Cold Case Christianity: How God Doesn't Use Hardship, but just laughs at you

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

 

Cold Case Christianity:

Lessons from Law Enforcement: How God Uses Hardship 

Posted: 11 Mar 2019 01:15 AM PDT

One night, officers working the north end of our city were investigating a call of a suspicious person when they saw a suspect run from them and start hopping fences in a residential neighborhood. My trainee and I were working the adjoining beat area and we rolled up to assist them as they looked for the suspect. Once my trainee and I were in the neighborhood, I could see someone run across the street several blocks ahead of us. Unfortunately, once we got to the area, he was nowhere to be seen. We knew the suspect was nearby, so we started canvassing the area trying to see if he was hiding somewhere.

 And because your infinitely just god limits your police work to just empirical evidence, no miracles, sounds like your own god wishes for you to believe that the only hope anybody has in any situation is in looking to the empirical evidence.  How did you discover the Mormon church was heretical?  Prayer?  Or did you look at the empirical evidence?

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Have you ever felt like God treated you the way I treat my trainees?

 Once again, you clearly aren't doing apologetics, you are only pandering to those who come to you with their god-presupposition already firmly in place.

Ever felt like God has been unduly harsh, or that He responded to your requests for help with silence, answering your prayer requests with a “No,” or at least a “Not yet?”

 One wonders how the Babylonian women would have answered that after God said he would stir up the Medes to go rape them:

 15 Anyone who is found will be thrust through, And anyone who is captured will fall by the sword.
 16 Their little ones also will be dashed to pieces Before their eyes; Their houses will be plundered And their wives ravished.
 17 Behold, I am going to stir up the Medes against them, Who will not value silver or take pleasure in gold. (Isa. 13:15-17 NAU)

 Maybe you should ask the baby born to David and Bathsheba, a baby your god tortured unnecessarily for 7 days with a painful sickness before finally killing it:

 13 Then David said to Nathan, "I have sinned against the LORD." And Nathan said to David, "The LORD also has taken away your sin; you shall not die.
 14 "However, because by this deed you have given occasion to the enemies of the LORD to blaspheme, the child also that is born to you shall surely die."
 15 So Nathan went to his house. Then the LORD struck the child that Uriah's widow bore to David, so that he was very sick.
 16 David therefore inquired of God for the child; and David fasted and went and lay all night on the ground.
 17 The elders of his household stood beside him in order to raise him up from the ground, but he was unwilling and would not eat food with them.
 18 Then it happened on the seventh day that the child died. And the servants of David were afraid to tell him that the child was dead, for they said, "Behold, while the child was still alive, we spoke to him and he did not listen to our voice. How the (2 Sam. 12:13-18 NAU)

Wallace continues:

I don’t know if “love” is an appropriate way to talk about my feeling toward my trainees, but I can say that I honestly want to see them succeed and grow into the police officers I know they need to be.

 Then you are spiritually immature. Your religion requires that you put in less effort to achieve worldly goals, and more effort toward getting people saved.  If you train a trainee, they will have to split their time between work and church stuff, but the trainee who gives up the police academy and pursues ministry full time can do more for the Lord.  See the exact same rationalization from apostle Paul:

  32 But I want you to be free from concern. One who is unmarried is concerned about the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord;
 33 but one who is married is concerned about the things of the world, how he may please his wife,
 34 and his interests are divided. The woman who is unmarried, and the virgin, is concerned about the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and spirit; but one who is married is concerned about the things of the world, how she may please her husband.
 35 This I say for your own benefit; not to put a restraint upon you, but to promote what is appropriate and to secure undistracted devotion to the Lord. (1 Cor. 7:32-35 NAU)

 I predict that Wallace is the most likely of all internet "apologists" to become "liberal" in his Christianity

If I, an imperfect FTO who knows only a little about each of my trainees, am willing to push them beyond their comfort to help them succeed, how much more would God, who truly loves you and knows everything there is to know about you, be willing to push you?

