I think Good is god and god is Good. Bad is not god. So god is good and bad is not god. Its very simple. It was said already evil is the absence of god.

You misunderstand the premise's Epicurus raises they are the premises put forward by the religious.

It is the religious who give god his characteristics.

You say:


If god is everything how can anything be separate from it.

All these contradictions do not do your argument justice.


If evil exist and god is everything, then god is evil.

Hold that thought I have work tonight and I need sleep.

And they moved my thread to religion...If I wanted it there I would have posted it there. How can you get it back. this is a faith vs science and philosophy discussion I believe it was right to post where I posted.

And to answer that last part I don't believe evil is a thing. Evil is not god. It's like the guy from earlier said Dark is the absence of light Evil is the absence of God just cause god can be everywhere at once does not mean he may choose to be everywhere at once. If I were to steal from my brother I would be disobeying God and It would be an evil act. It would remove God from me making me Evil lest I ask for God to return and forgive me. Where evil is God is not. If we are evil then god is not there unless we call on him. And when I said God is everything. I did not mean that literally. God is not this bowl I ate cereal out of and he is not the keyboard I using to write all this. When I say "God is" that is what I mean. I don't know how to explain this any clearer.

I agree, if the tack taken is a philosophical one then the question of if there exists a god is not a religious conversation. However referencing the bible and the god of Abraham is religious. The mods don't really care about the distinction, if one of them thinks it needed moving there is no oversight. They are the forum gods and what they say goes . . .. even if it is illogical . . .







Again I see many contradictions in your arguments. For god to be everything directly contradicts many of your arguments.

If I where to argue that god exists the last thing I would agree to is that god is everything.

I've posted so much stuff about this that I'm tired of typing it in.

If you believe that the stories are consistent more power to you.

It's utterly absurd beyond belief.

You have a supposedly all-powerful and all-wise God who jumps through hoops for an evil fallen angel.

That's already a huge contradiction right there.

This supposedly all-wise all-loving God is appeased by blood sacrifice. Being appeased by blood sacrifices is neither all-wise nor all-loving in human terms. In fact, it's utterly sick and sadistic.

You say:



Scrutinize his authority?

If humans believe that compassion is love, and the God of Abraham does not display compassion in human terms then what sense does it make to say that God is loving from a human perspective?

That would be like saying that Hitler represents love whether we agree with him or not.

What sense does it even make to talk about a word like 'love' if it means different things to God than it does to a human?

The very idea that an all-wise and all-powerful God would need to do something as desperate as sending his son to earth to be butchered on a pole by mankind can be seen as nothing other than a desperate God.

God would either need to be desperate to do such a thing because he had no choice or he would need to be utterly insane to do it if he had an alternative solution to the problem!

So there you have a God who either cannot think of a better solution (not all-wise), or had no choice (not all-powerful).

That's a very contradiction to what God is suppose to be. With God all things are possible they say!

Therefore it must have been possible for God to have solved all his problems without resorting to violent crude and rude methods. But let's face it, violent unwise solutions is the only way the God of Abraham handles all his problems!

Look at the flood.

God waited until the whole world was corrupt before intervening. I that wise? I don't think so.

I'm just a mortal man yet I can give you a myriad of suggestions of better ways to handle the situation.

First, don't let it get so far out of control.

Second, if you're stupid enough to let it go that far, then just wave your magic wand and make all the sinners disappear. There's not need to food the whole planet, that would be stupid. God is all-powerful and with God anything is possible. He turned lot's wife into a pillar of salt, why not do the same here?

Or better yet, why not just make everyone sterile and within a single generation all the sinners are dead naturally.

If God was truly compassionate instead of having Noah and his family build a stupid ark, he could have had them build a large nursery school. Then he could have turned all the adult sinner to stone, and had Noah's family go around collecting all the babies to raise them properly.

I can think of a million better ways to solve the problem. So according to the Bible I'm smarter than God.

That's a contradiction. But it was already a contradiction that an all-wise all-loving, and all-powerful God let things get that far out of hand to begin with and then solve the problem using a very messy and violent means.

This God tells people to stone sinners to death. This requires that people pass judgments on each other to determine who the sinners are. But that's supposed to be God's job. If God wants sinners to die, and God is all-powerful and all-knowing, then why wouldn't god just turn sinner into a pillar of salt? Or just give them heart attacks or whatever? Why ask other people to stone them to death? How crude and sick is that?

Think about this,...

What sense does it make for a God to tell people to judge and stone sinners to death? It makes no sense at all.

However, if view the Bible as having been written by mortal men who are attempting to control the masses it makes perfect sense! They know that they won't be there to judge and stone unruly people to death, so they just command their readers to do it as a directive from GOD!

