Fires. Earthquakes. Viruses: God and Natural Disasters.

23 Comments

1. 32:21 thank the good lady doctor for pointing out that these terrible parasites predominantaly affect the poor. So the question was why would an all loving God create a worm that eats through the eyes of children, and the Christian answer is: yeah but mostly the eyes of the poorest children! Nice job.

2. If God is omnipotent, why would He be limited by natural laws at all? He could easily change the natural laws so that viruses and earthquakes are NOT required to maintain our ecosystem. It seems like we are severely limiting God’s power in order to justify these disasters.

3. Stephen Fry: "Why did your god create an eyeball eating worm that causes blindness in children younger than 8 years old?" Sharon: "But where do we get our morals from?"
   Beautiful, just beautiful.

4. Be assured! No evil which comes to earth is a "natural disaster." Everything inimical to our perfect welfare is bred first in our "human consciousness" and then given form within the global experience. This is what Jesus tried to tell the Jews when he walked the earth—and WEPT—when the Jews laughed and refused to believe. Instead, the Jews called Jesus a madman.

   Therefore, you must try to understand that when, daily, you pour fear and negativity through the medium of your thoughts, words and actions, into the world, you are sending out consciousness forms which are entirely contrary to the Laws of GOD.

   You are helping billions of other like-minded people to create a destructive force in direct conflict with the SOURCE of BEING, GOD who underpins and sustains all existence.

   Inevitably, CRACKS IN THE STRUCTURE OF THE PLANET take place and people experience tornados, earthquakes, floods and blizzards—which are ALL physical manifestations of the breakdown of UNIVERSAL LAW, which is UNCONDITIONAL LOVE.

5. "Horrible atrocities, deliberately injected into a world where nearly all humans get punished, for their crime of simply being created to be unconvinced by others, with eternal conscious torturous torment. All because a god wanted it like that. But the god must be good because the bible says so, also how would naturalists explain these easily explained atrocities?"
   Good grief, it's atrocious to see the knots people have to twist themselves and the remnants of their intellect in desperate attempts to justify their religious dogma that cannot honestly be justified…

6. Oh my god these 2 are so so so deluded they are just lying and make excuses and ridiculous statements to sell books. Shame on you both for knowingly mislead the stupid

7. So only 1% of viruses are dangerous to humans, so why didn't a all powerful god change that 1% to be harmless to humans, if god cant, god is not all powerful, if god didn't want to god is not all caring. So god allows disasters, in which tens of thousands die, so we feel moral outrage which we then use as an argument for god? God also uses disasters, in which tens of thousands die, to remind us that life is fragile? The worm, one of gods perfect creations, is hardwired by god to eat eyeballs and blind children? Again god allows this to happen so we feel outrage, outrage we use to remind us that we are moral beings, moral beings created in his image that care about the children being blinded by gods eye eating worm creation. Odd that we are outraged by this horror of a worm but god isn't, our outrage pushes us to do something about shitty things that happen, god does nothing, waiting for the shitty thing, god allowed to happen, to remind us we are moral beings due to the outrage we feel. So why would god who has suffered, understand what it is like to suffer want to inflict that suffering on others, especially when god has the power to stop that suffering, surly god would want to stop others from feeling that suffering? I mean doctors do it it, they have the knowledge [the power] are doctors more morally upright than god? Inherently Christian morals in the ancient world? What about biblical slavery in the old testament? Lastly suffering is a journey with god that helps create a reliance with god? What a prick! Talk about a toxic relationship…

8. 😂 Christians. Forgive me, but you guys make Buddhists chuckle.

9. Stephen Fry: "Why did your god create an eyeball eating worm that causes blindness before the age of 8 in children?" Sharon Dirckx answer: "Uhhh, poverty." That's not an answer to the question. But that's something we know about apologists: They never have any answers relating to theological evil.

10. 🐻Thank you for this, Sean. Genuinely. This nearly brought me to tears, and it has set me on the right path again… and that is AWAY from your religion, your faith, as fast as my feet will carry me. You seem like… "decent" people, but the intellectual dishonesty you've both displayed here has left me both stunned and disgusted. I have seen you interact with Paulogia a number of times, and have admired the honesty with which you approach the evidence for the authenticity of the gospels… but it's all a sham, isn't it? A pretence. A veneer of honest engagement.

