Moral consequences of 'test' theodicy
Posted on: February 28, 2012 - 8:20pm
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Moral consequences of 'test' theodicy
Hello there!
When God supposedly allows disasters and sickness, many think He doesn't wrong people because He tests their steadfastness (...not to mention natural calamities are distributed in a "random" and unequal way).
Then, by this logic, you're not a criminal if you torture some persons or deliberatly infect them with sickness.. JUST to test their psychological stamina, no?
Some apologists replied: "Only God has this right. Special pleading? No! Because, being their Creator, He owns them".
Could you tell me what you think of their answer?
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Any answer they give will of course be ridiculous to me. And any reasonable rebuttal from me will be ridiculous them.
I had a similar talk tho, and I said if I owned a dog does that give me the right to play similar games with it. Should I set
him outside in the freezing rain or toss him into a raging river to test or build his endurance. They said "no, you are not god tho" I replied "I am to my dog. Am i not?"
They replied "You did not create your dog-God did". I said "But my dog knows no other god but me." It ended there.
As far as natural disasters go, the best they can do is say that god only set the wheels of nature in motion and is not directly punishing
innocent people. A lame cop-out, but what do you expect from delusional people.
"...but truth is a point of view, and so it is changeable. And to rule by fettering the mind through fear of punishment in another world is just as base as to use force." -Hypatia
Hi OPIE,
God is not a criminal since He is not accountable to man. Since there is nobody higher then Him to respond to He is thus not responsible.
I've been writing a book on this subject for a few years but to dive into the depths of thought would confuse you.
But God does not always throw tornadoes at people. Grant it that He is in control, if there is a tornadoe out in the desert that knocks down a few cactus's well, that tornadoes was decreed and is just the sinful world we live in though of course God is in control.
And some natural disasters are towards people who are wicked to either thwart them for a time or to judge them.
Logically speaking, if God created everything, He can do whatever He wants to that which He created.
The questions are backwards. The question isn't why does God pick on people He's mean like a 3rd grader, the question is if God can do this to entire cities (Amos 6:3) how much more will He do to me If I don't submit to Him.
Because what's gonna happen to you is a lot worse then a few tornadoes destroying some cities. Tornadoes go away, for you, you will have to endure God's punishment for eternity.
Let God be true but every man a liar (Romans 3:4)
Respectfuly,
Jean Chauvin (Jude 3).
[email protected]
A Rational Christian of Intelligence (rare)with a valid and sound justification for my epistemology and a logical refutation for those with logical fallacies and false worldviews upon their normative of thinking in retrospect to objective normative(s). This is only understood via the imago dei in which we all are.
Respectfully,
Jean Chauvin (Jude 3).
Eeew, sounds kinky ! ( don't forget to bring the KY )
Hello,
It's Amos 3:6 not 6:3 that says God brings calamity (evil) on a city.
"...but truth is a point of view, and so it is changeable. And to rule by fettering the mind through fear of punishment in another world is just as base as to use force." -Hypatia
Hi!
He is responsible in the sense that everything that happens in the Universe has been decreed by His free will while being aware of the consequences of His actions.
In case you don't know, even innocent suffer in some of these retributive disasters....
Nope! He 'can' in the sense He has the might to do so, but as you know might doesn't confer right.
If you were to claim He has the right to make sentient beings suffer for no reason,
then you abandon claim of God's goodness (for goodness stems from empathy and compassion) and of His perfect justice, and ultimately of His holiness.
In a nutshell, you just turn God into a tyrant.
The only way you could conceivably reconcile God with your Ownership theodicy is through ad hoc contorsions which consist in redefining Goodness into meaninglessness.
I don't see the point of the question you're proposing.
How ironic you are! How dare you write 'respectfully' while you ressorted to threats worthy of clownish preachers.
Hi Opie,
Who is He responsible to? you? Peter from the Pizza Hut? Again, since God is the highest Being that created EVERYTHING, He can what He will and it will be righteous since that's parr of His Being.
Case in point, God has nobody to respond to since He is the creator and the most Superior Being.
Also, since you have no reference for what morals are as an atheist or agnostic or toad or whatever you are, you cannot "test" that which you don't know.
And finally, for the clay to judge the potter and say, you can't do that, is absurd lest the potter crush you or make you a toilet if He is please to do so (ROmans 9).
