It meets your criteria: it asks something superficially very simple...just a choice of two. You can't get easier than that, in a sense. It its problem that it's....profound?Harbal wrote: ↑Wed Apr 10, 2024 5:04 pmThe first step in dealing with the topic would be to stop asking fuzzy, meaningless questions such as that one.Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Apr 10, 2024 4:31 pmWhat about the OP here? How "profound" would the discussion be to deal with it?
You'd best ask somebody who says that.And what is difficult about saying, "because the Bible tells me so"?IC wrote:Because it's easy. It gives one a sense of having grasped everything worth grasping,Harbal wrote:Why is a simple answer necessarily comforting?
That turns out to be the gateway to a whole lot of additional questions: like, "why is the world not fine," "what would a fine world be," "what does it lack," "what needs to be done about it, if anything," "how do we know the world's not fine," "how can we complain about something we can't change anyway..." etc.But what when the simple answer is, the world isn't fine as it is; that doesn't seem particularly comforting.The world is fine as it is, nothing more needs to be discussed, there's no further uncertainty, all has been solved, there are no serious doubts left...very comforting, indeed.
So that answer loses its winsome simplicity very early on. Does that make it better not to ask it?
It's only smug if God didn't say it. So that criticism is simply a begging of the whole question. If God said it, then it's true, and then anybody who also says it is speaking the truth -- God's truth, not his own. He'd be immoral NOT to say it...in fact, if he knew the truth and pretended he didn't, he'd be a kind of liar.And what is more smug than saying, "I'm right because God says so"?
And that's the problem with the old canard, "You only believe in God because it's comforting." Atheism and agnosticism can also be merely comforting. The issue remains not the level of comfort of the speaker, but the truth.That is a matter of what type of person you are, not whether you believe in God.Both give one the sense of having resolved all the relevant controversies, or at least all that anybody can be responsible to solve.