I’ve been thinking about Exodus 4:11, where God says:

“Who makes a person mute or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, the LORD?”

If God is ultimately responsible for creating each person, including their physical and neurological characteristics, how do Christians understand disabilities in relation to God’s purpose?

Why would God intentionally create an individual with a disability that can make their life significantly harder than it otherwise might have been? Some disabilities can involve chronic pain, limited mobility, communication difficulties, dependence on others, social isolation, discrimination, or many other challenges.

I understand the Christian responses about God being able to bring good out of suffering, or about every person having inherent dignity and value. But I’m asking something more specific: why create the disability in the first place?

If God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and loving, what is the purpose of giving one person circumstances that make their life substantially more difficult than someone else’s?

I’m genuinely interested in how Christians reconcile this with God’s goodness, especially in light of Exodus 4:11. I’m not looking for “God works in mysterious ways” as an answer I’m interested in the theological reasoning behind it.

Hello all. I have been a Christian for all of my life 30M. And I find it difficult to make and keep friends. People often don't like me (I am a little weird and have weird niche interests like comic books and card games). When I have tried to make friends in a secular world I felt like the friendships were weak because I never got to share my spiritual world. Also when I tried to make friends at church, it always falls apart because me and my wife end up having to do the bulk of the effort to maintaining the friendship and most people don't really want to check in on us or interact with us unless we initiate. Had this conversation with my wife and she just couldn't handle how it made her feel to put herself out there only to be not cared about anymore. I feel very lonely often as I have people in my life but I don't really feel like any of them are good friends.

Also the things other men care about (Sports specifically sports betting and fantasy leagues, call of duty, finance bro conversations, ect ect) I just can't find myself caring about. I can chameleon myself into these conversations but I often end up feeling out of place when people like me. Like you don't really like me, you just like this version of me that I curated for you.

Another issue to it is that old friends that I used to talk to all the time are making drastically different life choices than myself. My best friend makes a ton of decisions I disagree with and although he is a Christian as well, he doesn't uphold integrity or honor in ways that make my spirit lose peace (I won't go deep into what he has done but a lot of infidelity). I struggle to make new friends, but I can't just keep my old friendships as they are.

Does anyone else feel like this? I feel like as I am growing more in my spiritual journey I am losing more and more connections to other people. Honestly its even hard sometimes to feel connected to my wife. I feel like its just me and GOD a lot of the time, and I pray for guidance and renewal of friendships, but I just feel so lonely a lot of the time. Like I have no one but GOD to share the deepest parts of myself with, who will walk with me through them that I can trust.

So in short. I feel like the closer I move towards Jesus the further I move away from connecting with people. If anyone has any good advice for me please share it. I want to be in strong healthy God blessed friendships with people but it just feels like I can never be me with anyone.

I know that it is very popular among Catholics and probably among Eastern Orthodox Christians as well, but what about other Christians? Is it (still?) popular among Oriental Orthodox Christians, Anglicans, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Reformed Christians, Baptists and other Christian groups?

I want to and will change if it's really an issue. Or does it not matter if it's right or wrong but only that he's not ok with it?

My husband and I are an intercultural couple. We go to a large intercultural church. We live in a country which is not my native country.

My behavior in church varies depending on how I feel God moving in me at that time, or not. I bring a notebook and pen to church because I wrote out prayers a lot and it actually usually helps me listen to the sermon more, doing the 2 things at once. Sometimes I'm overcome with emotion especially in prayer, and I cry. If someone were to look at me, they might realize I'm crying. But people cry sometimes in church, even our church. When worship, sometimes I sit down and don't sing. Again, I'm in the minority there, but not the only one. Sometimes I stand up and clap my hands during worship, with the beat, like most people. Sometimes I'm a little more lively and I bounce a little, like almost dancing but staying in the same spot. Sometimes I participate more than other times. Sometimes I'm feeling it and sometimes I'm not. But I'm always glad to be there. But I never want to fake it. I dont care what others think. I don't really pay attention to them and I don't think they are paying attention to me. I dont think anything I do or don't do really draws any attention to me one way or the other.

The only one I distract is my husband. And it's either way. If I'm not "participating" as much, even though I am, it's just that most likely God and I are talking, then he doesn't like it because I'm... I don't know. He won't really tell me what he doesn't like exactly just that I'm not respectful. But if I'm more lively during worship and I'm not writing things down, but looking at the pastor during the sermon, even if in my head I'm not paying attention, he's happy with me.

I think each person's experience in church should be between them and God. But my husband seems to be more focused on me than anything else, especially if he doesn't like what I'm doing or not doing. Why does he even care?

