Why do people think God is good?

Let's just assume, for the sake of argument, that God really does exist. There is some sort of entity that is all knowing and all capable (I'm thinking along the lines of the "God" popular in most religions).

Why on earth would anyone think that God is good? All the evils in the universe happen because of God. That is the only logical conclusion I can come to.

God is evil.

oh, and because the bible says so. or does it. i was taught that as a child, but i see all these nutjobs out there and they seem to think god is a vengeful, mean jerk who thinks anyone who does not tow the arbitrary line created by THEIR religion should be punished in some way. so maybe I was wrong.

They say God is all that is good. But they also say that God is vengeful. That doesn't make sense.


I was raised in an evangelical Christian home. And all the stuff I learned seems so absurd in hindsight.

start asking questions.... all the contradictions... cracks in the story.... i wonder myself how anyone can believe that stuff. I actually do believe god exists. but i do so by walking outside my back door and listening to the birds sing and the breeze on my face.... at night i watch the fireflies dance around in the dark. The bible to me is just a book.... at best a book of stories... at worst, a book written to control people and used to control people. religion to me is just a way to control people. There is something quite contrary to what the book they claim to live their lives by when you have a group of men who dress in fine linens and live in a palace (and have a summer home too!) and all their followers act like the pope is some sort of deity or something.... that sure as hell doesn't fit with anything i rememmber being taught.

If God did not create the universe, it would not be God.

Forgive me, but I am not grasping what you are saying.

God is that of which nothing greater can be conceived. That is Anselm'a argument.

http://www.princeton.edu/~grosen/puc/phi203/ontological.html

The next question is: Is it more reasonable that such a thing would be destructive (evil) or productive (good)?

It ultimately will come down to a matter of faith, but the faith itself can be reasonable, if unprovable.

Because what humans observe as destruction is simply entropy increasing.

True destruction would be taking existence and making it exist no longer.



...wait hold up. That just completely shatters my entire fucking OP doesn't it?

as is extracting an abscessed tooth or a cancerous tumor.

If you think an all-powerful being hates you, you'll feel stressed and depressed. You end up being H.P. Lovecraft. A society of Lovecrafts would die out quickly. So you're left with societies that feel the gods are on their side, overall.

How should we feel then?

ie "there is some sort of entity that is all knowing and all capable" . And it's a huge question - "how should we feel" encompasses a lot of ethics, politics, psychology and more. Lifetimes have been spent trying to answer it well.

So don't expect great things in a single reply on DU. "Do as you would be done by" is a good attitude, I'd say. "Enjoy your life without hurting others".

Let's just assume, for the sake of argument, that God really does exist. There is some sort of entity that is all knowing and all capable (I'm thinking along the lines of the "God" popular in most religions).

Why on earth would anyone think that God is evil? All the goods in the universe happen because of God. That is the only logical conclusion I can come to.

God is good.

Which I am pretty sure goes back to the paradox argument.

If there is a God, and If that God actually operates in the context of good and evil, why assume "our" views are the same.

For example - cancer. We probably all agree that is evil.

But, what if this God considers it good. In the grand scheme of things - for example maintaining a sustainable population on our planet, cancer and famine and other diseases are good. It allows the rest of us to exist.

That there is no such thing as absolute good or absolute evil. And even if there is such a thing, it is of little importance to us because our reality is subjective.

not unlike our political positions here on DU.

We hold them dear and cannot understand the other side.

They are equally as passionate in their beliefs.

Who is to say who's beliefs are correct and who's are incorrect. We do. And they do. And we do not agree. Does not make either of us better than the other.

Presupposition is crucial.

If we presuppose that the purpose of living is to lessen human suffering, we construct an environment with agreement and contradiction; with absolutes.

in the context of technology, literacy, etc, then we construct a completely different environment. One perhaps based on the accumulation of wealth (in the generic sense - for example a wealth of labor savings devices, education or the like).

Again - the purpose of living is in the eye of the definer. We will NEVER agree on why we are here.

Or if there even is a purpose. I happen to not think so. We are just here because of an "accident" of evolution.

That should be blatantly obvious to anyone. I mean, he picks one tribe over all the others and then tortures them all anyway. He punishes non-offenders. He could have chosen anything to redeem "sin" --wind sprints, seaweed diet, meditation, etc. The possibilities are endless. Instead, he cooks up this drowning, blood, and symbolic cannibalism thing. He's nuts.

