As simple as possible to summarize the best way you can, first, please. Feel free to expand after, or just say whatever you want lol. Honest question.
How is it possible to answer the question until you define what “God” you’re referring to? Christian God?
In my case yes 😁
I have mad respect for Orthodox Christians. My sense is that they typically grok Christianity on a completely different level to other, more modern denominations. When I try to talk about God with my average local Christian, there is this “white man in the clouds with a big beard” image and that’s the level you’re starting with which I find very difficult.
Yes the Orthodox view of God accepts his imminence and his incomprehensibility all in one. It is a humble, mystical, experiential and all-encompassing approach to life. It is therefore extremely difficult for us stubborn humans to adhere too 🙃
I recommend Stalker and Solaris by Tarkovsky. Even though they are secular films the depth of Orthodoxy is present in their soul searching, repentant and deeply ponderous nature. Even the Solaris remake does a decent job just because of the mechanics of the story. I saw it years before becoming Orthodox and it stuck with me. We should all be deeply concerned with the state of our souls.
What does it matter ?
I think it matters because God can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Are we talking about Plotinus’ “το Ἕν” or are we talking about Allah? This is the problem with these kinds of questions. It’s difficult to discuss the nature of what God even could be, before we get on to whether or not you “believe” in it. As other posters have pointed out, even the language of “belief” is generally inadequate as a starting place.
You’re trying to answer a question that wasn’t even asked.
What question am I trying to answer?
“What is the nature of god that people believe in” instead of “why people believe in <whatever they believe in>”. The nature of what they believe wasn’t relevant to the question.
The spirit of the question is to provide an answer if you believe in any god. Could be Allah, Yahweh, Zeus, Loki, etc.
Thanks, it wasn’t clear, I thought it was more meta than that.
Simple answer: I find I carry on believing in God in much the same way I believe in Science. A mixture of experience, logical coherence, testimony, teaching from people I trust, and connection with other things I know/believe, that makes - to my mind - God’s reality overwhelmingly more likely than not.
I do not and i believe that religions are the number 1 problem in the world. The things people do for their “Gods” are stupid and cruel af
Actually I would say that religions are just a symptom of a human flaw.
The same gets exploited by politics and other things too.
Religion is just so bad because it is based on an intangible mind construct as as lies go, this is one of the biggest ever to keep spreading and going fueled by nothing more than the sunk cost fallacy in time and energy invested of current and past believers. They need to validate themselves by pushing ot onto the next generations because otherwise it would mean their their time invested into it was pointless.
I believe in God because I think its the best explanation for the existence of our universe with it’s laws. A being outside of our current space/time setting our universe into motion just makes sense to me.
That’s essentially the TAG argument.
Interesting, I’ve never heard of that term but I am partial towards the Maliki madhab which is highly influenced by the Asha’ri and I see them listed there.
I’ll be sure to look into this later.
If our universe requires a being outside it as an origin, why shouldn’t that being itself require another being of even further outside as an origin, and so on?
@FooBarrington @IttihadChe It’s turtles all the way down. 🐢
TAG addresses infinite regress. A transcendent being functions outside of our physical and metaphysical constraints.
Scientists believed this for the longest time, but I’ve recently seen a documentary explaining that, at the very bottom, there’s a giant koala bear. Apparently they’re still trying to determine why it’s smiling.
By nature of being outside of our universe they are not subject to the same constants/restraints or our same concepts of space and time.
But I’m not necessarily saying it’s a requirement. That’s just the line of thought I lean towards personally at this point.
TAG addresses this in the way you describe. A transcendent being is not constrained by our physics or metaphysics.
In short, yes because you lose nothing by trying to emulate Jesus.
That said, the church be crazy af
If emulating jesus was what the christian church was about I would have less scrupules
Define “Christian Church”. This almost invariably comes from former evangelicals in my experience.
People who say they belive in jesus, would be my definition.
You have to believe in the trinity to be a Christian. Regardless you aren’t going to find any group of people who are perfect. Christianity is all about how people are sinful and must commit daily to emulating Christ even though they will continuously fail. Regardless it sounds like you are opening yourself up for massive disappointment by casting such a wide net. There are many “Christian churches” which are just jokes if not outright scams. Christians can’t control who calls themselves a Christian. I encourage you to investigate the Eastern Orthodox church which has a rich tradition and clear direction for how the Orthodox should live their lives. It is Ancient Christianity that holds in high esteem prayer, fasting and alms giving. There is real spiritual meat on the bone.
I may not believe in God, but I can definitely respect the man. ✊
In some sort of greater being yes, in any kind of church or following no.
I find I have my own belief in some unknown cosmic entitys, something along the lines of energy is always in a state of flow, life and death, rocks to dust, consciousness to the sprawling reaches of the universe a bit of new age spirituality stuff,
That’s kind of where I am with it. Anything human led is suspect and I think any resemblance to “Jesus church” is long gone. I want to believe but I struggle with God being “just” but also allowing so much injustice.
If I had to put myself somewhere I believe in God but my faith for the rest of it is dwindling.
I wish I had a not so cynical view but the moment I see any human infont of any amount of others reading from a “holy text” or any interpretation of one I’m just like, your in a cult, your after power, there’s something you want, you want to judge others or some other underlying reasons.
Yer it’s hard to believe in anything when everywhere you look it’s just shit.
No. I believe in Stephen Fry.
He’s pretty close!
Personally I’m a huge fan of the Alcoholics Anonymous understanding of “god” and I think it applies more widely.
In AA it is supposed to be A-religious so as to accommodate as many people as possible. To them, god is whatever higher power you need to put your faith into to do better. An entity who you are striving to make proud or you are asking for guidance or help, etc.
