That god can inflict death and evil at will and still be “good” is evidence that mans morality did not transude from god, but in spite of him (if there was one)
If god is righteous simply because he says so, there is no difference between god and evil in which he would also be the author of his own immunity. He demonstrates this in scripture that his motives are just—inexcusable in the eyes of normal men, but often justified by obedience.
Deuteronomy 20:16 “But in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, 17 but you shall devote them to complete destruction, 18 the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the Lord your God has commanded”
Even a mere atheist can recognize this brand of totalitarian evil, which is god in his own unique perfectness, being one in the same, inseparable from his evil. Gods laws are not our laws (thankful for that) At least we’re making an effort to be civil. What is it we’re being accused of anyway to be so… fallen? Seeking knowledge? Refusing to do his bidding? Nope
Killing for god is historically acceptable by his command, but really the antithesis of Christian morality is the vile act of unbelief in Jesus as savior of the world—John 16:9 If there is a god, his morality is not transferred to the hearts of men—yet we see historically that through belief in him, we too often justify being like him.
“As surely as I live,’ says the LORD, ‘every knee will bend to me, and every tongue will declare allegiance to God.—Romans 11:13
What type of creature would demand that as a final consummation?
“Thus saith the Lord—the change from the old law to the new law is hereby a superficial duplicity. I will come forth in the last days in the usual tyranny“—
TheCommonAtheist 
You’ve reminded me about this internal debate I’ve been having concerning Christianity, the NT, and the OT. Is there any part of the bible that promotes healthy growth that isn’t contradicted elsewhere? Does the whole thing have to get thrown out in order to find something better? These are just a couple of the questions, but they’ve been giving me fits at times.
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I can’t think of one biblical command that doesn’t contradict another. This is what happens when delusion meets power. Right at the beginning with Abraham, the Bible glorifies what is obviously a nutter.
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Jim, what Faithers try to cognitively employ about their belief-systems are a paradox and contradiction of unchanged change in a specific historical time-period functioning timelessly. Riddle that one. 😄
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That/Those diagrams, flowcharts, etc, are called their sacred Holy Scriptures. Hahahaha!
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I have no answer but we were schooled to care about what we really don’t care about. A mere vulnerable moment in time keeps mankind on the hook to believe because something may have happened long ago
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You really think that “man” could have “evolved” into such mind-numbing evil without any help? Not a chance – nature would never countenance such deviance.
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I do think man can and has evolved into these evil and self destructive ways because, while we have an intelligent resourceful and creative brain, we are constantly overridden by the much earlier primitive brain and the combination doesn’t really work well.
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I think men in power who are most likely inbred and kookie had dreams interpreted them as important revelations. If it were authentic truth, it wouldn’t require so much circuitous explanation. But it it grows and grows for one bad thing to explain another.
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Good morning, Jim. Obviously “god” is abysmally unfit to guide mankind into the moral high ground, a given. However now I see that “evolution” is just as useless in pushing its failed high-end species towards the same goal. The question “Why?” resounds like a gong in a Tibetan Buddhist temple, but it’s only a gong – gongs, as Paul astutely noted somewhere, give no answer. So what now? We wait, soaked in horror and bloodshed while civilization disintegrates, while billions die horribly, for a “Third Option”? What’s the difference, if we wait for a second coming, of either Christ, or another evolution revolution? I know that most people, given a FREE choice, would choose love and compassion as a superior path for this species to take, so given that, “Why?” isn’t it happening? What is most frustrating about interacting with “normal” individuals (say what, there is are such creatures?) is their total unwillingness to consider a real “third option” while admitting that their divine/evolutionary theories are as full of holes as Swiss cheese with “eyes” are as blind as those of bats… minus the radar guidance system. Giving up on “god” then blaming genes or DNA or recidivist genes is just one more deadly cop-out. There is an answer to all this mindless predator behaviour. Anyone with a brain can figure it out. We even praise those who risk their own lives to help or save others (as is happening right now in benighted religion-blighted New Delhi where the M’s and H’s are massacring each other again) so we know that is the proper path, so why do we not unilaterally take it? “Why not?” freely choose to live our own lives compassionately? What’s really stopping us, huh? We know where the sore spot it, where the inflammation is creating pus, but are we too chicken to put our fingers to it and squeeze the sickness out or too programmed to believe we can do it ourselves, screw “God” and screw evilution? (Well, lookit that, my fingers typed “evilution” and that makes me wonder… I’m not correcting this priceless typo.)
