Yeah, don’t worry about kids dying of cancer. They’re irrelevant in the vastness that is god.
I wonder, tho. Which one do you mostly lean towards. Are kids dying to punish someone or are they dying to test the parents? Or is there a third, more important reason we mortals can’t comprehend? Or is it just about having faith that it’s his will?
I can go on a killing spree tomorrow and feel good about myself because that was god’s will, right? He allowed it to happen, right?
We’ve either got free will in which case there’s no “god’s will” or, we don’t actually have free will and everything is predetermined to happen anyway. Not sure which is more fucked up to believe.
HeavyRaptor@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Let me start with the calendar because I actually had to look up the history of calendars (which was super interesting). The first person to use A.D. was a monk called Dionysius who used it around 525. In the Roman empire years were counted by the year of the current reigning Consul. Dionysius wanted to avoid using the calendar based on Roman emperor Diocletian who widely persecuted christians. This new system was adopted by the church only.
Centering the calendar around nativity of Jesus was only adopted as an official calendar by Holy Roman emperor Charlemagne in around 1600, and the rest of the world changed over to it over time until around 1900.
So the people actually living in 1 A.D. had no idea they were living in the year of the lord.
As far as I know we only really know that Jesus was a real man in the Herodian Kingdom at the time and that he was in fact crucified around 33 A.D. (which would not have been called A.D. at the time). Weather we believe he was truly resurrected is more of a question of faith, relying on religious sources. So basically applying Occam’s razor I would say that the resurrection was just part of the religious texts written by monks, not necessarily something that was 100% true.
In maths there are definitely larger and smaller infinities. Take for example the set of all natural numbers [1, 2, 3, …]. This is an infinite set. Compare this to the set of rational numbers, these can be expressed as a fraction of two natural numbers [1/1, 1/2, 1/3, …]. There is already an infinite amount of rational numbers between 1 and 2, making this an uncountably larger infinite set. All this being said, the boulder thing always sounded a bit weird to me but it does raise the question of what we mean by omnipotence, and can we accept the existance of such a being, all of this gets very philosophical. (the paradox has several proposed resolutions if you are interested btw, some more satisfying than others)
Which brings us back to the problem of evil. Let’s say our lives on Earth are just a test to see if we are accepted in heaven. This explains why bad things happen as they are a test of faith. But this just raises more questions:
Why does it take God our entire lives to decide whether we are accepted? What about babies that die during birth or shortly after? How can they prove their faith?
Anyway, this got way too long. I’d like to reiterate that I think religion has very positive aspects: community, belonging, purpose, an answer to what happens after death.
But I’d also say that historically, religion (especially Christianity) was a tool to keep the masses docile and subdued, allowing the church to hold power over hundreds of years but also kept believers somewhat safe, at lest from their own community - commandments like do not kill, steal, or even Jewish customs of not eating specific types of meat. If they had to make up, or embellish things to keep it going, that was a price they were willing to pay.
jsqribe@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Very interesting and balanced response.
I think we choose to believe logic(maths,physics) based on some form of faith, it’s more scientific and based on peer reviews but ultimately there are times when some of this logic starts to break down e.g when you start looking at quantum and all the interesting things that can happen in theoretical physics with multiverse theory.
As far fetched as it can seem, I don’t think we can totally count out some form of mysticism or higher power. What I would say is that the current versions we have been given are all man made so by nature they have all been manipulated in some way e.g crusades or more currently, the conflict in the middle east.
Some people are afraid of the answer being as simple as “we don’t actually know” so they find the closest thing they can stick with to give them purpose.
Flax_vert@feddit.uk 1 month ago
Simple. Mercy. If we screwed up, then God would destroy us immediately. If God were to just stop evil happening on Earth, he’d have to kill everyone at the first moment that they sin. Either that or take away free will.
Biblical scholars would disagree. The earliest text that we have that mentions the resurrection was written by AD 51.
1 Thessalonians 1:9-10
For the people of those regions report about us what kind of welcome we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead—Jesus, who rescues us from the wrath that is coming.
Again, it’s worth mentioning that immediate writings were VERY RARE then. The entire Gospel of Mark would have cost the same as a house for a scribe to copy. Which is why we don’t have many writings from that time.
PapaStevesy@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Sorry, but Biblical scholars’ proof of the resurrection is from the Bible? You see how that’s not convincing right?
God created sin and hell, it didn’t need to do that. After three decades as a Christian, the best answer I could get to the question “Why did God make the universe and us in it?” was “so we could praise it for eternity in heaven.” So it could have just created us in heaven already. Instead it created a whole universe of randomness and ever-increasing chaos, stuck us in it and said, “You better love me and follow these very specific, often inane and arbitrary rules, or I’ll send you to this other place I made where all you feel is pain for eternity.” The god of the Bible is an egomaniacal sadist and it’s not worthy of your praise.
Flax_vert@feddit.uk 1 month ago
That’s like saying our proof for Caesar is Caesar’s writing. Now if I said Caesar’s writings were true because he said so, that would be circular reasoning. But no, they are backed up by history. In the same way, the Bible can prove Christianity, but circular reasoning is when I try and use the Bible to prove itself because it says it’s true. Although proof can lie within such as criteria of embarrassment, but mainly it’s to how it relates to what else we know about that time, which is how it lines up. Unlike, for example, the book of mormon which is completely verifiably fake as it talks about systems in an ancient america which we know didn’t exist
xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org 1 month ago
Sorry for being pedantic, but the set of rational numbers has the same cardinality (size) as the set of natural numbers, so it’s not “uncountably larger” (in fact, it’s countable). You should’ve chosen the real numbers for your example, which are uncountable.
HeavyRaptor@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Sorry, that’s right, got it mixed up