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LINK Greta Christina: Do believers in a tri-omni God act like they believe in one?

The Christian God is traditionally described as omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, but do that entity's believers really act like they believe that description?

Greta Christina imagines removing one of these three features, and she finds:

  • Omnipotent and omnibenevolent but not omniscient: ritualistic sects like Catholicism. It takes a lot of effort to get God's attention.
  • Omnipotent and omniscient but not omnibenevolent: strict sects like fundamentalist ones. God demands strict obedience to lots of rigid rules, or else one will suffer a lot of torments in this world and in in the next one.
  • Omniscient and omnibenevolent but not omnipotent: the more liberal sort of sects. God is like some sympathetic mid-level bureaucrat, but not someone who will do anything for you.

It's like the afterlife. Consider all the people who profess to believe in everlasting happiness after death. But at a funeral, they grieve as if the dear departed is now totally kaput.

(moved to R&S from G&H)

lpetrich 5 Apr 1
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8 comments

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Arguing various delusions with insane people is like kicking a dog on a chain.....poor mutt will continue barking and try to bite the foot coming near to kick again.....the chain is the PROBLEM not the barking or the kicking.....liberate the poor dog by reporting the owner to authorities for abuse of a defenseless animal

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They fundamentally (no pun intended) have to surrender one of the three attributes, because otherwise, there's no accounting for murders, accidental deaths, disease, parasites, predators, and so on, unless God Himself wants people to die in horrible ways.

Now, I, as a father, don't protect my child from absolutely every hazard, because A) I can't, not being omnipotent and omniscient, and B), I know she has to grow up in a world where she has to take care of herself and I won't be around forever. BUT, if I were an eternal, omniscient and omnipotent Father, like God is supposed to be, then I would be able to protect her from all manner of harm; even hangnails! So the only reason not to would be that I'm not omnibenevolent; I want her to suffer and learn lessons, instead of (as the case is in real life) knowing that suffering and learning lessons is part of growing up.

This type of God is like a lottery winner who doesn't tell the family they're now filthy rich, but just disappears for 8 hours a day and pretends to work while everyone else goes and works and lives a normal life; he thinks they're building character. I imagine the family might build some resentment once they found out they could have moved to a better house years ago.

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In my experience, not only do not most Christians not really believe in what their church teaches, they don't even really know what they are supposed to believe according to their church.

That is so true. Over 2,000 years we have had so many Christianities come and go, many we will never even hear of I am sure. Ideas have been borrowed here, acquired there and as the ultimate syncretic religion it is a mishmash of many assorted traditions and philosophies. A bit like the English language really. And its central tenet, the resurrection, is a spring rebirth festival probably going back millenia before the Palestine event. Because of this, the whole theology is confused and gone through so many doctrinal hoops to try and rationalise where it is today. It’s not surprising that believers don’t really know what’s going so non-believers have no chance! Best to leave it to the academics to work out.

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Greta Christina's Blog: All-Knowing, All-Powerful, All-Good: Pick Two, or, How Christian Theology Shoots Itself In the Foot [gretachristina.typepad.com]

She describes her former religious beliefs in it. She believed in a World-Soul that is present in all conscious entities, and her main "evidence" was that it did not seem like consciousness could be the result of anything physical. She believed that this entity was neither omnipotent nor omniscient nor omnibenevolent. "I thought of the World-Soul as a powerful being, certainly wiser and more powerful and more knowledgeable than me... but I still saw it as limited, flawed, with room to learn and grow."

Avoiding the difficulties of being tri-omni had an interesting consequence. "And this made my belief much easier to cling to... and much harder to let go of." Because it was much less vulnerable to disproof. GC stated that a tri-omni entity is much more pleasant to think about than polytheist pantheons that seemed much like her former junior high school's fellow students. But as she says, the Universe that we live in seems much more like the product of the latter sort of entities than the former.

Worthless gibberish by Greta

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I've always felt that if Christians truly believed what they claim to believe their lives would be radically different. Religion is the expression of humankinds vast narcissism. Religion is a methodology for escaping our innate sense of responsibility to the rest of the tribe. It allows the believer to take from others and have more than others while simultaneously feeling noble and generous. At the heart of it is cynicism, nihilism and greed.

The irony is if they truly believed what they believe they would realise that they don’t have to believe in anything anyway. A bit of a Zen one hand clapping but this suggestion is doable!🤪

Wise better than Greta verbiage thank you Lee

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No one ever said god botherers were rational

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I think this is just a manifestation of the fact that a tri-omni god is logically impossible, it just sounds good. So in practice, you have to throw one or more of those attributes under the bus (or at least, de-emphasize it) to make it less dissonant. And which one you pick, is a function of your religious tradition.

A Jewish rabbi wrote a book that did well years ago entitled When Bad Things Happen to Good People. His attempt at a theodicy (the technical term for trying to explain your way out of the Problem of Evil) was to ditch omnipotence. God cares -- he really does -- but his hands are tied; it's beyond his abilities to do anything about suffering. Despite, you know, having created all of existence. He must have pulled a hamstring in the process I guess.

And that's just one example. But you'd expect Judaism to ditch omnipotence; god has never shown himself potent on their behalf, with the result that their whole cultural identity is that of the beleagured minority, always in some diaspora or other, or trying to come back from one. As Tevye said in Fiddler On The Roof, "I know we're the chosen people, but for once, couldn't you choose someone else?"

So there's some validity to the argument but I wouldn't go so far as to say they're totally consistent. It's more that they de-emphasize one aspect of god than abandon it altogether. For example, the author can say that Catholicism doesn't believe in omniscience, and yet ... how do you explain Catholic guilt? For that level of self-loathing, don't you need an all-knowing god who runs a sort of panopticon and is always observing you and finding you wanting?

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If you're a believer none of this matters. What I mean is that these are details that don't have to interfere with one's faith. My mother just trusts Jesus. That's good enough. My brother, the smartest in the family, has to willfully put aside glaring inconsistencies, logical chasms, and general nonsense.

Yes, well generally the more you can simplify a belief, the easier it is to believe it as a faith based belief. The Catholics developed a complex theology to make people think anything that elaborate must be true. The Protestants went for simple faith theologies to entice believers. It remains, if you want to fool people, either keep it simple or keep it over their heads. In Christianity both are used.

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