A justification that trumps “reasons of national security” in its opacity, applicability, and potential for abuse. Were I a flawed God (and I assure you I would be)—on an epic and trans-epochal bender, let’s say—you can bet your me-damned life I’d be hauling that one out to excuse every one of my divine fuckups.
[quote=“Thudlow_Boink, post:19, topic:528668”]
According to the Biblical account, God was “upset” in the sense of “very sad,” not in the sense of “pissed off.” If that’s what you’re using for evidence, you’d have an easier time making a case that God was incompetent, or limited in power, than that God was evil, or limited in benevolence.
[/quote/
Sad, angry, what difference does it make? He is said to have wiped out the whole planet. That is evil.
I realize there was Noah, but no others? Everyone was wicked? Why does god have to go and look for decent people? Shouldn’t he know if there are any? Sounds like a spoiled brat who didn’t get his way so he takes his anger out on everthing he can.
I don’t think I’m reading that much into the story, I just may not have phrased my comment particularly well. God is _____ (fill in whatever emotion you like) at his creations. He sends a flood destroying everthing except for his favorite dude and some animals. Still sounds evil to me. Couldn’t he do something less extreme like wipe erase their memories or put them in time out? I’m just glad my parents didn’t react in a similar fashion when we made them sad.
kanicbird, what would be your opinion of me if I told you that I just drowned a puppy and a kitten?
How about a bagful of puppies and kittens?
What about several bagfuls of puppies and kittens?
Would you think bad of me if I drowned thousands of puppies and kittens?
Would I be evil if I drowned almost every single puppy and kitten on Earth?
Would you think everything would be okey dokey if I told you I owned all those puppies and kittens I was drowning?
What if all those puppies and kittens were horribly suffering in a cage with no hope of a cure or release. What if that person was the Lord God almighty who ended the suffering and placed them all in loving homes where they are right now all suckelling from their mothers who adore them.
We’re talking about evil here - which is to say, damaging harm to humans (among other things). It doesn’t matter what perspective you take or what additional information you think we’re not accounting for, it remains the case that the things we percieve as humans are being harmed.
“But people aren’t really being harmed!” some might say. Which is garbage - real harm is observable - in the context that humans exist in anyway.
“But that context isn’t relevent from the larger perspective!” Bingo - this gives you victory…sort of. With this statement, you are saying that all of human experience, including everything we know and experience, is irrelevent to God. You are saying that God’s not evil in killing us because we’re ants to him; nobody cares if you crush an ant so it’s not evil to do so. Of course, the weakness to this is that you’ve just declared that in your opinion slaughtering babies is a-okay; you have in effect declared that nothing that can happen in what we experience in reality can be considered evil. In practical terms you’re saying that god isn’t evil because the word itself is meaningless.
There are several reasons why this argument isn’t going to get you far with most people, starting with their silly stubborn persistence in their belief that it’s evil to kill babies. You might be able to get some traction with people interested in committing genocide, though.
“It’s not evil because God says it’s not evil.” Works for totalitarian dictators, I suppose…
WTF??
Let me put it even simpler for you(and apparently you alone): The “good” God described in the Bible killed most of the wildlife on Earth by drowning them. He could have just made them disappear by snapping his fingers, but he decided to personally drown billions of innocent creatures.
Yes, we can. Power does not equate to morality. And again; being omnipotent makes him worse, not better; it means all the suffering in the universe is by definition unnecessary. Either he doesn’t care, or he simply enjoys the infliction of misery. It’s the Problem of Evil again.
We have his alleged actions against us. We have the state of the world. And again; if he’s omnipotent then knowing that is all the knowledge about him we need to know he isn’t good. His plans, any larger context is unimportant, because being omnipotent means that ALL suffering is unnecessary.
No, it’s your argument that’s silly. Being powerful doesn’t give him the right to declare what is moral and what is not. And being more knowledgeable doesn’t make him morally superior; if he’s evil, that would just make him better at being evil.
I’ve actually heard a Christian respond to someone making the point that babies would have died in the Flood with “They were evil babies!”
I resisted posting to this thread for a while because I have no actual argument to offer. That is, I simply take it as an axiom that God is good, and that anything that says otherwise is not true. Thus, if someone says, “But Bible verse X says that God did Y, and Y is evil,” I just say, “Well, then, Bible verse X must not be true and God really didn’t do Y.” QED.
