A God Who Intervenes

[Mystery Meat]

A couple of threads over the past week have had me thinking specifically about the nature of God, who he is and what he does. First, I believe God is all-loving. I also believe He has the power to directly intervene in our lives. I find no contradiction in these statements and I think saying they are mutually exclusive is black and white thinking. God is not bound by time. While I believe he cares about our struggles, sometime our struggles are what will bring us closer to Him. If your son or daughter had cancer would you not subject them to radiation and/or chemotherapy if it was the only hope for a full recovery?  Well, we all have a cancer. This cancer comes in different forms. For some it is lust; for others it is pride, greed, selfishness, sloth, or indifference. Sometime, the cure is hardly what we want. 

Also, sometime bad stuff happens. I have no problem with a loving God saying that someone's mortal experience is going to be different from mine or someone else's. I don't pretend to know why. A child may be born in Africa who is destined to die of starvation at the age of five. God chose not to intervene; but what if He is there at the other side welcoming them to a different realm where life is better than anything we can comprehend. In fact from that point of view, could we not argue that the loving thing is to let them die so they can find a fuller measure of happiness? Can we really speak evil of an eternal being who sees are sojourn here on Earth for what it is? A small electron sized spec in the grand scheme of eternity?

Now, I know that God intervenes in our lives, because he recently intervened in mine. I had a plan, I heard a voice not my own that whispered to me a different plan, I reluctantly followed, and now I am married. This was a real experience where left to my own devices I would still be single, lonely and who knows what else. I admit, sometimes I feel guilty for that. That God intervened for me, when there are countless other who are more worthy than I and who still struggle with loneliness. Yet, I do not doubt that the Lord has much in store for them if they remain faithful. For God is truly all loving and benevolent.

Edited April 11, 2016 by Mystery Meat

[Stargazer]

15 minutes ago, Mystery Meat said:

Now, I know that God intervenes in our lives, because he recently intervened in mine. I had a plan, I heard a voice not my own that whispered to me a different plan, I reluctantly followed, and now I am married. This was a real experience where left to my own devices I would still be single, lonely and who knows what else. I admit, sometimes I feel guilty for that. That God intervened for me, when there are countless other who are more worthy than I and who still struggle with loneliness. Yet, I do not doubt that the Lord has much in store for them if they remain faithful. For God is truly all loving and benevolent.

Wow, that is great news!  I've had the same experience, and am also recently married.  See the thread HERE for more about that.

The circumstances of our even becoming acquainted at all, and the spiritual events that were involved in the process made it entirely clear to me that God was definitely intervening.  

I don't think that just because God doesn't intervene in the lives of other, supposedly more worthy individuals, it means that He doesn't love them, or loves them less.  I am convinced that we largely experience what we experience as a result of what God sees that we need.  I believe that being faithful despite all that we must endure is the supreme test.  Job was tested severely, and stayed faithful despite it all.  The fact that he was rewarded in the end, whereas some others are rewarded after this life only, doesn't matter a hoot-n-holler.  Nothing we are rewarded with in this life can possibly hold a candle to the rewards that will be available in Eternal Life.

[Stargazer]

The thing about my recent experiences is this: God did not seem to intervene in my life by saving my wife from dying of cancer.  And I had to watch, every precious day, as her life slowly ebbed, until I watched her breathe for the last time.  She never complained about God not prolonging her life, and was faithful to the last.  I prayed that He would save her for me; I gave her one or more priesthood blessing, too.  But I have concluded that it was His intervention that took her Home; not that He would not save her.  Because she was already Saved in the Kingdom of God.  I concluded also that she had tasks to perform that she could not do here -- as the only LDS member of her family, most of her ancestors had not heard the Gospel in this life.  So I have no doubt at all that she was needed.  And she did reach a good age: 74.

The fact that many times God's interventions aren't what we want is not evidence that He doesn't intervene!

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

"It is not only tiresome when otherwise intelligent people speak this way, it is morally reprehensible. This kind of faith really is the perfection of narcissism: 'God loves me, don’t you know? He cured me of my eczema; he makes me feel so good while singing in church; and just when we had given up hope, he found a banker who was willing to reduce my mother’s mortgage.' Given all this God of yours does not accomplish in the lives of others, given the misery that’s being imposed on some helpless child at this instant, this kind of faith is obscene. To think in this way is to fail to reason honestly, or to care sufficiently about the suffering of other human beings." -- Sam Harris 

If God is all-loving and able to intervene whenever He wants, people would not get sliced in half in traffic accidents that leave their intestines, limbs, and brains splattered across the highway. If God is all-loving and able to intervene, teenage girls in Mexico would not get caught in the middle of gang drug wars, kidnapped, raped, and beheaded with machetes. If God is all-loving, He would not explicitly and unambiguously command or carry out Himself brutal animal sacrifice, famine, pestilence, natural disasters of all kinds, racism, slavery, pedophilia, child abuse and genital mutilation, misogyny, misandry, rape, torture, burning people alive, the death penalty for everything from homosexuality to picking up sticks on the wrong day, the murder and cannibalism of innocent children, and genocide. If God claims that these things can somehow be 'good' for us, then our morality simply does not intersect in any meaningful way with His, and it's pointless to call Him God when He is clearly Satan. To compare these things to our desperate attempts to save people with chemotherapy is truly appalling, especially when God could supposedly heal the cancer any time He wanted to in the twinkling of an eye. 

