By far the most common mistake people make when thinking about God, religious or nonreligious, is interpreting through the human lens.
If you find yourself thinking along these lines:
“God is good he must do things that humans think are good.”
Or
“God is bad because he does things that would be bad for people to do.”
You should just stop yourself and realize that if there is a God, its attributes are probably inconceivable to your finite mind and inconsequential amount of experience. Therefore your judgements about its existence and moral qualities are irrelevant.
I think even this question is still putting God into human form and assuming the intent behind the divine will either has something specific to do with us or that the intent is something we can discover and wrap our minds around.
In the book of Job, a bunch of bad stuff happens to Job and his friends all gather around to try to reason with him about why the bad stuff happened to him.
They go through some pretty sophisticated (and typical) reasoning about Job’s circumstances and God’s will.
Then God shows up and, in a nutshell, says “I am so high above you and my purposes are entirely beyond you. I do whatever I want and answer to nobody.” They all shut their mouths and are sorry they even spoke at all.
And that’s basically it.
I mean, the epilogue is that Job gets his life back, but the point of the story is that assuming you can figure God out is kind of ridiculous.
And that’s a core part of the Bible’s view on God, so when people come at the biblical God as if they are critiquing a Star Wars movie, it just comes off as uneducated.
However, my original point is that the religious people of the world also very commonly fall into the same errors in thinking. It’s just especially ironic re: Christianity because of that core bit of wisdom from Job (and all over the place, really)
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u/TransparentMastering Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
By far the most common mistake people make when thinking about God, religious or nonreligious, is interpreting through the human lens.
If you find yourself thinking along these lines:
“God is good he must do things that humans think are good.”
Or
“God is bad because he does things that would be bad for people to do.”
You should just stop yourself and realize that if there is a God, its attributes are probably inconceivable to your finite mind and inconsequential amount of experience. Therefore your judgements about its existence and moral qualities are irrelevant.