 Irrelevant, your god can wave his magic wand and get even an idolatrous pagan king Cyrus to do whatever god wants him to do, Ezra 1:1.  With such ability, we do good to stop our ears when idiots like you come along and assure us that god allowed our little daughter to be raped to death, for the sake of some greater unfathomable good. 

No, when you have the ability and opportunity to prevent evil, and and you can do so without causing a greater evil, and yet you just sit around doing nothing, this is called "neglect", and according to the moral opinion of most mature Christian and non-Christian adults, such neglect makes you culpable.

If you insist the case is different with your mysterious invisible 'god', then you need to stop pretending it can be beneficial to "reason" about him.  Every time a human analogy makes your god look good, you scream out praise.  Every time a human analogy makes your god look like a sadistic lunatic, you remind everybody that human analogies are too limited to place much confidence in.  Well FUCK YOU.

If I, an imperfect FTO who knows only a little about each of my trainees, am willing to push them beyond their comfort to help them succeed, how much more would God, who knows everything, be willing to push you?

The question is irrelevant to atheists about as much as "how much more would the tooth fairy, who knows everything, be willing to push you?" is irrelevant to those who deny the tooth fairy's existence.

By the way, you are once again merely coddling the classical theism of your followers (i.e, their belief that God is omnipresent, omnipotent, omni-max, all just, all merciful, blah blah blah).  But there are Christians who think the bible teaches that God makes mistakes.  These people are called "open-theists".  See here.

And the open-theists are correct:  God regrets his own prior decision to create man, Genesis 6:6-7, and nothing in the grammar, immediate context or larger context indicate the information in those verses is any less literal the the information in the immediate context.  The single SOLITARY reason you insist this is a mere "anthropomorphism" is because you know the bible elsewhere says God is perfect, and therefore, as a believer in bible inerrancy, you are forced to find a way to "reconcile" that passage with the others in the bible. But objectivity says that what Genesis 6:6 actually means in context, is more important than whether it can be "reconciled" with something else in the bible.

It’s hard to understand why God allows us to experience pain and hardship.

 Not when you deny his existence and affirm the obvious truth that we are nothing more than smart junkyard dogs on a damp dustball hurtling about lost in space.   Belief in a cozy afterlife might help the parents of the child who died in a fire, but your problem is that you try to push that comfort to be more than what it is, as if there's an actual reality behind it.  No. Heretical Christians and Mormons "feel" the Holy Spirit on Sunday morning, but because you insist they interpret the bible incorrectly, this "feeling" isn't from the Holy Spirit. 

So just because something feels good or "works" for you during your hour of need, doesn't mean it must be something more than wishful thinking.

I know I have often hoped God would simply intercede and take care of all my problems. But sometimes hindsight can hep us understand. Looking back at every challenge offered by an FTO, even when it felt like they were belittling me for the sake of being mean, I now recognize the skills l I developed as a result.

 So what you are saying is that if God stands by and allows your child to be abducted and raped to death, this will work the good of causing you to grow spiritually.  The last I checked, the responsible objective person includes ALL the benefits that any human act is likely to cause, before they determine whether such act is morally good or bad. 

Is fatal child rape bad because it degrades the child's earthly life?

Or is fatal child rape good because it causes the parents to cling so much closer to 'god'?

The more you talk about how evil can work a greater good, the more you justify calling an evil act good.  Indeed, it is whether the act produces more good or evil, that we decide whether it is a morally good or morally bad act.  Yeah sure, your bible tells you to avoid saying "let us do evil that good may come" (Romans 3:8), but to me that's nothing more than a stupid ancient author obviously unwilling to go where his own logic inevitably leads.  You may as well call "feeding kids nutritious food" as "evil", then automatically banning any attempt to show the goodness of such act.  Sorry, but if more good than harm is intended to result from the act, then the act is obviously morally "good". 


If we aren't justifying evil by showing some good can be learned from it, then the fact that good can come from evil also cannot be used to vindicate god and his allowing evil

Your obstinate presupposition that God is always "good" regardless of the evidence, is precisely what stands in the way here, and this stupidity on your part stems from little more than your obstinate committment to bible inerrnacy.  If the bible had said the clouds form from god sneezing, you'd be insisting that all weather-related science is a trick of the devil.  FUCK YOU.

