• @TheDoozer
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    44 days ago

    Look, I’m no Christian, but I can point to the obvious answer to this:

    Slavery is part of the free will of humans. It’s humans doing things to other humans, in which God will, in general, not intervene. It all stems from the original sin and humanity as a whole living with the consequences of its (as a whole) actions. It’s such an easy, toss-away answer to give for the absolute worst of human evil and a supposed loving God’s complacency, but it’s there, and it’s easy.

    I prefer Stephen Fry’s example for condemnation:

    “Yes, the world is very splendid but it also has in it insects whose whole lifecycle is to burrow into the eyes of children and make them blind. They eat outwards from the eyes. Why? Why did you do that to us? You could easily have made a creation in which that didn’t exist. It is simply not acceptable.”

    Also:

    "I would say: ‘bone cancer in children? What’s that about?’

    “Because the God who created this universe, if it was created by God, is quite clearly a maniac, utter maniac. Totally selfish. We have to spend our life on our knees thanking him?! What kind of god would do that?”

    That’s not a matter of free will. That’s a matter of creating a world that is hostile to those who are innocent, even without the iniquity of Man.

  • @[email protected]
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    3 days ago

    Christian theology describes the joy that will come from watching people burn in hell.
    Bear with me here:

    But there are yet other spectacles: that final and everlasting day of judgement, that day that was not expected and was even laughed at by the nations, when the whole old world and all it gave birth to are consumed in one fire. What an ample breadth of sights there will be then! At which one shall I gaze in wonder? At which shall I laugh? At which rejoice? At which exult, when I see so many great kings who were proclaimed to have been taken up into heaven, groaning in the deepest darkness together with those who claimed to have witnessed their apotheosis and with Jove himself. And when I see those [provincial] governors, persecutors of the Lord’s name, melting in flames more savage than those with which they insolently raged against Christians! When I see those wise philosophers who persuaded their disciples that nothing was of any concern to God and who affirmed to them either that we have no souls or that our souls will not return to their original bodies! Now they are ashamed before those disciples, as they are burned together with them. Also the poets trembling before the tribunal not of Minos or of Radamanthus, but of the unexpected Christ! Then the tragic actors will be easier to hear because they will be in better voice [i.e. screaming even louder] in their own tragedy. Then the actors of pantomime will be easy to recognize, being much more nimble than usual because of the fire. Then the charioteer will be on view, all red in a wheel of flame and the athletes, thrown not in the gymnasia but into the fire. Unless even then I don’t want to see them [alive +], preferring to cast an insatiable gaze on those who raged against the Lord. ‘This is he’, I will say, ‘that son of a carpenter or prostitute [– Tertullian refers to the Jews from now on, as is shown by what follows and in particular by this well-known description of the mother of Jesus from the Talmud – ] that destroyer of the Sabbath, that Samaritan, that man who had a devil. He it is whom you bought from Judas, who was beaten with a reed and with fists, who was defiled with spit and had gall and vinegar to drink. He it is whom his disciples secretly took away so that it might be said that he had risen again, or whom the gardener removed so that his lettuces would not be harmed by the crowd of visitors.’ What praetor or consul or quaestor or priest will grant you from his largesse the chance of seeing and exulting in such things? And yet to some extent we have such things already through faith, made present in the imagining spirit. Furthermore what sorts of things are those which the eye has not seen nor the ear heard, and which have not come into the human heart? (1. Cor. 2, 9) I believe that they are more pleasing than the circus or both of the enclosures [first and fourth rank of seats, or, according to others, the comic and the tragic stages] or than any race-track.’ The material above in square brackets is Nietzsche’s addition to Tertullian’s text. At ‘[alive +]’ Nietzsche incorrectly reads ‘vivos’ (‘alive’) for ‘visos’ (‘seen’). 43 ‘By my faith’.

    – excerpt from Nietzsche, *On the Genealogy of Morals

  • @egrets
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    24 days ago

    This reminds me that I still haven’t watched God on Trial, a 2008 film about Jews in a Nazi death camp discussing whether a just god would let it happen. Saw a clip from it a while ago, and the dialogue was impeccable.

  • Blackout
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    24 days ago

    Hey little one. I have to test your parents faith so here’s stage 4 leukemia.

  • @sir_pronoun
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    -74 days ago

    It DOES depend on whom you enslave. I wouldn’t mind a bunch of MAGA fuckwits toiling on my plantation. Just until they learn their lesson.