Imagine you're in God's place. You see eighteen-year-old Elisabeth Fritzl being forced by her father Josef into a hidden room he built specially for her in his basement. He beats and rapes her for the next 24 years, and she gives birth to seven children, three of whom are allowed upstairs, while the other four are held captive with her (though one of them dies days after birth and is incinerated by Josef). 

At any time during the past 24 years, you, God, could simply cause Josef to fall into a deep sleep for an hour or two, and unlock the downstairs door. Instead, you stand by and watch. 

You watch. 

The scriptures claim that God can transform people from mortality to immortality in the twinkling of an eye, without even tasting death. Indeed, God does just that for Elijah, a murderer who God helped to kill 555 people. If God has the power not only to listen to the prayers and understand the social networks and intervene in the lives of all of the billions of people on earth, then God must be choosing to let people suffer. But if it does not take away our free will when we are resurrected and healed of all physical ailments and taken into God's presence, then God could choose to end our suffering right this instant, without all the usual excuses and rationalizations about preserving the free will of rapists and murderers. 

Instead, while some people are getting their faces blown apart into unrecognizable goo by rocket launchers in the middle east, God spends His time helping His chosen people find True Love by making them hear voices.

I invite anyone claiming that suffering is for our own good to spend one entire weekend going through the archives of, say, LiveLeak or BestGore. If you can honestly look at the obscene suffering in the world which God does nothing, NOTHING about, and then turn around and claim that He intervenes to find lost keys for a guy at a ski resort, then ... well, words fail me. 
 

 

Edited April 11, 2016 by JeremyOrbe-Smith

[Stargazer]

The ancient astronaut writes that there is no God, no ultimate reward for either goodness or evil, and we are all just unwilling spectators as entropy leads ultimately to the Heat Death of the Universe, and there is NOTHING more to it than that.  And his proof?  That bad things happen to good people.

In the first place, if there is NOTHING more to it than that, why the hell are you even bothering to post here?  Because misery loves company, and you want to convince us all that there is no point to it all? Give up.  There's no point to it all.  What does it matter?  Suffering or bliss, it's all the same in the end, which is NOTHING.  You remind me of Morla.

 

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

I don't act based on hope for a reward or fear of punishment. Maybe none of this will matter after the sun dies; I choose to make it matter now, while we're still alive. The mistake believers all to often make is assuming that 'meaning' depends on an external meaning-maker who condescends to authoritatively bestow it upon us; to the contrary, we generate our own meaning, and it is as legitimate as we choose. If it all disappears after we die, at least we were alive at all. 

[Stargazer]

I don't act based on hope for a reward or fear of punishment.  I act for what I strongly believe is right and true.  For what I feel strongly the Spirit has inspired in me.  I have had multiple spiritual experiences (that you and others would doubtless argue are bogus), and I find that I cannot explain them away as coming from me.  I have organized and directed my own life according to the things which I have received through the spirit, and this course of action has not failed me, and in fact has enhanced my life enormously.  I act upon knowledge, upon what is in my life repeatable scientific principle.  You will of course doubt this, and it's your privilege, but I don't care to direct my life's course using your methodology.

The part you seem to mistake, is the part about God being an external meaning-maker.  There is no external meaning-maker.  The meaning is already there; it is Eternal.  He does not proclaim it; indeed He follows it Himself.  

Quote

 

Alma 42:13

 13 Therefore, according to justice, the plan of redemption could not be brought about, only on conditions of repentance of men in this probationary state, yea, this preparatory state; for except it were for these conditions, mercy could not take effect except it should destroy the work of justice. Now the work of justice could not be destroyed; if so, God would cease to be God.

 

You are operating upon the premise that Morla gave.  If things are as you seem to believe them to be, you have no choice about making it matter now, while you're still alive.  Because if it doesn't matter forever, it doesn't matter now, either.  You're deceiving yourself if you think you can make it matter temporarily.  Because it literally cannot matter unless it matters forever.  Because when the sun dies, when even your brief time upon earth passes, it will all be for naught.  Morla wins.

If it all disappears after we die, who cares if we were once alive?  I won't.  You won't.  Nobody will.  That's why I find atheism to be nothing more nor less than pointless nihilism.  

Your problem is with authority.  Or so it appears to me.  Like the kid who doesn't like to be told what to do.  Or so he tells his father as they are driving to some destination.  Whereupon the father deliberately bypasses the freeway exit which would have led to their destination.  The son berates the father for missing the exit, but is silenced when the father explains that he didn't want to be told what to do by the sign that indicated this was their exit.  Now, if you don't believe that was your exit, perhaps you are wise to ignore it.  But perhaps not.