In fact, I don’t think I would have developed those skills if I had been protected from the hardships of the job.

 Nice try at justifying evil, but FAIL.  If God can do what he is alleged to have done in Ezra 1:1, then he can simply infuse your mind with whatever skills he wants you to have.  Calvinists aren't wrong to view Proverbs 21:1 as the final nail in your Arminian coffin.  See also Acts 16:14, God opens the heart of a woman who sells purple, which in that culture meant she was a business woman intending to convince other people to indulge their hedonistic desires and waste money and expensive vanities.  So you cannot even argue that God cannot do this until you first make the freewill decision to seek after him.  No, God also turns the hearts of certain sinners while they are in the midst of their worldly passions.  So why doesn't he do to the entire world of sinners, what he does in Ezra 1:1?   Too busy watching HBO?

Is God like the stupid parent who notices the children playing with a loaded gun, but then instead of removing it, simply bitches about it, then later tells the jury in court how wise he is, since because one of his kids died from a gunshot, the rest of the family has, in their grief, grown closer to Jesus?  Well gee, I guess allowing kids to play with loaded guns isn't quite as evil as the non-Christian might have thought?

I am indebted to my FTOs for all the times they were… jerks.

 So when a little girl is raped to death, go tell her parents they should be thankful that God stepped aside and allowed evil to happen as this created for them the opportunity to grow spiritually, which would then, under your own convoluted reasoning, justify them to be joyful and happy.

Do you ever look back on the tough times of your life and see your own growth as a result of hardship?

Do women ever look back on the time when they were raped as children and see their own growth as a result of that hardship?

When I am going through a hard time, I ask God for his help, just like my trainees ask me.

 So do the Mormons.  But you'd insist that because they have a non-existent god, any comforting feeling Mormons get out of prayer, is purely naturalistic and deceptive.  Likewise, if you get a good feeling after prayer to god, that doesn't get rid of the stark possibility that such feeling is purely naturalistic. I suppose the practitioners of voodoo feel exuberant as they dance around slitting a chicken's throat and pouring its blood all over themselves, but us modern day atheists know full well how powerfully deceived these lunatics really are.

And I’m still upset when things don’t go my way.

 Then you need to grow up.  If your daughter is raped to death, this is just god working through his mysterious ways to make you more spiritually mature.  Don't worry, be happy.   The more you are upset at the death of a loved one, the more you are allowing Satan to control your desires.  Remember how Jesus rebuked Peter when Peter resisted Jesus' plan to get killed?

 31 And He began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.
 32 And He was stating the matter plainly. And Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him.
 33 But turning around and seeing His disciples, He rebuked Peter and said, "Get behind Me, Satan; for you are not setting your mind on God's interests, but man's."   (Mk. 8:31-33 NAU)

If God gave you a vision of his infallible foreknowledge, which showed that next Friday at 11 p.m. your time, your daughter will be kidnapped from her bedroom and raped to death...how would you respond?  In way that would cause Jesus to classify you as "Satan"?  Maybe you need to see how Jesus encouraged his followers to give up custody of their kids to free up more time to follow him around, so you can appreciate the fact that Jesus does not support the extremely powerful emotional bond between mother and child that typically characterizes the modern American Christian family.  Matthew 19:29.

But when I step back, I must acknowledge that God has always been good to me, even when he allowed hardship.

So God is being "good" to the little girl while she endures the hardship of rape?

Tell that to the little girls of the Congo whose only way to survive is as prostitutes in brutal trafficking rings.

I still struggle to feel “okay” through hardships, both professional and personal, but I have to acknowledge that a good God would not coddle me and prevent me from maturing.

 Correct, a good god would wave his magic wand, and cause you to suddenly have whatever level of spiritual maturity he wanted you to have, easy, done, no bloodshed, no pain, no rape, no need to rationalize lunacy.  Ezra 1:1.