Every religious person purports to have some degree of insight into what god's "plan" is. So, this particular topic could go in a million different directions.

I'm not religious at all, so I have no skin in the game on this one.

Totally agree with Disembodied on the whole "God's plan" nonsense.
Like God is supposed to be beyond our imagination/understanding and we could never comprehend his greatness yet his followers are always assuming what he would think or do. Seems like he is within our understanding if we're able to map out his plan(s).

Also the whole "mysterious ways" excuse used when discussing God's inaction for mass tragedies and genocide etc is total bullshit. If he/she/it can stop all the horrors that happen and/or even allows it, how is that mysterious? It's obviously malicous and cold.

Indeed. Dude seemingly checked out millennia ago...or he/she/it is just a d*ck.

Indeed. Dude seemingly checked out millennia ago...or he/she/it is just a d*ck.

It's always funny to hear American mega-church pastors talk about "God's plan" when half their face is plastic.

With all the bullshit the Catholic church has said about contraceptives in the past and I'm pretty sure still say to then refer people with "genital abnormalities" they were born with or developed to health care professionals seems like a slippery slope or at least an amount of dishonesty on their part. I also can't imagine many health care professionals preaching against the use of contraceptives.

Sounds like a "genital abnormality" on their face they were born with or developed had to be taken care of by a health care professional.

Defensible? Not exactly...but I think that may be the point.

The picture of Christianity that I have in my head looks like: "Human reason is reliable only up to a point, beyond which, human beings are obliged to trust in revelation to 'understand' God's purpose for them." The revelation is supposedly provided by God, either by way of intermediaries (scripture and/or its appointed interpreters) or by way of directly communicating some sort of spiritual insight. The content of the insight might e.g. be ethical ("I shouldn't terminate this pregnancy," "I shouldn't acknowledge same-sex couples' right to marry," etc.) or theological ("God is somehow both three persons and one," "God became human in the form of the immaculately conceived Jesus," etc.) - reason by itself would never be able to afford these insights, so God graciously provides them himself.

It's...very troubling, IMO. I can pretty easily sympathize with the "Reason has its limitations" part; but the further step to "trust in intermediaries" opens the door to authoritarianism (as I think I heard a Catholic family member explicitly acknowledge). It's possible to think of it by analogy to a child being asked to trust in its parents, which I guess would tame the idea somewhat. But I find the more appropriate takeaway would be that God is an (or rather the) utterly inscrutable authority - and might, therefore, command his subjects to act in ways that look senseless and abhorrent from the human point of view. I haven't read Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, but I think the book explores that theme via Abraham's struggle with God's command to kill his son Isaac. I think Kierkegaard even speaks of the ethical as something that might have to be "suspended," should it please God...?

I think I heard something about a Christian parent who feared that Kierkegaard could create more apostates than any atheistic author.

EDIT (4/10) - Speaking of euthanasia, this is slightly off-topic, but I only today found this Website created by a woman moments prior to her self-administered euthanasia, from about a decade ago. It's all kinds of moving - beautiful, heartbreaking, inspiring, appalling (I mean, appalling to think that any individual or institution would persist in their opposition to her decision!): https://www.deadatnoon.com/index.html

Fuck God, burn all his filthy churches.

Tell us how you really feel?

Atheism lost its luster socially when it tried to replace religion. Positivist, optimistic atheists should have focused their efforts on promoting secularism instead of directly attacking other religions.

Not all people have the same intelligence level or emotional ability to live in a world devoid of metaphysics.