[The Nehor]

2 hours ago, JeremyOrbe-Smith said:

I invite anyone claiming that suffering is for our own good to spend one entire weekend going through the archives of, say, LiveLeak or BestGore. If you can honestly look at the obscene suffering in the world which God does nothing, NOTHING about, and then turn around and claim that He intervenes to find lost keys for a guy at a ski resort, then ... well, words fail me. 

I have read stuff that bad and worse and still believe God intervenes in our lives.

You treat death and suffering as the ultimate evil and somehow they must be avoided at all costs to the point that God must stop them in all cases. Why?

[The Nehor]

44 minutes ago, JeremyOrbe-Smith said:

I don't act based on hope for a reward or fear of punishment. Maybe none of this will matter after the sun dies; I choose to make it matter now, while we're still alive. The mistake believers all to often make is assuming that 'meaning' depends on an external meaning-maker who condescends to authoritatively bestow it upon us; to the contrary, we generate our own meaning, and it is as legitimate as we choose. If it all disappears after we die, at least we were alive at all. 

Yet I am guessing you are choosy on whose meanings actually mean anything. I doubt you would smile benevolently on someone who finds meaning in wealth and impoverishes many to get it or who believes in a master race and commits genocide to purify it or sees meaning in all sexual encounters and gains them via rape or who finds meaning in feeling like a god in killing and murders.

Is it just you making that call or is it an objective morality? If there is such an objective morality you support why would you hate a God who demands it?

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

Stargazer, I thought you were implying that you did act based on reward or punishment because you wrote "The ancient astronaut writes that there is no God, no ultimate reward for either goodness or evil, and we are all just unwilling spectators as entropy leads ultimately to the Heat Death of the Universe, and there is NOTHING more to it than that." I'm confused by how you can then say you "don't act based on hope for a reward or fear of punishment," as if I had introduced the idea.  

I don't think it's at all true that "it literally cannot matter unless it matters forever." If we disappear after we die, then I won't be around to care; I care now, while we're alive. Nagel's essay The Absurd has a pretty decent take (though the rest of it is kinda meh, and he doesn't end up agreeing with Camus, alas) : 
 

Quote

It is often remarked that nothing we do now will matter in a million years. But if that is true, then by the same token, nothing that will be the case in a million years matters now. In particular, it does not matter now that in a million years nothing we do now will matter. Moreover, even if what we did now were going to matter in a million years, how could that keep our present concerns from being absurd? If their mattering now is not enough to accomplish that, how would it help if they mattered a million years from now? 

Whether what we do now will matter in a million years could make the crucial difference only if its mattering in a million years depended on its mattering, period. But then to deny that whatever happens now will matter in a million years is to beg the question against its mattering, period; for in that sense one cannot know that it will not matter in a million years whether (for example) someone now is happy or miserable, without knowing that it does not matter, period. 

What we say to convey the absurdity of our lives often has to do with space or time: we are tiny specks in the infinite vastness of the universe; our lives are mere instants even on a geological time scale, let alone a cosmic one; we will all be dead any minute. But of course none of these evident facts can be what makes life absurd, if it is absurd. For suppose we lived forever; would not a life that is absurd if it lasts seventy years be infinitely absurd if it lasted through eternity? And if our lives are absurd given our present size, why would they be any less absurd if we filled the universe (either because we were larger or because the universe was smaller)? Reflection on our minuteness and brevity appears to be intimately connected with the sense that life is meaningless; but it is not clear what the connection is. 

Another inadequate argument is that because we are going to die, all chains of justification must leave off in mid-air: one studies and works to earn money to pay for clothing, housing, entertain- ment, food, to sustain oneself from year to year, perhaps to support a family and pursue a career - but to what final end? All of it is an elaborate journey leading nowhere. (One will also have some effect on other people's lives, but that simply reproduces the problem, for they will die too.) 

There are several replies to this argument. First, life does not consist of a sequence of activities each of which has as its purpose some later member of the sequence. Chains of justification come repeatedly to an end within life, and whether the process as a whole can be justified has no bearing on the finality of these end-points. No further justification is needed to make it reasonable to take aspirin for a headache, attend an exhibit of the work of a painter one admires, or stop a child from putting his hand on a hot stove. No larger context or further purpose is needed to prevent these acts from being pointless. 

Even if someone wished to supply a further justification for pursuing all the things in life that are commonly regarded as self-justifying, that justification would have to end somewhere too. If nothing can justify unless it is justified in terms of something outside itself, which is also justified, then an infinite regress results, and no chain of justification can be complete. Moreover, if a finite chain of reasons cannot justify anything, what could be accomplished by an infinite chain, each link of which must be justified by something outside itself? 