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and no evidence for your silly claims that evolution doesn’t “work”. Again, we see ignorance of what evolution is being the basis of woo.
and ooooh, how impressive you misspelled something and now want to give “meaning” to that. How ridiculous.
“I know that most people, given a FREE choice, would choose love and compassion as a superior path for this species to take, so given that, “Why?” isn’t it happening?”
because humans don’t agree on what they want to give love and compassion to. You want to pretend something magical exists. As for your “FREE choice”, we are stuck with what we are. Can we get better? Maybe, maybe not. In any case it will be hard work.
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Quote: ” Can we get better? Maybe, maybe not. In any case it will be hard work.” Yes, it is hard work because “faith” in god, science or anything else is of no use here. One actually has to do it, with or without education; with or without money.
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such the BS that science is “of no use”.
amazing how much you use that science and it is of use.
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For what it’s worth, you missed the whole point: I said “faith in” not “use of” People who expound “science” in desperate attempts to prove their bold godlessness are falling into the same religious crap-trap as the god-types. “Science” becomes “the Force” or the “Foundation” for all that is when it’s just a word describing how certain processes are used. It’s taking a simple description and turning it into another god. Those who defend “science” only prove the point. One could use the word “washing” in the same context since it implies cleanliness. But “washing” has many meanings besides laundering. Turning “washing” into a “Force” or a “god” won’t result in a cleaner world either.
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again, we have you having a fit about the science you use. No, science doesn’t become “the force”, that’s just the baseless claim of someone who wants to claim she’s special.
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I knew there wasn’t much point in wasting time explaining how “science” (the term, that is) is meant to be understood, but I did try. Me, special? Sure I’m special, just like everybody else.
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science isn’t something you can redefine just to win an argument. You want to demonize science for well, the reason seems to be to pretend you know something more than anyone else.
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I don’t know. Nature has plenty of examples of nastiness. Parasites alone are mind-blowingly nasty! Ants wage total war on other colonies. Viruses! Viruses are in the news.
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OK, I concede your point – I have no logical argument against your reasoning here. But (why is there always a ‘but’???) do we classify ourselves on the same moral level as ants, or viruses? I could go with that because in many cases we are even worse. We plan to decimate others, and our own environment, and not for survival either, but to collect booty, territory, Monopoly money, slaves and make trinkets to decorate our homes or cities. But why then do we continue to “fight” against our dictated nature? If we are nasties, why have prisons? Why laws and taboos? Why do moralists push us this way and that? For if we were naturally evolved exactly as we have developed then there is absolutely no point in attempting to “better” our approach to others. If a group of men are naturally evolved to rape, torture and kill a young girl, or a child; or if some indulge in sodomy (for example) what makes at least some of us react negatively against that? As I see it, we can’t have it both ways: either we are amoral creatures in which case we should exist in strict castes and be happy with whatever is meted to us; we should be free to do whatever we damn well please, or we have a sense of morality which opens up a Pandora’s box of problems we’ve been trying to solve since whenever – and if so, where does that sense of morality, of right and wrong action, originates from? Isn’t that the key question? On the one hand some would argue that we are on par with all other types of life – ants and viruses? – while on the other, some argue that our sense of morality indicates that we are of a different class of life expression, hence why laws and taboos, that sort of thing. Are we amoral animals AND humans, in which case all animals are equally human, or are we “something else” that at some critical juncture was forced to diverge in a diametrically opposite direction to the rest of sentient life, becoming an unnatural predatory mutation that is unsustainable and in the process of being “cleaned out” by nature?
We can beat up on religion; we can beat up on opposing political views; we can beat up on science but if neither those concepts nor we are honestly answering critical existential questions, what’s the point?
