Is there an interventionist G-d? If so, then does he intervene and what is the rationale behind the slaughtering of children?

No. There is no G-d.
Only people like me (maybe you too) will intervene if children are being willfully slaughtered.

My grandfather, a very Conservative Jew who went to an Orthodox shul, became atheist after World War 2 and was an atheist for the rest of his life. He said, “If there is a God and he could allow that to happen to people, then I don’t want anything to do with him.”

@Rarebear Mine, too.

@seazen_ – we’re talking specifically about G-d as in “of Abraham” – OT G-d, right?

@iamthemob Generally AFAIK Jews are the only ones who write “God” as “G-d”. I could be wrong. I never do it, though.

@Rarebear – that’s what I was thinking as well. I asked because I don’t want to talk about an interventionist “entity” when we’re talking about a very specific concept.

It doesn’t matter to me. It’s a habit. God. G-d. god.

@seazen_ You were obviously brought up in a Conservative household—that notation is common practice. I was brought up in a Reform where they don’t do that.

No there is not.

The horrors of the past few days in Japan should be evidence enough.

I must admit that I cringe every time I read a story about some horrible devastation with untold suffering and death, where some poor baby manages to survive although his family is lost, and religious folks cry “It’s a miracle! God saved him!” What do they think of all the others who died, including all the other children? That they deserved it?

There is no interventionist God. If there were, we would see the usual course of cause and effect occasionally breaking down because God decided to intervene in what is otherwise a deterministic Universe. We do not see that—ever.

Children dying. My grandmother suffering horribly the final years of her life. How can there be a God?

If there is a god, I can’t believe s/he is active in our lives at all. If s/he is, then s/he’s pretty damn arbitrary about it.

The horrors of the past few days in Japan should be evidence enough.

Children dying. My grandmother suffering horribly the final years of her life. How can there be a God?

My problem with the above is that the rules for what such a god would be or should do are set up based on limited human perceptions, and then claims that because it fails to prevent the things that we see and think are bad, it cannot exist.

It’s impossible, however, to understand or know how what happens now culminates finally. How each tragedy or evil in history might lead to the best result in the end. What happens to people who suffer in life after they die, and what happens to those that cause suffering in life after they die. When we talk about things that happen to us, we can’t pretend to know what the reason for it could be when we’re talking about the some being who may cause it or push it or allow it to happen, as the perspective of such an individual may not have any linear concept of time, may have a complete view of it, understands the nature of our existences before and after our physical lives, etc.

The most simple analogy is something along the lines of a parent who yanks their pre-verbal child out of the street before they get hit by a car. It doesn’t cover everything, but it covers some of it.

You obviously haven’t spent much time around children.

@iamthemob Plenty of good people die in a moment, with basically no suffering. Then there are good people who suffer horribly. I don’t buy that suffering gets you into a better place in heaven, there is no consistant evidence to suggest such a thing.

I don’t think a loving God, who considered us his children, would create a world so painful. I don’t think he would be so punishing.

@iamthemob If I told you that I am the newest messiah and began to subject you to all sorts of unfair treatment which I excused by claiming that my thoughts are higher than your thoughts, and my ways higher than your ways would you buy it? Isn’t that a very convenient dodge to throw reason and rationality out the window and allow a belief in a God that it makes no rational sense to believe in?

@JLeslie – I never said that suffering would get you into a better place in heaven, or that there was a heaven, etc. Since the assertion wasn’t made, no evidence need be presented.

But you’re asserting that the world is hermetic, and our suffering is not meant to provide greater lessons to others or ourselves, or that it is something that in the totality of our existence is significant instead of incidental. The fact that there is suffering may be to show us as a species or a people something that we need to know or discover, or our existence in suffering may be necessary for us to understand what to do at the next level of existence. I don’t argue that they do – but when we start to say that a god couldn’t let that happen or is being cruel or punishing us is to assume a lot about what we know is actually happening on a scale that stretches from the beginning of time until the end, in the entire universe, and on the micro- and macro-scopic scale, and about a being that may exist and understand all those levels at once.

