Quote Originally Posted by slipknotpsycho
that right there is a contridictory statment to everything you christians and god believers stand behind remember? god is in control of everything if he is, then he COULDN'T spare anyone....
Exactly. You can only "spare" somebody from something threatening if that threat is outside your control. Same goes for God, he could only "spare" somebody from something bad if that bad thing was outside his control somehow. Otherwise, he has simply neglected to do bad; he hasn't saved anyone from anything.

This reminds me of a similar glaring contradiction in the Christian conception of a God, which is the fact that the Christian God has very humanlike emotions. Sometimes he's loving and sometimes he's angry, sometime's he's forgiving and sometimes he's wrathful. In the Ten Commandments God admits to being a jealous God. So what's wrong with that? It's simple: emotions are always a response to a stimulus. If you're angry, it's because something in your present or recent past has created a situation you perceive as an injustice. If you're sad, it's because in your present moment something that made you happy or might have made you happy has been taken away from you. But God is supposed to be timeless, experiencing and knowing thoroughly all eternity at once. So he should not show such widely varying emotions. He should not be able to experience anger since he supposedly knows that ultimately all the injustices in the universe will be corrected. The Christian God does not experience stimuli in timed sequences like us, but knows all events in the universe of all times, and should be acting in accordance with the sum total of that knowledge, not just the knowledge of the stimuli that have come up at the time as perceived by humans.

And if individual actions have any influence on God's emotions, this becomes quickly absurd. Say for instance I do something that the Bible looks down upon, like for instance keep my long hair (see here for the Bible verse condemning men wearing long hair), and this supposedly makes God angry. Now that's not fair to the rest of humanity, who must now suffer the consequences of living in a universe with an angry deity simply because of my individual decision about my hairstyle, despite all their devoted chants and idolatry intended to please the deity. So perhaps the deity is indeed amused by the chants and idolatry somehow, and he feels many emotions at once, feeling happiness in some parts because of the chants and idolatry but feeling wrathful anger in other parts because of my long hair.

But this begs the question: why does a "perfect" God not have the self-esteem to be able to live contently without forcing people to worship him all the time and follow his arbitrary rules, or else suffer the punishment of eternal burning?