Since justifications must come to an end somewhere, nothing is gained by denying that they end where they appear to, within life - or by trying to subsume the multiple, often trivial ordinary justifications of action under a single, controlling life scheme. We can be satisfied more easily than that. In fact, through its misrepresentation of the process of justification, the argument makes a vacuous demand. It insists that the reasons available within life are incomplete, but suggests thereby that all reasons that come to an end are incomplete. This makes it impossible to supply any reasons at all.

[...] 

The final escape is suicide; but before adopting any hasty solutions, it would be wise to consider carefully whether the absurdity of our existence truly presents us with a problem, to which some solution must be found - a way of dealing with prima facie disaster. That is certainly the attitude with which Camus approaches the issue, and it gains support from the fact that we are all eager to escape from absurd situations on a smaller scale. 

Camus - not on uniformly good grounds - rejects suicide and the other solutions he regards as escapist. What he recommends is defiance or scorn. We can salvage our dignity, he appears to believe, by shaking a fist at the world which is deaf to our pleas, and con- tinuing to live in spite of it. This will not make our lives un-absurd, but it will lend them a certain nobility.

Nehor said: "I have read stuff that bad and worse and still believe God intervenes in our lives." 

Okay, but based on what evidence? I admit I'm skeptical that any such evidence actually exists. 

"You treat death and suffering as the ultimate evil and somehow they must be avoided at all costs to the point that God must stop them in all cases. Why?"

If you don't see suffering and death as the ultimate evil, I don't know what I can say to persuade you besides the tautology 'because they hurt'. I thought the whole premise of the gospel (at least as presented in, say, smarmy GC talks) is that God knows they hurt, and will heal us and resurrect us and save us from Thanatos. 1 Corinthians 15:26, "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." Revelation 21:4, "God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away." 

The problem, of course, is that I see no persuasive evidence that such a being as God actually exists in reality to wipe away anyone's tears. We have to do that for each other. The scriptures are a mass of contradictory confusion, one moment claiming that God thinks sorrow and suffering and death are bad things, another moment claiming that God causes sorrow and suffering and horrific death on an absolutely unimaginable scale. 

"I am guessing you are choosy on whose meanings actually mean anything. [...] Is it just you making that call or is it an objective morality? If there is such an objective morality you support why would you hate a God who demands it?"

God doesn't demand it. 

Even the most cursory reading of scripture shows that God is the ultimate archetype of the genocidal authoritarian dictator. You mention wealth gained through impoverishing others, belief in a master race, genocide, rape, and murder? 

... have you read the Bible? 

I'm pretty sure the common folk were not living as well as Solomon, yet in Kings/Chronicles God literally comes to him in a dream and says "I will give thee riches, and wealth." From where? From the tribute extorted from the common impoverished people, comparable to how "all Judah brought to Jehoshaphat presents; and he had riches and honour in abundance." Or, much earlier, all the wealth and land and people stolen during the God-ordained conquest of Canaan. God literally designates the Israelites as a Master Race and commands them to commit genocide, for instance in Deuteronomy: "ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with fire. For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God: the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth. [...] Thou shalt consume all the people which the Lord thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them." God literally commands kidnapping and rape in Numbers: "Kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children ['ishshah taph], that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves." Also in Deuteronomy: "When thou goest forth to war against thine enemies, and the Lord thy God hath delivered them into thine hands, and thou hast taken them captive, And seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and hast a desire unto her, that thou wouldest have her to thy wife; Then thou shalt bring her home to thine house." And I don't know how one can read the scriptures without coming to the conclusion that God positively delights in bloodshed. Psalms 2:4 says "He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision. Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure." The Lord slays Er, then Onan; He slays innumerable people throughout the Bible, either indirectly through His commands, or quite directly by His own hand. There are too many references to list. "The Lord discomfited them before Israel, and slew them with a great slaughter at Gibeon, and chased them along the way that goeth up to Beth-horon, and smote them to Azekah, and unto Makkedah." 

The scriptures show that God recognizes that we experience pain as unpleasant, and want to be saved from death. Furthermore, the scriptures claim that God has the power to make people immortal in the twinkling of an eye, so that they do not even taste death. I cannot fathom what 'lesson' some young guy in Brazil learns by having his brains slowly beaten out of his skull with a hammer. And yet we have the videos of him screaming in agony, so we know that God certainly didn't numb his pain; he definitely 'tasted death'. If a neighbor has the power to stop the murder or at least spare the agony and doesn't, that is evil. Same goes for God. We give kids shots and it hurts them, but we don't currently have the power to do it any other way. The scriptures explicitly state that God does have the power, and yet He does not intervene in any perceptible way. 

1 John 4:16 is certainly not correct when, after a thousand bloody pages of God-caused gore, it claims that "God is love." This bipolar God has the chutzpah to command us to love Him as being merciful, tender, and peaceful, even after He commits literally every possible human rights violation imaginable. If a being claiming to be God actually intervenes in the ways that the authoritative scriptures claim, that being is clearly Satan. 

