That's too simplistic and is assuming that humans understand a given grand purpose, as well as God, might. To conclude that He is indifferent presupposes that He is obligated to prevent or cure your suffering. I suppose that you could dismiss Him and shop elsewhere.
It's almost like God is a very abusive parent and we, his children, enable his abuse by making excuses for him all the time: "I prayed and my child lived (albeit with severe injuries or disabilities he'll have to suffer from the rest of his life). My prayers were answered!" "I prayed and my child still died. It's God's Will, even though we cannot understand it." Heads he wins, tails you lose. No matter what God does, you make up excuses to enable the continuation of his abusive behavior.
When atheists mention this issue, we laugh at sports teams and nations' military forces who both pray to the same god for sure victory and the defeat of the enemy. So whose prayers are answered and why? Did one side pray that much harder? That kind of mentality just does not make any sense to normals.
And I'll touch briefly on the matter of
Atheists in Foxholes (an actual group of atheist veterans using their name to point out the idiocy of that bromide: "There are no atheists in foxholes." Indeed, I have a war story from an atheist who had served in Nam. One night while he and his other atheist buddy were in the base club (NCO Club, I would assume) Charlie started to mortar the base. He and his buddy just grabbed a bottle of whiskey and drank calmly waiting for whatever the outcome (in another friend's other war story, a Marine, their base was under mortar attack and he helped carry a wounded Marine into the aid station for the doctors to save him -- the mortar that destroyed the aid station was roughly centered on the wounded Marine on the operating table, so a mortar can hit anywhere). Also in the club were the base holy-rollers, fundies who were constantly proselytizing with the "Christian Death Threat" ("Here's what's going to happen to you when you die and you're not saved!") and were similarly taking cover under another table. While the atheists were calmly waiting out the attack and accepting the likelihood of death, the "Saved Ones" were almost literally pissing and shitting themselves in absolute terror of dying (my friend did not conduct a post-operation debrief and inspection to verify that). Atheists can handle the thought of death, whereas believers are absolutely terrified of it because of what they believe awaits them.
Add to that the Believer's Doubt, that nagging feeling that maybe you're not really saved. I mean, you said all the right things and you believe all the right things, but what if it didn't take? How would you know? Children raised in the fundie faith and so actually believe it (unlike their parents who had converted and so had learned to compartmentalize) tend to suffer such doubts which can lead to psychological scarring. One test of whether they are actually saved is found in the
Fruit of the Holy Spirit in Galatians 5. They are taught that it isn't an ideal to strive for, but rather that if you are saved then the Holy Spirit bestows them upon you. So we have these teenagers going through teenage wasteland exacerbated by hormones which result in nothing like the Fruits that they would expect. For many, that proved that they weren't saved, which led to all kinds of personal Hell -- please note that 75% to 80% of youth raised in the faith leave it as fast as they can.
Our UU minister told us of the one faith healing he had performed. He performed some hospital ministry using that minister's collar (so the patient never knew your denomination). One terminal patient, a believer, was terrified of dying because he wasn't completely sure that he was saved. Our minister quoted from his favorite verse, Micah 6:8, "He hath showed thee, O man, what [is] good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" The patient was visibly comforted with that thought.
BTW, another form of psychological damage done to fundie kids is from
The Rapture. Children depend on their parents in very deep psychological ways, as we can see when they are suddenly torn away from their parents (eg, during a war as in Ukraine, at the border by Trumpian policies). Now consider raising your children with the idea that their parents could suddenly be called up into Heaven
at any moment and leave them all alone --
Left Behind in spades! Of course, you kiddies will also be taken up, but just how does
that play as the kiddies mature and start to doubt whether they're saved ("no signs of the Fruits of the Holy Spirit yet!"). I've read a testimonial of just that exact life experience. Every single time his parents left him to go out, he quite literally never knew if he would ever see them again (for our dogs, we would establish the "Guard the house" ritual which included us eventually returning (though never soon enough for the dog), but kids are too smart to fall for that one). As he grew older, he would engage in substance abuse to dull that pain and became increasingly listless. He met several others in the same situation as his and who had also grown up with
The Rapture.
Be very careful what you teach children about religion -- they'll take it far too seriously. Just consider the repeated atheists' testimonials that what had turned them into atheists was ...
reading the Bible! (and making the mistake of taking it seriously)
OK, that's one way to look at it. Here's another.
Refer to my page,
BILL MORGAN'S QUESTION: Should Kids be Taught About God?. A local creation science activist I was corresponding with threw yet another
gotcha question at me (that was all that he had):
"If God exists, should the kids be taught about Him?" I gave him a complete and brilliant answer to that question (follow that link to read it), but he didn't even understand his own question (so sadly typical of creationists).
Part of the answer was what is meant by "be taught about Him". Which also leads us to what is actually meant by "believe in a god". Most Christians seem to assume that means "believe that that god exists", but shouldn't it also mean "
trusting that god"? Two very different things. I have a friend and I feel that I can trust her. I also have an ex-wife and I know for a demonstrable fact (
a plethora of demonstrable facts) that I
cannot ever trust
her (никак, никогда). Does "believing in them" have anything to do with whether they exist? No, they
both exist (most unfortunately for everybody in the case of my ex-wife). Rather, the question in question is whether we can trust them, whether we can depend on them.
Do you
believe in God? What does that even mean? Believe that your god exists? Meaningless! Believe that you can depend on your god to come through for you?
Now we're getting somewhere!
So what happens then when you are in a position of having to absolutely depend on your god? Will he/she/it come through for you? Most likely not ... they very rarely do show up; it's a god-thingee, you know?
So then just what
can you depend on? Not much of anything. You're in exactly the same boat as an atheist, except you have to expend an enormous amount of effort to justify your god not ever bothering to even lift a finger to help you in the time of your greatest need.
Speaking of abusive familial relationships, it's kind of like the system of Trumpian loyalty.
I am a military veteran of 35 years with the requisite and appropriate NCO/PO training and experience. Loyalty flows both up and down the chain of command: the crew needs to be loyal to their superior officers, but those superiors must also be loyal to their crew -- you look out for and
take care of your people.
Trumpian loyalty is always one-way. You have to have and practice rigorously complete and utter loyalty to Donald J. Trump,
but he owes absolutely none to you. If he used you, he'll throw you under the bus. If you show even the faintest sign of wavering, he'll throw you under the bus.
So then just how is your god any different from Trump? Frankly, I cannot see any difference. Can you?
Here is the Unitarian-Universalist Call to Prayer that I remember our minister using:
quote:
We do this knowing that prayer does not change things, but prayer changes us and we are the agents of change.
Try presenting that to a bunch of "common Christians" and they will completely freak out.
But then, what is a prayer, after all? Public prayers, of course.
Private prayers are meant to be said in private, not as any kind of public display which Jesus himself declared to by
hypocrisy, the very sin that he seemed to hate the most (but then since when have
you ever concerned yourself with what Jesus reportedly said and thought?).
I see properly administered public prayers as an expression of the group's common goals. Subverting them to sectarian expression just subtracts from their purpose.
™ Version 4.2
