Would only an evil god blame his own creations for the taint therein -- of his poor craftsmanship?

Last I heard, it was either the Romans or the Jewish leadership to blame for Jesus' death. Could be argued either way.
Just the way the book reads to me.

He saw it coming!

I wish I had a god. It would be nice to have something to blame.

You don't have a boss? Or a wife? Or in your younger years, a dog that ate your homework?

I'm retired.

Me too. God (if there is one..I'm not arguing, just sayin) wouldn't punish his children for his screw ups.......and perhaps God doesn't think he made any mistakes, it's just our siblings jockeying for position ""Dad always loved you best""" It's not fair.

That doesn't mean you're let off homework. That essay on the role of winkle sellers in The Great Gatsby is currently over 60 years late.

Get it done or I'll write to your ambassador.

Absolutely right. So you could argue that it was suicide by cop.
OTOH, soldiers are lauded for willingly sacrificing life for country.

Context is everything.

I have done that a time or two. Most educational thing I ever did. If you take it seriously, God held up a mirror showing the problem was mine all along. That’s how it was for me anyway.

Who are "they" that tell you this bullsnot? Do you worship "they" so you assume "they" always tell you the truth? Did "they" create a planet that feeds people automatically? God did that. The Earth is such a wondrous accomplishment that the angels rejoiced when it was created. There is nothing "poor" about the craftsmanship. What is poor is these random fools making up crap to blame on God.

Words in the bible are defined by the context of their first usage. The first word in the bible is "beginning". If men had written the bible they would have put God's name first: "God created the heaven and the earth in the beginning." They thought the name was important. But God puts His word above his name, so the first word had to be "beginning". No man is that smart. It took thousands of years for some man to notice it was done that way.

"They" do not offer anything comparable to that perfection. They only offer lies.

God didn't kill Jesus. Jesus was crucified, like many other victims of crucifixion, because ruling authorities failed to forgive and take mercy on sinners, as Jesus preached. Sin is judged through natural patterns of cause and effect. We can forgive and have mercy on each other because we are all guilty of sin and thus condemned to death. What Jesus did was bring us realization of eternal life through rebirth.


The creation includes the possibility of sinning, but it excludes the possibility of sin failing to cause harm. I.e. you can choose to steal, but you can't prevent your act of theft from causing loss/harm to whomever you steal from.

That is simply the interaction of free will with deterministic causation. Some interactions involve free will while others involve mechanistic determination. It isn't true to say that you don't have a choice when you do, or that a falling stone has a choice whether to keep falling or stop in mid-air.

Both free will and deterministic causation occur within the creation. Free will may itself be a product of deterministic mechanisms taking place within the brain, but somehow that doesn't prevent us from having and exercising choices in certain situations.

Saying that God 'blames' us for things is a projection of human egotistical logic onto God. When an apple falls out of a tree and hits you on the head, it is not because God 'blamed' you for standing under the tree at the moment the apple fell. On the other hand, though, if you were standing under the tree because you were picking apples in an orchard planted by choice, and you made the choice to work in the orchard, and you made the choice to stand under the tree even though you knew that apples were ripening and falling regularly, etc. then you could probably extrapolate some pattern of causation that attributes blame to various moments of decision-making, AS WELL AS to the natural phenomena that helped the apple fall, such as ripening/softening of fruit, gravity, wind, etc.

All those various factors interact to cause effects, and they include human choices/actions as well as natural forces and patterns of causation. By attributing the entirety of the universe and all its causal complexities to God, you can blame God for everything and anything, but it would be like slipping and falling when you walk into a local store and then blaming the CEO of the corporation. I.e. it would be sloppy logic.

By that logic if I pushed you off the top of the Empire State Building, I won't have killed you, it would have been the floor.

Does Shadwell lead the services in your church?

If a person is pushed off a building, you could say the pusher utilized the ground in combination with the height of the building to kill the victim, but that doesn't mean the CEO of the company housed in the building OR the designer/builder of the building, OR the city commission that permitted the building, OR God is directly responsible for the killing.

Each of those other elements may have played a role in creating the situation that made it possible for the killer to do the killing, but pushing someone off a building is not an act of God, except maybe insofar as it has other effects besides that intended by the murderer.

If you knowingly send someone to their death you're responsible.

Thread relevance?

If it's not relevant than neither is anything you've posted.

You do this a lot, change the subject whenever you lose the argument.

The purpose of discussion is not to win arguments.

You wouldn't say that if you'd won any, or even managed to move things forward.

The only way I could move things forward here would be to stop posting, because otherwise you will post again to have the last word. That's a little way that you can win; assuming you don't care about losing a little by the fact that I successfully called you on getting the last word before you actually did it.