This genericized god idea kinda gives up the game to me as an atheist, but it doesn’t mean it’s bad. In fact it’s made me believe in god as an idea.
There are plenty of studies on “manifesting” goals and how saying out loud to yourself or to someone at all substantially increases your chance of succeeding in your goal. This is just prayer or a magic spell or whatever else you wanna call it. I call it a ritual.
The fact that god is a made up idea has been uncontested in my mind for eons, however the psychological power of a belief in god is new to me and makes me appreciate the systems of religion more (doesn’t excuse a lot of their bullshit).
AA is a great program and is basically secularized Christianity. Two great religious books that talk about the program from a more explicitly religious perspective are “Breathing Underwater” (Catholic) and “Steps of a Transformation” (Orthodox). Even with your agnostic perspective I think you would find them enlightening.
Upvoting the actual answers here, as some who were not the target audience and haven’t read the question have answered.
Agree.
OP wants to hear opinions from people agreeing with statement X, not those who disagree.
I disagree with the notion of the universe being a probability game, but that’s not asked.
Thumbs up from me too. I’m always eager to hear/read from people who aren’t shy but rather open and reasonable about their beliefs, whatever those may be.
Alright, now that you mention it, the universe is ‘a big ball of yarn’. You can’t see the fabric, because we use the fabric to see. Planets and stars shrink and/or grow, all of them have solid surfaces, thunder isn’t always a local planetary phenomena, but often an exchange between two large bodies, usually between the host star and planet. ‘Neutron stars’ and ‘black holes’ are regular stars completely misinterpreted and dark matter and dark emergy are stop gaps in broken theories.
The pattern looks like a boxershorts or Lederhose
Makes me feel more assured and will reduce my suffering until I die. After my death, regardless of if I am right or wrong, the net positive of having had the soothing idea of a larger meaning can’t and won’t be retroactively undone. So why the hell not?
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Why do you think truth matters so much? Don’t disagree, but why is it humans will forego a more beneficial situation if it’s proven to be “untrue” or “not real” etc?
Well I’m not that guy but I can speak from myself that every time I have been true to myself and others, I have felt more and more real and tangible myself. And it is a much better feeling than “fooling yourself” with the why not, using rational logic to just make a decision like that. I always say to my kids, nobody can know what happens when we die and if they say they do, they are making it up. But we can talk about some truths still, that are felt, and then communicated to you as just something that is comfirmed by experience, that is, you experienced something nobody else should know and then they did too, with synchronicity and other phenomenon which just makes us assume it’s true. But in the sense of scientific fact it can not be described because words and language kind of is not enough or it doesn’t kind of translate at all.
I think that’s a really healthy conversation to have with your kids, man! I totally agree with your sentiment, and being “authentic” feels right, but it’s odd when you think about it. Where does it come from? Humans self-deceive all the time, right? It’s almost a useful skill in certain situations (e.g. optimism bias), but there’s an overriding feeling that “real” is “better”. It just boggles my mind a bit tbh.
It was unlocked hugely by an insight I got long ago that is a deep truth that I always keep an eye on, which is that;
The more honest you are with others, the more honest you are with yourself.
It is one of the effects of “mirror neurons” phenomenon and the realisation that our subconscious, our “self” does not explicitly distinguish between you and other people the way your prefrontal cortex and conscious mind does. This is old research by now but to me it makes so much sense and I see the effects in people around me all the time.
In dream or deep meditation, “god experiences” (I forget the English name for it) or with psychedelics, this comes to the surface and provokes many “we are one” messages and compassionate teachings such as the golden rule and karma etc. But bottom line, most of our brain just doesn’t give exactly a fuck about who is who at any given time. Just the relationship between them.
Similarly, if you talk down on yourself, you are also more likely to feel like other people are not enough. We all mirror each other and react to subconscious signals every day. This is an cascading effect, that will become exponentially useful if you consciously choose and gradually adjust how to be towards others.
(I kind of go off on this tangent now, because I apparently like talking about it but feel free to ignore the rest if you aren’t into the specifics of my understanding of why it is like this)
Our bodies are talking to each other (subconscious to subconscious) with immense bandwidth, from smells and hormones, microexpressions, physical notes (leaving objects or others in some specific state). But most of it is discarded and not raised to system 1 (frontal lobe)
By learning other people’s predictions, our body can predict events and sometimes chains of several events between several people, and intuit how they came to be at a certain place at a certain time or why the car keys are in a new place, inferring other events, and all these predictions occurs in system 2, subconsciously and continually so that our focus can be on what’s at hand.
By being predictable we incur safety and signal affinity. Any deviation from normal will be evaluated by system 2 if it should warrant a notice to system 1 to investigate, and that will most often be a signal of discomfort, as unpredictability of any kind is an “expensive” metabolic operation.
A very dry explanation that perhaps gives a little insight into the crisscrossing neurological mechanics. It’s good to first understand that the body is continuously budgeting for any prediction error, and for instance meeting new people or interacting with someone that speaks differently than we expect, is draining from a pure metabolic standpoint. The body needs to have prepared glucose and other material and if it happens many times in a row with no rest period for the thoughts to settle, the stress can make you straight up ignore what others say and just answer your prediction to what they just said. It’s the cheapest mode of operation and most common during a day.
I digress a lot but it’s fun because I just pieced together a pretty solid understanding of the whole and previously I had just so many sporadic and isolated insights that lately has found each other into a cohesive model and it’s kind of cathartic to just share it blatantly. It’s a tiny bit probable that my ADHD medication makes me ramble a bit and I hope I didn’t overwhelm ya. Cheers!
