God is Evil

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And if trade by sea is that important to you that you feel the need to live by the sea, then that is your choice. You take that risk willingly.



Not necessarily at will, but nobody is stuck wherever they are, or at least very few people.



Well, that's why I edited out of my post. I'm not really prepared to go searching for the information necessary to back this up. However, I do have this link to provide you. This is actually the way that Chinese doctors thought was the best way to prevent what we call cancer. This is from way back when, and they are not considered doctors by Western medicine. Because the rest of the body was out of balance with the immune system, cancer was allowed to take over.

As far as genetic disorders? Not always as big of a deal as people tend to make them out to be. Considerable amounts comes from envy, for example. "Other people can do this. Why can't I?" Be happy with what you have. Believe it or not, you don't need to be able to walk to be happy, for example. However, people qualify their happiness. "I will be happy if, and only if, x is true. If that's true, then I'll be happy if, and only if, y is true..." And it continues. It's because people qualify their happiness that makes them unhappy, because there's always something more that they'll want.

Contented humans purchased at the expense of even one person subjected to extraordinary suffering calls into question the plausibility of the idea that the universe is just. One child with Tay-Sachs (or Harlequin type Ichthyosis or IDK something whatever) refutes the idea that the world is a just place with respect to humans; further, that one child certainly calls into question whether the Creator is both "God" and benevolent because we might reason that any being worthy of the term "God" should if it so chose be able to create the world minus that one suffering being. If the human being is wired to 9 times out of 10 suffer under X circumstances, then is not the Creator at fault if it creates the beings which may suffer and then plunges them into the circumstances virtually guaranteeing it?

God would have foreseen the consequences of its actions. If it created a world where it knew there would be some limited and determined being which would subjectively experience suffering, then God is responsible for the suffering is it not? To bring about suffering is evil, people are not responsible for the inputs dictating their behavior and decision making processes so that the world determines the existence of the suffering, so that if it were logically possible for the world to exist minus the suffering then God is evil. Your arguments have addressed nothing of the brute fact that suffering exists, and people are (essentially) deterministic so that any God knew exactly what it was creating. If God created suffering, how shall we justify Him?

I tend to think there may well be some weight and merit in the metaphysical suggestion that we have a broader life - and then we have many sort of micro-lives within it. Microlives are, pretty much existences on a planet like this as it is with no knowledge. The theodacy is explained that if its all ok in the end and the worst that can happen is you sufferer a lot before you die and go back; it denotes that our state only means a lot while we're here (and there's the argument that this is just an integrity-builder).

Really in that perspective, life on Earth is kinda like the bowl of wet getting passed around the party where about six billion people right now at least were crazy enough to hit it.

Wiring changes, and that's why people feel that they're suffering when they should not be. People are naturally accepting of the things that they have in life. Who is happier with what they have than a child who has not been told that they "deserve" or "should have" these other things?

And, for the record, I already addressed your issue of suffering existing meaning that God is evil. First it is because of the fact that people allow themselves to not be as they once were, to not be happy with what they have. Second, just because God is not good does not mean that God is necessarily evil. This assumption boggles my mind. There is no logic in it. There is an in-between, and, as has been said, it makes more sense than either extreme.

I can give examples of Jesus telling the apostles about genetic disorders being caused by our will in the reincarnation process. But, my C key is all jacked up and it's very annoying typing here. However, I like what y'all have to say. Nobody has touched on the alien hypothesis yet.

The issue was not whether I live by the sea (which I don't) but whether all the people who live by the sea should move inland, which to me seems silly, if not ridiculous.

It's like solving the transportation problem by insinuating that all people should walk to wherever they're heading. It's much safer than driving a car, you know!


I'm not going to go into the whole socio-economical thing today (a lot of people are obliged to live where they are born) but even if it's only 'very few people' your whole argument falls apart.


And if people can't afford these therapies, or can afford but do not have access to it, or are forbidden to do it?



I'll quote twoshots:

Last edited by Henriksson on 18 Jun 2009, 6:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The transhumanism thread just made me think of it, but I have always found that subject to be somehow unsettling and never much cared for the notion. We do not seem to really belong here though, do we?

