Is God good?

There's an awful lot of discussion going on focusing on whether the Bible says God is "good" or "evil."Oddly enough, that's not how we tell good from evil in any other circumstance.It takes very little effort to find some extremely reprehensible actions that are directly caused by or ordered by God in the Bible which are unquestionably evil - or would be considered so if absolutely any human being ever did such things (we can get into the special pleading later).Genocide is evil. Killing kids is evil. These are nigh-universally agreed moral principles.Yet if we take the Bible as a historical record, God committed the largest genocide ever seen - he damn near wiped out the entire species in the Flood. And then, later, he killed off all of the firstborn of Egypt, combining infanticide with genocide.For even one of these acts (and there are others, there's just no need to continue beyond the basic qualification) anyone would be universally condemned as "evil."If these acts on their own do not qualify the Biblical God as "evil," then there is no qualification that would be accepted; those who insist the Biblical God can still possibly be "good" are simply exempting their God from moral judgment - the Authoritarian argument that, since morality flows from the the Authority, and God is the Authority, God determines what is "good" and "bad" and there need be no consistency at all. Anything God does or orders is "good," even if the exact same action is "bad" in every other instance.It's entertaining that those who disdain moral relativism tend to be those who most strongly cling to authoritarianism, claiming its morality to offer a universal standard...so long as their authority doesn't change his mind, anyway.

Close. I'm vehemently pro-sentient life. I don't much care about insects and squirrels and so on from an ethical standpoint. I care even less about a fetus (until later in the pregnancy, when brain activity indicative of self-awareness is detectable). A fetus is not self-aware. I care about as much about a clump of fetal cells in a womb as much as I do about a cockroach - that is, not at all.Look, you're trying to "catch" me in some ethical inconsistency with abortion. It's not going to work.Let's be really super-simple here.Grand Moff Tarkin ordered the Death Star to fire on planet Alderaan, killing billions of sentient beings. For this, we consider him to be a "bad guy." In fact, even if he opened a charity that saved a million lives, that wouldn't make up for the monstrous act of killing off an entire planetary population.This is almost exactly analogous to the god of the Bible in the Flood myth: god is Grand Moff Tarkin, and the Flood is the Death Star.If god is not considered evil for this act, but Moff Tarkin is considered evil for a nearly identical act, then you are logically inconsistent.Would you prefer a more real-world example?Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were both responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions of people. For this we call them "evil." Hitler did some good things in his life, I'm sure - but it doesn't matter, because anyone who commits genocide is evil.The Biblical god doesn;t just kill off a single race - he depopulates every species on Earth, including human beings, down to just a handful of individuals. By any estimation this act is worse than the holocaust. If we can call Hiutler evil, and if we can call Stalin evil, then we must also call the Biblical god evil because the Biblical god performs a similar act of mass-murder on a significantly larger scale. To do otherwise requires special pleading.It doesn't matter if the Biblical god healed some sick people, or if he says he loves you, or if he offers eternal life to some people - he committed genocide, and is therefore evil.Bullshit. Just as my mother does not have the right to kill me now that I'm an adult despite having given me life, there is no reason that some deity should have that same right. The right to life is inherent in self-aware beings - it's not "given" by a deity, it's a matter of consistently applying moral weight. If we value self-aware life, then self-aware life has the same value whether it's taken by a human murderer or a divine murderer. It's the same thing, the result is identical - a self-aware being's life has been involuntarily ended. Saying "but it's okay if god does it" is simply more special pleading; saying "god can take away what he gives" requires that sentient life not actually have value. Indeed - there is no ultimate standard of morality.Morality is a social invention. It only exists in social animals, like human beings.Your Authoritarian morality is straight out of the Bronze age - which is unsurprising, since that's when your book of moral guidelines came from.Humanistic ethics objectively result in a better standard of living and more stable societies than your outdated nonsense...in large part because humanism establishes consistent rules and values, while you, as an Authoritarian, also have no ultimate standard of morality, since your deity can make exceptions or completely change the rules on a moment's notice.It's laughable that you argue for an "ultimate moral standard," while in the same post argue that your god is exempt from the moral laws of the rest of us. Is there an ultimate moral standard, or isn't there? If there is, then your god is unquestionably evil, as he has performed unquestionably evil acts, similar to the acts of Grand Moff Tarkin, Hitler, or Stalin.