The truth has value in decision making, while comforting lies have value in stress reduction. Choosing ‘truth’ over ‘comfort’ is a long-termist strategy. Being satisfied by a simple answer will make you feel better now, increasing survivability in the short term, but finding a better model of the world to operate by, a.k.a. learning, lets you make better decisions for the rest of your life.
More beneficial for whom? The truth is that pollution is bad. I can make myself feel better about how much energy I use by assuring myself that I’m chosen by God and deserve to consume resources and pollute. This harms other people though. The truth is non-opinionated, so actually useful. Believing something to make yourself feel better, and ignoring problems, is biased favoring yourself and against others.
What is truth and how do you know that?
There’s no way to know the truth on something like this, but you should always seek it. There are ways to know certain things aren’t true though. For example, the Judeo-Christian faith must be wrong, at least to an extent, because it’s self-contradictory. Also, most religions are mutually exclusive, so how do you go about seeking the correct one if striving for truth is valuable?
There is no way to know the truth
Is this true? Because if so it is a contradiction.
There are ways to know certain things aren’t true
This is just another way of making a truth claim even though you can’t know the truth.
…you should always seek it
How do you go about seeking the correct one if striving for truth is valuable?
Who says seeking truth is something we ought to do? Particularly if knowing the truth is an impossibility. These are all assertions as to what we should do without any justification as to why we should do them.
I’m being slightly annoying to shine your own standards on yourself. Not meant to be combative.
There is no way to know the truth
Is this true? Because if so it is a contradiction.
Knowledge and truth are two different things, although I should have written it better. There’s no way to know the truth on this particular subject. (Well, there is a way to know theoretically, if a god exists. There isn’t a way to know if one doesn’t exist though. You can’t prove that something that doesn’t exist doesn’t exist. You can only prove that something exists.)
This is just another way of making a truth claim even though you can’t know the truth.
No, you can use logic to prove certain things can’t exist. If there’s a contradiction, it can’t be correct, for example.
Who says seeking truth is something we ought to do? Particularly if knowing the truth is an impossibility. These are all assertions as to what we should do without any justification as to why we should do them.
I’m not making a universal statement. I’m making the statement that someone who values truth should seek truth. That seems self-evident.
Assuming you’re a skeptic…
There’s no way to know the truth on this particular subject. [i.e. God]
Arguments for God’s existence (such as classical theistic arguments) are not merely isolated truth claims—they function at the paradigmatic level, offering a foundation for knowledge itself.
If you deny God’s existence, you must account for the reliability of reason, logic, and abstract universals like mathematics. If these are simply “self-evident,” then you’re assuming the very thing your worldview has no means to justify.
No, you can use logic to prove certain things can’t exist. If there’s a contradiction, it can’t be correct, for example.
Only if you can justify the validity of logic in your worldview. But without a transcendent source of rationality, why assume logic is binding or that it applies universally? You’re using a tool (logic) without explaining why it ought to work or why it’s trustworthy in a purely materialistic or skeptical framework.
I’m not making a universal statement. I’m making the statement that someone who values truth should seek truth. That seems self-evident.
Okay well this is just an opinion then. My main point here is that you can’t propose any “oughts” without a justification.
Again. I’m being nit-picky but I feel like this thread is meant to invite some apologetic banter.
If you deny God’s existence, you must account for the reliability of reason, logic, and abstract universals like mathematics. If these are simply “self-evident,” then you’re assuming the very thing your worldview has no means to justify.
All of those are based on axioms. They’re true if the axioms are true, but not otherwise. They are useful, but not self-evident. The axioms seem to hold though.
Only if you can justify the validity of logic in your worldview. But without a transcendent source of rationality, why assume logic is binding or that it applies universally? You’re using a tool (logic) without explaining why it ought to work or why it’s trustworthy in a purely materialistic or skeptical framework.
Why do we need a transcendent source of rationality? We only need to build upon foundations of solid axioms.
Okay well this is just an opinion then. My main point here is that you can’t propose any “oughts” without a justification.
Do I need to spell out why someone who values truth should seek it? It’s not really an opinion, but a statement. I guess it isn’t a complete statement. I guess a more complete statement would be “someone who values truth, and wants to find what they value, should seek truth.” Is that better? I don’t think that middle portion is required to spell out, but whatever.
my choosing to engage with something that might not be true isn’t hurting anyone. i’m a solo practitioner of a non christian faith. :p of course the truth matters, but when staring at it makes you actively suicidal and feel like everything lacks meaning, why not make use of the circuitry our brains evolved with, and let a little bit of What If light the path forward?
From my perspective they are not lies.
In the hope of civil discussion, it is not helpful for you to frame it that way IMO.
Because religion can be and has been used to convince people to do terrible things. The fewer false beliefs people hold the fewer things can be used to manipulate them in this way.
water can and has drowned people. i fail to see your point.
Yes, and that’s why we don’t allow people to flood school, hospitals and homes with water. It is controlled and diverted.
we also don’t refuse to allow people to have small amounts of it accessible to them at all times or call it absolutely bad outright just because when used in a malicious way or left to be uncontrollable in particular situations it can be dangerous. shrug.
That’s because water is necessary to life.
When doing risk analysis something that is required to keep people alive gets a few extra points towards being accessible for, hopefully, obvious reasons.
If even something that is necessary for life is controlled due to the danger it poses, you can imagine why people would seek to restrict dangerous things that people can live without.
I think most people think like this at their core regardless of class, status, label.
If you look at it very very loosely, many major religions are reaching toward the same general concepts and have enough similarities to suggest a consensus that there’s a “something” up there.
We probably all have an imperfect idea of what that “something” is, but there are enough similarities (or echos of the same ideas) across many religions to suggest they’re looking at the same indivisible thing and interpreting it differently.
