Gonna move this into the new reply to keep it less confusing…
No. Not ‘those who don’t yet know God’, those who never had the chance. Remember, everyone but the inhabitants of one island on Athra had rejected God. All of humanity. Everyone who lived on Caldari Prime after the gates shut down, but before First Contact with the Amarr had no chance to know God.
Everyone who lived on Intaki during that time. Or Matar. All of the Ni-Kunni prior to First Contact. Every inhabitant of every other world between 8061 AD and 21423 AD by the Amarr calendar. Everyone who lived anywhere other than Athra for thirteen thousand years.
Why damn them?
Now then…
NO.
First off, the ability to speculate, the ability to question, the ability to criticize? These are things God gave us. To refuse to use God’s gifts would be rude, at the very least. But even more importantly, while still being the exact same point:
Why can’t we begin to understand how God makes his decisions? That, too, was a choice God made. He could have made us perfectly capable of understanding his reasoning. Heck, the Amarr scriptures comprise more volumes than any reasonable library can physically hold, he could have, I dunno, explained it all very thoroughly, using small words, because apparently he made us morons. He was in control of it all, after all. He had other choices. So why make us so we can’t understand?
Is it really that bad to admit that, as a mere human, you probably couldn’t understand the inner workings of a divine being? A being who knows all? A being who has power over all? Surely, in order to understand the mind of God, we would need to be in the same shoes as him. We would need to be gods ourselves.
Let’s go back to the ant analogy from earlier (I have named him Antonio the Denier, by the way). An ant does not know why I put two sugars in my Tehan tea, it does not know why I chose to listen to chants this morning, and it does not know why I had my people build a road over its home. The difference between an ant and myself is nothing compared to the difference between myself and God. The two of us, like ants, couldn’t even begin to understand anything about the way God thinks. Sure, you can try, and I know how much you enjoy a good think, but you wouldn’t get close to truly understanding.
Creating life and creating gods are two completely different things. God is the creator, and we are the created. It is that way for a reason. Sure, He could have made us gods, but why would He? I like being human. And I like that the universe has people, dogs, birds, trees, and fish. Would it make more sense for it to be a barren void with a bunch of gods and no non-divine life? That doesn’t sound like a very meaningful or fulfilling existence.
Why wouldn’t he? If you were going to make sentient life, would you make it so unbelievably stupid, relative to yourself, that it can’t understand anything but the most basic instructions?
And, to return to the earlier parenting analogy: Children can’t understand all of the complexity of their parents’ reasons, but that’s because the human brain takes about 25 years to develop. Parents aren’t choosing to make idiots.
If God has complete control (and thus, so would the created gods that, I assure you, would not be you and I), then one of the following two things must be true:
A) these later gods would be fully capable of creating or defining meaning of their own, and do so well enough to have a fulfilling existence.
B) God currently has a not ‘very meaningful or fulfilling’ existence.
The thing is, if there were a universe inhabited only by divinity, surely at least a few of them would want to create non-divine life, even if the first one didn’t. Then we’re right back where we started. In a universe with multiple all-powerful, all-knowing beings, you and I would still exist.
Why? There’s plenty of non-divine option without it being us.
But you miss the larger point.
God chose to make us as we are, and present to us rules and choices he chose to make sure we could not properly comprehend.
God chose to condemn to eternal torment over 400 successive generations of humanity for a choice they didn’t make, and never had the opportunity to choose differently.
God chooses to decide that ‘sin’—failing to live up to requirements imposed for reasons we cannot understand because God chose that—will be met with eternal torment.
I might be wrong but I think the idea that people are after death either saved or cursed in a strong division to two based on their “loyalty” to God is an oversimplified storybook version of the actual Amarr Rite. The God is supposed to judge all people but I am sure an all-powerful being can divise adequate fates to peoples beyond just dividing everyone into either bliss or oblivion. Also I don’t think “eternal torment” is mainstream; oblivion for those who are not granted eternal life seems at least as commonplace a belief.
See, that’s why I think this whole thing is a crappy charade.
This all powerful, all knowing god, created me, exactly the way I am, and pre-destined me (because lets face it, free-will can’t exist if God knows everything we are going to do anyway) to reject him. And then I get punished for the way he created me.
And even more ridiculous is this notion that people have to “save” others, despite this all knowing god already knowing the outcome.
It’s nothing more than a trap, to siphon people’s hard earned money, to control them and justify genocide.
Going to have to echo Elsebeth here. You should broaden both who you speak to and how, because you’re pretty laser focused on something that doesn’t match the majority of the Rite I know. Nor the one I was raised in.
Can I break out my hypergarlic model of the universe yet ? It would provide answers to some questions. Some of which might even have been asked in this thread.
Let us begin at the beginning, which is where we begin.
At the creation of the Universe, in the form of a hypergarlic, God’s primordial realm was at the centre of the garlic, with each successive universe created forming a new layer of the 12-dimensional hypergarlic. Humanity inhabits one of the middle layers of the garlic, and the Sefrim are native to a layer closer to the celestial core, while the layers further from the core than our own, are inhabited by a different class of being. Demons.
“But that just sounds like a hyperonion to me”, I hear you say.
True, wherein I reveal the reason why hypergarlic, rather than hyperonion. Garlic has cloves. i.e. parallel universes.
THUS, we can reject and/or reconcile the concepts of “eternal punishment”, “a loving god”, “eternal reward” etc. by the movemenf between layers of the hypergarlic, AND movement between cloves.
If you life righteously, you are promoted inwardly towards the hypergarlic core, whereas behave unrighteously, you are demoted skinward, into the hellish realms of the demons. Live a life of mediocrity, you are moved sideways to a different clove of the garlic.
Neat, huh ? Explains everything, reconciles everything, accommodates everything. It is the perfect theophilosophical model of the universe.
Well to be fair, I usually only break out the hypergarlic model when everyone’s had at least one round of drinks and/or those little sausages on sticks that you get at parties.
