Atheists BTFO by Hal Jordan

Atheists BTFO by Hal Jordan

So God's just a puppet with strings.

People will suffer and always will be. That's our fate on this Earth. It's not meant to be heaven. Heaven comes after death. What would be the point if every problem got resolved by God? What kinda people would we be?

Yeah, but do they have quite suffer quite as much as they do?

>What kinda people would we be?
As opposed to the kind of people we are now?

Were already shit, i used to think wed be better off if god kept us in paradise, even then i still think he should send angels to stop some bad shit. It doesnt matter really because whatever created the multiverse probably doesnt even know what mankind is

Yeah, because god is real in the DCU and he has a power ring. Hal has directly seen a recording of god making the universe. Shit, Hal died, went to heaven, and became an angel. He's not talking guesswork.

>Not having jesus as your faggot waifu, always thinking of him shirtless and tortured while daddy protects you
haha yea, atheists are silly.

This oneshot is magnificent, I still want more God of Light Hal.

I didn't mean that as we'd be shittier people, but rather we wouldn't be people at all. Never faced with any sort of challenge, difficulty, never changing or developing. There would be no need for free will.

At least that's how I see it.

Happy people, if childish.

>There would be no need for free will.

You can't be conscious without free will. Even animals have the ability to choose what they do with every second of their lives, they're just not smart enough to know all their options.

>they're just not smart enough to know all their options

It's a little depressing if you think how many dogs could live with their owners in a life in luxury if they simply barked a pop song on command and made their owners youtube stars. The poor dogs probably think they're being helpful by barking at cars instead.

>God's got no choice but to watch. That he couldn't stop it. That he had to let it happen.

So much for omnipotence.

>God helplessly relives every moment of human suffering and has to because he granted us free will and cannot stop it without taking that away

You know, I was raised Presbyterian, lapsed, went to a Baptist university, went full fedora, but this is probably the first time i've heard it put this way and... I kinda like it.

Go to bed, Lex

Is the page really implying that God doesn't have free will?

He could just remove suffering altogether, free will would still be intact but people wouldn't burn in hell forever for practising something God wants them to practice.

But if we are going on the biblical God, then we are not here to live perfect happy lives, that was eden. Eden is gone. We do not live in paradise. The punishment is living life over and over. Experiencing good and evil on earth and learning to distinguish the two with experience, as we ate from the forbidden tree of knowledge of good and evil, but did not eat the fruit of eternal life hence your mortality and suffering

>He could just remove suffering altogether, free will would still be intact

And what purpose would it serve?

>Is the page really implying that God doesn't have free will?
Some sects would argue that God does not have free will, not in the sense we understand it. But no, I think round about it's trying to say that God gave us free will, and so has no choice but to not act, because that would be styming our own free will.

>The Catechism of the Catholic Church asserts that "Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will". It goes on to say that "God created man a rational being, conferring on him the dignity of a person who can initiate and control his own actions. God willed that man should be 'left in the hand of his own counsel,' so that he might of his own accord seek his Creator and freely attain his full and blessed perfection by cleaving to him.""The section concludes with the role that grace plays, "By the working of grace the Holy Spirit educates us in spiritual freedom in order to make us free collaborators in his work in the Church and in the world."

"God willed that man should be 'left in the hand of his own counsel,' so that he might of his own accord seek his Creator and freely attain his full and blessed perfection by cleaving to him". So the idea is that mankind and existence isn't a state, it's a process. We are all collectively undergoing the very long and arduous road to perfection.

Think of Sup Forums's reasoning for why modern Africans are so shit-tier: Food is abundant, weather typically warm. Yeah, there are monsters, but a group of humans living together could pretty much go along without ever changing up their survival tactics or improving.

God already made lesser animals. If He made us with something more in mind (the ability to grow and evolve as individuals within our existence), He would not want us to immediately have all of paradise: we would be spiritually stunted. Angels exist for that already.

This, angels exist already and have no choice but to obey Gods will (INB4 "but Lucifer/Satan", not biblical and a huge mess Christianity really needs to get it's shit together)

>(INB4 "but Lucifer/Satan", not biblical and a huge mess Christianity really needs to get it's shit together)
Wait really? The snek wasn't satan?

"Satan", as in an angel of God who rebelled, as well as Hell, a place where all the unfaithful and wicked burn and are tortured for eternity, do not actually appear in the Bible.

The thing in the Garden of Eden is only referred to as the Serpent, and the figure in the story of Job is 'the nemesis' or more properly translated 'the prosecutor', whose task it was to test mortals

>And what purpose would it serve?

What purpose does eternal suffering serve?

>The punishment is living life over and over.

