if christian god existed, would he be a cruel god?

@Sleepy_Gary said in #70:

God created everything and knows everything, so he created us knowing of the terrible cruelty that would ensue and yet still went ahead with it. Sounds pretty cruel to me.

Ultimately, Gary, God is Love and the opposite of love is selfishness.

It's the reason why selfishness is the key ingredient and influence behind all unloving misbehaviour.
There is no way around it.

Complaining about selfish misbehaviour, is to request God's presence.
There is no way around it.

I mean, think about what you just said, here!

You are inferring that if we engaged in perfect Love, and avoided selfish and needless cruelty, that then our context of life might be in a completely different state of affairs that would not be worth less, but that would be worth much more!

So, all you have really said is the following:

Life and (perfect) Love are never to be separate.
I do not condone life outside the context of heaven.
I need God. Everywhere. All of the time. Fundamental in all. Without exception.

That's all that you've actually said!

And you know what? You're not alone.

Keep at it, we might just get our wish! :)

I will not discuss God and his measure of justice, and a few volumes will not suffice. Read the Bible. There, the so-called mercy of God in all its glory. As he called for the destruction of entire nations and did not spare babies. And what about the Flood? How do you understand this? So there is nothing to speculate about. Whoever wants to err cannot be brought to his senses. But as for the fact that it is easier for the rich to be kind, and it is harder for the poor, and therefore let's be more lenient, a very dangerous position. Yes, in a socially difficult environment, it is more difficult to preserve human qualities, but this is not a reason to gasp, oh, he is poor, let's be more lenient, well, he stole, the environment is to blame, well, he was a hooligan, you think it's a prank, it's so hard for him, poor people. I know a lot of cases when in a prosperous family children grow up to be naughty and vice versa, the children of parents of drunkards have made their way into the world. I myself grew up among punks, all my entourage went to prisons. I graduated from university, got a profession and worked honestly all my life. I have come to the conclusion from experience that a large role ...

@Resurrection_of_Abel said in #71:

Your train of thought drivel has no basis in logic. Either your personal definition of ethics is so skewed that it's okay for a being to wipe out entire populations and kill children due to other people's mistakes, or you don't actually apply ethics to your own God because you jump through 1,000,000 hoops that let you say that anything that god does is okay. The fact that so many people devote their entire lives to this nonsense that is impossible to prove false fills me with disgust.

@Resurrection_of_Abel said in #56:

@MircallaLives said at #8

Imagine that you're riding shotgun with a loved one...

And someone listening to their lying mouth decides that they want your friend's car and therefore drill a hole in their head, open the door and dump them out, as they shoot you in the hip to help expedite your vacating of the vehicle...

You would celebrate the unloving misbehaviour, would you?

You would smile, give them an appreciative nod, tell them "well done", while holding your hip and bleeding profusely?

You'd be laughing while giving your statement and recounting the events?

You'd show up at your friends funeral, say, "Praise ungodliness and unloving misbehaviour," to their family members?

I somehow doubt it.

I find it boring that you feign to exhalt the most sickest and ungodly mistreatment of human beings.

And I find it boring that you to feign as though you can't wait to find your child missing from its crib so that you can praise the pseudo-existence of ungodly misbehaviour, in person, up close and personal.

You can't say both, "child abuse is heinous" and "child abuse is great" at the same time.
And you also can't possibly rewrite or otherwise disavow the ungodly and unloving source of it.

You've certainly cast a lot of innuendos my way, based on what I said back in #8, and without asking me to clarify what I meant, before preaching a sermon at me. And here is what I did say, back in #8: I said that I had met God and I had met the Devil, and that I would choose the Devil and Hell over God and Heaven.
Was I kidding? Trying to make light of the whole salvation business? No I wasn't kidding. I have walked the streets of Heaven, and it is crowded with people just like you. People who down through the ages have cast their innuendos against anyone and everyone who didn't conform to their own theology. And that is why I say, "Give me the Devil; give me Hell."
And the Devil I'm referring to is the "real Devil" -not the Devil invented by Christians to frighten people into converting, or to cast their innuendos by associating him with pagans, witches and non-believers. The real Devil (the one I've met) is the most genuine person I have ever met.
But I really don't wish to argue religion with you, and I'm not going to. You can reply to this post if you wish, but I'm not going to debate religion with anyone, unless he or she first understands the Creation Story in Genesis. Until you understand that, you don't know half as much as you think you do. What is the "Tree of Knowledge"? What is the "Tree of Life"? Who is the serpent?What about Cain and Abel? Was Cain evil and Abel good? If their parents were virtual identical twins (God fashioned Eve from one of Adam's ribs), then Cain and Abel must have been virtual identical twins also? But one was justified and the other was condemned? And I don't care about the nonsense they teach you in Sunday school to explain Adam & Eve. I'll debate religion with anyone who can tell me what it really means.

