I’ve read through as much as I could of this thread and have to go to work.
Judeo-Christian type God would have to be evil.
Captain Amazing
“If there’s something that faultlessly chooses x, whatever x is, than it doesn’t have a free choice. It’s programmed to choose x.”
Isn’t God is ‘all-knowing’? Let’s say he didn’t know what we would do, why did he fail with us if he’s perfect… instead we’re told we’re the failures? Why does he have the right to hold that against us? Whatever you think “free will” is, I think it’s just all variables and outcomes, cause and effect.
God would know. Lets say he didn’t want to know, he’s our creator, if we failed, he failed… but that’s just one example. God wouldn’t torcher those who are much less fort us, here on Earth, or LET us humans be torchered in to the degree that they are. Some people have *lived *hell, and it’s not right by any standard. Yeah, God’s plan my ass. If Judeo-Christian God is real, he’s a damn bully.
I’m not saying this out of spite, I just simply feel bad for those who let him boss them around. Look at what he did Job. What a dick?
Good and Evil are subjective terms. We all assume we know what is good and what is evil, or what is right and what is wrong. Yet we all have varying moral guidelines for what makes something good or evil. To assume our perception of something is the only valid one is arrogant and ignorant all at the same time.
I’m confused when Athiests use the Bible as proof that God is evil when they don’t believe in God or the Bible. It seems like a way to tear down others beliefs and just trap them in a strawman argument. There’s no real effort for understanding or discussion taking place when that happens imo.
We assume that things that are painful are “bad” or “evil,” but what if those type of events allow for people to become better, stronger, wiser, smarter, etc? Every tragedy presents people an option to get bitter, or better. If everything was sunshine, gumdrops, and lollipops all the time, when do we have a chance to push ourselves to rise above and become better people for it? Which leads me to…
You can’t have good without bad. We live in a bi-polar universe, where opposing forces balance out. If everything was “good” all the time, we’d have no understanding of the word “good.” There would be no bad. We’d just be robots doing as we’re told. If we have free will and we are just divinely smitten when we fuck up too much, what was the point of giving us free will (then God really would be a vindictive asshole). Freedom of choice means freedom to fail, freedom to make poor choices, freedom to live your life and deal with the consequences. Sometimes shit happens to everyone. Saying bad things disprove a God or prove God to be evil are infantile at best. It’s more complex an issue than that.
Maybe God is omniscient enough to realize that if we are spoonfed everything, we’ll turn into a bunch of lazy slobs who have no motivation to improve ourselves. Maybe that’s the purpose of life - to leave it a better person and make the world better for having you in it.
To clarify - I’m not a Christian. I do believe in a concept that could be called “God,” but please don’t assume you know what that means without asking me about my beliefs on specific things.
It’s no different to using the Lord of the Rings to argue that Sauron is evil. People refer to fictional beings as evil all the time.
No, it’s not. Most believers claim that God is omnipotent; an omnipotent God wouldn’t have to use any intermediate steps. It wouldn’t have to be indirect. It wouldn’t have to torture us into being better, it would simply make us that way from the start. Unless the point is not to make us better, but simply to torture us.
And there is simply too much suffering in the world that does anything but make us better. In what way is someone driven insane by what they have suffered better?
Let me end your confusion concerning this matter.
As an atheist(no need to capitalize-we aren’t really an organized sect or group), I believe the character “God” that is described in that popular semi-fictional book, The Bible, is an evil character.
Everything clear now?
Thanks for that. I understand what you’re saying now. Interesting to think of God as the villain. Kind of Luciferian (not satan-worship).
I kind of see the Christian text as an evolution of a people’s understanding of God (not the only one, simply one path/perspective). The ancients attributed everything to God, and in their primitive understanding of life, the universe and everything, assumed God was like them - egotistical, vain, and demanding of worship.