Punishment is death and disappearing if we go with old biblical God. Originally hell was not a place of suffering but a bleak place of oblivion where you disappear when the last memory of you has been forgotten. Before the whole eternal pain-thing the selling point of Judaism and Christianity was life ever-lasting. Heres the thing though. God chose to plant that tree there and test humanity that he knowingly made into flawed creatures. Would he be a benevolent God he would not have tempted his creations in the first place. At least with Zoroastrianism which inspired judaism in the first place, God is not omnipotent, he has an equally as powerful entity in Ahriman, an evil god. And in hindu-buddhism we are already suffering and stuck in Samsara, gods are just incredibly benevolent souls reincarnated and rewarded in their next lives but they're just as much prisoners as we are.

>Yeah, but do they have quite suffer quite as much as they do?

Most suffering is caused by free will.

>God chose to plant that tree there and test humanity that he knowingly made into flawed creatures

I was actually going to get to that next! If we accept that the common view of Satan is inaccurate, and that Satan is a prosecutor or a harrower, whose job it is to push and prod humanity, we realize that God DID try to put us into a world without suffering or evil and we rejected it because we weren't ready for it.

The problem is this is usually depicted as a "sin", that humans carry some great burden of guilt, rather than understanding that this was a natural part of humanities growing experience.

Maybe

>we realize that God DID try to put us into a world without suffering or evil and we rejected it because we weren't ready for it.

That makes no sense though, God is omnipotent. That means if he wills it that we are ready for it, then we're ready for it. It was His doing that we were not ready for it. It is the standard Problem of Evil at work here, God can't be both benevolent and omnipotent if evil and suffering exists.

>That means if he wills it that we are ready for it, then we're ready for it.

If you beat Contra using the 100 lives code, did you win the game?

>is the standard Problem of Evil at work here
Atheists not reading the Book of Job?

Animals have no free will. They are programmed by nature.

>If you beat Contra using the 100 lives code, did you win the game?

If you killed hundreds of labrats just to make it more challenging for you to reach your goal, could you say you're a benevolent scientist? At least with Hindus benevolent gods can have violent and angry aspects. We live in an age of Kali, characteristics being that we can only live for around 100 years of age and our lives are filled with disease, death and suffering.

Yes, because Labrats aren't people.

Also, a better comparison would be bugs.

If God thinks the same then he's not benevolent and there we have it.

>implying the "universe" isn't a supercomputer and we're not elements of an algorithm studying some profound question of existance

BAKA desu senpai

The only Satan in the bible is actually an entity that is suggested to work for God. He is the deceiver, but his job is ultimately to test creation to see if we truly follow God or are half-assing it.

The Serpent/Legion/The Beast are all different entities.

I don't think this would be comforting to hear if I was a child. It would be pretty fucking horrifying actually.
>Hey kid, that guy you worship can't actually do anything to help you, all he can do is watch you and all your loved ones suffer for tens of years until you all die :)

Christians tend to have weird ideas about what sounds comforting to others. It's not their fault. I've got a friend whose hardcore fedora because he got the "god has a plan" speech from a relative when his grandmother got really sick and died.

YHWH is not a benevolent God. YHWH is a God of Laws. They are very different. You either follow them and be rewarded, or you can choose to disobey.

Suffering and Pain are just a part of creation that was inflicted on man after the fall. Job is very clear on how creation itself is nonsensical at our perspective.

Don't worry man, God is always watching. He can't help but watch whenever you go and take a dump, or masturbate to superheroines.

Labrats and bugs are still living beings with their own consciousness. If we say less smart animals deserve lesser treatment then we also accept that we deserve lesser treatment from smarter and more powerful beings.
Maybe a higher civilisation has judged the suffering of our world to be an acceptable price to pay for their own experiments.

>If we say less smart animals deserve lesser treatment then we also accept that we deserve lesser treatment from smarter and more powerful beings.
Not so much 'deserve' as 'can receive', but otherwise correct.

>Never faced with any sort of challenge, difficulty, never changing or developing.
you can be challenged without there being suffering involved

So... is he telling the kid to take revenge, or just be grateful that he's alive and able to make his own choices?

because it also kinda sounded at first like he was gently berating the kid for not doing anything to save his father.

Also fuck you, OP. I hate these kinds of discourse.

If there's no consequence then free will is essentially meaningless.

in context, Hal just became a God, and is about to prevent his father's death along with every other bad thing that happened to him, but he realized that even if he made himself immune to the paradox, it would still irrevocably divorce him from everyone and everything he cares about. either he never got personally involved from everyone's perspective save his own, or they only know about and like/dislike him because he made it that way after rewriting reality, which is just brainwashing and reduces everyone to stage props that only exist for his satisfaction

An omnipotent god could make so that free will doesn't need consequence to have meaning

Unless God chooses otherwise.

wtf I have an erection now

That's called being driven by instinct, the worst kind of prison because you never realize you're in it. We're the same way, only we're convinced we have a choice at all because it justifies our existence to ourselves.

>Some would ask, how could a perfect God create a universe filled with so much that is evil. They have missed a greater conundrum: why would a perfect God create a universe at all?

