Are you morally superior to the god of the bible? [Spirituality & Religion]

@SW-User Wait........"he" is a "person" ?????????

@Underconstruction Well, he has a soul and a mind, so I suppose. Depends on what you call a person.

@SW-User

So because god gets to decide, that makes it moral?
Because god is the one who understands what death means, it's moral to slaughter everyone on the planet because your unhappy with their behaviour?

@Pikachu Well, if you’ve created the entire universe with a set of moral rules, and asked your children to follow those rules but they refuse at every turn, then I suppose so. Again, the word ‘slaughter’ makes it seem like it was an unjust act. All of the humans knew the rules in that scenario and chose not to follow them.

@SW-User I don't think of God as having a soul or a mind for that matter. There's not likely to be a "brain" involved here as it never evolved. The idea that at one time there was a single celled "God" organism eating up universes is a bit frightening. We have no frame of reference for understanding what God's is or what "God's" are. Like I keep saying, we are just concentrated energy so perhaps we are just a dream.

@SW-User

So you give birth to your children. You tell them what you expect of them but they disobey and disappoint you, maybe even hate you.

Are you morally justified in killing them and their children and their children's children? Is that morally correct.
Slaughter is not a judgement on the justification, it's a description of the act.

@Pikachu It’s the equivalent of putting your children in time-out on a godly scale. God’s always willing to forgive and forget and grant you eternal happiness as long as you aren’t a self-centered asshole. I think that’s pretty fair.

@SW-User

[quote]time-out on a godly scale[/quote]

Um....no. It's not.
When you go to hell you get tortured forever.
That's not a time out. A time out is when you sit alone and think about what you did. You're not sending your kid to a time out if you lock him in a chokey and poke him with sticks.

When jesus returns in his kingdome, the faithful will spend eternity in worship at god's knee and the sinners will burn forever.
That's not a time out, godly scale or no. That's forever.

@SW-User I think humans know what death is...it is a big part of our fucked search for symbolic immortality (ie connection to a higher being). Trying to give meaning to something that actually has very little meaning...such as us.

@SW-User I see. So if I impose moral rules onto my children, and they choose to ignore them, can I kill them?

@Pikachu According to Rob Bell, God's love is so great, that even people in hell can be saved. But I guess that wouldn't appeal to you, because the idea that everyone gets to heaven eventually means you're not as special as you thought you were. The only thing that makes the misery of religious worship bearable is the idea that everyone who disagrees with you will be tortured forever by your loving God.

@LeopoldBloom Unless you created the concept of morality itself, no, that would not be okay.

@SW-User I didn't create the concept of morality, but human beings collectively created it through mutual agreement.

The Euthyphro Dilemma proves that God could not create the concept of morality either. He either follows a morality imposed by a being greater than he is, or he just makes it up arbitrarily as he goes along.

@LeopoldBloom The fact remains that what’s acceptable for humans to do and what is acceptable for God to do are two very different things. God possesses all the knowledge in existence and knows the consequences of every action. We do not.

@SW-User

[quote]The fact remains that what’s acceptable for humans to do and what is acceptable for God to do are two very different things[/quote]

Why? why is that fact?
Because humans decided that there should be a double standard? Because the things god does are not recognizably moral to us?

@SW-User Assuming, of course, that God exists outside of your imagination, and isn't just an excuse for you to do what you want under a claim of false authority.

@Pikachu Because God is our creator and free of all sin. That’s something that only three or four people in history can claim. It is his duty as Lord do pass the judgements that we corrupt humans cannot.

@SW-User

That's not an answer, my dude. That's an abdication of thought.
God is free of all sin, therefor the apparently amoral things he does are moral?
Nah man. Not good enough. Explain to me why murdering thousands of men, women and children is morally correct, depending on who's doing the murdering.

@SW-User You're making too many unfounded assumptions with no proof. There's no evidence that a) God is our creator, b) that he is free of sin, or that sin exists at all, and c) that anything is his duty just because you say it is.

@Pikachu Sure thing. God never kills out of selfishness. He only kills because he wants to protect the world from selfish people, and he alone can decide what happens to them after death. However, humans kill out of selfishness all the time and have no control over what happens to that person’s soul after death.

@SW-User

Seems to me you're pretending to know a lot about the mind of god. Not sure how you claim to know that. By his own word, he's not free from things like jealousy, why should we presume he can't be selfish?
But again, his motivation for mass murder is irrelevant.
Explain to me why murdering thousands of men, women and children is morally correct if you're not doing it for selfish reasons.
How many movies have you seen where some villain wants to kill everyone for a genuinely held belief that he's doing good for humanity?
Do we look at him as a good guy or do we cheer when the heroes thwart his genocidal plan?

@Pikachu First of all, I’m a big Thanos fan for that very reason, even though he still is the villain. But more importantly, the villains in those movies don’t have the power to take their victims to a better place after death. God does. Whether we live or die in this world is irrelevant because our hundred years on Earth pales in comparison to the eternity of our afterlife.

@SW-User

Oh you think murdering women and children is good if you have good motivation for doing so. That explain a lot.

On what grounds do you claim that god is taking all those people he murders to a better place? Only the faithful will enter paradise.
Everyone else is going to burn.

@Pikachu Actually, the people that get into heaven are the ones that repent. Big, big difference. Even the most evil man in the world can see the error of his ways after death and be allowed into heaven. Whether or not you get into heaven depends not on how selfish you were in life, but whether or not you regret it.

@SW-User

Is that true. Can you share with me the scripture that says repenting is enough?