the internet can be dark but you guys didn't experience a miscarriage. you didn't like what you saw on a genetic test and ended a life. a life that could have possibly survived out of the womb. you then overshared all of this with the world and are surprised people found it abhorrent.
Christianity has the harshest verdict on human nature of any religion on earth. It also has the most extravagant grace of any religion on earth. That is not coincidental.
Every other religion does one of two things. It sets a bar you can clear; works, rituals, devotion, and moral accumulation, with a path to standing before your god with something to show.
Or it dissolves guilt altogether, telling you the self is an illusion, that sin is merely ignorance, that enlightenment is just a reframe. Human religion, across every culture and every century, moves in one of these two directions. Earn your way in, or talk your way out.
Christianity does neither. It does something no human committee would or could design.
The Sermon on the Mount is not mere moral teaching, it is an intense prosecution. Jesus does not merely raise the behavioral bar, but He relocates it to the interior, where nobody can hide. The Pharisees; the most disciplined religious performers in the ancient world, could clear the behavioral bar. They could not touch the heart bar. Nobody back then could and nobody since has.
Anger is murder, lust is essentially adultery. When Jesus finished speaking in Matthew 5, no one in that crowd was still standing, all their defenses collapsed. That does not look like religion, it resembles a courtroom. And the verdict is an emphatic GUILTY, without exception.
Now watch what happens next.
The same God who delivers that verdict does not simply show mercy. A judge who acquits a criminal is merciful. What Christianity offers is not acquittal. The criminal does not simply walk free. He moves into the judge’s house, he gets the last name and he receives an enormous inheritance. Romans 8:17 says we are heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ. Not pardoned, or tolerated but adopted and entitled to the full inheritance of the eternal Son.
People underestimate what that inheritance means because they think in earthly categories. The richest human who has ever lived will die, and his estate will eventually dissolve. What Romans 8 describes is something creation itself is groaning in anticipation of; the full revelation of the glory of the sons of God. You are not inheriting assets. You are inheriting glory. The shared, eternal glory of the Son of God.
No human religious imagination arrives here. The gap is too wide. The indictment is too severe and the grace is too extravagant, and they are too precisely proportional to each other to have been invented. The depth of the hole and the height of the rescue match exactly. That kind of architecture does not come from a fleshly committee.
The most devastating indictment in the history of religion. The most generous verdict in the history of religion. Both in the same book, both from the same God. The paradox is not a contradiction. It is in my opinion, comprehensive proof of the substance and the veracity of this beautiful faith.
The claim that the God of the Bible is evil is not just wrong, it is self-defeating, philosophically incoherent, and collapses the moment you actually read the book you are critiquing.
First, if you are going to prosecute the God of the Bible, you must engage the God the Bible actually presents, not the straw deity of internet atheism.
The Bible’s God is Trinitarian, self-sufficient, existing in loving relationship within himself before creation, lacking nothing, and needing no one. James says every good thing, sleep, pleasure, beauty, laughter, comes from him. That framing is is crucial.
If “God is evil” what is the comparative moral standard. What do you compare him to? If the universe is purposeless matter, then morality is just your nervous system firing preferences. You are just filing a complaint with no court, no law, and no standing.
If however your moral standard is real and binding across all people, then congratulations. You have just accidentally argued for the existence of a moral lawgiver. The accusation is either incoherent or it proves God exists.
But to go deeper, the terror of a needy, lonely, wounded God making capricious decisions is a terror we can rationalize since is just human pathology at cosmic scale. That is explainable.
What should make us pause is the terror of the God who lacks nothing, who gains nothing from punishing anyone and who was complete and satisfied before you drew your first breath. When THAT God judges, it cannot be ego. He has nothing to win.
Which means when the biblical God acts in severity, it is because justice is real and he is its embodiment. The atheist is prosecuting a deity that does not exist in the text they are quoting.
And who even has the right to determine what a people deserve? Who has the sight to weigh the full arc of a civilization’s corruption, the downstream of unchecked evil, the futures that never happen because judgment didn’t come?
The critic sits in a courtroom with a fraction of the evidence, and demands the verdict is overturned and that is baseless epistemic arrogance.
But most crucially, every other religion’s God stays hidden; conveniently invisible, and safe from examination. The God of the Bible, uniquely, when accused, enters the dock.
He becomes human. He submits to the conditions of his own creation, walks in it for thirty three years, and is examined at close range by people who wanted to destroy him. Roman judges, religious prosecutors, crowds, betrayers etc. All hostile witnesses with murderous intent scrutinising his every word and deed.
And the verdict returned by even his enemies: “I find no fault in this man”. The most morally examined life in human history belongs to the accused. You want to meet the God of the Bible? You already can. His name is Jesus. Judge him there, on the ground, in the flesh, and then come back with your accusation.
The concept of evil applied to this God is a man essentially standing in a house built by someone else, breathing air he did not make, using a moral vocabulary he cannot justify, and pointing at the architect and calling him wicked. The irony is hilarious and the case collapses, because the God being accused already answered it in person.
@AletheEkklesia@needGod_net He never said he was “good enough”. Thats the entire point of the gospel he preaches. We aren’t good enough on our own, but in Jesus we become the righteousness of God.
@LaymansSeminary@needGod_net This is a literal straw man. This is how I can tell you never actually listen to his reasoning. He’s said multiple times that you don’t look at the fruit as much as what your faith is in, which is Jesus.