NationStates Jolt Archive

I now realize I somewhat mislabelled this thread. It should be "Is god all powerful?" Sorry.

Look at the book of Job. It comes with three assumptions.

1. Job is a good man.
2. God is good.
3. God is all powerful.

Now, there is a simple test in the book of Job. You must pick two of these assumptions for the book to make any sense at all.

According to the book of Job, his neighbors chose options two and three. They said Job wasn't a good man, otherwise Job wouldn't be punished by god.

Also according to the book of Job, Job himself rejected the idea that he wasn't a good man, instead deciding that god is not good, because to believe that god is good is to restrict god, and you can't restrict an all powerful god in any way.

Now, let me as you this: How many of you would want to follow an all powerful, yet so cruel a god as would do what was done to Job?

I hate to say it, but if I was asked to follow an all powerful god who has no rules whatsoever, who can do whatever it wants in spite of all morality, then I would not follow such a god. I would burn in hell, knowing full well that I am suffering for a good cause, because a god who is not good is a god who is a tyrant, pure and simple.

And I am not the only one with this opinion. Rabbi Kushner, who wrote "Why Bad Things Happen To Good People," also shares this opinion. Of course, he's "only a rabbi," so "what does he know about god?"

I accept the notion of a good god who is not all powerful. Shit happens, and god can't always control it or prevent it.

To accept an all powerful god is to blame god for everything that goes wrong. It is to blame god for Jennifer's death {she died at fifteen minutes old, and caused unmeasurable grief for her mother}. But Jennifer's death is no more god's fault than it is god's fault people contract HIV or people get pregnant!

Job is good. God is good. God is not all powerful.

Let's see what you think of them apples.

Bible?

Inconsistent?

Colour me purple with multicoloured polka dots and call me Stan!

Surely this cannot be and it's simply a case of your interpretation being wrong?

On a completely unrelated side note, I've completed a book on the life and times of Muhammed and, while I might respect the man, to even think he's speaking the words of God is completely insane. He's making it up as he goes along and that's having read a book entirely sympathetic and apologetic for Muhammed.

So he's all peace and love and everything but then he realises his position in Medina is in danger if his group cannot contribute to the city. Being traders from Mecca, unable to farm or do anything really useful...

...what does God tell him?

'Oh, yeah, it's totally okay to raid convoys going through the desert, they're totally laden with goods dude, you be sand pirates you faithful goons, such is the word of God'.

Whatever.

Seriously, I''ve yet to find any religion that shows one iota of believability, discounting the loveable Ganesh of course.

I first heard of the interpretation from Rabbi Kushner. He did the interpretation because he lost his own child at an early age, and all the comforting words he had given to people about how "god meant for it to happen" and "god has a plan" and all that rang hollow when he was on the recieving end of them.

He had it reinforced, too, through other experiences. One he related was about a young couple engaged to be married. Two days before their wedding day, the soon to be husband was struck down by a drunk driver. On the day of their wedding, they were having his funeral, instead. Everyone said to her that god planned it and had a plan, for god is all powerful, and that is how it must be. Her reaction was "Why is everyone trying to make me hate god?"

Which inconsistancy is in the book of Job? It seems to me to be a pretty good example of what the Rabbi was discussing.

I reject the idea that Job was a good man. Why must the state that he was good? Goodness is not an inherent trait in humans. It's a potential, but humans have both a good and bad side. No one is inherently good %100. It seriously bothers me.

Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization.
Many think that a good and all powerful god would have designed the world so that life is an eternal combined orgasm and cocaine high. In such a world there would be no suffering only happiness, a lot of happiness. On the other hand there wouldn't be anything to strive for and achieve in such a world. Everything we do is an effort to make things better for ourselves, to change our situation from bad to good, to eliminate suffering and achieve happiness. We need both suffering and happiness to define what we want, if only happiness existed we would not want anything so we would not do anything. The part I reject is the idea that humans could function if life was a constant monotone state of happiness.

I doubt either exists, so I am inherently denying all three.

the book of job wasnt meant to be taken literally.

no jews were harmed in the writing of this book.

Yeah, I dislike the notion that God is Omnipotent. Imho, He is omniscient, so He already thought of that, and so doesn't want to make our lives said orgasm/cocaine high. By throwing us in at the deep end, He made it easy to see who can strugle through life and come out the other side relatively unscathed.

I don't see how any God can be proved to be Good or bad, as they are difficult to believe in to begin with let alone working out how they think, that is if they do exist to think, or think to exist. I think.

Such tales in The Bible only prove that if there's a God up there, His Word certainly isn't to be found in The Bible. The Old Testament is an amalgamation of several stories originally invented by several different people.

This here image is a good representation of what i'm tryin' to say here: http://eddirt.frozenreality.co.uk/strips/20080225.jpg

For what it's worth:

1. Job was a good man. YES.
Job 1:1 "There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job, and that man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil." This is exactly the reason that he was tested. Read verses 9-12.

2. God is good. YES.
Our natural tendency is to believe that if God is good and He loves mankind, then He will make life pleasant for us. Consequently, when things go well for us, we're inclined to think that God is good, and when they don't, we question His goodness or even His existence. Our current happiness is not a standard by which to judge God's goodness. We are not the center of the universe, not the reference point against which goodness can be judged. It sounds silly even to say it, but we act and think as though God's goodness depends on how well we like what's going on. We are not in a position to judge the goodness of God's actions. We see too small a part of the overall picture — a picture that covers all of time and all of mankind.

PS - Job never 'decided God was not good'. While going through tough times he questioned why it was happening, which everyone does, but he never says that God isn't good. And if you read the end of the book, we find out that Job is not only sorry for what he said (Job 42:6) but says that he thinks God is all powerful (Job 42: 2).

3. God is all powerful. YES.
I fail to see how any of this proves God isn't all powerful. If your question is, "Why did this happen to Job? After all, isn't God all powerful? Can't He do anything He wants?" This is much like the silly question, "Can God make a rock so big that He can't pick it up?" Well, no he can't act out incoherent self contradictory statements. Of course God cannot make a rock so big that He could not pick it up. This is not because of any limit in God's power. Rather it is because the question itself is a logical absurdity. It is playing with language so that it has the appearance of a sentence because it is structured like a sentence. But it is not truly a coherent sentence, for it changes definitions of words in midstream. A rock, any rock, by definition, can be picked up by God. A rock so big God could not pick it up is neither a rock (or the whole universe for that matter), or else God is not God. So, no, God could not make such a rock, for such a "god" or a "rock" by definition is a logical absurdity, changing its meaning within one sentence.


So I vote for #4. All of the above.

God was a bit of an asshole before He became a father. Having a kid mellowed Him out some. *nod*

God was a bit of an asshole before He became a father. Having a kid mellowed Him out some. *nod*


lol