Date: August 5th, 2026 4:13 PM Author: Bull headed federal athletic conference
What do you think of the classic move Leibniz makes in his theodicy that God knows all of the best possible worlds and still picked the one with the most good. Do you find that satisfying?
Date: August 5th, 2026 4:14 PM Author: swashbuckling friendly grandma
Why does it have to be some big theological debate and not just "Loutish yidbags will create moral busywork (pay a nigger hitman to attack you, encourage Banderites to attack you while in meditation, etc) if you start making actionable criticisms of singular matters"
Date: August 5th, 2026 5:24 PM Author: effete histrionic selfie
yes, it encourages antinomian and predatory behavior for personalities ill equipped to otherwise handle the horror of it. but that (1) doesn't make it not true and (2) doesn't mean there aren't ways of operating under such a horrific god image (i.e. via indiviudation)
Date: August 5th, 2026 5:28 PM Author: swashbuckling friendly grandma
Ok so there's not actually any horror of it and people deal and cope with sadness and loss as they come and go and on balance even the poorest man's life is filled with more contentment and happiness than terror and anguish
You "have" a tactical theological framework that encourages antisocial behavior, jewish handlers, blackmail-as-a-profession and all sorts of foulnesses because it's lucrative and you consider pecuniary or financial gain to be more important than the well-being of the people and charges that you are abandoning when you choose to profit off of their loss rather than engage in the much more difficult but essentially good work of uplifting the people and removing the plague of Judeo-American zero sum thought from the popular consciousness
Date: August 5th, 2026 4:20 PM Author: Richard Ames
I am probably not the target audience for this, but my view on this sort of insane shit is that God's love is available to us all and the more you live in the Spirit of God and surround yourself with people who genuinely also live with His Spirit, the better your life will be.
It doesn't mean that nothing bad will ever happen or that it will all be roses. But I don't think any truly serious believer will argue that.
I recall some meme that got big which said something to the effect of "each day we move further and further from God's love" and there is truth to it.
So in essence, you have made a straw man argument that I'd expect more from Charlie Sheen on Two and a Half Men!!
Date: August 5th, 2026 4:23 PM Author: effete histrionic selfie
"but my view on this sort of insane shit is that God's love is available to us all and the more you live in the Spirit of God and surround yourself with people who genuinely also live with His Spirit, the better your life will be."
the article in OP is about four kids killed by their mother and grandmother who never had the chance to "live in the spirit of god" or to choose anything really. so the OP article undermines your question
Date: August 5th, 2026 8:52 PM Author: Bull headed federal athletic conference
Not really though, because the problem of evil is supposed to be formulated within the context of classical theism. If you accept classical theism the problem of evil is an issue. Saying "durrr something bad happened therefore god doesn't exist" is missing the entire reason the problem arises in the first place. The people who tried to answer this problem btw were not atheists, they were classical theists who saw it posed a problem for their metaphysical argument and wanted to do anything to fix it
Date: August 5th, 2026 4:35 PM Author: Richard Ames
Could you at least write [he said jewishly] in that poast?
I'll just re-say my piece: the more you live in the Spirit of God - and the more you are truly surrounded by people who genuinely do the same - the better your life is. That does not preclude the existence of people who choose to do otherwise.
Do you think those two people who did that are going to be better off for it? Or will they suffer for the rest of their lives in untold ways. Does anything about their actions suggest they were trying to live in the Spirit of God?
They made a sick choice using their free will to do something horrific. You are trying to use a "why do bad things happen to good (or innocent) people" example to argue a point that (effectively) no one on here will make.
Date: August 5th, 2026 4:40 PM Author: effete histrionic selfie
i'm saying that your response is unsatisfying. it is satisfying only to the extent that people have the free will to choose, and four children in this case did not have that right. if these children did not have the right to exercise free will and were killed by those who did, then you have a remainder problem -- god will have to "make things right" in the afterlife for him to be "all good". and that doesn't line up with my perception of reality, hth
Date: August 5th, 2026 4:55 PM Author: 180 lettuce
Ur too focused on earthly perceptions. Humans aren't the arbiter of what's good wrt god. Life sucks to varying degrees because we live in a fallen world. These kids, their mom, an uncontacted Amazon tribemo, and mother Theresa all are total shit compared to god and don't "deserve" his love or salvation, but he will freely give it to some people according to his will.
Date: August 5th, 2026 4:57 PM Author: effete histrionic selfie
my reasoning is abductive -- my conclusion is based upon the totality of my experience, but it is a partial and incomplete and finite conclusion, a tentative one, subject to revision if i receive enough contrary evidence
my abductive conclusion is GOD EXISTS but he is TOTALITY and CONTAINS EVIL
Date: August 5th, 2026 4:28 PM Author: the White jensen huang
This is like 100x more pathetic than your Jewish central bankers arc, which while totally made up, was at least interesting and a decent topic of discussion
Date: August 5th, 2026 4:58 PM Author: effete histrionic selfie
there is horrible stuff like this daily in the news
also see wonderful stuff like this which must be the product of a loving god!
Slave-making ants. Certain ant species raid neighboring colonies, seize larvae, and carry them back to their own nests. The captured ants emerge and spend their lives working for the conquering colony - gathering food, caring for brood, and maintaining the nest. Some slave-making species become so dependent on this practice that they cannot survive without enslaving other ants to perform basic labor.
The ichneumon wasp. Darwin famously singled out parasitic wasps in the family Ichneumonidae. The female injects her eggs into a living caterpillar or other host. The larvae hatch inside the host’s body and slowly consume it from within, deliberately avoiding vital organs until late in development so that the host remains alive as long as possible.
