Is God entitled to kill us?

I have been stewing over this post for awhile.  My usual method of addressing Christian arguments is by poking holes in them, by lining up logical fallacies that are undeniable, and by making cracks in the foundations until the argument starts to crumble.

But this one's different. It's personal.  It can't be attacked head-on with a spear of logic.

Instead, we as humans must gather up our senses of worth, identities, and individualities, and stand up to say, I have value.  I am not disposable.

OK, what am I talking about, you ask?  

This all started when I began writing a post about all the killing that God does in the Bible.  In general, when I write a post, I research the Christian side of the argument -- to see if it has merit, and to see how best to refute it.

I could not believe my eyes what I saw what one Christian wrote in defense of God. 

According to John Piper:

"It's right for God to slaughter women and children anytime he pleases. God gives life and he takes life. Everybody who dies, dies because God wills that they die.

God is taking life every day. He will take 50,000 lives today. Life is in God's hand. God decides when your last heartbeat will be, and whether it ends through cancer or a bullet wound. God governs.

So God is God! He rules and governs everything. And everything he does is just and right and good. God owes us nothing.

If I were to drop dead right now, or a suicide bomber downstairs were to blow this building up and I were blown into smithereens, God would have done me no wrong. He does no wrong to anybody when he takes their life, whether at 2 weeks or at age 92.

God is not beholden to us at all. He doesn't owe us anything.

Now add to that the fact we're all sinners and deserve to die and go to hell yesterday, and the reality that we're even breathing today is sheer common grace from God."

Are we merely characters in God's video game?

John Piper's statement is hard to read. I have often ruminated over the fact that the Christian God seems so much like a kid playing a video game. He starts up a world, populates it with creatures, and then fills that world with mortal dangers at every turn, all the while demanding worship. Every now and then, he floods a town, starts a forest fire, causes two cars to collide or a train to derail, or creates a worldwide pandemic. According to John Piper, every single death in the world today is directly at the hands of God*. Like a kid with an ant farm, he reaches his finger in and smooshes out our individualism and autonomy.

The crucial difference between a kid playing a video game and God creating the Earth is that we are sentient creatures. If God exists, then he made us with an ability to perceive great physical pain and intense emotional suffering. God gave us the ability to suffer, and yet he toys with our safety, our communities, and our loved ones, and seems to care nothing for our pain. He is completely indifferent.

Why bring a newborn baby into existence only to kill it two weeks later by a virus he sprinkled across the Earth?

Why allow a little Christian boy to be decapitated on a water slide?

Even if he did make us, don't our lives have any value beyond being God's playthings? Is it loving to bring us into and out of existence at his whims?

Why does God treat us as if we are disposable? Is it for his entertainment?

*It's interesting how before humans developed modern medicine, God tended to kill people through things like childbirth and diseases more often. Have God's methods of killing changed? Is his power too weak to combat antibiotics, forcing him to find new causes of death? Why has life expectancy increased over time? Did God decide to let us live longer? Or is it because of our improved knowledge and infrastructure? It's almost like...God has nothing to do with this at all.

Should we be grateful to God?

"Now add to that the fact we're all sinners and deserve to die and go to hell yesterday, and the reality that we're even breathing today is sheer common grace from God."

But...why are we sinners? Because God made us that way (the whole omniscient thing really killed the fall of man story).

And why do we deserve hell? Because God made hell specifically for those creatures he made who had no choice but to be made how he made them. Hell is for those who don't obey, don't worship him, don't love him, and/or don't believe he exists (which is understandable since he left no evidence and never shows himself, on purpose, just to make it not so easy to get into heaven).

But we're supposed to be thankful? We're supposed to see God as graceful?

Obviously, I don't believe any of this at all. But if it WERE true, this God is in no way full of grace and love. He created a thousand problems, then offered a one-size-fits-all solution that is impossible for the average person to achieve. In other words, he doomed nearly all of us -- knowingly. He got EXACTLY what he wanted.

This does not feel like love.

But isn't he taking them straight to heaven?

No. Most people would be going to hell (myself included). But if God let us live our full lifetimes before he picked us off, we would have more time to be saved (in other words, to delude ourselves into believing).

But God already knows who will believe in the end and who won't.  So is he only picking off the ones he knows will never be saved anyway?  No, that can't be right, since Christians die young all the time! 

And if God already knows before people are even born (or spawned) if they will be saved or not, then what is even the point of life on earth? 

Couldn't God just create some people for heaven and some people for hell?

In that case, why bother making the hell-bound people at all?  I, for one, would surely rather have never existed at all than spend an eternity in a torture chamber.  I didn't seem to have any objection to not existing before I was born.

So God could have just made perfect people in heaven with him and skipped the hassle of having to create a bunch of people on Earth, throw mortal perils at us like COVID and starvation, watch us (and animals) suffer, separate the wheat from the chaff, and finally have the small percentage of humans who pass his test to spend eternity with him in heaven?

Hmmm, and I thought I couldn't attack this with logic.  Looks like I just did, with logic and a run-on sentence. 

So what's the takeaway?

NOTHING ABOUT THIS MAKES ANY SENSE.

Everything above points to God not existing. If he does, he has a lot to answer for.

If God truly operates this way, then is he really a loving, gracious, understanding God, or is he a cruel puppetmaster, forcing suffering on sentient beings who never chose to exist, and damning them to hell for being exactly as he designed them?