• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Is God evil?

Ali said:
Let's not fool ourselve but let's strive for complete obedience in the Lord.
If you want to be a complete fool thats fine with me, but not with God.
Click to expand...

If god wants me to do something, all he has to do is ask.
Until he says otherwise, I'll assume he's OK with how I'm living my life and my current (lack of) beliefs.

Did god tell you personally he's not OK with fools, or are you just guessing?
 
Ali said:
You make science an excuse for foolishness; you confuse yourself with what science has to offer, since you (or anyone else) cannot get very far in it.
Click to expand...
Clinging to what amounts to a 4 leaf clover and calling me a fool isn't very compelling.
 
Brian-M said:
If god wants me to do something, all he has to do is ask.
Until he says otherwise, I'll assume he's OK with how I'm living my life and my current (lack of) beliefs.

Did god tell you personally he's not OK with fools, or are you just guessing?
Click to expand...

Brian, no-one's told me anything about fools, in fact I would prefer to be a fool rather than be physically abusive to anyone who is holy.
 
Well, the question doesn't really make any sense since a "God" would be the final arbiter of what is good and what is evil. Even if God did the most awful things we can conceive of - it still wouldn't be evil because God defines what is good and evil. In a God governed universe, good and evil are thing that come from God and God determines what is good and evil.
 
Ali said:
Brian, no-one's told me anything about fools, in fact I would prefer to be a fool rather than be physically abusive to anyone who is holy.
Click to expand...
"Physically abusive"? What? What are you talking about?

Who is being physically abusive?
 
billydkid said:
Well, the question doesn't really make any sense since a "God" would be the final arbiter of what is good and what is evil. Even if God did the most awful things we can conceive of - it still wouldn't be evil because God defines what is good and evil. In a God governed universe, good and evil are thing that come from God and God determines what is good and evil.
Click to expand...
Ok, I'll play that game: Sounds fun. Is god's morality logically consistent?
 
Ali said:
Brian, no-one's told me anything about fools, in fact I would prefer to be a fool rather than be physically abusive to anyone who is holy.
Click to expand...

I'm assuming then that you're not physically abusive to any holy people.
 
billydkid said:
Well, the question doesn't really make any sense since a "God" would be the final arbiter of what is good and what is evil. Even if God did the most awful things we can conceive of - it still wouldn't be evil because God defines what is good and evil. In a God governed universe, good and evil are thing that come from God and God determines what is good and evil.
Click to expand...


I'm a blind person; all I see is what mankind does and says, and what I find is not very nice. :o
Tell me something on the contrary: I'm afraid you can't.
 
RandFan said:
"Physically abusive"? What? What are you talking about?

Who is being physically abusive?
Click to expand...

You know, it's like what Relic claimed in this thread. When his beliefs were mocked, he said he was being persecuted. When his persecution complex was mocked, he said I was... what was that word? Oh yeah, "demonic" for making light of Christians who have been slaughtered. So apparently mocking Christian beliefs with words is the same as physically killing people.

Hey, it's about as logical as the rest of their claims. :rolleyes:
 
Silentknight said:
You know, it's like what Relic claimed in this thread. When his beliefs were mocked, he said he was being persecuted. When his persecution complex was mocked, he said I was... what was that word? Oh yeah, "demonic" for making light of Christians who have been slaughtered. So apparently mocking Christian beliefs with words is the same as physically killing people.

Hey, it's about as logical as the rest of their claims. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...
:)
 
Ali said:
I'm a blind person; all I see is what mankind does and says, and what I find is not very nice. :o
Tell me something on the contrary: I'm afraid you can't.
Click to expand...
Would you listen?

"...still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest" --Paul Simon

"For the time shall be when they will not bear sound teaching; but according to their own lusts will heap up to themselves teachers, having an itching ear" --2 Timothy 4:3

"If all you have is evil in your heart then all you will see is evil in the world." --My Mom

Perhaps the problem lies with you.
 
RandFan said:
Ok, I'll play that game: Sounds fun. Is god's morality logically consistent?
Click to expand...
You are sort of making my point - since God is God morality is whatever he says it is. It may or may not be logically consistent and we can see for the his supposed word that it is not. Isn't that the lesson of Job - that you have no business questioning God whatever he does, however capricious or arbitrary or cruel from our perspective since he is God and determines what is moral and immoral. I'm not sure if I am being clear.

If there were a God, everything in the universe would be of God and whatever God's will is would be the morally correct thing. Implicit in the idea of God is the idea that he is the sole judge of what is moral and our ideas about morality amount to nothing. Now, I believe there is no God and have never heard and theory of God that even makes any sense. I'm just saying that if there were a God that morality would consist of obedience to him and nothing else. We might look at the slaughtering of innocent children as horrendously immoral, but if it was God's decision to do it it would by definition be the correct and moral thing to do - in a God ruled universe.

This is why it is always a wrong tack to try to discredit God with believers by pointing out his cruelty and capriciousness. From their perspective morality comes from God and if it comes from God anything he does is moral, regardless of whether or not in some early chapters God is saying to butcher infidels or disobedient wives (or whatever) and in some later chapter (of "his word") he says to turn the other cheek. You can point to God's cruelty or inconsistency, but to a believer that means nothing since his ways are beyond our understanding.

The moral of Job, if I understand correctly, is that you have no business questioning God about anything. You role is to obey. To me the only potent argument against God is that he doesn't exist and there is not reason to suppose he exists and not that he is not a just God. If he exists, he is just. Am I not at all sure I understand how pointing out God's awfulness from your perspective is any kind of an argument against him existing. It is only an argument that you disagree with him and are disobedient.
 
