Well you have a point there. However, if he calls this http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/ entertaining, well…you just have to wonder, don’t you?
Hey, I like the occasional first person shooter, and thought that Carmageddon 1 and 2 and Grand Theft Auto 3 and sequels were great games. So I can hardly criticize.
(I’m not omnibenevolent though - especially to things I create.)
That analogy doesn’t work ( and I’ve seen it applied to other fictional superior beings besides God ). We DO suffer; a character in GTA ( or a plant or an insect ) doesn’t. The analogy breaks down when it involves qualities that the lower species ( or whatever ) doesn’t just have less of, but none at all; we are NOT the same to God ( or to the superhuman AIs of Betelgeuse Six ) as bacteria are to us.
Not that I’m changing back to theism (well, deism), but I don’t think your last statement is supportable. If God existed, we might well be no more than bacteria in his/her/its view. The only way to find out would be to ask, which we obviously can’t.
He might think that way, but he’d be wrong. We think, and feel, and suffer; bacteria don’t. Bacteria aren’t just less than us; we have things they don’t have at all, not just in lesser qualities. We can treat bacteria as if their suffering doesn’t matter, because they don’t have any suffering to matter. We can treat them as if their opinions don’t matter, because they have no opinions. And so on. Our pain or consciousness may be inferior to a god’s, but it DOES exist.
Except, of course, that you don’t KNOW that bacteria have no consciousness. Or, for that matter, that I do. You merely infer that. (Not that I would make a different inference regarding bacteria’s sentience of yours.)
My point is not that God exists (I’d say that there is no compelling evidence that God does), bt that, if you posit an eternal, transcendent, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent being, it is pointless to ascribe any moral qualities to it, or at least any morality that is comprehensible to humans.
Well, you guys, anyway. I of course am superior, if evilly so. 
But I don’t believe such a being would have any desire to be worshipped, and I’m more than happy to say that persons who assert such a being should be worshipped are in error. (I won’t say “insane” or “evil” though, as I know non-evil, non-insane theists.)
I agree with the fact that there is no proof that bacteria have no consciousness, and certainly no compelling argument that they don’t feel pain (everying from insects on up certainly does, or they wouldn’t avoid death) - however I disagree with this quoted bit.
By defining a god as omnibenevolent you are ascribing a morality to it - quite specifically the morality that is based in the extremely comprehensible* concept of benevolence. Speculation about a diety that treats us like bugs or computer game characters (like the OT god does) are jabs at the idea of a omnibenevolent god, because such speculated uncaring dieties match up much better with reality than the tri-omni one.
- comprehensible until believers come in and try and twist the definition to make the contradiction go away, anyway.
:smack: :smack: :smack: :smack:
Preview is my friend. I should use it some time. “Omnibeneovolent” was meant to be “omniscient.”
I shan’t argue with the rest of your post, as I tend to agree with it, and anyway you’re contesting a position I only seemed to held because I was distracted by my wife’s perky bosoms while posting.
Cite?
Hey, how come you have hands free to type, then. 
With the change, you’re right. We’ve been talking omnibenevolence here, but without that there is no morality ascribable to god. We might not like the morality he does have, in fact, considering the world, if there is a god his morals are pretty shabby. God is supposed to set morals for us. Russell noted there is a big problem with this. If he can arbitrarily set our morals, he can tell us to go out and rape and kill, and we’d have no reason not to do it. If the morals he does set are within the context of some universal morality which he obeys, then god is just parroting this moral law, even if we are not able to read it.
Der Trhihs point, is, I think, that we as moral humans know that it is wrong to cause sentient beings to suffer. If God does this, he is being immoral by some larger moral law, and does not deserve our respect, however powerful he is. Liberal believers tend to reject any Biblical commands that go against their ingrained moral code, for instance those against homosexuality.
I’ve said before that all moral decisions are atheistic, in the sense that we choose to obey or not obey the various and contradictory moral teachings from religion based on something other than orders from god.
It’s nonsense like this that barely addresses my response that reminds me of why I rarely attempt to have any dialog with you on this subject.
I struggle with the amount of suffering we observe as well. It seems you just had an exchange in which an attempt at creating minimal suffering amounted to stasis.
And this point , left unqualified, is incorrect.
I have a rather overwhelming amount of evidence that they don’t and you do. You don’t find absolute certainty outside of mathematics.
Ah, your standard evasion. You have no good responses, so you merely declare what your opponent says “nonsense” without bothering to explain why.
And I haven’t left it unqualified. But as I and others have pointed out, there’s an IMMENSE amount of suffering in the world, no matter how much you try to pretend that dying in agony over years is some trivial irritation. Your defenses of God sound rather like the sort of parent who beats his child to death for his own good, and says that he had a right because it was his child, to do with as he wished. Since you are fond of parental analogies about god.
As it turns out, No response to you is the good one.
good ones coming up.
That discussion was about zero suffering, not minimal suffering. For humans I don’t think the zero suffering case is either possible or desirable, and many of the conditions of the zero suffering case would cause me to suffer. A lot of that case posited a totally different type of being than us, which is fine, since I requested a possible world, not ours.
Given that God decided to create humans, he can do better.
We don’t? I said moral humans, not sociopaths.
If you are talking about his exchange with me, I do not feel that he successfully made the case that he was even responding to the scenario I presented, or that he presented a compelling argument that either my scenario, or that the scenario he misrepresented as being mine, would lead to stasis.
Even under the differing scenario he presented, the fact that he gave an example of the pinnacle of happiness resembling “happy jellyfish, floating in a warm sea, gobbling up bits of food around, and randomly mating with anything that comes past with no pleasure involved.” (No pleasure? Good lord, his position contradicted itself) does not mean that scenarios where peak happiness involved frenetic activity and constant productivity could not occur.
What about dentists?