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Ah religion…so grateful it was never a part of my life.
Seems to me just by reading this latest 19th/20th/21st interpretation of the old book of killing, is enough to send any sane brain into mind blowing zaps, as to how people could believe such nonsense and much more so, think that this god is a good character.
I can think of few characters in history that have risen (?) to this level of killing whole cities of people, drowning tens of thousands and killing and smiting whole groups of people and always including the children that he so loves.
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Even if you assume the founder is a real innovator called by god. The wannabe syndrome proves strict obedience is immoral.
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Re Deuteronomy 20:16 That these events did not happen makes this a piece of fiction and, in my mind much worse in that the author thought that putting these words in God’s mouth (hubris anyone?) was somehow a plus.
And, like Islam, no matter where the religion starts (creation, good and evil, light and dark, rules to live by, etc.) they seem to end up in describing war. The Koran has a section that describes how to divide the spoils of raids (which are organized theft of what does not belong to you).
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Once again proving god made in man’s image. Too bad the barbarians have managed to pass down their god of violence and evil for more than two millennia and people don’t bother to think to themselves that maybe this isn’t a good thing to live by.
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“Even a mere atheist…” : ) Thanks and peace, Jimmay!
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What need does an omnipotent god have of puny beings to kill other puny beings for him? With a thought they’d be gone.
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That would be way too easy and boring. God prefers to stage overly elaborate forms of death — global floods, earthquakes, rains of fire and mass genocides — to keep himself entertained.
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The downside of omnipotence. Boredom.
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The long running mediocre but fun fantasy series Supernatural uses just this idea in the final season-God is an Author and we are merely characters in His story. And, like many human artists, he is kinda nasty about his “work of art”-especially when it talks back!
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Bow down and worship me . . . or else.
“God, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
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Isn’t it funny that no matter where you go, god is there and so is the devil? More evidence it’s coming from yourself. Unless your from the UK and then you are just simply a devil. No god needed. Hehe.
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Indeed! It’s like God and the devil are co-joined twins. Perhaps that explains why one OT book says God moved David to take a census, while another says Satan incited David to take the census. 🙂
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Sometimes, I just want to say, “there are not gods” and walk away. Works for me.
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good and bad, two enslaving concepts that mind has to transcend for its own liberation. no concept liberates, only the absence of concepts.
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Old Testament morality as a whole is very similar to the morality of other ancient Semites. Yahweh’s morality was not meant to come off as radically different from “human morality”. I keep reiterating this, but again, think of the Moabite Stele of Mesha. Time, change, and culture have created the problem with Biblical morality. Christians today think that the Jews were(or are) the chosen people, and their religion, mores, customs, and views were the only valid ones. The problem is that no one, not even the Jews and Christians, follows most of these rules. Islamic states like Saudi Arabia are the best current approximations of regimes with Biblical morality. But even Christians will speak ill of these places, despite the fact that it was perfectly fine for the Israelites to have similar laws, and the fact that their perfect source of morality supposedly Yahweh made these rules.
Christianity has in my opinion really messed up moral discourse. Or maybe, it was Zoroastrianism. The Jews and Christians want to steal the credit now, but it was that Iranian creed that created the idea of “good versus evil” as a cosmic principle, that people still can’t let go of. Much of the time I just want to tell Christians to scrap their talk of Jesus and Satan, and say Ahura Mazda and AngraMainyu, or Ormazd and Ahriman, or Mithra and Aeshma Daeva, or Asha and Druj. What that really does is make the proponent label themselves as good, and their opposition as evil. There are Persian inscriptions bragging about how the temples of “daevas”(evil gods, devils) were demolished by the their state.
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By any intellectual standard, by any reasonably sane, stable, well educated person, WHY, why, why do so many millions upon millions on this one minuscule, tiny Pale-blue rock within our OBSERVABLE Universe of 93 billion light-years in diameter, emphasis on observable, still cling to antiquated cultures, myths, fallacious dogmas and traditions that are over 2-3 millenia outdated and proven to be bogus? THAT is the biggest mystery for our species!
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