Reread. My accusation is that the Biblical god is evil because he committed acts of mass murder, which are indisputably evil. The fact that one of those incidents of mass-murder targeted specifically first-born children is basically incidental. I see no reason to. I attach virtually no moral value to any entity that is not remotely self-aware. The amount of moral weight increases as sentience is approached, and when a brain exhibits activity indicative of being self-aware, I attach the full moral weight of a human being.This means that, in the first stages of pregnancy, when a fetus does not even yet have a brain, I couldn't care less if it lives or dies from a moral perspective. If I were trying to have a child with my partner and the fetus died within the first few weeks, I might express disappointment that the fetus didn't survive, but that's not the same as believing my child has died - I wouldn't hold a funeral, for example.So no, I do not value a fetus any more than I value a mosquito. Most fertilized eggs never actually attach to the uterine wall and are discharged in the menstrual cycle - I don't hold a funeral for my girlfriend's tampons, she throws them in the garbage Ind I throw them in a dumpster, just as I would a paper towel containing a smashed mosquito.If a woman decides she does not desire a baby or pregnancy, and the fetus does not yet have a brain exhibiting activity indicative of self-awareness, an abortion carries no greater moral significance than swatting a fly. This man is not me. My ex-wife had two abortions. I didn't care, it was her body, and what was terminated were not actual human children. I think that the fact that my conscience and moral values work entirely differently from yours indicates that you are utterly wrong in this belief, and that our "conscience" is an internal function of our own moral codes as shaped by personal experience, personal judgment, and social influences. Blah blah blah. You aren't going to win an abortion argument with me by referring to "forgiveness" or "redemption" that I don't believe I require from characters I'm convinced are fictional. I can agree with that 100%. I'm convinced by the conclusions of neurologists who have performed fetal brain scans.And the fact that, you know...until a certain point, the fetus does not have a brain at all, and therefore is not capable of any form of thought or awareness.But you know...the abortion debate, while an interesting aside, is not actually the topic here.The topic is whether the biblical deity is evil. I'm going to skip down to where you actually start to say something relevant. It can be used to illustrate a point. Besides, from my perspective, this entire thread is about the ethical worthiness of a fictional character - your deity. I see no great distinction, in real terms, between your god and Grand Moff Tarkin. Neither one actually existed, and both committed fictional atrocities that never happened in the real world. There is no Death Star, there was no Flood. This thread is not about whether the events were real, it's about determining the moral significance in terms of good and evil of specific characters as portrayed in the relevant fiction. It's very simple, Jaywil. You don't have to re-watch the movies (though now I kinda want to...)Warning, Spoiler Alert for the three people in the Western world who have not seen Star Wars.The EVIL GALACTIC EMPIRE builds a moon-sized battle station called the DEATH STAR, capable of blowing up entire planets. Grand Moff Tarkin is in charge, with Darth Vader acting as his underling. In an attempt to get Princess Leia to reveal the location of the hidden rebel base, Tarkin "tests" the destructive power of the DEATH STAR on Leia's home planet, Alderaan. The planet explodes, and everyone on it is instantly killed. Grand Moff Tarkin is now guilty of murdering an entire planetary population.In your Bible, god sends a massive Flood that kills "all which hath breath" except for Noah, his family, and the animals on the Ark. Your god is now guilty of murdering nearly an entire planetary population.(Apparently, the power to Flood a planet is insignificant next to the power of this battle station, and you find my lack of faith disturbing. Sorry, hard to talk about Star Wars and not work in the required pop culture references)These two fictional characters have committed crimes of nearly identical nature and magnitude. Tarkin is labelled as "evil," he's one of the "bad guys" in the movie. Your god should also be labelled as evil, because to do otherwise either requires the moral acceptance of murder, or simple special pleading.You, of course, take the "special pleading" route. In other words:Blame the victim.It's okay for god to have killed everyone in the world, because they totally deserved it. You know, they were faithless and evil and wicked and they had homosexual sex and violent.jaywill...there is no morally justifiable reason to involuntarily end the life of a sentient being outside of defending another life from immanent harm. It's okay to shoot a guy who's trying to shoot you, even though it's still sad, but no matter how much you want to play the "blame the victim" game, what your god does is not morally different from what Tarkin does. Your god was under no threat, and you can't defend lives by killing everybody.Sorry, jaywill. Your god is an evil genocidal monster.