Thus you fail on all 3 accounts like a banana fighting against a monkey. You're the banana.
Respectfully,
Jean Chauvin (Jude 3).
A Rational Christian of Intelligence (rare)with a valid and sound justification for my epistemology and a logical refutation for those with logical fallacies and false worldviews upon their normative of thinking in retrospect to objective normative(s). This is only understood via the imago dei in which we all are.
Respectfully,
Jean Chauvin (Jude 3).
No one, because he doesn't exist.
Yay, might makes right ! Fuck everyone else !
Does that piss off the Holy Spirit and Jesus ? Do they ever fight over the TV remote ?
"Test, test...is this thing on ? Helloooooo...test 1, 2, 3.."
You like toilets ?
Banana ? What is it with you and phallic symbols ? Are you some kind of latent sodomite ?
What? What He does is good because He is God? That's meaningless. As I said, convoluted logic.
So what? How being accountable to nobody entails doing whatever one wants?
If God is such an arbitrary entity, what does divine Justice mean? How can we say He is All-Good and Holy?
You don't need a cosmic being to understand that morality comes from our will to survive and our own suffering.
That's tantamount to "Human, don't argue with me, or else!" as if truth depended on power. Sorry but besides this absurdity:
clay can't reason, human can; clay has no personnality and isn't able to feel pain, human can. Hence, moral consequences won't be the same between mere objects and sentient beings. Hence your analogy FAILS.
Ah....The pot calling the kettle black.
Hello,
actually it's not meaningless. God's nature and character described in the theorem's of Scripture demonstrate this fact. So this is a logical flow from the axiom of God and the axom of Scripture. Also Titus 1:2 says God cannot lie. Anyway, I did not syllogistically argue but simply made a point I assumed you would have caught up on but I suppose you are not familiar with my arguments.
While I said God can do whatever He wants, i was oversimplifying this since a public school kid really deserves no time. God can do anything as long as it does not go against His nature. God cannot lie, He cannot steal, He cannot kill Himself, He cannot create a toilet bigger then Himself to flush down in, He cannot grow, He cannot learn, he cannot sin, etc, etc, etc. So logically, as an Omnipotent Being He is, He logically cannot do that which makes Him non omnipotent.
So within those confines, Since your so called attempts to account for His actions are not based on absolutes or universals anyway, your attempts fail lol. And GOd need not account to a Being that He created since once again, No body is Higher then Him in Being. He is the creator of All.
God's free will is bound by His nature. So your point makes no sense.
God is all Good and holy via His Being. Justice is a demonstration of His wrath and Mercy. Holy simply means separated from filth. God is righteous in His actions. It is not God at the dock but man is at the dock lol.
and since you are finite and cannot comprehend the infinite (finitum no paus infinitum) then you are lost in construte.
----I agree with you that clay intrinsically cannot reason. But when the Holy Spirit breaths in that clay, they it can which is what happen with us. God made up from (Adam means red clay in hebrew) clay, and gave us life with the Holy Spirit breathed in us. At that moment we were the image of God.
No tantrum, lol, just logic. Finitum non paus infinitum. The finite with limited understanding that was created by an infinite Being with infinite understanding cannot logically be the one to bring God accountable, that is absurd as far as logic goes, You would have to be in equal or above power to do this.
You are borrowing Chrisitan morals to attack Chrisitan morals thus refuting yourself presuppositionally speaking.
The burden of proof is on you to show me how God is accountable if He created and superior in Being then His creation. His creation being finite and Him infinite. You have the burden of proof. Since you have not met that burden of proof and since I annihilated you on top of that. then I must declare check mate!!!.
So basically, unless you have another question, live life to the fullest before you burn in torment and hell and have the demons use your organs for gum. In Jesus Name of course : )
Respectfully,
Jean Chauvin (Jude 3).
A Rational Christian of Intelligence (rare)with a valid and sound justification for my epistemology and a logical refutation for those with logical fallacies and false worldviews upon their normative of thinking in retrospect to objective normative(s). This is only understood via the imago dei in which we all are.
Respectfully,
Jean Chauvin (Jude 3).
No, for the simple reason that by defining God's righteousness as an expression of His nature, this gives nothing interesting to understand the concept you're referring to;
and nothing necessitate a fundamentally Good Creator, I can conceive a powerful, infinite but malevolent creator.
