Why is God considered cruel and malicious? Maybe God simply observes, as opposed to intervening?
I watched David Attenborough on TV observing a lion hunting and killing a gazelle. Is David Attenborough a cruel malicious bastard for not doing anything about it?
Maybe God has put mechanisms into place which mean that after we die, we reap what we sow.. and not necessarily an eternity in a lake of fire, perhaps it’s more like “you created the mess, now you sort it out”?
What is it exactly that we expect from God? He created the entire bloody Universe, and it all ticks along very nicely indeed. What more do we want from Him?
Here’s another idea. I call it the universal basic reward (UBR) problem. Briefly stated, unless there are levels of heaven, a person who has suffered exponentially more than someone else would find themselves being given the same reward as someone who never so much as sprained an ankle their entire lives on erf. This can’t possibly be right.
On the other hand, if there are levels of heaven, there can be no real communion between heaven’s occupants. It would be the same as it is on erf. There are people here, going to heaven or not, that i absolutely never want to be around. I can even imagine meeting them in heaven… like that happy couple that lives next door and smiles too much. There will be billions of souls like this in heaven. Just as shallow, superficial, and inexperienced as they were on erf.
David Attenborough didn’t create the world where the gazelle must die against it’s will in order to be good for the lion. David Attenborough is simply a human thrown into the world, therefore, Attenborough doesn’t bear primal responsibility for what happens in the world. And stopping a lion from getting food by killing a gazelle favors the gazelle but is cruel to the lion. It is a moral dilemma for him. A person is not accountable for a moral dilemma.
However, if God created all that is, then God is accountable for all that is, the good and the bad. Thus God bears responsibility for what happens. David Attenborough does not in the circumstances of the lion and gazelle.
If God is indifferent, then God is not evil, but God is not Benevolent either. However, if God sends people to hell for no other crime than being an “unbeliever” then that seems to tilt things toward malevolence to me. It’s basically, kiss my hand or die, something an evil tyrant would demand of his or her serfs.
“Maybe God has put mechanisms into place which mean that after we die, we reap what we sow.”
A non-starter. God sowed everything, and freewill is impossible.
This is why i say a) god is Spinoza’s god, b) there is no god or energy monsters, or c) there is only an energy monster. What there certainly is not is a single intelligent benevolent anthropomorphic creator. That’s just unmitigated nonsense.
The last will be first, and vice versa. You have more of the eternal if you ask for more, and if you share none of it, even what you think you have is given to others who will share it. Starts here, now. Some who think they are “the haves” — have not. Some you think “have not” — have more than enough.
God created everything, all matter, all life. Then He just left it all to take care of itself.
Maybe David A was a bad example, I’ll give you that, but just as he has no responsibility for the gazelle, God has no responsibility for us. That’s why we have free will, so He can go off and do other things without having to babysit.
I agree with everything you said, apart from the freewill part. I have a thousand choices of what I want to spend my day doing, and it’s completely up to me. I can be kind, or I can be cruel. Where is my lack of free will?
So if God is an indifferent zoo keeper, then what difference would it make to God if we worship him or not? Maybe God doesn’t care if we worship him, the same as he doesn’t care if suffering befalls some of his creations.
“What is it exactly that we expect from God? He created the entire bloody Universe, and it all ticks along very nicely indeed.”
If one is a sociopath they should like very much what god has created.
But there’s another kind of sociopath higher than that kind, and that’s the sociopath sociopath killer. An apex spiritual predator and militant atheist de sadean in his defiance of god and anything to do with em. Like when some invalid thanks god for getting that bank loan and declares that god is gracious… and yet before he even leaves the bank, thousands of childrens will have died in agony in some country that’s not in his living room.
A thousand years ago, this ignorance was excusable because people were morons who weren’t aware of the scale of suffering on this planet… but today there’s no excuse. To call yourself a Christian is to admit of being an imbecile or a sadist.
I don’t think it does make a difference at all to worship God. As for the zookeeper reference, that’s a bit lacking, Earth is not a zoo, it’s the opposite, nothing is directed beyond what the environment and subsequent evolution to it dictates..
Everything you describe are failings of human society, not God or nature. Do you want God to come and bang the gavel and say “you’re doing it all wrong”?
I’m perfectly happy with what God has created. Humans, on the other hand, often don’t seem to have a clue what they are doing and are simply incapable of stopping to think and reassess.
If God is an indifferent observer, then maybe you are right. God is not a “zoo keeper”. At least zoo keepers seem to care about the animals in the zoo and will intervene if necessary in order to try to make zoo life as pleasing as possible under the circumstances. I can’t say I see evidence of God intervening to help anything that suffers in this world. Suffering still happens.
Fuck man… you’re a philosophy newb. I’m not criticizing or insulting you, of course, but this makes things incredibly difficult. It’s like the steak scene in the Matrix. Do I explain to you that you have no freewill or let you continue believing you do? What if you crack like the cat-people here when you discover that you have no freewill? I don’t want that burden, bro. Maybe later.
Why “the last will be first” jazz doesn’t fly… and why god would know that it wouldn’t fly.
Incidentally, the world is such that there are people (capitalists, nation leaders, etc) who encourage people to be modest, humble, obedient so that they can be more easily taken advantage of. God knows this so he would not endorse such meekness and humility. He ‘puts himself in our shoes’ and finds himself laughing at the demands of his own religion.
I can knock em down as fast as you put em up, Itchy. Please believe me and spare yourself the horror.
“Maybe I am a newb, but if you want to disprove my logic, then provide your own.”
I wouldn’t tell you anything that hasn’t already been said by determinists. I will tell you this, though… all that really matters at the end of this 2,500 year old debate.
Neither determinism nor freewill are verifiable theories because causality is not an empirical phenomenon. We simply infer that it happens when we experience contiguity in events.
Now what. Where does the philosopher take his stand on the matter. Well, two immediate nails in freewill’s coffin are the impossibility of freewill for creatures created by a creator that can’t be wrong or mistaken about what it knows (I’ll have to explain this) theory and the problem of ontologically distinct substances interacting causally in the material world (how Descartes soul sits in the pituitary gland and drives the body) theory. So, with god or with a soul, there are major problems with accounting for freewill.
In the end, the parsimonious thing to do is to assume, very strongly, that we, like the other material things in the world, move about and do things because of causally sufficient antecedent conditions. Searle gives the example of a bridge. It collapses, and because we know everything about the bridge, the aged weakening of the beams, the bay that it’s built over, etc., we can tell you a story about why the bridge had to collapse under those circumstances. We have to assume nothing is different about a human being. If we could observe all the conditions under which a person makes a decision, we can tell you why he was going to make that decision, just like we can tell you why the bridge will collapse unless x, y and z are different.
Therefore, “going to hell” means being excluded, ostracized, rejected from the collective…a death sentence for a social species…and before death a period of extreme psychological and physical suffering. Being excluded means you cannot pass on your genes…..the future is denied to you.
And what does it mean to “live forever”?
It is to be recalled into memory. It is to be reproduced.
God doesn’t need to direct evil. Evil is built into the world. No human causes an earthquake or volcanic eruption. And everything in this world gets nourishment from the demise of some living being out there. Just by eating, we humans partake in the destruction and suffering of living beings. Just by existing, we pollute and destroy habitats, including our own. Just by defending ourselves against invaders, we must kill some innocents who are not responsible for the decisions their leaders make to invade us. There are ethical dilemmas where we must do evil in order to prevent greater evil.