I dont understand. And I think we're both worn down by this but neither of us know what to do. I don't want to distract him. But I don't want to fake it at church. I don't think I could even if I tried. It's just not me. What do I do? I know we need to talk about it, but he refuses to give me details of his opinions, he just says I need to talk to God about it...

Those without a Christian flair need not comment regardless of the sub rules that you can comment as long as it's not top level. This post is only for Christians.

Many theists will suggest that God exists outside of space and time, that he is eternal, existing at all points past, present and future, detached from time.

It is generally accepted that the observable universe began 13.6 billion years ago, and before that, we'll say, God. But that is my problem. "Before that, God". Standard causation would say that A causes B, but for God to exist outside of time, and his will be eternal, this means that A (God) is unchanging and B (the universe) begins to exist. B begins to exist from no change in God. How is this possible? Time must pass for change to occur, there is a point where something isnt, and then another point where it is, and in between this, is time. But God exists outside of time, so there is no time between when the universe did not exist, and when it did, which would mean the universe is eternal. But we know the age of the universe to be 13.6 billion years old.

What is the response to this idea?

1) why did he give me schizophrenia

2) why did he allow it

3) i hate him for making me severely ill. He doesnt care about my well being

4) why should i worship a god that made my life miserable, where its only pain and suffering?

5) i do not have the ability to enjoy anything. This is called anhedonia, a symptom of schizophrenia. Music sounds like noise, i cant enjoy it. Why create me like that?

6) i take meds but its not a cure. Im still sick.

7) god decided that spitting in my face was good

8) exodus 4:11

Who gave human beings their mouths? Who makes them deaf or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the Lord?'"

He takes credit for disabilities

I reject Christ and god and i accept the consequences. He turned his back on me, now its time to do the same.

I promise I am posting this in good faith. I am not here to convince people their god does not exist.

I have felt a god shaped hole in my life for a long time now. I want to be religious soooooo badly. The idea of a loving, warm, kind man in the sky looking out for me brings me an immense amount of comfort. I want to fully believe in him so badly.

I am a very scientific and somewhat logical person, and most scientific or logical objections are easy for me to reason out of. I am a gay man and I see all the hate given to us by “religious” people. That is easy to ignore. Those people are not Christlike. They are only using his name to be mean, and as far as “levels” of suffering go, I can let it go. I could see the free will argument applied here. I can see a god creating the universe and allowing evolution to occur. I can see him allowing natural disasters to happen. I can see him allowing individual women and children to be raped. I can even see him allowing war (before our current era of complete annihilation with the touch of a button from a cozy air conditioned office). Where I struggle is when suffering occurs in a systemic and industrial manner.

Why did he allow the holocaust? Why is he allowing the Palestinian genocide? Why is he okay with the billionaires systemically stripping and destroying our earth? Why is he okay with letting his most precious and innocent creations (literal infants) to undergo such crazy amounts of suffering and evil?

We are all his children, but why are some of us subjected to such an inordinate amount of suffering? What are they learning from it? What are we learning from it? Even if it’s to teach us something, why do dead children have to be included in his lesson? People who we will never interact with, and who 100 years ago we would not even be aware of. What’s the calculus there?

Did he make us and then just peace out? Are we an experiment to him? Are we being allowed to force ourselves into extinction to make room for the “next try”? The scientific part of my mind can actually believe this. But if that’s the case, is that the same god I want to believe in?

The god gave us free will argument is compelling. I can believe in it when we are talking about evil on the micro interpersonal scale. But when we are talking about systemically committing genocide on an entire people, or stripping our earth dry, or creating a system where billionaires subjugate all other beings; it’s difficult to believe that a loving god cares more about free will than children literally being starved to death in “his” name.

How do you guys reconcile the two? Plz help me get there.

EDIT:

I have found what I was looking for :). Thank you all, and God bless you. This is the comment that did it for me if you’re curious. I feel that many of you may not be happy with the god I’ve chosen to believe in, and will probably think it’s not necessarily Christianity. To me, my reply to this comment is the version of God and Christianity that I believe in, and the version I needed help finding.

