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?

snip

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.

Cold Case Christianity: Why Make the Case for Christianity, If God Is in Control?

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

Why Make the Case for Christianity, If God Is in Control?

Posted: 31 Jul 2017 01:58 AM PDT 

 

I’ve written a Christian apologetics book that makes the case for making the case.

No doubt because you have perfect confidence that God doesn't need your help on anything, having already Himself written a book that you publicly profess to be not just divinely inspired, but also "sufficient" for faith and practice.  I'm getting the idea of a dad who installs training wheels on his daughter's bike, but insists to hell and back that he isn't trying to "help" her do what she wants to do by making the bike a bit "better".

I argue that Christians ought to embrace a more evidential, thoughtful faith and accept their duty to become Christian case-makers.

And since your Reformed and 5-Point Calvinist brothers in the faith strongly insist that the evidentialist approach to apologetics is both flawed and unbiblical, you are also involving your intended unbelieving readers in a debate that not even spiritually alive people can resolve, how irrational is it, then, to pretend that spiritually dead unbelievers could possibly find the truth here?

Many people, after reading the book and thinking about this call to become better case makers, have asked, “If God calls His chosen, can’t He achieve this without any case-making effort on our part?”

Probably because they know about bible verses which teach that God not only can, but often does, force people to do what he wants them to do, and apparently he doesn't stay up late at night worrying about whether their freewill was violated:

 4 "I will turn you about and put hooks into your jaws, and I will bring you out, and all your army, horses and horsemen, all of them splendidly attired, a great company with buckler and shield, all of them wielding swords; (Ezek. 38:4 NAU)

Sure, that "hook" is metaphorical, but the metaphor cannot be defined as irrelevant; it still brings to mind an obvious level of force overriding any contrary intent by the humans themselves.  And why would God use a metaphor that brings images of absolute force and overriding of freewill to mind, if that mental image is somehow inaccurate?

I also pondered this question as a new Christian, and I think the following analogy is helpful, although certainly imperfect.

Exactly, you could have chosen anything from the bible, but no, you are a marketing genius, you recognize like other authors that you can increase sales if you infuse personal stories into your books.  This is probably because you are aware of how strongly the Holy Spirit controls the lives of true Christians and doesn't need your help in any way whatsoever.

When my son David was a young boy, he hated mushrooms. If salvation were dependent on voluntarily ordering a mushroom pizza, David would never experience heaven because he would never, on his own accord, order such a pizza. In fact, I once took David to a pizza restaurant and cleverly removed the mushrooms from a pizza in an effort to convince him to eat it. He refused. “I can see the shape of the mushroom right there!” He knew it had been poisoned by “mushroom juice,” and no amount of effort on my part could change his mind, in spite of my best mushroom-pizza case-making efforts.

But what if there was some way to remove David’s hatred of mushrooms prior to entering the restaurant? If David no longer hated mushrooms, he would be open to my mushroom-pizza case-making efforts. Then, if I was able to make a “five-point case for the deliciousness of mushroom pizza,” David would, under his new nature (having had his hatred for mushrooms removed), choose to voluntarily order the mushroom pizza.

 I think you ate some mushrooms without pizza right before you wrote this.

In this admittedly imperfect analogy, David’s salvation was clearly dependent first on the role God played in removing his enmity for mushrooms. But once this enmity was sovereignly lifted, David was open to my case making. God allowed me to play my role as a case maker, and David responded to my effort in a way he never would have if God hadn’t first moved.

And the bible-god's ability to sovereignly override human freewill to force whatever he wants to happen, is precisely why your god is a fucking liar for pretending that we make him mad or angry.  If you can prevent your child from playing in the street, but you let them do it anyway, you have nobody to blame but yourself if they get ran over.  Nobody will listen during your parental-neglect arraingment that you issued clear warnings and the child willfully disobeyed.  They will say that if you are such a loving father, you wouldn't just stand there issuing edicts, you'd FORCE them out of the street, because true love will employ such force to protect the loved one from the consequences of their own stupidity or rebellion.

God’s incredible love for us is evident in this process.

But it's not evident when he just stands at the foot of the bed and watches as a little girl is raped to death.

God loved my son enough to remove his hostility,

Does he love little kids enough to remove the hostility of the man raping them?

and He loved me enough to disciple and encourage me. Even though God is clearly sovereign, He graciously allowed me to play a part in reaching David.

If the bible has anything to say about it, the part you played was that of a puppet.  Or so say your 5 Point Calvinist spiritually alive brothers who think your apologetics are a load of crap.

I got to make the case for what I know is true about salvation, and in the process, my confidence grew as I mastered the evidence for Christianity. God’s sovereign purposes and amazing love were ultimately expressed both in the son He called and in the son He encouraged.