Thank the FSM I'm an atheist.

on this find an evangelical of the Calvinist tradition.

The internal validity of the logic is pretty much impeccable as I remember and it boiled down to "The gap in understanding between god and human is too vast to be bridged, thus disqualifying us from judging; it really doesn't matter how a human conceives of the nature of god i.e. whether god or evil."

The entire argument was one of the more fascinating constructs I've come across.

then why are there wars, famines, diseases, people doing horrible things to other people, atrocities, etc. etc. etc.

Religion is man's attempt to control the uncontrollable forces of nature.

If we believe that some omnipotent being exists, he is neither all good or all bad. For sake of argument, I am going to accept the Judeo-Christian interpretation of an all powerful God - at least initially.

First, God favored the Hebrews. Now he had a pretty funny way of showing of it, allowing them to serve the Pharaohs for hundreds of years. But finally, he got off of his divine butt and decided to unleash some divine whoop-ass on the Egyptians. The bible says God "hardened Pharaoh's heart" this would seem to contradict the idea of us having free will and be a pretty crappy thing to do besides. But nonetheless, God did eventually free the Hebrews with his mighty hand and outstretched arm. God brought them to the Promised Land after making them wander in the desert for 40 years. Maybe God was doing something else or just wanted to see how long it would take Moses to ask directions.

So God brought the Hebrews to the Promised Land and helped them throw out the people already living there. Good for the Hebrews, not so good for the folks already living there.

I guess the Israelites did something to make God mad, because they went into exile, returned for a while and went into exile again. It seems like at this point, God had decided to favor the Christians. Later maybe God thought it would be amusing to let another bunch of his followers, the Muslims, fight with the Christians for dominance in the world.

After several hundred years of this, God got must have gotten bored with the stupid people he had created. He thought about letting them all get wiped out by plague so he could start over, but then decided that maybe it would be more fun if people were smart. He decided to share his enlightenment. Art, music and literature flourished. He also figured these kings were getting just a tad too arrogant thinking they were like Gods themselves, so he decided to take them down several notches. Some of these kings really were lousy. Look up hanging, drawing and quartering for an example. Remember that treason could be saying, "I don't like the King."

God decided it would be interesting to set up the world with unequal resources, so that some humans could easily profit while others endlessly toiled and suffered. What a boring world this would be if we were all really equal. Right now, he seems to be favoring the Western world. Look at how lousy things are in Africa and parts of Asia. But you know, that could change and maybe it's already starting. The drought in the southwest doesn't seem to be getting any better. We have drought in the Southeast, too. Our prosperity was made possible by an abundance of natural resources, but now we seem to be using them up. If God still likes us he'll fix it and restore the plenty, but if we've fallen from God's favor we are so screwed. Maybe he'll bestow his blessings on some of the countries of Africa next, and they could certainly use a break. Maybe in a few hundred years people in Sudan will be watching television ads to send money to help the starving kids in America, or about how women in Arizona have to walk 3 miles to get water and risk being raped by roving bands of outlaws when they venture out.

God sends diseases, and God sends cures. God sends more diseases.

Maybe God allows man to do evil because this great social experiment of his is amusing. Even if you assume we have free will God could have sent a stray bolt of lightening to strike down Hitler before he became leader of Germany. God could have sent a sudden heart seizure to Stalin before he could murder 20 million Russians. God could have sent a flood to drown Pol Pot in the early 1970s. Maybe we should thank God for being on our side so that the Allies won World War II.

If you accept an omnipotent God, you cannot ignore that the very blessings of liberty and prosperity we now enjoy stem from his grace and goodwill. Yes, prosperity. If you are reading this on the internet you are prosperous. I don't mean to minimize the troubles of foreclosure and bankruptcy many in this nation face, but compared to other parts of the world, we are prosperous. Hard work plays a part too, but let's be fair, do you think our millionaire CEOs work that much harder than farmers in Congo? God laid the groundwork for Western society - gave us a pretty good gig. Others, not so much.

and men think themselves to be good.
and some of the incredibly goofy stuff they do is good when looked at in a certain way.
Like invading a country for no reason.
like destroying a village to save it.
like killing homosexuals.
all good in the eyes of some and therefore approved by their God who thinks just like them.