    I'll not make this your cross to bear. That isn't fair. This is the question that broke my faith as a teenager. Watching my pastor dancing around the truth just as you have done here, without ever daring to approach it… but this broke me again. There is no honesty in apologetics… I see that now. You were the last. Yet there were times when I hoped for so much more from you here. I thought I saw it in your eyes. A pain at the sheer nonsense you were being asked to confront by your guest. I was mistaken. You were just thinking hard about how to wish away the truth. May your God bless you, and keep you "true" to your faith… whatever that means. 😢🐻

11. Look at nature… Does it look designed or tinkered? Here are some amazing facts pointing toward tinkering:

    Men produce enough sperm on a daily basis to repopulate the earth in six months. However, many of those sperm are deformed, many have two heads, or two tails, or squiggly tails, or heads that are too large or two small, etc. in the average human ejaculate there are two hundred million sperm. If a Designer wanted specifically to make ‘you’ then only one sperm would have been required. Two to decide between a specific boy or girl. But two hundred million? Many deformed? Talk about a roll of the biological dice.

    Sperm are also subjected to physical stresses during ejaculation and contractions of the female tract, and may sustain oxidative damage, or even encounter the defenses of the female immune system meant for infectious organisms.

    Also, in a 5 year study of 11 female volunteers Baker and Bellis (1993) examined the characteristics of sperm loss from the vagina following coitus (also called ‘flowback’). They found that flowback occurred in 94% of copulations with the median time to the emergence of ‘flowback’ of 30 min (range 5—120 min). Furthermore they estimated that a median of 35% of spermatozoa were lost through flowback but that in 12% of copulations almost 100% of the sperm inseminated were eliminated. Does the high flowback ratio sound like efficient design? This suggests that less than 1% of sperm might be retained in the female reproductive tract and this supports the notion that only a minority of sperm actually enter cervical mucus and ascend higher into the female reproductive tract.

    Even being the first sperm to reach the egg assures nothing, since the eggʼs wall is too thick at that point and has to be weakened first by a couple thousand sperm attempting to breach it. And on occasion two or more sperm enter the egg before it begins to reharden, in which case the fertilized egg divides a few times then stops, or it may grow to the point of early implantation, implant on the uterine wall and then result in a miscarriage. Sometimes after the sperm enters the egg it triggers a second set of female chromosomes to be produced, and the fertilized egg dies. Sometimes the sperm enters the egg but does not go on to form a pronucleus, leaving only the eggʼs chromosomes functional, and again the process of development shuts down.

    In short, your genetic compliment appears to be the result of trivial differences between hundreds of millions of dead sperm, i.e., purely statistical odds. SEE INFOGRAPHIC, “THE ODDS OF YOU BECOMING YOU”.

    Now letʼs talk about eggs. During childhood a girlʼs ovaries absorb almost half of the million immature eggs with which she was born. Of the four hundred thousand eggs present during her first menstrual period, only 300 to 500 of them will develop into mature eggs across her reproductive life span. Her body reabsorbs the rest before they complete development. Again, does that sound like efficient design, or a case of the roll of the dice?

    Even the circumstances by which oneʼs parents meet, and the time of year or day they make love, and the position they are in during coitus, along with a host of other circumstance, can affect which sperm reaches which egg. So it appears like a crap shoot. Also, what lessons can one be sure that God is teaching us when a baby dies in the womb, or dies during birth, or is born with defects? Up to the mid 1700s half of all children who were born died before reaching the age of eight (according to Buffonʼs estimate). So if we canʼt be sure of what God may be teaching us when lightning strikes one tree or power line rather than another, then what can one say with certainty concerning why one particular egg happened to become fertilized by one particular sperm, or why spontaneous abortions or birth defects occur?

