Is god evil

[Clizby Wampuscat]

You tell me?
You seem to have it all worked out..

I don't. But couldn't your God end the war and also accomplish His goals? Maybe if he came down and convinced everyone to end the war?

 

[Clizby Wampuscat]

Without badness and imperfection, goodness and perfection are nothing more than neutral.

Can you show that this is true? I can understand up without understanding down. I can understand that feeding a hungry person is good even if I don't understand that starving is bad.

Well, that's an interesting point. Maybe that's true in the Christian paradigm, I don't know. Maybe eventhough badness and imperfection don't exist in heaven, they still exist in hell which allows for good and perfection to remain as superlatives.

Maybe

 

[muhammad_isa]

Maybe if he came down and convinced everyone to end the war?

Almighty God has no form, nor does he "have time".

He will send Jesus back again, though.
..but this doesn't happen every five minutes.

The Messiah will unite sincere believers in destroying evil.
There will be a lot of heartache.
Armageddon is not a tea party.

 

[dybmh]

I can understand up without understanding down

Up and down, may not be a good example. There are virtually infinite directions which contradict up. Explaining/understanding up can be accomplished by also explaining/understanding any of these other directions. Examples: "Up not left", "Up not right", "Up not staying here" ... But no matter how one describes up, it requires the exclusion of the other directions. If the other directions ( including down ) did not exist, up would have no meaning. Even pointing up with your finger excludes the other directions.

I can understand that feeding a hungry person is good even if I don't understand that starving is bad.

This is a better example. To illustrate my point, or perhaps to show it's false, can you explain why feeding the hungry person is good or neutral without any implied reference to the harm not eating does?

 

[Brian2]

Then how can He judge us for our determination that God does evil things? He is keeping me ignorant, I have no way to determine or know His actions are moral. All the evidence points to a God that will not stop a war that He could stop. Surely any good that will come of this war can be achieved without the war if God is all powerful.

It is you who have decided that God should not be given the benefit of the doubt, and so that God is evil if He exists.
Yes the evidence is that God does not stop us from doing evil. But of course there is evidence of God having intervened in many situations to prevent evil when He wants to and if we want to believe them, otherwise it is just anecdotes that we choose not to believe.
Angels in the rafters — Cecily Paterson | Author, Editor, Writer

God is good all the time. It is us humans who are not good all the time.

 

[Clizby Wampuscat]

Except...perhaps revelation from God I believe the proof of which is beyond reasoning and realize is also beyond that which we can determine except perhaps in hindsight.
So, for those humans who do not except revelation as an actionable truth we are left not with what is most just or even more just but with our perception of what may be just given our limited powers of reason.
Can we agree though that there must be, despite our inability to definitively discern it, a most just path to take?

Probably.

No, justice is discerned by people and as shown, most imperfectly. People don't create Justice through their action. Their action is at best determined to be just or unjust by imperfectly applying reason to the situation. Now people may define what is meant by just or unjust but cannot by example since the term is an abstraction of what is moral and such abstractions can be defined but not definitively determined to fit a particular case as much as we would like to think or hope so. Innocent people have been "justly" sent to prison only to later change the terms used to unjustly not because people decided to redefine their actions but because they didn't define them properly to begin with .

I agree justice is determined by people. No one 100% agrees on what that looks like in any situation. This is why we have jury's to help mitigate the situation and to come to an agreement on what is just.

How we define Justice has nothing to do with what we say is just. What believers determine God wants does not define what is Just but is interpreted to BE just as we have defined it.

I agree.

I think even believers can generally agree on what justice means. Whether or not that definition applies to a particular instance is another matter of which believers and non-believers are imperfectly subject to. I wonder where people got the notion that since it can be shown that there are differing believers having differing notions of what is just that that proves that all believers must be wrong? Because believers can be wrong does not prove all believers to be wrong. The same as applies to non-believers.

No one can claim they know what perfect justice in in any situation, that does not mean that it is not perfect justice. We will never know. I think we are in agreement.

No, we can only have an awareness of a present good only in comparison to an awareness of a potential bad and once we are aware we can actualize either as autonomous persons.
It is good to help a person in need only because the potential to not help them is bad. If the potential to not help them doesn't exist then we couldn't be aware of helping them being good. It would simply be an insincere action.

I don't think this is the case. We can disagree but it really is not that important because the real world has good and bad actions as we define them to be.

