your god is made of good and evil

Y

Are you bothered that it has other friends?

As I generally indicate in the posts.

You make declarative statements about your creator's nature and function.

You *know* its ways are "mysterious," because you said so.

You do understand how foolish you make yourself look by directly contradicting yourself all the time, right?

Revealing.

You go right on being the awesome Christian you are, gil.

And nothing will change.

Speaking of change and all.

I have absolutely no problem doing so.

That's how it works. No faith is required to deal with hardships in the present moments. One need only reflect on the past, when hardships weren't present, and look to the future, when current hardships will be in the past.

Of course, at some point, we will no longer have a future to look toward, but as long as we are alive, we have the present and the past.

Different people draw on different resources when situations seem dark. Some draw on religious faith. Others draw on their life experiences. Somehow, we usually manage to get through dark times. Perspective can be applied to any situation, since we all have histories on which to draw, or some other means of putting difficult times into perspective.

Religion works for some. Other things work for others.

...and try to tell yourself all these kids are dying slow, horrible, painful deaths well before their times just so God can teach their parents' some kind of vacuous, fortune-cookie-league lesson in humility.

saw their 3 year old daughter suffer and die from a particularly deadly type of kidney cancer. We tried to support them, but obviously could not fully understand their grief. We told an acquaintance of ours about the child and her parents. He said, and I quote, "What could a three-year-old have done to deserve that?" A devout Catholic, he assigned the cause of the disease to the victim of it. We did not misunderstand him or misread his statement. We called him on it at the time and he defended it, saying, "God would not do that to a child if there weren't a reason."

We never spoke to that man again. His delusion was informed by his faith.

Yet another reason to reject such faith.

I once heard an interpretation that proposed to explain why God didn't step in to save Jephthah's daughter from being murdered by her father the way he saved Isaac from Abraham. God let Jephthah go through with killing his only child to punish Jephthah for making a reckless vow, and to teach him and the rest of the Israelites to think before they speak.

There is also the story of God sickening and killing David's son with Bathsheba, as punishment for David's sins. The fact that neither the child nor Bathsheba were guilty didn't really factor into the decision to strike down the child in order to teach the father a lesson about selfishness.

There are other stories, too. God has a history.

He also killed 42 children in one sitting. The moral of those stories is don’t screw around on your wife (unless it’s with another one of your wives or a prostitute), and don’t make fun of Elisha’s bald head. Then again he could also do so for no good reason such as when he smoote Ezekiel's wife. Probably hadn’t had is morning cup of coffee yet.

He was really mad at David.

I guess being a dad/son changes you.

So this:

I find the whole "suffering is good for you it gives you wisdom" line of BS offensive and patronizing.

If it works for some people, and helps them through their own suffering, well, good for them. But inflicting it on others as some kind of divine truth just turns me off completely.

Of course this is not surprising to anyone here, since you insist on defining atheism for atheists.

Henceforth I have changed my denomination to unaffiliated apatheist.

to keep the millions of wretched people in their congregations servile for a few thousand years.

You suffer, and we don't do anything to change that, cause God's will and all.

is what you posted not just the writer's view?

But I would say the Church keeping the people in there place is not an original concept from me.

A few others through the centuries have noticed it.

And recommend what I find interesting.

What I identify as my own opinion is just that.

I should have said "just the writer's view".

I will amend that.

"Go take an airbourne copulation with a deep fried pastry"?