David Kyle Johnson
Who among us would dare to go that far? What if we do have free will and we have it because God intended us to have it. On Judgement Day, after He explains exactly how our free will can be reconciled with His own omniscience, will we be given the chance to judge Him?"Wenn es einen Gott gibt muß er mich um Verzeihung bitten."
anonymous
This German quote, which translates as “If there is a God, he will have to beg my forgiveness,” appears in a documentary about the Mauthausen concentration camp.
Starting with the Holocaust for some and for others starting with this...
Or does our free will revolve entirely around worshipping and adoring Him despite all of the things it might seem reasonable for Him to ask our forgiveness for....an endless procession of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and tornadoes and hurricanes and great floods and great droughts and great fires and deadly viral and bacterial plagues and miscarriages and hundreds and hundreds of medical and mental afflictions and extinction events...making life on Earth a living hell for countless millions of men, women and children down through the ages...
Or has Harold Kushner himself having just died recently now been able to confirm that in fact God is not in the least omnipotent?
It would be interesting to know the reaction of the other prisoners after reading it. Would some, smack dab in the middle of a death camp that an omnipotent God permitted to exist, consider it to be blasphemy? Would the prisoner who wrote it be hounded into taking it off the wall...to recant and beg forgiveness from God?It was supposedly written by an unknown prisoner there, on the wall, during the holocaust. Because the walls have long since been painted over, the veracity of this claim is difficult to verify—but there is little reason to doubt it. The events of the holocaust have long raised questions about God’s existence, and why (if he exists) God would allow such suffering; so it’s not hard to imagine that a prisoner in one of Hitler’s concentration camps, in the throes of despair, would have etched such a thing on the wall of their prison cell.
On the other hand, it's not for nothing that the arguments of those like Harold Kushner manage to comfort the faithful. It's not that God is morally imperfect but that He is not omnipotent. He created the Heavens and the Earth but He found Himself unable to fully control it. For example, suppose in creating the laws of matter, God Himself is not permitted to transcend the consequences of them in regard to those "natural disaster" above?Now this quote is far from a clearly articulated argument with a specific conclusion. But once we realize that conditional (if… then) statements like this can be translated into disjunctive (either…or) statements, the potential conclusions the prisoner might have had in mind become clear. So translated, the quote becomes this:
"Either God doesn’t exist or he will have to beg for my forgiveness"
If we add in the assumption that God certainly exists, then the conclusion becomes that God will have to beg the prisoner for forgiveness. And from there, it is a short step to the conclusion that God is morally imperfect (I); any divine being that has done something to apologize for, by definition, cannot be morally perfect.
So, when you die and Judgment Day arrives, if you truly do worship and adore God, then your soul is saved and you are in Heaven. And once there all of the souls of the faithful who perished in those "natural disasters" are there as well.