[bcuzbcuz]

2 hours ago, JeremyOrbe-Smith said:

Stargazer, I thought you were implying that you did act based on reward or punishment because you wrote "The ancient astronaut writes that there is no God, no ultimate reward for either goodness or evil, and we are all just unwilling spectators as entropy leads ultimately to the Heat Death of the Universe, and there is NOTHING more to it than that." I'm confused by how you can then say you "don't act based on hope for a reward or fear of punishment," as if I had introduced the idea.  

I don't think it's at all true that "it literally cannot matter unless it matters forever." If we disappear after we die, then I won't be around to care; I care now, while we're alive. Nagel's essay The Absurd has a pretty decent take (though the rest of it is kinda meh, and he doesn't end up agreeing with Camus, alas) : 
 

Nehor said: "I have read stuff that bad and worse and still believe God intervenes in our lives." 

Okay, but based on what evidence? I admit I'm skeptical that any such evidence actually exists. 

"You treat death and suffering as the ultimate evil and somehow they must be avoided at all costs to the point that God must stop them in all cases. Why?"

If you don't see suffering and death as the ultimate evil, I don't know what I can say to persuade you besides the tautology 'because they hurt'. I thought the whole premise of the gospel (at least as presented in, say, smarmy GC talks) is that God knows they hurt, and will heal us and resurrect us and save us from Thanatos. 1 Corinthians 15:26, "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." Revelation 21:4, "God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away." 

The problem, of course, is that I see no persuasive evidence that such a being as God actually exists in reality to wipe away anyone's tears. We have to do that for each other. The scriptures are a mass of contradictory confusion, one moment claiming that God thinks sorrow and suffering and death are bad things, another moment claiming that God causes sorrow and suffering and horrific death on an absolutely unimaginable scale. 

"I am guessing you are choosy on whose meanings actually mean anything. [...] Is it just you making that call or is it an objective morality? If there is such an objective morality you support why would you hate a God who demands it?"

God doesn't demand it. 

Even the most cursory reading of scripture shows that God is the ultimate archetype of the genocidal authoritarian dictator. You mention wealth gained through impoverishing others, belief in a master race, genocide, rape, and murder? 

... have you read the Bible? 

I'm pretty sure the common folk were not living as well as Solomon, yet in Kings/Chronicles God literally comes to him in a dream and says "I will give thee riches, and wealth." From where? From the tribute extorted from the common impoverished people, comparable to how "all Judah brought to Jehoshaphat presents; and he had riches and honour in abundance." Or, much earlier, all the wealth and land and people stolen during the God-ordained conquest of Canaan. God literally designates the Israelites as a Master Race and commands them to commit genocide, for instance in Deuteronomy: "ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with fire. For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God: the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth. [...] Thou shalt consume all the people which the Lord thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them." God literally commands kidnapping and rape in Numbers: "Kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children ['ishshah taph], that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves." Also in Deuteronomy: "When thou goest forth to war against thine enemies, and the Lord thy God hath delivered them into thine hands, and thou hast taken them captive, And seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and hast a desire unto her, that thou wouldest have her to thy wife; Then thou shalt bring her home to thine house." And I don't know how one can read the scriptures without coming to the conclusion that God positively delights in bloodshed. Psalms 2:4 says "He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision. Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure." The Lord slays Er, then Onan; He slays innumerable people throughout the Bible, either indirectly through His commands, or quite directly by His own hand. There are too many references to list. "The Lord discomfited them before Israel, and slew them with a great slaughter at Gibeon, and chased them along the way that goeth up to Beth-horon, and smote them to Azekah, and unto Makkedah." 

The scriptures show that God recognizes that we experience pain as unpleasant, and want to be saved from death. Furthermore, the scriptures claim that God has the power to make people immortal in the twinkling of an eye, so that they do not even taste death. I cannot fathom what 'lesson' some young guy in Brazil learns by having his brains slowly beaten out of his skull with a hammer. And yet we have the videos of him screaming in agony, so we know that God certainly didn't numb his pain; he definitely 'tasted death'. If a neighbor has the power to stop the murder or at least spare the agony and doesn't, that is evil. Same goes for God. We give kids shots and it hurts them, but we don't currently have the power to do it any other way. The scriptures explicitly state that God does have the power, and yet He does not intervene in any perceptible way. 

1 John 4:16 is certainly not correct when, after a thousand bloody pages of God-caused gore, it claims that "God is love." This bipolar God has the chutzpah to command us to love Him as being merciful, tender, and peaceful, even after He commits literally every possible human rights violation imaginable. If a being claiming to be God actually intervenes in the ways that the authoritative scriptures claim, that being is clearly Satan. 

Well stated. 

Growing up in the church, I believed that God would intervene in situations of our every day life. After studying for an exam I would dutifully go down on my knees and ask God to help me remember the important details that I studied. I fully expected him to be listening and then with the all inclusive, "thy will be done" (or Inshallah, if you're Islamic) he would decide to help or not help me during the exam.