Undesired Walrus said:
Consider the following:

God murders every single human being on Earth in a massive flood, including young boys and girls who have not even had the chance to decide if they will obey or rebel.

He then lays down the most horrific laws you can possibly conceive. A child must be killed for slagging off his parents and a women can be stoned to death on her fathers doorstep if not a virgin on her wedding night. Even if we impose the "Different times, different laws" excuse, we have to ask what possible benefit these rules -that make the Taliban look like Rupert the Bear- can bring to society other than misery.

Then his son has the cheek to suggest that we love this genocidal maniac.
Click to expand...
Nothing can make the Taliban look like Rupert - for one thing, he dresses way cooler than them, and his IQ is way higher than theirs!!
 
Of course, Paddington is way cooler than Rupert - and if half the stories of his adventures with Mrs. Brown and Judy are true then..........
 
leon_heller said:
Since the existence of God can neither be proved or disproved, asking if he, she or it is evil is an invalid question.

Leon
Click to expand...


But assuming that God exists does include that he created everything, including her-/him -self plus creating Satan just to tweak some noses.
Okay forget it, it's getting stupid already to even think about it...
 
Maybe God made the world unstable because it was meant to be one big fantasy roleplaying setting.

http://www.nuklearpower.com/daily.php?date=040228

"Who designed this campaign setting? Why would you include four points of such catastrophic weakness that tampering with any of them results in the destruction of the global ecosystem? It makes no sense! A kind and loving creator would never have done this, and a cruel one would simply have made the air out of acid. And it wouldn't have evolved on its own, as there's no advantage to living in a world poised on the brink of annihilation!"

So all the disasters and chaos in the bible aren't God's fault. Adam and Eve tampered with the cosmic keystone, namely the forbidden fruit, thus resulting in the fall of man and the ruin of God's perfect creation. If God were kind and loving, he would never have designed the world with such a delicate tipping point, but if he were downright cruel he would have made the atmosphere corrosive. Therefore God would be more along the lines of a lazy writer. ;)
 
billydkid said:
You are sort of making my point - since God is God morality is whatever he says it is. It may or may not be logically consistent and we can see for the his supposed word that it is not. Isn't that the lesson of Job - that you have no business questioning God whatever he does, however capricious or arbitrary or cruel from our perspective since he is God and determines what is moral and immoral. I'm not sure if I am being clear.

If there were a God, everything in the universe would be of God and whatever God's will is would be the morally correct thing. Implicit in the idea of God is the idea that he is the sole judge of what is moral and our ideas about morality amount to nothing. Now, I believe there is no God and have never heard and theory of God that even makes any sense. I'm just saying that if there were a God that morality would consist of obedience to him and nothing else. We might look at the slaughtering of innocent children as horrendously immoral, but if it was God's decision to do it it would by definition be the correct and moral thing to do - in a God ruled universe.

This is why it is always a wrong tack to try to discredit God with believers by pointing out his cruelty and capriciousness. From their perspective morality comes from God and if it comes from God anything he does is moral, regardless of whether or not in some early chapters God is saying to butcher infidels or disobedient wives (or whatever) and in some later chapter (of "his word") he says to turn the other cheek. You can point to God's cruelty or inconsistency, but to a believer that means nothing since his ways are beyond our understanding.

The moral of Job, if I understand correctly, is that you have no business questioning God about anything. You role is to obey. To me the only potent argument against God is that he doesn't exist and there is not reason to suppose he exists and not that he is not a just God. If he exists, he is just. Am I not at all sure I understand how pointing out God's awfulness from your perspective is any kind of an argument against him existing. It is only an argument that you disagree with him and are disobedient.
Click to expand...
I'm familiar with this perspective. The problem, as I see it, is that if god is really logically inconsistent then nothing matters. Satan and god are the same as is heaven and hell. God's laws are meaningless as are the laws of physics and reality. It's all an arbitrary and capricious game. There's nothing to keep god from rewarding Stalin for killing people and punishing Oscar Schindler for saving others.

Defining god as perfectly merciful and perfectly just and logically inconsistent is the height of nonsense. We might as well accept square circles.

What's the point?

What's important to understand is this kind of reasoning is simply shoehorning contradictory information.

God is just.
God kills innocent children.
God's justice = killing innocent children.

It really doesn't work but if you believe that a geometric shape can be both sqare and circle then you can get it to. Not really but hey, what does logic and reason have to do with anything when it comes to god? When you forgo reason and logic nothing is illogical.

"I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. `When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." --Through The Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll

One more thing, anyone who holds this position has no right to appeal to my reasoning by using logic. I'm sorry that much of the nonsense of the bible was written before Plato and Aristotle and that many Christians are married to a litteral interpretation of the Bible. That's not my problem.
 
Last edited:
Silentknight said:
Maybe God made the world unstable because it was meant to be one big fantasy roleplaying setting.
So all the disasters and chaos in the bible aren't God's fault. Adam and Eve tampered with the cosmic keystone, namely the forbidden fruit, thus resulting in the fall of man and the ruin of God's perfect creation.
Click to expand...
This part of your post, I agree with, the rest of it, depends on the definition of lazy writer.
This is a concept that I have felt was best explained in video game terms, but did not know the exact terminology.
Basically, I believe God created a universe with a built-in possibility of evil rising up, within it.
I think it was necessary, in order for the man (that God put into this universe) to reach his full potential of being god-like.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom