Movie: "God on Trial"

If surrendering and trusting then you wouldn't end up in his courtroom for your trying to matter.Once having trusted, there is no harm in trying your best for other (non-self righteous) motivations.Edited by iano, : No reason given.

Lets discuss for a moment, shall we? So we have retribution, which is essentially a payback. An eye for an eye sort of thing.We have penalty. The question would then arise as to what the crime was. If the answer was that the crime was rejection of God, this sort of a disagreement would have to be hammered out in court, between said God and the accused. Which gets us back to the point of this movie. The prisoners felt that the God whom they worshiped was being unfair. Edited by Phat, : add quotebox

I take it that you've no problem with the principle?- In the general sense the crime would be "doing wrong" - with God having created man to be a) in a position to choose whether to or not and b) agree (in his heart) that 'doing wrong' attracts a negative wage.Created man wouldn't have a say in how the 'game' is set up - he only has a say in which way he'll play it.-When it comes to these prisoners, it need not be God's wrath alone that is at play (assuming that God's wrath is involved at all). Suffering is a consequence of sin (even anothers sin) but is also one of the levers used to bring men to their knees before God. Such is the drumbeat repetition in the Old Testament model of the Jews before their God.

And as we are both aware, Romans 2:9 is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to New Testament anti-Semitism. Please don't play dumb. The hatred aimed at Jews in the NT ought to be enough to put them off it. Did you ask a neutral observer? No. It is simply that the defence has no case. There are no answers here that would suffice. That is because you in particular embrace one of the most repugnant versions of Christianity. You pose God as a cosmic slave master, with no morals beyond ordering us to obey him or face his wrath. Your god is an immoral monster and you have, for reasons that escape any free, thinking individual, who takes responsibility for their own life, chosen to blind yourself to his evil.Nobody owns me and nobody owns you. The very idea is sick. You may chose to wallow in this warped fantasy, but I can only advise you to emancipate yourself from mental slavery, as the song goes. Most Christians manage to delude themselves into thinking that God is good. That you do not and yet still continue to worship the vile reptile says more about you than him.I think that your comments confirm what I said above. If you cannot understand why normal people would be put off by the idea of worshipping a genocidal serial killer, you are never going to get it.Of course, the problem here is not so much God expressing his wrath, as God egregiously failing to to turn that wrath upon the Nazi war machine. The Jews in the Death camps saw no divine wrath. They had to wait for men to come and save them and far to many never made it. Where was God for them? This notion that God would sit idle as his worshippers were tortured and killed is incompatible with the idea that God takes an active interest in our world.Well, maybe it's compatible with your version of God, the slave owning, wrathful serial killer God, but most people aren't going to want to worship him, having correctly concluded that he doesn't deserve worship. A better question would be to ask how the paedophile can claim to love the children he murders. Your God is apparently supposed to love us and yet he is responsible for the deaths of more children than any other entity in history (if your favourite book is to be believed). By comparison, the average paedophile comes across as a bumbling amateur. *sigh* Iano, the point is that God, being a fictional character and all, has no justice to offer. He can only offer the same justice he gave to the inhabitants of Birkenau and Auschwitz, i.e. none at all.Human justice is superior simply because there is no other kind.Mutate and Survive

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On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. - Charles Babbage

The Jewish authors of the NT are anti-semites? Can this be (on a technical level)?- You omit the other option: obey his ways and enjoy his blessing - which includes a life after death in which the desire to sin is absent. Your objection needs to take account of the whole - else it suffers as the film suffers.- This doesn't stand toe-to-toe with the argument. Disbelief isn't an answer to the argument.- As I said earlier: wrath and goodness are compatible. Have you an answer to that?- Again I point you to the NT. If true, then the Jews are no worshippers of God. They are followers of a religion which eschews God in favour of an idol. Your argument needs to take account of such basics.Suffering can be used for punishment. It can be used to discipline. It can be used to halt the advance of sin. It can be used as a tool to bring the rebellious lost to their knees. Your uni-dimensional view doesn't even begin to tackle this variation.- Asking a better question is one way of avoiding an answer. Love necessitaties hate. Discuss.- Disbelief doesn't rebut an argument. Take a look back at your post GM. It's virtually all huff and puff.Edited by iano, : No reason given.

Again, you play dumb. The authors were actively turning their backs on Judaism. They chose to write a line under the Jewish heritage of their religion by casting Jews as Christ-killing villains.You are well aware of the anti-Semitic content of the NT. Please do not pretend that phrases such as "blood libel" are unfamiliar to you. It ought to be perfectly obvious why so few Jews embrace the NT. No, I did not omit that option; that is still slavery. You are free to believe in this mental slavery, you may even chose to think it a good thing, but it is still slavery. Yes and it is one I have already mentioned; where was his wrath during the Holocaust? Selective wrath is not justice, especially when it ignores such horrors. But the film does not. The film addressed a supposedly true incident. The Jews in the concentration camps were not arguing the relative merits of their NT, they were arguing about Judaism. That is what the film portrays. You act as if the film could have been improved had its protagonists all converted to Christianity at the end. That's not what happened. The film addresses Judaism and ignores the NT because that's what the film is about. For it to have brought in explicitly Christian apologetics would have been a damn insult.Besides, a god who would choose the Jews as his "chosen people" only to turn his back upon them is not worth worshipping.A god who would turn his back upon anyone who suffered as the victims of the Holocaust suffered, is not worthy of worship.A god who would turn his back on anyone for so trivial a non-crime as idolatry is not worthy of any respect whatsoever. The use of suffering as a tool by so powerful a being as God is necessarily invalid. Humans should only resort to the use of suffering as a tool when we have no other options. It should always be a method of last resort.God is not so constrained. He can choose any solution he wants. He could, quite easily come up with a solution where everybody is happy, but instead, he prefers suffering.I can see why you would like to drag the discussion onto this. You seek to obscure the main message of the film. The film's core message is not that God is damned because of what he did, it's that he is damned because of what he did not do. He sat idle whilst people were thrown into ovens by those who claimed to act in his name. Not even the issue, but very well.Whether it is necessary to hate the actions of paedophiles or not, it is not necessary to mimic them. The extent of God's wrath, as depicted in the accounts of his atrocities, represents a hideous over-reaction. One may hate the actions of a paedophile without responding with evil in return, without visiting that hate upon the person. I do not believe in punitive punishment. The kind of eternal punishment so often celebrated by Christians strikes me as being the ultimate act of evil. No, the lack of any evidence of any form of justice being offered by your god rebuts your argument. You say his justice is better? Well show it to me. Show me how the victims of the Holocaust receive their justice.We have two versions of justice on offer. one is man's version, which is imperfect, but at least capable of protecting the innocent from further harm. the other is God's version, which, as far as I can tell, has no effect of any kind at all and is indistinguishable from a complete lack of justice. And when I look at yours, I see a callous indifference to the suffering of others, an inability to recognise moral failings,and an inability to recognise the worth of your fellow human beings. You even seem unable to realise that an innocent child is innocent.I will stick to being huffy thank you. It seems the appropriate response in the face of such disgusting attitudes.Mutate and Survive

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On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. - Charles Babbage

Really? It was written by a Catholic who based it on a story he heard from a Jewish Holocaust survivor(Wiesel, who he mentions below). Here are the screenwriters own words:

quote:

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Nearly any other screenwriter in the country would have been only too happy to Dawkins up some diatribe about the badness of God. But as a Catholic, I'm actually quite fond of him and felt uncomfortable about acting for the prosecution.

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Two academic rabbis, Dan Cohn-Sherbok and Jonathan Romaine, changed my mind. They introduced me to a long Jewish tradition of wrangling with God, going right back to Abraham bargaining with him over the destruction of Sodom, and forward to Elie Weisel's famous declaration that God was hanged on the gallows in Auschwitz. Here were people talking to God on a frequency that wasn't on my dial. The trial of God would not have been some blasphemous aberration, but something in the tradition of the psalms, the Book of Job and even Christ's terrible accusing cry from the cross: "Why have you forsaken me?"

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I wrote speeches that ran for pages. To get them right, I had to read the scriptures: the Torah, the Talmud, everything. I assumed that doing so would enrich my own spiritual life. It almost killed it stone dead. I thought I was familiar with much of these texts, but reading them straight through was a different experience.

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Doesn't matter? Source. You do realize that the main character that is speaking here has been silent throughout the film, that this is the climax of the trial? Have you seen the whole thing? The film isn't about proving God is a bastard or non existent: It's about a living, complex, difficult relationship with a living god and the pathos and struggles that go with that and how this relates to true faith rather than just strong belief. The Jews in the film are to be executed in the morning, and the audience leaves them as they are praying to God.Haven't seen it myself, incidentally, but I read about it and will probably track it down to see the full trial at some point.

But this isn't a good analogy for God loving all of us but punishing those of us who reject Him. The child and the paedophile are two distinct people; we are not. Unless you mean to say that God only loves believers, and hates non-believers?You might say that, in the analogy, the children represent us and the paedophile represents sin, but it is we who suffer God's wrath, not sin, so that doesn't work either.

Anyone who believes that eternal punishment is an ethically appropriate response for what can only be temporal crimes is morally bankrupt themselves.Anyone who believes that any sort of greater good or increased utility is served by punishing crimes like theft, or adultery, or worshiping the wrong deity with death is similarly ethically bankrupt.There is something extremely problematic with "God" or anyone or anything else killing/smiting/torturing/cursing/whatever. There is precisely one ethical model under which such punishments are appropriate: authoritarianism. Literally, might makes right, and God is right to do whatever he wants because he's God and you don't get to question it, period. It's wrong for you to rape and murder, unless God tells you to, in which case you're morally obligated to do so. It's perfectly fine for God to afflict a good man with disease, murder in cold blood everyone he loves for having committed no crime, and generally be a dick just to see if one of the victims will continue to worship him, because he's got a bigger stick than you, and what are you going to do about it?That sort of ethical reasoning is absurd on it's face, and anyone with a half-developed conscience should be able to tell.iano supports genocide, as long as God is doing it.Genocide is a monstrous act and can only be tolerated by a monster regardless of circumstances.Therefore, iano is a fucking unethical monster.