What complete nonsense. The naivety of it all astounds me now. I expected help with my minor worries at the same time that millions around the world fought against the odds, to survive sickness, hunger and poverty. One need look no further than the daily news or a few easily researched statistics to see the numbers of people (mostly children aged less than 5 years) who die every day from prematurity, pneumonia, birth asphyxia and birth trauma, and diarrhoeal diseases. Malaria is still a major killer in sub-Saharan Africa. 

God apparently doesn't listen to those who pray to the wrong God. He gets quite angry, in fact. 

As a Mormon, I used to watch late night TV preachers, like Garner Ted Armstrong, Jim Bakker (and Tammy Faye, of course), Benny Hinn, Peter Popoff, Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, Jack van Impe, and many more, with a great deal of amusement (and an immodest amount of self-righteous "looking-down-onism"). It always amazed me how these frauds bilked millions upon millions of dollars from unwary peons. 

Do we learn from the misery of others? Of course we don't. 

[Maedros]

7 hours ago, JeremyOrbe-Smith said:

If God is all-loving and able to intervene whenever He wants, people would not get sliced in half in traffic accidents that leave their intestines, limbs, and brains splattered across the highway. If God is all-loving and able to intervene, teenage girls in Mexico would not get caught in the middle of gang drug wars, kidnapped, raped, and beheaded with machetes. If God is all-loving, He would not explicitly and unambiguously command or carry out Himself brutal animal sacrifice, famine, pestilence, natural disasters of all kinds, racism, slavery, pedophilia, child abuse and genital mutilation, misogyny, misandry, rape, torture, burning people alive, the death penalty for everything from homosexuality to picking up sticks on the wrong day, the murder and cannibalism of innocent children, and genocide. If God claims that these things can somehow be 'good' for us, then our morality simply does not intersect in any meaningful way with His, and it's pointless to call Him God when He is clearly Satan. To compare these things to our desperate attempts to save people with chemotherapy is truly appalling, especially when God could supposedly heal the cancer any time He wanted to in the twinkling of an eye. 

I find that most people who've suffered, acknowledge and recognize the hand of God in their situation even if we don't. The rain falls on the just and unjustice alike - a bomb will kill missionaries, children, old people and murderers and robbers. Why does God allow it? I don't know - maybe the power that causes it is greater that His power to stop it - saying that its all in His plan is just to cover our hurt feelings but I doubt that He causes difficult situations to happen to us - bad things are the result of the efforts of another being. However, when we say: "If God is all-loving" then we miss the point completely, our job is not to counsel but to seek counsel, as Isaiah said:

6 ¶Seek ye the Lord while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near:

 7 Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.

 8 ¶For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord.

 9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.

 10 For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater:

 11 So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.

 12 For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

 13 Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree: and it shall be to the Lord for a name, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.

[Atheist Mormon]

Just now, Mystery Meat said:

 

Now, I know that God intervenes in our lives, because he recently intervened in mine. I had a plan, I heard a voice not my own that whispered to me a different plan, I reluctantly followed, and now I am married. This was a real experience where left to my own devices I would still be single, lonely and who knows what else. I admit, sometimes I feel guilty for that. That God intervened for me, when there are countless other who are more worthy than I and who still struggle with loneliness. Yet, I do not doubt that the Lord has much in store for them if they remain faithful. For God is truly all loving and benevolent.

I find your post interesting here about knowing.                                                                                                                                                    My sincere apologies if I burst your bubble about this but; A God who interferes into a single person's affairs and does not warn a young family  on upcoming tsunami let's them perish (worse, spares mother)...How does God's providence work?                                                              If faithfulness was a criteria, after I became an Atheist Mormon  my health, my business took off......now I have a place in park city, I drive a range rover.....Who should I be grateful to? I am not minimizing your experience about God but it is going to take alot more to convince a skeptic guy like me, in fact nothing shorter than a demonstration of Biblical examples......                         

[Gray]

Rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. The idea of an interventionist God is rife with wish-fulfillment fantasy. Somewhere beyond that is an approach that says, we are responsible for us. The role of God is not to take care of us. We take care of each other, and do the work of God. 

[RevTestament]

2 hours ago, bcuzbcuz said:

Growing up in the church, I believed that God would intervene in situations of our every day life. After studying for an exam I would dutifully go down on my knees and ask God to help me remember the important details that I studied. I fully expected him to be listening and then with the all inclusive, "thy will be done" (or Inshallah, if you're Islamic) he would decide to help or not help me during the exam.

What complete nonsense. The naivety of it all astounds me now. I expected help with my minor worries at the same time that millions around the world fought against the odds, to survive sickness, hunger and poverty. One need look no further than the daily news or a few easily researched statistics to see the numbers of people (mostly children aged less than 5 years) who die every day from prematurity, pneumonia, birth asphyxia and birth trauma, and diarrhoeal diseases. Malaria is still a major killer in sub-Saharan Africa. 