That something you’re referring to is just fear. Fear of nothingness fear of death fear of the unknown etc… Fear of this being it. Fear of the end. That’s all it boils down to. Thus they have to create something to answer that fear. But it’s not like there’s a universal truth they’re all circling around. They’re all just creating something to address that fear.
Okay cool.
OP asked for reasons, and I gave one of mine. I didn’t intend or expect it to be convincing to anyone. If I wanted to give a formal argument for the existence of a higher power I would, but that’s not the point of this thread.
This was a thread for believers. Let them have this one.
And if they had expressed a personal belief I probably wouldn’t have even responded. However they talked about a general phenomenon.
This is my very loose, shower thought level description of my personal belief.
“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding.” Proverbs 9:10
I don’t believe in the Christian god because there are too many contradictions and I don’t think the divine truth is corruptable. Anything so corrupt it doesn’t even agree with itself cannot be divine truth.
contradictions
Like what
I see a fair amount of Christian-related posts in your post history so I’m gonna go ahead and suggest that this is probably a conversation you don’t want to have. I’m trying not to be an asshole here, but I am very well read on the subject of Christianity, so suffice to say that contradictions exist, they are widely known, and I find Christian apologia on the subject wholly unconvincing.
That said, if I’m really the person you would like to go on this journey of discovery about your religion with then I will take you, but I can’t say that you are very likely to enjoy the results.
I’m an Orthodox Christian our theology (which is that of the first thousand years) is likely different from anything you take issue with from Catholic or Protestant traditions in regard to soteriology, ecclesiology, sanctification etc
It’s great that you have interest in Christianity but Orthodoxy leans on 2000 years of scholarship and tradition. With all due respect you’re not going to ask any new questions or bring up any novel points. I don’t claim to be an expert but have Orthodox resources I can draw from.
Fair point. I am not very familiar with Orthodox Christianity at all, save a little of the very early history. You also sound fairly well-educated on the subject, which makes you twice over not the usual kind of person who responds to my comments about religion.
So, first, let me apologize for making assumptions; the usual kind of person I get is an American evangelical protestant who hasn’t read most of his or her own bible and is of the opinion that anything important for them to know would be whispered on the wind directly into their ear by god himself, so they have a pretty dim view of learning in general, but also of learning about their religion in specific. That’s clearly not you. My bad.
Second, it’s my understanding that Orthodoxy (probably not the right word, my bad) uses fundamentally the same scriptures as Catholicism and Protestantism, with some additions to the Old Testament. My issues come from the bible’s descriptions of god, events, and people, so I’m going to assume there’s enough common ground that my these translate to Orthodoxy as well as the others. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
I have 3 core issues with Christianity:
- Original sin: imposing the consequences of one person’s actions on others is called collective punishment and it’s a war crime, and needless to say baking a metaphysical war crime into the very heart of a religion - its origin story - is just not ever going to fly with me. It certainly doesn’t help that this is further complicated by #2.
- Omniscience/free will: either god is omniscient (lit: all knowledge, which includes perfect knowledge about the future) and free will is impossible so we can’t choose to love god, or he isn’t omniscient. His claims about moral authority are held together by this linchpin, and honestly either way it falls doesn’t look great. If we can’t choose to love god then punishing us for ‘choosing’ otherwise is effectively god punishing others for his own crimes since he made us unable to choose otherwise, so we’re right back on the war crimes train. If he’s not omniscient then he doesn’t have a plan, can’t judge sin in the hearts of men, etc. Is he even still a god at that point? Also that would make him a liar, which again is not a great foundation upon which to build a claim to moral authority.
- Vengeful/loving god: the Old Testament is full of examples of god as an angry, petty, vengeful tyrant, only for him to change his ways or something in the New Testament and be all about love. There are exceptions in both, obviously, so I’m referring to general trends. I think Jesus had some great ideas (best summed up by Bill & Ted as, ‘Be excellent to each other’), but the rest reads like infantile revenge-porn. And I’m not buying that ‘hate the sin, love the sinner’ thing either (that’s probably an evangelical thing), because god sure wasn’t raining fire and brimstone and calling for the wholesale slaughter of the sins, that was inflicted upon the sinners. And their sin mostly seems to boil down to not believing in god.
These, to me, seem like unsolvable, unavoidable paradoxes. I see two paths when faced with them:
- I’m forced to admit that the ‘perfect eternal Divine Truth’ is neither perfect nor eternal (re:god’s nature purportedly changing) and therefore also not true.
- What is being passed off as divine truth was either created or corrupted (which doesn’t necessarily imply malicious intent; simple error will suffice) by flawed humans and thus is also not true.
I don’t begrudge people who believe or find comfort in it, mind you, but it’s not for me. I’m searching for Truth, not a search for ‘it’s probably not true but I guess it’s a nice idea?’
First of all “Orthodoxy” is accepted as a shorthand referent to Orthodox Christianity so no issues there.
Secondly no worries on the assumptions I also anticipate Protestant hand waving when it comes to certain topics such as canonicity.
Now for your core issues…
- Original Sin - This is where Orthodoxy is different from everyone else. The Orthodox perspective is that the guilt of Adam and Eve’s sin is theirs alone. The consequence of their sin, death, is inherited however. This factors into the sotieriology (e.g. salvation doctrine) of the Church. The nature of man entered a state of fallenness due to the sin of Adam and Eve. Since God cannot be in the presence of sin Adam and Eve had to be expelled from the garden. This expulsion brought with it struggles such as the pain of childbirth, toil, hunger, sickness etc. This is, however, a mercy because despite entering a fallen state humanity has an opportunity to sanctify itself in this life and rejoin with God in death. This is a unique feature to humanity. Heavenly beings are in a static state. It is why Satan is jealous of humanity because the state of his soul cannot be changed and he will be eternally damned. The human soul can no longer change its spiritual state when this life ends. Human beings for all the struggles they have on earth can persevere in their faith and enter the Kingdom when they repose.
