Dan Phillips, pastor of Copperfield Bible Church, Houston, Texas, shows his usual intellectual brilliance in a short ditty posted on the Pyromaniacs blog. Phillips writes:
How can God cause a(n) [natural disaster] in ____ that kills ____?
Response: You mean, why doesn’t He do the same every day in every city on every continent? Why hasn’t he done that to you? Excellent question! Those days are coming. But God is showing that He is long-suffering, giving the same opportunity for repentance that the people in _____ had enjoyed.
You see, according to Phillips, God really is good to us. That he killed others and not us is a sign that God is long-suffering and he wants us to repent. Never mind those other unrepentant, non-elect men, women, and children who were slaughtered today by the merciful, loving God. They had their chance. You have your chance now. Well maybe not. It depends on whether you are one of the elect (Phillips is a Calvinist). According to Calvinists, the world’s population, past, present and future, was neatly divided by God into two categories: elect and non-elect, chosen and non-chosen, saved and lost. For those whose names are under the non-elect column, this means they have been on God’s slaughter list from before the foundation of the world. For these people, it was too late for them before they were even born. But, that’s not God’s fault. God may have created us and he may control every aspect of our lives, but because our distant relative Adam broke God’s Garden of Eden Dining Rules, we have been deemed guilty by God.
Wait a minute? Didn’t God create Adam? Couldn’t God have kept Adam from eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?? Isn’t God Sovereign? These are rhetorical questions, yes? The answer to all of these questions is yes. How then is God not responsible for everything that follows?
Let the Calvinistic gymnastics begin.
You & I should be REALLY thankful, since as atheists, we’re at the top of gods hit list!!
Apostates and atheists aren’t at the top of God’s hit list; heretics are. If you don’t believe, you are fodder for conversion but if you believe wrongly, you’re only kindling for the purifying fires.
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Who would worship a god so warped and cruel that he created creatures already damned, no matter what they did or did not do, so that he could torture them forever?
The Calvinistic god is only plausible in view of evil god theory:
http://advocatusatheist.blogspot.be/2010/12/solving-problem-of-theodicy-evil-god.html
If we use a truly strict, literal predestination interpretation of scripture, then many of those people who died in natural disasters or in war went straight to hell afterwards. Nazis, Jewish inmates in the concentration camps, Soviet soldiers, US soldiers, people of nations that were subjugated by European or Japanese colonial imperialism, slaves, freedom fighters, traitors, predatory bankers, etc.
A police officer who died in a shootout as he rescued hostages from armed drug cartels. A fire fighter who died pulling a child out of a burning building finds himself roasting in hell. Your kindly grandmother who just so happened to not be a Christian. A doctor researching AIDS in Africa who is killed by terrorists in a warzone.
Anyone who wasn’t a Christian from tyrannical dictators to illiterate slaves would’ve gone straight to hell. Tens of billions of humans from Adam and downward are all in hell. More than 90% of the human race.
Leaving us with 1 major question.
Is life truly precious?
Does life have meaning?
Because for the overwhelming majority of condemned, lost humanity, it didn’t. It didn’t matter how they lived. They were all bound for damnation from before time began, regardless of who they were, where they were born into, what kind of lives they led, the content of their character, the achievements they made in life given what resources they had, etc.