Sounds like your editors and ghost writers did a good job agreeing on the best way to rouse the emotions of the Christians you market your shit to.

Demolishing Triablogue: No, Steve Hays, a theology of secondary causes does not absolve God from being the author of evil

Steve Hays argues that Calvinists can consistently deny that God is the author of evil as long as they have a theology of secondary causes:

If actor was a synonym for auctor, then to deny that God is the "author" of sin means that God is not the agent, viz, God is not the doer or performer of sin. Rather, it's the human agent (or demonic agent) who commits sin. 

In that sense, it's perfectly coherent for Reformed theologians who deny that God is the author of sin–so long as they have a theology of second causes.

Several problems:

1 - Some bible texts claim God is directly responsible for causing people to sin, such as Ezekiel 38:4, the hook-in-jaws metaphor bringing to mind a sense of absolute force.

2 - Semantic quibbles about how God doesn't personally act in the human sin are theologically suspect, a god who is as omnipresent as Calvinists typically say he is, has more intimate association with a kidnapper's crime than the kidnapper.  Or are some classical theist doctrines resting upon hyperbolic biblical language?

3 - Semantic quibbles about how God doesn't personally act in the human sin do not imply that God is somehow not culpable.  God often orders others to sin:

 19 Micaiah said, "Therefore, hear the word of the LORD. I saw the LORD sitting on His throne, and all the host of heaven standing by Him on His right and on His left.
 20 "The LORD said, 'Who will entice Ahab to go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?' And one said this while another said that.
 21 "Then a spirit came forward and stood before the LORD and said, 'I will entice him.'
 22 "The LORD said to him, 'How?' And he said, 'I will go out and be a deceiving spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.' Then He said, 'You are to entice him and also prevail. Go and do so.'
 23 "Now therefore, behold, the LORD has put a deceiving spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets; and the LORD has proclaimed disaster against you."
 (1 Ki. 22:19-23 NAU)

Unless Calvinists say they would absolve the mob boss from the crime of murder because he only ordered the hit, but didn't himself actually pull the trigger, then the popular moral objection to the Calvinist god authoring evil is not refuted by observing that God doesn't personally commit the sins.

4 - Secondary causes are moot for the reason explained above:  If what God himself is doing is evil, the fact that secondary agents have their part to play in the overall scheme does not take away from his own culpability.

 

5 - God appears to have carefully distinguished the evil David did, from the evil that god himself would do, to wit, causing David's wives to leave him and have polygamous sex in public with another man:

  9 'Why have you despised the word of the LORD by doing evil in His sight? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword, have taken his wife to be your wife, and have killed him with the sword of the sons of Ammon.
 10 'Now therefore, the sword shall never depart from your house, because you have despised Me and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife.'
 11 "Thus says the LORD, 'Behold, I will raise up evil against you from your own household; I will even take your wives before your eyes and give them to your companion, and he will lie with your wives in broad daylight.
 12 'Indeed you did it secretly, but I will do this thing before all Israel, and under the sun.'"
 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.
 (2 Sam. 12:9-13 NAU)

 Whether the wives had freewill is immaterial; God is claiming all the credit for causing this instance of people engaging in polygamous sex in public.

 

V. 12 doesn't make sense if it doesn't mean God is declaring himself responsible for this particular bit of evil. 

There can be no doubting whatsoever that at the end of the day, consistent Calvinism teaches that people compare to God the way puppets relate to a ventriloquist.

 

Indeed, unless one accuses Paul of premising his Romans 9 theology on hyperbole, which would nuke Calvinism off the face of the planet, then when Paul tries to support his theology by arguing that God is potter and we are the pots, he really wasn't pushing the analogy too far.

 19 You will say to me then, "Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?"
 20 On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, "Why did you make me like this," will it?
 21 Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for common use?
 (Rom. 9:19-21 NAU)

If Paul wasn't pushing the pot/potter analogy too far, then we cannot be any more responsible for our sins, than pots can be responsible for being what they are. 

Why God paints himself as so wrathful against his pots turning out to be exactly what he wanted them to be, requires we conclude that God is as irrational as an intelligent being can possibly get:  He is angry and wrathful because his plans worked perfectly.

One has to seriously wonder at how Calvinists can go about seriously believing that God makes Christians feel guilty about doing his secret will.

If a Calvinist praised God's secret will in allowing children to be raped to death, would God accept or reject this theologically correct form of praise?  

If God is a God of truth, does that mean he accepts any and all praise that is based on actual truth, or does God require that praise of him not take into account certain actual truths?

These are questions that Calvinists, who think God secretly wills all human sin, cannot easily answer.