Petrolheadia wrote:So, God is kinda evil?
Because it would take quite a fair share of malice to do harm to people when you are omnipotent, and have them worship you for that.
That is the fallacy, at least in respect to Christian theology. God only 'controls' himself; he is 'omnipotent' in the sense that, in his capacity as a discrete entity, he can appear anywhere. But living things have free will, God can't control them. If somebody does harm to you, God was not involved. I understand that a common atheist argument is thus 'why would I worship God, since he doesn't stop these bad things from happening to me?' What I'm saying is that the further argument which I often see, to the effect of 'why does God do bad things to me?' is deeply fallacious and not correct. God never does anything bad to anyone; other humans and living things, who have free will, are the ones who do bad things to people. And it may be that this does not satisfy many people, nevertheless, it is a logically consistent and longstanding Christian answer to the retort 'why doesn't he stop bad things from happening to me?' The answer: God personally punishes wrongdoers, but most of the time, it's post facto.
In Christianity's original milieu, this satisfied people. The slaves/servants of a tyrannical lord or king when, for instance, after years of tyranny he would finally drown in the river or die of consumption or something, they would think to themselves 'hah! God nabbed the fucker. He had it coming to him...' Regardless how one exercises their freedom of choice to select a personal ideology, the rhetoric of many atheist advocates is deeply confused on the principles of the Christian religion. The religion is logically consistent according to its premise. The flaw, which frustrates me, is that most people identify with the untenable and irrelevant metaphysical aspects of the Biblical premise, rather than focusing on the more valuable sociological elements of the Biblical premise.