1) The motivation of a murderer is irrelevant. A person is still dead whether the murderer was angry or "judging" the victim. You might also note that I'm staunchly anti-death penalty and consider it to be absolutely no different from state-sanctioned murder.2) This is all just "blame the victim" nonsense. It's okay for your god to commit mass murder because they were all bad, really, and so they totally deserved to be drowned to death. Even the children who couldn't have done anything wrong yet.I simply don't for a moment accept your Bronze-Age Authoritarian morality, Faith. Murder doesn't suddenly become not-murder when your god does it. Involuntarily taking a person's life is evil no matter who does it. You presume that I care about eventualities. I don;t. I care about actuality. A fetus might develop to the point it is self-aware. When it does, I care and attach moral significance to it as a full person.But before that happens...it's not a person. It's missing the defining trait that makes a person a person. My finger is not me; I am my thoughts, I am, in effect, my brain. When a fetus has no brain, it is not a person. When a fetus has a brain but the brain is not yet self-aware, it is not a person.I care as much about a newly fertilized egg as I do for masturbatory ejaculate.This isn't "moral dementia," though your ad hominem is duly noted. It's simply a consistent application of my moral values, and under my ethical code, a "person" is any self-aware being. That encompasses late-term fetuses (though I still place less significance on them than the mother - if her life is in danger, I'm okay with a late-term abortion, but otherwise I support full abortion rights prior to the point on the second trimester where the brain is sufficiently developed) and adult people.As I said to jaywill - most fertilized eggs never even implant on the uterine wall. They're flushed out with your menstrual cycle. I don;t feel any desire to hold a funeral for my girlfriend's tampons, and I feel no twinge of regret or remorse or loss when I throw the garbage into a dumpster. At the moment of conception, you would say that the fertilized egg will "inevitably" progress to person-hood...but most of the "children" you've had this way were thrown into a trashcan, and you cared not one bit. This is, at least, a more cogent argument. But I can be awoken when I am unconscious and become conscious at any moment, and the "unconsciousness" of sleep is not the same as the "unconsciousness" of an undeveloped (or even nonexistent) brain. Try to revive a fetus the way you would try to revive an unconscious or sleeping person, and you'll see the difference.

I'll respond to the rest of your lengthy post later...but I had to bite on this now.The Harry Potter books specifically mention London and many other real locations. Does that mean that the Harry Potter books are nonfiction? Should I start looking for the Wizarding World?The fact that the Bible mentions real-world locations and people has no bearing on whether the remainder is factual...just as the mention of London in Harry Potter has no bearing on the actual existence of magic wands and dark lords.

Well, nobody claims the Harry Potter books to be true. If a large percentage of the population were to do so, I'd be arguing against them, as well.There's no need to dispute something that's not claimed.

See, that right there is the problem."Whispering," "hating God," "boasting," none of the things in that list are worthy of death.That's why we don;t execute people who do those things. That's why, if you slit the throat of a disobedient child or an "insolent arrogant boaster," we'd call you an evil murderer.You're simply engaged in special pleading and blaming the victim.Your deity is reprehensibly evil. No amount of appealing to the Bible is going to change it. No amount of blaming the victim will help your argument.

Once again: special pleading. It's okay for your deity, but evil for anyone else.Evil is evil. Your deity commits evil acts in the Bible. Your deity is evil.This is a difference of root morality, jaywill. Your Bible means no more to me than any other work of fiction, so quoting it can only be used to determine what the fictional characters within are responsible for. If your Bible says it was "good," that doesn;t override my own moral judgment.I don't accept your Bronze-age Authoritarian ethics. They are inconsistent, as they stem solely from an authority who can change the rules and make exceptions at any time. To you, if your god told you to bomb a kindergarten classroom, that would be "good," as after all, "the last judgment is his."My ethics stem from a consistent valuation of sentient life and suffering. Causing death and suffering is evil.Consistently valuing sentient life means that genocide is evil. End of story. There is nothing a people can do to deserve to be killed en mass. Anyone who commits genocide is evil. Period.That means your deity is evil.

