Is God good?

So, I have at last found a Nazi reference to Darwinism. It's in their guidelines for banning books.Along with "Die Literatur des Marxismus, Kommunismus, Bolschewismus" ("the literature of Marxism, Communism, Bolshevism") and "Die liberalistisch-demokratische Tendenz- und Gesinnungsliteratur" ("Literature with liberal-democratic tendencies and attitudes") they also wished to suppress writings "deren Inhalt die falsche naturwissenschaftliche Aufklrung eines primitiven Darwinismus [...] ist" ("which contain the pseudoscientific exposition of primitive Darwinism").They also condemned "Alle Schriften, welche die christliche Religion und ihre Einrichtungen, den Gottesglauben [...] verhhnen, verumglimpfen oder verchtlich machen" ("All works which mock, libel, or make contemptible the Christian religion and its institutions, belief in God ...")Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

I suppose that you take God to task for this right? Why?

Do you deny that the person you are today is largely a result of what your parents told you, what your teachers told you, what you read in books, what your friends told you, movies that you watched and got something from, TV that you watched as a kid and got something from?I can tell you for certain, that I am a product of all of the above plus my own internal sorting of all that information and what meaning I ascribed to it all.

Well, causing suffering, plagues of boils and killing the cattle and the kids and frogs and the water just to show you are the baddest pimp on the block is hardly what I would call "good". Also Romans is NOT Exodus, it's yet another editorial comment.How is it possibly "good" to kill folk just to build a rep, just to show off?

If God were a mere man, I would certainly agree with your assessment. Does God have the right to do as he wishes with his creation? Does he have the right to cause plagues and boils etc...? If God is ultimately responsible for your coming into existence, does he not have a right to demand your worship? You are assigning human motivations to a holy God. God has no need for reputation nor to show off as humans understand those concepts.Edited by foreveryoung, : No reason given.

No, he does not have the right to demand my worship.He could try to earn my respect and maybe even worship, but worship that is gained through threat and intimidation is pretty worthless.As the Bible says, man knows right and wrong just as God does and man must even challenge God when God is about to behave immorally.Since we do have the capability and charge to determine right and wrong, why would the God character be exempt from such judgement?AbE: Yet that is not what the stories say. The stories, both Exodus and your quote from Romans both say that was the reason the God character did those things.Edited by jar, : see AbE to address foreveryoungs last line.

I never even contemplated denying it, especially with the thoughtful caveat of your second paragraph. Certainly I am the product of my nature filtering my nurture, what else?But what does this have to do with anything?

Yes, he does and when you refuse to acknowledge the one who created you and be thankful for it, you deserve whatever action you get from him. He should have to try and earn your respect, and in fact he doesn't. You should respect him as God by virtue of him bringing you into existence. Yes man knows right and wrong, and man knows it is wrong to disrespect the God who brought him into existence. What is right and wrong for man isn't necessarily right and wrong for God. We have no basis whatsoever to lay the charge of behaving immorally at the feet of God as Job had to learn the hard way.

Your nature is the product of thousands of internal decisions you made in your head over all the years of growing up.

Again, you offer nothing to support God being good. Why does She have the right to demand my worship?My parents created me.But what does that have to do with the topic?The issue is dealing with the Gods found in the Bible stories. Why should those Gods not be judged based on what the stories say?IF the stories are true, then the Gods described in those three cases (we can deal with others as well should you want) can only be judged as at best, petty and cruel.

That's not what "nature" usually means when discussing the nature-nurture distinction. If would refer to the propensities that I was born with. (And there must be some --- as a reductio ad absurdum, if you were to expose a tortoise to exactly the same stimuli as I experienced growing up, it wouldn't end up thinking exactly the same things.)But I am all agog to find out what, if anything, this is relevant to.

No one raised that point. The question was whether Darwin somehow caused or enabled racism. It's quite clear that Darwin caused racism only in the same sense that the Bible caused slavery and racism. You have no choice but to admit it for the Bible because it is well documented history. On the other hand, your story about Italian women feeling up Negro booty is just an anecdote whose connection to Darwin is unknown.That said, I'm sure that somebody did use Darwin to further their racism. Darwin himself was a racist. Neither of those discredits the theory of evolution any more than some fools take on Ham discredits Christianity. And wasn't discrediting the theory of evolution the point of your post? After all, it's not as if anyone worships Darwin. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Maybe he's instead referring to all those times that the Pharaoh agreed to let the Jews break camp only to have God himself harden Pharoah's heart and force them to stay. If we are to believe the writer of Exodus, the explanation for God's use of the plague-harden-plague sequences was for God to increase his own glory. Or viewed another way, all of those goofy statements that God allowed Adam to sin because He values free will are made a mockery of by the story in Exodus in which God makes Pharoah disobedient.Of course the typical Calvinist's out is that whatever God does is just. God is unknowable and cannot be questioned. Instead of accepting that the expression that God hardened Pharoah's heart is just a figure of speech for the Pharoah's own recalcitrant behavior, the Calvinist tells us that the answer to the question 'what is difference between good and evil' is 'it just depends'. Then the Calvinist wonders why some people snicker when the Calvinist gets into his/her practice of doling out accusations of relativism.Jar takes another tack. He assumes that the Exodus is only a story. My problem with Jar's take is that even taking the story as a myth, one might well wonder the value in a story that makes a monotheistic God seem unjust.

It is a common bullying tactic: hit people if they don't do what you tell them and hit them if they do.It is a good way to keep people scared and confused, because they don't know what is right or wrong anymore.
Instead, they wait to be told.Edited by Panda, : No reason given.

Hello FEY, Earlier in this thread I was jeered (including by you) for a statement that I found many views by your side as being psychopathic.Psychopathic - "A person with an antisocial personality disorder, manifested in aggressive, perverted, criminal, or amoral behaviour without empathy or remorse" - From The Free Dictionary.To find it 'just' that any intelligence, no matter how far ahead of us can just wipe us off the face of the world is a disgusting attitude.We are mentally far above ants - but if you saw someone just stomping on them for fun wouldn't you think them a psycho?To acquiesce to a higher power in fawning adulation is sick. You are beneath contempt and I make no apologies for my tone this time. I believe your religion has corroded your brain to the point where rational empathic and consequential decisions have been degraded away. If this is the price of your religious fervour - you can keep it!!Is God good? The bible - his own words - betray that statement massively - you'd have to be blind, or a fool to think otherwise.