If you think of God as a being, then it’s tough to reconcile. If your concept of God is the ground of being, or being itself, then to me it’s less problematic.
How anyone could look on that Genesis narrative with anything other than horror is beyond my ability to understand. I kind of hand-waved it away as a kid but it reflects a deeply entrenched hatred toward humanity at best. At worst it’s a portrait of a demonic, gaslighting, supremely abusive celestial being. I happen to suffer from some severe reproductive health issues so every time I consider that the Christian God cursed me specifically because of my genetic makeup, which I had zero control over, and specifically because my body parts are similar to the body parts of some lady I have never met who pissed God off millions of years ago for doing something she had no ability to know was wrong, and then in the same breath the Bible tells us that God is just, well, no, that’s not any kind of justice at all. No reasonable person could think that’s just.
Totally agree.
Not that I care what anyone wants to believe(I have few lines I draw there) or what religion they want to practice.
I knew the baby Jesus wasn’t gonna save me by about, age 3.
When babies have to come to terms with their own demise something is wrong.
I didn’t care what people believed until the rise of Christofascism in my country, and now it seems pretty important.
Must be nice. I haven’t been a Christian in twenty years and I’ll probably be afraid of hell for the rest of my life.
100%. I don’t believe in this God, but if I did, it’d be like believing in Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos, or some other Lovecraftian god. It’s a being of unimaginable cruelty and sadism, according to the stories.
And that’s before you get to Job.
I’m a confirmed Presbyterian. The morning of my confirmation–Easter Sunday when I was thirteen–I started to itch, and by the afternoon had come down with a terrific case of chicken pox that laid me up for all of Spring Break.
It was a clear message from God that I shouldn’t believe in Him, and I took it to heart.
I response to the questions in the thread title, I feel called upon to point out that neither demons nor sin are real things.
So, no and no.
But, did demons call upon you to point that out? 
Pbbbbt! 
The natural next question is whether this god concept is a thinking entity and whether it does anything. If not, why should anyone care?
If not, you’ve just renamed something “God”.
Panentheism has been a theological concept for a while. Paul Tillich sold a lot of books during his lifetime, so plenty of people did/do care. As to why anyone else should, I dunno. I don’t care if they care or not. It’s the belief in the Christian Nationalist God that concerns me.
I can see why people think this. God belief is so ingrained in many people this is a way of keeping it without having to say you believe in nonsense. Kind of like deism.
And it would be a much better world if all god believers were deists or pantheists. No argument there.
I believe, or at least feel a psychological need to believe, that there are some things that are objectively immoral. That if Hitler won the war and the vast majority of living people agreed with his goals and methods, it would still be evil. That slavery was wrong even when society accepted it. That morality is not completely flexible to popular opinion. There is Right and Wrong in addition to tons of grey.
To me that implies something universal beyond us to underpin it. I don’t have to understand what that something is. That belief does not imply to me any entity that thinks in some anthropomorphic manner let alone cares or intervenes. No afterlife implied. My imaging is more along the lines of Spinoza’s pantheism than anything else.
The alternative to me is nihilism, and even if that made rational sense to me my functional and psychological well being rejects it
Doesn’t the fact of satisfied Nazis, centuries of slavery, and a very long list of horrors inflicted on “humans” by other humans show that everything is subjectively immoral? If history tells us anything it’s that the rules are only for the ingroup and the outgroup is fair game.
I agree that there’s a profound psychological need to believe that there is an objective morality, but any glimmer of a hint that there is one comes only from ourselves.
Death: You think so? Then take the Universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet... you try to act as if there is some ideal order in the world. As if there is some... some rightness in the Universe by which it may be judged. Susan: But people have got to believe that, or what's the point? Death: You need to believe in things that aren't true, how else can they become?Or it’s just human biology and psychology. Which isn’t literally objective and universal, but until we encounter alien intelligence might as well be.
As well, logical consistency is objective, and lots of what gets labeled “evil” is neither consistent nor followed consistency; just a set of arbitrary rules set up to enable bad behavior and ignored when inconvenient. One of the more common features of “principles” that tyrannical, cruel or exploitive people claim to follow is that most of the time those supposed principles are abandoned the instant they, personally are on the wrong end of them. Which demonstrates they were never a moral system at all in the first place, just excuses.
Also, I think people get too caught up on labels. You can call a pair of opposed moral outlooks “Good and Evil” or “System A and System B”, but that won’t change what they are, just the label.
No. It proves that what is subjectively moral and immoral, beliefs about morality, can and do change; not that morality itself does.
And you can choose to accept that as your basic postulate, but that is what it is. The existence or non- existence of some objective moral reality, independent of any specific cultural moment’s belief about it, is an assumption we choose to accept one way or the other.
One set of postulates logically leads to nihilism: there is no Right and Wrong, just arbitrary teams; there is no meaning; there is no moral reason to reduce suffering in others at any scale, to make sacrifice for a greater good. We just delude ourselves that there is. No meaning in our lives other than arbitrary delusions of meaning shared by our tribe. Reality is in that system a meaningless void.
The other implicitly underpins how all but a few of us actually live our lives, even as we disagree about what the objective morality reality is.
I actually am not so sure that I am capable of making a choice between the two? I am hardwired as a human to accept that postulate. The “profound psychological need to believe that there is an objective morality” is that strong.
I end up coming to the same place I get to in the tiresome Free Will debates: Free Will and an objective morality may both be illusions, but they are necessary illusions. Human consciousness and society requires them both. I accept that I accept that.
Which was a longwinded way to answer why I personally care about the existence something that isn’t “a thinking entity” in any sense that is within our understanding, and that doesn’t do anything. A bit off from “demons” but related to “sin” anyway.
No; belief in the existence of an “objective morality” generally just means that people either declare their personal opinion to be “objective”, or reject being moral as being good because they constantly see awful things declared to be moral. It’s either treated as a hammer used to smash other people into compliance, rejected, or “gamed” in some fashion. Happens in real life, happens in fiction, happens in discussions about real life and fiction.
People don’t actually want objective morality, unless it agrees with their personal opinion in either way. But that’s largely the result of the desire for a weapon, and ignoring what “objective” even means. “Objective” means our desires, preferences and needs are irrelevant, so “objective morality” might well actually be “the Nazis are good because they killed lots of innocent people, which is an Objectively Moral act”. You can’t expect objective morality to be any more benevolent to humanity than gravity is.
Which is why I consider the idea not only nonsensical, but undesirable. Objective morality leads to a world where being good is being immoral.
And yet the statement above implies belief in the idea, to my read. Unless each of those value words, “undesirable”, “good”, “immoral”, were meant to be in quotes as things that don’t really exist other than arbitrary fantasies that individuals create, or at least adopt, to serve as “weapons” of our own “desires, preferences and needs.”
I get that you intellectually believe such. I doubt that your brain actually behaves in a manner consistent with that intellectual belief.
Keeping the focus on @Voyager ’s question of why anyone should care, why have a belief in there being something, any spirituality, any belief in actual Right and Wrong, if it does not imply an entity that thinks and that doesn’t do anything - because such helps many of us experience more meaning to our existence, even if we are confused as to what that meaning may be - because some basic shared self-evident postulates of values underpin our existence as social creatures. The belief has utility.
But morality is nothing more than a generally accepted set of beliefs.
Our wants and needs are what define morality, yes; and are what makes the concept meaningful and useful. As opposed to “objective morality”, which we have no reason to assume would be desirable or human-friendly at all. Or moral in the first place, by human standards.