The topic of the thread is not whether the Biblical deity is real or fictitious. I think we all know where we stand on that question, and discussing it is probably for another thread.I suggest that we all simply acknowledge that any character, fictional or real, can be judged by documented actions, under the assumption for the argument that the documented events actually happened. When I argue that the Biblical god it evil because he Flooded the Earth and committed genocide, I am arguing as if the Biblical god is real and that the events actually happened. When I argue that Grand Moff Tarkin is evil for blowing up Alderaan, I am arguing as if Tarkin and the Death Star and Alderaan were all real.It doesn't matter if a character is real or not, it doesn't matter if the events were real or not; what we are arguing here is if those characters actually did what was described, how would we then judge them morally?If a real person killed off the entire global population of Earth, regardless of who that person is, or what magic powers that person has, I argue that we would consider this person to be evil, as murder and especially mass murder are inherently evil acts.I argue that the wickedness of such acts stems from a consistent valuation of sentient life and suffering, and causing suffering or involuntarily snuffing out life is always ethically negative.I argue that the commission of such acts outside of the immediate defense of other lives is inherently evil.I argue that, since the Flood was obviously not an act of defense and was instead simply an example of mass murder on an unprecedented scale, that any being responsible for causing such an event is evil.I argue that to argue that the Biblical god is not evil while upholding the value of human life and labeling Hitler, Stalin, and Grand Moff Tarkin as evil despite similar acts of mass murder (if on different scales) requires simple special pleading, which is a logical fallacy.I argue that no matter how many quotes jaywill farms from his Bible, no matter how many times he seeks to blame the victims for their own murder, special pleading is still a logical fallacy and therefore his argument is wholly invalid.jaywill has presented absolutely no rational argument for his position, except that his deity is what defines "good" and "evil," and therefore his deity can perform absolutely any act at all and still be called "good." He argues that this is so because the Bible says so, and therefore his moral compass must point accordingly, regardless of the argument involved.This is ironic because jaywill accuses "atheistic morality" of having "no ultimate authority," and therefore such morality is unbound by consistent rules, that people embracing moral relativism can actually count the Holocaust as a "good thing."jaywill is mistaken. He is so mistaken that he either does not comprehend even the basics of humanistic ethical systems, or he simply chooses to ignore them and instead tries to utilize emotional pleas to demonize an ethical system that, contrary to his words, is significantly more consistent than his Bronze-Age Authoritarian ethics, which change on the whim of the authority (or, as history has shown, on the whim of the interpreter).The god of the Bible is guilty of multiple counts of genocide. If any other individual were to perform exactly the same act, that person would quite obviously and rightly be labelled as "evil." If we are to be logically consistent, the god of the Bible must also be considered evil.

This would appear to be the root of the disagreement in this thread.The topic of this thread is "Is God good?"The topic of the thread is not "Does the Bible say God is good?"The Bible does say the Biblical god is good. It says so repeatedly.But by any consistent system of humanistic morality, the Bible is wrong, and the Biblical god is evil.

So you agree that killing the whole world is bad...but as long as I leave 8 people alive, I can still be "good?"

This, jaywill, is an ad hominem. You are attacking me, rather than my argument. My moral value is not up for discussion in this thread - only the Biblical god's is.Your opinions on my ethical system as it applies to abortion are off topic. Your calling me a "monster" simply demonstrates that you must resort to personal attacks and insults, as you are unable to effectively deal with my arguments.Entertainingly, as I have never actually sponsored or performed an abortion, even if I were to accept your premise regarding when life attains moral value, I would still be guilty of no crime, whereas your god, if for the sake of argument we are to assume the veracity of the Bible, is still absolutely guilty of mass murder.The remainder of your post, of course, is basically off-topic. You're attempting to divert attention away from the world-killing Flood of Genesis, and instead focus on apologetic arguments defending other examples of immorality as mere hyperbole.It will not work, jaywill. If the god of the Bible killed off all but 8 people in the entire world in the Flood, then the god of the Bible is guilty of the largest-scale genocide ever. This makes him evil.

1) A fetus is not a child.
2) Abortion is not the topic
3) Most importantly, this is a strawman argument. I said the Biblical god was a monster because he killed the entire world aside from 8 people. I said the god of the Bible was evil because he committed genocide. That has nothing to do with restricting the crime to children,.
4) It is also a tu quoque fallacy. Whether or not my position on abortion is evil or not, and in fact whether I myself am evil or not, is irrelevant to the question of whether the god of the Bible is evil.If mass murder is evil, then the god of the Bible is evil.Your attempts at a rebuttal consist of nothing more than fallacious arguments and deception.

I never claimed god was eager to slay kids.I claimed that, if he was responsible for the Flood, then he is evil.Please try restricting responses to claims actually made.

If Hitler personally risked his life to save a thousand children, would that make up for the Holocaust?If he saved a million?I'm aware that the Bible contains examples of goodness. Most of it was from Jesus. The problem is, doing good works does not erase evil.Hell, even the Bible supports that - there are no good works that can be done, according to Christians, capable of saving the soul of a human being.Nothing good in the Bible erases the fact that in Genesis god kills off all but 8 people in the whole world. Nothing makes up for the largest mass-murder that (n)ever happened. That one act, regardless of any others, is sufficient to label him "evil."