(February 26, 2015 at 2:48 am)aemorrow Wrote: I think personally, that the God of the bible is good, using the Platonian definition. I also believe that the God of the bible is beyond good in a way that I don't understand so I would have to plead agnostic in that sense, but the God that I understand from the bible is at least Platonian good.

Please supply this "Platonian" definition of good. I've tried to look it up and come up empty.

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(February 26, 2015 at 2:57 am)aemorrow Wrote: I don't mean to be offensive in any way, but logically speaking, if a sociopath is someone who goes against morality and God is supposed to author the moral code, how can God be a sociopath?


What is "good" and who gets to decide?

Your god is no author of morality, considering his bloody hands.

@Rob

This one is spot on with what we're talking about. Very funny.

God is good, good is god.

Meaningless tautology.

Nothing to do with wellbeing of humans.

Would you like to address what I wrote ignorant?

(February 26, 2015 at 10:13 am)watchamadoodle Wrote:

(February 25, 2015 at 11:39 pm)The Reality Salesman Wrote: Because the nature of this conversation is about varying degrees of a commonly used sentiment, such as "good", it's important to be particular with the words used . . .

Essentially this seems to be a roundabout way of saying that God is good because we define him that way.

I assure you that it is not the round-about way that you suspect. Speaking about goodness in this way does not even demonstrate that there is, in fact, some single thing which IS goodness itself. All it means is that goodness is understood as that aspect of things which humans judge to be satisfying of particular human hungers/appetites/desires (e.g. the hungers for food, survival, reproduction, community, justice, love, etc.). It is strictly about goodness.

Human experience shows us that nothing in this universe seems to sate all of our desires. This means that everything in this universe is only good under one or more aspects (i.e. every object/thing is only "partially" good when considered "in itself"). So either goodness, i.e. something that is good under any and every aspect, exists "somewhere", or it doesn't.

First, "Goodness itself" must be shown, if possible, to exist. Then, it would have to be shown that "goodness itself" and "god" can be rationally said to be the same thing. Necessarily, that would require either that it can be shown that god is the thing that satisfies all human desire. Seeing as that would require a great deal of work, common agreement on terms and concepts, and a lengthy exchange with a high chance of misunderstanding, I wouldn't hold your breath while waiting for it to come!

(February 26, 2015 at 12:58 pm)Ignorant Wrote: I assure you that it is not the round-about way that you suspect. Speaking about goodness in this way does not even demonstrate that there is, in fact, some single thing which IS goodness itself. All it means is that goodness is understood as that aspect of things which humans judge to be satisfying of particular human hungers/appetites/desires (e.g. the hungers for food, survival, reproduction, community, justice, love, etc.). It is strictly about goodness.

Human experience shows us that nothing in this universe seems to sate all of our desires. This means that everything in this universe is only good under one or more aspects (i.e. every object/thing is only "partially" good when considered "in itself"). So either goodness, i.e. something that is good under any and every aspect, exists "somewhere", or it doesn't.

First, "Goodness itself" must be shown, if possible, to exist. Then, it would have to be shown that "goodness itself" and "god" can be rationally said to be the same thing. Necessarily, that would require either that it can be shown that god is the thing that satisfies all human desire. Seeing as that would require a great deal of work, common agreement on terms and concepts, and a lengthy exchange with a high chance of misunderstanding, I wouldn't hold your breath while waiting for it to come!

For one god by definition is Amoral meaning he can and has in the bible done more bad than good so no god isn't good god is evil.

(February 26, 2015 at 3:35 am)robvalue Wrote: If one being gets to decide what is good, and that's it, then that is not morality at all. Especially since that being is not part of the group affected by the actions being judged. His judgements in no way guarantee whether actions are harmful or helpful to humans. So he could be an evil malicious tyrant. Which he is, he spells it out in detail in the bible.

Do Christians claim that murder is wrong... because God just made it that way? Was God "free" to create a world in which murder would have been a virtuous act?

In my opinion, you are right to be confounded by Christians who claim that view. So, if you care to know, there are Christians who offer a very different understanding of goodness, morality, and freedom in human action. If you'd like a book, a good start (though it is very dense) is Servais Pinckaers's The Sources of Christian Ethics. It is a philosophical, historical, and theological description of the Christian ethical tradition.

Quote:How come christians are ignoring these, and so much more of the bible? Because they know these things are wrong. Wrong as in harmful, not wrong as in some uninvolved third party handing out random judgements. Of course they then justify this to themselves with ridiculous contorted arguments as to why most of the bible doesn't actually say what it says and why it no longer applies. But these are after-the-fact rationalizations, which is why they are always such terrible arguments.

Well, if that first question is an honest one, then I hope you will seriously consider that the answer is not simple to explain why Christians don't know what exactly they are saying. The answer is a very complex history of philosophical and theological developments that even got carried away into political developments. It would be too simple to point to a single event, but a good start is the historical development that resulted in the divergence of the Catholic philosophical tradition into two subsisting traditions: realism (with several slightly different descriptions) represented principally by Thomism, and the Nominalism of William of Occam (a Franciscan monk/priest). The former speaks about the goodness of things being determined by WHAT those things are. Nominalism speaks about the goodness of things being determined by the free-will (liberum arbitrium, lat.) of God alone. That is a very simplistic description, but hopefully you can see which school corresponds to the Christians you disdain so much. Most Christians today are nominalists and voluntarists (i.e. the will has primacy over the intellect and acts in absolute "freedom from" the intellect). They know the will of God and that things are the way they are simply because that's the way God wanted them... there is no real rhyme or reason to it.

Quote:If christians didn't do this filtering, they would be very soon dead or in jail.

Have you ever wondered where they get their criteria with which to filter? It is almost as if they have this mysterious filter that is rational and helps promote justice and charity in society... but they have no idea where it came from (because, as you are claiming, it isn't in the bible). It is as if they are trying to "conserve" what is left of this ancient artifact of Christian morality, but all they have left are disconnected pieces with no one to make rational sense of them all.

What if that "whole" which the pieces at one time made up existed before them, but then something happened that discarded large portions of it? It might be worth looking into.

Quote:Subjective morality is never going to be perfect. Everyone's judgement is going to be slightly different. Or perhaps a lot different. But as a society, we come to agree on many things naturally. Murder, theft, assault, rape... in most civilised societies, we agree these are wrong, without having to learn this from ancient books.

I agree. Most of those things seem very simple to judge correctly. You might even say that those things are "objectively" (i.e. considered in themselves) never good. Well, you have started to enumerate a morality that is both subjective and objective, and you have barely scratched the surface of Aristotle's ethics =)

Quote:Subjective morality works, on the whole, and it's really good

With rational people sure it does. You won't find me denying that.