@Sleepy_Gary said in #68:

Murdering entire populations and making parasites that eat eyeballs for the “sins” of a few people is horribly cruel.

I’m obviously not going to change your mind, because religious people always pull out some BS to justify the cruel existence we live in. Hopefully some rational people reading this that have their parents/community trying to indoctrinate them into their cult can understand that if the Christian god does exist, they are either terribly cruel or have no love for humanity.

So with that logic I assume that imprisonment and the death penalty are cruel as well?

@Resurrection_of_Abel said in #67:

The term "sin" is a bit woo-woo.

The term "unloving misbehaviour" is not.

The term "sin" allows confusion.

This is actually very interesting. Jesus said that the law was fulfilled by love when he said "Love your neighbor as yourself." and "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul mind, and strength." So yes, sin is unloving misbehaviour. Murder is a sin because it's not loving (ofc). Jealousy is not loving. Cheating is not loving. So to an extent, they are similar!

@MircallaLives said in #74:

You've certainly cast a lot of innuendos my way, based on what I said back in #8, and without asking me to clarify what I meant, before preaching a sermon at me. And here is what I did say, back in #8: I said that I had met God and I had met the Devil, and that I would choose the Devil and Hell over God and Heaven.
Was I kidding? Trying to make light of the whole salvation business? No I wasn't kidding. I have walked the streets of Heaven, and it is crowded with people just like you. People who down through the ages have cast their innuendos against anyone and everyone who didn't conform to their own theology. And that is why I say, "Give me the Devil; give me Hell."
And the Devil I'm referring to is the "real Devil" -not the Devil invented by Christians to frighten people into converting, or to cast their innuendos by associating him with pagans, witches and non-believers. The real Devil (the one I've met) is the most genuine person I have ever met.
But I really don't wish to argue religion with you, and I'm not going to. You can reply to this post if you wish, but I'm not going to debate religion with anyone, unless he or she first understands the Creation Story in Genesis. Until you understand that, you don't know half as much as you think you do. What is the "Tree of Knowledge"? What is the "Tree of Life"? Who is the serpent?What about Cain and Abel? Was Cain evil and Abel good? If their parents were virtual identical twins (God fashioned Eve from one of Adam's ribs), then Cain and Abel must have been virtual identical twins also? But one was justified and the other was condemned? And I don't care about the nonsense they teach you in Sunday school to explain Adam & Eve. I'll debate religion with anyone who can tell me what it really means.

Firstly, if you don't celebrate being mistreated unlovingly, and all of it's effects, then you seek God.

This fact is more dependable than the laws of physics.

What our lying mouths like to say, compared to what we are really saying, are often dichotomous.

Secondly, the "tree if knowledge" is very simple.

If you and I were the only two people in the garden, we would split up to go get food and cover more ground, and then we would meet to share and eat what we'd gathered.

We would sleep with two eyes shut.
We would understand the truth about our unity.
We would experience only love.

This would continue until one of us found the other eating apples in the bush, and then lying about how many they had collected/stole.

From that day forward, the thief would worry about being thieved, and the thieved upon would worry about thieving more than the thief.

The perfectly peaceful sleep that we once knew would cease.
The perfect trust that we once knew would cease.
The perfect love that we once knew would cease.

From that point forward, we would sleep with one eye open and hope that the inevitable road towards mass psychoses could be somehow staved off.

We knew only love until we contrived unlovingness.

We learned the difference between perfect Love (God) and anything but Him.

The "snake" is the same lying mouth that I speak of.
It was what influenced and encouraged the one to selfishly turn on the other.

