#theist

If God created a person knowing that person would end up in Hell...then, effectively, He created that person to go to Hell...?

I really want to know...

Hi Theism, Atheism, and others...

How can I answer this?

Is there an answer or not?? 🤔

If I make up a test for something I've never done before (say the biggest number I could count to within a minute), with God being omniscient and all knowing, would He know the outcome of the test before I do the test? Or would He immediately become aware of the result after the test had been completed?

Important to note that this doesn't call into question free will, because I'd be trying my best each time. Like if He did somehow know before, He would know my limit, not like the number I did if I decided to stop halfway through anyway. And Him knowing this limit wouldn't like, force me to not stop during my test. Even tho I wouldn't anyway.

Picture a child. She is six years old, and she wakes up screaming every night because her mind is plagued with terrors she cannot control. Doctors call it early-onset schizophrenia. She sees monsters in every shadow. She hears voices that tell her she is evil. She is too young to even know what schizophrenia means, but she already knows what fear is.

Now ask yourself: if God is testing her, what exactly is He testing? A six-year-old has no free will left to exercise when her brain has already turned against her. To call that a test is not wisdom. It is cruelty.

Picture a young man with severe depression. Every day he wakes up with the same thought: ‘The world would be better without me.’ He tries to pray. He tries to believe. But the silence in his head is louder than any God. One night, he ties a rope around his neck and his mother finds him too late. What lesson was taught here? Who grew closer to God from this? Did his death make the world more compassionate, or did it simply leave a mother with an unhealed wound for the rest of her life?

Picture a veteran, home from war, tormented by PTSD. He relives his trauma every time he closes his eyes. His mind will not let him rest. He begs God for peace. Yet night after night, the nightmares return. If this is meant to draw him nearer to God, then why does it push him further away, into the bottom of a bottle, into the cold steel of a gun barrel pressed against his temple?

These are not abstract questions. This is the reality of mental illness. Millions live and die this way, locked inside prisons of their own minds, while heaven remains silent.

And when pressed for answers, believers say this is a mystery. That God’s ways are beyond our understanding. But mystery is not compassion. Mystery does not wipe the tears of a mother who has lost her child. Mystery does not stop the shaking hands of a veteran at 3 a.m. Mystery does not heal a child too terrified to sleep.

Now contrast that with us, with humanity. When we see suffering, we do not call it a mystery. We act. We build hospitals. We research cures. We fight stigma. We hold out our hands to those who are drowning. We do not let them sink just to teach someone else a lesson. We dive in after them.

And that raises the most devastating question of all: if flawed, imperfect human beings can be more compassionate than God, then what is the point of God at all?

The choices are stark. Either God exists and is indifferent to this suffering, which makes Him unworthy of worship. Or God does not exist, and the silence of heaven is exactly what it seems to be: emptiness. And in that emptiness, we find the truth. The fight against suffering belongs to us. The duty to love and to heal rests in our hands, not in God’s.

And maybe that is not a tragedy. Maybe it is a liberation. Because once we stop excusing cruelty as ‘mystery,’ once we stop waiting for help that never comes, we discover that compassion does not need God to exist. Love does not need divine permission. Healing is not a gift from above, it is the work of human hands and human hearts.

So I ask you to look at the suffering of the innocent and ask yourself honestly: if God allows this, is He good? And if He is not good, is He God at all?

"Finding your God through other's Goddamn you's"

In theology, without a basic understanding of ontology, epistemology & cosmology, you may be placing your "faith" in ignorance, Though ignorance is common, ignoring the truth isn't common sense! But to condemn others for using alternative methodology by their own understanding of "God" is a stupid & contagious arrogance! This is why the theologist will always need the apologist!

Arrogance is an error in ignorance, like an inflated ignorant that cuts out all of it's own bliss thru marking a destination it knows doesn't even exist, forever blaming the whole world for what it's missed! Like reading the same book about a creator or a crook, both named "God", a theist & atheist took as saying either God is even or there is no even only odd! As a gnostic & agnostic, either very wise or very lazy, take figurative language as poetic wisdom, but then read it literally sounding crazy. Though they could sit on either hand, all four ignore the very feet upon which they all stand. Perpetually caught in the same quicksand of an impregnable, unwinnable, though fortified dry land!

"Faith isn't blind nor does it leap, as if my eyes jump & legs weep!"

True faith is knowing, as in, you certainly don't need to be intellectualizing breathing & heart beating before waking up every morning to start living and believing! But there is a part of you that knows what to do and this same part is where your faith lives too! Understanding the fundamentals of the breath and heart beat is knowing when to hold on, let go, move on, rinse or repeat!

It's rhythms & rhymes, patterns & signs, showing that life isn't just a single straight line! Nor is it random, meaningless, or unaligned! To give is to receive, as to believe is to relieve, as perceive is to conceive, to be the needle, thread, & weave, as contractions bring expansions, you enter the shack only in transient, knowing every time you'll come out as a fully mastered mansion!

As inputs influence outputs influencing other inputs influencing outputs, to facilitate & delegate inputs & outputs will continue to create new outlooks! To be the stage, the act, and the scene, as you write the play diving deep within the depth thru the spaces in between, the fundamentals of nature, although figures of speech, were literally created for all to be seen!

"The Illiteral always lies where the Literal falls ill and dies!"

You & your God are only as great as the depth of your analogies!

Before literalism came to conquer the world with it's ologies, language used genders & personas for eons to describe the nature of the beyonds, though the intent was never to define "God" as this or as that, by putting God into a box labeled "wrathful jealous brat!" Nor was there a need for an institutional organization to conquer thru division for the highest position & even higher education! For this is the true abomination of desolation!

As if they & only them hold the keys, the one & only holy, soul proprieties to the kingdom of heaven! Oh My God, Oh My Lord please seize these ironies rising from the parable of the leaven!