It is quite a jump from believing God will intervene in everything to believing He intervenes in nothing. I don't believe God will intervene to make you smarter. I believe you make yourself smarter. God works with intelligences which have always been. He doesn't make them more intelligent. In prayer if you pray for the Holy Spirit, He might help you to remain calm so your intelligence doesn't get overwhelmed etc. I believe the Holy Spirit will help you to make the right choices in life, but to believe that he will blunt your free agency by doing everything for you, would nullify our purpose for living this life.

The death and suffering you see in the world is because we are mortal beings subject to the world like other creatures. If God were to eliminate those to mollify your sense of justice. he would nullify the purpose for this probationary state. You would like for him to make us immortal, so that we have no trials in this life - no suffering, no death, etc. Instead he has rendered us all equally...mortal. 

Quote

God apparently doesn't listen to those who pray to the wrong God. He gets quite angry, in fact. 

As a Mormon, I used to watch late night TV preachers, like Garner Ted Armstrong, Jim Bakker (and Tammy Faye, of course), Benny Hinn, Peter Popoff, Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, Jack van Impe, and many more, with a great deal of amusement (and an immodest amount of self-righteous "looking-down-onism"). It always amazed me how these frauds bilked millions upon millions of dollars from unwary peons. 

Do we learn from the misery of others? Of course we don't. 

Actually we do. We learn empathy. We learn to think of others. We learn to serve others and not ourselves. These are all godly attributes, which allow us to become more like Him. Without us learning to be willing to do this, we are stuck in a state of self-consciousness forever. He has given us a chance to prove ourselves. That we are willing to "lower ourselves" to help others. If He were to give some immortality, would they still be willing to do this? to help others?

 

[Mystery Meat]

Let me repeat, I KNOW God intervened because I heard His voice. I won't go into details as that would be lost on many of you, but the incident was so powerful that it prompted me to make this post: 

The experience I refer to is the voice which led me to the girl I am now married to. I had not kissed her at this point, and in fact she still had plenty of doubts and concerns (who can blame her?). So real was the experience that there was no doubt what would happen and it was as if we were already married (I only revealed to her this spiritual experience after we were engaged and she was ready and eager to marry me, FTR). That is evidence. You can dismiss it if you like. But its fruits are undeniable to me as I experienced them first hand and KNOW (not believe) that God directly intervened in my life.

[Mystery Meat]

1 hour ago, Atheist Mormon said:

I find your post interesting here about knowing.                                                                                                                                                    My sincere apologies if I burst your bubble about this but; A God who interferes into a single person's affairs and does not warn a young family  on upcoming tsunami let's them perish (worse, spares mother)...How does God's providence work?                                                              If faithfulness was a criteria, after I became an Atheist Mormon  my health, my business took off......now I have a place in park city, I drive a range rover.....Who should I be grateful to? I am not minimizing your experience about God but it is going to take alot more to convince a skeptic guy like me, in fact nothing shorter than a demonstration of Biblical examples......                         

You will note that I never said that wealth is direct sign of God's providence. I don't believe the doctrine that if you keep the commandments you will prosper (materially). I think it is false. 

[Duncan]

If God doesn't exist then why do these awful things happen? people die everyday, if God is watching or not

[stemelbow]

I don't get it for sure.  No offense to anyone, but it concerns me to no end that God would intervene in a case where a person might end up single rather than married, but then totally go absent for those who actually suffer real pain.  I don't care what one says being single does not constitute more pain and suffering than many things people live through in this life.  Why would God intervene for one when not intervening would not mean much at all, but then ignore others when intervening might actually have some impact?  Perhaps a better example is the keys thing.  Who cares ultimately if someone misplaces their keys? 

[Mystery Meat]

18 minutes ago, stemelbow said:

I don't get it for sure.  No offense to anyone, but it concerns me to no end that God would intervene in a case where a person might end up single rather than married, but then totally go absent for those who actually suffer real pain.  I don't care what one says being single does not constitute more pain and suffering than many things people live through in this life.  Why would God intervene for one when not intervening would not mean much at all, but then ignore others when intervening might actually have some impact?  Perhaps a better example is the keys thing.  Who cares ultimately if someone misplaces their keys? 

Admittedly, I don't pretend to understand the mind of God. But there was lots of talk on this board about Him not intervening. I have direct, real and personal experience that contradicts this idea. There have been other times where I wished he would have intervened and didn't. I trust God completely to use his perfect discretion in a way that is not only for my eternal benefit (even if to my mortal detriment), but for the eternal benefit of all mankind.

[USU78]

10 hours ago, JeremyOrbe-Smith said:

I don't act based on hope for a reward or fear of punishment.

Erich Fromm would disagree.

[Jeanne]

I try to wake up grateful for each day.  But there are times, especially now in my life..where I ask.."Where did He go?"  Both parents with cancer, a brother in a coma, and in the past, I lost a husband and mother just three months apart.  Within one year, I had a sister who committed suicide, a mother who died in her sleep surprisingly, and a husband who was trying hard to stay alive.  Just what was I supposed to learn from all of this?

