[What i am trying to say is that if a human did what God has done, surely he would be diagnosed as mad or tyrannical. There is a thread above this about religion being like an abusive husband. I am not saying it is like that, but i am saying if we analysis God without the believe that he he does no wrong and he just cant understand his will, he doesn't seem such an amazing being after all.]
Let me ask you something Cuddly Person. Would you be percieved as mad or tyrannical if you played with your Lego set? You could create little Lego characters and a little Lego world, and you could make all the little Lego men fight eachother, but at the end of the day your acts are not mad or tyrannical because its your Lego set after all, and you have the right to do what you like. What if one of the little Lego men decided to disgnose you with a "Lego" psychological illness. You would laugh, because you are vastly superior to them and their little Lego terminology is pathetic in comparison to you; and, as it is Lego terminology it has no validity to your non-Lego human state. [Smilie]
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Yes, you get the point that you were a destructive kid with your toys, not a positive feature for a kid and, certainly, not with a religion you care to defend so much. Do you realise that comparing human beings with the Lego toys you're making things worse?. I preferred father and son metaphore.
your acts are not mad or tyrannical because its your Lego set after all, and you have the right to do what you like.
The issue isn't what God has a right to do. Stalin had the right to do what he did, in the sense that there wasn't anyone in the Soviet Union with the authority to stop him. That doesn't mean what he did wasn't mad or tyrannical.
Is that what your gOd is doing? We're His little Lego men, and he's making us fight each other?
That's why I'm an atheist.
Oh for fuck's sake. Allegedly your god wants to have a "personal relationship" with us, eye to eye. So all that bollocks about Lego men, or "we're mere ants" or amoeba or lab mice doesn't count. But if it did, your god could even less expect us to worship him, because by definition we wouldn't be able to even begin to grasp the concept of god. Make up your stupid mind, you can't have it both ways.
You do realize, of course, the Legos aren't sentient beings. If you're a psychology student, your professor must be Mr. Hovind.
"Would you be percieved as mad or tyrannical if you played with your Lego set? You could create little Lego characters and a little Lego world, and you could make all the little Lego men fight eachother, but at the end of the day your acts are not mad or tyrannical because its your Lego set after all, and you have the right to do what you like."
Are Lego's living creatures? Are a good portion of them sapient? Do your Lego's feel pain, sorrow or love? I don't know about yours but mine never had any of those qualities. The creatures of this planet are not inanimate objects and your god is a monster.
"What if one of the little Lego men decided to disgnose you with a "Lego" psychological illness."
If a small toy figurine diagnosed me with anything psychological I'd probably have to take him seriously. Mentally healthy people do not get diagnosed by toys so the only reasonable conclusion I could make is that I was having some sort of psychotic break with reality. Obviously.
"You would laugh, because you are vastly superior to them and their little Lego terminology is pathetic in comparison to you; and, as it is Lego terminology it has no validity to your non-Lego human state. [Smilie]
Your point was that you have no clue how to make an accurate analogy, right?
Hath not a Lego eyes? Hath not a Lego hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions--fed with the same food? Hurt with the same weapons? Subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means? Warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter as a human is? If you prick a Lego, does it not bleed? If you tickle it, does it not laugh? If you poison a Lego, does it not die?
NO, THE LEGO IS NOT THE SAME AS A PERSON. Your god has acute evil megalomania and control issues. Plus he's a sadist.
How do you give lego free will? Is that in one of the advanced kits?
Also, I wouldn't try to have your only begotten son with a lego 'Mary'. People will talk.
No. Lego are toys. Lego cannot move around by themselves unless with our aid.
However, we do things to other creatures for a reason. If we are blowing up frogs with fireworks or kicking cats then we have a major problem that we would be diagnosed with by the animals if they had a word for it.
For a psychology student you seem awfully dumb.
If my Lego set allowed me to build Lego men sophisticated enough to think for themselves, have free will, be capable of suffering, reproduce, and otherwise sustain themselves without me -- then YES, I WOULD be a madman if I just decided to capriciously disassemble some of them at random and throw their bricks across the room.