- Omniscience/Free Will - This is a false dichotomy and is highly dependent on what you mean by free will. Just because God knows all things doesn’t mean he orchestrates all things (e.g. foreknowledge ≠ predestination). God is incomprehensible and operates outside of time. This is part of what makes God a transcendent all powerful being. Furthermore because the Orthodox don’t believe in Original Sin the theological allowance for how man moves and works in the world is different. Man can live in the world and freely choose between Good and Evil. Salvation is achieved through a process of working together with the Holy Spirit in all aspects of life. This process is called Theosis.
Orthodoxy doesn’t conceive of God’s knowledge as something that competes with human will. Because God is not bound by time, His knowledge isn’t predictive—it’s participatory. We remain free precisely because God allows our freedom to unfold within His omniscient love. This is the mystery of synergy with the Holy Spirit.
What we perceive as logical already presupposes the existence of God, because logic itself depends on the existence of objective truth. If God is bound by created laws, He ceases to be God; He is the source of all order, not subject to it.
- Vengeful/loving god - This is primarily a postmodern critique of scripture by people like Richard Dawkins although ancient Marcionites and Gnostics love this critique as well. The Orthodox wholly reject this critique as a shallow reading of scripture that does not take into account the context of passages in and of themselves or scripture in its entirety. While God does render punishment in the Old Testament he is also endlessly loving despite being heartbroken by the wayward sins of his people who repeatedly abandon him for other Gods that can’t save them. There is love and wrath in both the OT and the NT. (e.g. OT - Jonah, God saving Nineveh when they repent; NT - Jesus over-turning tables of Money Changers) This is more of a squishy critique than the other two so I’m not sure what else to add.
Two paths forward…
I’m forced to admit that the ‘perfect eternal Divine Truth’ is neither perfect nor eternal (re:god’s nature purportedly changing) and therefore also not true.
The revelation of God is one that compounds on the past. Creation, Expulsion, Punishment, Enrichment, Liberation, Exile etc until you reach God incarnate in the form of Jesus Christ who uses the history of human failures to illustrate the grace of God and the establishment of a new covenant that saves all people. This is a logical progression.
What is being passed off as divine truth was either created or corrupted (which doesn’t necessarily imply malicious intent; simple error will suffice) by flawed humans and thus is also not true.
I haven’t seen a compelling case that divine truth has been fundamentally corrupted. It seems more a result of your sentiment than a critical analysis.
I recognize you may disagree with the points I adequately communicated or have questions about ones I failed to describe well. I am a fallible human after all 😂. You may find that many of the contradictions you’re grappling with don’t exist in Orthodox thought in the same way they might in some Western traditions. I’d encourage looking into Orthodox apologia for a perspective not burdened by the theological inheritances of later Western heresies like penal substitution or strict determinism…
An aside about “war crimes” – I will not expound on this too much because it’s a whole separate topic but be wary of using a modern lens when assessing the ancient. You’re smuggling in a moral framework to critique a metaphysical one. It’s easy to forget that secular ethical ideas such as “war crimes” typically find their origin in Christian morality to begin with (at least in the West). What is the epistemic justification for Good and Bad in a world where everything is relative? Philosophically it is an arbitrary critique without grounding.
Re:Orthodoxy - fair enough.
Original Sin
The Orthodox perspective is that the guilt of Adam and Eve’s sin is theirs alone. The consequence of their sin, death, is inherited however.
Ok, that’s an interesting take. If man is not guilty of the sin of Adam then why does he bear the consequences of the act? Why punish someone for something you don’t believe they did?
Since God cannot be in the presence of sin Adam and Eve had to be expelled from the garden.
Yeah but then he followed them around? Adam praises god on the birth of his sons, they give offerings to god and even talk to him, etc. And if Adam’s sin is transmitted to all mankind then Cain and Abel were sinful too, so it kinda seems like god didn’t have a problem being in the presence of sin?
This is, however, a mercy because despite entering a fallen state humanity has an opportunity to sanctify itself in this life
This doesn’t fly with me, because god created Adam and Eve as they were and they (assuming omniscience) couldn’t choose to do otherwise. So not only is god punishing them for a sin of his own making, he’s punishing everyone else despite, in the Orthodox version, them not being guilty of that sin. And then to call pain and suffering a mercy because it gives us the ‘opportunity’ to ‘earn’ back what you took? Nah, I’ll take a hard pass on that one. Sin but not guilt is kind of worse actually. It’s like telling your kid, ‘I know your brother was the one who took the cookie, but I’m going to spank you for it too.’ See also: pettiness and tyranny.
Heavenly beings are in a static state … the state of [Satan’s] soul cannot be changed
If it was static, how did it change from ‘angelic’ to ‘damned’ or whatever after his act of rebellion? Was it the act itself that somehow changed the unchangeable, or did god decide to rewrite reality just this once? If that’s the case, rewriting someone’s soul just so you can eternally punish them for one mistake is kind of a dick move.
Free Will
This is a false dichotomy and is highly dependent on what you mean by free will.
I don’t think so, though I concede that there might be definitions of free will that render it thus, I’m using the pretty common definition of having the ability to make choices.
Just because God knows all things doesn’t mean he orchestrates all things … foreknowledge ≠ predestination
I whole-heartedly disagree, foreknowledge precisely equals predestination. He doesn’t have to orchestrate things; merely knowing ahead of time that I will turn left instead of right at the next intersection means that it is definitionally impossible for me to turn right. If I was able to turn right anyway that would definitionally preclude foreknowledge: you can’t know that I turned left if I turned right.
