If God is Loving....

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then why did he create people who are inherently at a disadvantage? Don't get me wrong I know there is a God who created us, that helps to explain things like why do girls have a higher pitches than guys. But I have a hard time believing in Him when He created people like us.It's not just Autism, it's Downs Syndrome, it's any disability that makes us lower than the rest. It makes it hard to keep believing that He has my back when I look around and I see those people in pain or crippled since birth. But most importantly, Why Am I Here? That's what I wanna know, Why Am I Like this?

There isn't one. There are people who have a vast range of different levels of ability. Some people are born more advantaged than others. That's okay, though. We can make this a world where even disadvantaged people can manage to live relatively happy lives...if we so choose.

We have figured out only that there is one trait that makes a person superior to others, and that is concern for those who are weaker and less advantaged. Nothing else, in a human being, matters in a person's value. You either have it, or you don't. If you don't have it, then no matter how smart you are or how rich you are, you do not have any genuine ability as a leader among your people, for the essence of leadership is concern and care for others, regardless of their ability or level of strength.

Because you choose to be. Tomorrow, you may choose not to be. As long as you are choosing, day after day, to be here, perhaps you should invest more thought in how you can make that decision worthwhile. Or you may not. Many people just spend the day watching the wheels go around and around, not really caring. Some of them are happy. Others are not so very happy.

Why would you be any other way? Really, why would you be born a "neurotypical" with all of the traits of character that go along with it? Why were you born as a human, rather than a lobster? Or a cat? Why are you not a four-footed creature like a housecat? Imagine for a while that you are a housecat and wondering why you are not a human, and try to get it to sink in how silly this question is.

The fact of the matter is that you ARE like this. What do you choose to make of it?

Firstly the actual existence of any supernatural deity is highly unlikely, which makes your question a rather mute one. However if you are to ask is the God of the bible universally loving and kind then clearly the answer is no. To quote Dawkins for the umpteenth time “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” And careful reading of the words of Jesus show that not a lot has changed in the New Testament.

I was more or less asking why worship God, sorry if I made this sound like something that belongs in The Haven.

But with that said you make very good and legitimate points there, sometimes I sulk in my misery too much and don't really think of it the way you do. Thanks.

Not exactly what I was looking for but that was more or less my fault.

I will further refrain from responding because I do not wish to cause a Flame War.

also atheist here, but back in my theist days I read rabbi harold kushner's "when bad things happen to good people". his theory is that god lets us be challenged in order to let us learn important lessons.

Why worship Him though when your entire life is a challenge?

You could ask to have the thread moved out of PPR.

good question.

Indeed!


This is only an explanation if you want to find a reason to believe. A quick google will give you other explanations. If this is one example of the sorts of reasons for your belief, there are better explanations available.

But back to the main question - Why worship him?
"God is good" is one of those modern cliches, made popular in the 70's mostly, along with the "God is love" pitch. Before then, God was characterized more like an authority figure who must be obeyed. Sure, he had his loving moments, but his anger and judgement were more topical. And a part of that was his jealousy. He virtually demanded to be worshiped. There is nothing new in this - a lot of gods have this attribute.

But if you're looking for a reason to worship him, other than it being required, then there's nothing in this modern age to suggest a good reason. In early times, when superstition was ahead of science, God's miracles appeared frequently. But in these modern times, such miracles are absent.

When I was a Christian, I could always recite miracles I had heard about, but no one I knew had actually witnessed one. So if God performed nearly all his miraculous feats during more superstitious eras, then he's done nothing lately to be worshiped for.

Why worship him? Beats me.

This is why I say that, if I worshiped any deity, it would be some dark underworld deity. When I was religious, I always found the image of the Grim Reaper to be more attractive than any deity. I always regarded that figure as warm and comforting, somehow. I never saw that figure as sinister but more as someone who would be there for me in my loneliest moment.

I would take a big, ugly, black dog over a platoon of trumpet-bearing angels. A black dog is there when you need him. He is a source of warmth and compassion when you are cold.