And, ever since, we've enslaved ourselves to a wicked precedent and protocol of needless ungodliness, including all of the weak and pathetic alibis that we've fabricated to pseudo-excuse our misbehaviour.

So, again, if we're not celebrating a person mistreating us unlovingly, then we obviously want nothing to do with the lack of God/Love that we claim would be so great; and we, by default, condone and celebrate the worst abuses; and we do it because our lying mouth tells us that we're too weak to make a change.

And, by the way, but for God, life is not an option in the first place.
The only reason you're in a position to tell lies about Him is because of His existence, not yours.

So, in fact, you can kiss the idea of 'experiencing', much less "something to choose to follow", good bye.

2+2=5 doesn't even exist to tell its lie...without 2+2=4, first.
Therefore, every time 2+2=5 speaks in order to proclaim itself the "truth", it tells on its own lies.

This is your only annoyance with our Heavenly Father.

Life is part-in-parcel with God.
It is not part-in-parcel with a lack thereof.

The idea that God isn't annexing or withdrawing from this locale, is just more of that lying mouth that we've find ourselves catastrophically hypnotized by.

But that's really not the whole story, because there is no death in heaven.

So, ultimately, what we're probably looking at, here, is our ability to re-enter heaven.

It's tragic that your mouth says "heaven would be terrible and that you want nothing to do with it"...while simultaneously shunning the selfish mistreatment of your person.

Also, the way that you speak of "Heaven" has me thoroughly curious what you experienced?

You say that it's filled with individuals who respect Love (or 'loathe selfishness' in our language) enough to never mistreat their one another selfishly?

Hmmm...

Either way, the idea that we can continue to pawn off the needless and unloving mistreatment upon our Creator, which we've wrought on ourselves, and against the advice of our Creator, is now defunct.

It's been seen.
It's been acknowledge.
It's been corrected.

Lastly, the idea that you'll successfully swap out 'the God that came to remind us of His love' with 'the devil', and 'the devil' with God, is boring.

Also, my lying mouth wants you to experience the wrath of the grievous parents whose children you celebrate and condone being dead/missing/hungry...the sound of its lying hiss is repugnant to me...it wants nothing more than to stomp faces and have its face stomped...like a clumsy and pathetic ouroboros...sad...pathetic...has-been...carnival-clown.

But I...myself...would ultimately prefer that no one have their children be dead/missing/hungry in the first place...and I...myself...would prefer that we forgive us each other our debts and move on expressing and experiencing only love.

@ALucasM said in #76:

This is actually very interesting. Jesus said that the law was fulfilled by love when he said "Love your neighbor as yourself." and "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul mind, and strength." So yes, sin is unloving misbehaviour. Murder is a sin because it's not loving (ofc). Jealousy is not loving. Cheating is not loving. So to an extent, they are similar!

Not similar...they are synonymous.

The active ingredient in all sin, is selfishness.

It's the problem with sin.
It is sin, itself.
It is the effects of sin.

It's how we recognize and identify it.
It's the active ingredient.

Since what we do to our one another we do to God...there is only one single commandment:

Show (only perfect) Love towards our one another.

He didn't say "only perfect"...but for something that He didn't even say out loud...that part is certainly deafening, isn't it?

We only need go stand beside a bomb when it blows up...or find our child missing...or see a Mack truck bearing down upon us...or experience infidelity of someone we thought we could trust...or be preyed upon by companies with the power to price gouge...or try to find an honest mechanic...or be born a pig/cow in a kill mill that is run by someone who is beholden to the shareholder's bottom line...etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.

@Resurrection_of_Abel May I ask how long you've been Christian?

@Sleepy_Gary said in #68:

Murdering entire populations and making parasites that eat eyeballs for the “sins” of a few people is horribly cruel.

I’m obviously not going to change your mind, because religious people always pull out some BS to justify the cruel existence we live in. Hopefully some rational people reading this that have their parents/community trying to indoctrinate them into their cult can understand that if the Christian god does exist, they are either terribly cruel or have no love for humanity.
God gave Adam and Eve the choice to obey or disobey and they disobeyed... they could have had a peferct lie forever but they chose to eat the fruit......