250
Catholic church canonises its first gamer saint, and one of his favourite games was Halo
(www.pcgamer.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2025
250 points (94.3% liked)
Not The Onion
18033 readers
817 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That’s not "punishing evil". that’s cosmic tantrums.
If a human did it, you’d call it evil.
You only excuse it because you slap "God" on the front. That’s divine command theory. might makes right. Which isn’t morality, it’s just fear dressed up as worship. Ironically, its the same logic which fascists like Hitler use.
Strawman. Nobody said "let Hitler into heaven".
But drowning toddlers and nuking towns isn’t "justice", it’s indiscriminate slaughter. If God’s only two settings are "do nothing" or "kill everyone" that’s a design flaw, not justice.
Same tired "who made X" game.
Who made God?
If you say "He always existed", then congratulations, you just admitted things can exist without being created. Which means biology doesn’t need your sky-dad either.
False analogy.
My dinner isn’t a conscious being. If I invited you over and drowned your kid in my soup "to punish evil" you wouldn’t call it dinner. You’d call the cops.
(Furthermore, I'm vegan, so my meals don't include anything which is/was a conscious being)
Then do it.
Stop dodging. Show reproducible, testable evidence that distinguishes your God from imagination. Until then, you’re just asserting.
Nobody "designed" it. Evolution by natural selection explains complexity from simplicity, no designer required. If you think complexity requires design, explain who designed God, who is infinitely more complex.
Wrong. Biology is clear: human life is a continuum, not a single magic switch. What’s disputed is when rights should be granted, which is a moral and legal question, not a scientific one. You’re just mixing categories.
They were going to be evil otherwise.
They were essentially telling Elisha to kill himself. And he used God's name in vain.
Job is now in heaven. I don't think Job cares about the distant point in time when things were bad. That's like calling your parents cruel for banning you from videogames as a kid - although even that is more significant than what happened to Job.
That's because God is God. If a pig slaughters another pig and eats it, then pigs would find that evil. Yet it's okay when a human does it.
Oops! You didn't mention any nuking of towns 🤔
Finally, there's your goalposts. It has to be "reproducible" and "testable". Can you show me reproducible and testable evidence that Napoleon existed?
Pre-crime executions of babies? You’re justifying mass infanticide with Minority Report. That’s not morality, that’s thought-policing unborn futures. By that logic, God should’ve killed you before you typed this comment.
They yelled "baldy." You’re the one rewriting it as "kill yourself" to excuse bears mauling children. Imagine standing in front of a grieving parent and saying "don't worry, your kid had it coming for making fun of a prophet’s haircut."
So torturing someone is fine as long as you reward them later? If I broke your legs today but promised you a PS5 in ten years, would that make me moral? This is abuse with a consolation prize.
Wrong twice.
First, might doesn’t make right. If God orders genocide, it’s still genocide. slapping “God” on it doesn’t turn evil into good.
Second, your pig analogy fails with me because I'm vegan. It isn't okay when humans slaughter pigs. You just admitted your morality boils down to "the strong can do whatever they want to the weak."
That’s not morality, that’s predation.
Congratulations, you admitted it: divine command theory. If God ordered you to skin your child alive, you’d call it good. That’s not morality, that’s just worshiping raw power.
Jericho, Sodom, Gomorrah. Ring a bell? The Bible is full of God wiping out entire cities. Pretending otherwise won’t erase the body count.
Strawman.
We don’t need to "reproduce" Napoleon, we verify him through multiple independent sources: letters, accounts, artifacts, battlefields. If you have comparable evidence for God, written by neutral parties, corroborated by archaeology, contemporaneous, and consistent, then put it on the table.
Spoiler: you don’t.
All you’ve got is one internally contradictory book written by believers.
If He did, He would be well within His right to. If they weren't going to be totally depraved, He would have rescued them.
No. Refer to the text and context.