Sorry for taking up your time - I did a sloppy edit which didn't reflect the position of the author himself.Insofar as the piece is commandeered as a signed/sealed/delivered judgement of God-of-the-Bible, the piece is both one-sided and somewhat incomplete, the God in question being the God of the Old Testament.- Again, I was dealing what the snippet as it appears to have been commandeered. No doubt I was shooting somewhat prematurely from the hip though.Must track it down myself too though, it looks like a rivetting piece.

Eternal separation from God (and that being experienced as torment) strikes me as the overarching condition of the finally lost. That the decision to occupy that state is made by a person in the temporal realm isn't ethically problematic.- Death merely shifts a person from temporary stage to final destination. It happens all of us. I'd be less concerned about the reason why God removes a person at the time he does and more about the final destination that is theirs on removal from this life.I wouldn't get too hung up on the temporal/eternal division- There's one other: holiness. All that is sinful offends it and attracts a reaction from it.- All good/right/holy means is "in line with God's will". Defined so, it isn't might which makes God right, but definition. You would have a different definition no doubt - which isn't very helpful. It's probably better to examine things and find where you and he disagree and why that might be.He commands people to be put to death as you say. But since no one dies without his say so that's hardly the biggest problem. Some get a long period on the stage, others a shorter period. So what - if our life here isn't the Big Picture?There is no such thing as a good man. None are without sin. Besides, there are positive aspects to be had from suffering - where would be be without a tootache to tell us that something is amiss.God commanding rape is a reach. Something laid onto the text, not extracted from it.- Emotive words those. But can you substantiate them with some firm thinking?For example: what obligation would God have ( him being the sustainer of everything) to support the life of a man for longer than He desires to do so? For longer than it takes to serve the purpose He gave the life for?Be careful not to let some self-decided upon purpose usurp the one he has for giving you life. That wouldn't count as firm thinking.Edited by iano, : No reason given.Edited by iano, : No reason given.Edited by iano, : No reason given.

I've seen you use this type of language before, where you are differentiating between eternal torture and eternal separation from God. Are you saying that this separation from God isn't such a bad thing, maybe only a 6 on the discomfort scale rather than a 10? This might make God out to be less of a monster, certainly. But then that would kind of lessen the whole impact of Jesus being the Savior, since what we would be saving us from would be moderate suffering, which a lot of us are already undergoing here and now.If, on the other hand, this separation is real and terrible suffering, are you really saying that people knowingly and willfully, with full comprehension of the consequences, choose this over God? That seems very unlikely.

So, if I was to kill someone then that wouldn't be me killing them. It would be god no longer sustaining them.

Turning your back on the religion of your birth doesn't make you an anti-semite. Could you be a little bit more precise - perhaps supplying some text to back up your position?- In the sense that God didn't create us to operate independently from him I'd have to agree with you (that we are "enslaved"). However, the argument is that we are 'we' because he breathed himself into us. Made in his image and all that. If it weren't for that there would be no "we" to speak of. We'd be down all that makes us people.Could you deal with that omission?- I'd be careful what I wish for if I were you. If desiring his wrath being expressed at the moment it is deserved then Poof! - there goes Granny Magda (and iano).Would you still like God to act at the moment of evildoing?- You're discussing with a Christian. An initial Christian response to "God didn't help his worshippers" is that they are not necessarily worshippers. It's a narrow point.Not that God necessarily prevents bad things happening to his worshippers. Or that his worshippers can't loose faith and point an angry finger at God.Help comes from understanding more of what God's overarching goal is wrt both the individual and the world at large. It's not a sure fire salve for the troubles of this world. But the potential for solace in the face of the most tortuous of circumstances is there.- You would agree that suffering and strife focus' attention in a way that nothing else can do? It's certainly the way of this world - we desist from a desirable path when it pains us too much to continue on it. And only then.- Suggestions? It would help if you could frame the problem first.- What's in a claim? *rolleyes*If his purposes are better served by permitting suffering then what's the issue. Although there are no doubt atheists in foxholes the principle stands: people will turn to God when there is no other place left to turn to.It can't be helped, such is the depth of the desire for independence from God.- This boils down to a question of degree. As love > infinity so will hate (and the reaction to that which insults love). Similarily, depending on how one see's the crime, so to will one's sense of punishment be informed. There is no reason to suppose all should stop at your weighing up of things.- Let's not lose our context: God in the OT judging. And men finding that judgment unjust. Doesn't this depend on a particular view of innocence? That adultery (for example) shouldn't attract judgment.- The complexity of the situation with "children and idiots" requires demonstration that the 'easier' issues be dealt with first. If that's not possible (as it appears not to be) then there is no point in adding that complexity.The worth of my fellow human beings is best represented in the sacrifice undertaken by this self-same God on their behalf. Neither you nor that snippet of film (insofar as it is commandeered to condemn the biblical God) make any mention of that. Edited by iano, : No reason given.

What would prevent you killing them except his restraining your desire to sin?So yes, it is him killing - by doing nothing in the face of your will expressing itself. No get out of jail card there I'm afraid.