Again, I don't think so. An awareness of perfection requires an awareness of imperfection.

Can you demonstrate that this statement is true somehow? It seems you are just accepting this as true like a presupposition.

Once you are aware of either or in order to make either of those a thing we are capable of being able to be aware of they must be capable of actualization.
Once perfection is achieved whatever that means, it would have to include an awareness of imperfection and the loss of its potential actualization. Anything less would not be perfect. Assuming perfection included an awareness of it.
Say humans were created perfect, what ever that means, this would imply imperfection in humans never existed. If it was Gods intention to be glorified by making them aware of their own perfection that perfection would have to include being autonomous or else they wouldn't be perfected as aware creatures. And since being aware of what perfection is, these creatures would have to be aware of what imperfection is, and since these creatures in their perfected state would have to be autonomous that implies ability to actualize what they are aware of since if they couldn't they wouldn't be autonomous and perfect. Hence the necessity for the potential of imperfection and if that necessity isn't met then no perfection is possible in the aware creature. So any creature given awareness must of necessity be created less than perfect in an unperfected universe in order to achieve an awareness of perfection.

Maybe we are talking about different things. Knowing vs believing what is perfect. I can believe something is perfect or good without knowing why it is. I can tell my 10 yo son that the derivative of x^2 is 2x, he can believe that without knowing why that is the case. God can tell us what is perfect and we can believe it without knowing why. In the Christian belief that is the condition before the fall and God said that as good.

Why is helping someone get up considered good? If nothing is considered evil in the world then not helping them get up would be just as good. If no evil existed then it couldn't be considered bad for them to have fallen in the first place. Or they couldn't have fallen. If their situation is not bad then why is changing their situation considered to be good?

You may be right. I will think about it. Do you agree that we can believe what is good without knowing what is bad?

 

[Koldo]

Except...perhaps revelation from God I believe the proof of which is beyond reasoning and realize is also beyond that which we can determine except perhaps in hindsight.
So, for those humans who do not except revelation as an actionable truth we are left not with what is most just or even more just but with our perception of what may be just given our limited powers of reason.
Can we agree though that there must be, despite our inability to definitively discern it, a most just path to take?

No, justice is discerned by people and as shown, most imperfectly. People don't create Justice through their action. Their action is at best determined to be just or unjust by imperfectly applying reason to the situation. Now people may define what is meant by just or unjust but cannot by example since the term is an abstraction of what is moral and such abstractions can be defined but not definitively determined to fit a particular case as much as we would like to think or hope so. Innocent people have been "justly" sent to prison only to later change the terms used to unjustly not because people decided to redefine their actions but because they didn't define them properly to begin with .


How we define Justice has nothing to do with what we say is just. What believers determine God wants does not define what is Just but is interpreted to BE just as we have defined it.

I think even believers can generally agree on what justice means. Whether or not that definition applies to a particular instance is another matter of which believers and non-believers are imperfectly subject to. I wonder where people got the notion that since it can be shown that there are differing believers having differing notions of what is just that that proves that all believers must be wrong? Because believers can be wrong does not prove all believers to be wrong. The same as applies to non-believers.



No, we can only have an awareness of a present good only in comparison to an awareness of a potential bad and once we are aware we can actualize either as autonomous persons.
It is good to help a person in need only because the potential to not help them is bad. If the potential to not help them doesn't exist then we couldn't be aware of helping them being good. It would simply be an insincere action.

Again, I don't think so. An awareness of perfection requires an awareness of imperfection. Once you are aware of either or in order to make either of those a thing we are capable of being able to be aware of they must be capable of actualization.
Once perfection is achieved whatever that means, it would have to include an awareness of imperfection and the loss of its potential actualization. Anything less would not be perfect. Assuming perfection included an awareness of it.
Say humans were created perfect, what ever that means, this would imply imperfection in humans never existed. If it was Gods intention to be glorified by making them aware of their own perfection that perfection would have to include being autonomous or else they wouldn't be perfected as aware creatures. And since being aware of what perfection is, these creatures would have to be aware of what imperfection is, and since these creatures in their perfected state would have to be autonomous that implies ability to actualize what they are aware of since if they couldn't they wouldn't be autonomous and perfect. Hence the necessity for the potential of imperfection and if that necessity isn't met then no perfection is possible in the aware creature. So any creature given awareness must of necessity be created less than perfect in an unperfected universe in order to achieve an awareness of perfection.

