(April 5, 2014 at 4:59 am)Jacob(smooth) Wrote: It's a funny thing. When I was a Christian I got pissed off because of weak Christian arguments. Since I started thinking of myself as an atheist, I'm sort of the other way around.
There have been a few "gods a meanie" type threads recently. Has that ever worked?
If you believe in you probably believe that he defines morality. In which case any argument that god acts / has acted in an immoral, or evil, way is De facto flawed. The epicurean paradox has been mentioned a lot. From the perspective of a good christian, this falls to the same logical fallacy as the origin argument falls to atheists.
The argument is basically, " we don't know how the universe, therefore God" . It fails because the logical position knowing that the universe clearly exists, is simply "we don't know how the universe". Accepted ignorance is the logical position.
Now put yourself in a theists shoes for a second. Pretend that you accept as absolute truth the existence of a benevolent God. Now plug in one of the "meanie" arguments. "god is a meanie therefore God can't be good." The logical position for the theist to take then simply "God appears to be a meanie, obviously I don't understand the situation well enough". After all once you've accepted as truth that God is the infinite creator of the universe, how much sense does it make for me, with my limited squashy biological brain, with its 4 dimensional limitations and it's tiny window on the world, and it's very limited information to think I know better than God.
Really, the suffering argument is as weak for the theist as the ultimate origin argument is to the atheist.
The first thing to know is that the Biblical God character is a composite of all of the Assyrian/Babylonian/Persian emperors who ruled the Middle East. That's why the God character comes across as a nutjob.
The second thing to know is that humans adopt the moral codes and behavioral habits of their direct rulers and other influential people, such as religious leaders and even actors.
In the case of the Bible we have billions of people following the crap the Moses character spewed out. Others like what the Jesus character supposedly said. In the Islamic world people followed what an early 7th Century illiterate desert Arab supposedly said about how they should live their lives.
The bottom line is that most Westerners are incapable of imagining a deity other than the one Middle East Jews cooked up thousands of years ago to describe their rulers. So even if a person rejects that deity it's still the one he thinks about when he thinks about a god entity.
Religion is the most concrete example of the power of brainwashing there is. Even the ex-commie Putin is claiming to be a Christian God believer.
