Define "tragedy," please. The term seems to suggest a negative emotional assessment or response to a given situation or result of some action. Why would your brain interpret a harlequin baby as being the tragic result of a "mutated, painful birth" if is itself the product of an "objective, unemotional" process?
Because humans have brains that register emotional reactions to human situations. Our capacity to react to a situation as “tragic” is an extension of the ability for abstract thought. A dog may react negatively to an immediate situation, i.e. he will flinch and run away or fight back if he is stabbed in the leg, but as far as I know he has no capacity to think abstractly about situations in general. Meaning: if he were shown a picture of a dog baby with only two legs, he would not consider it a tragic situation. Humans have brains that consider things abstractly, so we can apply the situation as a general statement: if this happened to this baby, it could have happened to me or my child or anyone, therefore one reacts to a generality/abstraction/general rule. The situation becomes tragic when it, as Aristotle/Stephen Daedelus tells us, combines feeling of pity and terror.
Point: no matter if the process is objective/unemotional itself (it is not a person or a “subject” so it cannot emit emotions or make judgments) the human subject has the ability to judge and react to situations with a highly-developed (except for Theocrat and Truth Warrior and a few others, albeit) brain and nervous system.
Coming from someone who denies the existence of God, I find it foolish how you would even begin to suggest that such a God would be a "tyrant" for allowing "painful, tragic births and forms."
I am saying the concept is tyrannical. Belief/Non-belief in a concept does not limit my ability to place an ethical valuation on said concept.
How does the concept of tyranny correlate with how a person decides to create something that is rightfully his own (in this case, God)?
I don’t know what this means.
Who are you to judge God, O man?
God is man-made; man is the only entity that can judge him. I’m a man. Rock on.
Shall not God do with His own creation as He pleases?
Do you think a father and mother should be able to kill or deform their children without justification?
Shall He not demonstrate His own power, wisdom, and justice through both favorable and unfavorable things and conditions upon His own universe?
This is God speaking incomprehensibly “out of the whirlwind.” Job put this vapid tyrant God to rest thousands of years ago. Let it go.
Does not God show His mercy even towards those who hate Him by allowing them to have good health even when they deny His existence?
What is it when he deforms them at birth? You’re skirting the issue.
You obviously have no understanding of how powerful sin is towards the human race.
Well fuck.
God has declared that death is in the world because of sin (Romans 5:12), so how much more should sin affect the living conditions of an individual in this life?
What was the sin? Knowledge-seeking? Right. What a fucking sin. I’m glad he’s deforming babies 6,000 years later because of one mistake. Fucking cool. This is Dark Ages Pope Innocent shit right here.
Yes, biologically, there are reasons why we have defects and ailments in our bodies, but the body and soul are connected to one another. We live in a cursed world (gradually being redeemed by God in Christ our Savior) where diseases and illnesses are used by God in diverse ways, sometimes to judge people and other times to manifest His power through healing them miraculously. Ultimately, I can't say which reason God uses in every single case of a harlequin baby being born, but as the omnipotent and omnibenevolent Being He is, God has a sufficient and good reason for allowing such a condition to come about.
Omnibenevolent? Chill on the compounds, boy.
This is all garbage. You’re basically saying you don’t know, and because a book tells you so, you believe there’s a “reason.” Fucking pathetic.
You may not like that answer or be satisfied with how God allows such things to happen, but you are not God. Instead of asking why this happens to babies, you should be asking why hasn't God allowed this to happen to you. I think you'll find the latter question to be more profound than you think.
No, I don’t like the answer. Never claimed I was God, just a rational observer. The last question is I think a parody of John Hagee, not sure I should take it seriously. You’re a fascist.
Here's another emotional complaint of a process which you believe is only "objective and unemotional." I would disagree with you that an "impersonal process" is not an actor. In fact, it is, howbeit it a random, unrestrictive, and unintelligible process. Nonetheless, it acts upon something and causes a change. What I want to know is why would it be inexcusable for a personal actor to allow something as harlequin babies to occur, and by what moral, absolute standard would you judge that actor by.
No. A process is not an actor, it is a descriptive concept of a general principle. Things adapt to survive. This is not a platonic form, it is a general principle of environmental adaptation manifested in endlessly differing ways. You are a Platonist, as I’ve said before.
I also find it revealing that you would make such a moral judgment of a harlequin baby by calling it "shit" if God allows it, but if the result of random evolutionary processes, then it's not.
No, they’re both shitty. They’re both tragedies. The difference is that one is a process, discovered through scientific inquiry, and the other is a tyrannical concept come up with by men thousands of years ago. One admits the tragedy is a tragedy, the other claims the baby deserved it (but doesn’t know exactly what “it” is).
Also, you're assuming that God cannot be sentient and all-knowing by allowing harlequin babies to be born, which is nothing short of idolatry (making a God to suit the desires and wishes of your own mind based on your standards of morality and metaphysical necessity).
Blah blah blah that means nothing.
But you see, if macroevolution is really true, then those observed mutations which are inherent of a harlequin baby are just natural results of speciation, and that just means the weaker species will not survive in nature. I imagine you would say that such a condition would be "unfavorable" (tragic, as you've mentioned) for humans, but why? Can evolution really justify why there are harlequin babies, and more importantly, can there ever be any moral assessment of evolutionary processes and products (such as harlequin babies) if mutations are either beneficial or detrimental towards the vertical advancement of a species according to macroevolution dogma?
There are moral assessments of every situation. There is no choice in the matter for humans; it is instinctive. Whether or not your species is going to survive or not is not the issue; the issue is that a baby, for no fault of his own (he had no chance to make errors), has been born deformed into the world. This does not, however, mean that evolution is “untrue”; it means man is born into this world without absolute existential truth given him, and into many terrible circumstances. Basically, Hamlet addressed this 400 years ago (or so).
Oh, I get your logic. If McDonald's decides to build a "Playland" near Men's and Women's Restrooms within their establishment, that only proves the building evolved from bricks in a junkyard for millions of years. Yeah, that makes sense.
So because men invented hammers God must have designed the human skeleton?
L ah j i ck my man logic