I'm not sure what the case will be in "heaven" but in order for aware creatures to be perfected imperfection must be realized as well.


Why is helping someone get up considered good? If nothing is considered evil in the world then not helping them get up would be just as good. If no evil existed then it couldn't be considered bad for them to have fallen in the first place. Or they couldn't have fallen. If their situation is not bad then why is changing their situation considered to be good?

I don't quite get one point in particular: Why would perfection require awareness of perfection?

 

[setarcos]

I don't quite get one point in particular: Why would perfection require awareness of perfection?

Perfection doesn't require awareness of perfection. However like any entity that has or has acquired self awareness necessarily includes being aware of what is not itself by definition so to does any entity that has or has acquired perfection have to have acquired awareness of that perfection in relation to what is imperfect. When I said perfection requires awareness of itself, I meant the being that is self aware not the state the being is in. In other words a perfected self aware being must be aware of its own state of being.

 

[setarcos]

No one can claim they know what perfect justice in in any situation, that does not mean that it is not perfect justice. We will never know. I think we are in agreement.

Correct. Humans cannot recognize perfect justice without revelation from God. God or its concept if your not a believer is the only thing that can actually recognize perfection

We can disagree but it really is not that important because the real world has good and bad actions as we define them to be.

I think it is most important. First we necessarily define the good and its opposition the bad in light of what is just. Christians believe these things to be innately implanted within man. Then we have to be capable of recognizing those things in the real world. These two things dictate our action and/or attitude in this world towards what is just. While we may retroactively define any particular action in the world that happens despite our defining it as good or bad the fact is if we were not aware of the differing classifications of action which we have defined they would be neither good nor bad but arbitrary actions with arbitrary consequences. The equivalent of poorly programmed robots not caring what they do or is done to them.

Can you demonstrate that this statement is true somehow? It seems you are just accepting this as true like a presupposition.

I've elaborated in my post 268

I can believe something is perfect or good without knowing why it is.

Not simply knowing why it is but necessarily without knowing that it is.

I can tell my 10 yo son that the derivative of x^2 is 2x, he can believe that without knowing why that is the case.

I see what you trying to say but there is a difference between accepting how we define derivatives and why the particular case fits that definition.
1. He must know how we define derivatives
2. He must understand why this particular case fits that definition
Those two things must happen if your son is to get beyond simply having faith in you knowing what your talking about without having meaningful information about what your talking about and himself gaining meaningful information which he may utilize in his future actions.
In other words he can have faith or he can have actionable knowledge.

God can tell us what is perfect and we can believe it without knowing why. In the Christian belief that is the condition before the fall and God said that as good.

Yes, with revelatory statements we must have faith when it comes to God. A lack of faith in God is what caused the "fall". Ultimately humans, ironically, cannot, without God, escape having faith. Even in our science there are just some things we must have faith in. Faith that it is true, and/or faith that it will remain so.

Do you agree that we can believe what is good without knowing what is bad?

No. Not if we are to give definition to an action beyond a mere label.
.

 

[Koldo]

Perfection doesn't require awareness of perfection. However like any entity that has or has acquired self awareness necessarily includes being aware of what is not itself by definition so to does any entity that has or has acquired perfection have to have acquired awareness of that perfection in relation to what is imperfect. When I said perfection requires awareness of itself, I meant the being that is self aware not the state the being is in. In other words a perfected self aware being must be aware of its own state of being.

But we are not aware of every single bit about us.

 

[setarcos]

But we are not aware of every single bit about us.

That is why we are not perfected.

 

[Koldo]

That is why we are not perfected.

Why would perfection entail that we are aware of every single bit about ourselves?

 

[setarcos]

The perfection I am referring to is a perfectly self aware being. Such a being that includes ignorance about itself in some manner wouldn't have perfect self awareness of its being. Such a being in order to be perfected needs at least 2 things.
1 A knowledge of perfection
2 An ability to recognize perfection
Take for instance a perfected human being. By definition human beings are self aware. So a perfected human being would require a perfect self awareness. It would require a perfect understanding of the differences between itself and some other self aware being that is not itself.
It would require a perfect realization of what a human is, can and cannot do, be, or actualize in reality. Such a human being would have limitations but those limitations are limitations of definition not ability. A perfected human being can actualize anything that is "humanly" possible but would be limited by that possibility. Like a perfect circle cannot be a perfect square and remain a circle.