What was God’s plan behind Creation and why does he need one?

If suffering never happened every one is a winner. Forgiving something does not mean overlooking! Thus your god could have punished Adam in a lesser way (say banished him for a few weeks) and he would have learnt his lesson. This is not true: causing people to suffer is not a righteous act and you god does it all the time. For the reasons above it is clear he did not overlook the rebellion for no good reason. Sigh. Who gave us these instincts? Who stacked the deck in such a way that we would have actively go against our god given instincts to be righteous?It's like addicting some one to heroine and punishing them when they take it. But why punish all of humanity? Why? What you are doing is blaming people for being wicked to each other: fair enough.I however and concerned in this thread with your god making us suffer. Not people making us suffer.If a person makes another suffer when they don't need to they are cruel. As you god is not required to make us suffer, he is cruel.Not a loving god at all. So you love the god who chooses to make you suffer?Stockholm Syndrome much?The bottom line is that your god could have us living with him any time he chooses. He makes all the rules but chooses to have suffering part of the human condition.Your god does not rectify this situation immediately.Why? Remember, he can do anything so nothing stops him apart from his decision.

Its seems that you really arnt looking for answers to these questions. You've made up your mind and you are sticking to it.If you really want to question God over such things, you can. And his reply is found in the verses of scripture that I posted but I notice you did not comment on any of those verses which tells me that you are not really interested in allowing God to provide his defence.So you've effectively sentenced and charged him without hearing his defence. I hope i never meet you in a court of law lol.

God's eternal, no? Or time, as normal people call it.

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I hunt for the truthI am the one Orgasmatron, the outstretched grasping hand
My image is of agony, my servants rape the land
Obsequious and arrogant, clandestine and vain
Two thousand years of misery, of torture in my name
Hypocrisy made paramount, paranoia the law
My name is called religion, sadistic, sacred whore.
-Lyrics by Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead

Your scripture is very poetic but it explains how things were and how things will be; not why you god chose to take the course of actions that he did.What your scripture fails to answer is the question posed by this thread.I ask why god chose to punish us for one man's sin and you reply with (paraphrased) 'don't worry it will all work out in the end'.My mind is not made up: provide a reason for your god doing what he has done i.e. engineered the current situation with reality.

Hello Larni, He is in charge, and we can't stop him, this much is true. But I do not believe he is mistreating us. If God took pleasure in causing us pain, or delighted in our suffering, for no reason other than it was just for fun, then I would agree with your position. But many verses in the Bible indicate that God is concerned about our suffering. Sure you may say that it does not explain why He allows it or does nothing to stop it, and I agree that we can't explain it.Yes, ultimately, in regards to our suffering, the buck stops with God. But the reason why us christians still love Him, is because of what God did about our suffering. You feel that the only answer for our suffering is to not have any at all, full stop, end of story. God's answer was to sacrifice himself for us. Yes he allows suffering, but He did not even spare himself from it by sitting in an ivory tower sympathising with us. He became human himself, and willingly went through agony to the point of death. If you were to make a top 100 list for greatest sufferers in all history, God would be No.1 on that List.I do not like to suffer. I do not like it when others suffer. You obviously are horrified by it. God also takes no pleasure in seeing us suffer. You cannot see how anything would justify it, from your limited perspective. I however trust that God, having all knowledge, has a good reason to allow it. I hope that one day you also will begin to trust in this.It is the devil that promises a life of pleasure, like the lure of pleasure island in Pinochio, but in the end you'll end up an ass. Yes, God's way hurts right now, and we don't know the full reason why we have to suffer. But He has promised us that in the end He will wipe away our tears, and there will be no more suffering, and we will live in paradise for eternity. I believe in God's promise.If there is no God then suffering is truly meaningless?If you want to really know more then there are a few books I will recomend. The first is by Phillip Yancey. The version I have is two books in one volume, but you may still be able to buy them separately. The first book 'Where is God when it hurts' is about physical pain. Yancey looks at the complexities of how we sense pain, and examines people with leprosy, who feel no pain, and many other issues. The second book 'Disappointment with God' is about emotional pain. Neither are meant to examine the question of why did God create a world with pain, but in a roundabout way they did take some of the wind out of my sails, reducing my complaints against God.An article I'd recomend is at Why Us? The Problem of Evil - creation.com , which covers alot of what I have already covered, only a bit more eloquently.Alot of your questioning is regarding the contrast between justice/punishment and mercy/forgiveness. I'd like to examine this, but time is the problem.

Oh please. Like he was the only one that was tortured to death.

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I hunt for the truthI am the one Orgasmatron, the outstretched grasping hand
My image is of agony, my servants rape the land
Obsequious and arrogant, clandestine and vain
Two thousand years of misery, of torture in my name
Hypocrisy made paramount, paranoia the law
My name is called religion, sadistic, sacred whore.
-Lyrics by Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead

And let's not forget he only died for a weekend.And where was he during the time of his avatar's death?Large-ing it up in heaven with...himself.I saw a bigger sacrifice in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kharn!

