u/E-Reptile

And by ultimate evil I mean the following:

A short and brutal life of immense physical suffering (disease, abuse, ect) followed by an eternity in hell without compensation. For them, specifically. That's probably key here for the mirror neurons to fire.

At this point, I suspect theists would object to this God on the grounds that God is not being omnibenevolent.

The Problem of Evil is easy to dismiss when one is not subject to evil.

But if God is subjecting one to evil, even unto eternity, I suspect the average theist would object to this God.

"Oh, but he promised me Paradise if so and so happened/I did X"

Doesn't matter, God does what He wants.

"But that isn't fair."

Yeah, join the club, buddy.

Stick with me here; given Jesus' status as God, and given God's omnipotence, there's no reason that a physical body of Jesus being discovered in the tomb by the women listed in the Gospels would disqualify Jesus from his position as God of the universe (non-contingent, prime mover, objective moral standard, ect)

I think Christianity has a fixation on whether the tomb empty or not.

"If empty, then God". "If not empty, then not God."

But that's not how things work. That's remarkably uncreative and is applying this really silly filter to other explanations.

Other users brought this up the other day, but there are other explanations for an empty tomb besides "Jesus is God". (Body never made it to the tomb in the first place, being chief among them)

In the same way, there are other explanations for a "full" tomb other than "Jesus is not God".

Here are a few:

1. Jesus simply hadn't risen by the time the women checked on him. He was still harrowing hell. He left after being anointed and went straight up to heaven.
2. Jesus simply quantumly entangled with himself in heaven. There was no need to move a body around. His spirit resurrected.
3. Jesus simply phase-shifted through the tomb door in spirit form and left his body behind. He materializes body parts outside as needed (or casts the illusion that he has) (He already phase-shifted into Hades)
4. Jesus simply decided he didn't need to bodily leave the tomb and is (bodily) running the universe from the tomb. It's not like heaven is literally just "up in the sky". It's in whatever dimensional plane he wants it to be.
5. Jesus simply made a perfect homunculus after resurrecting and used telekinesis to push the stone back.

And if you're getting tired of my use of simply, I'm sorry, but "simply" is just how things are when you're omnipotent.

Now, if you'd object to these procedures because they don't fit the Messianic picture, well, Jesus already didn't fit that. He's doing half of them later anyway. Just reinterpret the prophecy as needed and run in back. Besides, there's no reason God needs to conform to prophecy. Perhaps that specific prophetic fulfillment that doesn't line up anymore wasn't even about God in the first place and it was just a dud.

And if you object to these procedures because they would not have facilitated the spread of Christianity as effectively, welp, too bad, whatever God does is best, and if I can't provide counterfactual methods on how Jesus could have reached just one more person, neither can you. Your subjective view of what God ought to have done does not matter to God, as he knows best. God could have always shown himself to 5000 instead of 500 and stuck around for 50 days instead of 40.

There's simply no reason to forget omnipotence, once we assume there is, in fact, an omnipotent being, when we're analyzing God candidates. A hidden God could always be working in a way that's mysterious to you, too.

A more supernatural explanation is no longer up for disqualification once God can do any logically possible thing.

If this all feels a little silly, well, that's on purpose. There's simply no need to fixate on only two possibilities when it comes to the empty tomb.  Christianity doesn't really seriously consider omnipotence when identifying and disqualifying God candidates.

And this could be an communication issue on our part too. We (I, I'll only speak for myself) am not saying:

"Here are examples of God being evil."

I'm saying:

"Hey, take a look at these verses that look like something a fallible and barbarous human would write. They just happened to add in the "God's word" tag in the description. What's more likely? This is really God's will, or this is man's will being propped up as God's?"

The argument being put forward isn't that "God is bad, therefore I won't believe in him/he doesn't exist".

The question being posed is: "How bad could God's word be before you, the believer, reevaluate whether it's really God's word?"

Now, a believer can trivially define God's word as true and just and perfect by definition, but that's not why these verses are being discussed. We're asking you to take a step back and figure out why exactly you're so convinced these verses are, in fact, from God (other than the writer said they were. Because come on, that's not a great reason to believe it.)

Believers, unless they accept any and all reports of "God's word" as true, are putting these reports through some filter.

For anyone who's interested, how much worse could Numbers, 1 Samuel, and Leviticus get before you threw up your hands and said, "nah, I'm out". Like what specific extra details would push that lever for you?

Would you feel cheated or deceived? Or would you feel a sense of relief?

So Frieren and Fern had to go through a whole arc to get legally certified to cross over into the Northern Plateau.

And when they get there...it's just... people hanging out? Villagers, merchants, ect. Like it's a little more dangerous but it's still a functioning society of relatively normal people.

I guess I'm not really sure how perilous this region is supposed to be. It's sort of sectioned off, but not really. It's not like demons and mages can't pass through.

Jesus only saves some people from the arbitrary consequences of their own sins. Jesus doesn't save other people from your sins, and this reveals a lot about the character and mindset of the average Christian.

And maybe none of this is surprising. After all, rapists would rather be forgiven for their crimes than stopped before they can rape.

Imagine two different beings:

One is a judge who forgives the crimes of a rapist. Hardly a hypothetical, "many such cases", as they say.

The other is a law enforcement officer who (in a rare moment of actually serving the public) stops a rape that is about to happen by apprehending the person attempting to rape.

Now, it's hardly controversial to say that the Judge is failing to carry out justice while the Law Enforcement Officer is succeeding in carrying out justice.

Right?

Until you call the Judge "Jesus".

Then all of a sudden, it becomes wrong for Jesus not to forgive and wrong for him to stop the rape. Honestly, kinda crazy when you think about it.