I'm not religious myself but I think the usual Christian explanation is that everything was perfect before the fall. Humans failed to live in a perfect world and messed up, and now we are on this flawed earth. Perhaps it is also a contrast between the life we have now and the world to come? There is also this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evilhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil

If you've seen the movie The Matrix, people living in it used to live in a perfect world but they could not believe it. Agent Smith explains that they had to to create a simulation of a flawed world so people would actually believe it was real. I thought that was vaguely similar to the Garden of Eden compared to what we have now.
Perhaps it would be useful for Christians to post here, now it has been mostly atheists.

In the tv series Vikings they sort of depict Odin that way. An old man with dark robes and a huge black hat, with carrion birds flying around him. Since one of his roles is collecting the dead he is similar to the Grim Reaper, except he takes you to his mead hall to party

I wonder this sometimes too, especially when I am in pain or when I see others in pain! I have found a lot of comfort in the Catholic idea that we suffer BECAUSE of God's grace. We are all in the image of God, and since Jesus suffered, by suffering with him we are sharing in the redemption of the world. Colossians 1:24 "my suffering fills up what was left behind by Christ etc." (I am paraphrasing from memory a bit, but you get the idea)

There's a great line from Diary of a Country Priest which I'm going to paraphrase a teensy bit here, but I read it as a teenager (and I still re-read it at least once a year) and it was HUGELY influential to me: "If our god was the god of the pagans or the philosophers, the weight of our suffering would tear him out of heaven. But our god did not wait, but came down, and was born, and was tortured, and died. So go ahead, hate him, curse him, spit on him, finally crucify him- so what? It's already been done." Which reflects the earlier idea (suffering does not equal bad, because Christ did it) but also gives permission to us to be FURIOUS AND UPSET with God when we suffer, because there is nothing we can do that hasn't already been done.

I also received an admonition when I was kid that I really took to heart, which was "Pray like the psalms." Because the psalms aren't all happy and thankful- a lot of them are FURIOUS and curse their enemies, and others are heart broken and and beg God for an end to suffering and an explanation. So when I'm angry, I pray angry, and when I'm sad, I pray sad. Don't think you have to be happy with God to have a relationship- I can be angry with my mom and still love her and talk with her, y'know? But I personally, if I find myself looking up at the sky and all I see is the void, I don't pray, because I think that to pray when I don't actually believe I'm praying to anyone is to make the void my idol, if you know what I mean, and that would be worse than not praying. If there's one thing I've learned from Isaiah, it's that God HATES hypocrites, y'feel me?

Anyways, I never learned more about the theodicy (the technical term for "why does a good God allows evil") then when I was studying Judaism, so I would HIGHLY recommend reading Jewish sources on the topic Catholicism tends to fall back on "but suffering is good!" pretty quickly, but the Jews have been wrestling (#israelpunnoonebutmewillgetprobablylol) with the question more than any of the other Abrahamic religions/sects and have come up with some pretty in depth stuff. It's been a while since I wrestled this, so I'll have to go hunt down the sources I thought were good, if you are interested.

Also, as to why allow people born with suffering, one answer is to show that the value of human life transcends the physical body and mind, and is valuable just in and of itself, via the soul? Another thing I've been thinking about recently is that literally the majority of Catholic saints were either disabled or mentally ill. I was thinking maybe you need the bulk of society to be able bodied and neurotypical to keep things going, but you need people on the fringes to be the avant-garde? But this undoubtedly has implications I haven't thought through all the way yet so I am not yet committing to it yet lol, but it is something to think about?

That is a huge question, and there are no easily-acceptable answers. The bottom line is that when God originally made humanity, we were perfect. No diseases, no death, etc. But when the Fall happened, everything got screwed up. Adam and Eve were divided away from God in spirit, and since they were the first people, all their descendants inherited that same separation. As people's bodies started deteriorating, things like birth defects and such came about. Also, people started tampering with the genetic code in the last century or two, trying to make us better...but most attempts went wrong. God also limited our earthly lifespans after the Fall, so we'd have the opportunity to be purified in eternity.

If you buy a perfect car, and never take it back for a service, it will go wrong.