That does not address the issue. I reject anything that tastes even slightly like a free will justification on the grounds that free will is bunkum. It makes no sense from an objective standpoint; God knew what was going to happen when He created it (else he is a demiurge, not God), so He knew there would be suffering. God created the suffering, people just did what they do.

I'm rather less than convinced that God *can* be neutral. Possessing perfect knowledge and power implies that nothing happens which God does not will. Evil happens, hence God willed evil. He may not be actively malicious, but at the least He's morally bankrupt.

I think that God allows evil to exist in the world, but I don't believe that God created evil, since evil is not a created thing or object; that is to say, evil cannot exist on its own.

I think evil is the deviation from God's will. Mankind has the free choice to do good or to do bad, and I believe it's mankind's choice to do bad that causes evil, not God.

How can something deviate from a diety's will, if that diety is both omnipotent and omniscient?

Your post made me think of Magnus' earlier use of the word indifferent. I guess it could be possible a being so above us would be far enough removed from our suffering and evil to be apathetic. I mean, within the scope of the entire universe, what would our problems amount to? Gotta' go...thinking about the universe makes me feel really tiny...

Thanks for the welcome (By the way is Tollorin, not Tellorin)



My post was mostly a conterargument from what was saying MrLoony, by showing that random things can ruin your life, independantly of your choices. Was for my last line, is was my cynical side.

The way I see it, natural phenomenon are not good or evil, their simply "are". As the nature and reality are simply "are". The humans only interpret what they can perceive of the reality.
As for the "good" and "evil", I see it mostly as a human (and maybe alien, by the necessity of evolution) thing. Something quite important and essential for the humans being, but not as a intrinsecal part of the reality.
So I don't thing (If He exist.) that God can be qualified as "good" or "evil", because is simply not a human being. We can not define Him by our morals. He,s even most likely to be beyond our comprehension. (A rat, for example, will never be able to grasp calculus. So why humans, with the same, only bigger, little mass of meat use for thinking, will he be able to grasp the greatest mystery of the Universe?)

But I'm not sure it matters how small we are; even if there were only one unnecessary suffering being, then God has designed the universe unjustly. If God does not care, is he not sociopathic? A human may be excused its moral shortcomings on grounds of imperfect knowledge or limited resources, but God could have no such limitations; analogies to the human relation to lesser animals don't make sense because 1) God possess perfect knowledge of the state of people, while people have highly imperfect knowledge of the state of animals, and 2) We assume that there is at least some gradation between more and less conscious beings, so given the limitedness of resources it becomes practically necessary to afford less value to lower life forms.

I must I suppose be showing my moral biases, but I think that any being capable of reasoning has a moral imperative to not unnecessarily inflict suffering. God inflicts all suffering, but He may have inflicted none. What is this but evil? Assertions that we cannot judge Him don't make sense to me, as morality is a human construct for judging the behavior of sentient entities, so "God" inasmuch as we may use the word seems to fall in that sphere. For God to not be judgable seems to require that He not have will, in which case the anthropomorphic concept breaks down and the use of the word God is nonsense.

That is, irrespective of scale, the sentence "God has willed evil" seems to my mind to hold. I just don't think that for a God being it can be morally permissible for it to be apathetic. If the evil of an action is proportional to, let's say, the "intrinsic evil" of inflicting suffering, as well as the foreseeability and the preventability and inversely proportional to the necessity of the effect, then the perfect foreseeability and the complete preventability and the complete unnecessity seems to imply that the action is egregiously evil no matter how small the "intrinsic evil" is. (subject of course to how you set up the equation; I'll have to think that one through more )

I hereby dub our diety as His Supreme Indifference.

If you remove your own pride from the equation, you really don't mind if God is 'indifferent', you are just a cog in the machine, an ant, a puppet playing a part, it's not an insult to your pride if you don't have any. So when one has turned away from 'the world' and 'the self' it makes more sense, I don't know that worldy people would comprehend it. It's 'Thy Will Be Done', not mine.

Which raises the question; why posit a diety at all? What reasons do you have to find this compelling?