewill because he could have chosen to give us different natures, or to put us in circumstances that would not have led to us committing great sins. As in my example of Hitler. Do you really think Hitler would have killed eight million jews if he had born in New York in the 1980s? The fact that God knew that if he created this individual in this time and place and he furthermore had the power to have not created him or to have placed him in a different time and place means that he must have created Hitler TO kill Jews. His pre-knowledge and his status as creator shows intent or at the very least negligence.
“Only through presenting our differing ideas, and challenging what we believe, will we ever Learn.”
The fact that he authored our natures and knows what we will do does not mean he supports it; in fact the fact that he knows before hand and does nothing supports the freewill argument. If God were to give us different natures because he knew our choices or if he were to put us in circumstances that would not have led to us committing great sins that would be destroying freewill.
In fact I believe that your “The Virtue of Ignorance” blog can be used here, neither of us can ever “know” weather or not we in fact have Freewill, or if there is an omniscient creator, the fact that we ask questions show a desire to constantly be in the active pursuit of knowledge, I personally believe that we should question our faiths, and that blindly adhering to any belief is not what God would want. The argument can be seen from either side, in the end I’m happy to admit “I don’t Know” but I still “Believe.”
"The fact that he authored our natures and knows what we will do does not mean he supports it;"
Yeah, actually it does. The only way it wouldn't is if he had no choice but to create us, which is not the case or if creating people who were not inclined by nature to sin would preclude us having freewill which it wouldn't since there are many who are non-violent and non-selfish by nature who do still posess freewill. Creating a being inclined to commit genocide or child-molestation or serial homicide does not equal freewill. It equals indifference, malevolence, or stupidity.
"In fact the fact that he knows before hand and does nothing supports the freewill argument."
See but he does do something. He knows beforehand yet still he creates someone destined to commit evil even though there were alternatives that would not have impeded their freewill such as having them born with different natures or to different parents or in a different place and time none of which would have somehow made that person an automaton. Also, the fact that biblically God has intervened numerous times kind of blows the freewill argument to hell if we are discussing the Christian God.
In the end I am happy to admit that I don't know therefore I do not believe.
wrath,
Question. With the way the world can be and is...would an answer help you sleep better at night? Really? If God did give you an answer would that change the reality that life on earth, for many earthlings, is enmeshed in poverty and oppression?
What good would an answer do?
Let me put it this way, when I was fighting, knowing that winning the fight meant a bigger purse in my next fight, a step closer to a world title, increased adoration and attention from often very lovely fans and groupies, and the respect and admiration of my peers, would keep me fighting long after I might have otherwise given in. It made the pain of broken ribs, severely bruised thighs and shins, dizziness and exhaustion, tolerable knowing that there was a prize waiting for me when it was all over. When I was on the streets and me and my boys would run into a pack of skinheads and get into a brawl, the cuts and bruises I took then were tolerable knowing that I was fighting for a righteous cause or principle that I believed in. No prize, no cause, and I would not fight quite as hard or perhaps I'd only fight hard as long as I was winning but once I started losing I'd just quit on my stool or turn tail and run. I wouldn't take it quite as seriously. That's what I'm looking for, a reason to take this shit serious. 'Cause right now life is an amusing and entertaining joke at best and a hopeless trajedy at its worse.
Wrath,
I feel you bru. We do want to know the 'reason' to keep on fighting. Even though I am a Christian I ask myself the same question from time to time. I normally come up with pat rationalizations to myself. My children, my religious belief, kill time, etc.
Normally I come around to some kind of theological answer. Such an answer, I believe, is self-justifying. There is no interest nor neutral way to 'prove' this to be the right answer. It just rings true to me.
But then there are days that doesn't ring true. To be honest brother...I stay in the fight, most of the time, because I see life as a precious gift. And that there have been many poor bastards who have not been as a fortunate as I have been. So I keep fighting for them...the unfortunate many who were not given the good fortune I might have received.
I hear the cries of slaves at the bottom of the Atlantic, I hear the prayers of slaves on the plantation, I hear the screams and pleas for mercy from my ancestors...that say this:
Live for us when we could not!
This may seem like sentimental garbly-gook but it rings true for me. But not all the time...just when I'm looking for a real reason to keep on fighting.
I hope this helps the conversation.
Keep on keepin on bru!
Beautiful words, bro. I use some of those same rationalizations to get me through sometimes.
I'm back!!! For everyone who backed me up, thank you. I din't have much time to comment and post everything I thought. Since I don't think people will come back here, I'll just save it for later.
Hammer out.
RC Hammer
well i have news for you. I am God, I wouldn't bother wasting my time coming down to earth to get poked around with a bunch of stupid questions.
If you want enlightenment, your going to have to do it they way i did it. By yourself.
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