God is incomprehensible and operates outside of time.
Even if I grant this for the sake of argument, humans do not operate outside of time so foreknowledge of human futures, again definitionally, must necessarily be knowledge about the future of the time that humans operate in. But even if that wasn’t true, if god exists outside of time then he also definitionally exists outside of causality and cannot influence or be influenced by human choices within time, which precludes foreknowledge of human futures.
Furthermore because the Orthodox don’t believe in Original Sin the theological allowance for how man moves and works in the world is different. Man can live in the world and freely choose between Good and Evil. Salvation is achieved through a process of working together with the Holy Spirit in all aspects of life. This process is called Theosis.
Ok, I’ll take your word for it, but according to the most widely-accepted definitions if man is free to choose then god cannot have forenkowledge of those choices.
Because God is not bound by time, His knowledge isn’t predictive—it’s participatory. … We remain free precisely because God allows our freedom to unfold within His omniscient love.
If he’s not outside of causality (as implied by the participatory element here) then he’s not outside of time, because those two things mean effectively the same thing. You say he allows it out of love, I say he allows it out of lack of foreknowledge, because that’s the only thing that is logically consistent.
What we perceive as logical already presupposes the existence of God, because logic itself depends on the existence of objective truth.
Logic doesn’t presuppose god, it merely presupposes consistency. Objective truth can arise from the structure of reality itself without requiring a divine source. We have mountains of evidence that logic is internally self-consistent; that’s not the case for pretty much any holy book I’ve read.
Vengeful/loving God
This is primarily a postmodern critique of scripture by people like Richard Dawkins
That doesn’t render it invalid. Also: primarily, but not uniquely as you point out; I was personally puzzling over this stuff back in the 80s before anyone but the editors of a few science journals had ever heard of Richard Dawkins.
The Orthodox wholly reject this critique as a shallow reading of scripture that does not take into account the context of passages in and of themselves or scripture in its entirety.
I don’t dispute that he is also loving, I dispute that he is exclusively loving as of the New Testament. He just goes on and on about how vengeful and angry he is in the OT, and there’s some of that in the NT too, though I think it’s all said by others since (IIRC, it’s been a while) god doesn’t really have a speaking part in much of the NT. Also I don’t think you get to send your PR team out to call you a ‘loving god’ after slaughtering innocents and children (and advocating the same) over and over again.
NT - Jesus over-turning tables of Money Changers
I wouldn’t count that as wrath, and I also wouldn’t attribute it to god. We know he’s capable of turning those tables over himself if he wanted to, but he didn’t. :P
This is more of a squishy critique than the other two
That’s fair, it’s definitely more of a vibe-check thing, I’m not sure there’s much space to discuss there.
(cont, TIL lemmy doesn’t have that high of a maximum post length.)
Two Paths
The revelation of God is one that compounds on the past. Creation, Expulsion, Punishment, Enrichment, Liberation, Exile etc until you reach God incarnate in the form of Jesus Christ who uses the history of human failures to illustrate the grace of God and the establishment of a new covenant that saves all people. This is a logical progression.
Which is kind of my point. A logical progression of revelation implies change over time in god’s plan, actions, or relationship with humanity. But a truly perfect, eternal, unchanging truth wouldn’t require progression or revision. If the Divine Truth was perfect and eternal and true, why did it need changing? Evangelicals talk about the ‘new covenant’ all the time, but humanity isn’t any different now than it was then, why did we need a new one? Seems like either god changed or the truth wasn’t eternal.
I haven’t seen a compelling case that divine truth has been fundamentally corrupted.
Corrupted might not be the right word, but we have examples of, say, King James commissioning his own bible to support the divine right of kings. But aside from that, human fallibility plays a part in the transmission of this truth, and anyone who has played a game of telephone in grade school can tell you how that tends to go: you line up the whole class, whisper something into the first kid’s ear, they whisper into the next, and what started out as ‘Billy can’t come to school today because he’s sick’ comes out the other end as ‘little Billy died’ or whatever. Even if you assume each person in the chain intends to transmit it faithfully people make mistakes, there are disputes over word choice and changes to meaning over time in translation, there are newly-discovered ancient texts that cast new light on the ones we had, etc. I don’t know about fundamentally corrupted, but if the perfect eternal truth is all of those things then something else has to account for the paradoxes, and if we’re assuming the literal existence of god then that leaves only human fallibility.
I recognize you may disagree with the points I adequately communicated or have questions about ones I failed to describe well. I am a fallible human after all 😂.
Me too man, I’m just here to have an engaging conversation and learn a little something. All we can do is do our best to own mistakes and not be shy about admitting fault.
You may find that many of the contradictions you’re grappling with don’t exist in Orthodox thought in the same way they might in some Western traditions. I’d encourage looking into Orthodox apologia for a perspective not burdened by the theological inheritances of later Western heresies like penal substitution or strict determinism…
That doesn’t surprise me. What little I know of the early history of Orthodoxy is that there was an early, pretty severe schism over some fundamental stuff that sent the two churches in very different directions. I am curious to know more, though, so I hope you stay and keep the discussion going. I admit that (probably because the way I fell out of Christianity and then into a long but fortunately-ended period of atheism) that Orthodoxy was never really on my radar in my religious studies. But I am a more curious person than I once was with considerably more free time, so I’ll do some poking about and see what I can find. ;)
An aside about “war crimes” … be wary of using a modern lens when assessing the ancient.