Oh, I don't mind what YOUR scriptures say (as i don't beleive in them), i'm only adressing the general concept of God.
Thank you for this useless reminder...By "doing anything He wants" I never meant acts which would undermine His omnipotence. Your strawman pittifully failed.
It's based on human suffering which is common to every culture. Burning any human causes him to suffer even if the sensation of burning in itself is subjective. By harming a a human without moral reasons, a God would violate His claim of Justice... so His own nature, no? Unless you think God values human as mere objects...
We know all this, but as i said, this doesn't prove He has the right to do anything He wants.
How doesn't it make sense? Did you really read what i said?
The only concepts of justice human know are basically retribution of people according to their deeds by considering both their intentions and moral awareness.
The entities people consider as good is those who not only act in accordance with justice but treat a non-evil person with care and respect and help him when necessary, not for selfish interest, but out of compassion/empathy.
Regarding your stuff, it doesn't mean anything to us, it's a mere convoluted redefinition.
It's like trying deseperately to insert a cube into a round hole...
Not only! it something worthy of respect and veneration. What's filth? Isn't tyrany filth? if not, isn't filth something relative?
Then, how would aynone venerate a deity while having some unclear notions of "absence of filth"?
Yep! if you define goodness as what God does, that's consistent... but arbitrary. Sorry, but "not lying", and "not contradicting one's own nature"
aren't sufficient for an sentient entity to be considered as righteous/good...
Alas, your trick is a two-edged sword: if our finite mind can't understand the infinite nature of God, then we couldn't say anything positive or negative about Him, he would be beyond our reason by definition. And thus we can't know whether He is Holy, Just, All-Good or not...
This is just a deseperate trick to render God's concept immune to any refutation, better known as "God's ways are unscruntable!"
Nope, I'm not; since christinanity doesn't monopolize morality, in case you don't know. Even if i am, there is nothing illogical in doing that. Ever heard of reductio ad absurdum?
You start from a false premise, i didn't say He's accountable to anyone. I merely reduce His actions to propositions to see whether they're consistent with the holiness, justice and allgoodness theists ascribe to Him, in this stance we have the right to say "since, such or such divine action obviously causes free suffering, it contradicts goodness,..."
FailJean I suggest you start with...
... tickle torture.
For shame, man. For shame.
Liberace, but wth...
(anyone else care to "fag" up this thread any further?)
except amongst the "gals-wanting-metrosexual-guys", crowd.
Hello,
lol, you have not met the burden of proof, but merely complained that you don't like it that God punishes wicked people. A long post of complaints is not worth my time.
1) Justify ethics absolutely to test God, however, your ethics will be particular based and not universally based thus giving us no insight into knowlege or your whining complaint.
2) Since we are living in the post modern world for a reason, and the entire world has apathy towards everything, art, ethics, beauty, knowledge, that has been brought to us by atheism and liberalism, and since you as an atheist and a liberal, must then fight against the stride of culture which your own kind created to come up with a universal form of ethics to test God.
Since both the above are logically impossible since post-modernism is just a flow of the chain of consistency of atheism is, and since you ahve failed to meet the burden, then whining and complaining and asking mommy for chicken noodle soup because you don't like it that God is in control of your destiny is pretty pathetic.
Complain all you want, and when you're thrown into hell for being a pervert, then you can coplain and whine. But for now, do the atheist matra, eat dring and be merry, for tomorrow you die and suffer for eternity as the fool you are.
Respectfully,
Jean Chauvin (Jude 3).
A Rational Christian of Intelligence (rare)with a valid and sound justification for my epistemology and a logical refutation for those with logical fallacies and false worldviews upon their normative of thinking in retrospect to objective normative(s). This is only understood via the imago dei in which we all are.
Respectfully,
Jean Chauvin (Jude 3).
In life, that Christ-hater demanded the special privileges of "separation of church and state" and "religious freedom and neutrality," when the Constitution doesn't even use those words. In death, he can enjoy the special privilege of eternal torment in the lake of fire. Praise Jesus!
JESUS IS LOVE
LOL I don't know where you've learnt to read: on the contrary, I never said punishing evil people was wrong, this is basic justice and...surprise, surprise...my previous reply defended this concept. My point was something else, and my arguments were little more than my preferences.