Then the NT shows how we are all God’s children (children of the universe), and love and forgiveness are true spiritual virtues (as opposed to the vengeful and wrathful God the ancients perceived). Unfortunately, humans got ahold of a truly uplifting and inspiring message of personal responsibility and committment to making yourself and the world better, and turned it into religion (as usual).
So yeah, it’s easy to see God and even his followers as evil when they contradict so much of what their own Gospel preaches.
I just tend to think of it as a flawed perception. My concept of God transcends the rather primitive ideas of “good” and “evil.” It gets way more complicated than that.
As far as I’m concerned, the only “God” I can consider concerning this matter is the one in the Bible, since I am incapable of reading the minds of my fellow humans. Be honest-if you presented the Bible to a society which had never heard of it or Christianity as a work of fiction, how do you think they would describe the character “God”?
Depends on which parts they don’t like and ignore ba-dum-chink
Seriously though, yeah you make a good point. Again though, next time someone says something about Muslims wanting to “kill the infidels” and you show them the parts of the Bible where their god says the same thing, they ignore it, or have an explanation as to why it is “different.”
The major downfall of all religions is they all piously believe they have 100% of the Absolute Truth (except some of the more enlightened groups/individuals). They’re all hypocritical in some way or another because of human influence/government corruption.
Interestingly, core virtues, ideals, and values are remarkably similar (despite the varying levels of internal contradiction). I tend to think that what many find to be true over time can be seen as true (evolution for example, or gravity).
Whatever this “God” thing is all about, I think we’re still evolving our understanding of it collectively, and it’s too soon to assume “he” is just like a bunch of moldy old books say “he” is.
Fair enough, but I’d like to know any universe where god must directly hurt us. God may certainly not give a crap about us, but given his supposed powers, I’d put that kind of god in the evil camp. In what moral universe did every baby who died in the tsunami or the earthquake have to die?
The argument: God is good, so everything god does is good by definition, and if what God does seems evil, see the first definition is not very convincing.
We use the Bible as a basis for discussion about that particular brand of God. We don’t use it to show Krishna or Odin does not exist. The real strawman would be to invent a definition of god not believed in by any religion and disprove that. It is true that most Christians don’t really believe in the God defined by the Bible also, and it is tough to pin them down on what they do believe.
BTW, it is interesting to read the NT with the perspective that Satan was actually the good guy, who lost. Besides tempting Jesus and convincing Judas to betray Jesus (which was necessary for salvation) what has he done wrong? The supposed good God drowned the entire world save 8 and ordered various massacres - and that is not even counting natural disasters. They say Hell is horrible, but in the Dantean Hell Satan is trapped in ice in the center, so God must have designed and built the place. Why would Satan want to torture his allies, away? The Shavian devil seems much more plausible to me.
So if a child dies of SIDS and God’s purpose for that seemingly meaningless death is to make the parents somehow “stronger” or “wiser” as a result, what of the child his/herself? Are they collateral damage to the master design that dictates that the parents “grow”? Is it just another variation of the saying that you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs? Or more accurately, that the ends justify the means?
According to the Bible and the Judeo-Christian tradition generally, humanity is made physically, morally, and intellectually in the image of God. Even in our limited and flawed state, we understand that kidnapping or killing someone’s loved one may make them stronger somehow theoretically, but doing so for this purpose would be wrong. If we can’t justify it through our morality or our reason, both of which are supposedly based on God’s own, then it appears increasingly likely that there is no justification.
If you can’t have good without bad, then how can someone be judged for being “bad” if that person or their behavior is necessary (and indeed, part and parcel according to your reasoning) for having “good” around?
One could question :Why a God would regret creating humans,(when he knew they were faulty) then destroy the entire earth(according to the Bible) and keep a few humans and a few animals alive in a Ark, packed together for nearly a year. Since all plant life would have also been destroyed,and many innocent babies and mentally challenged people.