No that makes SENSE! The Bible was written by authoritarians who were trying to control the masses and get them to do their dirty work for them. No decent God would ever pull a stunt like that!

In fact, if you look at the Bible like this the whole way through it should quickly become apparent that the book was not written by an all-wise all-powerful God but instead it was clearly written by very unwise and powerless men who need to get their readers to do their dirty work for them.

There is nothing virtuous about the Bible. It's a horror story that begins by claiming that all men have fallen from grace from their creator and the only way to get back into grace is to obey the commandments of the authors of this godforsaken book!

The Bible is the greatest atrocity ever written by mankind. It's the most shameful scam ever devised.

It's built upon blood sacrifices not unlike the Greek Mythology of Zeus (yet another jealous God that is appeased by violence). It's just a take off from the same basic mindset with the intent of getting rid of all the other Gods of Greek Mythology. And also to undermine women. The Bible is extremely male chauvinistic.

Do you believe that the creator of this universe would be a male chauvinist pig?

I don't.

The Bible isn't the word of God. It's a horrible manmade farce that is a disgrace to the very idea of a divine creator.

I'm not an atheists. I believe in spirituality. But that doesn't send me off worshiping the Jews!

That's basically what you're doing. The Jews wrote the Bible! Or more precisely the Israelites, Not God!

The Bible is not the word of God.

You say that I question the authority of God. No way!

I question the audacity of the Israelites to have claimed to speak for God. I think their stupidity, ignorance, male-chauvinism, and jealousy of other religions is quite apparent in their book. I don't believe that the creator of this universe is as stupid and as nasty as the Israelites.

They don't speak for God. They shoot themselves in the food the whole way though the book.

The Bible is a disgrace to the creator of this universe.

It would be an insult to God to suggest that God could have had anything to do with such a stupid and ignorant book.

You can believe in God all you want. I have no problem with that.

But if you're going to try to tell me that the Bible is the word of God I'm just going to puke.

If God were like the Bible claims then God would be a idiot and a demon far less moral, compassionate, and intelligent than many mere mortals.

No, the Bible is not the word of any God.

And the creator of this universe is not at war with any stupid fallen angel whose out to steal your soul.

Those are utterly stupid ideas that contradict the very idea of a God that is supposed to be all-wise, all-powerful, etc., etc., etc.

An all-powerful God cannot be at war with a stupid fallen angel to the point where he's desperate enough to need to have his own son nailed to a pole to save the world.

This mythology isn't any brighter than the myth of Zeus and his gang.

God? No no no you got it all wrong!

It is a Goddess that looks like Halle Berry in a catwoman outfit!

meow..hiss..hiss - scratch! for not believing in her

Now if that kind of god manifest itself to me in my bedroom at night, I could get behind worshiping that!!!!!!

Literally!

Ah, so in these statements, we have reached what is part of the Transcendentalist Movement and one of the key concepts of the New Thought Religions, "If God is everything, how can anything be separate from it" The answer is nothing is separate of God. It is all part of God. And that means we must reconcile what appears to evil, injustice, bad things happening to good people, the whole of human suffering.

i dont believe in any god for many reasons

if i`m wrong then hes one selfish sick twisted being that must have been sitting around bored one day and said "hey, i think i`ll greate a word full of people to worship me and donate there hard earned money to biuld me big luxury churches lavished in gold while people starve to death. and if they dont do so i`ll send them to a place i`ll call hell where they will spend eternity burning. then when i get bored earth i`ll destroy the earth like shaking up a ant farm and bring the ones i choose up here with me so they can continue to worship me and lavish me with gifts of gold....yes this i shall do"

OR . . . we need to reconcile that everything is not godlike and thus should not be worshiped as if it where godlike with a conscious willful perspective.

If you cannot assign characteristics that distinguish one thing from another then a thing cannot have a proper ontology, without an ontology a thing cannot be said to exist.

God by this definition is not a being, but a collection of all things that interact without will or independent purpose.

I'll make a phone call and see what I can do for you

Abracadabra >

Just to point out GOD gave us choice. He gives us the perception on what is Wrong and Right. There is only Evil because we create it.

Outside of a few others in here that has to be the best post I have read in a while. Really puts it quite simply.

I was the one that posted that topic about puppies. I have to admit that at the time I was fairly emotional about watching the puppy suffer with mange. I don't believe in god, and that is after years of thinking I did then not being sure, then not believing at all.

