God's Problem a short review.

Recently I listen to an audiobook by Dr Bart D. Ehrman, a renown Bible Scholar and Professor of New Testament at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, called God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question--Why We Suffer. I enjoyed the audiobook, in it he shows that the Bible offers at least five answers that often conflict with each other. 1) The prophets think God sends pain and suffering as a punishment for sin and also that human beings who oppress others create such misery; 2) the unknown writers who tell the Jesus story and the Joseph stories think God works through suffering to achieve redemptive purposes; 3) the writers of Job view pain as God's test; 4) the writers in parts of Job and Ecclesiastes conclude that we simply cannot know why we suffer; and 5) the apocalyptic belief (a dualistic ideology) that was popular during Jesus' ministry in which suffering is caused by the forces of evil (the Devil and his angels) and therefore, God is not responsible. When the kingdom of God comes, God will make things right, and the righteous will inherit the earth. He shows how these answers fall short of answering why we suffer, especially if you take into account gratuitous suffering of innocent infants like those who died in the Nazi's death camps, who were cooked alive in the fires of the Nazis when they did not have enough time to kill them with their mothers in the gas chambers; or the children who died when the 2004 Tsunami that occurred in the Indian Ocean which killed thousands of infants and children; and those infants and children who were killed by God's commandment in the old testament flood, and God's authorized genocides of land claiming by the Israelite Armies. One of the things that really hit home for me that Dr Ehrman brought out was about praying or giving thanks for your food. If you are thanking god for giving you your food, you are at the same time implying that god failed to provide food for someone else, why don't god provide food for the starving infants and children in the refugee camps in Darfur today or even the 25,000 people who die daily from hunger and hunger related diseases and illnesses; why didn't god provide food in Ethiopia during its great famine of the 1980's (he did in the Old Testament for the children of Israel in the desert, when he provided manna and quail). This is why I left the faith of Christianity, because I don't see any evidence for the god it claims to exist, a personal god who is active in the world would be a failure if such a god existed. Think about it...

It is what it is

I think at the moment that life is its own point, and to me that is significant enough. I came to this conclusion: because if life pointed to something else then what is the point of what it is pointing to? For example, if I say the point of life is to go to an afterlife paradise some call heaven or suffer in a torture chamber called hell, I need to ask what is the point of heaven or hell? If someone say to praise and worship a god, still I would continue to ask, and what is the point of that? And to think about the torture chamber of hell, what is the point of that? ( Especially if it does not have a rehabilitation function.) An analogy would be a fly being conceived from an endless chain of ancestors for billions of years, just to hit my windshield, was that the fly’s point? Think about it, for billions of years if the fly ancestors had not met and copulated with the next fly, avoided being food for whatever its natural predators are; if this fly ancestors prior to passing on their genes had died before passed on their genes then this fly would have not existed. All of these string of events happen just to see their lineage end on my windshield, is that the point of life? I think the point (if there is a point) of the fly was to live and be a fly nothing more. The point of a human is to live and be a human (period) nothing more. As a result, if someone ask me: Where did I come from, why am I here and what am I here for, I know how I would answer. Where did I come from? I would reasonably answer that everything in the universe is either matter or energy, and from science I understand that they are two forms of the same thing and that something has always existed, so I did not come from any where, I emerged from the existing universe. I exist because I think, therefore I am, and thus I reasonably conclude that I am a form of matter-energy or as Carl Sagan stated we're "star-stuff contemplating star-stuff". In other words, if there is a point to life it would be that we are one of the many ways the universe is aware of itself. I come from the union of my parents and every ancestor that preceded them; I received half of my genes from each. Why am I here? I am here because the conditions for existence exist; if they didn't exist then I would not exist. What am I here for? I am here, if lucky, to pass on my genes to the next generation. MOST IMPORTANTLY, I AM HERE TO LIVE, TO EXIST, Exist means to stand out, stand forth or emerge. I think its best summed up by Epicurus for he stated about life and death, "Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not" or to put it into today terms or slang: Death is nothing to fear because when I am alive I aint dead and when I'm dead I aint alive so why should I fear death. The point of a thing is what the thing do (so the point of life is to live), and that’s the way it is, or I would say "It is What it Is". Think about it...