2 Kings 2:11-12, 23 [11] And as they still went on and talked, behold, chariots of fire and horses of fire separated the two of them. And Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven. [12] And Elisha saw it and he cried, “My father, my father! The chariots of Israel and its horsemen!” And he saw him no more. Then he took hold of his own clothes and tore them in two pieces. ... [23] He went up from there to Bethel, and while he was going up on the way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, “Go up, you baldhead! Go up, you baldhead!”
Basically, Elijah is missing. Elisha is claiming to be his successor. They mock the account of Elijah leaving earth instead of dying, and basically telling Elisha to go disappear with Elijah. Since they possibly didn't believe Elijah was carried up and instead died, they'd be asking Elisha to do the same.
So torturing someone is fine as long as you reward them later? If I broke your legs today but promised you a PS5 in ten years, would that make me moral? This is abuse with a consolation prize.
A PS5 isn't comparable to heaven. An eternity in paradise isn't a consolation prize. And God didn't torture Job. Satan did.
Fair. I hope you'd agree that killing unborn children is also wrong.
How would you define morality
The towns so bad that only one decent person lived in them? Who were spared alongside their family, despite their family also being terrible people?
I do. There are multiple independent sources pertaining to Jesus, accounts. Alleged artifacts, definitely sites mentioned are proved to have existed. They are contemporary and consistent.
No, we don't. The New Testament is 26 separate writings. And even then, there are a few writings outside of it such as Josephus, The Didache, and Polycarp.
You're expecting someone to literally see Jesus rise from the dead and write about it and not be a believer? That's like me saying "Everyone who writes pro vaccine material is pro vaccine. Find me some anti vaxxers arguing for vaccines, then I'll listen".
Translation: God killing babies is fine because God did it.
That’s not morality, that’s raw power worship.
If Hitler had been omnipotent, would you have called his actions "right" too? Because your standard isn't good vs evil; it’s just strong vs weak.
So the kids didn’t say "kill yourself", they said "go up like Elijah" Which is mockery, sure, but still not a capital offence.
You’re still defending child-murder-by-bear for playground trash talk. If your morality system equates insults with death, it's not morality, it's authoritarian fragility.
Wrong. Job 2:3 literally says God gave Job into Satan's hand "without reason". If I hand my kid to a known abuser "as a test", I’m responsible for everything that follows. Passing the blame to Satan doesn't make God look better, it makes Him look like an accomplice.
I'm pro-choice. I don't believe potential life has more value than the actual lives of the people carrying them.
But here's the kicker: even by your standard, your God fails. The Flood, the plagues, Old Testament wars; unborn children wiped out en masse. You claim to worship the "sanctity of life" but your own deity is history's biggest abortionist.
Morality = reducing unnecessary suffering and increasing well-being.
By that standard, bears mauling kids, floods drowning babies, and plagues killing firstborns are immoral.
Your definition is "whatever God says" which means if God told you to burn your toddler alive, you'd call it good. That's not morality, it's obedience.
Even if you take that at face value, God still torched everyone; children, infants, livestock. Collateral damage doesn't vanish just because you declare "everyone there was bad". That’s exactly the justification every human tyrant has ever used.
None of those are contemporary.
Josephus was born after Jesus allegedly died, and his passage about Jesus is widely considered tampered with by Christians.
The Didache and Polycarp are Christian writings, believers repeating their own story, not neutral evidence. That's like Mormons citing Joseph Smith's buddies as "independent sources"
Also, proving Jesus' existence doesn't prove his divinity. I dont care if a person named Jesus lived 2,000 years ago.
And no, your vaccine analogy fails. We have independent, testable, reproducible data for vaccines. If all we had were 26 internally inconsistent pamphlets from believers claiming vaccines worked, we'd laugh them out of the lab.
Your entire defense boils down to this: "God is good because He's God". That’s not an argument. That's an abdication of morality. You'd excuse anything; genocide, torture, infanticide; as long as it had divine branding.
Which means you don't have a moral compass at all.
You've outsourced it to a book that justifies things you'd call evil in any other context.