That’s entirely fair. I don’t think I was intentionally doing it but there may have been some subconscious stuff going on there. My intent, and perhaps I should’ve chosen a better tool, was to use the terminology of modern ethics to convey the weight of my distaste for the idea of punishing one person for another’s crime in any context.
What is the epistemic justification for Good and Bad in a world where everything is relative? Philosophically it is an arbitrary critique without grounding.
I don’t think everything is relative, nor do I think god is the only source of morality. Even without modern utilitarian concepts like least-harm, it’s pretty clear that ancient human cultures had a concept of justice that depended on the simple and self-evident truth that causing intentional harm to others is bad. It may have been applied unevenly and inconsistently, but. And hell, even a toddler with barely a grasp on language, much less culture or philosophy, can tell the difference between getting bitten by the kid you bit and getting bitten by some kid because she thought you bit her. They’re unhappy at being bitten in either case, but - and I’ve seen this in my nieces and nephews - they get downright angry when they feel that sting of injustice, even if they can’t describe it.
As a Christian I would like you to try to rock my world.
You are welcome to read the thread below, I’ve laid out my issues here, but it looks like we might get a proper conversation going if you want to keep reading.
If you’re serious, there are so many. Here’s one of the first results I found in a search, but you can find so much writing on it if you want to, which if you actually believe you’re following the “truth” you should look into.
One of the most common fundamental contradiction arguments is the Judeo-Christian god is defined as omniscient and omnipotent, all knowing and all powerful, as well as benevolent. If this is true, why is there evil in the world? He’s omnipotent so must have the power to make a world in which it doesn’t exist, and he must be aware of whatever will happen in the world he creates, since he’s omniscient, and must not want evil to exist since he’s benevolent.
These cannot all be true. If they were then he’d create a world that satisfies his goals that does not have evil, which he must be capable of doing if he’s omnipotent. If evil must exist to accomplish his goals then he isn’t omnipotent. If he can’t detect evil will exist then he isn’t omniscient. If he wants evil to exist then he isn’t benevolent.
I viewed your link and randomly selected 4-5 of the “contradictions” and basic knowledge of the bible and historicity dispelled them. I’m not going to go through all 50. Sorry you get out what you put in lol. But I’ve heard many of them before and highly recommend the “Whole Counsel of God” podcast which walks through scripture verse by verse and addresses the most common Catholic, Protestant and Post-Modern critiques of scriptural “contradictions” which are typically due to bad theology, poor historicity, translation errors, cultural ignorance etc etc It’s also a great way to learn scripture in a deeper way.
If God exist why bad thing happen
This is a meme in Christian apologetic circles because non-Christians always think it’s a big own when it is really just a demonstration of a lack of understanding of what Christianity is actually about – Redemption. The story of how the world enters a fallen state is explained in Genesis. The fact that the world is fallen is critical to Christian theology and the process of sanctification.
God does not play by your rules. The struggles we face on Earth (often of our own creation) are for our salvation. This is what the bible and church tradition teaches.
I have a more expanded response in this thread here for some other points – https://lemmy.ml/post/30390799/18750134
This is a meme in Christian apologetic circles because non-Christians always think it’s a big own when it is really just a demonstration of a lack of understanding of what Christianity is actually about – Redemption.
It being a meme doesn’t mean there isn’t a reason for the argument. Redemption from what? Whatever it is, God had control over it happening. Why did it happen? He is trivially capable of creating a universe where there is no need to be redeemed. Why is one where redemption required the one he chose to create? Dismissing something as just being a meme does not actually answer the question.
God does not play by your rules. The struggles we face on Earth (often of our own creation) are for our salvation. This is what the bible and church tradition teaches.
The point is, God knew we would create the struggles. Is he omniscient? He knew it would happen. Is he omnipotent? He could have created a situation where it doesn’t happen. Is he benevolent? He wouldn’t want it to happen.
Yes, this is what the church teaches. I’m well aware. Does it make sense?
It being a meme doesn’t mean there isn’t a reason for the argument.
I understand. I’m more commenting on how it’s usually framed as a gotcha as if Christians have never thought of this before.
Redemption from what? Whatever it is, God had control over it happening. Why did it happen? He is trivially capable of creating a universe where there is no need to be redeemed. Why is one where redemption required the one he chose to create? Dismissing something as just being a meme does not actually answer the question.
The real answer to what is essentially the Epicurean “Problem of Evil” lies in Freedom and Love. God created human beings with genuine freedom, because only freely chosen love is real love. This means that the possibility of rejecting the good (e.g. evil) is not a flaw in creation but a necessary precondition for freedom.
The point is, God knew we would create the struggles. Is he omniscient? He knew it would happen. Is he omnipotent? He could have created a situation where it doesn’t happen. Is he benevolent? He wouldn’t want it to happen.
Yes. He is omniscient, omnipotent, and all-good. But benevolence doesn’t mean preventing every possibility of suffering. In the Orthodox view, God’s goodness is shown not in preventing freedom, but in enduring suffering with us, and transforming it into life and healing. God knew the risk of creation, yet chose to create and then chose to redeem through suffering love. That’s not negligence—that’s the Cross.
Yes, this is what the church teaches. I’m well aware. Does it make sense?
Not in a tidy, rationalistic way—and Orthodoxy is okay with that. There’s a deep apophatic element to the theology: the idea that not everything about God can be explained in human terms. But what does make sense in experience is the way the Church helps us encounter God through prayer, sacraments, and love. Evil isn’t ignored—it’s faced head-on, and transformed in Christ.
I understand. I’m more commenting on how it’s usually framed as a gotcha as if Christians have never thought of this before.
I think the questioning of it originally comes from Christians, so obviously that isn’t the case, nor is it what I’m saying.
