Who knew? Who suspected? Yes, of course I’d ramble so much that a third part would be necessary to finish this up. Is verbosity a useful trait or should I defer to my old English teacher who promoted the need to be concise, clear, and to the point?
Obviously it’s far too late for this set of posts (first and second). Maybe I can work on that another time.
Anyway, here we are at the tail end of this really short post I came across about the nature of God and goodness. I’ve been disagreeing, in case you wonder.
Everything god does appears to be for subjective reasons. He doesn’t like this, so he kills those people. He doesn’t like that so he kills some more people. He gets jealous and vindictive and rude and mean over any and all things. But, he approves of Noah’s obedience and to reward him, lets him build a boat for his family and every animal he can rustle up and then drowns every other human being because they don’t measure up to Noah’s faith in him. What the fuck is that all about? Nobody ever talks about the families who supposedly drowned. I’m sure they weren’t all bad. But they had to go because they weren’t like Noah? Why can anyone buy the ark story as proof of anything beyond god’s petulant, childish sadism?
The only way a god could ever be considered objective is if he were a non-emotional computer program monitoring behaviour on the planet. For this action, respond this way. But then there would have to be so many limiting factors to determine exceptions because, let’s face it, not everyone gets the same treatment when they do the “wrong” thing.
If god really was capable of destroying a city because he saw someone have gay sex, you think there would be any cities left? Unless the rule was, god sees gay sex, god must burn California. If that were so, there would never be a day when California wasn’t burning. But who told him to burn California? Was he also burning the west coast in the bible days? Maybe nobody could report on it because nobody even knew North America existed when the bible was assembled.
Back to the post, finally:
Since an ethical life is half of any kind of a reasonable human life once the good is drowned out there is little more about us of any real value, and this is where the atheist wants us to be; with them in the meaningless jumble of protons with neither truth nor goodness.
Again with this silly ass assumption that goodness is not a trait a person can have without god in the picture. What can atheists do as a group to demonstrate how our values and ethics and desires for humanity reflect our quest for meaningful life experiences?
A comment on one of my other blog posts suggested we need to approach the problem from a values based angle. Rather than focus on defining “goodness” we should jointly come to agreement on what values benefit society and on what levels. Competition is good to a point. Ambition is good to a point. Cooperation is usually worthwhile for everyone. Honesty, integrity, loyalty, honour. All vital, all values that should be expected and applicable to everyone in our society. There should be ways to come together in agreement on this stuff. It matters to all of us, regardless of god belief. It’s absolutely wrong and untrue to believe otherwise.
If we are going to have a God we need him to be a God worth having and anything other than the Christian God is easily reduced to triviality.
What you’re essentially saying is every other god belief is trivial and yours is the only one that’s true and right? What a laugh there is to be had there. Oh, the egotism of it. At least atheists are smart enough to claim every god belief is trivial. We’re equal opportunity offenders. heh.
A friend wrote to me…
“Someone who says “but a good god would would do ___” is measuring his theoretical god against his *own* standard of what he thinks “good” is. In doing so, he really has made himself to be God, and what he calls “god” is merely a citizen of his own kingdom.” VW
And I think that that is true for the most part
I agree. We only have our standard of what good is, which is why people can’t wrap their heads around what god does and what god says is good. How we are to judge vs what god gets away with. They don’t match. It’s a hypocrisy and it will always be a hypocrisy because the bible is an unchanging document of a history of god belief in ancient times.
What about now?
Cultures change. People change. People’s needs for society change. Values change. Morals evolve (how does the average person feel about slavery now compared to 500 years ago?). Ethics alter as we learn more about the earth and things upon it. We’ve realized just how few resources we have and what we can do to extend their usability. We figure out ways to improve life and living conditions and innovation leads to solutions, or at least ideas for better solutions.
but we can also see that since God himself put in our hearts and very constitution (as sentient beings created in the image of God) his own moral law and ethical categories, we are born into the world with the ethical equipment to recognize justice and find God through such activity. Thus we can only in this limited sense “judge God” in that we have the ability to see what he does and that he is always good.
I’ll agree we can recognize justice. But all too often we confuse it with vengeance. Eye for an eye crap. There is more to that verse, isn’t there? As for as “he is always good” – that only works if the logic is “Anything god ever does is good.” It winds up being such a loose definition of good.
Does that mean we don’t have the right to intercede after floods and natural disasters to help people? God might still wish them to be dead so it’d go against god to provide aid. If god can only do good things, we should never get in the way of his goodness, no matter what grief it causes humanity at large. Just pray they find the path to god’s righteousness before they see the flames of hell, I guess.
That explains a lot. I’m deeply saddened to think there might be people who would take the belief of god’s goodness to this conclusion and I’d bet a cookie that some do. That’s so depressing. We should always help, no matter what the tragedy. If people wind up thanking god instead of volunteers when they live, so be it. We still should help, even if we’ll never get a thank-you or reward for it. That should never be the reason to do the right thing anyway.
I think this kind of exercise of judgement is found even in holy scripture when we are called upon to not only relent, but to recognize the goodness of God. We are called not just to admit that God is powerful and sovereign over Heaven and Earth, but that he is actually good. His goodness is not reducible to merely his authority and omnipotence but is an actual moral quality inherent in the Godhead itself. Thus perhaps in judging God by the “good” we could say that we are really judging God by God, or maybe measuring God by his own moral consistency.
People will judge us every day because of what we do. God’s judgement doesn’t matter as much as theirs does. I think god’s apparent concept of morality shouldn’t apply to any human beings who want to care about their fellow human beings. I think that anyone who claims to understand god’s judgement has to make it up as he goes along.
Nobody can really know god, right? That means no one can really know what he apparently thinks about anything. All the faithful can do is assume and rationalize and postulate and infer. They can’t prove any of it. They can believe whatever the hell they want to believe, I guess, but they can’t prove any of it is factual truth. It’s not verifiable in any way, shape or form. We can only take it on their word that it is so.
But why should we? What makes that version of reality more true or right than another? I would rather credit plate tectonics than be like the ones who point to a group of people and claim god didn’t like what they were doing so he shook the earth to punish them all. Nope.
What really happens is your group’s intolerance of another group allows you the freedom to claim god punishes that group you don’t like by sending earthquakes and fires. You hate what they do so you claim a freak disaster is god’s good righteous judgement upon them. Praise the good lord for judging you to be as horrible as we already think you are! Hooray! Die horribly! Hooray! You totally deserve it you freaks! Hooray!
Such a ridiculous notion. I don’t know why it sticks around. Sure defeats the need to promote compassion or any decent human behaviours. Doesn’t matter if you use earthquakes, disease or accidents in the analogy. It all works out to the same conclusion – God’s judgement on a world gone to hell. Armageddon is on the horizon because we can see boobs on HBO.
I don’t know about you but I’m tapped out. I don’t know why I do these posts. Minds won’t change unless people want them to anyway. If these people want to believe every tragedy that befalls a human being can still be considered proof of god’s inherent goodness, fine. Be that way. I don’t get it. I don’t want to get it.
I just have to say that I am glad to be an atheist right now. The joy is so tangible, it must be shared. I have to dance because I’m so happy to be an atheist right now. I am so full of joy, I have to dance like an idiot!
