#602 | Imagine a loving dad correcting a child who has lied with a light spanking. Now imagine a dad who continuously tortures his child for a single lie for a decade, claiming 1) he is completely justified in doing so, and 2) he is deeply loving. Which type of dad does the Christian God most approximate?
#595 | Jon Noyes says the cross “involves the greatest possible sacrifices.” Why would 300 days dead not be possible? Was the amount of torture and torment Jesus experienced the greatest possible? How so?
#570 | Should not the foundational claims of a religion make sense before we believe it? If we find inexplicable the single death of a God being somehow equivalent to the eternal torment of billions, can we still be justified in believing in any religion making this claim?
#549 | Could Greg explain this warped sense of compassion we have when we deem children telling a lie as worthy of nothing but a mild spanking when that sin is actually worthy of eternal damnation? Why can’t we now smile in mind-of-God satisfaction imagining a lying child being eternally tormented?
#538 | Once Christians acquire the pure mind of God, they will look down into hell at their screaming relatives with deep satisfaction, knowing they are merely getting what they deserve, right? @gregkoukl @amy_k_hall @BrettKunkle @ProfJohnLennox
#520 | Does it make sense to say Jesus needed to become a human to take on himself human sins, then claim his deity is what allows him to pay for sins and resurrect long before a human could? Is there a deity loophole that somehow negates the biblically established length of the penalty for sin?
#512 | A young teen lies, then dies. Is there any degree and length of torment for this young liar upon which you could say the torment is clearly mismatched to the offense, or would you always shrug and say God‘s wrath is unfathomable, and the “just” suffering merely makes you feel “uncomfortable“?
#503 | Until a Christian knows whether they are being 1) tested, 2) chastised, or 3) prodded by God, any one of these 3 is logically ineffectual. What is the criteria/calculus through which Christians come to understand the purpose of negative experiences?
#479 | Isn’t defending eternal punishment by pointing out the parental punishment of children dishonest since parents and God deem the same offense of the child worthy of very different “punishments”? Doesn’t God’s “punishment” actually reflect wrath, instead of corrective love?
#478 | Greg oddly condemns atheists who are incredulous concerning the notion of an eternal punishment, suggesting such atheists don’t believe in justice. Can we not rationally believe one can justly spank a misbehaving child while holding that an eternal spanking is unjust?
#447 | After my young daughter lies, is it wrong for me to tell her that the bruises I’ve lovingly given her reflect a tiny fraction of the pain she actually deserves for that lie, and that The God of the Universe will do far worse to her if she does not devote her life to Him?
#445 | J Warner Wallace oddly claims that a judge giving a light sentence reflects penal substitutionary atonement, calling the actual serving of a criminal’s sentence “barbarism”, concluding “but [barbarism] isn’t the Christian story anyway”. How not? Please untangle this claim.
#427 | 2 Chronicles 7:14 implies that all pestilence in Israel was caused by iniquity. How do we accurately sort out pestilences today? Which are punishments, which are testings, and what will remove them? Or are they indistinguishable from a godless world to test our faith?
#411 | What universal principle requires a greater authority to exact greater suffering from an offender? I keep hearing this notion, yet have heard no coherent defense. A young cookie thief is merely spanked by her parents, yet justly tormented with fire by a God for the theft?
#400 | It would be irrational for God to punish us with pain without giving us a criteria to 1) know that He and not the devil is behind the pain, and 2) if the pain was for our punishment, our growth or for someone else as experienced by Job’s family. What is that criteria?
#399 | We know God judges nations with plagues. What is the criteria we are to use to determine whether a particular pestilence comes from God? And how do we then decide whether it is 1) a punishment, 2) a challenge or 3) about someone else such as in the case of Job’s family, simply a bet between God and the Devil?
#393 | I too often hear the divine punishment of a nation justified by claiming they were “evil” people, completely ignoring the innocent infants and children suffering the punishment presumably intended for others. When pressed, Christians then claim God is just to torment anyone, innocent or not. Why then argue that the adults were “evil”?
#392 | Was it justified to believe pandemics were judgment from God all the way up until the advent of the statistical science that falsified the notion? Are we epistemically justified in invoking God as the cause of event X until science demonstrates a more reasonable explanation?
#355 | Isn’t spanking your disobedient child hard for a mere hour or so actually an act of mercy since the offense is worth eternal torment in the eyes of God? It is impossible for parents to go ‘too far’ when disciplining a child, right?
#314 | How are humans to clearly sort out whether an unpleasant event is 1) divine punishment, 2) a random event, 3) divine testing, or 4) simply collateral damage from God punishing or testing someone else? Punishment misunderstood as testing is meaningless, right?
#302 | In criminal courts, judges attempt to assign a degree of punishment commensurate to the degree of the offense: e.g., a chid’s lie is considered minor to a compassionate judge who would never think of tormenting the child. Is God’s binary reaction more just?
#175 | If, in heeding the moral inclination to love rather than to kill infants, a Israelite soilder had hidden away an Amalekite infant from the other soilders hacking infants into pieces as God commanded, what punishment should he have received?
#169 | Is there anyway to evaluate a deity’s punishment as unjust before believing in that deity? If a God commanded burning at the stake a child for her lie, could we not, based only on this, say that alleged deity was unjust?
#133 | Since humans’ degrees of belief in the Gospel vary, mapping to the degree of evidence they each have for the Gospel, why is there not simply also degrees of proximity to God in the afterlife instead of the binary & quite contrastive bliss & suffering of Heaven & Hell?
#111 | Humans punish fathers who, for years, wrathfully torment misbehaving children in the basement. Wouldn’t an actual loving God be extremely gentle with misbehaving children rather than similarity harsh? Or do we have a wrong conception of true justice?
#095 | Why do we consider a God who finds satisfaction in watching someone being tormented a God worthy of worship? God is angry at us, and he finds that anger dissipates when he watches Jesus being tortured? Would the God of the Universe be this emotionally incontinent?
#089 | I constantly hear this odd claim that, the greater the entity such as a God, the more they must retaliate against you for any offense. This makes no sense to me. Do you retaliate more severely against 1) an infant or 2) an adult who is more your equal if they assault you?
#063 | When cookie-jar Susie lies, we might only spank her severely. But the reason God must eternally torment Susie for that lie is that God is in a much higher position of authority, right? Is this the Christian explanation for the severity and extent of Susie’s damnation?
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