If every person and every soul existed at every point in time simultaneously, you would have a point. But they do not.
Time is nothing but the human perception of simultaneous movement of matter. Hence your refutation doesn't make sense, because non-material beings like God only interact with time insofar that they interact with material beings.
Yeah, sure it was. Just like the dinosaurs were a part of his plan.
They were, since nothing happens contrary to God's plan.
By the way, the purpose of sarcasm is to point out logical fallacies or factual inaccuracies, of which the existence of dinosaurs imply neither. Apparently, you seem to think that anything human beings cannot understand is simply illogical, which implies there is no intelligent ordering in the universe, and therefore no intelligent orderer. But human beings can in no way determine this from our standing, since no matter how much we learn, we still cannot understand everything in an omniscient way as God does.
That is an illogical statement. You do not need to be religious or need to be one with God in order to find happiness.
False. Anything that exists has a final cause (i.e. purpose). This can be seen both
a priori, from the fact that God makes no mistakes nor does anything arbitrarily and hence has given a purpose to anything that exists, and
a posteriori, insofar that it is observable that all things that exist have some sort of effect on the universe.
Now, the good of all beings is that which they strive for, which is to say, their final cause. Since God is the creator of all beings, and has endowed them respectively to His own ends, we can say that all beings strive for God. Hence, the happiness (i.e. complete fulfillment in which nothing else is desired) of all beings is to complete their function as given by God.
God, as an omniscient and omnipotent being, makes no mistakes nor does anything arbitrarily. Hence, we can say that the fact that human life exists is according to his plan. We say that God loves us in the sense that He wills our good, which is himself. Hence, happiness is impossible to achieve without God by definition.
Our nature is not to know & love God, but to, as He says, “go forth and multiply.” The perpetuation of the species is our nature.
Reproduction is a secondary precept of the law of nature. This is evident from the facts that (a) there are unhappy people who reproduce, and (b) there are happy people who have not reproduced. I hope you can admit this point, since it's blatantly obvious.
The primary precept is to "do good and avoid evil," and since the good of all beings is God, it is our nature to do God's will.
Really?
After 4,000+ years of easily preventable strife, of devout people being mercilessly slaughtered, of disease taking people’s lives by the trillions, of children being raped & murdered and countless of other atrocities that could be easily preventable by an omnipotent being, do you really have to ask why I say that God is not interested in interfering with our world?
Do you praise God for miraculously saving an individual from catastrophe while ignoring the fact that He could have saved all of the victims? Do you thank God for providing the food on your table each night while ignoring that millions of people are starving to death worldwide? Are you narcissistic enough to believe that he pays super-close attention to your life, while billions of others continue to be ignored?
If it’s “all part of God’s plan,” then God is either malevolent or an asshat. Some people might be willing to worship a malevolent asshat out of fear of damnation, but I am not.
Your error is in assuming that "evil" is to be equated with "death" and/or "suffering" which is not the case. God is all good, I agree; hence everything under his direct control is completely good. What God chooses not to interfere with is our free will. Hence evil is nothing more than free, rational actions that do not have good in the intention. So evil is entirely confined to the choices of rational beings, which are humans and angels.
Nevertheless, everything is according to God's plan, so it has to be explained why God allows evil to happen to others. The answer to this is that since God perpetually wills our good, we have to in some sense admit that whatever misfortunes happen to us is good in a not-necessarily-perceivable manner.
I recommend you read "Uniformity with God's Will" by St. Alphonsus de Ligouri, since he proves this thesis with very compelling arguments. It's also only about 30 pages long, so I hope that you try not to excuse yourself with the excuse of apathy or lack of time.
This is the only plane of existence that I know of, so if thanking God for my existence and acknowledging its existence is not enough to avoid being condemned, then oh well.
Again, that's a pretty casual thing to say for your immortal soul.
If God is willing to condemn trillions of people to eternal pain & suffering because they were ignorant of his teachings or refused to thank him for their daily beatings, then He is a malevolent entity. Malevolent beings should not be worshipped. Not out of fear, and certainly not out of love.
If anybody is condemned to eternal suffering, it's because they knew what the good was and chose to actively strive against it because they preferred pleasure or other perceived goods to it.
Furthermore, God cannot be malevolent by definition. If you perceive Him to be as thus, then the problem is in your logic or perception, not God; since, as we should remember, God is infinitely more intelligent than both of us. Hence it is insultingly arrogant to think you know better.
Why would I choose to worship a being who wishes for harm to befall us?
The meaning of the phrase "God is love" is that the definition of "love" is to "will the good of another," and the good of all beings is God; hence in His very essence, God both wants, and is Himself, our happiness. If any harm befalls us, it is for our own good, even if we cannot see the divine reasons behind it.
I’ll have to keep that in mind the next time I hear about another infant who dies from disease. I’m sure that such children’s souls were all properly amended by such a loving, merciful god, who desired for their lives to be prematurely snuffed out for the betterment of all mankind and his master plan, before condemning them for all of eternity because they were not baptized.
One, unbaptized infants are not condemned to hell. Two, again your problem is that you think death is evil, which it's not. Death is the completion of our earthly nature and is a good thing. What is evil is unjustly ending another's life, but God cannot be unjust, since the definition of justice is "to perpetually give to each what is due," and everything belongs to God.