Note:  By parents with cancer, this is my stepmother and father.

Edited April 11, 2016 by Jeanne

[Mystery Meat]

4 minutes ago, Jeanne said:

I try to wake up grateful for each day.  But there are times, especially now in my life..where I ask.."Where did He go?"  Both parents with cancer, a brother in a coma, and in the past, I lost a husband and mother just three months apart.  Within one year, I had a sister who committed suicide, a mother who died in her sleep surprisingly, and a husband who was trying hard to stay alive.  Just what was I supposed to learn from all of this?

Note:  By parents with cancer, this is my stepmother and father.

I can't answer that for you. But when that answer comes, it will all make sense and you will be grateful for a loving God who knew the end from the beginning.

[USU78]

4 minutes ago, Jeanne said:

I try to wake up grateful for each day.  But there are times, especially now in my life..where I ask.."Where did He go?"  Both parents with cancer, a brother in a coma, and in the past, I lost a husband and mother just three months apart.  Within one year, I had a sister who committed suicide, a mother who died in her sleep surprisingly, and a husband who was trying hard to stay alive.  Just what was I supposed to learn from all of this?

Note:  By parents with cancer, this is my stepmother and father.

I cannot begin to guess, Jeanne, and I think most all of us struggle with these questions  ...  and are supposed to struggle with these questions.

The child whose brain is pickled by his feckless mother's substance abuse, the girl whose father sexually abuses her while his wife is away in Norway with her mother visiting the old sod, the RM swain who plays the part of dutiful husband while secretly diddling a special needs neighbor and exposing himself to tweener girls, the twenty-something wife who tortures her husband because her ex was a snake, the cold-hearted mother with no affection to give her sensitive sons, the cold-hearted wife who ridicules and abuses her deaf and dementia-addled spouse, the secretly homosexual brother who grooms his siblings for later harvesting by his lover, the insatiable satyr RM husband who mocks his put-upon spouse's pain, the predator stalker preying on previously betrayed now-ex-wives trying to find a bit of kindness in an increasingly bleak world, the narcissistic sexual bully who ruins her daughter's temple wedding with her in-the-sealing-room exhibitionism, the mamma's boy who by turns neglects and abuses his sweet spouse and daughter  ...

These all concern me far more than whether G-d is fair in setting up a physical worlds where all of us are subject to misery, loss and pain.  They are all preventable.  They are all the result of sin.  These, and worse, I have seen and/or experienced, and, please trust me, they caused more than sufficient pain and loss and misery.  I submit they are worse than the impersonal suffering at the hands of nature that so concerns this and other recent threads.  They are worse because each is the result of pain imposed by those who had a duty to love.  Nature has no particular duty to us as a species or individually.

G-d, however, can and does heal both bodies and hearts and souls, regardless what agency caused the misery, loss or pain.

[Jeanne]

5 minutes ago, USU78 said:

I cannot begin to guess, Jeanne, and I think most all of us struggle with these questions  ...  and are supposed to struggle with these questions.

The child whose brain is pickled by his feckless mother's substance abuse, the girl whose father sexually abuses her while his wife is away in Norway with her mother visiting the old sod, the RM swain who plays the part of dutiful husband while secretly diddling a special needs neighbor and exposing himself to tweener girls, the twenty-something wife who tortures her husband because her ex was a snake, the cold-hearted mother with no affection to give her sensitive sons, the cold-hearted wife who ridicules and abuses her deaf and dementia-addled spouse, the secretly homosexual brother who grooms his siblings for later harvesting by his lover, the insatiable satyr RM husband who mocks his put-upon spouse's pain, the predator stalker preying on previously betrayed now-ex-wives trying to find a bit of kindness in an increasingly bleak world, the narcissistic sexual bully who ruins her daughter's temple wedding with her in-the-sealing-room exhibitionism, the mamma's boy who by turns neglects and abuses his sweet spouse and daughter  ...

These all concern me far more than whether G-d is fair in setting up a physical worlds where all of us are subject to misery, loss and pain.  They are all preventable.  They are all the result of sin.  These, and worse, I have seen and/or experienced, and, please trust me, they caused more than sufficient pain and loss and misery.  I submit they are worse than the impersonal suffering at the hands of nature that so concerns this and other recent threads.  They are worse because each is the result of pain imposed by those who had a duty to love.  Nature has no particular duty to us as a species or individually.

G-d, however, can and does heal both bodies and hearts and souls, regardless what agency caused the misery, loss or pain.

Thank you for your thoughts.  I am still learning in this life.  For all those things I mentioned of the past, it is what brought me to activity again in the church..and to strive and be better.  Then the walls crumbled and shelves fell and the questions went unanswered again.  I guess my answers will be like everyone else and I will wait for another world to understand.