The thing is, I can’t figure out for the life of me why atheists are the ones who always make that argument. By definition, they must believe that any statement that says “God did Y” is false, because a being that doesn’t exist can’t do anything. And yet, there was a Pit thread recently entitled, “I’m an atheist and even I’m mad at God about (Haiti).” How is that even remotely logical?
Really, guys. I consider myself a Christian and I believe God is good. If you don’t believe he exists, that’s fine. Do I think you’ll go to Hell for that? No, and not even if you quote me the entire Bible. I mean, bringing up the Great Flood to prove that God is evil? On the message board where YECs are routinely crushed beneath the mountain of evidence that proves the theory of evolution? Give me a break.
If you want to argue some ultra-hypothetical position that says, “If everything in the Bible were literally true, then God would be evil,” I’d say, “And if your aunt had testicles, she’d be your uncle.” Tschüs.
If a god exists as described in the bible…then, yes, he is a totally evil son of a bitch.
Because it disproves the tri-omni ( omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent ) God that most believers push. The Problem of Evil. Such a god is simply logically incompatible with the real world, which is why the argument keeps coming up.
From Job, Yahweh’s exact answer is:
- 2 "Who is this that darkens my counsel
with words without knowledge?
3 Brace yourself like a man;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.
4 "Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
5 Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
…
33 Nothing on earth is his equal—
a creature without fear.
34 He looks down on all that are haughty;
he is king over all that are proud."*
Which basically amounts to; shut up, who are you to question me. Elsewhere in Job we get the idea that we should ‘love the surgeon and hate the knife’, that divine acts we would interpret as evil have some far greater divine purpose we cannot even comprehend.
I guess that sounds fair.
As I said, I don’t know what the answer to the Problem of Evil™ is in the real world. However, I do have an answer to it in the universe of Dungeons & Dragons. Enjoy!
Why Bad Things Happen To Good People: A D&D Parable
Once, there was a pious cleric named Jozan who worshipped the sun god Pelor. For many years, he provided spiritual guidance to his small village. Then, one day, Zephron-Ri, lich-lord and cult leader of the demon lord Zuggtmoy, sent a plague of toxic fungus. Jozan did all he could, but in the end, the village was consumed by fungus-infested zombies. The sight of the dead little children – their eye sockets filled with cursed black mildew – filled Jozan’s heart with despair. In desperation, he spent seven days and seven nights in prayer begging Pelor for an answer to a simple question: Why?
As the weakness of starvation overcame him, Jozan found himself in the brilliant presence of his god. Kneeling before him, Jozan asked the question which had been eating away at his heart in much the same way as the fungus ate the eyes of the children:
“Why, O Great Pelor? Why do you allow evil to exist?”
The sun god smiled. “Oh, my son, I know what troubles your heart so. It is indeed terrible what became of your village. But before it finally fell, did you not incinerate many zombies with your solar rays? Did you not smite the cult’s fiendish second-in-command by smashing his head like a melon?”
“Why, yes, O Great Pelor.”
“And in so doing, did you not receive enough experience points to advance to 15th level, as well as a chest of gems worth 20,000 gold?”
“Why, yes, O Great Pelor.”
The deity smiled. “Then, my son, you have answered your own question. If there were no evil in the world, there would be no enemies to fight and no way for anyone to gain power. It would be a world filled with nothing but worthless 1st-level commoners who owned naught but a few rusty farm tools. Eventually, one commoner would covet the farm tools of another. He would smash in the other’s head with a shovel, and, in so doing, would become evil. Then, the other commoners would be forced to smash in his head to defend themselves, and, in so doing, would gain both sets of farm tools and become heroes. And thus, the battle between good and evil is eternal.”
Jozan awoke, his body and soul refreshed. Filled with a newfound sense of faith in the righteousness of his cause, he tracked down Zephron-Ri and used his +1 holy mace of disruption to smash the lich-lord’s undead skull into bone dust. For his heroic deed, he received a vault of treasure worth 55,000 gold pieces, all of which he kept for himself. And thus did righteousness triumph once again – until Jozan was ready for his next level.
Moral: Killing everyone in sight and taking their gold is every D&D character’s gods-given right.