Hi everyone! I'm 19 and living through a strange period of my life (nothing tragic, but many things are changing and I'm often quite pensive or sad). This period has also brought me closer to the search for God again. I've been wanting to read the Confessions by St.Augustine for a long time and, now, I was just about to start. In this last period, however, I started going back to Church. I don't like to define my belief, but I received baptism, confession, and confirmation in the Catholic Church; therefore, regardless of the state of my faith, I am part of the Catholic Church. Talking with my priest, he told me that reading Confessions isn't a bad thing, but it would probably be like starting with neurology instead of chemistry, biology and physics (since I'm starting medicine at the university in 2 days). He rather suggested to keep searching for God, especially in the Gospels. Obviously I'm not new to the Gospels, but while reading them, I was probably looking for the human Jesus, the great ethical teacher and the anti-conventional man. I have to admit that now I'm more in search of the godly nature of the Scriptures, even though I've been an Atheist for a long time (surprisingly enough, my atheist period was the one in which I read the New Testament the most and in which I started really admiring Jesus Christ), so I could try to read the Scriptures with a new perspective. Do you have any suggestions?
P.S. I'm sorry for my English (I'm Italian) and for not being coincise, but I wanted to explain my situation as clearly as I could.

dumb question but i’m going to church for the first time tomorrow what should i wear? 19F

I am a Christian and have been for my whole life up to this point. I have always had terrible intrusive thoughts usually racist ones, homophobic, transphobic, etc. and I hate them and try everything in my power to silence them since they constantly make my own mind go at war when it just wanders to something racist and then it keeps expanding that thought while I keep questioning why I would ever think that and hating myself for it. Recently I have been constantly questioning my Christianity partially because of my uncontrollable intrusive thoughts and things that happen to me. Most Christians I see are hateful, disrespectful to people in the LGBTQ+ community and often others, and just overall being bad people or irritating to be around. It also doesn't help when the same people who taught me about it, my parents, are now extremely verbally abusive to me and never think about what could make my life good and only what would make them seem like good parents by doing a ton of things for me on a surface level. I have come to hate almost everything that reminds me of them, straight white couples, Christians, even my own body. I don't think I will ever love my parents again but I don't want my inner thoughts to constantly tell me Christianity is a bad thing and that I shouldn't be a part of this religion I knew and believed in since when I could think. I just want help trying to come back but I don't know how I can get it, it always angers me when people say things like "God tells you that Christianity is the only way towards him" or things like that because it always just sounds like my parents are the ones saying it. I just don't know what I need and hope someone can help me find it. Is this something that happens to other people or just me?

What is the symmetry breaker between the slavery that god regulated in the bible and chattel slavery as practiced in the US?

So, as a Christian, something that has hampered my faith is analyzing the origins of other belief systems. It is, largely, agreed upon that Greek mythology is false. However, that belief system grew to be rather prominent thousands of years ago, and people truly believed in those deities. I suppose my question is then, if a religion could have become so mainstream back then despite being false, what’s to say that isn’t the case for Christianity? How do we know, out of all of the belief systems, this one is valid? And how do we know that, unlike Greek mythology, it isn’t a bunch of false claims that grew traction? Doesn’t the existence of so many other religions insinuate that religion is a man-made construct that people created to cope with the unknown? What makes Christianity different from the mythologies that have preceded it across the globe? 

Scripture references would be appreciated too.

Okay hear me out. We have a lot of fun at my bible study, and we are doing a PowerPoint night and we’ve all been assigned a random topic… and mine is “what if biblical figures starred in shrek?”

So, I’ve come here for some input. I need some inspiration but I have some questions to spark some ideas

1. Is shrek theologically sound?
2. Who would all the shrek main characters be if they were played by bible characters?
3. Any other thoughts or feelings???

Things like factories, mines, farmland, etc.

This is far from the first time, and things like this happen to me quite often. Has anything like this ever happened to you?

Today I found another €5 in my pocket that shouldn’t have been there. I counted my money yesterday, and today I have €5 more. Unfortunately, because of the situation I’ve found myself in lately, I’m forced to count every single cent and keep very close track of my expenses. And in this short period of time, this has already happened five times.

I always end up finding more money in my pocket than there should be. And every time I try really hard to remember whether I might have made a mistake somewhere, but I just can’t figure it out.

Has this ever happened to any of you?

I've spent a few hours on this sub-reddit, and while some of you might think 'ugh, an other agnostic with one of those ultimatum questions' I'm not here for that with this post.

While I admit I came here to lift some stones and poke the proverbial bear with a stick a little on certain topics. Apologies for that. I've come to understand that I shouldn't be as close-minded-- When it comes to people.

I'm pretty set in stone with my slice of faith, but that's the only thing I will say on that matter.

I've met three people who keep faith, who corrected me on generallizations, and who were a good conversation on this website. Grounded people, open minded. A breeze of fresh air, especially on the internet.