Parasitic wasps more generally. Across many wasp families, similar strategies appear. Eggs are laid inside or on other insects; the emerging larvae eat their host alive. Sometimes the parasite even manipulates the host’s behavior, turning it into a living bodyguard or food source for the developing young.
Megarhyssa macrurus (Ichneumonidae), a parasitoid, ovipositing into its host through the wood of a tree.
Brood parasites like the cuckoo. The common cuckoo lays its eggs in the nests of other birds. When the cuckoo chick hatches, it instinctively pushes the host’s eggs or chicks out of the nest, ensuring that the foster parents devote all their energy to feeding the intruder. The adoptive parents raise the parasite while their own offspring die. The pejorative term cuckold or cuck, used to reference men raising the offspring of other men, comes from the cuckoo.
Hyena scavenging and predation. Spotted hyenas often begin eating prey before it has fully died. Their social structure is rigidly hierarchical, dominated by powerful matriarchal lineages, and competition within clans can be brutal.
Chimpanzee warfare. Long-term observations of wild chimpanzees reveal coordinated raids between neighboring groups. Patrols cross territorial boundaries, isolate individuals, and kill them, sometimes gradually dismantling rival groups through repeated attacks. Victorious groups may absorb the territory of the defeated one.
Cat parasitism (Toxoplasma). The parasite Toxoplasma gondii infects rodents and alters their behavior, reducing their fear of cats. This manipulation makes the rodents more likely to be eaten, allowing the parasite to reproduce inside the cat’s digestive system.
Cordyceps fungi. Certain fungi infect insects and gradually take control of their nervous systems. The infected insect climbs to a high location, clamps down, and dies as the fungus erupts from its body and releases spores to infect others.
Date: August 5th, 2026 5:01 PM Author: Cheese-eating obsidian university coldplay fan
to me, the question of whether God exists isn't even that interesting. if he does, so what? we still have to exist in this terrible place. who cares if he/she/zhey "loves" us or whatever.
Date: August 5th, 2026 5:03 PM Author: effete histrionic selfie
everyone has a "god-image", a highest order belief which regulates everything underneath of it (it could be democracy, capitalism, anything that one accepts as a first-order belief). atheists have it, secularists have it, "spiritual but not religious" types have it, you have it, i have it. problems arise when lived experience contradicts one's existing god-image, and my work primarily deals with how to grapple with what happens then
Date: August 5th, 2026 5:12 PM Author: Bull headed federal athletic conference
If your idea is that everyone organizes their beliefs around some set of deepest commitments that constrain and prioritize everything else then maybe. Calling this a “god-image” is too broad though. It becomes metaphorical. But if you define it more strictly your statement is almost definitely false in the strong sense
Date: August 5th, 2026 5:22 PM Author: effete histrionic selfie
"If your idea is that everyone organizes their beliefs around some set of deepest commitments that constrain and prioritize everything else then maybe. Calling this a “god-image” is too broad though."
yes, this is the argument - it is a wittgensteinian meta-hinge set, it determines how thought is formed in the first place. other terms like worldview, cognitive schema, deep prior, ultimate framework are all wrong for different reasons
Date: August 5th, 2026 5:29 PM Author: Bull headed federal athletic conference
Aren't wittgensteinian hinges more like background certainty embedded in a language game? What you are saying is a much stronger more psychological and quasi-transcendental kind of argument than this
Date: August 5th, 2026 5:32 PM Author: effete histrionic selfie
my understanding is its what must be in place for doubt to be possible, the beliefs that humans carry that shape the presuppositions that go into the thought form itself
i define god image as "The highest-order psychophysiological regulatory architecture of the psyche. Not primarily a theological opinion, but the foundational organizing principle that determines perception, affect, motivation, contradiction-tolerance, and somatic coherence. A God-image screens reality, filters out competing perspectives, and maintains psychic equilibrium. All lower-level beliefs are nested beneath it."
I'm not even religious and it's retarded to take the actions of man as evidence for a lack of God. I've always been of the opinion that God, if He does exist, is omnipotent but just limited by concepts. You can not have free will without the capacity for evil. They're diametrically opposed. It's like hot vs cold, if temperature is even a concept in Creation, then you necessarily need opposites. Not every person is good. That's not God's fault.
Date: August 5th, 2026 8:58 PM Author: Cheese-eating obsidian university coldplay fan
"Evil" is a constructed moral quality, not something that objectively exists.
but if you insist on the Christ answer, there's also a famous theological distinction relevant here: posse peccare vs. non posse peccare. being able to sin versus being unable to sin. the highest form of freedom isn't the ability to choose evil, it is freedom from the necessity or temptation to choose evil. The ability to do evil is therefore characteristic of a less perfect form of freedom.
I am right and True because I majored in Philosophy.
Date: August 5th, 2026 9:24 PM Author: Charismatic Nibblets
pet peeve is when people think god is disproven by evil. it presupposes that the speaker knows everything about the laws of nature, that it would be trivial to tweak just one little thing and stuff like this would be impossible - like, ok
Date: August 6th, 2026 10:00 AM Author: Bull headed federal athletic conference
The existence of a god isn't disproven by evil. But the existence of a perfectly good perfectly loving one almost certainly is. If it's totally nbd like you seem to be implying then why did thinkers like Augustine and Leibniz spend so much time trying to grapple with it?
Date: August 6th, 2026 8:21 PM Author: Charismatic Nibblets
But the existence of a perfectly good perfectly loving one almost certainly is.
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Nah, ding. Again, to suggest such a thing takes such ego, such arrogance, that like OK yeah you could create a better existence. May well cause an impossible contradiction to tweak things to remove free will, or the possibility of evil, or whatever.
--
You're right, I'm guilty of being as glib on it as I'm accusing you and OP of being. It's a serious question, worthy of grappling. I've thought about it deeply for years, and that's my strong developed view.