Did God tell you to end your sentence with a preposition? :shrug:













:rofl:

are a major part of why I think that the concept of a god or gods is a purely human invention. People make up stories that have flaws in them. Nature fixes its flaws, eventually. Therefore, the flaws in the "God" legends are not from the way that things are, but from the way that men imperfectly create institutions to perpetuate their rule.

and the belief the the basic orientation of humanity is toward "goodness", but not without the acknowledgment that "evil" also exists. The god is good belief just reflects that orientating of goodness philosophy.

...and perhaps in some ways that could be true. At the same time, however, if you're going to bother using words like "good" and "evil" at all, then they have mean something concrete, useful, and descriptive for the words to be worth having in our vocabulary.

Another poster suggested that cancer, for example, might be seen as a possible "good" as part of keeping population under control. That's pretty absurd, however, if we're talking about a supposedly all-powerful God who should be capable of creating far less painful, terrible solutions to problems like overpopulation, like simply limiting our ability and desire to procreate beyond a certain point.

In fact, if you jettison the ridiculous notion that a God would have to hide himself and be discreet (except for the occasional "miracle" which is either a grand event in the distant past or, oh, one person NOT dying among hundreds that do die in a plane crash), I can easily imagine a very pleasant world with very little suffering, yet still with enough challenges and personal freedoms for life to be worth living.

I think some people get hung up on the idea that faith without evidence is somehow virtuous, that faith even in the face of "seeming" evil is a virtue, so that they are willing to accept all sorts of terrible things happening, and a God who keeps himself mostly hidden, just so humans have the opportunity to demonstrate this apparently all-important virtue of faith.

Some might argue that for all the bad things that God apparently lets happen, you need to also give credit for the good. But are we that generous in judging our fellow humans? If a doctor saves ten lives over the course of a week, do we excuse him for going out on Friday night and killing a prostitute? He'd still have credit to the good for nine lives, wouldn't he?

Good God - evil God - doesn't matter to me a bit.

It's usually his fan clubs that truly scares the shit out of me.

then some could be good, some could evil, and some could be both.

Every cell in your body has died many times over since you were born, some of them in horrible ways.

Think about how comforting it would be, in a world full of violence, hate, natural disasters, and other such strife, to have an all-powerful fatherly figure watching over your every move.

"God" is good because we needed him to be good. And "Satan" is defined as evil so that we can continue to think of "God" as good.

All the evils in the world are the end result of man's poor choices. God gave us the ability to choose between right and wrong.. so now you want to reflect all the 'evil' back to God ?
Why not place the blame where it really belongs?

make that god good or evil. Nor does the god's ability to do stuff we can't.

Good and evil are human constructs where we make value judgments in accordance with our own history, mores, and experiences. These can no more be ascribed to the gods than human feelings of hunger or sexual arousal. The Greeks and others fooled around with humanoid gods, and they are all forgotten-- only mystical superhuman gods survived the ages.

Dealing with the Judeo-Christian God, since that's the one most of us have more experience with, this whole good and evil business is a corruption of a far more ancient Eastern concept of duality. Yin and Yang cannot exist alone-- they must coexist, and from their interaction comes all change, and life itself.

We in the West ended up with God and Satan signifying the duality, but had to muck it up by assigning values-- God is good, Satan is evil. The truth is that neither of them can exist without the other. The disorder that Satan tries to bring down on us is meaningless without the order of God. Likewise, the order of God is meaningless without the disorder of Satan.

Good requires evil to define it, and vice versa.

Now, as to God being the root of all disasters-- if one believes God created the universe, than God is ultimately responsible for EVERYTHING, good or evil. But, then we get into the whole free will thing and have bad dreams from Paradise Lost.

One can argue that God created war and cancer, but then who gave us sunsets and bluebirds?

“All the evils in the universe happen because of God. That is the only logical conclusion I can come to. God is evil.” OP

The logical extrapolation is that in the absence of any god “all the evils in the universe happen because” that’s just the way the universe is….leaving atheist prospective parents confronted with creating a living being that will potentially experience “all the evils in the universe”.

If the theoretical God is “evil” because of “all the evils in the universe” then where does that leave atheist parents who bring life into a godless evil laden universe?

The theist may argue that in a god governed universe with eternal life there is ultimately no lasting evil or ill that a person can suffer.

The atheist who believes that there is so much evil in the universe that god must be evil to have created or allowed it would also have to question/challenge the morality of bringing life into such an evil universe.

humans, with free will, can do good and not so good things.