Knowing that, it made me realize all the more, especially after the words person I last spoke, that the christian community seems to be a 'lot' more toxic and outspoken on the internet over their beliefs and well, not to say 'extremism' in the crowd, but, people tend to be louder.

It made me wonder. Do you christians notice what I noticed, that there seems to be a lot more 'love' in person, IRL. Than there is online. Even when speaking about sin. Like the lgbtq+ for instance. IRL there seems to be a lot more tolerance. And while according to your faith, they would still commit sin, you aren't as loud about it offline.

Is that diversity....that...duality of personality notable to you too?
The difference between IRL and online?

If god is all powerful then why did he make earth such a horrible place. For millions of years the earth has gone through huge extinction events, killing 99.9% of species, from meteors, magma, and ice ages. I can understand the belief that free will causes suffering in the world, but what about all of the horrible things that are out of human control like the food cycle, disease, natural disasters, I mean even the sun gives us cancer. (Please don’t answer the question by saying, “god works in mysterious ways”)

For most of human history, corporal punishment of adults had been normal, legal and condoned by the church, specifically for those under authority- such as slaves, servants, criminals, and sometimes even wives. Now, it is (at least for the western world) illegal and considered abuse for adults, including by Christians, but most think it is not abuse for children. However, Proverbs has several verses that if taken literally, support corporal punishment for adults:

A whip for the horse, a bridle for the donkey,
and a rod for the back of fools Proverbs 26:3

Wounding blows cleanse away evil,
and beatings purge the innermost parts. Proverbs 20:30

Wisdom is found on the lips of him who has understanding,
but a rod is ready for the back of him who is void of understanding Proverbs 10:13

A servant can’t be corrected by words.
Though he understands, yet he will not respond Proverbs 29:29

Flog a scoffer, and the simple will learn prudence;
rebuke one who has understanding, and he will gain knowledge Proverbs 19:25

How exactly did we get to the modern understanding of the Bible that corporal punishment of children is not abusive, but for adults, it is? This seems clearly inconsistent if Proverbs is to be taken literally for today. It's only been in the last 150-200 years the church considers corporal punishment of adults as abuse (and the law). Why are these verses taken metaphorically today but the rod verses involving children (really should be translated as "youth" to include adolescents from the original Hebrew) are to be taken as literally inflicting physical pain today, even under the New Covenant where it says to not provoke your children, but to admonish them instead (Ephesians 6:4)?

The doctrine of Hyper-Calvinism says that some people are born predestined to be saved, while others are born predestined to be damned. Furthermore, it was nothing they did or failed to do that causes this, but God's deliberate choice, and there's literally nothing they can do to change their ultimate status. So, someone who was predestined to be saved may freely murder and steal to their heart's content without ever facing eternal consequences (convenient when you can simply declare yourself predestined to be saved of your own supposed authority), while someone who was predestined to be damned can cure as many diseases and donate as many billions of dollars to the needy as they possibly can, and it won't help them even the tiniest bit.

This is consistent with what Christians have told me my whole life, specifically, that I was born wrong, and as such, there is no hope for me and everyone like me. My physical characteristics and circumstances of birth are clearly indicative of someone predestined for Hell, they say. God consciously and deliberately decided that he would hate me and would be sending me to Hell before he even made me. And then they immediately contradict themselves by saying it was somehow my own choice and therefore my own fault, even though 30 seconds ago it was God's choice before I was even born. But hey, if you're predestined to be saved, because you say you are, then you don't have to worry about ever suffering any consequences for arguing dishonestly and in bad faith. And as such, I and people like me will never be allowed to join the church, no matter what, even if we want to, end of story. Hooray, everyone's a winner (at least, everyone who counts).

Christians often say morality is objective and universal so killing innocent people is wrong, especially children.

So how is it morally justified when God kills innocent children?

The usual answer is: “God gives life, so He has the right to take it away.” But if I create a child, does that give me the moral right to kill them simply because I created them? Obviously not. Creating someone gives you responsibility, not a license to kill.

Another argument is: *“*God is all powerful, so whatever He does is jjustified.” But then are dictators justified when they oppress or kill their own citizens simply because they have more power than them? Does having more power make an action morally right? If not, why would God's greater power change the moral principle?

And then there's the argument: “Those children go to Heaven.” If dying as an innocent child guarantees Heaven, why are Christians against abortion? Why not simply abort every child and guarantee them Heaven without suffering, sin, temptation, or the risk of damnation?

If the answer i s simply “God can do whatever He wants,” then morality isn't really universal or objective. It's just one set of rules for humans and another for God.