How come people that consider themselves monotheists always describe a benevolent God?
I’m not stating an opinion here, just a question from evidence that doesn’t seem to follow logically.
In all the major Middle-Eastern religions, scripture has God telling people to do horrible things to complete innocents. In everyday life, we are continually tormented, from not getting a date in high school through having your legs fall asleep when you sit on the floor to being killed horribly. God is commonly supposed to condemn people forever for making decisions they have no actual information about.
If we are intended to all be one big, happy family in some sort of paradise, why not just put us all there? Why would someone Good bother with all this in-between crap?
I’m not really looking for answers to the above things, because I know that there’s probably a Chick publication for every one, plus whatever the other religions’ wacko arms have put out. I’m looking for more a sociological reason for this obvious fallacy.
If there’s one creator God in charge of everything, from what I see, s/he’s either not omnibenevolent or not omnipotent or both.
I guess my question is not Is God Good but more along the lines of Why do we say that God is Good despite all available evidence?
God is simply defined as a being that is benevolent: that is, God defines what is meant by “benevolent”, and is essentially synonymous with benevolence.
Therefore, anything that God does, is benevolent.
This requires that there be no additional features of the definition of “benevolence”, because otherwise, there could be a contradiction.
God was defined as being that which is “good”. It’s a circular thought process.
(and, at least my handle is shorter) (you’re welcome) 
We can always just construct a synonym for something without problems. “Things that are red? I’ll now refer to them as glubflordar.” We just create an interchangable term.
Problems arise when we assert that a particular thing shares a relationship with other particular things.
For example, I can say that all God’s actions are ‘glubflordar’ if the word has no other definition. ‘Glubflordar’ just means “a thing that God does”, so it’s necessarily true. If ‘glubflordar’ means “unfair to invisible pink unicorns”, then I’m making a claim about the universe that may or may not be correct.
The “infinite power and infinite cruelty” god-concept is out there. It tends not to do too well though, possibily because it’s depressing as Hell to ponder the existance of an all-powerful sadist.
That’s both circular and doesn’t help. Of course there’a a contradiction, That’s what I’m wondering about.
Let me ask again: How come we call a creator God benevolent when several observable phenomena of creation aren’t?
I must need sleep. That made sense.
However, you’re essentially adding to the reason for my question and not helping to answer it.
If God’s actions are glubflordar, but the identical glubflordar actions of anyone else are NOT glubflordar, then glubflordar doesn’t mean…
oh, damn…
The words good and benevolent mean good and benevolent when applied to good and benevolent deeds done by people, but God is called Good and benevolent even when God obviously isn’t.
This is why I specified monotheism.
HennaDancer:
Stop me when I’m wrong.
You have a definition of what it means to be ‘benevolent’ and ‘good’, yes? And this definition involves the world being in some state or condition, yes? And you see that the world often isn’t in the state or condition that would be considered ‘benevolent’ or ‘good’, yes?
A person who defines ‘benevolence’ as being “whatever God does” considers the world to be genuinely good and benevolent. If aspects of the world seem wrong or bad to them, they simply conclude that they don’t understand enough about God to know why those things are actually benevolent.
To such a person, there is no contradiction between their core beliefs and what they observe, because their beliefs alter the way they perceive the world. By their standards, they are correct.
The problem is that the word they use to describe a property of God is one with a generally accepted meaning and interpretation. I think your issue revolves around your recognition that the generally accepted meaning contradicts the evidence of God’s actions.
People use the word in a way that’s totally different from the way you do. There’s no way to argue with them, because no communication is truly possible.
[sigh]
I suspect that this is a question that troubles everyone who believes in God, as I do. (And I should note here, FYI, that I am not a Christian in the Chick-tract-handing-out sense. Indeed, among the Chick-tract-hander-outers I am no Christian at all, since I’m Roman Catholic. Still, the question is an interesting one, and though I don’t have a definitive answer to it I’ll jump in anyway.)
I agree that the “anything that God does is defined as benevolent” argument is circular and not very helpful. It’s also tempting to simply say “The Lord works in mysterious ways” and leave it at that, but that’s not really useful either, unfortunately.
C.S. Lewis answers this question with another: how do you come by your definition of goodness and justice? By saying that the world is cruel and unjust, don’t you compare it to an ideal, instinctively felt if never actually perceived, that the world should be just and good? And where do you come by that instinctive sense that the world could be good, but is not? As Lewis puts it in Mere Christianity (1943), "A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. " We feel that the world is unjust because we know that injustice is wrong. How do we know that?
One view is that the world was once good and has somehow gone wrong, but still retains the memory of what it means to be good. Another is that the world is meaningless and that the things that happen are random. Both views are defensible (though I subscribe to the former). But the view that the world was created to be cruel and unjust by a cruel and unjust god doesn’t make sense; for how then would we know that it is cruel and unjust?