There are plenty of times that we treat someone in a manner that they think is cruelly for their own good. When we say that suffering is evidence of the lack of a loving god, we assume far more than we should.

@ETpro – I would not buy that no. However, god hasn’t shown up to say that or anything else, as far as we know, although many claim to have written his or her words or know the way. And it’s not convenient at all – in fact, it brings up constant accusations of “throwing reason and rationality out the window.”

The problem is, when you say that there is no rational sense to believe in god, it’s perhaps the most arrogant statement one could make because it asserts that one has all the information necessary to make a rational or reasoned assessment one way or the other. It claims that we are aware enough to know an absolute morality so we can assess right, wrong, and suffering. That we know on a grand scale that the suffering we see is not a necessary part of creation.

The thing is – evolution itself is arguably suffering. We are here because those that couldn’t handle it died out. Evolution as a mechanism that led to the human race may have been set off by god, who knows. If it was, then we have to say that any god that would create through evolution is cruel. But is evolution cruel? Well, it’s arguably morally neutral – unless there’s a creator god. Then it becomes cruel. But that of course assumes that a more creationist style beginning of life on earth wouldn’t have been more cruel…or that it wasn’t the best way to do things, or that it didn’t produce the most good overall in the end. And can we say that? No…we’re not at the end yet.

To say that there’s all this cruelty and therefore there is no god necessitates one take the position that they have the correct moral code to get the right answers. Anyone with certainty about morality scares me.

@iamthemob Why do you argue for Christianity when you don’t know its belief system. Are you just playing at taking a position for the fun of it. Both Christianity and Judaism accept this from their sacred texts. Isaiah 55:9 “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

This is used over and over by Christians and Jews to justify all manner of hideous suffering , even when it strikes innocent children. God gets credit for miraculous cures when a human doctor does what he knows how to do and saves a ife. God is held as perfect even when death and distruction rain down on millions of innocents.

@ETpro – How am I arguing for Christianity here? Once @seazen_ stated that it wasn’t about the god of the OT, I responded in a general sense.

That this is part of Christian rhetoric is beside the point for me. Just as I think that it’s arrogant to say god can’t love us if we suffer, it’s arrogant to claim that when we are freed from suffering or have successful lives or whatever that god thinks we’re good or god has done a good thing for an innocent. The fact that many Christians do is the same kind of assumption that we can understand the mind of god that I find troubling, or at least unsound.

In all honesty, I’m surprised that you’re attempting to pigeon-hole me into an argument, or claim that I have a position that I’m advocating, or associate me with a group. I’m stating that attributing our morality or sense of reason to an incomprehensible mind is at worst arrogant, at it’s best shallow. I look at my dog and it wags its tail and I think it’s happy. But that’s because it’s when he wants my attention and it makes me happy. It could be happy when it’s left alone, but knows that when it needs something it can get me to do it by wagging it’s tail and looking at me. Knowing the morality or reasoning of a mind that is completely alien to you, during a life that you have very little understanding of the beginning or end of, is something that is rightly stated as beyond us, at least for now. Therefore, it can’t be used as an argument for proof for or against an interventionist god of any sort.

@iamthemob Ah, sorry I missed the discussion with @seazen_ and wrongly took this to be a defense of the typical Christian explanation of suffering.

@iamthemob I understand what you are saying, but it just does not work for me, I cannot accept it. I have gone through some pretty bad things, and I have learned from them, I would say even maybe some good came out of my pain and suffering, but the cost was way too high. I would definitely rather have not gone through it to begin with. I am about to face something terrifying and I just hate everybody who has not believed me for so many years. All of the doctors, all of my anguish, all of my physical pain, I have been treated horribly for the most part. I know I am being vague.

Anyway, your analogy is similar to a parent who tells a child they must do something that the child does not want to do for their own good. The child is limited, can’t see the big picture, doesn’t understand why he has to get the polio vaccine, or wait to drive a car, etc. In my world the pain I have gone through has led to more pain for the most part, not to the other side of a long tunnel into a better circumstance. My tunnels keep getting longer and longer with scarier shit in them. So since I really can’t see the overall good on my little level, I reject it on a grander level.

