God is not a hero

I thank you for your response. I know of this book, however I did not know just how wrongly this man thinks. I have often observed how people cope with traumatic events(myself included), and I have seen that they normally react in one of two ways. These people either take blow after blow and allow what faith they once had has been crushed, and find that, in doing so, their rational has been crushed along with it. These regretfully pitiful people become blind to the wonder of this world and see all of the terrible things that man has done and make believe that all of these things were not done by man, but were done by God. These people cope by living in this dark, cramped, and cold world where there is no God, and there is no meaning. These are the people that my heart goes out to every day. However, there is the other group, who have remained in there faith. These people find that they have become stronger and can enjoy life all the more for what has happened to them. These people are the fruit of this fallen world, which God has nursed out of the dying soil that is this world. Now I will begin my argument with the cold light of truth. In your first argument, you make the claim that the victims of the holocaust would have been better off if they had no free will, because they are now dead and free will no longer matters for them. I contest this argument and say that it does matter to these people. If these people had no free will, and the world was this perfect and mindless place which you wish for, then it would not matter if these people died peacefully in there beds or horribly by hanging by the neck. If they died in their beds, then all's well. If they died by being hanged, then neither they or the people doing the hanging would have any will in what they were doing, and would therefore be without meaning. Logically and morally there would be no difference. After reading the passage from Mr. Wiesel's book, I find myself staring at the words of a terribly twisted mind. He has completely lost his sense of what is true and what is not. He blames God for creating Auschwitz, for burning children, and for torturing men and women. Did God do this? No. Man did this. I would wish this man, and so many more like him, to find there courage. I would wish them to stop cowering behind there idea of an impersonal, cruel, distant, and uncaring God, and come to the truth that it is not some scape goat of there minds who are doing these terrible things, but that it is their own kind who do these things. It is the Nazi soldier who pulls the switch on that furnace. It is the Jewish man who turns on his fellow man for a meager chance of survival. It is the crazed fanatic who orders 6,000,000 Jews dead. You define a hero as "a man of distinguished courage or ability, admired for his brave deeds and noble qualities", and in your closing statements, you give the men dying on the gallows as examples of what a hero is. I accept your definition of a hero(though there are many others) and agree with your saying that those men were heroes. However, I am amazed that you do not see God as a hero after seeing that you do have such a sublime understanding of what a hero is. When you say that "the three men because THEY weren't afraid to die what they believed in" were heroes, do you not see the Christ? Do you exalt these men for standing up to the Nazis and dying because of it, but dismiss God's becoming a man, and dying as brutally as any of the victims of the Holocaust in order to bring a redemption to a rebellious and terrible world? "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." KJV God is a hero because when his creation rebelled against him and became to vile to look at, he did not destroy it. In fact, he made the ultimate sacrifice by sending himself to become a human, lived a humble and perfect life, and allowed himself to be tortured and killed in order to free us from the damnation that was owed to us. God did not take the easy way of saving the human race, and talk his way out of his own laws. He took the hardest road of all, and upheld his law. He did not just wave the punishment for us, but he gave himself up for his own punishment for us. This is true love. This, my esteemed opponent, is a hero.