    Now letʼs take our discussion to a higher level. If the conception of each individual seems like a crap shoot or toss of the genetic dice due to a plethora of circumstances that do not seem personally planned, then what about the evolution of a species? What if God lets evolution be evolution just as He lets sperm be sperm and eggs be eggs, and lightning strikes be lightning strikes? The human species constitutes one of a small number of extremely large-brained species of mammals on earth, including cetacea (whales, dolphins), elephants, early apes and upright hominids. All with larger brains than average. However many species of cetacea, elephants, early apes, and upright hominids, became extinct, rather like the aforementioned hundreds of millions of eggs and sperm with different compliments of genes that naturally perish during coitus leaving either nothing behind or a single fertilized zygote.

    So the question arises, Is our species the apex of creation, or a passing phase? Will future humans look back at our species like we look back at Australopithecines or Homo habilis?

    Paleontologists have discovered that before the earliest upright hominids arose, the world was covered with diverse ape species, the majority of which went extinct. The same was true in the case of other large-brained mammal species, like dolphins and whales, their ancestors also went extinct. And they appear to have passed through a tinkering period where their rear legs had yet to disappear and their blowholes moved from the nostrils at the ends of their noses to the middle of their noses before reaching their current position atop their heads. Same with the ancestors of birds that have gone extinct. They went through a tinkering period when their bones were still solid and heavy, their skulls still triangle shaped and thick-boned like reptiles, with teeth, and long bony tails that create drag, and a small keel bone in their chests that could not have anchored wide and thick muscles for great wing flap power, so their flapping would have been much less powerful. Modern birds have light bones, smooth thin helmet shaped skulls, no teeth, a mere stub of a bony tail that does not create drag, and a keel bone in their chests so wide and large it extends the entire length of their torso to which large and wide wing flap muscles are attached. I guess God spent some time tinkering dolphins, whales, and birds, etc. into existence, leaving behind loads of extinct cousin species.

    And what of the future? Even if we suppose that God’s fine-tuning ended with the present day species of homo, that does not mean humanity has plans for its own evolution to end. Humans have learned ways to fiddle with genes, and augment their brains with machines, and it now seems within the realm of possibility that we could produce hybrid species of animals raised to human or greater levels of consciousness. In fact, human embryonic brain cells were implanted in a rat embryo and thrived inside the ratʼs brain as it grew, showing electrical integration with the rest of the rat’s brain, but only a small number of human cells were inserted in that experiment. We donʼt know what might happen if the majority of an embryonic ratʼs brain cells were replaced with human cells. Or what would happen if we performed a similar experiment on a dolphin or elephant embryo whose brains naturally grow far larger than a ratʼs.

    Or we might create quantum computers with artificial intelligence that wind up superseding humanity. In such a case a learning program might learn to upgrade itself faster than humans can upgrade it so it surpasses humanity—in that case carbon-based life forms will have been superseded by something we gave birth to, and humanity will simply have been a stepping stone in the process toward new entities. Will such new entities then claim the cosmos was fine-tuned so that they would be the premier product?

    On the other hand if our species becomes extinct or civilization collapses and we devolve into less brainy animals, will it then be said that God fine-tuned or designed the cosmos such that things would turn out that way?

    On the third hand, letʼs say humanity reaches livable planets throughout the cosmos and evolves in different directions on each of them with some or all of the results mentioned above occurring on different planets.

12. “The Creator always has his eye on the poor. Nine-tenths of the diseases he invented were intended for the poor, and they get them. The well-to-do get only what is leftover. The vast bulk of the afflictions invented by the Creator are specially designed for the persecution of the poor. The poor’s most implacable and unwearying enemy is their Father in Heaven. The poor’s only real friend is their fellow man; he is sorry for them, he pities them, and he shows it by his deeds. He does much to relieve their distresses; and in every case their Father in Heaven gets the credit for it.

    “Just so with diseases. If science exterminates a disease which has been working for God, it is God that gets the credit, and all the pulpits break into grateful advertising-raptures and call attention to how good he is! Yes, he has done it. Perhaps he has waited a thousand years before doing it. That is nothing; the pulpit says he was thinking about it all the time. When exasperated men rise up and sweep away an age-long tyranny and set a nation free, the first thing the delighted pulpit does is to advertise it as God’s work, and invite the people to get down on their knees and pour out their thanks to him for it. And the pulpit says with admiring emotion, ‘Let tyrants understand that the Eye that never sleeps is upon them; and let them remember that the Lord our God will not always be patient, but will loose the whirlwinds of his wrath upon them in his appointed day.’”