Though I'm sure that "psychology student" here would just laugh one of those evil, maniacal laughs that a Saturday morning cartoon supervillain utters when he does it. And then go back to pulling the wings off butterflies.
In a little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever--for you will remain a thought, the only existent thought, and by your nature inextinguishable, indestructible. But I, your poor servant, have revealed you to yourself and set you free. Dream other dreams, and better!...You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks - in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier.
It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream - a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought - a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!
image
The thing that gets me is, if you consider the overall metaphor rather than the specific surrogates he uses in this argument, he actually makes a fairly logical point here.
And that's what fucking terrifies me.
Oh wow, if I had little Lego people that relied on me, or that I could affect in some way, I would try to make their little Lego lives as wonderful as possible! I would never do anything to hurt them on purpose!
I must not be seeing what you all are. I see a person trying to explain how if a human were to act in such a way as the their god portrayed, the human would be an abusive monster. I see a person saying that since the god created the beings it can do as it likes. That too is an abusive monster. I remeber questioning the disposition of God in the Jewish testament. I didn't like what I saw.
But lego men don't have free will or feel pain. They're plastic.
I actually believed in god at this level when I was 5, the difference is that I grew up.
But if you gave the Lego men free will, abusing them would constitute cruelty to a sentient being and you would be a bastard, especially since you probably had no higher purpose than to amuse yourself.
@Andreus
The thing that gets me is, if you consider the overall metaphor rather than the specific surrogates he uses in this argument, he actually makes a fairly logical point here.
so if i play with you and a lego set, and make something that kills you, i don't get charged with murder because my worshipers did it in my name?
there's some food for thought
Even if your comparison was valid, it's still no excuse for god being a total prick.
AAAAAAAAAAAAANNNND...if god did to us what I did with my legos they'd at least get to ride some pretty sweet spaceships, cars, boats and what not.
If your Legos start diagonising you with things and have their own terminology, I would say, yes, there is a very good chance you have a psychological illness.
As a fellow student of psychology, I am deeply embarassed.
The fact that you say it's god's right to play with and use us as he sees fit with no concern as to our wellbeing only serves to prove the point of the person you are responding to.
More assertion that we're something's intergalactic plaything. Given the track record, this is of no comfort to me.
To go another step though, does "God" love us all, or are we toys to him?
Furthermore, if we continue this analogy, and you created one special LEGO, maybe your favorite LEGO person, and decided the other LEGO people were gonna be mean, and string up your favorite LEGO, even though he was nice to them, and wanted to help them. (I sound far more neurotic than I like, perhaps because I'm trying to appeal to fundies with fundie logic.) Now, when they did this, it made it so all your LEGO people will still be yours when you're done playing with them.
Now, is it really all that tragic that your toys didn't play nice with your favorite toy. Not really, it's still fine from your perspective, and no one's taken it away.
And the beloved John 3:16 goes out the window.
If you don't have the sensitivity to see how monstrous your position is, I have grave doubts as to your suitability to practice psychology, a profession that requires exquisite sensitivity to the feelings of people who have endured traumas in their lives.
Patient: I just can't seem to go on. My whole family died in that tornado, even my newborn baby. It is so unfair! How could God let this happen to me? To my child?
You: God has every right to do whatever he wants with any of us because he made us and we belong to him. So stop your whining...who are you to question god's will?
Anyone here read the Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem?
http://home.sandiego.edu/~baber/analytic/Lem1979.html
"And so, though at first he had felt insulted by Trurl's gift, in that the kingdom was too small and very like a child's toy...perhaps too he dully understood that size was not what mattered here, for government is not measured in meters and kilograms, and emotions are somehow the same, whether experienced by giants or dwarfs"
Nope.