I can't say if it's ego or not, but I can't believe a God who is all powerful would create such conditions that man and animal would suffer from. Some said that man created evil, that doesn't answer the question why this puppy had to suffer from mange as I don't believe that man created mange, and if people say that god created everything then he created the mange as well.

Any way of there is a god and he/she/it created mange, I prefer to have as little to do with this god as possible because there is just not acceptable answer for me why it would be nessessary to make anything suffer like that.

I really never should have posted it in the first place. But I am sure one could see that I was a bit on the frantic side.

You are right, if there is a god, he/she/it would not nessessarily have to be what I expect or assume... I guess I just refuse to accept a god who would find it nessessary to create such beauti and such evil at the same time.

Aren't you also making an assumtion that if there is a god that this god is really any better than we are? Just curious... I mean you said you don't beleive in god yet you just said it's our ego to impose standards of behavior on God. You placed this god above us when you don't believe in his god in the first place. I am so confused.

Geez, wouldn't it be funny if when we die we find out not only that there is no god but that we ourselves created our existence, collectively. When I look around me and see how people treat eachother, I might be more apt to accept that. And maybe through the process of evolution will we some day grow up to be kinder less judgemental human beings. Ok ok I'm decending into fantacy here.

Actually I might have totally misread your post, so forgive me if my rambling doesn't begin to make sense.


PS. Personally I like you last comment best: Far easier just to scrap the whole God concept and take some repsonsibility for ourselves.

The idea that god is everything. VERY problematic for a theist.



If everything is god then nothing is god. The universe does not care about you.

If we truly are made in the image of 'god'... and evil and sin are part of what we are...

Evil is also a part of what 'god' is. Else we are not made in his image, which would make the whole concept false anyway.

What about your g-d freely tormented Job, just because he could?

I can completely understand this. As an animal lover myself, I have no wish to see any animals suffer. I guess my point, though, was that our individual feelings about animals suffering (or about anything else, for that matter) really don't provide sufficient evidence on the God question either way.



This is the crux of my argument -- if God exists, we can't presume to know his value system, agenda, whatever. While we may feel that certain things are horrible, we're coming at it from a wholly anthropocentric viewpoint. As we have a vested interest in the anthropocentric position, I don't think we can be truly unbiased here. Puppies are cute, it hurts us when they suffer. That's just a human reaction. My point is that this has absolutely nothing to do with the possibly-existing God's attitude towards same.



Evil is a wholly anthropocentric concept, and does not exist outside of human belief systems.



I can agree with this as a gut-level reaction to one's perceptions of cruelty. To be honest, I wouldn't want to have anything to do with that God either. I just don't think we can use perceived cruelty as a grounds for claiming he doesn't exist.



It's a great topic for discussion, and has been very enlightening. Please don't feel the need to apologize! I, for one, appreciate it.



Again, these are subjective and anthropocentric judgments -- not necessarily having anything to do with whether God exits or not.



No, I'm trying to point out that he is merely (possibly) different from us in ways we have a hard time assimilating because of our intrinsic biases.

"Better" or "worse" doesn't enter into it. Those terms really don't apply here since we're juxtapositioning two radically different concepts.



I'm delving into some hypothetical interpretations here. In my opinion, man created God as a means of controlling the behaviors of other humans. The "supernatural enforcer" was a good strategy back in the days when science was barely out of diapers.

I think the ego comes into play when we legitimately expect God (real or otherwise) to adhere and comply with OUR subjective belief systems. If he is a deity, a supreme being, how can we be so haughty as to try to tell him what to do?

But note that I used "if."



I have hopes that someday man will evolve into something better. Although the longer I live, the more I see the process going the other way.



It's OK, this is a deep subject and warrants examination from many different perspectives!



It's how I try to live.

Truth be told, I wish I COULD believe in a God. I think it would make life so much easier. But I can no more fall back on the God Crutch than I can on the Alcohol Crutch.

Oh wow - the gangs all here!

I have some serious questions for both believers and non-believers.
Answer truthfully but be careful of your language. Be honest but not manipulative. In other words, speak your feelings and not your prejudice.

QUESTION ONE:
What is it that believers and non-believers have in common? Truely think about this - think about morals or ethics, in what ways are believers and non-believers alike?

QUESTION TWO:
What is the greatest cause of friction between believers and non-believers? By this I mean - what is your opinion, what do you perceive to be the greatest cause of friction?

FINAL QUESTION:
Based on what you think we have in common, and what you think causes the most friction - what do YOU think the most ethical or moral resolution would be?

I'm really curious to know what others think we have in common, why there is perceived friction, and what would solve that particular issue.

This just may dispell the need for anyone to prove or disprove a personal conviction of faith to a personal belief.