The Christian framework perversely values punishment over prevention, except for the Christians themselves, who don't even value punishment since they believe they'll be forgiven. This is all a little silly when we remember God is already in the business of preventing an infinite number of things and free will doesn't mean getting what you want.

I think the "meta" explanation for this phenomenon is that Christians are creating their worldview "off-screen". They have to contend with the obvious reality that their God doesn't actually do anything, and so they make up things for their favorite character to do behind the scenes in order to feel better about their favorite character. This is very common in fiction for poorly fleshed out fan-favorite characters who are told (not shown) by the author to be "super good/super powerful/top of the verse". The fans pick up the slack for the author and make their own headcanon. Sadly, this unsupported headcanon persists to this day.

Clearly, Muslims believe that Allah is in possession of a mechanism that makes it impossible to corrupt his word. The Quran is supposedly a miracle.

And yet, Muslims also believe God's word regularly got corrupted. Right up until Muhammad revealed the Quran. Which is...kinda exactly what you'd expect a conman to say, but whatever. That's a more meta point. I think this is pretty blatant example of a "retcon". It's also unfalsifiable.

The Quran is not a new book. Allah wasn't trying and failing to deliver an uncorrupted word and then finally, after years in the lab, unveiled his Quran.

The Quran is God's final book and Muhammad's the last prophet, but "last" doesn't require previous entries. A mother of one's last child can be her only child. Similarly, Allah could have simply just started with his last word, and thus ensured an uncorrupted word from the outset.

Rather odd he forgot to use this superpower until Muhammad, no?

Incorruptability can't be used as criteria for the divine if the divine has, up until this point, been corrupted.

Monotheists don't care about what weakness has to say. Given two Divine Commands, a proper monotheist will default to the command they've been convinced is from a higher power.

If X says don't kill Canaanite babies, and 10X says go kill Canaanite babies, theists are going to kill those dam babies.

This makes any sort of "David and Goliath" narrative farcical. It's not David vs Goliath; it's Yahweh vs a disabled mutant. The outcome is obvious (and preordained)

Theists aren't really risking their neck; they're leaning their head on the shoulder of the boyfriend they've been convinced is the maximally good boyfriend.

Oh, and if anyone asks, I can tag the exception to this rule.

Generally speaking, monotheists pretend like they're not utilitarian consequentialists, but they're just suppressing the truth in unrighteousness.

I feel like Abrahamic authors don't really understand power scaling, but eh, modern authors struggle with it too.

Believers often try to portray the conquest of Canaan as some sort of grim necessity. "It was the only way."

Was it? You have God on your side. You don't have to kill a single person. And we can't pretend God is non-interventionist. He does his own dirty work plenty. He floods, casts fireballs, does salt transmutation, possesses bears, sonic blasts, rains frogs, wrestles, (a bunch of real silly stuff tbh).

But the idea that this is the best God's chosen people could come up with is absurd. God can teleport you to safety. God can teleport your enemies to another location. God can put them in a pocket dimension with time dilation that tricks them into thinking they never left, all while the Israelites take over an empty promised land. God can cast an infinite staircase desert illusion forcefield to keep out invaders.

Heck, even low-level magical displays ought to be enough to get an enemy to surrender. Just make it apparent that the Israelites' enemies don't stand a chance.

And I will be unwilling to accept that any of these options are more evil than commands to slaughter entire populations (unsaved populations, mind you, so high chance they'd just go to hell)

Even if we look at something like comic books, superheroes (who are far, far from tri-omni) don't need to command their fans to risk their lives to go out and kill villains in order stop villains. One of the perks of being really powerful is that you can just go ahead and prevent violence without getting people killed. You know, as long as you care enough to be careful.

The real answer is a lack of creativity and proper world-building. And this is really common; fantasy authors love to concoct overpowered characters and then forget how easily they can solve the story's conflicts. Many such cases.

And if we really want to get meta, I think the other, darker side of the story (and these really probably are just stories, gruesome fanfiction where ancestors are portrayed as far more destructive than they ever were)

is that these "divine" commands to kill and conquer are loyalty checks. It's conditioning, so that you can manufacture consent among a population for future atrocity.

Primarily because these religions are not dualistic. There's not some cosmic balance between good and evil; there's no actual battle between God and the Devil (it's all theatre). Evil is not logically necessary for the sake of good.

And yet, it's not uncommon to hear about spiritual warfare, demonic possession, black magic, nephilim half-breeds, ect. And I'm not talking about demons and dark spirits (and nephilim) as anthropomorphized avatars of human sin, I'm talking about created, free-will, non-human agents with supernatural powers.

Demons aren't getting redeemed, and they're not necessary beings. They don't have to exist, and they don't have to be "allowed" to do anything. They're not God's "main creation", they're a superfluous side-project that went wrong.

Generally speaking, their free will is already being curtailed. They're not allowed into heaven. They're not allowed (to stay) in possessed humans. They're regularly "chained up" and limited in their capacity, and someday they're going to be dealt with completely.

Any sort of demonic problems are completely avoidable given the power discrepancy between God and demons.

And while this is a bit of a tangent, I think the existence of supernatural evil is a huge roadblock for any theist trying to solve the Problem of Evil.

1. Because it demonstrates that God is completely capable of "casting out" evil free will agents into like, pocket dimensions or something. (Although apparently these dimensions can be accessed? It's pretty bad world-building, tbh)

2. And it shows that God can just make certain evils physically impossible to his free will agents. It's not like I can possess people like demons can. Or do black magic.

Furthermore, insisting upon the existence of supernaturally intelligent and powerful evil spirit entities completely obliterates a theist's ability to make reliable claims about God and his special revelation. Because guess what? Could just be Ipos and Malfus pulling a prank.