My Response to J. L. Watts, You Must First Understand My Argument Before You Can Effectively Critique It

Yep, that's what I think, and I don't think he understands what it is enough to offer an effective critique, so this will probably be my last reply to him. We'll see...

You can follow what's going on right here. This is what I said in response:

Joel said:

Okay, then you envision a God who is still treating the human race as babies. Again, I fall back to say that your vision of God is not my vision of God.

Nope, once again my claim is that a good parent never gives a child responsibility until such time as that child can handle it. This is an analogy. We are not children. That’s the analogous part. If you don’t understand an argument you cannot effectively respond to it. God, being a good parent, should not give us as human beings more responsibility until such time as we can handle it, you see.

Joel said:

But, John, it has been resolved, just not to your liking.

Joel, what has been resolved? And again I want you to think, because everything I am saying calls into question why I should believe an ancient set of canonized documents along with you particular interpretation of them. Christians disagree on their interpretation of these texts, you see, so that means you not only have to defend these documents as authoritative but also your particular interpretation of them, which is one step farther removed from those ancient documents.

Joel said:

First, Christians have a duty to help relieve the horrific suffering. We are His instruments.

So what? How could any Christian help people who drank polluted water before they knew that doing so would kill them? Only God had that sort of knowledge and he let many people die from these sorts of things before we figured them out for ourselves. Only God could have helped and he didn’t. It does no good to help comfort the survivors of a lost loved one after that, you see. So if God placed this responsibility on the backs of Christians he didn’t give them the proper tools to help.

Your answer accords in a similar way with the Christian response that God waits to do things until people pray. Or, that he doesn’t save people without Christians first praying that he sends missionaries. You are blinded by your faith not see this as a cop out for why God just doesn’t do anything. No good person would wait to help others until they asked him to help, if there was a real need. Picture this: Some mother hates my guts and is just too stubborn to ask me to help her with her child who is dying. So I do nothing because she refuses to ask me? How could anyone describe me as a good person if I'm too stubborn to help until she grovels at my feet? And so, if God will not do anything to help until Christians pray, that makes absolutely no sense to me at all, especially if, unlike me, he’s a perfectly good God. The God you believe in is an egotist made up by ancient people and modeled after the kinds of kings they knew. If there is a need then it never matters to someone whom we wish to call a good person whether he’s asked to help or not, if the goal is to alleviate suffering rather than the desire to crow about what a good person he is, which can only remind us of the Pharisees.

Joel said:

Further, I also believe as a Christian any temporal suffering will be replaced by eternal rejoicing.

Two problems: Of the people who die from lead poisoning that I mentioned, don’t you think most of them went to hell, since only the few get into heaven? Aren’t you forgetting them? And wouldn’t you think that if someone was going to hell God would want to keep them alive for as long as possible since they might in the future get saved? Surely you cannot think for one second that no one who died prematurely would have ended up believing if they lived longer? Secondly, tell me this: Can anyone under any circumstances ever justify causing harm to others because later those victims will be compensated for their pain? If being compensated for one’s suffering justifies that suffering then a torturer who compensated his victims could torture at will. And it does not matter the kind of compensation either, for no matter what it is it cannot morally justify the harm caused.

Joel said:

[The] problem, John, is that you believe that only thinking Christians will thus become Atheists.

I never said that. I only want to force you to think.

Joel said:

You should allow that my life has not been a bed of roses, etc… and that many times, I have wondered the same thing, but in the end, my trust being in God, my faith is well founded.

Or, you have been brainwashed more than others. That is the other alternative.

Joel said:

I don’t like using the bible to discussing these things with atheists – unless it is needed, of course – because I realize that it doesn’t hold the same appeal to you. Yet, in the end, I can only give the answers of those who have gone on before.

And none of them make much sense when we actually think about them.

Joel said:

If God made us with Free Will, just as I believe He made the angels, and a divine spark, if you will, then it is our own responsibility which we take when we sin. When the First man sinned, he did so without faith. He didn’t need it. He knew nothing else but God and yet he sinned.

Would you please try to explain, not quote the Bible, why this should be accepted given my argument? I had said: “…if we all would have sinned then God is to be blamed for how he created us or for the test itself. But if instead some of us would not have sinned under the same initial conditions then there are human beings who have been punished for something they never would have done.”

But let’s back up a step, okay? If the angels along with Satan were in the unmediated presence of God and chose to rebel anyway would you kindly explain to me why they are not suicidal, pure evil, and dumber than a box of rocks? What reason would there be to rebel against Omnibenelovent love except that they were pure evil? And given that God is all powerful they had to be suicidal to rebel. More importantly if they thought they could succeed they were all dumber than a box of rocks to try. And yet you probably believe Satan was the smartest of all God’s creatures since an ancient set of texts said so to exonerate God from all the evils in our world. That just does not make any sense at all! Such a being simply does not exist because no being can be that dumb that evil and that suicidal all wrapped up into one.

Joel said:

Let’s say universalism, of some sort, had become the excepted doctrine of Christianity. (And trust me, it was considered valid by many) What then to your argument? What if in the end, those who teach an eternal hell are wrong? What if this life of ours is only a staging ground, and now that Christ has come, the sin brought about by one man has been removed by One as well?

Well, you tell me since Christians disagree. What do YOU think? In any event if universalism is the case there would be no motivation for evangelism and as far as I can tell from this I am saved too. Then why bother blogging at all? Why not enjoy life to the fullest rather than banter back and forth with an atheist like me? That makes no sense unless you don’t have much better things to do.

Joel said:

People have always walked away from various faiths, including our own. I would tend to believe in many who leave Christianity to become angry atheists – not all atheists are angry or anti-religious – do so because they lose faith. True? But in what did they place their faith?

When you stopped believing in Allah what did you replace your faith with? I know you probably never believed in Allah but that’s my point. I simply stopped believing. There was nothing to replace it with. I am a non-believer. That’s what I take as atheism, which simply means a non-theist, a non-believer. YOU are a non-believer in Allah, and Moroni so you too are an atheist. In fact Christians were called atheists in the 1st century because they didn’t believe in the gods and goddesses of Rome. I just reject one more god than you do for the same reasons you reject all other gods.