Answering another religion-debunker

So I answered one unbeliever in a post below and then listened to another:  Sam Harris who is rather famously known for his arguments against "religion."   His main argument is that God isn't loving but unjust and cruel because so many "innocent" people die terrible deaths in this world, including millions of young children.  And for some reason it seems most Christians don't have good answers to this.  Perhaps I don't either and perhaps no answer would suffice for these moralists, but it does seem to me that the usual answers fail to get across the fallenness of this world.  It was the "original" sin of our first parents that brought death and disease and misery into the world in the first place, and it is our ongoing sins that keep producing these sufferings.  What is being blamed on God is in fact our own fault, the fault of the human race as a whole that is since normally we have no way of knowing the particular causal chain that leads to any given suffering or death.   Except sometimes our own suffering if we've been paying attention to events in our lives as we should, especially taking note of our own violations of God's Law. 

In the religions that teach "karma" this is maybe more appreciated than it is in Christianity, but karma always seems to me to be a partial intuition of God's Law as we are taught it in the Bible.  Buddhism teaches refraining from at least four actions that lead to suffering, that are roughly the same as four of the biblical Ten Commandments:  Not stealing, not lying, not committing sexual misbehavior, not committing murder.  Obeying these principles prevents suffering, and the same is true of obedience to the Ten Commandments.  One differences is that according to the Bible we inherit the consequqnces of the sins of our ancestors, as well as the propensity to those same sins, which in, say, Buddhism, seems to be explained in terms of sins committed in the supposed past lives of the individual rather than inherited from ancestors.

Asked about how Buddhism explains something like genocide, one teacher refers to the millions of people on the planet with their millions of past lives to explain how the accumulated earned suffering of them all could come together in such an event.   Biblical thinking would find the explanation in the inherited sins of ancestors.  Nevertheless Jesus taught that we err by imputing causes to such sufferings when we are all sinners who may deserve worse and eventually reap worse.

But the point I want to keep in mind is that it is sin that brings about suffering.  You can speak of God's judgments and mean the same thing but the judgment is calibrated to the sin, it's not some whimsical or inexplicable pain inflicted on innocent people, it is prfect justice.  We can only know this by believing the Bible of course, since the specific causdes are not usually evident to us.  In the case of the "genocides" unbelievers often complain about as described in the Old Testament, all that is said is that the sins have accumulated over time, often centuries, until a tribe has reached the point where this sort of punishment is the inevitable just result.  And it is just, though to an unbeliever like Sam Harris it is unjust and cruel murder of innocent people.   What may be known about a particular people that are subjected to such slaughter is that they practiced idolatry or worship of demons by human sacrifice, even the sacrifice of babies.   If you don't know that about them you may be inclined to think of them as innocent.  And of course if their babies are included in the punitive slaughter anunbeliever is liketly to be outraged that such innocents are punished along with their guilty parents, havintg no knowledge of the slaughtering of their own babies as sacrifice to the demon gods has over time accumulated the sins that deserve this kind of punishment.   You can still object to God's ways according to your own offended human nature, or really your inabiltiy to understand how God's Laws work, but anyone who trusts the Bible as revelation of how God's Law works, horrified though we may be because of our frail flesh, has to take it as something we need to learn about how sin and justice work in this world.

That's one kind of objection someone like Sam Harris has to "religion."  Another he rought up in the video I listened to was that believers are lying when we say that there is no contradiction between our supernatural beliefs and science.   The virgin birth of Jesus supposedly proves we are lying, as does His resurrection from the dead, and the miracles Jesus and others did.   You'd think he could ansswer this himself, it's not all that ifficult to understand.  The whole point is that these events are exceptions to the scientific rules.  Those rules hold up for all physical events in the universe, which is why science is possible at all (and in fact it really took the Bible's law-giving God to teach people that science was possible in the first place.  If we didn't know the physical universe operated by law and order we'd never have attempted to discover the laws that have led to the enormous knowledge we've accumulated about how things work.)  The point is that the supernatural events that are reported are one-time exceptions to the normal rules.  There was only one virgin birth, of God Himself taking on human flesh.  Everybody else is born according to the scientific rules.  So far only Jesus Himself has come back permanently from the dead.  Others were brought back to life in the Bible, but only to live out the rest of their lives until they die again.  None of this violates the rule that sinners die, that "the wages of sin is death."  (And by the way, Hell is the NORMAL end of the entire human race because we are ALL sinners. ) But Jesus does offer us eternal life through His own resurrection after paying the price for our sins, the price exacted by God's Law.  The physical laws reliably persist through all these supernatural exceptions.

Or another wqay to think of it is that they are two different realms, the physical and the spiritual and they both operate by laws.  The spiritual realm is superior to the physical and can set it aside or overcome it, could even presumably completely overcome it and replace it.  But God has no reason to do that though He has had reason to override it in order to teach us about Himself and His plan of redemption.  Jesus'
 miracles were all for the purpose of showing that He is in fact God.  Throughout the Old Testament miracles also validated the God-sent identity of God's prophets and servants.  None of which interfered with the reliable operations of the physical laws.



So there are a couple of explanations for the debunkers.  Sam Harris probably wouldn't be impressed.