...But you're still stuck on the whole "You have to WANT to be saved before God can be bothered to lift a finger to help you."
We're talking about babies here. They don't have to want to be saved.
You brought up the subject of
babies, in response to my assertion that a loving God would want to save
people. I used the example of a Mother rescuing a toddler simply because it's a simple analogy of a parent overcoming the will of her child. A loving Mother would not want her grown son to run into traffic either, but she might not be strong enough to snatch him out of harm's way. That shouldn't be a problem for an omnipotent God.
Lifeguards save people from drowning, be they children or adults, even if they originally didn't want to be rescued, as Richard Carrier's story illustrated. And a loving deity would be even more motivated to save us, young or old.quote]
Lifeguards (generally) don't exercise any discretion. They don't 'decide' who to save. They will (robotically) save you with or without your consent because that's the default setting for being a lifeguard.
Great point! A lifeguard saves people regardless of how much she loves them. Therefore God should be even
more motivated to save everyone since he loves us all, or so the Christian tells us.
...If God truly has all the facts and we do not (as Christians are quick to assure us) then he would not hold our ignorance against us when it comes to our eternal destiny.
I fully agree. And God DOES have all the facts. You can't pretend to be ignorant. God knows the difference between wilful ignorance and actual sincere ignorance.
Did you read the two paragraphs I quoted from Richard Carrier? The woman on the capsized boat
wanted to drown herself because she thought she had nothing left to live for, but her rescuer refused to accept that instance of
willful ignorance and saved her. Later, when it turned out that one of her children had also been rescued, the woman saw that she was wrong. She thanked the rescuer for not letting her have her own way.
If the Christian is correct, and eternal life with God is better than eternal damnation, and if God saved the atheist against his will, then the atheist would also thank God for saving him.
A lot of atheists claim that eternal life,
as it is portrayed in the Bible, might not be preferable to oblivion, but then we have not assurance that the Biblical writers accurately portrayed it. It could indeed be better than we can imagine. At any rate, it's bound to be better than eternal damnation.
The fool in his heart says there is no God. That's not ignorance, that's a fact claim.
Well, I can't speak for others, but I don't claim that there is no God. I simply don't believe that he exists. I could be wrong, of course, because the evidence that has been presented so far is rather thin. But if better evidence comes along, I'll happily change my opinion.
Now if God wants to hold that against me, well there's little I can do about that. But if I'm then to suffer eternal damnation for that, well then I would be proven correct that God is not a benevolent deity.
...If God truly loves Christopher Hitchens, then he saved Hitch from eternal damnation, regardless of what opinions and beliefs the man held during his brief time on Earth.
If those "beliefs and opinions" were, as Hitchens' brother Peter puts it, a
rage against God then it's hard to see what more God should do. should God force people to have predetermined "beliefs and opinions"?
It's not hard for me to see. A loving God would save a person, regardless of that person's feelings toward him. A loving God would sit down with Christopher Hitchens and hash out where the rage came from (assuming we can trust the word of brother Peter.) The Christian tells us that God gave up his
life to save Hitch; why would a little one-on-one face time to answer questions be so awful?
Back to the rescuer story. Suppose the rescuer knew that one of the woman's daughters had been saved and would be needing her mother. Don't you think that the rescuer would have
told the mother that as she was struggling to drown herself? That is, if the rescuer had
superior knowledge about the situation, and was able to enlighten the mother about it, wouldn't that have changed the mother's response? Would she have struggled to end her life if she learned that she did indeed have something to live for?
Besides, what makes you think Christophen Hitchens didn't change his "beliefs and opinions" as he neared the end?
Maybe he did, but there's no evidence of it, and Hitch even warned us that people would suggest that very thing. But we're talking about what God would do, not Hitch.
You think a healthy, sane adult can plead the defense of temporary insanity even if it was a premeditated crime committed with malice a forethought?
Again, you're stuck on the the idea that we have to
want to be saved. That speaks to a fairness issue that seems to be ingrained in human nature. "Why should
he get into Heaven when I was a good believer all my life?" Jesus gave a parable about some workers that grumbled about being paid a day's wage for a day's work, but others only worked an hour for the same wage. Do you recall what Jesus' response to the claims of unfairness was?
Bottom line: if God loves everyone, then he would save everyone, regardless of our thoughts and attitudes during the eyeblink of time that we live on Earth. That he doesn't seem to save everyone (according to the Christian) is a mark against Christianity.
No, it's not a fact claim. It's more of a knowledge claim, and the knowledge it claims is knowledge the claimant doesn't have. And it's not ignorance, it's arrogance.