Good, Evil, and Suffering are just words. God would be way beyond the scope of human logic. So if he had a plan, it wouldn't make a shitload of sense.

I didn't know Hal was a religious man

if there's no escape from it there's nothing to escape from and nobody is imprisoned by it

And how many brave steps did you take out of your house today? Did you get rewarded with tendies?

>there's no escape from it
There could be, we just haven't elevated to that point. At this rate though, maybe we won't because most people don't see any reason to.

I mean yeah, God is an objective fact in the DC Universe. Hal was his fucking right hand man for a while.

>Epicurus’s old questions are yet unanswered. Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?

I made about $170 at work today learning how to triple-wipe shitloads of computer hard drives in a timely and efficient manner along with generating all the required documentation and uploading it to the company server in like three seconds per unit once its done.

retarded

It's almost as if the writer was wrong.

If suffering has to exist to allow free will, does that mean there’s no free will in heaven?

there's a few points in the bible where god says the actions of men have caused him suffering, so heaven is not a 100% pleasure zone

Well Big G could knock it off with the natural disasters and horrible diseases.

So why didn't God just up everyone's empathy stats while giving us free will?

considering there are a billion and a half other deities than the presences in this universe id say his omnipotence is probably a bit exaggerated

>itt Sup Forums tries to talk religion

The Presence is the real deal omnipotent DC God.

It's Hal comforting himself as a kid, he's seen enough shit that those thoughts probably ARE comforting

>His Wrath constantly gets punked like a bitch
>He's supposed to be top dog

Honestly Zeus has a better track record than the Presence.

dude thats been shown to not be true, the presence only exists in the local mulitverse cluster for one, and the empty hand alone can wipe out multiverses. there are plenty of fish bigger than the presence.

not to mention moniters (supergods) look into the multiverse. plus only after ragnarok and the death of the third world (creation of the godwave) did earth and other planets get gods, its unknown if YHWH came about during that but either way, the way i like to think of him in DC is he is the contamination within the void that the monitors noticed. he's not the author of the book or anything he IS the book, he IS narrative.

The TLDR of heaven is that it's constantly playing "Everything is awesome."

>We must dissent.

Considering God is objective fact in the DC universe and that Hal Jordan has gotten pretty fucking close to him in power so i'm damn willing to believe him.

Then God made us to suffer? What's the point of creating something and making it suffer only to tell it that if you don't believe in it you will get Infinite torture? And the problem is that God has known this for eternity, he's pretty scummy desu

Getting a lot of molestation vibes from this.

>Food is abundant, weather typically warm.
>unironically using Sup Forums as an example

I think you have brain damage, user.

God didn't give us free will though.
He said, do whatever but don't do that one thing, then we did that one thing cause Stan told us to and we got kicked out of Gods house.
Thanks for Free Will Stan.

...so satanism would logically be more moral than christianity?

Why wouldn't she just aim the lipstick at the door?

Surprisingly, Stanism has never waged blood wars for hundreds of years.

But God created us knowing we'd eat the fruit, it's not our fault

>god has no free will
>god has no consciousness unique to him beyond the existing universe
>god has no moral system

Y-you sure showed me.

There's a difference between having free will and the capacity to do things good or bad, and being able to do said things without consequence. Free will gives you the ability, it doesn't give you the right

If God is all powerful, why didn't he make a world where free will and moral behavior exists without any pain and suffering. Also, thinking that challenge and difficulty make life better or meaningful is straight out fallacious. I don't need to cut off my arm to be appreciate having arms. I don't need to suffer unfairly to know what's right and wrong. This shit isn't difficult to understand, but you people clearly never spend even half a second thinking about any of it and instead rely on some popular platitudes.

Do you think that He hoped we wouldn't?

People adapt. We can handle much more than we think. Life is a big fucking pile of shit, but there's good here too. I'd say more good than bad, even.

>Earth weather patterns randomly fuck up
>causes a big drought
>tens/hundreds of thousands die
I don't think it that was a conscious choice

god is Uatu!

and an atheist religion killed 100 million in a 100 years, your point?

>Atheist
>Religion
>Communism as a religion

What did he mean by this?

Stan never did like the idea of blood wars. Good to see his followers keeping true to his feelings.

What purpose does hope serve if you know all and are all powerful? Hope springs from uncertainty and powerlessness.

>people have freewill
>but an all powerful all seeing God has still ordained every single event that happens

You have the free will, the only suffering comes from your own sinful choices or the sinful choices of others having an adverse effect on on us. Like a burglar who kills a family memeber or the president declaring war, again which god allows to happen because of free will.

How could he have possibly hoped for anything? He's omniscient

That doesn't mean he has his own emotions or attitudes towards different things.

If you know that it is one hundred percent, irrefutably fact that an event is going to occur, you can't hope that it won't.
People can hope for things because uncertainty exists, but an omniscient being has no uncertainty