Tony\'s God (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, November 21, 2011, 17:45 (4752 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

Tony has given a detailed response to my “case for the prosecution”. I will try to keep my responses to the responses as brief as possible.

EVIL:
TONY: In God all things are possible, great and small, good and evil. What separates him is that he possesses the ultimate knowledge, complete information, and the wisdom to make a proper determination between what is good and evil.

My aim was to prove that God and not humans created evil, which you have accepted. What you call a “proper determination” is almost tautological, because he makes the rules and sets the criteria, so if he says it’s proper to slaughter kids, it’s proper,

CONSENSUS
Dhw: ...there is a general consensus concerning a number of “evils”. (I mentioned murder, rape and robbery.)

TONY: The thing about general consensus is that it is generally wrong, and normally subject to the fatal flaw of incomplete information.

So murder, rape and robbery are likely to be OK in God’s eyes? As prosecuting counsel, I once again draw your attention to God’s indiscriminate slaughter by flood, and by killing the firstborn of all Egyptians. If he says it’s proper, it’s proper, but it ain’t my idea of proper. If members of the jury agree with you, we shall have to change our laws.

WORSHIP
TONY: In order for your children to take the things you said to heart [...] they had to love and trust you. And like any parent, God wants, and deserves, our love.
[God] needs the constituent parts of worship, not for any self-gratifying reason, but as a necessary component to being able to confer knowledge and wisdom.

Parents don’t deserve love because they are parents. They have to earn love. There are millions of parents who are hated by their kids. As a parent and teacher, I did not tell anyone to prove their love and trust before conferring what little knowledge and wisdom I had on them. I gave them what I could, and that was how I earned their love and trust. (I hope!)

SACRIFICE
You made your daughter earn her boots. Good for you. But you were not testing her love, or her faith that Daddy knows best even if what you asked was something appalling (which of course it wasn’t). You were teaching her that we have to work for what we want – an excellent lesson for life. What lesson for life was God teaching Abraham when he told him to slit his son’s throat?

PEEING ON GOD’S SANDALS
TONY: In evolutionary terms, what happens to the parents is inherited by the children.

In biblical terms, as quoted by my learned friend the Counsel for the Defence, “The son will not share the guilt of the father” (Ezekiel 18:20).There’s no evidence in your bible that Abel and Cain peed on God’s sandals, and since Abel was such a goodie and found favour in God’s eyes, I don’t see what grounds you have to say he did. I agree that Cain did (unforgivably), after God had shown his preference for the blood of innocent lambs over the hard-won, bloodless fruits of Cain’s labours.

KILLING KIDS
TONY: While this certainly sounds like a harsh thing to say, what God did could be seen as sparing them the problems of this life, and fast tracking them on the road to a better life.

Great. Then let’s kill everybody, to spare them the problems of this life. And let’s rewrite Exodus. Instead of “Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you; that my wonders may be multiplied in the land of Egypt”, let God say: “Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you, that I may kill all the kids and fast track them on a road to a better life.” Your Honour, I submit that the Counsel for the Defence is advocating mass extermination in the name of the Lord. And I don’t like the look in his eye.

GOD’S MOTIVE
TONY: Who cares WHY he started creation? What matters is that after he decided to start, he showed great care and consideration for absolutely every aspect of it. We would call this love.

This view, just like my alternative, is your preconceived pattern imposed on the world as you imperfectly know it. Your method, as summarized in your discussion with David, is “studying, theorizing, and basing whole bodies of work based off of indirect observation.” So is mine, and it leads to the opposite conclusion. I do not dispute the variety and beauty; I only dispute your vision of the perfect design and your justification for psychological torture and indiscriminate slaughter. You are right that “we do not have the pre-requisite knowledge, wisdom etc. to say what was necessary or logical, or sensical”, to which I would add morally justifiable. That is what this trial is all about, and motive is directly relevant to our understanding of the alleged crimes. But you and I can ONLY debate the issues according to our (not just my) limited knowledge, and according to what WE see as right and wrong. The rest is up to the jury.

*******

An important personal note: I hope it’s clear to you that while these arguments do, I think, require an answer, I’m deliberately setting black against white. If I believed in God, my views would be very close to David’s wonderfully wise and balanced opinions as expressed in his posts to you on this thread.