If the alternative is eternal torture in hell I'm not sure that holds.
"Take care of your body or else it will grow weak and sick" has a directive and a warning of consequences---is it a threat?
There need not be a consequence of failing to follow the Christian Bible; God/Satan have decided that there will be consequences, and Satan will be the one torturing you if you don't do what God says. That's definitely a threat. In these stories, God and Satan are conscious, sentient beings with free will. They can choose to reward or punish you based on whatever criteria they've decided.
If God is good, why do bad things happen?
I never got an answer that resonated with me. Wound up not pursuing theology.
‘I don’t understand something therefore there is no God’ is one of the most common trains of thought that lead to atheism.
Especially and most commonly ‘How could a loving God allow x.’
There isn’t an easy answer to this stuff and I wouldn’t expect there to be. The notion that the universe is easily comprehensible is a framework of thinking that only gets there by discarding everything NOT easily comprehensible and calling the remainder ‘real.’
When people ask why a loving god would allow bad things to happen I want to reply ‘how would you do it better? Design a universe that has meaningful goodness without suffering and evil. Explain how it would work …’
> Design a universe that has meaningful goodness without suffering
Without meaning offense, “you try it” is one of the weaker defenses of religion I’ve heard…
I view it as a wonderful resource that people deny themselves through overweighting their own cleverness.
What you call hypocrisy I call a mystery or an enigma or something that it might takes decades of work to understand.
How can you be called by something that doesn’t exist? Or you are saying it does exist but isn’t good. Or the practice isn’t good.
I just don’t understand why lacking a good explanation for the existence of suffering that you, personally, can wrap your mind around would be such a deal breaker.
I’m sure it makes sense to you. I just don’t think that way, at least not anymore.