Maybe when God does not intervine in suffering it is not proof there is no God, but it is proof to me that if that is God, I am not happy at all with how he set up the universe. In Christianity doesn’t it start with the Garden of Eden and a human being fucks the whole thing up by giving in to temptation? This punishment for that one mistake is too long, cruel and unusual, and punishes people not responsible for giving into the curiosity of what would happen of that forbidden fruit. I know you are not specifically talking about Chrisianity, but for me your explanation is just another way to try and comfort me in times of pain, and it does not work, it does not make me feel better.

@JLeslie

but for me your explanation is just another way to try and comfort me in times of pain, and it does not work, it does not make me feel better

In all honesty, that’s not my point at all for making the argument. Whether your suffering has led to lessons for you…that’s not the scope I’m talking about. Again, what happens after death is a mystery. Further, we’re not sure what effect your suffering may have had on others across the globe in ways undetectable at this point.

It’s now about providing hopre or comfort, or it working for you. It’s simply that yeah, if you don’t like how god seems to have handled the situation (if god’s a part of it), that makes sense – but no one knows what’s going to happen next. God, in theory, might. So it’s simply a recognition that we don’t have complete knowledge, so assuming some kind of morality for god based on our morality makes little sense.

It’s like saying the tsunami itself is cruel. If somehow the tsunami was sentient and had a mind…we would have no idea what the moral motivations of it would be.

@iamthemob Well, what you say reinforces to me that it is not very important to figure out God or worry about him judging us. Your idea does not insist there is judgement or punishment, but rather we are experiencing and learning, sounds more Eastern philosophy to me, although I have never studied the Eastern religions. It still doesn’t soothe me, not that I am saying your goal is to make me feel better. But, generally I think religion and God should help us feel better, find peace, and I don’t feel that at all with this explanation of suffering. Maybe I am doomed to suffer until I accept the lesson? Somehow I doubt it, because countless others accept God, and his plan, let him take the wheel so to speak, and they suffer horrible things also.

I think that the goal should be to find peace and happiness – and part of that for me is just realizing that I’m not going to figure out what it is that god, if there is any, wants me to do. If there really was a real solid will, I’m fairly certain we’d have been given one, single and clear set of instructions on it.

I don’t think that the goal of religions is to sooth, but to help discover or state what the truth is. If it actually does it, then it’s never soothing – but for me, should always be challenging.

@iamthemob Well, we are not completely on opposite ends. :).

I don’t think God intervenes in the world either to slaughter or to spare from slaughter or in any other way. God didn’t send the tsunami to Japan because he had it in for the people there it was random. I don’t mind God, I will take my chances with Him it is Man that frightens me.

I believe each of us carries God, our higher, nobler selves, within ourselves, and it is we who choose to intervene or not to intervene when faced with trajedy or wrongdoing.

Suffering and cruelty don’t go hand and hand. I agree completely with @iamthemob that evolution is a product of suffering (I’ve never seen it put that way before, but it’s an apt description.) Animals suffer all the time, and they suffer by natural causes. Cruelty, on the other hand, is something that I only feel that only a handful of species can inflict, humans being the most adept at it. If A is cruel to B, B will suffer. But the opposite is not necessarily true. If B suffers, it doesn’t mean A is cruel. A cat may “play” with its prey, but does that mean it’s cruel?

@Rarebear

This is why I usually divide the world into moral agents- those beings that can make ethical decisions, that have a concept of right and wrong- and moral patients- those beings who are subjects of a life and to whom we have duties, but who, themselves, are not capable of making any ethical decisions, and thus cannot be held accountable for their actions. Normal adult humans are in the first group; infants, the severely mentally disabled and senile, and most sentient animals are in the second group. The first group can behave cruelly; the second can cause suffering but cannot be cruel.