(Upon preview: I find it interesting that The Vorlon Ambassador’s Aide and I both started at the same place - definitions of “good” - and end with different conclusions. I hope I am not as impossible to communicate with as he predicts.)
I can’t, that actually does make sense. Wow, that’s pathetic. So, people think that for example God benevolently and, er, good-ly rammed two planes into the World Trade Center? When bad things happen, it’s not bad, we just don’t see the good in it?
EEEURGH
Not at all difficult to communicate with. C.S. Lewis… It just so happens that this 29 year-old mother of 2 occasionally closes her eyes as she walks through a doorway just in case it should happen to open into Narnia at that moment. But back on topic:
We define Goodness as that which makes us content and safe and loved and occasionally delighted. We define benevolence as a wish and action for good things to happen to others.
As a child, you learn at just a few weeks that if you smile, people will smile back. If people are smiling, they will feed you or change your diaper faster and more gently, and are more likely to play with you. Later, you learn that by smiling, you can take a grumpy person (rough and preoccupied) and turn them into a friendly person (gentle and playful). In an ideal world where a child is brought up with love and reasonable parenting. a child learns that by giving goodness, he can receive goodness. Later in life, because doing good is associated with receiving good and therefore happy feelings, he may feel happiness at merely doing good, even before or without the receiving from other sources. This is benevolence, the wish and action of doing Good to other people. You don’t need anything but a relatively normal childhood to recognize goodness and benevolence. You feel that the world could be good but is not because it once was, even if as far back as in Mama’s arms.
There are of course kids who do not get this nurturing childhood, who are abused and injured. The very fact that they exist, or that people exist who would injure the defenseless, is a big factor in my wondering why we call God benevolent, but the fact that even they can recognize Good and become benevolent makes me think it’s hardwired.
Apes socially groom each other. They don’t need the grooming especially, but it’s a way to keep together as a group and bond, plus it feels good to the groomed. Apes who don’t do this nice thing for each other are outcast, less able to survive. Perhaps benevolence is a survival trait?
I don’t buy the racial memory of a paradise lost, but if God were benevolent, and we once were creations in paradise, we’d still be there.
Well, sure. The Gnostics believed (among many, many other things) that the “god” of the Old Testament was actually Satan. Or does the God/Satan duality count as polytheism, to you?
I think if one God has all the power and the other one has limits, it’s monotheism with supernatural accessories. If you have two or three equally powerful Gods, no matter what you call them, it’s no longer monotheism.
Many of the actions of the Old Testament God seem downright evil to outsiders. There’s the famous bashing babies’ heads against walls and raping all women and girls incident.
Of course, then we have Allah telling Muhammad to kill everyone down to the youngest baby in a tribe because the tribal leaders had broken a mutual defense pact. Only did that once, but still, hardly benevolent.
Remember when we see something printed or hear someone say something about what God does or did, it is only the opinion of the writer. God is good, kind, compassionate and doesn’t condemn people to a firey eternity. God is only Love. This information is found in NDEs, by those who were in His presence.
Love
Leroy
I have a bit of trouble with this argument. Whether we have a benevolent and kind god or a cruel and unjust god, those descriptions only have meaning to us if we understand that there is an opposite-- or at least different-- state. Therefore a cruel and unjust trickster god would only be able to revel in our misery if he tantalized us with the happiness. If everything was misery without relief we could hardly perceive our own unhappiness.
If I love a dog that wants to have puppies, I’m not going breed her with the bad-tempered male with the teeth that abrade holes in his lips, front feet six inches longer than rear, and no sense of smell. If I (in a sense) create that set of puppies, I am kind and compassionate if I make them genetically sound at birth, then vaccinated, kept with their mom until old enough to leave, and locked away from cars and bad-tempered tom cats. I am loving if I help them learn how to deal with their world and learn from it. I am NOT kind and benevolent if I place the box of puppies next to the road minutes after birth and say I’m giving them free will.
I give literary examples but I am mostly speaking from my own observances.
On what do you base the observation that Gos is love?
Also, what’s an NDEs?
Near Death Experience.
It is a mistake to judge things as they exist in the world. The world that we live in is a world of duality and so we want to judge according to good and evil. God transcends both and even though we are caught in this world, we need to try and see beyond.
[sup]Not really the orthodox Christain view, but I’m not that kind of guy.[/sup]
God doesn’t mess with your life or anyone else’s. He does not place the puppies near the road, and if they are near the road, He does not move them. People have free will to do as they see fit. That is the way we learn here.
Don’t blame God for the bad things or praise Him for the good. But do be thankful for the good.
Love
Leroy