The real answer to what is essentially the Epicurean “Problem of Evil” lies in Freedom and Love. God created human beings with genuine freedom, because only freely chosen love is real love. This means that the possibility of rejecting the good (e.g. evil) is not a flaw in creation but a necessary precondition for freedom.
The flaw here is he’s all powerful. If you believe the Adam and Eve story (and even if not it makes a good small case argument) he created the garden, created the tree and fruit, created the serpent, knew they’d eat the fruit, knew he’d damn them for it and they’d suffer for it, and chose to do this anyway. He trivially could also have created a world where they chose not to. Even when given the freedom of choice, he knows what choice will be made (since time is not relevant to him) and can set things up to create any outcome.
God knew the risk of creation, yet chose to create and then chose to redeem through suffering love. That’s not negligence—that’s the Cross.
It’s not a risk. He knew what would happen. He created something where this specific thing is what would come to be with fill awareness and decided that’s what he wanted, if it’s true. It’s not negligence, it’s indifference to suffering. There is no other option for it than that, since he could choose to have made something where it didn’t exist. Maybe we can’t imagine what that would be, but that’s what it means to be omnipotent.
But what does make sense in experience is the way the Church helps us encounter God through prayer, sacraments, and love.
Yeah, that’s fine if it helps you. However, every religion has this claim, so it isn’t evidence that it’s correct. That’s fine. Faith is by definition belief without evidence.
The flaw here is he’s all powerful. If you believe the Adam and Eve story (and even if not it makes a good small case argument) he created the garden, created the tree and fruit, created the serpent, knew they’d eat the fruit, knew he’d damn them for it and they’d suffer for it, and chose to do this anyway. He trivially could also have created a world where they chose not to. Even when given the freedom of choice, he knows what choice will be made (since time is not relevant to him) and can set things up to create any outcome.
You’re right to point out that God knew what would happen. In Orthodox theology, this is acknowledged—but it’s essential to distinguish foreknowledge from predetermination. God’s knows the outcome of free choices but doesn’t coerce them. His foreknowledge does not violate our freedom.
More importantly, God is not only omnipotent but all-good. And since God is the source of all goodness, the possibility of choosing anything other than God is the possibility of choosing evil—which is, by definition, a lack or distortion of the good. If we are to love God freely, we must be free to reject Him.
Therefore yes, God could have created a world where Adam and Eve never fell—but that would not be a world of genuinely free persons. It would be a world of perfectly programmed beings, and Orthodoxy insists that freedom is essential to personhood. Without it, love isn’t possible.
Also, it’s important to clarify: Orthodoxy does not teach that God “damned” humanity for the Fall. The consequence of sin is death and corruption, not divine vengeance. God’s response was not punishment but a rescue mission—the Incarnation. The “Tree of Life” returns in the Cross.
It’s not a risk. He knew what would happen. He created something where this specific thing is what would come to be with fill awareness and decided that’s what he wanted, if it’s true. It’s not negligence, it’s indifference to suffering. There is no other option for it than that, since he could choose to have made something where it didn’t exist. Maybe we can’t imagine what that would be, but that’s what it means to be omnipotent.
From our human perspective, it may seem this way. But God did not create evil or suffering—He permitted it as the cost of freedom, because only through freedom can there be love, growth, and communion. What matters is not just that suffering exists, but how God responds to it.
And His response is not indifference, but sacrificial love. In Christ, God enters our suffering, takes it upon Himself, and opens a path to life. The Cross is not God watching suffering from a distance—it’s God partaking and being the example for all of man for our sake.
Yeah, that’s fine if it helps you. However, every religion has this claim, so it isn’t evidence that it’s correct. That’s fine. Faith is by definition belief without evidence.
While it may not mean much to you I would be remiss not to defend Orthodoxy here. Faith isn’t blind belief or wishful thinking; it’s trust grounded in revelation, history, and experience. The resurrection of Christ, the lives of the saints, the enduring wisdom of the Church—these are not “proofs” in a modern empirical sense, but they are reasons for belief.
Furthermore I don’t know what your standards for evidence are but I encourage you to look at arguments like the Transcendental Argument for God. It argues that universals like logic, reason, and math are only justified if God exists. (e.g. X (God) is necessary for Y (logic, math etc). Y therefore X.)
If you deny God’s existence, you must account for the reliability of reason, logic, and abstract universals like mathematics. If these are simply “self-evident,” then you’re assuming the very thing your worldview has no means to justify. Furthermore without a transcendent source of rationality, why assume logic is binding or that it applies universally?
Believing in God is foundation to a worldview that relies on universals the alternative is arbitrarily granting yourself self-evident axioms.
I believe in a god but it is strange lol. I will truly never understand the concept of being all knowing and powerful so my idea is he’s either so bored with his existence he created us for entertainment or simply boredom. I imagine him similar to a comic book writer or tv show creator
I don’t believe gods exist.
I know the Abrahamic god doesn’t exist.
How do you know that?
Because it has conflicting attributes.
I am genuinely curious what these conflicting attributes are in your view.
But also, from a dialectical lens, contradiction exists in all things in our own observable reality, from the lowest levels of the concept of movement to the highest levels of the organization of human society. Why would a seeming contradiction be proof that God cannot exist?
That’s the nature of a contradiction. 2 or more mutually exclusive attributes can’t exist together.
But contradiction exists everywhere in our understanding of nature and the universe.
This would also make god imperfect.
Just for the sake of argument… According to what standard? Yours? Why should we follow your standard?
I don’t believe it would. Perfection can, and insofar as perfection exists in our reality does, exist alongside perceived contradiction as contradiction exists in all things.
Something tells me you are doing armchair exegesis. Give me an example.