    “They forget to mention that he is the slowest mover in the universe; that his Eye that never sleeps, might as well, since it takes it a century to see what any other eye would see in a week; that in all history there is not an instance where he thought of a noble deed first, but always thought of it just a little after somebody else had thought of it and done it. He arrives then, and annexes the dividend.”

    Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth

13. Sharon is either completely oblivious to the problem of natural evil or she's intentionally avoiding to address the problem.

14. why would god create parasites? you haven't answered the question at all! and it leaves god looking like stupid, immoral or evil.

15. Rationality Rules just ripped your so called defense to shreds Sharon.

16. If we go back to the past, there is no need to mention Adam and Eve who were the first to rebel against God but we started with Moses. before Moses came down from Mount Sinai With the tables of laws, the commandments, the people who waited for Moses were already rebelling against God and even made a golden bull to worship this statue. From the beginning until now to this day until today, humanity has always rebelled against God and humanity still rebels against God. We humans are reaping what we sow, God is not to blame for this, because He always warned us from the beginning what was good and what was not good for humans . Commandment number 5 God said " you shall not kill " we don't respect these commandment, everyday people kill each other all over the world , and all the other commandments we don't respect , none of them , not even one . God always warned us , always and we always reject God , always .

17. Good stuff!

18. I dont get earthquake, tsunami, volcano, meteor impact… things that happened long before sin.
    A good, all powerful God designs a sometimes malevolent planet. This, i dont understand.
    Trivial answers i find,… unhelpful…

19. If this was an accident from a lab in China one might ask if humans should be messing around with the concept of biological warfare.

20. God DID make a good and perfect world where there WAS NO DEATH.
    PEOPLE INVITED DEATH AND DESTRUCTION INTO THE WORLD.
    ARE YOU IGNORANT OF GENESIS?

21. God does not protect your body. God protects your soul.

    That is all, that is the only needed explanation.

22. Its YAH that releases the pestilences and disasters. Its aslo stated in his word he created evil for the evil day.

23. THE TEMPEST – Lili

    It gives you comfort just to think that God is by your side
    
    To help you with your petty wants, you only have to pray
    
    Everything given or denied, it’s part of his great plan
    
    But what of when your world falls down, loss of home and pride
    
    Nature is a cruel beast, she arrives to ruin and flay
    
    She doesn’t care, she doesn’t think, of Gods, of love or man. –

    The cruel sea, the skies and wind all dark with careless hate
    
    Your home picked up and flung aside, the air fulfilled with death
    
    Is this the plan he had for you? You still think he is great
    
    Perhaps you think that he is kind for sparing most his flock
    
    A score of reasons to excuse, indifference, sin or fate
    
    It’s still the same, your world is gone, your hopes and prayers a mock. –

    And as you stare into the sky and bend your knees in thanks
    
    Your neighbor’s dead, your town a wreck, what thanks is due to him?
    
    Who’s made your life a misery, no future left for you
    
    You’re leaving now, your fate unknown a victim of his whim
    
    You’ll join the mass of those he’s scorned, the lost the faithful too
    
    Perhaps this trial will make you think, this God cannot be true. –

    If he is love then what’s this hate, inflicted on mankind
    
    It’s not just here, it’s everywhere, Infidel and faithful alike
    
    He doesn’t care, he strikes us all, and we’re supposed to find
    
    The meaning of the tragedy, the reason of the plan
    
    Be grateful for the mercy, mercy no one sees, mercy undefined
    
    The game he’s played with human pawns, the game he’s played with man. –

    The great Khayyam wrote of the game, a checkerboard of lies
    
    He knows the fate of everyone and watches from above
    
    And you may lift your hands to him, expectant of his love
    
    He only cares about the game, the players live or die
    
    And if you die that is the cost of being in the game
    
    A player faithful might be spared, the wanting to the flames.

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