If he knows all things, created all things as is recorded in the Bible then he didn’t act like a loving father. It would seem to me a being of such high intellect could have found a better way to teach people than to kill everything on earth except some sea life! Why didn’t he start over when he knew Adam and Eve were faulty,instead of punishing their offspring? We would put such a human father in jail. Doesn’t God rate a higher standard? Beating a child for a minor fault that he hasn’t been told about( or is not responsible for) is not a fair punishment. It is like punishing someone because they haven’t the ability to do something. It doesn’t tell if a God exists or not, but does dispute the idea of a loving ,fairminded,kind being!
Come to think of it, this sort of argument seems to amount to a claim that “good” is worthless. If it was something actually worthwhile, it would still be valuable with or without “bad”. I don’t need to alternate eating tasty food with sewage in order to enjoy a nice dinner. This argument seems to be defining “good” as merely the occasional absence of evil. It assumes that things are defined by being under attack, which makes no sense.
I think it’s defining “good” as above the baseline, and “bad” as below the baseline. If there’s a world where all the food out there is “tasty”, then the idea of food tasting good becomes meaningless to the people of that world. The food would just taste like normal food to them, even if, to you, coming from our world, it would be the best tasting food in the world.
I see no reason to buy that. Pleasure is a thing of itself; a good taste would be a good taste no matter your previous experience. And even if I’m wrong about real-world humans, an omnipotent could certainly create a species for which is WAS true.
It would be a good taste, but you wouldn’t know it was a good taste, because good taste is the only taste you know. And we’re talking about the God of the bible here, who’s obviously not omnipotent. The God of the bible can’t even stop iron chariots.
I disagree; it would be pleasant, which is what makes it good. They probably wouldn’t bother to come up with separate words for a good and bad taste; but the taste would still be good.
I was talking about God as is normally worshipped. The God of the Bible is neither omnipotent or good; the “Problem of Evil” doesn’t apply there.
But Godzilla can; obviously he is more worthy of worship.
X can only be defined by the boundaries between itself and not-X; “on” is a nonsensical concept without a corresponding “off,” “pretty” is useless without “ugly,” etc. Just theoretically this seems beyond dispute, but it’s also clear experientially. If I have an excruciating burn on my arm – say an 8 out of 10 on the pain scale – and I then apply a salve that brings the pain down to a 2 out of 10, I will experience the new level of pain as a great relief, i.e., as a pleasure.
Now supposedly it would be possible for an omnipotent god to create species which don’t experience pleasure/suffering in this way, either because they have no positive or negative reactions to anything, or because they experience every minute of every day as being better than the one that preceded it. We would prefer this latter scenario, but would it necessarily be morally preferable by a standard other than what we would wish for ourselves? An omniscient god could believe, for example, that there was inherent moral and/or aesthetic value to overcoming hardship and achieving in spite of suffering, and that the value of human pleasure was not as significant. If he were to believe such a thing, we should expect him to be correct.
See above. There could theoretically be a moral universe in which it is preferable that we *not *experience life as an unending series of greater pleasures. Once you introduce pains into life, their apparent magnitude is not as important as it might first seem.
Things could be much worse than they are. I’m sure we could both imagine much more horrible things than baby-killing earthquakes which do not exist in this world; alternately humans could be wired differently, so that we were in endlessly increasing state of emotional despair. Just as no one here is giving a hypothetical god credit for sparing us a worse state of affairs than actually exists, if there were no baby-killing tsunamis or the like, we would not be grateful for being spared them. Rather, we would just be upset about the next worst thing.
Perhaps, but if we posit that there is in fact a god, then what you or I find convincing about a particular moral argument is insignificant compared to what god finds convincing.
But people wouldn’t know what “pleasant” meant. To a starving person, a moldy piece of bread tastes good. To you or I, it wouldn’t.
I’d say the God of the Bible is good, but he’s not just omnipotent. He frees the Jews from slavery in Egypt, leads them to Canaan, and helps them take the land from the inhabitants. He gives them a code of laws, and as long as they follow them, he gives them prosperity and victory over their enemies. Sounds good to me.
