Which of these applies to God?

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Human beings are social beings. Love and belonging ranks third after survival and security in Maslow's hierarchy of human needs. Autism does not negate or lessen this need, despite being a disability that makes fulfilling this need nearly impossible. As a result, many Aspies often experience severe depression, which often leads to suicidal thoughts. We are all people who were born with condition. We did not choose to be the way are, and we did nothing to deserve it as a punishment. There is no way to cure this condition, leaving us with no hope that our loneliness will ever go away.
Billions of other human beings who are not on the Spectrum suffer from other ailments, which they likewise did nothing to choose or deserve. Millions of people suffer and die every minute, due to war, poverty, or disease.
The wicked are the ones who always prosper, often at the expense of thousands of innocent men, women and children. Thieves and butchers have roamed the planet throughout history unchecked, leaving death and destruction in their wake, all while reaping nothing but the sweetest of rewards for their evil. While the righteous; people like Gandi, Martin Luther King Jr., JFK, even Jesus himself, all ultimately received the same reward for their selfless efforts to help others.
What I ask you is this: what kind of a god, do you think, would create a world like this?

If it is a given that God exists, neither. We experience pleasure and misery because both are necessary for our survival. Suffering and death are necessary for adaptation. Pleasure and Pain is what motivates us to survive.

I thought about this when I had a child with multiple congential anomalies that didin't live very long. It is just the way things are. Life can be beautiful and pleasurable beyond imagination or ugly and horrifying beyond comprehension. We get to wonder why because of our culture and language.

Many of us get to take a warm shower and climb into a warm bed. Did many of our ancestors reap this benefit for the efforts necessary for their survival? If they had just those two things how much better would their life have been?

Civilization can create the illusion that life can or should be fair. I doubt anyone had this illusion 5,000 years ago. I doubt that anyone asked that question then.

Anyone experiencing the illusion that life is fair and kind is, in effect, living in the heaven referenced in different religions. We can thank our ancestors for bringing us to the point where at least a few beings can experience "heaven in life".

I'd go with passive-aggressive instead.

If there is an all encompassing supreme conscious force any speculation as to it's motives based on the idiotically small sample we have here on Earth is only the output of immense hubris. We barely comprehend the tiny bit of the universe we can sense. We are not doing too badly considering but to be overconfident as to our analyzes is to rather nuts.

How can we possibly know how well we are doing, that in itself seems overconfident, to me anyways. How can we know if our notions of comprehension are even correct, we can't even know of error in our physical perceptions unless compared to another.

If control of world conditions is any indication, we may be screwing up like crazy but in comparison to foxes or oysters we are a bit ahead. Bacteria as a whole are doing much better but they are, after all, grand masters.

Based on what? Our interpretations of intelligence and progress could be skewed by faulty perception.

^^^^

The 'evolutionary argument against naturalism' by Alvin Plantinga. You do realize that you are putting forward the first premise of an argument that leads to proof of the existence of God? I suggest you check it out.

You've got to work with what you've got. All you've got is your perceptions and how you interpret them. There isn't any more.

Thats the equivalent of saying either the world didn't exist before you or that the world was irrelevant before you. or If you can't/haven't seen it then you can't do anything about it in which case I'm confused because I was certain you where a hard atheist could you be more clear?



I'll look into it.

My statement says nothing about the existence of the universe. It merely says that what we know about the universe through our perceptions is the raw material for our understanding of it. This has been accepted since Aristotle. There is no assumption that our perceptions contain everything there is to know. Merely that's all we have. I do not assume that our perceptions are self activating.

Are you suggesting that the existence of God is a falsifiable hypothesis? Good grief...

It seems that if God is taken to be only able to work within the confines of what is logically possible. It is possible then one could logically argue that God is either impossible or unlikely. I think any examination of the logical arguments for God's existence combined with my own view that the experience of the Holy Spirit is itself an objective proof, then God's existence is not only possible, but also quite likely. However, anyone who thinks that it is impossible for their own view to be wrong, is quite silly.

Quite possibly when the experience of the holy spirit is a common and repeatable phenomenon under laboratory conditions it will be taken a bit more seriously.

Are you talking about the Holy Spirit existing as a literal entity, or more about your own subjective feeling of being "filled with the spirit" during spiritual or otherwise significant activities? If it's the latter, that's a feeling - and feelings are valid, but are not proof. If it's the former, are you suggesting that you can prove the existence of said Spirit to a scientific standard, or even that said existence has already been proven?

@PanoramaIsland

I would be referring to the latter. From my own perspective I have no reason to doubt the objective nature of the experience. I consider belief in God to be a 'properly basic' belief. So I try to anchor my faith to that of it being logically justifiable. I do this by simply assuming that if the Christian God is true, then its very likely that I should experience the Holy Spirit if I give myself over to Christ. Without disproving Christianity it seems entirely sound to me that I consider this to be an objective experience, regardless of outside evidences, since it is an epistemologically correct belief.

Here is a response to a quite similar question by Dr William Lane Craig,
http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/New ... le&id=6489