We can explain it: by your god choosing not stop the suffering.He can, but he won't. If he is the Alpha and Omega where all things are possible we must conclude that he has no good reason for not ending the suffering.Lets be clear: he could end it without any negative consequences to anyone.Why worship someone who makes a conscious choice to submit some people to misery?I'll point to my self here: I don't think I've experienced misery but many of my patients have had truly awful, horrific lives.Why does your god hurt them and not me? Why does your god chose to hurt some people but not others when he does not have to hurt people at all.

Hi, Peg. Honestly, Peg, Message 73 (which I assume is what you’re referring to here) is just a list of random scriptures. I don’t think any one of the verses you quoted in that message has any relevance at all to the topic at hand---which is, Why did God create life?---or with the subtopic, Why is there evil/bad?This isn’t just a question of whether or not it’s all going to work out in the end, or whether or not we chose to do evil on our own: it’s a question of why we even exist at all, and why our existence is configured the way it is.You can’t get at this by expounding on biblical eschatology. You have to turn your mind to the point at which God made life and ask what was His motivation for doing so? To do this, you have to contemplate what was happening at that time, what the universe was like, and how God related to it.

• Was there already good and bad back then? Did God experience them?
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• Why did He choose to make a universe at all? Once He did, what made Him decide on this configuration?
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• Could He have made a successful, working universe that functioned on entirely different principles?
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• If so, was His choice to do it this way (free will, suffering, rules about "good" and "bad," etc.) arbitrary? Or, is this configuration superior in some way to other possibilities? What makes this way superior, and how do we judge superiority, anyway?
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• If not, what was preventing Him from doing things differently, and why/how was it preventing Him?

This is not a simple question! You cannot just sweep away Larni’s questions as the product of a biased, anti-Christian worldview! They are legitimate and important questions with huge metaphysical/theological implications!You do it a massive disservice by pretending that it’s simply a matter of whether or not it results in your eternal happiness.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

He didnt choose to punish us.the world we have today is the direct consequence of being independent of God. He didnt choose our independence, Adam & Eve did.But in saying that, what God did do was promise to send someone into the world who could redeem mankind from independence. In genesis we read 3:14=15
"God proceeded to say to the serpent: ...And I shall put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed. He will bruise you in the head and you will bruise him in the heel.So God wasted no time in putting a plan into place to ensure that the one who was behind the rebellion (Satan) was going to be put to death by a 'bruise to the head'This promised 'seed' is the one who was spoken of to Abraham at Genesis 22:18 "And by means of your seed all nations of the earth will certainly bless themselves due to the fact that you have listened to my voice.Then 2 thousand years later the seed arrived, Jesus. He opened the way for all the nations to learn about God and his purpose and his plan to redeem them from death. Christianity has been preparing people to live by means of Gods laws and to desist from living independently of God.So far from enginerring the situation or punishing people, God has been patiently gathering them and teaching them because his plan is to redeem them from the situation we are in.

the topic has certainly gone off on a tangent then because the the question i was answering was 'If God is good, why is there evil'i didnt ask that question, i merely provided an answer to it.My apologies.

He knew this would happen in advance and he could have punished Adam and Eve and then forgave them their trespass.But he did not. As well as choosing to engineer the situation so that they would eat the naughty apple (after all he created it and put it within reach of Adam and Eve and created the serpent with a very specific nature). He choose not to forgive them their trespass and to punish them and their children for ever after.Now you say he is waiting for something before he decides to forgive us.You ignore the point that your god can do anything at all; including forgiving Adam and Eve at the time!All of the suffering that anyone has ever had could have been averted if your god was more ofrgiving of Adam and Eve.You absolve your god of all responsibility for the bad things that he has created!Your faith stops you from seeing that you god has the power to make everything right with no negative consequences to anyone; and yet he stands by and watches when he could act.

That's not true. You have said that it will be all right in the end.That's not an answer if you are honest with your self.Sorry to put such a hard line on you Peg, no Christian has even come close to being as up front in this topic as you have with me and I really appreciate that.Edited by Larni, : Clarity

Hello Huntard, I was not just referring to the physical suffering during His death. God Still exists and is still suffering, and He has been since Adam sinned, from our continual rejection of Him. Individuals may have suffered physically more than Jesus, but they did not bear the weight of the worlds sin. God loves each one of us, and every sin we commit grieves Him, as does every one of us that chooses to be eternally separated from Him.

Well, this is the "faith and belief" forum, so I guess there is not much i can do to counter that, since it is your belief, and is internally consistent.Regardless, I don't believe that to be the case, so let's leave it at that.I will say that I now understand where you are coming from, and in that context, you were right, god is the biggest sufferer of all.