Any useful ethical standard must be based at least on:
* knoweldge&experience of human's suffering and vulnerabilities (which are ultimately biological characteristics)
* a predisposition to empathy
*knowledge of our world
*observance of justice
From this, anyone could have a basic idea on what a good character should be. However, your concept of a 'despotic' God doesn't
satisfy 2 of these conditions at least.
Claiming the Creator is Good and Just whereas these attributes are somehow deprived of their normal meaning is an exercice of futility,
thus if you maintain these attributes, you have to test them with human's understanding of morality. Otherwise....you could have saved a lot of words by simply
saying 'He's Good/Just because I want Him to be so'.
Such a baseless 'demonization' of atheism doesn't even require any rebuttal, (just like the babbling of Truechristian troll)..... And you're saying i'm pathetic??!
In fact, I don't mind your lovely threats, so if you absolutely (and desperately) want to do something useful with them, contact BDSM movies producers, as I said. You'll always find some customers being aroused by images of dismembered and agonizing people.
This is one of the points "we" make about the fallacy of gods in general.
The god of the jews, christians and the muslims is one giant cluster fuck of a fallacy.
1 - their god knows every thing
2 - we have free will
3 - their god knows what we do before we do it
4 - if we are being tested then their god knows the answer before we do it.
5 - we don't have free will
Now, some will say, "you still have free will to do right and wrong", but if their god knows what I am going to do before I do it must mean that their god "who created me" did pre-program us.
Take for example this:
If I go to the store to purchase a gallon of gatorade but pass through the dairy isle and see chocolate milk on sale. I ponder, should I get chocolate milk? Should I get gatorade? Should I get both?
Their god already knows ALL of these things. Their god knows what I was going to wear that day, what car I was going to drive, that I was going to bump in to an old girlfriend who wanted to hop in the sack with me, that I would step on a ant, that I was going to think about buying a lotto ticket, how many steps it would take me to get from the car to the gatorade display, etc etc etc.
To the casual observer, they know none of these things other than I went to the store for gatorade. To the casual observer I have free will.
Unfortunately because their god knows ever thing, and since their god created me, I do not have free will. Every thing has been determined already through fate.
It's a fallacy. They want both but they can only have one.
* so what does this ramble have to do with sickness and disasters?
Well, if their god knows everything, then it knows when a tornado will touchdown, the direction it takes, the speed of the wind, the number of cows it will pck up, the number of grains of sand, the number of deaths it will cause.
Their god knows that you will be driving through Texas ten years from now with your family. It knows that you will be driving a station wagon and that this car needs a brake job because one of the retention springs will be broke. It knows that you 16 year old daughter is pregnant because she didn't insist that her boyfriend wear a condom and that the condom he had in his wallet was a ribbed variety which was purchased....
See what I'm getting at? When they say that their god "knows everything" they mean "EVERYTHING".
This is impossible to know every thing and still give freewill.
It's is impossible to know every thing and still test us.
It was the Jesus charactor who first said "render unto Caeser that which is Caeser's, render unto god that which is gods'", you know seperating church from state. Before I could hate your Jesus charactor I would first have to believe he was real; he wasn't. Blind hatred seams to be the bailiwick of the religious.
"Very funny Scotty; now beam down our clothes."
VEGETARIAN: Ancient Hindu word for "lousy hunter"
If man was formed from dirt, why is there still dirt?
Ask them if we should re-institute slavery
1. God is all-good --> God can only do good
2. God owns people
Conclusion: Owning people (slavery) is good.
Questions for Theists:
http://silverskeptic.blogspot.com/2011/03/consistent-standards.html
I'm a bit of a lurker. Every now and then I will come out of my cave with a flurry of activity. Then the Ph.D. program calls and I must fall back to the shadows.
LMAO!!!!
I'm going to be laughing for the enitre weekend. Thanks for this post.
“A meritocratic society is one in which inequalities of wealth and social position solely reflect the unequal distribution of merit or skills amongst human beings, or are based upon factors beyond human control, for example luck or chance. Such a society is socially just because individuals are judged not by their gender, the colour of their skin or their religion, but according to their talents and willingness to work, or on what Martin Luther King called 'the content of their character'. By extension, social equality is unjust because it treats unequal individuals equally.” "Political Ideologies" by Andrew Heywood (2003)