**
Czarcasm** our starting premises are very different, and what you think should be a simple answer using your starting premise actually just shows that you don’t understand the starting premise that I am using, IMHO we do not live in ‘life’, but in death, from the moment we are born, we are dieing (staying away from pre-birth issues). This is the condition of the ‘fallen’ world and why the Lord said to Adam that you will surely die. We all live in this ‘death’, along with our animals, what God wants for us all is eternal life, a restored Garden of Eden, He wanted us to Love and be Loved (God = Love = life). This is what Jesus offers to us. Those who cling to their life in this current form will lose it.
Jesus is eternal, and always was there for anyone who came looking for Him (John 8:58 “I tell you the truth,” Jesus answered, “before Abraham was born, I am!”). Jesus was available to those people, they did not appear to seek Him, and they died, this is part of the plan, only through Jesus can one be saved.
As for the animals, I believe they are either fractal spirits of us, in which case it is the point of use dieing, that they must die, and how we treat animals are a reflection of us, or, very possible, they are also intelligent spiritual beings, but we see them through man’s reality, not the animals, and not God’s. We don’t know what happened to the animals that were in the flood, if they came back as the offsrping, if the flood hurt them at all, or were they removed from our world. Also a related aside I’ve often wondered about bees and the hive mentality, here we see each bee as a creature, but could they be part of a single spirit?
This is pretty close to it. Since the fall of man, we entered into a Satanic system where men feed off of each other (both physically, spiritually, and others like financially) and animals. In many ways we are in a DnD Serrano until we learn that God wants to provide everything we need.
I hope you bring more critical reasoning to the process of buying a car than you do to reading the Bible. Whether it was inspired by God or written by priests with an ulterior motive, it is hardly an unbiased work. Why couldn’t God find a way to save the innocent babies? Why exactly did people many of whom might have even known Adam (check out the dates) turned evil so quickly? Why were the people of earth given no chance to repent, which worked for the city Jonah warned? Do you think the tribes slaughtered by the Hebrews deserved it also?
I’d like to introduce Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov into the discussion.
In Book 5, Chapter 4, Rebellion, Ivan relates to his brother Alyosha his reasons for his atheism or rather agnostsism. I encourage everyone to read it as it’s too substantial to quote here: (Note: my printed copy must be from a different translator and this version just doesn’t seem as forceful, lyrical, and poetic as my copy)
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28054/28054-h/28054-h.html#toc83
Basically, Ivan brings up several stories of children being tortured or abused through no fault of their own, then asks, “Why?”
Is it because they would have been evil? They were never given the choice.
Is it because they pay for their father’s sins? That defies comprehension.
Is it because of free choice? Is this the price we pay for salvation?
He ends by saying that if the price of free choice or salvation is even a single child, then the deal isn’t worth it. The price is too high. “I respectfully return my ticket.”
We are discussing the God of the Bible, not the God of your fervent imagination. This conversation will go much smoother if we deal with one fictional story at a time, thank you very much.
…Which was a complete cop-out on God’s part.
Nevertheless, agnostic here… love the Book of Job.
Oh my, no. It’s not that god is justified in harming humans because he’s bigger, but rather that humans would not be competent to judge god for the apparent harm he does.
Man kills ant. Can the ant say that man is evil? No, because the ant can’t know whether he was killed for fun, accidentally squished, or incidentally bulldozed to make way for a children’s hospital, nor would he be able to comprehend that those sorts of possibilities even exist. It’s not that we’re too small to matter, it’s that we’re too ignorant to have an opinion.
You took that interpretation of what I said and just ran with it, huh?
Anyway, it’s a mistake to suggest that not being able to judge god means not being able to judge humans. A human, even a dictator, is our equal. We have enough information and experience to put the human’s actions into some reasonably helpful context. More important, we know that the human we’re judging can be making a mistake; god can’t.
We both take it as axiomatic that causing harm to humans is evil. It’s possible for us to be wrong about that, but, again, not possible for god. If he says that (or behaves as if) avoiding human suffering tends to be preferable but is secondary to other, more important ideals, then he’s either correct (because he is the arbiter of right and wrong, or because he is omnipotent and thus perfectly able to *distinguish *right from wrong) or he’s lying.
Only if there’s no virtue to intermittent suffering.