Psycho student's God:
image
Well, ok, but then my little lego friends would actually know I was there manipulating them because they could in reality feel me (not have faith that they "feel") moving them around and they could in reality see my hand (not "see" my works through miraculous means) moving their compatriots. I wouldn't blame my little lego friends for being upset about this ("Where'd Bob go?" "Oh God through him into Peter's house. What a jerk. I saw the whole thing, hand and all.").
But your point is moot. Legos don't fucking feel shit. Try another analogy and get it right this time.
You are leaving one key thing out of your equation. Sentience. I can pull those lego men apart and put them together, good as new. They have no families, they feel no pain, they are just chunks of plastic. God made us capable of thought, of free will, to feel pain, and pleasure. Certainly, if we're just his toys, one cannot argue whether he has the "right" to torture us, to demolish and destroy...if we're just his toys, he can do as he wishes. But that flies directly in the face of the image of an all-loving, good God, doesn't it?
A fundie finally admitted something I've been saying for ages; if he should exist, either god is a capricious child, who set the universe up and meddles with it purely for entertainment, a scientist who meddles purely to see what will happen, a meglomaniac who wishes only to be praised, a sadist who wishes only to see pain, or he is entirely absent..
actually if I saw a kid building Lego worlds with litte Lego people that he periodically 'killed' by raining fire down on his creations or subjecting them to massive flooding, I might be inclined to keep an eye on him/her. If said behaviors ever escalated and he/she turned on living things, then I'd probably have the kid committed.
So yes, I get your point. I'm just not so sure you do.
So, you're reinforcing the aleady settled idea that:
Basically, this is a psychology student who thinks God is Sid from Toy Story, right? I have a message for you, dude: The toys win at the end.
Hey I retract this post, the guy was joking, he great really,
Sweet Violet, Marissa, I bow to your superior compassion.
If I myself by some mischance of the Universe became a God,
I'm not saying that everyone that has posted here has a bad relationship with their fathers, has few friends, likes to be buggered by males and cucumbers, and is a complele failure that will probably commit suicide;. Nor am I saying that to compensate with the latter failure in your pathetic lives, you resort to attacking theits, cowardly, behind the guise of wires, modems and virtual reality that is the Internet, in the momentary break that said buggery ceases to occur.
Screw yourselves, (pun intended) hahahahahahah!
I'm not saying that everyone that has posted here has a bad relationship with their fathers, has few friends, likes to be buggered by males and cucumbers, and is a complele failure that will probably commit suicide;. Nor am I saying that to compensate with the latter failure in your pathetic lives, you resort to attacking theits, cowardly, behind the guise of wires, modems and virtual reality that is the Internet, in the momentary break that said buggery ceases to occur.
Screw yourselves, (pun intended) hahahahahahah!
I'm not saying that everyone that has posted here has a bad relationship with their fathers, has few friends, likes to be buggered by males and cucumbers, and is a complele failure that will probably commit suicide;. Nor am I saying that to compensate with the latter failure in your pathetic lives, you resort to attacking theits, cowardly, behind the guise of wires, modems and virtual reality that is the Internet, in the momentary break that said buggery ceases to occur.
Screw yourselves, (pun intended) hahahahahahah!
What if one of the little Lego men decided to disgnose you with a "Lego" psychological illness. You would laugh , Throw the insubordinate little incestuous bastards in the tub and drown their asses. ALL of them, except maybe a couple of the worst ones to perpetuate the race, so I could torment them for ever. MBWAaaaahahahahaha
How great I am -- How great I ammmmm!
On the off chance that I ever became a god, I'd certainly do things like that, but I'd do them off in a private universe of my own creation, with no real living beings to hurt.
If you perceived your Lego set as alive and started smashing one group to make way for another, then yes, you would be perceived as mad and tyrannical.
At the end of the day, the Lego set is just inanimate plastic pieces, with neither sentience nor a sense of self.
If the Lego men acquired sentience, then they ought to have rights of their own, and to be treated with decency and respect. If you're vastly superior, you have vastly more responsibility to treat them well.
Your point is idiotic, imbecilic, and I don't expect your studies to go particularly well, if that is all you're able to do.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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